It's All Love
Page 3
We can only move forward by walking back through the narrow streets. They are dark, but it is safe, a cocoon, a womb. I am with Issanda and that is enough. The good Muslims do not drink and carouse late into the night, and so the streets are ours. They are now narrow winding corridors in an immense gray, dusty house, and they all mysteriously merge into one. Issanda and I, tipsier than we thought, cannot find the way back to our separate hotels. We turn small sharp corners and end up where we began, giggling at our silliness but not at all afraid of this strange place that has become one of Calvino's invisible cities. We leap over the same sewage drains, squeeze past the same donkey that refuses to budge from the middle of the street but simply stands there, head bowed dejectedly. To be lost with Issanda is magical. Everything is. How to express this initial thrill of attraction that makes anything you do together special, imbues it with a sharp and sensuous quality? Even cutting our fingernails together would be unearthly because it would be our moment.
Issanda says he does know the way to his hotel, and I give in so easily. He is not a person to resist; there is simply no place for negativity. We turn, hold hands, and walk to his dark hotel, bang on the heavy carved wooden door until someone opens, climb up steep curving uneven steps, pass the courtyard with bushes and cement stoops made for chats, but also perfect for mosquitoes. The beds have mosquito nets, and Issanda's has a top of green and white kanga cloth attached to swaths of white net curtain that surround the bed, giving it a bridal feel with a Swahili flair. I creep under the curtain into his bed fully clothed. I am suddenly shy rather than lusty, as if anticipation were better or at least safer than what was anticipated, because it brings everything closer to the end. This has always been my fear: the end, even before the beginning. I cannot explain this and do not even try. He does not insist on anything, and so we sleep.
Only a day later, lust grows stronger than fear. His lips are the largest I have ever kissed. He uses them delicately. He says my name with every sentence. I act like a man, demanding and impatient. He takes it with confidence and more than enough lust and thrust for me. Dare I confess that after white lovers, the pure blackness of his skin is heightened pleasure in and of itself? I have taken delight in the contrast of dark skin entangled with white, but that has now awoken me to what I used to take for granted before: the beauty of black on black, and how skin turns in the light or dark to coffee, loam, red soil, lava rock, all sorts of tea colors, on and on. I luxuriate in the constancy of Issanda's color, doubly aware that it is mine too. I am greedy for his smooth, almost childish hairlessness, the feel of his supple young muscles moving under my palms, the way we move together. Much later, when he slips his jeans up over his slim hips, my belly jolts with lust all over again.
And we talk, of course. I tell him I have always felt I was too much for most people, but not him, for some reason. When I was about eight, my father called me Kamabati because my constant chatter was like the clanging of rain on metal roofing, mabati. I laugh too loudly, dance and sleep too much; I am much too opinionated for a woman. Issanda says he can take it, which of course is the right answer, but I believe him. I want to be myself with him, instead of trying to be someone else, as I usually do with men I fall for. This is different, perhaps because I am more than ten years older than he is. I feel he is attracted to me because of my experience, my accomplishments, my opinions, even when I am being a smart-ass. I wonder why for so long I have tried to fit into a fake female mold, to be demure, to assume the position of lesser, to not want to outshine my partner, especially in public. Not this time. Or perhaps not yet, since I do not know him enough, but I can't help but hope.
Issanda does not take me lying down; he is razor-sharp and ironic and funny and melancholy all mixed. He must be even more so in French. I want to tell my friends everything he says, like how one evening he pretended to be Senegalese, but then we were regaled with Senegalese stereotypes (that are not worth repeating) for hours on end from some beach boys. Issanda whispered to me, “I chose the wrong country,” and I could not stop giggling. I know, I am like a mother so besotted by her child that she finds his every move fascinating. But we go deeper quickly. He tells me about his move by necessity from Congo to Burundi to Senegal, and I tell him about mine, almost by compulsion, from Uganda to Italy to America and back. He says he is not at home anywhere, and may not want to be. Neither am I; we are ambivalent about the places we have chosen to live and the countries that claim us. He has seen the dark sick side of human nature, in the war in western Congo, things he has yet to tell me but has hinted at. There is so much more about Issanda that I need and yearn to learn.
I jokingly tell him seducing me was so easy, all it took was one night of no. It was I who pursued him; I deliberately turned longing and the play in my head into reality, instead of having him chase and catch me, thus making me a prize worth having, as women usually do. He disagrees, saying he pursued me but was so subtle that he tricked me into thinking I was the one on the chase. We laugh and harvest yet another precious moment of mutual appreciation and satisfaction.
But. Great sex and the springing up of a new friendship on a tiny island of paradise do not a relationship make. We may be foolish to try to build on that fantastic (in all senses) foundation. He is back in Senegal, in school as well as teaching, and I am back in the United States, working and writing. No amount of phone calls, e-mails, and IMing changes the fact that we are not physically together, getting to know each other in a concrete and everyday way. Perhaps not being with each other is what makes this so enticing. Is this just a drama of longing?
We almost could have been neighbors once. He grew up in eastern Congo, and my ancestral home is in western Uganda, but both of us are so far from there now. We don't even speak the same language: He speaks French and Swahili, and I, English, because of a colonial accident or, rather, colonial grab and takeover. I could have spoken Swahili, but don't, having spent too much time in school immersed in English and having considered Swahili an instrument of terror, as it was the language of Idi Amin's army and all the ones that have followed since. Our mother tongues belong to the Bantu family, but we don't speak them well enough and might not have understood each other even if we did. So near, geographically and culturally, and yet so far because of history. Once, as we struggled to understand each other, he said, “Look at what they have done to us,” and we laughed at our mock victimization that is based on truth.
He can speak some English, thank God, but my French is nonexistent, and now my love project is to learn it. I tell him to speak to me in French because it sounds so romantic; who am I to resist cliches? It is also not the language I argue in, fend off creditors, talk to my boss or worry in; it is not part of my real life. French to me now represents something budding and beautiful, like the word bisous, little kiss, which to me is a bee buzzing around a flower, then zeroing in for a delightful sting. French is Issanda's voice down the phone line, telling me how much he misses me. It is the memory of long French kisses.
But. I am forty-one, he is twenty-nine. Despite my confidence when we were together, my age gives me low-level trauma, while his age, I admit, is something I want to get drunk on. Yet one more reason why I enjoy his young supple body is that I am acutely aware that mine won't stay this way much longer. He does not need to work up energy or try to store it, and he takes being physically flexible for granted. I don't. Can I compete with nubile young babes? I'm told by many, including Issanda, that I do not look or act my age, but when that is said to reassure me, it underlines the issue. More practically, I want a child, and it is now or never for me, but not for him. But we hardly know each other. I would like us to have a few years all to ourselves. When I tell Issanda my exact age, months after Lamu, he says, “Then we have to make a baby soon.” That is about the dearest thing I have been told by a man. Whether it is sweet talk or genuine longing, I am not sure, but I love him even more for saying so.
Can the beauty of how this began be enough to conquer the obvious ob
stacles? The island and color and lust and spark and skin? After that peak of pleasure, we are now in a vast plain that is months of distance. What is on the other side? How do we get there? We all know that love, or infatuation, fades, but what can grow is friendship. Do we have that? Not quite. Not yet. How can we cultivate it? How can we make fragile frothy feelings become farmed land, as steady as the seasons? Solid, fruitful, full, and into the future?
We could have let it remain a delectable liaison on a tropical island, let it become a delightful memory, and I would not regret it, oh, no. We did not have to complicate it by taking it out of Eden with us, but we have. We rubbed beautifully against each other and birthed a living fire. Now we must keep on blowing, dreaming, and making it real, just like we did on Lamu.
After She Left
WILL BESTER
THERE ARE THINGS you understand when a woman you love has walked out the door. If you are awake and alone, you understand that it takes eight hours to get from 3:00 A.M. to 4:00 A.M. There are phone calls I could make, visits that might momentarily dull the pain of her absence, but I convince myself that if I am to learn the lesson before me, I must give birth to a new me without anesthesia.
I am a good Black man, one of those brothers who we perennially lament are in short supply and high demand. I am tall and attractive. I have an advanced degree from a premier university; I have good credit and I give back to my community. I live in a city where there are at least three eligible Black women per every eligible Black man. And I am completely alone.
My friends see my story as a success. Raised in a home rife with violence and substance abuse, I have never raised my hand to a woman in anger or used an illegal drug. My two brothers have battled lifelong addictions. I have a law degree and the respect of my peers. People frequently tell me that I am an inspiration. It has become increasingly difficult to accept that compliment without feeling like a fraud. The truth is that some of us simply hide our scars better. In one of my earliest memories, I awoke to the sounds of an uncle and his wife fighting late at night. The next morning as I left for school, I found my uncle lying on the couch, his shirt stained crimson from where his wife had stabbed him with a pair of scissors, a wound that would require surgery and weeks of recovery. This was not the only time I witnessed such episodes. On the surface, I appear to have escaped unscathed.
The woman who loved me knew better. She knows that I do silence the way my brothers did coke binges—starting off in small fragments of time, believing that this is a momentary lapse only to find that hours or days have gone by and you have been trapped in the same unhealthy place. She knows that I am intelligent and the law comes easily to me, but away from the public world where I thrive, I am emotionally dyslexic. The paradox is that I am exuberant about the accomplishments of the children I tutor and open and encouraging to the people in the community who need my services. But alone with a woman whom I love I am as expressive as a television on mute.
A friend once told me that shutting a woman out is nearly as bad as hitting her. His words stayed with me, they told me that even though I never raised my hand—or even my voice— I had carried on that tradition of violence in my home. I came by the silence honestly. The men I looked up to as a child were uniformly reserved, brooding figures. They withheld themselves from the world—and especially from those closest to them—and kept themselves exiled behind furrowed brows. I remember my uncles whose yeses held the gruffness of other men's noes and who grunted appreciation for some act of kindness from their wives. I wondered why it was that men seemed so unhappy and assumed that it was part of the unfolding mystery of adulthood. I assumed that when I was a man, I too would learn to keep the world at arm's length. My story is not unique, generations of Black men have literally internalized this lesson. Solemnity has become the cornerstone of our manhood. It was no coincidence that both of those uncles died of cancer. Their deaths were tragedies and metaphors.
My woman left because of the silence. She tearfully told me that she was tired of being alone even when we were together, tired of waiting for me to show up and summon the courage to smile and be open to her. In a moment of painful introspection, I admit to myself that each woman who has ever left me has done so for the same reason. I have come to understand the difficult truth that even with the ever-dwindling numbers of available Black men, a woman who values herself will not settle for the cruel quiet of a man who is only partially present. I have been taught that eligible and available are not necessarily the same thing.
Still there are times when the facade cracks. A few months ago I was playing with my eighteen-month-old cousin in my basement when his mother called him up to dinner. He began crawling up the stairs. After he successfully mounted each step, he would turn and wave good-bye to me. By the time he found his way to the kitchen, I was in tears, overwhelmed by the purity of a gesture from a Black male soul too young to have calluses. Had I been able to admit the beauty of that moment, to call my woman and share it with her, maybe I would not be alone. But I held back.
So this is where I am, in the dark distance between 3:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M., waiting for late to become early. Listening to my own silences and knowing that I would sleep if she were here again curled up with her back pressed against my chest. It is the middle of the night, and sleep is miles in the distance, so I make use of my time and offer a prayer that my little cousin never sees in me what I saw in my uncles, that he never learns to hide himself from himself. I pray that it is not too late to share my soul with a woman who has walked out. And I pray that God makes my heart as open as a child waving good-bye as he climbs up the stairs.
Loving Johnny Dedline
LISA PAGE
THIS MORNING I lay next to my husband in bed, the way I have so many times before, listening to him breathe. It was before dawn, and the room was dark. I listened to the ticking of the bedside clock and to the sound of the freight train several blocks over, rattling through the inky blackness. I listened to the man snoring next to me and wrapped my arm around his body. His fingers intertwined mine automatically, even though he was asleep. I forced myself to pull back the covers, knowing I would fall back to sleep myself otherwise. I got up and found his shoes in the bathroom, black and polished on the white tile floor, found his keys on the sink, his tie slung over the towel rack. I went downstairs to grind the coffee.
This is my life with Clarence.
We have been together for over twenty years, but as I write this, it feels like a lie. I feel like he was always in my life—feel like I was always in his life too. There was never a time we led separate lives, had childhoods, other relationships. We've always been together, even as I know that's not true either. We live in this old house, outside Washington, with its wraparound porch and its high ceilings, like we've always been here.
But there is evidence to the contrary. Our son, for instance, is only seventeen. We have not always been married. The past is full of people who are long dead—Clarence's parents, an ex-wife, and old friends. We led single lives once, loved other people, and made mistakes. Whereas today our lives are made up of ink stains and coffee rings, newsprint and talk radio playing in the background. But it wasn't always this way.
I FIRST SAW Clarence doing a stand-up on local television in the early 1980s. He was in my living room, via satellite feed, holding a microphone that read “Channel 2 NEWS.” He wore red-rimmed glasses, a bow tie, and suspenders, and he sported a mustache. In those days it was a rarity to see a Black man reporting the evening news, and I remember thinking, Who is that guy?
CBS had hired him away from his job as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and made him its community affairs director.
I was in my twenties then, trying to make it as a writer myself, working as an editorial assistant at Playboy magazine. I spent my days transcribing tapes by Hunter Thompson and fielding telephone calls from Roy Blount, Jr., David Halber-stam, and other journalists who wrote for the magazine. In those days Playboy was still trying to be The New
Yorker, even as it was a skin magazine, with photos of naked women sandwiched in between choice fiction, interviews, and major features. I cut my teeth there, learning about layouts, dummy books, and bylines. And in my spare time I wrote for weeklies and an arts magazine.
The columnist Bob Greene was a friend of my boss. He wrote about a character named Johnny Deadline, a sort of superhero reporter in a trench coat. In those days it seemed like reporters were everywhere.
Chicago was on the precipice of major change. Harold Washington had become the first Black mayor in the city's history, and doors were flying open in corporate offices everywhere. In a city with a reputation for the worst segregation in the country, there was a feeling of opportunity electrifying the atmosphere. The media reflected this: The head of CBS was a Black man, and Black editors were at the Chicago bureaus of Time, Newsweek, and Playboy too. I myself was promoted at Playboy nine months after being hired by the magazine.
But there was a dark cloud amidst all this good news. Leanita McClain, the first Black female member of the Chicago Tribune's editorial board, committed suicide. This was a woman with her own column in the paper, who was garnering national attention, when she died. She had also been married to Clarence Page.
This was front-page news. Leanita McClain had grown up in the projects and climbed into the upper middle class, only to take her own life at the age of thirty-two. She wrote about her identity crisis as a token Black woman in a White male world in a column titled “The Burden of the Black Middle Class”: “I have a foot in each world, but I cannot fool myself about either. I can see the transparent deceptions of some Whites and the bitter helplessness of some Blacks. I know how tenuous my grip on one way of life is, and how strangling the grip of the other life can be.” Her eloquence echoed what many of us felt at that time. She was also brutally frank about the racism she found in her White colleagues during Harold Washington's mayoral campaign. Mike Miner's Chicago Reader profile mentioned her divorce from Clarence Page, two years prior to her death. The piece included Clarence's description of his late ex-wife—how he first noticed her freckles, light complexion, and hazel eyes when he met her in the Tribune offices. Reading it gave me chills—he could've been describing me.