It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  While I had never met Leanita, I was touched by her death. Her struggle with depression, a secret she kept throughout her life, was suddenly public information. It was a story that rippled through Chicago's publishing world.

  And at Playboy magazine she was a hot topic of conversation that went on for weeks, especially among the sisters. The editorial department was abuzz with innuendo. How could she have had so much outward success and still been so unhappy?

  Six months later I met Clarence for the first time. The Tribune had lured him away from CBS with the promise of his own column and seat on the editorial board. He effectively took Leanita's place. When I asked him, some years later, how this made him feel, he said he saw the situation as a “blood stripe.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “It's a term I learned in the army. You get a blood stripe when you replace someone who died in combat.”

  OUR FIRST MEETING happened at a party hosted by Chicago magazine, celebrating the Nelson Algren literary award. I'd gone completely on the spur of the moment. Playboy had a nonexistent dress code, and I'd gone to work in jeans and a sweater. Friends from the fiction department told me there was a party at Chicago magazine, and I initially refused to go, knowing I was underdressed. But I knew many writers would be there and so relented and went to the party after work.

  Chicago magazine's offices were alive with writers, that autumn night, ones I'd met before like novelist Leon Forrest and poet Sterling Plumpp. I had so much fun, working the room, sipping white wine, I completely forgot I was so casually dressed.

  Eventually I recognized Clarence Page across the room, wearing a suit and tie, and staring at me.

  I smiled and shook his hand.

  I said, “I think you're wonderful! I just read your piece on Louis Farrakhan.” Clarence had written an exquisite profile for Chicago magazine that included interviews with Minister Farrakhan and Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz, among others. We talked about it before I made my way to some other section of the room and realized he was following me.

  “Might you be available for lunch sometime?” he asked.

  And that was the beginning.

  I should say here that in all honesty, I knew Clarence was asking me to lunch in terms of a date. But I ignored this at the time. I was married to someone else then, a guy I'd known since I was sixteen years old. And being married was extremely useful to me, even as I was unhappy in my marriage. Working for Playboy meant men got ideas about me when they found out where I worked. I often flashed my wedding ring in those days.

  But when Clarence found out I was married, he surprised me by wanting to be my friend. I fed him stories about Playboy that he used in his column. He gave me suggestions for ways I could pitch my own stories to other magazines. We met for lunch, for drinks, and occasionally for dinner. I liked him because while he loved to talk, he also really listened. Playboy had promoted me into its circulation/promotion department, and I was doing publicity junkets and writing press releases. I could tell him about my new life, about the trips around the country Playboy sent me on. I could tell him about O.J. Simpson buying champagne for the Girls of Texas, in Houston one wild night, about the Library of Congress censoring the Braille edition of the magazine.

  I could not talk to the man I was married to. My professional success rubbed him the wrong way. I had stories for days that he didn't want to hear. So I saved them for Clarence and told myself it was okay to do.

  Clarence needed a friend. His mother had died shortly before Leanita killed herself He'd lost two of the most important women in his life in one year. His stories about his marriage became a touchstone between us. He called his former wife Lee and talked about their years together, about how alone she felt early in her life. I learned she'd left the projects for Northwestern University, on full scholarship, and had won one award after another, once she began her journalism career. But the awards and the recognition only served to fuel her sense of alienation and despair. I learned she was suicidal, even during her college years, before she ever met Clarence. And during their short marriage she tried to commit suicide several times. He had been at a loss as to what to do. She begged him to send her to a mental institution, a request he refused, thinking she was mentally coherent—how could she consider herself so emotionally unstable? Finally, after their divorce, she went into therapy and went on medication. But it turned out she was saving up the pills, and one rainy night she took them all.

  These stories cut me like a knife. I had a mentally ill family member myself. I knew what it was like to live with a person who suffered terrible bouts of depression in secret. I understood the burden of leading a public life where you pretended everything was fine, all the time knowing the opposite was true. Where friends of mine speculated about Leanita's suicide and how she'd been driven crazy by Chicago politics, Clarence described a different story of loneliness, confusion, and despair. He'd clearly been in love with her and was devastated by her death.

  But on occasion he'd take on a different persona, where he smoked More cigarettes and jauntily referred to her as his “ex.” He talked about his “Bachelorhood #2 Phase” and told me I looked “adorable.” I'd recoil—this seemed so out of character from this man nine years older that I was becoming so fond of. Seeing my reaction, he would eventually relax into the man who was my friend.

  Meanwhile, a Playboy editor named Walter Lowe had assigned a feature about the Atlanta child murders to the writer James Baldwin. That magazine story became a book called The Evidence of Things Not Seen. I set up a meeting with the editor and Clarence, resulting in another column. And we were both introduced to James Baldwin.

  We talked about other writers too, like Ntozake Shange, Michelle Wallace, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Clarence discussed Alice Walker and the male characters in her novel The Color Purple on national television. He debated novelist Ishmael Reed on Good Morning America. Much like Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, The Color Purple was deemed a feminist diatribe celebrating female empowerment at the expense of Black men. Clarence thought that was ridiculous and said so. This led to more national attention, more TV appearances, and a higher professional profile. And in response, he started to physically change. He shaved off his mustache and got rid of the red frames. He got rid of his bow tie and started wearing tortoiseshell frames, silk ties, beautiful suits. It seemed like he was better-looking every day.

  Then one Friday night, after drinks at Riccardo's, a famous watering hole for journalists, Clarence walked me to the subway at Grand and State. As we said good-night, he kissed me.

  It was such a romantic moment! I was completely surprised. But then I had to ride the train north and make the walk to my apartment where I knew my husband was waiting for me. I had to go through the whole weekend, pretending like that kiss had never happened. I felt like I was falling in love with Clarence, but I had to act like he was the farthest thing from my mind.

  I decided I couldn't see him again, except in the daytime. We could only meet for lunch from then on. Clarence understood. He said he was content to be my friend. He didn't want to be a problem in my life. He would do anything to keep our relationship alive, and if it could only be platonic, so be it. And while I let on that my marriage was unhappy and had been for some time, he said, “You ought to give it the old college try.”

  Two months later I left my first husband.

  THAT WAS OVER twenty years ago. Clarence and I have been together ever since. Between the deadlines and the sound bites, we have forged a life. Our kitchen is full of bills and correspondence that pile up between the fruit bowl and the Rolodex. The front page, the jump, and the op-ed spread themselves like cloths on the table. Blogs and Web sites, e-mail, and dates on the calendar make up small talk, while background noise is supplied by NPR or the Tom Joyner Morning Show. The newsprint stains our fingers, as we crack our boiled eggs and taste the coffee. And other equipment is at the ready, including the laptop, the tr
io, the cell. (I remember when he was a Filofax man. Those were the days.) Our house is full of remnants from our travels that are displayed in every room: stained glass from Chicago, a starfish from Cozumel, batik from Zimbabwe. Our son wanders in, a red iPod in his ears, and gets ready for school.

  In the evening, after work, Clarence has a cigarette on the back deck, where he goes with pen and paper, and I can see the first gray hairs sprouting on the back of his head. The smell of the smoke gives me pleasure even as I close the door and go back to the stove and check the burners, shake the salt. I can see him through the window, flicking ashes into a flower pot as he puts his feet up on a garden chair. The land behind our house spreads out below him, an expanse of lawn and shrubbery that leads to the back woods some yards away

  Is it always this idyllic? By no means. We've had our share of ups and downs. But our strength is conversation and the time we take to share it. Listening and talking are two things that go together, but sometimes voices are raised and feelings are hurt. Getting bent out of shape goes with the territory, I've learned. We are both strong-willed people with fierce political beliefs. We have our differences. We need our space. But so far we always come back to talk about the details of our day. The argument fades. The place mats are set.

  I grew to know Leanita McClain's parents and her two sisters. Clarence compiled a collection of her columns and published them in a book entitled A Foot in Each World. His own columns were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He won in 1987. That was how we came to Washington—he began doing so much TV here, including the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, The McLaughlin Group, and Lead Story at BET. The Chicago Tribune transferred him to its Washington bureau in 1991, and we've been here ever since.

  Clarence got to know my family too. They embraced him even as they were initially surprised by our relationship, because of my first marriage. In time they adjusted.

  Our son is already a writer. While he is still in high school, he has a byline on a student newspaper and is working on his first novel. Now all three of us fight for the floor when we have political discussions, and sometimes I throw up my hands and give up. The two of them are so alike, I need to take them on separately.

  I have cobbled out my own career and forged my own space. That's been important to do, in terms of having an identity of my own. So that when we come back together at the end of the day, I've got my own stories to tell.

  This is my life with Clarence.

  One Hundred Days of Bliss

  SONSYREA TATE MONTGOMERY

  TO: god@universe.com FROM:

  sonsyrea@peace.com

  SUBJECT: Many Thanks

  Dear God,

  You know I've wanted to write about a beautiful love since I was a little girl. I've wanted to write about the wonderful men in my life who weren't like the men in the Black classics I read—molesting a child and beating wives like in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I wanted to write about men I knew—even as a little girl—who were different from the men in Zora Neale Hurston's “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” men who drained women of all their value. You know I wanted to write about men who didn't torture women like the men in Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.

  God, You know I wanted to tell stories different from the ones my grandmothers and aunts told: that most men ain't worth a damn, but if you can luck up and get yourself a good one, make him marry you and hold on for dear life. I was even determined to put to paper something other than the hard-luck stories I shared with my girlfriends in our early twenties and thirties.

  Even though I went through men like pairs of jeans we outgrow or trade up, and even though I lived some of the scenarios in Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale, I hoped I could someday present a better narrative. You know that my first marriage was monstrous and that when I later lived with a man I loved dearly we each had so much maturing to do we nearly tore each other to pieces—those times when I set all his clothes, suits included, outside our apartment in trash bags or I left him, taking everything I owned, including the chickens out the freezer and the bag of broccoli too. The time when he set my furniture in the middle of the street, and the other time he jacked me against the wall to make me drop the knife I tried to cut him with. Madness. But those growing pains are in the past, and God, I thank You for that. If I learned nothing else from it, I learned that men's feelings are as real and strong as mine and they too must be honored.

  God, You were there when I succumbed to the drone of women's cries, calling their husbands “dumb-ass, asshole, the goddamned devil.” It's a wonder I wanted to get married at all, my heart and head filled with these dire warnings. God, You know my friends and mentors with all these horror stories stood like sentries around my heart. Hell, You probably sent them to test my convictions about and real commitment to love.

  God, I thank You for delivering me from those dark days and for guiding me to write in the light and to write about the light. Only You knew I deeply craved the love of a loving, strong, complex man like my granddads, Dad, and my uncles. God, do You even remember this prayer? Only You knew how I wanted to be able to write about this man in my own personal story.

  I still can't get my hands around how it happened; it seemed so fast. But I can see now how You were working this as a grand plan all along.

  I clearly remember Mike telling me about when he saw me standing before a small audience reading from my first book. He thought I was the sexiest woman he'd ever seen.

  “I was wearing a baggy suit!” I reminded him.

  God, only You would send this gentle spirit in the form of a police officer moonlighting as a security guard at the Oxon Hill library where I read from my debut memoir, Little X, in 1997- Only You would have him join the librarian ladies who took me out for dinner afterward, having first made these librarian ladies our mutual friends.

  I remember Mike sitting at the other end of the table, but I had no idea he was interested in me personally, and God, You know, for my part, I was only interested in promoting the current book and writing another one—and holding down some kind of mindless job to make ends meet in the meantime. But You would have it so that just a few months later Mike would show up at a reading one of our mutual friends hosted in her home. Did You mean for me to be so oblivious? I had no idea this fine brother was scoping me out.

  You know we laugh about it now. Mike says I was wearing a dress the second time he came to my book event. He says I sat off in a corner like I was scared or nervous. I don't remember it quite that way. I remember feeling outside of myself, like I was not me onstage. This business of being a celebrated author was new to me. I had yearned for it, and it was thrilling but also a bit scary. And I didn't even realize my girlfriends hosting book parties for me also were secretly inviting eligible brothers trying to make a love connection.

  It's funny how the next several years would find me nibbling on relationships just enough to take the edge off my hunger as I pursued a publisher for my second book. Interesting how those years would find Mike dating and marrying a librarian, not realizing he was fulfilling one of her life's goals just shortly before she would be diagnosed with cancer and called home to be with You. You know I consider it no small coincidence that she would leave him a trove of autographed books, many autographed by famous authors.

  God, how many times can I thank You for that fateful day in June when You sent me to Avis so she could redirect me to Mike.

  God, I remember the day when I arrived at the right place at the wrong time to report on an event for my job. That was You at it again, wasn't it? You had me arrive at the Lake Arbor Country Club to cover an event so I could meet Avis, who would put me and Mike together again, didn't You? I still remember the thrill of learning someone (Mike) had given my book to a friend for Christmas. God, I thank You for giving me enough gratitude and good humor to call him and thank him for gifting my book. But let me ask You this, God: Why'd You make a sister so dense? Why'd You make a brother s
o shy? I mean, I called him and jokingly told him he was one of only five people who bought my book so I wanted to thank him personally. He appreciated the humor and invited me to lunch. I accepted the invitation, but I thought it was work-related. I was a reporter, who needed reliable “sources” within the police department. He was a police official. I thought he could use a few good friends in the media. Talk about going through life with blinders on! God, I just didn't get it, but I see You had it planned all along. My last engagement didn't work out because You had this marriage in the works. Wow. I mean, thanks!

  God, I need to thank You too for dressing Mike in the right clothes when You put us together at Avis's Christmas party. That's where the lightbulb came on. It was his Kangol turned backward, his black leather jacket, and very sexy walk that did it. Whoah. I mean, the white shirts and expensive ties he wore to lunch were fine, and they reminded me of the security I'd felt as a little girl in the presence of Nation of Islam soldiers who wore white shirts when they protected the Temple. But the pristine white shirts and straitlaced ties Mike wore didn't turn on my womanly wiles. I hate to admit it, but God, You already know some part of me still longed for the thrill of a bad boy. So thank You for sending Mike to the party in cool-ass gear. A good boy with bad-boy flava. Yes!

  I still remember him walking me to my car. Brother had a pimp and a coolness that blew me. It's a wonder I made it home that night. I felt too dizzy to drive, and You know it wasn't from the one rum and Coke I had.