It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  When she reaches the top of the escalator, he has already cut across Connecticut Avenue. He's made it to the median, anxious for what looks like his destination: a bookstore and cafe across the street.

  She prepares herself: Dupont Circle. She was just getting used to the idea of the suburbs. She hadn't figured on Mr. Cates living here, where the rents are high and there are more White folks than Brown. Samuel Cates can't live here, she thinks.

  Perhaps he is meeting someone, a friend or lover. In all the years that she's imagined him in her mind, she has never thought of Mr. Cates in love. It's only now she realizes that for a long time he's lived in her as sexless, much as she has come to think of herself.

  She can't remember the last time she was sitting across the table from a date, worried over whether to talk politics, crack jokes, or make eyes. She can't remember. Can't or doesn't? Won't or chooses not to? Too many trifling men in Washington, she thinks. She's used that one many times, responding to coworkers or the busybodies at church, just before or after she reminds the nosy or concerned how many more women there are in D.C. than men. When she hears, “Girl, you so right,” she breathes the pressure out and doesn't worry herself with how long it's been since she last imagined a man in her bed.

  But she's envisioned men in many other ways: in the store, wandering the aisles in search of the mysterious products their dead mothers or ex-wives had used to clean and feed them; in the office, bullshitting their way out of casework; on the train, sly grin, furtive eyes over the sports section, and moist, scowling lips when she doesn't smile back. Everton Fox, the portly BBC weatherman, makes her smile with his four-button suits and the gallant sweep of his hand as it passes over typhoons in Australasia; his accent lilts what she imagines as East London, but she is sure she can hear the hint of his Jamaican ancestors’ Creole.

  It troubles her that she has no image of what Mr. Cates finds attractive in a lover. All she can picture now is what she sees: blazer, khakis, running shoes, now nervously jaywalking Connecticut Avenue. She pauses, takes a breath, heads for the crosswalk, and prepares to enter somewhere she's never been in the city she calls home.

  LYNETTE'S MOTHER told her husband to call Leena Morris, from down the hall, for her to help Mrs. Simmons help Mr. Cates. When Lynette would see Miss Morris on the elevator, Miss Morris would tell Lynette to call her Leena, even though Lynette's mother had told Lynette to say Miss Morris. Leena wasn't like Lynette's mother or Berthine or Odessa or anyone Lynette knew. Berthine wore her best hats only to church and managed to carry her 270 pounds on four-inch heels, but still she called Leena Morris “one of them new-style women.”

  Leena Morris worked late, but no one ever talked about what she did for work. On early summer mornings, when Lynette and her mother sometimes walked over to Sixteenth Street to meet her father halfway as he came from his security shift, she could see Leena's flickering, TV-blue living room windows, the only ones lit up in the building.

  Months before Samuel Cates jumped, Lynette had been eavesdropping from the living room couch as her mother and Berthine talked in the kitchen about Mr. Cates: Sammy Cates, who only came to church on Christmas Eve and left early; Sammy Cates, up at all hours of the night; Sammy Cates, who spent too much time by himself.

  While the two women spoke, Lynette was imagining Mr. Cates sitting alone in his apartment, maybe looking out the window, maybe looking into the alley. She tried to picture her mother, alone, sitting with a can of club soda at the kitchen table. Or her father, without his wife, sitting in front of the TV, no food on the table, no ball game on, no nothing going on.

  When Leena knocked on the front door and slipped in, Lynette could see the get-the-hell-out-my-house look on her father's face. He waved toward the deck and told Leena, “They out there.” Mr. Simmons was irritated by this—all these people in his home, from down the street, down the hall, through his roof—and him having no say in it.

  Leena nodded to Berthine and Odessa and shot a wink to Lynette before stepping to the deck, and sliding the door closed behind her. Mr. Cates stumbled to get up, but Lynette's mother held him where he sat. She smiled at Leena, pointed inside, and, without much more talk, came into the living room and went straight for the bathroom to get gauze and alcohol.

  Out on the deck, Mr. Cates eased back in his chair. Leena already had his shirt open to wipe away blood and see if he was cut anywhere else.

  Lynette remembers that when Berthine said, “She don't waste no time, do she?” her little girl's mind thought it was thinking what Berthine was thinking, even though she didn't yet know what that was all about. Berthine said to no one in particular, “I could say something, but I won't,” but pulled Odessa close to whisper something Lynette could not hear anyway.

  IN THE CAFE SECTION of the bookstore, Lynette is on her second coffee. Mr. Cates is nursing his first. He's been at a table by himself since he came in, looking from the bar of the cafe to the front of the bookstore.

  Lynette drifted in a moment or so after, orbited the New Arrivals table, and wandered into the front room of the cafe, which is also lined with books. She worked her way carefully through the poetry section, tracing her fingers from Z on back before easing down to the table where she now sips at her coffee.

  Samuel Cates hunches over his cup, looks to the street, looks into the restaurant at the back of the cafe, then back into his coffee. The track lighting warms the room, and in a glow that looks like late-autumn daylight, his features soften. The light shines on the skin of his head, where she had imagined the hair to be thicker. His awkward lean onto the table looks more like a habit his body has learned. His hands hold the cup like a chalice, and he looks around the room with the same keen fascination she sees in the elderly who watch children at play in the park.

  This is not a place Samuel Cates knows well, but he enjoys it, the jazz over the speakers, people speaking and laughing loudly, engrossed in the witty things they are saying. For just a moment Lynette watches a small grin flash on Mr. Cates's face, and then it is gone. Perhaps, because he is alone or because she now sees how he's aged, he seems more pitiful. She is not sure why, but Lynette starts to feel that the lines in his face have come from more smiles than frowns. Just as Lynette comes to feeling this, Mr. Cates slips a small nip-size bottle of Scotch out of his blazer pocket and quickly pours all of it into his cup, which he shields with his arm from no one in particular.

  The small bottle vanishes, and she marvels at the deft movement of his hands. Without a beat, he is back to his hunch over the table. She is thinking on wanting a little taste too, something hidden, something quick and secret, maybe scotch, maybe rum. She wonders what takes the edge off, the liquor itself or the secret of it, snuck into a coffee cup in a room full of people. Maybe both. She wants to ask him, “How long you been at that, Samuel Cates? You go to work sauced or is it just at the end of the day? That what gets you home?” But somehow she knows it's just a taste, every now and then. Sammy Cates, with his little taste on Connecticut Avenue. “All this time, where you been?”

  LEENA MORRIS had been on the deck with Mr. Cates for some time, the two of them talking as if nothing had happened. Mr. Cates seemed to have cracked a joke, because Leena was laughing. When she smiled, her mouth opened wide, and Lynette could see her teeth, which weren't very white, but they were set straight and apart from each other so that when she smiled she had a warm, inviting face. She was moving her hands around as she spoke. Her fingers were long and thin. She moved them gently, like she was gently brushing away smoke, and Lynette was thinking that Mr. Cates must be watching that too. Those hands, gliding through the air. The sun was bright on her cheekbones and her wide, flat nose. She was beautiful.

  Lynette noticed that her mother was now standing at the sliding door holding alcohol, also watching Mr. Cates and Leena. And it was then that Lynette realized that everybody—her mother, Berthine, Uncle Norman, and even her father—was watching Leena and Mr. Cates. Everyone watched them through the sliding glass door a
nd no one said a thing. The ball game was on. Lynette could hear it and nothing else. Mr. Cates and Leena both turned to see everyone in the living room looking out at them.

  Berthine was the first to laugh. Mr. Cates was still smiling as everyone stepped outside. Uncle Norman was the last one on the deck, and he was still laughing when he came out. He reached out to give Mr. Cates a beer, but when Mr. Cates took hold of it Norman held on, tugging it, then let go. Everyone laughed at that too.

  Then Norman said, “You a weird one, Sammy Cates. Next time you want a date, just call the sister; you don't got to be jumpin’ off no building.”

  Lynette's mother stopped laughing. So did Leena. Everyone stiffened. No one would look at each other at first. Then Lynette looked at her father, who looked to the deck ceiling for a moment and then pulled Norman back inside.

  Leena got up and hurried for the door.

  Mrs. Simmons ran after her and shut the sliding door behind her. Before Berthine could say anything, Odessa pushed her inside. Lynette was left standing on the deck, alone with Mr. Cates.

  Samuel Cates looked at Lynette. She smiled at him because she thought that he might too, but he looked dazed again. Once, as the elevator was approaching her floor, just for kicks, she said, “Hey, Sammy Cates!” instead of, “Hello, Mr. Cates,” and that startled him. Her mother pinched her arm, and he turned back to face the door. She wondered what might happen if she got to talking to Mr. Cates. She put her hand on his shoulder. His body was rigid. Her mother had never allowed her to be alone with strangers, but her mother was off chasing Leena Morris, and here was Mr. Cates, left behind with her. Lynette thought about how she felt at recess, when it seemed that no one wanted to play with her; it's easier to be chosen than to ask.

  “Hey, Sammy Cates,” she said.

  He had gauze in his hand. He was unraveling it and balling it back up. When he had several balls of bloody gauze, he didn't know what to do with them.

  Lynette put out her hand. “You can't pay no attention to Norman. He says stuff he has no business sayin'.”

  Mr. Cates shrugged his shoulders.

  Lynette took a couple of the balls from his hands, which weren't very big, just a bit larger than her mother's.

  There were two pigeons sitting on the balcony railing, and Lynette tossed the balls at them. The birds fluttered their wings and flew down into the alley Mr. Cates watched this and squeezed the remaining gauze tightly in his hand.

  “I think God makes some folks like Uncle Norman so that the rest of us can see what actin’ a fool looks like.” She reached to take the rest of the gauze out of his hands, and he closed his fingers around hers.

  “I'm not much for all that God business,” he said. His face was calm. If his eyes were closed, he could have been asleep. He focused in on their hands. The tops of his were coarse, but his palms were smooth, and even though he didn't let go of her hands when Lynette pulled, he wasn't holding too tightly. If she pulled hard, she could have freed herself.

  “You okay, Mr. Cates?”

  “You don't got to call me that.” He loosened his hands.

  Then Lynette did pull her hands away, and the gauze fell onto the deck. When she looked up, the pigeons had come back.

  Mr. Cates picked up the wadded cotton, stood up, and threw it at the pigeons. He threw the wads one at a time and missed wildly, but he threw them very hard. The birds flew off in all directions. Then he looked back to Lynette.

  She suddenly wondered where everyone else had gone.

  He went to the sliding door and opened it to leave.

  “Hey.”

  He stopped and looked back at her.

  “You not gonna do anything else crazy, are you?”

  He smiled and ran his small hand over the cut on his forehead. Then he gave a slight wave and closed the sliding door behind him. That was twenty-five years ago.

  WHEN LYNETTE SLIPS BACK from this memory, Mr. Cates is gone. All that remains at his table is a ten-dollar bill under his coffee cup. She picks up her bag and walks to his table. The coffee is gone, but he has left his faded Washington Bullets bag. It sits on the chair next to where he sat. She picks it up and runs for the door.

  Lynette follows him a few blocks until she stops across the street from the building he enters, a retirement home in a renovated apartment building. Lynette can't help but smile, for this development fits her pity. She smiles and is immediately ashamed for imagining him as a drunk, senile man wandering the city, riding the Metro, collecting meaningless items in an old bag lined with weeks-old newspaper. She stands on the corner, hand on the zipper of the bag, wondering if it will matter to him that she's looked inside it. The thought strikes her that what's in the bag might surprise her, telling her more than she wants to know. She stands under the streetlight, staring across the street.

  It is a small building he has walked into. The upper floors have drop ceilings with large square light fixtures. Inside, the fluttering hints of shadows that fluorescent lights barely reveal. From outside the glass door, the lobby looks small. A hallway leading into the back of the building, a long table just inside the door, a few chairs opposite the table. He must be missing the bag, she's thinking, and how long can she stand on a dark corner, in Dupont Circle, Northwest Washington, D.C.?

  Lynette crosses the street, rushes in the door, heads for the hallway. There must be a resident directory near the elevator.

  “Excuse me, sister. Excuse me!”

  Lynette turns to see a large woman at the table she's just passed.

  “Can I help you?” The woman wears the white blouse, skirt, hose, and shoes that nurses wear. She's got what is left of a sandwich in one hand, some other part of it in her mouth. She moves the food from one side of her mouth to the other. “You can't come in here, unannounced and all. Who you tryin’ to see?”

  Lynette steps up to the desk. She sees a registration book next to the woman's neat stack oi Jet magazines. She runs her finger down the visitor's log. She looks down the hall, then points to where “S. Cates” is scribbled in the log.

  “Junior or Senior? Junior just gone up. You from the drugstore?”

  Lynette is quiet for a moment, sets down her bag, holds on to Mr. Cates's bag. She feels herself getting nervous, unsure of what she knows.

  “Senior been waiting on his pills all day. Man call down here four times, askin’ after them pills.”

  Lynette starts to fill her name into the register.

  “If you from the drugstore, I know Cates Junior wants to talk to you. And Lord, take his daddy those pills!”

  “I can wait for him down here.”

  “Wait on who? Cates Junior? He'll be up there another forty-five minutes! Sign in and get them pills up there. Been waitin’ on you, girl. I don't want to hear no more from that old man tonight!”

  Lynette picks up her bags. I'm not from the drugstore. She is not sure if she has said this or thought it. A panic fills her because she's run out of things to say. She is not from the drugstore, she is not visiting, she has had nothing to say before she walked in. Suddenly she loses sight of what Mr. Cates looks like. All of this is so far beyond what she had considered. Her mind flashes on a faceless, formless man sitting impatiently next to the bed of his father. The both of them are silent, one beside himself with waiting, his octogenarian expectation of the medicine's delivery eating at him worse than his need for taking it; the other, the son, anxious for this hour's visit to be up, thinking more about another scotch in his coffee than anything else. Or maybe their life is nothing like this.

  This is what bothers Lynette. She worries that the Cateses, Senior and Junior, may be right now laughing about fishing trips and Momma Cates's collard greens or ribbing each other over dominoes. Maybe their life is like this, not stolid and monotonous, neither of them bitter at the other for something that could not be explained. And she'd rather not ask the nurse “And how's Senior doing?” like some close family friend making small talk, because she hasn't figured on this other Cat
es, and a bit of socializing might get the nurse talking—and the nurse is the sort who talks—about how good it is that Sammy Cates comes to see his father: Junior, be in here once, twice a week in the evening, once on the weekends, in for just an hour, and then he gone till next time. You could time the trains on that man. And a talker like that will get around to some unsolicited reflection. Lord knows we all could spend more time with family. I'm more bad than good with that, but, girl, I'm tryin … You got family? And then Lynette would have to answer, bag in each hand—groceries and unknown—weighing the answer: Yes, girl, I tell my kids the same, we got to get over to see their grands … but she has no pictures of children when the nurse wants to see—the talkers always want to see pictures. So Lynette ponders: No, my parents passed awhile back, when I was in my twenties. Don't have any kids—no man on the scene—but if I did have children …

  Lynette grabs up her bag to leave. She will go back home. No train this time. If she's lucky, a cab will stop. She's just a zone or so away, so it won't cost that much. She will go home, soak beans for tomorrow, take a bath, fix a drink, watch the news—just like any other night. But she's still holding this Washington Bullets bag, with no idea what's in it, and she's not sure what to think of this Mr. Cates if she doesn't open it.

  She's halfway out the door.

  “Hey, girl, hold on! Just hold tight.”

  Lynette sits in a chair, sets down her bag.

  “You all right? If you want to wait, then wait.”

  Lynette looks at the wall past the nurse, then down the hall to the elevators, then back to the wall. She thinks of her parents. She's struck by how little they have lived in her since they passed. They are buried in the suburbs, at a place where the gravestones lie flat, so that the cemetery lawn looks more like a golf course. A place with few trees, but it was where she could afford. She has hung their pictures on the walls of her apartment, but it strikes her that she can't remember the last time she looked at them. She has not been to the cemetery in years—no reason, no explanation behind it.