by Brit Bennett
That night, the girls threw a party. In Harley’s crowded living room, she squeezed onto the windowsill, nursing a rum and Coke. She wasn’t in a partying mood but she still felt too embarrassed to go home and face Reese; of course, he then arrived at the party, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, his hair still wet from the shower. He’d waved to her when he first walked in but he didn’t come over to say hello. Maybe he pitied her. He’d only kissed her because he felt so bad about yelling at her. He knew that she hoped that kiss meant more so he was avoiding her, standing so far on the other side of the room that Harley asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” she said, tilting more rum into her cup.
“Then why’re you both acting so damn funny?” he said.
He had blond feathered bangs like Farrah Fawcett that he kept sweeping out of his eyes. She shrugged, staring out the window. She couldn’t continue like this, pretending that everything was normal. She needed air. But the room suddenly fell into complete darkness. The music cut off, the silence as jarring as the black. Then voices ringing out, Barry asking where to find a flashlight, Harley offering that there might be candles in the bathroom, and Luis, leaning over by the window, calling everyone over. All around the block, all the other buildings descended into darkness too.
She said that she would look for candles and groped her way down the dark hallway toward the bathroom when Reese grabbed her hand.
“It’s me,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
In the dark, you could be anybody, but she knew him before he even spoke. His cologne, his rough palms. She could find him in any darkened room.
“I can’t see shit,” he said, laughing a little.
“Well, I’m trying to find the candles.”
“Wait. Can we just talk?”
“We don’t have to talk,” she said. “I know you don’t like me. Not like that. And it’s okay. We just don’t have to talk about it.”
He dropped her hand. At least she didn’t have to look at him. Maybe she would never find the candles and she wouldn’t have to see his face. She inched farther down the hall, finally feeling the tile on the bathroom wall, but when she opened the medicine cabinet, Reese pressed it shut. Then he was kissing her against the bathroom sink.
Down the hall, their friends were gamely calling each other’s names, laughing at their own blindness. But in the bathroom, they were kissing desperately, as if both knew that the moment couldn’t possibly last. The lights would flicker on, someone would come searching for them, they would wrench apart at the sound of footsteps, guilty, caught. But by the time Barry returned from the kitchen, triumphantly waving a flashlight, they’d already slipped out the door. They felt their way down the stairwell until they emerged on the sidewalk, still holding hands, fading into the blackened city. Overhead, traffic lights blinked uselessly. Cars crept along the street. The skyline above them disappeared, and for the first time in nearly a year, she saw stars.
Somewhere, across the vast city, a grandmother listened to children tell ghost stories in front of the black television screen. A man sat on his porch, petting a dog’s graying muzzle. A dark-haired woman lit a candle in her kitchen, staring out at her swimming pool. A young man and young woman walked home, climbing the silent steps, shutting the door on the rest of the city. She held his lighter as he searched the cabinets for candles. He couldn’t find any and they both felt relieved. She wasn’t afraid of the dark; he felt safer inside it.
In bed, he tugged off her shirt, kissing down her neck to her breasts. Only once he was kissing between her thighs did she realize that he hadn’t undressed at all.
All over the city, couples doing what they were doing. Teenagers kissing on blankets at a beach, the ocean rolling in black. Newlyweds fumbling in a hotel room. A man whispering into his lover’s ear. A woman holding a match to a slender candle, her face glowing off the kitchen window. Across the city, darkness and light.
Six
There’s something different about you,” Desiree Vignes told her daughter over the phone.
By late August, a heat wave had rolled through Los Angeles, and even with all the windows open, you couldn’t catch a breeze. Outside, the pavement shimmered like a pond. Big brown crickets searched the pipes for water, and every morning, Jude always found one or two in the shower; she grew so paranoid that they would blend into the beige carpet that she refused to walk around barefoot. The heat was maddening but life could be worse, she thought, watching Reese slide an ice cube between his lips. He was wearing blue swim trunks and a black T-shirt, his collarbone glistening with sweat. She twirled the phone cord around her finger.
“Ma’am?” she said.
“Oh, don’t ma’am me. You heard what I said. There’s somethin different. I can hear it in your voice.”
“Mama, there’s nothing wrong with my voice.”
“Not wrong. Different. You think I can’t tell?”
They were meeting the girls at Venice Beach; she’d just started packing a picnic basket when the phone rang. She hadn’t called home in a month, so she felt too guilty to ask to talk later, but now she regretted answering. What did her mother mean, different? And how could she even tell? Jude hated the idea of being so transparent to anyone, even her own mother. Then again, hadn’t Barry noticed right away? Two days after the blackout, she’d met him by the fountain outside the May Company and before she’d even walked over, he was suspicious, squinting at her.
“What happened?” he demanded. “Why do you look like that?”
“Like what?” she said, laughing.
Then it dawned on him. “You didn’t,” he whispered. “Oh, I can’t believe you! You sat right there on my couch and told me you had some big fight—”
“We did! I mean, nothing had happened then, I swear—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said. “I don’t know why neither of you called me.”
But after the blackout, she hadn’t told anyone. She wasn’t even sure how to explain what had happened between her and Reese. One night they’d been friends, the next lovers. He’d left for work by the time she awoke in the morning. She’d reached across the wrinkled sheets, still warm from his body. In the light of day, the previous night seemed like a fever dream. But those still-warm sheets. Her panties on the floor. His cologne on the pillow. She rolled over, burying her face in the smell of him. All day, she imagined how he would tell her that the previous night had been a mistake, but he climbed into her bed that night and kissed the back of her neck.
“What’re we doing?” she said.
“I’m kissing you,” he said.
“You know what I mean.”
She rolled over to face him. He was smiling, playing with the fringe of her T-shirt.
“Do you want me to go?” he said.
“Do you?”
“Hell no, baby.”
He kissed her neck again. When he tugged off her pajamas, she reached for his belt and he squirmed away.
“Don’t,” he said softly, and she froze, not knowing what to do. Lonnie had never been shy about what he’d wanted. Shoving her hand down his boxers, pushing her face toward his lap. But there were rules to loving Reese and over time, she learned them. Lights off. No undressing him. She could touch his stomach or arms but never his chest, his thighs but not between them. She wanted to touch him as freely as he touched her but she never complained. How could she? Not now, not when she was so happy Barry noticed it radiating off her from across a shopping mall, so happy that her mother could even hear it through the phone.
At the beach, she sat on her towel, watching Barry and Luis and Harley splash around in the water. They’d been stuck in traffic for an hour, slowly creeping toward the coast; when they finally arrived at Venice, the girls shucked their shirts, tossing them in a careless pile, and ran yelping toward the shore. Reese rested his head in her lap, watching as
they dipped into the water, slick under the sunlight. She raked her fingers through his hair.
“Don’t you want to swim?” she said.
He smiled, squinting up at her. “Maybe later,” he said. “Aren’t you gonna get in?”
She told him that she didn’t like to swim. But she’d loved going to the city pool in D.C. In Mallard, she never dared to swim in the river—imagine showing so much of yourself. She wasn’t in Mallard anymore, but somehow, the town wouldn’t leave her. Even now at Venice Beach, she pictured sunbathers laughing as soon as she tugged off her shirt. Snickering at Reese, too, wondering what on earth is he doing with that black thing?
That night, when they came home from the beach, Reese slid on top of her and she asked if she could flip on the light. He laughed a little, burrowing his face into her neck.
“Why?” he murmured.
“Because,” she said, “I want to see you.”
He stilled for a moment, then he rolled off her.
“Well, I don’t want you to,” he said.
For the first time in weeks, he slept on the couch. He came back to bed the next night but she still remembered the loneliness of sleeping without him, only a wall apart. Sometimes she felt as if that wall had never quite fallen. She never felt what she wanted to feel, his skin on hers.
“I’m seeing someone,” she told her mother the next time she called.
Her mother laughed. “Of course you are,” she said. “I don’t know why you think I don’t know anything.”
“He’s . . .” Jude paused. “He’s nice, Mama. He’s so sweet to me. But he’s not like other boys.”
“What you mean?”
She thought, for a second, about telling her mother Reese’s story. Instead, she just said, “He keeps me out.”
“Well,” her mother said, “I’m sorry to tell you but he’s just like other boys. Exactly like all the rest of ’em.”
The door unlocked, and Reese shuffled inside, tossing his jacket on the back of the chair. He smiled as he walked past, reaching over to stroke her ankle.
“Jude?” her mother said. “You still there?”
“Yes ma’am,” she said. “I’m here.”
* * *
—
A JOB. She would find a new job.
The answer seemed so simple once it arrived one night as she watched Reese climb out of bed in his sweaty T-shirt. He wanted a new chest. Carried in his wallet a worn business card from Dr. Jim Cloud, a plastic surgeon with an office on Wilshire. Dr. Cloud, a patron at Mirage, had worked on friends of friends, but his price was steep. Three thousand dollars cash up front. Fair, if you thought about the risks he was incurring even performing such procedures. The medical board could revoke his license, shutter his practice, call for his arrest. The shadiness unnerved Jude, although Reese insisted the doctor was legit. Still, she’d done the math, unfurling the faded gray sock in his drawer and dumping the crumpled bills onto the bedspread. Two hundred dollars. He would never save enough by himself.
“I need a new job,” she told Barry.
Autumn had arrived, along with the Santa Ana winds. At night, angry hot gusts rattled their windowpanes. They were celebrating Barry’s thirtieth birthday, everyone crowded in his apartment.
Barry shrugged, running a hand over his shaven head.
“Well, don’t look at me,” he said. He was on his third martini and already fresh. “I need a new job too. Those white people don’t hardly pay me as it is.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “A real job. One that pays real money.”
“I wish I could help, sweet thing, but I don’t know nobody who’s hiring. Well, my cousin Scooter drives a catering van but you don’t wanna do nothing like that, do you?”
Scooter picked her up the next afternoon in an old silver van that read, in peeling purple cursive, CARLA’S CATERING. Inside, the van was crumbling, a chunk of yellow foam gaping from the passenger’s seat, the roof cloth hanging like a canopy, a faded air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. Not much to look at, but the fridge worked, Scooter said, thumbing at the wall separating the cooled food. He was lanky like Barry but yellower, wearing a purple Lakers cap.
“Let me tell you,” he said, “don’t believe none of what you hear about the economy and all that. It don’t matter one bit. White folks always wanna throw a party.”
He laughed, the van lurching onto Fairfax, and she quickly reached for her seat belt. He drove with an arm hanging out the window, chatting amiably the whole time, always starting midway into a conversation as if he were responding to a question she hadn’t actually asked.
“Yeah, I had my own spot once,” he said. “Nice little joint, off Crenshaw. But I couldn’t hang it. Never been all that good with money, you know. I get a penny, I spend a penny, you know how that go. I was good with the food but I ain’t no businessman, that’s for sure. But it turned out all right. Now I’m Carla’s right-hand man.”
Carla Stewart, he explained, as they crawled along the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu, was tough but fair. You had to be both if you were a woman in the food world. She’d built the catering company after her husband died. A smart business in a city where there was never a shortage of people wanting to host events while exerting as little effort as possible. He tossed a black polo shirt onto her lap.
“You gotta put this on,” he said. When she hesitated, he laughed. “Not now, when we get inside! I ain’t no pervert. Don’t worry, Barry said you like a little sister to him and he better not hear I tried to flirt with you or nothin.”
It was the nicest thing Barry had ever said about her, and of course, he never intended her to hear it.
“Barry’s funny,” she said.
“He is,” Scooter said. “He’s a funny boy, but I love him. I love him all the same.”
Did Scooter know about Bianca? Barry prided himself on his ability to keep his lives separate. “It’s like the Good Book says,” he told her once, “don’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.” He was Bianca on two Saturday nights a month, and otherwise, he pushed her out of sight, even though he thought about her, shopped for her, planned for her eventual return. Barry went to faculty meetings and family reunions and church, Bianca always lingering on the edge of his mind. She had her role to play and Barry had his. You could live a life this way, split. As long as you knew who was in charge.
* * *
—
“WHERE YOU BEEN?” Reese asked when she climbed into bed that night.
He sounded worried; she never stayed out late without calling. But she’d catered a party for a real estate agent who’d sold homes to Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch. She’d wandered through the house, admiring the long white couches and marble countertops and the giant glass windows that faded into a view of the beach. She couldn’t imagine living like this—hanging on a cliff, exposed by glass. But maybe the rich didn’t feel a need to hide. Maybe wealth was the freedom to reveal yourself.
The party had ended at one and she’d had to clean up after. By the time Scooter dropped her back off, the morning sky was tinting lavender.
“Malibu,” she said.
“What you doin all the way out there?”
“I got a new job,” she said. “With this catering company. Barry helped me find it.”
“Why?” he said. “I thought you said you were gonna focus on school.”
She couldn’t tell him the real reason; he didn’t even like her to pay for dinner, always reaching for his wallet as soon as the check came. He would never agree to let her pay for an expensive surgery. And what if he misunderstood? What if he thought she wanted him to have the surgery because she wanted him to change? She could never tell him, not until she’d saved so much money that he would be foolish to refuse it. She slid into the crook of his arm, touching his face.
“I j
ust thought it’d be nice to have some extra cash,” she said, “that’s all.”
* * *
—
THAT SEMESTER, she thought of bodies.
Once a week, she sat on the edge of the bathtub, holding a hypodermic needle while Reese rolled up his plaid boxers. On the counter, a glass vial filled with a liquid that was yellowy clear like chardonnay. He still hated needles; he never looked when she flicked the tip before squeezing the fat part of his thigh. Okay, she always whispered after, sorry that she’d hurt him.
Each month, he paid out of pocket for a vial small enough to fit in his palm. She barely understood how hormones worked, so on a whim, she enrolled in an anatomy class that she enjoyed far more than she’d expected. The rote memorization that bored the rest of the class thrilled her. She left flash cards labeled with body parts strewn all over the apartment: phalanges by the bathroom sink, deltoids on the kitchen table, dorsal metacarpal veins squeezed between couch cushions.
Her favorite organ was the heart. She was the first person in her class to properly dissect the sheep heart. It was the most difficult dissection, the professor said, because the heart isn’t perfectly symmetrical but so close to it that you cannot tell which side is which. You have to orient the heart correctly to find the vessels.
“You really must experience the heart with your hands,” he told the class. “I know it’s slippery but don’t be shy. You have to use your fingers to feel your way through the dissection.”
At night, she placed her flash cards on Reese to quiz herself. He stretched out on the couch, reading a novel, trying to remain still while she propped a card against his arm. She traced a finger along his biceps, chanting the Latin terms to herself quietly until he tugged her into his lap. Skin tissue and muscles and nerves, bone and blood. A body could be labeled but a person couldn’t, and the difference between the two depended on that muscle in your chest. That beloved organ, not sentient, not aware, not feeling, just pumping along, keeping you alive.