by Brit Bennett
* * *
—
IN PACIFIC PALISADES, she carried platters of bacon-wrapped dates around a mixer for booking agents. In Studio City, she served cocktails at the birthday party of an aging game-show host. In Silver Lake, a guitarist hovered over her shoulder to ensure that the crab salad was made from real crab, not imitation. By the end of her first month, she could pour a martini without measuring. At the laundromat, she found crushed water crackers in her pockets. She could never wash the smell of olives off her hands.
“Why don’t you see if the library’s hiring again?” Reese said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re always gone. I barely see you anymore.”
“I’m not gone that much.”
“Too much for me.”
“It’s better money, baby,” she said, wrapping her arms around him. “And I get to see the city. More fun than being stuck in some old library all day.”
She worked jobs from Ventura to Huntington Beach, Pasadena to Bel Air. In Santa Monica, she carried a tray of oysters through the home of a record producer, pausing in the foyer to admire the pool that spilled endlessly toward the skyline. From here, Mallard felt farther away than ever. Maybe, in time, she would forget it. Push it away, bury it deep inside herself, until she only thought of it as a place she’d heard about, not a place where she’d once lived.
“I just don’t like it,” her mother told her. “You oughta be focusin on your studies, not servin white folks. I didn’t send you all the way to California to do that.”
But it wasn’t the same, not really. She wasn’t her grandmother, cleaning after the same family for years. She didn’t wipe the snotty noses of children, she didn’t listen to wives complain about cheating husbands as she mopped the floor, she didn’t take in laundry until her home crowded with other people’s dirty underwear. There was no intimacy here. She swept through their parties, carrying trays of food, and never saw them again.
Late one night, she lay in bed holding Reese, too hot to fall asleep so close to him but unable to let go.
“What you thinkin about?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Just this house in Venice. You know they had centralized air? And didn’t even need it. So close to the beach, they could just crack open a window and cool down. But I guess that’s how rich folks are.”
He laughed and then climbed out of bed to bring her a cup of ice. He slipped a cube through her lips and she swirled the ice around her mouth, surprised by how normal this all felt. Months ago, she couldn’t even admit that she had a crush on Reese, and now she was lying naked in his bed, chewing ice. She peeked through the blinds at a police helicopter whirring overhead and turned back to find him staring.
“What?” she said, laughing. “Stop that.”
He was still wearing a T-shirt and boxers, and she suddenly felt self-conscious, tugging the sheet over her breasts.
“Stop what?” he said.
“Looking at me like that.”
“But I like looking at you.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “you’re nice to look at.”
She scoffed, turning back to the window. He didn’t mind that she was dark, maybe, but he couldn’t possibly like it. Nobody could.
“I hate when you do that,” he said.
“What?”
“Act like I’m lying,” he said. “I ain’t those people back home. Sometimes you act like you’re still back there. But you’re not, baby. We’re new people here.”
He’d told her once that California got its name from a dark-skinned queen. He’d seen a mural of her in San Francisco. She hadn’t believed him until he showed her a photograph he’d taken and there the dark queen was, seated at the top of the ceiling. Flanked by a tribe of female warriors, looking so regal and imposing that Jude was heartbroken to discover that she wasn’t even real. She was a character from a popular Spanish novel, an art history book said, about a fictional island ruled by a black Amazon queen. Like all colonizers, the conquistadors wrote their fiction into reality, their myths transforming into history. What remained was California, a place that still felt like a mythical island. She was in the middle of the ocean, sealed away from everyone she’d once known, floating.
* * *
—
PERHAPS THE STRANGEST part of that fall was that she started to dream about her father.
Sometimes she was walking beside him along the street, holding his hand as they passed through a busy intersection; she jolted awake as the cars whizzed past. Other times, he was pushing her on a playground swing, her legs stretching in front of her. In one dream, he was walking in front of her on a track, and she ran to catch up but could never reach him. She awoke, gasping.
“You’re shaking,” Reese whispered, pulling her closer.
“It was just a dream,” she said.
“About what?”
“My daddy.” She paused. “I don’t even know why. We haven’t talked in so long. I used to think he’d come looking for me. He’s not even a good man. But part of me still wants him to find me. Isn’t that stupid?”
“No.” He was staring up at the ceiling. “It’s not stupid at all. I ain’t talk to my folks in seven years but I still think about them. My mama used to like my pictures. She showed everybody in church. I took so many photos of her but I left them behind. I left everything.”
“What happened?” she said. “I mean, why’d you leave?”
“Oh, it’s a long story.”
“Then tell me some of it. Please.”
He was quiet a long moment, then he told her that his father had caught him fooling around with his sister’s friend. He’d been home alone, pretending to be sick while his family went to a tent revival, rifling instead through his father’s closet. He tried on crisp dress shirts, practiced Windsor knots, walked around in slick leather wingtips. He had just splashed himself with cologne when Tina Jenkins appeared on the lawn and tapped on the windowpane. What was he doing? Was he in some type of play? His costume wasn’t bad, he just needed to do something with his hair. She’d pinned his ponytail to the back of his neck.
“There,” she said. “Now you look more mannish, see? What’s the play? And do you have anything to drink?”
He ignored the first question and tended to the second. Later, Tina would tell her parents that the gin made her do it. The gin that he’d poured in two big glasses, replacing his mother’s Seagram with water. She did not tell her parents that she’d kissed him first, or that they’d only stopped because his family had come home early.
“My daddy had one of those belts with the big silver buckle,” he said. “He told me if I wanted to be a man, he’d treat me like one.”
She clenched her eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Long time ago.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “It wasn’t right. He had no right to do that to you—”
“I used to think about drivin down to El Dorado,” he said. “Tell him to try me now. It ain’t right to feel that way about your own daddy. Chokes me, like I can’t even breathe through it. Then other times, I think about just walkin around town. No one recognizin me. It’d be like showin up to your own funeral. Just watchin life go on without you. Maybe I knock on the door. Say, Hi Mama, but she’d know already. Even though I look different, she’d still know me.”
“You could do it,” she said. “You could go back.”
“Would you go with me?”
“I’d go anywhere with you,” she said.
He kissed her, pushing up her shirt, and she reached unthinkingly for his. He stiffened, and she shrank when he pulled away. But he disappeared into the bathroom, and when he came back out, he was shirtless, bending over her in the bandage wrapped around his chest.
“I need it,” he
said.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
She pulled him on top of her, her fingers trailing up his smooth back, touching skin and skin and cotton.
* * *
—
FROM THE BEGINNING, Reese Carter had thought about the end.
Like when he’d first arrived in Los Angeles—homeless, shorn like a baby lamb, already imagining himself leaving a city that would certainly destroy him. Or when he first saw Jude Winston at a Halloween party, a party that he’d only attended because a boy he spotted for at the gym invited him and he thought, hell, why not. She was standing alone, fidgeting with her skirt, dark as anything he’d ever seen and pretty enough that he felt like a heavy hand was pinning him to that couch. Leave it alone, Reese. Easy now. He already knew how that would end, how she would leave him once she reached for his lap and only felt him pushing away.
In the beginning, he never thought about staying in Los Angeles. He’d only wanted to put as many miles between himself and El Dorado as possible. He would’ve kept going into the ocean, if he could. For weeks, he’d spent his nights touching men in dark alleys, sometimes using his mouth, which he hated, although those men were kinder after, more grateful. They pet his head and called him a pretty boy. He carried his father’s hunting knife as protection, and sometimes, glancing up at those heads thrown back against the wall, he imagined slicing their bobbing throats. Instead, he pocketed their crumpled bills and searched for shelter, sleeping on park benches or beneath freeway overpasses, which reminded him, strangely, of camping with his father. Sitting on a hollowed log, watching his daddy slice open a rabbit with a knife he told Reese to never touch. A knife handed down from his own father, a knife he would have passed on to his son, if he’d had one, which was why, when Reese left, he took it.
He met men to touch at nightclubs and bars, men who grabbed his hand as he passed through the crowds, men who foisted drinks toward him and begged him to dance. He never went to the same club twice, always terrified that someone might notice his smooth neck or small hands or the rolled-up sock in his underpants. Once, an angry white man in Westwood discovered his secret and gave him a black eye. He quickly learned the rules. To be honest about the past meant that he would be considered a liar. The only safety was in hiding.
The night he met Barry, he was dizzy with hunger, sipping on a whiskey soda and almost desperate enough to follow him home. But he’d never been with a man outside of the alleys; he felt safer there in the darkness. So he told Barry no, which was why he was surprised when, later that night, Barry grabbed his arm and asked if he wanted dinner. Reese shook himself free, startled.
“I fucking said no—”
“I know what you said,” Barry told him. “I’m asking if you want food. You look hungry. There’s a spot right there.”
He was pointing to a late-night diner a block away. The neon sign washed the concrete in purple and blue light. Barry ordered pecan pie, and Reese ate two cheeseburgers and a basket of fries so quickly that he almost choked. He would have to pay for the meal somehow, or maybe not, he thought, feeling the knife in his pocket. Barry watched him, trailing his fork through the whipped cream.
“How old are you?” he said.
Reese wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then, feeling uncivilized, reached for the napkin dispenser.
“Eighteen,” he said, although he wouldn’t be for two more months.
“Lord.” Barry laughed. “You a baby, you know that? I got students as old as you.”
He was a teacher, he said, which was maybe why he’d decided to be kind. In another life, Reese might have been one of his students, not some boy he picked up in a nightclub. But Reese never finished high school, which he didn’t regret at first, not until he fell in love with a smart girl. School seemed like just another way she would eventually leave him behind.
“So where’d you come from?” Barry said. “Seems like everybody in this city’s from somewhere else.”
“Arkansas.”
“Long way, cowboy. What you doin all the way out here?”
He shrugged, dipping his fries into a puddle of ketchup. “Startin over.”
“You got people out here?”
Reese shook his head. Barry lit a cigarette. His fingers were lovely and long.
“You need people,” he said. “Too big a city to be out here by yourself. You need a place to stay? Oh, don’t look at me like that. I don’t want nobody who don’t want me. I’m asking if you need a place to sleep. What, you too good for my couch?”
Reese didn’t know why he said yes. Maybe he was just sick of sleeping in abandoned buildings, stamping his feet to keep away the rats. Maybe he saw something in Barry that he trusted, or maybe he felt the knife banging against his thigh and knew that, if he had to, he could. Either way, he followed Barry home. When they stepped inside, he paused, glancing around at the wigs lining the countertops. Barry stiffened.
“It’s just a thing I do sometimes,” he said, but he touched a wig gingerly, looking so vulnerable that Reese turned away.
“I’m not what you think I am,” Reese said.
“You’re a transsexual,” Barry said. “I know exactly what you are.”
Reese had never heard the word before—he hadn’t even known that there was a word to describe him. He must have looked surprised because Barry laughed.
“I know plenty boys like you,” he said. He took a step closer, eyeing him. “Of course, they all got better haircuts. You do this yourself?”
In the bathroom, he wrapped a towel around Reese’s neck and reached for his clippers. He gently pushed Reese’s head forward, and Reese closed his eyes, trying to remember the last time another man had touched him so tenderly.
* * *
—
BY DECEMBER, the city had finally cooled but the sun still hung high and unnaturally bright; it felt wrong to even call it wintertime. In the catering van, Jude stuck her arm out the window, enjoying the breeze. She’d picked up a last-minute shift to work a retirement party in Beverly Hills, and the money was too good to turn down even though Reese had sulked watching her slip out the door.
“I wanted to take you to dinner,” he said.
“Tomorrow, baby,” she said. “I promise.”
She’d kissed him, already imagining the tips she would pocket once the night was over. A company party was always good money. Big wigs, Scooter told her, as they coasted into Beverly Hills. The van glided up winding roads that grew more secluded until they finally reached a black iron gate. Scooter snorted.
“Big money they pay to live like this,” he said, the gate slowly creaking open. “Can you imagine?”
The next century would be like this, he told her. The rich moving away from cities, locked behind giant gates like medieval lords building moats. They drove slowly down the quiet tree-lined streets until they reached the house—a white two-story hidden behind Roman columns. Carla let them in. She rarely appeared during their jobs but the party was important and she was short-handed.
“The Hardison Group is a very loyal client,” she said, “so on our best behavior tonight, yes?”
Her mere presence made Jude jittery. She could feel Carla appraising her as she chopped celery and pureed tomatoes, as she swept through the party balancing trays of rolled prosciutto or mixed cocktails at the bar. The retiring man was Mr. Hardison—he was stocky and silver-haired, wearing a gray suit that looked expensive, his young blonde wife hanging on to his arm. The crowd, all white and middle-aged and moneyed, toasted his career and raised a glass afterward to his successor, a handsome blond man in a navy suit. A girl lingered by his side. She looked eighteen maybe, leggy with wavy blonde hair, and she wore a shimmery silver dress cut scandalously above her knees. Halfway through the party, she stepped away from the man and sauntered over to the bar, tilting her empty martini glass.
“I’m not s
upposed to serve anyone under twenty-one,” Jude said.
The girl laughed, pressing a hand against her collar.
“Well, I’m twenty-one then,” she said. Her eyes were so blue, they looked violet. She tipped her glass again. “This party’s a drag anyway. Of course I need a drink.”
“Your dad doesn’t care?”
The girl glanced over her shoulder, back to the handsome man.
“Of course not,” she said. “He’s too busy trying to distract himself from the fact that Mother isn’t here. Isn’t that something? I came all the way in from school because he got some big promotion, and she couldn’t even bother to show up. Now isn’t that a bitch?”
She wiggled the glass again. She clearly didn’t plan on leaving until she got her way, so Jude poured her a fresh drink. The girl turned toward the party, slipping the olive through her pink lips.
“So do you like being a bartender?” she asked. “I bet you get to meet all sorts of fascinating people.”
“I’m not a bartender. Not all the time. I’m a student mostly.” Then Jude added, a little too proudly, “At UCLA.”
The girl raised an eyebrow. “How funny,” she said. “I go to Southern California. Guess we’re rivals.”
It wasn’t hard to tell which part seemed funny to her: that a stranger happened to attend her crosstown rival or that the black girl serving drinks had, somehow, managed to attend a school like UCLA. A white man in a tweed jacket asked for wine and Jude uncorked the bottle of merlot, hoping the girl might leave. But as she began to pour, she heard exclamations filtering in from the foyer. The girl turned to her glumly.
“Fun’s over,” she said, and drained her martini in a gulp.
Then she set her empty glass on the bar and started toward the entrance, where a woman had just walked in. Mr. Hardison was helping her out of her fur coat, and when she turned, passing a hand through her dark hair, the bottle of wine shattered on the floor.