He felt silly standing there in his turban and his long robe behind the dark shades, which had him walking blunderingly around the room like a blind man. He stood away from her. Even through his simpleminded shades, he could see the slimly womanish roundness of her, as she stood before him once again, daringly, seductively. Her pregnancy did not show at all.
She said, “All right, so I’m not pregnant. I had to do something to get you here. I didn’t really want to resort to calling a press conference, whatever the hell you were up to.”
He was overwhelmed with mixed emotions of disappointment and deliverance. His fatherhood of such brief duration. He was not sure which feeling dominated.
She reached up and took his dark shades from him. “Take those silly things off. I want to see those sexy bedroom eyes of yours.” She took him by the hand and led him toward the couch and went into his arms again. Her lips sought out his mouth again. Her clever tongue busied itself anew. Her hands were busy too. Feeling the back of his neck, back in the kitchen where the baby hair grew, always and forever grew. She knew where every erogenous zone on his body existed. She knew how to turn him on. She nibbled an earlobe. Her hands on his back, caressing tenderly his spine, his buttocks, now a-flaming with desire.
He felt himself turning on, erecting shamelessly in the middle of him, even as he protested. “Now before we both get carried away, let us first be clear. I am not your Jimmy Jay, or whoever—I’m—”
She was so damn sure of herself. He tried in vain to resist and resent the contentment in her silken voice. “Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it. It’s all right with me.” She rose from the couch and left him. “I’d better see what’s doing in the kitchen.” He watched her walk away from him, her high-assed slimly rounded buttocks swiveling subtly from side to side. He thought, Maria Efwa never walked seductively.
He looked around the spacious living room. The floor was covered with colorful scatter carpets arranged artistically around the place. Press work was the way she earned her grits and paid the rent, but painting was where her heart was. He looked around at the paintings on the wall, Tom Feelings and Charlie White and Ernest Crichlow, Romie Bearden, Otto Neals, Vincent Smith and Leo Carty, Izell Glover, a couple of her own, one an old portrait of him as Jimmy Jay, another very recent one of the Minister Primarily. There was a knotty pine make-it-yourself rectangular table in the dining area near the kitchen, which served as work space and was also a dining table. She came out of the kitchen. “Smells damn good, if I do say so myself, and I definitely do say so myself.” She started clearing the table of books and portable typewriter and painting materials. He rose and came toward her to help her.
She said, teasingly, “As my darling Jimmy Jay, you are perfectly welcome to give a helping hand, but as Your Excellency, Prime Minister of Guanaya, it is my pleasure to serve you and my prerogative to have you patiently await my service.”
Jimmy Jay continued to take books and typewriter from the table, “Nevertheless I am Jaja Okwu Olivamaki, and it is my pleasure to help you set the table and prepare for this memorable feast.”
Now they sat there opposite each other at the table, staring at one another one moment and stealing glances the next, speaking with each other almost at cross-purposes. She reminiscing about the two of them as Jimmy Jay and Debby, and he speaking to her of the lovely country of Guanaya and the great and lovely people who lived there.
“Remember the time when we demonstrated at the Statue of Liberty with Harry and Sidney and Odetta and Killens and his wife and his mother and his children?”
He said, “I spent two years in a British prison in my own country for sedition against the Crown.”
“I know you remember the time we went down to the March on Washington. Nineteen sixty-three? You were just about eighteen years old and just out of Mississippi. Hadn’t gotten the cotton out of your head yet.” She rolled her eyes. She laughed and shouted softly, “‘Country!’ You still smelled like collard greens. And I was nothing but a child myself. Came down there with my older sister.”
“I remember the March on Washington; it was my first year at Lincoln University.”
The kitchen and the dining area were saturated with appetizing and familiar odors of baked chicken with stuffing and candied yams and greens and buttermilk biscuits and a home-baked apple pie. He was getting high on kitchen smells. His head was getting giddy. He was stuffing himself like a boa constrictor.
“You had just done one year at Toogaloo. Football star. Thought you were the hottest stuff in town. We met at a party somewhere up near Howard’s campus. I was with my sister. You and your guitar and your country music. You thought you were the second coming of Leadbelly, and that’s when you met Belafonte. I was outrageous that night. Followed you around like your butt was made of chocolate candy. I was only ten years old, a precocious ten. The older people laughed at me and teased me, the way I followed you around. And did I have a crush on you?! It was awful. It was painful. The next time I saw you was ten years later. You were singing at the Village Gate. You didn’t remember me from Adam.”
The smells from the kitchen, the memories of her young fresh sweetness, tomboyish sassiness, all the good feelings came together and ganged up on him, caught him off guard. He said, “That wasn’t country music. That was Black folk songs. I-I-I mean, that was the year I spent the summer in London.”
She felt so good, so at home in this place with him, she didn’t even notice, as she and His Excellency cleared away the food on the table. He insisted on putting on an apron and helping wash the dishes. There were sayings on the wall around the kitchen, satirical quotations, such as: “It’s difficult to soar with eagles, when you have to work with turkeys . . .” “The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming train.”
Now they were sitting on the couch together, sipping Scotch and ginger. She had gotten high and giggly. “Jimmy Jay! Jimmy Jay!” she snickered. “All the way with Jimmy Jay. That is what we used to say. All the way with Jimmy Jay.”
He said, “I’ve got to be going. I really enjoyed the dinner. I’d love to stay longer, but we have a really busy day tomorrow.”
She got to her feet and the room began to spin around and around, and she fell back into his arms. He repeated embarrassed, “I really do have to be going now. They’re waiting for me outside.” He disengaged himself from her and got up from the couch.
She got up with him. She said, “I got a buzzing on. Qoh! High as a Georgia pine. Would you do me a fuh-fuh-flavor, Your Excellency? Would you fu-fu-fix me an Alka-Seltzer, get it out of the kitchen cabinet?”
“My pleasure,” the bogus PM responded.
He moved heavily toward the kitchen, which was when she suddenly came alive and took a pill from her pocketbook and dropped it into his drink. When he returned, she was stretched out cold on the couch. Her sweet-looking limbs had exercised her skirt up to her dark brown hips like an open invitation, the subtle skin tones of her thighs of brown and black and burgundy gently clashing, sweetly blending. He wanted terribly to believe that in fact she was Her Excellency Maria Efwa. He took his own drink and emptied it with one swallow. Then he took her head in his arms and tried to pour the seltzer through her lips. In a sudden jerky motion, she knocked the glass from his hand. She mumbled, “I’m sorry, Your ’xlency. So very very sorry.” As she fell back full length on the couch.
He said, “I think you had too much to drink.”
She got up and straightened herself to her full height. She said indignantly and yet clownishly, “I resemble those remarks.” Then she fell back to the couch again, her skirt up to her slim dark sweet hips and he could see the crotch of her black bikini panties.
He felt a little wooziness. Thinking that last drink he had was lethal.
“Your ’xlency,” she mumbled. “You wouldn’t leave a lady in distress like this. Surely, you’re much too chivalrous. Take me to my bedroom and put me in my proper bed. I’m at your complete disposal or perhaps
it’s your disposure.” She giggled foolishly.
He took her up in his arms and stumbled toward the bedroom and lay her on her bed, as she mumbled, “Your Excellency, please undress me.”
He fumbled clumsily with the buttons of her blouse, dispossessed her of her bra and stared at the dark sloping hillocks of her breasts all tense now and tumescent, burnished now and blisteringly swollen. He swallowed hard, and excitement beat madly at the temples of his forehead. He relieved her of her skirt and slip. He hesitated, and she murmured, “My panties, please to remove them. You know I always did sleep in the nude.”
He slid her panties down along the round full slimness of her dark and gleaming thighs and legs. And she lay there stretched before him as naked as a newborn baby. He could not keep his eyes away from the scant baby fat around her midriff and the tufted upside-down pyramid that darkly curled sleepily between her thighs. He stared at her from head to feet. So much beauty was unreal, he thought. Extravagant. Ostentatious. He must be hallucinating. He heard her mumbling, “Make love to me—with me, Jimmy Jay, Your Excellency, whichever.” And he disrobed hurriedly and went toward her and took and slid her between the lavender sheets. And now he was actually hallucinating, fantasizing, as he made himself believe that she was for real Her Excellency Maria Efwa, there in bed before him and had asked him to make love to her, with her. The sweet special smell of her body made him dizzy, as he began to get a funny feeling that was tantamount to vertigo. He got beneath the covers with her. And took her in his arms and felt his growing hardness up against the middle of her, even as he felt a growing dizziness. The bed began to dance beneath him, as did the room, which danced around him, pirouetting like a crazy carousel running wild out of control. He reached for her to keep from falling from the steepest precipice, just as he became totally enveloped in a great white world of nothingness.
* * *
The smell of bacon cooking had awakened him. He sat up quickly in a panic. The autumn sunlight came in thickly through the windows. Where in the hell was he? He scratched his beard, as had become a habit with him whenever thinking deeply, which was precisely when he found out he was beardless.
He leaped out of bed, as his head began to dance around again, and heavily. He came out of the bedroom. “What in the hell’s going on here?”
Then he heard a pleasing voice say, “Breakfast is almost ready, Your Highness, Your Excellency.” And she came out of the kitchen and stood before him in her cinnamon-colored see-through negligee. Her dark breasts honeycombed and muscadinely nippled, the darkness between her legs of her inverted tufted triangle. All of that darkening beauty belonged to her alone. So much lavishness was shameful.
She stared at him and smiled mischievously. “His Excellency is certainly in a proud and ennobled state this morning. If I hadn’t known for sure you were Jimmy Jay, I certainly know it now.” She began to laugh, raucously. “I’d recognize that pretty mole anywhere—”
His hand went up to the side of his nose.
She said laughingly, “I don’t mean the one on your nose. I’m talking about that cute little darling mole on your member. I mean your member, of the wedding. Remember? We used to call him the member? Of the wedding?” She added, “Even though we never wedded one another.”
It was only then that he realized the situation of his nakedness as he stood there before her protruding homely, and turgid. His face flushed warmly as he reached for the empty air to cover his extended rigidness. Ultimately, he ran back into the bedroom, as she followed him, and he snatched the sheet from the bed and wrapped it around the middle of him. She continued cracking up with laughter. “His Excellency, the ennobled member of the wedding, with the pretty darling mole. I shall never forget Him as long as I live.” She was the devil in silken negligee.
They ate breakfast almost in silence. Finally, as she sipped at her second cup of coffee, she asked, “Well, do you want to tell me about it, Your Excellency?”
And he thought, Why the hell not? And the more he told her about it in its minutest detail the more relieved he felt. He didn’t even bother to pledge her to secrecy. He knew it wasn’t necessary.
They talked about old times and reckless times and foolish times, in and out of each other’s lives. They had grown together and away from one another. Each of them had been married to some other person very briefly.
They talked about the time he took her to dinner at a fancy and expensive restaurant in downtown Manhattan. After they finished eating, he’d found that he’d left his wallet at home. He was flat broke, embarrassed, and perspiring.
“Not to worry,” she’d said, nonchalantly, as she extracted two twenty-dollar bills from “titty city,” as she called it, reaching in behind her bra.
“Titty city,” he repeated now, ten years hence, and they laughed hysterically together. She was outrageous. She was self-possessed, as was Her Excellency Maria Efwa. But quite different was their self-possession. Tame, sedate, majestic was Maria’s self-possession, as compared with Debby’s, which was rebellious and irreverent.
When finally they ran out of conversation, little talk, chitchat, big talk, she said, “Well, what’s it going to be? I’m unattached and I imagine so are you.” She’d always been like that. As devious as the devil himself, or herself, but at the same time believed in bringing everything right down front. Bring it out into the open. Put it clearly on the table.
He cleared his throat, took a gulp of coffee that must have gone down the wrong way, as he began to cough fitfully, and his eyes began to tear. “Excuse me.” Then he said, “Debby, it is a fact that I love you and that I always will love you. And I believe you love me too.”
She responded, “So? So, what’s the problem?”
He continued as if he was thinking out loud. “But I don’t have the faintest idea where this present episode in my life will take me, and I have no right to complicate your life, while I stand around undecided. Obviously, I will be going back to Africa. At this point I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life after that. I don’t know if I’ll make Africa my home for the rest of my life. I surely can’t expect you to give up your career in the media. I understand that there’s a chance you may become an anchorwoman on one of the national networks.”
“There’s only one question involved,” she stated with finality.
“Which is?” he asked uneasily.
“Is there someone else?”
“But surely, I mean, the position as an anchorwoman. I mean—”
“I don’t crave upward mobility so cravenly that I would sleep with Mister Charley.”
He stared at her with a shocked expression. But why should it surprise him? “Surely you wouldn’t have to—I mean—”
“You’re a big boy now, Your Excellency. Such sleeping arrangements go along with the territory. Sometimes it’s actually written into the contract. I’m not saying that every Black anchorwoman has had to make these kinds of compromises and sleeping arrangements. Some are luckier than others. But very little has changed, my dear, since the good old days of slavery.” She smiled at him, ironically. “The question remains the same. And it remains unanswered. Is there someone else in your eventful life?” He was silent. She said, “I mean, you just told me you loved me, but are you in love with me? There is a difference, I suspect. The question is a simple one. Is there somebody else?”
He said, “The question is not a simple one, neither is the answer.”
She said, “I think you just gave me the answer.”
“It’s very complicated. It might sound corny, but I think I actually fell in love with her, because she was so much like you.”
She exploded. “Of all the bullshit rationalizations!”
He took her by the hand and walked her into the bedroom and stood her before the mirror. “Look at the lady in the mirror. You’ve seen her on TV. You’ve seen her in person. You said you were at the Armory that day.”
Even as the two of them stood there staring at her image in the mi
rror, he knew that the only resemblance shared by Debby and Maria Efwa was entirely physical. They were merely look-alikes. Where Maria was always composed and proper, Debby was impetuous and passionate, excitable. The complete and total rebel.
She stared until her eyes were widening. “You are one flaky sonuvabitch!”
He argued, “I don’t know what to say to you, Debby. She’s your spitting image. Ways, temperament,” he lied. “Everything. We’ve been thrown together so much these last few weeks. I just don’t know, and I love you too much to lie to you. And it’s further complicated by the fact that she’s already married back in Guanaya to an older man, a man respected throughout the continent.”
She sobbed, impulsively, “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” And went into his arms again.
It was as if the night before was destined to repeat itself, but somehow altogether differently. There was no dizziness for him this time. There was only eagerness for both of them and tremendous expectations. Like the night before, he took her up in his arms and carried her lovingly to her bed and lay her down before him. And dispossessed her gently of her nightdress, her cinnamon-colored negligee. As before, she lay there in all her lovely nakedness. He stared at her and swallowed deep down to the bottom of his belly.
This time her entire body vibrated tremulously, as if his staring eyes were a member (of the wedding) and had stabbed into her profoundly down to the very tip of her convulsive womb. She moaned before he actually touched her. Now they lay together naked in her bed. The moment he entered her, they arrived at consummation and exploded simultaneously; she uttered a muffled scream, he groaned, as they both were overcome with spasms, tiny spasms, large spasms, long deep extended spasms. Then serenity and sweet fulfillment. And now the honeyed and salty smells and taste, of ocean waves and froth and sea and foam, floating, joysome, toward a peaceful shore. The sea was calm now, the storm abated, momentarily.
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