“Why d’you think that is? Why’re they so angry at women?”
“They’re insecure about what it means to be a man. In a culture where manhood is defined by what you own, a youth without money is bound to feel insecure. I mean, men with money have always gotten more than their fair share … but the ordinary guy used to be able to pull a girl with sweet talk and nice ways. So to hedge against rejection, ghetto youth get defensive. And it comes out in the music.”
She found his perspective wrongheaded, but intriguing nonetheless. Most men she knew did not have opinions. Talking to them was like playing tennis and serving all aces.
“You said this culture defines manhood in terms of what men own—how do you define it?”
“Like the bible says, ‘As a man thinketh so is he.’ Manhood for me is about values, intelligence, courage, and imagination.”
“Whadyou mean by values? The term just sounds so … I don’t know … Republican and Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan.”
“Oh yeah … alla dat?” He chuckled at her overreaction. “Values for me is a simple thing, treating people like you’d want them to treat your mother.”
She patted his waist. He would know the right thing to say, wouldn’t he?
They came upon a production crew setting up for a fashion shoot. The models were hankering around the catering table, looking but not eating, their bodies nurtured to emaciation with amphetamines, coke, and cigarettes.
“How much do looks count to you?”
He looked at her. Is she allowing these clothes hangers to make her feel a way?
“As I-nelik once told a woman who was threatening to leave him for a Mr. Body, ‘With four months and a personal trainer I could be him. But how long,’ he asked her, ‘would it take him to be me?’ ”
Wary of going home, but not willing to admit it, they made a detour at Old Fulton Street and went to sit on the edge of the jetty, their feet dangling over the water that lapped at the pilings and gently tossed the barge, which seemed like an ark now, for all the guests were in twos, paired off against the railing, or dancing to the cover band, a pick-up side of tuxedoed jokers who played everything from Disco-Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes to Basia and the Doors.
“When you get to Oz, Dorothy, will you write to me?” he said of the twinkling skyscrapers on the other bank.
“This does feel strange, doesn’t it?” she replied.
“Good strange or bad strange?”
He was leaning against a mooring post with one leg drawn up toward him, his knee supporting his elbow as he twirled his hair. She was sitting with her legs over the edge and her body turned to the city. Her face, though, which glowed with the sweat of attraction, was turned to him.
“Good strange,” she said. “Like wearing Earth shoes for the first time. You just get a whole new idea of what fit means, of what comfort is, and you begin to think of all the shoes in your closet … and even the ones you outgrew or threw away … and you start to ask questions like, ‘How did I wear those for so long? What was I thinking? Can I ever go back to wearing them again?’ Do you know what I mean?”
He nodded, hearing in her voice the dirge of a premature decision. It was too early for her to say she wanted this, he thought. Him or his way. She was like Ian in some ways. She needed status and possessions to feel secure. The Earth shoes were a good comparison. Once upon a time they were the rage … now they too had been outgrown or thrown away. Time would tell with her. The real test would come when he went away. Would she want him then? Or would she want the life she’d gotten used to? She was lukewarm now, although she thought she was feverish.
She said something that he didn’t hear. He looked up, cocking his head interrogatively.
“I said you remind me of Bob Marley,” she repeated. “I saw him at the Garden with the Commodores. I’d never seen such charisma in my life. And … wow … I remember taking a hit off my first joint and thinking, ‘Oh shit, I’ve never wanted to get involved in a concert this way before.’ Whenever he would call out, I’d cup my hands over my mouth and scream the loudest. Wo-yoyi. Wo-yoyi. Wo-yo-yo-yo-uh. Wo-yo-yo-yo-uh. There was a sensuality to him … not plain sex appeal … but a spiritual magnetism … as if he were a shaman … as if he had the power to draw people out of themselves into this new space … his space, I guess … and make them do things they’d always wanted to do or never thought of doing before.”
“Bob,” Fire said, wondering how this was related to the discussion. She began to hum, and he recognized the bluesy air of “Turn Your Lights Down Low,” which the band on the barge was playing now, guiding the ballad with a torch of shimmering guitars.
She turned her body to him and drew her knees in to her chin, wrapping her arms around her shins.
“You look like the picture on Natty Dread,” she said. Her voice was soft but buzzy like the ripping of damp silk. “The hair is the same … not locks … but a mantle of Spanish moss. And your nose is similar and your cheekbones … they’re like fragments of rock. Your eyes are different, though, and your forehead. But especially when you’re sleeping, or thinking, the resemblance becomes uncanny.”
Her lisp, now that she was getting tired, was becoming more pronounced, investing even the most common words with an erotic sibilance. The mention of sleep aroused in him the memory of her nakedness. And as he thought about watching her through the doorway, he began to undress her with his narrowing eyes, drawing his lids closer so his lashes could coordinate more fluently as his eyes slipped the straps of her dress over her shoulders.
“Did you ever meet him?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Marley. Are you listening to me?”
In his mind she was lying on her back with her legs apart and his tongue was engaging her clitoris. Whispering to it. How are you? Nice to meet you. Are you shy? Is that why you wear this hood all the time? Here … let me help you slip it off. I want to see your face so I can kiss you …
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Yes … I’m listening to you.”
“What are you smiling about?”
“I’m just having a nice time … that’s all.”
“So … did you ever meet Bob Marley?”
He had. Several times. She wanted to know what he was like. Quiet, Fire said. Introspective. Listened more than he talked, and pretended to know less than he did. He didn’t like to lose, so he was always good at what he did. Did he have indulgences? None besides women and a beemer … not even guitars … and the beemer came late. For most of his career he drove a Volkswagen camper or a Bug. Was he a role model? Yeah … sure … he was roots but cosmopolitan, tough but humble, thrifty but generous, workaholic but laid back. And he didn’t take the easy route and go disco; plus he understood love in all its forms—spiritual, fraternal, and romantic. “Forever Loving Jah,” “One Love,” and “Is This Love?” Oh, by the way, did I-nelik play at the Garden? Yeah, man, he was the guy in the army fatigues on the other side of the drummer from the bass player. The one with the beard all up in his glasses? Same one. Oh, he was the coolest thing that night.
“Could I ask you a favor, Fire?”
“Sure.”
“My reggae collection is kinda weak … can you suggest a dozen or so CDs to build from?”
“Yeah, man … The Wailers, Catch a Fire; Bunny Wailer, Black Heart Man; Lee Perry, Super Ape; Bob Marley and The Wailers, Babylon by Bus; Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey; Steel Pulse, True Democracy; Black Uhuru, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; Third World, 96° in the Shade; Toots and the Maytals, Funky Kingston; Jimmy Cliff, Wonderful World, Beautiful People; and the Heptones, To the Top. And can you show me your breasts?”
He didn’t realize he’d voiced this until she exclaimed in surprise, “Here?”
He looked around—at the people on the barge and the traffic on the street—then looked back at her, the world around him intensified: the lapping water, the driving music, his breathing, Manhattan’s glinting lights.
She was biting her lip.
“Come here.” His voice was coolly insistent, like a razor.
She’d never been addressed this way before. Or received a request of this nature, much less in a public place.
She slid toward him. She imagined herself leaving behind a silver trail.
His face seductively serene, he reached out and stroked her nose with the magic finger, traced the outline of her lips, dipped it in her mouth like a fountain pen in ink, and made mysterious signs on his face with her saliva. He replaced it in her mouth. She sucked it in with a moan, flaring her lips, collapsing her cheeks around it, playing the role of fellatrix with the emotional truth of a Method actor.
“Come closer,” he said. “I want to be near you always.”
He opened his legs and she sat between them and placed her thighs outside his and crossed her ankles behind the mooring post. She placed her finger in his mouth and began to feel his tongue transform her tall man into a nub of erectile tissue, wondering, as she felt a shudder in her belly, if her arms would tremble more than her legs if he made her come this way.
Closing her eyes, she imagined her sweat as a film of yellow light, a yellow that was burning into orange now as his tongue investigated then traced the whorls of her fingerprint, the most complicated and privately guarded series of crevices on her body, even more so than the ones around her anus, which, she was thinking, she would surrender to his mouth if he asked.
She grabbed his hair as a wet heat spread from her fingertip. She began to screw his lips now, shoving in deep and backing out slowly, imprinting her knuckles on the walls of his mouth. Then, working slowly, she proceeded to rub her finger around the edge of his lips, teasing him … making him want to grasp it, which he did, pulling her tip to a sweet spot in the meat of his soft palate; then he moved his jaw in a slow rub-a-dub, locking into her groove, fusing their sense of time as the film of light became an iridescent red and the ball of pressure in her belly, on the verge of rupture now, sought release through her arteries, causing her arm to stiffen and tremble, then go numb, then sensate again, then numb again, as the light around her unwrapped itself from the rest of her and coiled itself around her arm, compressing itself to her elbow, then her wrist, then over her palm, to the root of her finger where it burst and surged to the tip, showing its electrical nature by overloading her nervous system and blacking her out for a second.
He held her tightly, rocking her, whispering her name. “Sylvia, Sylvia, my darling girl … it’s okay … it’s okay.”
“Oh fuck,” she repeated as he hushed her. “Oh fuck.”
When at last she calmed down, she kissed him gingerly and leaned back on her elbows, not caring who would see, allowing her thighs to fall open. She undid three buttons from the neck down and peeled away the fabric, exposing first her cleavage, then her breasts—a pair of droplets with the color and sheen of virgin olive oil.
“I think it’s time to go,” she said, directing him to the barge with her eyes.
He looked up. A couple had their glasses raised in salute.
“Let’s go,” he said with a smile, “before they ask for an encore.”
She took a bow as they walked away. She had never felt this sexy in her life.
As they arrived at her house, the pain that had been lying dormant in her knee began to stir, and she limped slightly as she moved up the steps. He asked her about it and she told him that she’d bumped her knee while she was cleaning, not wanting the story of the fight on the bridge to break apart their mood.
In the bathroom, which had peach walls and light blue fixtures, she peeled away the floral curtain and sat on the edge of the tub. He knelt between her legs on the mint green tiles and replaced the transparent bandage on her knee, whistling the theme from M*A*S*H.
“By the way, Hawkeye, I have more questions.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “By the way, did you ice it down earlier?”
She hadn’t. He went to the kitchen. When he returned she asked him to remind her how he’d met Claire. She’d forgotten, she said. Which was true.
He wasn’t sure about her motives though.
“Oh Claire,” he began, hoping that she wouldn’t delve deeply. Knowing he’d been involved with Claire might color their own affair.
“I met her in Lisbon,” he said, studying Sylvia’s knee. There was a small cut at the edge of the contusion. “By the way, can I use a piece of your aloe plant?”
She said yes and he returned from the living room with a leaf, which he sliced down the middle, creating two halves that glistened with off-white flesh. He wiped a cotton swab across the meat, dipped it in some hydrogen peroxide, and dabbed the nick.
“I met Claire in Lisbon, remember? I went there to live with Ian after leaving Brazil.”
The contact made her wince. He blew on the cut to soothe her, directing soft streams up her thigh.
“And you were painting in Lisbon?”
“No, trying to write a book.”
She laughed.
“What’s so funny?” he asked, applying the ice now.
The coolness stoked her awareness of the heat between her legs.
“You make writing a book sound like something you just get up … and … feel like doing … and just do … like mowing the lawn or something.”
“Oh, I never feel like mowing the lawn,” he quipped.
“You know what I mean.”
She kneed him in the forehead. He pecked her on the thigh.
“So … did you ever finish it? That book?” she asked. She was harboring a smile in the corner of her mouth.
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever get it published?”
“No,” he told her, reminding himself to pull the manuscript out and revisit it when he got back to Kingston.
He made a monkey face, and she began to laugh and lost her balance, falling in the tub—a bundle of flailing arms and legs. He began to laugh as well.
“Help me up, Fire,” she asked, stretching toward him.
“Mr. Fire,” he replied in an Oxbridge accent.
“Okay … Mr. Fire, help … me … up, please.”
He was standing now, clasping his hands behind him. “Actually, it’s Sir Fire.”
“Okay … Sir Fire, help me up, please—why am I even doing this?”
“Because you have no other option. By the way, has anyone ever called you turtle before? Turtle.” He placed his index finger across his lips. “Hmmmh, now why did that come to mind.”
“I said Sir, didn’t I?”
He leaned over her with his hands on his knees. “Sorry, I meant King. Did I ask you to say Sir?”
“Oh … I’ll show you king,” she said, grabbing the edge of the tub to get some leverage. But he was quicker. As she raised herself to come out he turned on the shower and drenched her.
“Bye.” He slipped two ice cubes down her dress and chuckled as he left, flipping the light switch and closing the door, leaving her to yell and laugh in the dark.
“Fire … Fire … you better come back here! Oh you’re gonna get it so bad. Revenge is sweetest when cold, y’know. If I were you I’d take mine now. Fire … Fire … Fire, you bomboclaat!”
* * *
They sat in the living room watching television while he dried her hair with a soft white towel, he on the couch and she on the floor between his legs in a light yellow summer dress with a scoop neck and spaghetti straps and buttons down the front to the hem.
She inhaled deeply.
“Do you know what this feels like?” she asked, reaching back to wrap her arms around him.
“Tell me.”
“When I was a little girl, I had to spend some time in the hospital because of a breathing problem. And at the hospital I used to make up all these things that I wanted to happen to me, like having a grandmother who would do my hair for me. I had grandparents, obviously, but I never met them. They died before I was born.”
She cracked her neck.
“Anywa
y, when I came home—I was about seven or eight at the time—there was a new family living in the yard. I can’t remember where they were from. But now that I think about it, they might have been from Haiti. The grandmother—they were a big clan—was an old woman … black like ink, and her back was curled like a question mark. She didn’t speak a word of English, didn’t speak much at all, and she smoked a pipe nonstop. Gosh—when I think about it now she might have been smoking weed.
“One day my father was struggling with my hair, pulling on my scalp clumsily, trying to loosen my plaits to wash my hair—wow, all this is coming back now—and out of nowhere she just came and took me away from him and led me to the standpipe, pulled the plaits out in no time, and washed my hair for me. Then after that she took me to her back step. She sat first, then she gathered her skirt and put me between her legs and dried my hair for me, and parted it and oiled my scalp with Sulfur 8, and combed my hair with a sparkly comb … and brushed it. It was so beautiful. She began to comb my hair every day. I would just go stand outside her house and she would call me in with her fingers. And I began to call her Granny. I would sit with her on her back step every day without speaking, just sit there motionless while she did my hair …”
“Knowing that if you moved you’d get the back o’ the brush on your leg.”
“Oh, but you know it … and although she never said it or showed it in a huggy kinda way I knew she loved me.”
“Those old women never tell you they love you.”
“Of course not. You just feel it. You know what the feeling is, Fire? It’s the feeling that no matter what you do or turn out to be in life, good or bad, they will always love you. Their love is constant. They don’t love you for a reason. They love you because they just love you. They don’t know any other way to feel about you. And if you ask them if they love you they look at you as if you’re an idiot—”
“And if you ask them again they lick you with the brush.”
“But you know they love you.”
“Do you want me to oil your scalp for you, sweet girl?”
Waiting in Vain Page 17