Flyover States, page 9
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I say. “Poor Armando.”
And later that night, I am sick. Sick to my stomach from the martinis, sick of Luis, sick of the fact that the world seems to be full of folks who get away with all kinds of nonsense, yet I get to pay publicly and in real time for things I didn’t even do. I decide that tomorrow, I’m turning over an entirely new leaf. Less alcohol. Less funny business at the Office Saloon. More writing, which is what I came to Langsdale to do anyhow. I am going to strap myself to my computer at least two hours a day and try to get something accomplished this summer—something other than garnering nonflattering nicknames at the local tienda. Further, I am going to call my sister and really help out with the wedding. Get on with planning her wedding shower, though I’m technically opposed to it since they generally only address the marital areas of cooking and fucking: pots, pans and lingerie. Mondo-retro in the gender department. Who am I to judge another person, least of all my sister, for sliding into the retro-bridal thing? After all, I rowed right onto Doris Day/Rock Hudson fantasy-island, and that’s about the most retro shit playing this side of Nick at Night. And stop swearing.
When I tell Ronnie my plan for reform the next day, she says:
“You’re gonna stop swearing? Didn’t you try that for Lent one year and it happened for all of ten minutes?”
Professor Lind gave her seminar the day off, so Ronnie and I are able to take our “nature walk,” ambling around the outdoor track while the more devoted runners lap us repeatedly.
“God’s on my side this time,” I say. “Did you hear that storm last night? It was the angels cheering for my dirty mouth coming clean.”
Last night it rained something brutal. The sky blushed this crazy tornado-green shade in the late afternoon, and by nine-thirty in the evening it was hailing and the sirens were sounding off. One thing I learned about second-story apartments when I moved to the Midwest is that while they may be a city gal’s idea of safe, being a greater challenge than ground-floor apartments for your average pervert and/or serial killer, basement apartments are the way to go in the event of a tornado. I think that I’m supposed to lie down in my bathtub with a mattress over my head if one touches down. To my citified mind, it seems like a “kiss your ass goodbye” kind of proposition, but I assume that the weather folks know more than I do. At any rate, you’d never know from today’s sky that anything had happened. It’s eighty degrees, no humidity, and it’s so blue outside it barely looks real.
“I guess it did rain pretty hard last night,” Ronnie says. “I didn’t notice so much.”
“You didn’t notice?” I ask. “The emergency sirens were going off. How could you not hear that?”
Ronnie shrugs.
“Could be the lifetime of earthquakes, or being tired as a slave, or maybe I was listening to something a little more exciting.”
“Really,” I say, appropriately baited.
“One La Varian called last night and left a message on my machine to ask if I might not want to attend a moving-picture show with him this weekend. All gentleman-like and proper-datelike and everything. That’s got to be more exciting than some old tornado. Tornadoes we get all the time.”
“Okay, given how very few human beings of the adult-male variety who we actually know, might I make the analytical leap that this is our Day-Glo-T-shirt man?”
Ronnie nods. “The more I think about it, the more I don’t care about his odd-color shirt selection. Black goes with everythang.”
“How’d you manage to pull that off?”
“Take a wild guess,” Ronnie says. “Who, besides me, would be most frothing at the mouth over a real-live handsome specimen of African-American manhood? Who would be trying to ‘out-black’ him with her knowledge of Bessie Smith and Miles Davis and Duke Ellington and her whole black menagerie of jazz greats?”
“Iris.”
“Only good thing to come of having that woman in class this summer. They were talking in the hall yesterday before we went in, and Iris had to introduce me because I was there and smiling. I knew she didn’t want to. She had that crazy ‘mine all mine’ look on her face. He was running her up and down a pole, too. I swear, I don’t think she has a damn bit of sense.”
“So did you get a feel for him?” I ask. “Did you find out what he’s doing here this summer?”
“Not totally sure,” Ronnie admits. “But he’s definitely intense. He did mention something about reading his chapter.”
“My, my,” I say. “Barely a conversation and already out with the chapters.”
“Can’t blame a brother for trying,” she says. “Plus, I haven’t seen a chapter in so long I’m not even sure what to do with one anymore.” She fans a swarm of gnats away from her face. “Luis ever write you back?”
“No, but the hell with him. What’s he going to say? ‘Sorry, I can’t figure out how gay I am?’ I do have a date with Chris this weekend. He cheered me up in my hour of greatest need.”
“I thought Zach did that.”
“No,” I say. “Zach fed me to the wolves. Then he knit himself a hat.”
Ronnie laughs. “I still think you’re getting a little sweet on him.”
“I’m learning not to hate him,” I say. “Let’s not get carried away.”
While the attempt to curb my swearing may be doomed from the outset, I am able to spend a quiet and productive evening at home writing. I start a poem about Luis, then I start a poem about the weather, then I start a poem for my sister’s wedding. I’d like to have something special to read for Lisa and Marvin, my sister and her hunka-hunka-burning lawyer. The poem about Luis isn’t so much about him as it is about voice: specifically finding it and keeping it. It’s hard for me to stay mad at Luis, since a year ago, I couldn’t sit down at a computer without feeling physically ill. One of the dangers of turning the thing you love most into your bread and butter is that you can make it pedestrian—take it for granted the way you might a really good boyfriend, or clean air, or doors you don’t have to lock at night. After years of graduate school, and years of writing workshops in the city before that, I couldn’t even hear my own voice through the clutter. I’d sit down at the computer and I’d hear I’m not sure what the speaker means by that word. Or, That last line strikes me as inauthentic, manufactured. I’d like a greater sense of vitality. Or, I’m sure that I’m just not the intended audience for this piece. I’d write two lines, and instead of seeing those actual lines, I’d see them the way the twelve other poets in workshop were going to see them: like legs dangling under the water’s surface in one of those killer-shark movies. And I froze up. I couldn’t write anymore.
Luis may be a pretentious philanderer, but he loves language in a way that no other poet I’ve met comes close to matching. Probably because he has that satellite dish in his house and embraces pop culture. He doesn’t “rank” words the way some poets do. He’d get as excited about the way “bootylicious” could be used in a poem as he might “sinewy.” For me, Luis’s feedback was like the gates of heaven opening. I felt as if I’d been given permission to take in the whole world again, not just the arcane references and pretentious spin-offs. And if by taking in Luis as well, I took in a wee bit too much of that world, I’m glad that even though he’s gone, I have this part of me back. The part of me that trusts how I see things.
Ronnie
La Varian wears a lot of jewelry. I don’t know how I never noticed that before. The simple gold chain I don’t mind. It’s even elegant. It’s the bracelets and rings that are a little weird, a little…flamboyant. On the one hand, I like La Varian’s flair—the wild colors and the jewelry—because it’s a breath of fresh air in the land of Brooks Brothers. It’s so not English department. For a woman, even, it’s so not English department. So, because he’s hitting on me as hard as he is, I’m filing my observations away and I’m just going to enjoy being out with an outrageously handsome black man. I don’t pay attention to what he’s saying half the time. I just nod. Though all the while I’m looking at his long delicate fingers and admiring the silky dark skin. My skin’s always changing colors now that I’ve moved to the Midwest. Grayish and blotchy in the winter, but an even caramel in the summer. Thank God it’s summer.
“So, Miss Veronica Williams,” he says, stroking his impeccable goatee. “How’s a sista been keeping herself in a town like Langsdale?” His index finger glances my knee, for emphasis, I guess. It’s one of the rare times—in these days of Valtek—that I’m wearing a dress, and we’re sitting outside on the deck of the Vineyard—one of the more high-end restaurants in town—at La Varian’s insistence. I look down at my knees when I feel his finger, and when I look up at him, he’s peering at me over his glass of Maker’s Mark.
I give him a quizzical look and direct him around the deck with the arch of my eyebrow. He looks around at the all-white clientele and chuckles. “I have made some really good friends though, like Doris, and my friend, Paolo. You’ve probably seen Doris around. Tall, dark hair, fashionably fierce.”
“Wait.” La Varian leans into me. “Does she wear a beret all the time?”
“That’s her.”
“Ha!” He leans back in his chair and then crosses his legs.
So what, he’s crossing his legs, I say to myself. It’s Eu-rope-an.
“I see her all the time,” he says, picking something off his pants and rubbing his fingers together until whatever it was has been carried away with the breeze. “What a character.” He drops one hand atop the other on his lap so that he looks like a model casually reclining.
The smile I’d maintained all evening to appear amenable and eager so that the pretty man will like me fades just a little bit.
“What do you mean, ‘character’?”
“No, it’s just funny, the beret. She always looks like Marcel Marceau or a guerrilla or something. It definitely takes…effort, that look.”
I decide he’s allowed to talk a certain amount of shit because he doesn’t know Doris, and hell, if I saw her wandering around, I’d notice the outfits, too. Neither of us has managed to one-hundred-percent blend. Also, I don’t allow myself to envision his past outfits, and I don’t allow myself to look closely at the striped billowy pants he’s wearing, because I’m drinking alcohol and I might say something my mother raised me not to say. I don’t think a man should own billowy anything, but if you look like La Varian, you can get away with it—for now.
“Well, anyway, that’s Doris,” I say. “And there’s Paolo. He’s from California, too. Used to dance—ballet—but now he’s just teaching it and trying to get his degree in theater.”
La Varian motions to the waiter. “Are you ready to order?”
I shrug and then nod, but the waiter doesn’t seem to notice La Varian’s motion, and he wanders off inside the restaurant. La Varian’s eyes follow the waiter and his mouth sets into a tight pucker. He swirls his ice cubes in his glass. “Dang. Theater and ballet. Must be gay.”
This is the moment brought to me by God. My chance to finally know, Is he is, or is he ain’t? I take a deep breath before taking the figurative plunge. I laugh, loud and phony. “Actually, I almost thought you were gay. Isn’t that silly? Hee Hee,” I say behind my hand. La Varian doesn’t see the fingers crossed on my other hand underneath the table.
He flicks his wrist dismissively. “People always think that about me, just because I wear a lot of flamboyant things, jewelry and whatnot. I like gorgeous things,” he explains, looking at me and giving me a slow grin. “I like gorgeous things, Miss Veronica Williams. But I am not gay. I’ll prove that to you soon enough,” he says. He runs his hand over his shaved head and stares me down.
I have to fan myself and shift in my seat after he says that. I blame it on the summer heat, but the truth is, I’m wondering, how soon is now?
“Can I offer you a drink?” I ask La Varian because, of course, he’s in my apartment already. What can I say? Dinner was good.
“I better slow down,” he says. “I’ve had a lot to drink already.” I counted his drinks, and La Varian’s “a lot” is my “just getting started.” I should slow down, too, on both the drinks and on trying to get La Varian naked, but you can’t show a starving woman a steak and expect her to count calories. Black men don’t pass through Langsdale, and beautiful, black, single men, who happen to be Ph.D.’s are as rare as a goddamn leprechaun. Better believe it’s time for a buffet.
He wanders around my apartment looking at pictures and pulling books from the shelves. “This is a nice place. Very grad school, writerly funky.”
I scan the paintings and photos given to me by my friends in L.A. and am slightly self-conscious about all the little toys and pop-culture amusements scattered around my apartment. Like the Tweety Bird Pez dispenser and the Slinky framing Cornel West’s Black Matters on my bookshelf. “Thank you?” I say and he laughs.
“No, I’m serious. This feels like you, this place. It feels how you are.”
A line about him taking his hands and feeling how I am passes through my mind, but I decide not to be that damn easy. A hungry person can choke on a steak, too. So instead I say thank-you and ask him to pick out some music while I go get a glass of water.
I’m in the kitchen when I hear him laughing again. I come out swirling the ice in my glass. “What’s so funny?”
“What are these CDs you have?” he asks. He’s crouching and has two CDs in his hands. His striped pants sweep against my hardwood floor.
“What?”
“Who in the hell are The Smiths, and sure, intellectually I understand the significance of the Sex Pistols, but please. You don’t really listen to this stuff, do you?”
I smile, but I don’t like the way he makes me feel with that question. “Sure. I really like it. The Smiths are good eighties music. British and morose and all that.”
La Varian shakes his head and puts the CDs back—not where he got them—but back. “You have a lot of crazy-white-folks stuff in here, but luckily you got some old-school stuff, too.” He picks up my Isley Brothers CD and shakes it at me. “Good music.”
I love the Isley Brothers. It’s solid music, music I grew up on. But so are The Smiths and REO Speedwagon (I know, arguable), and thank God he didn’t see them. I didn’t like being made to feel glad that La Varian stopped teasing me about my music. I hadn’t had this kind of conversation since I was in fifth grade. Are you a surfer or a cholo? Surfers listen to rock, and cholos listen to black stuff. Since I was clearly not a surfer and not one of the Mexican kids in low-riders listening to oldies, I never really ever made a choice. I listened to what I liked. This was all sociopolitical, racial-identity shit about which I didn’t want to have no lengthy anthropological, historical, rhetorical “discourse” right now. I didn’t give a good goddamn. That’s for Professor Lind’s class on Monday, now I’ll undress La Varian to make sure he isn’t a leprechaun.
The next morning I watch La Varian sleep, and stare and stare at him, as if I’ve never seen a black person before. I like that he’s here, in my bed. It feels like the start of something. When he turns his back to me, I run a line down his back, wanting him to wake up, but he doesn’t. Even though it’s early in the morning, it’s hot anyway, so I get up and turn on the air-conditioning, which is almost as loud as being at Valtek. My apartment is old, i.e., dilapidated by L.A. standards, and though the air-conditioning is loud, it feels as if someone with an ice cube in his mouth is just blowing really hard. Not cold, but better than nothing. La Varian sleeps like the dead, just like me, so I decide to leave him alone and make myself coffee. I put on some Dinah Washington, after deciding it won’t wake up La Varian. I might actually be happy. This might actually be okay. I hum along with Dinah, singing about the world being a showplace.
Television will mess you up, because I have all the scenes, all the episodes, of my future life looping over and over in my head. I’ll be like Debra Winger being lifted off her feet at the factory. Except it won’t be the military that’ll be my ticket out. It’ll be my own book of fiction, and my hot-professor husband. The über-black couple, Cliff and Clair Huxtable—deluxe—if that’s possible. All my life I’ve kept my eye on the prize, the ultimate brother, while dating just about anybody in the Rainbow Coalition. An Italian, fine. British, fine. Regular white American, fine. But La Varian, he was more than fine.
“Trying to pull an Iris?”
I was staring out the window and fantasizing about Theo and Denise and Rudy. I’d practically forgotten that I had the real thing in my bedroom.
“Pull an Iris?”
La Varian had put his clothes on from last night, but he walked heavy and barefoot toward me. He sat down on my couch and stretched his legs out over my lap.
“You know, Dinah, the jazz…”
I started arranging his pant legs, pulling them toward me because they looked bunched up and uncomfortable. They didn’t look so, so homosexual in the light of day, and not after last night.
“What’s wrong with that girl, anyway?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“Your girlfriend.” I wink at him and he pinches me.
“She’s just another white person in love with black people of the past. Safe black folks. For people like her, black folks have to be from the twenties or some shit before they get invited into her house. Let my cousin J.B. come around with his pants hanging off his ass and see what happens. She’d run calling for the police if a modern-day brother—without a damn trumpet in his hand—tried to talk to her.”
“She invited you to her house. You’re a ‘modern-day’ brother.”
“Yep, but I’m cleaned up, pasteurized, and—”
“So bright and articulate!”
“I hate that shit!” he says, laughing. He stares at me for a minute. “I had a great time last night. Thank you. I didn’t know how I was going to pass the time this summer. I started thinking I’d just have to throw myself into research and just get the hell out when I was done. Now I’ve met you.”
