Bliss (13 page)

Going
.

Eva turned back toward Hakeem to find him looking at her. She felt caught, and tried to put a nonchalant expression on her face.

But Eva felt certain Hakeem and Myra were laughing at her.

Sunny answered her suite door sleepily.

“What the hell,” Eva said. “I was waiting for you. At the bar.”

“You know I can’t stand Myra’s ass. And fuck Hawk, too.”

Eva walked through the door, but Sunny pushed her out. “No. You’re going to Dart’s.”

When they got to Dart’s door, Sunny started to hand Eva a key card. “Wait,” Sunny said, holding Eva’s fingers. Sun’s mouth turned down, confused. “So you got the bracelet.”

“You spoke to Ron? This morning?” All Eva could think was how many thousands of miles she was off her game. So Sun and Ron were talking now. And about her. Sunny was probably going to leave her, go to Ron.
There’s a trick to this. A trick I can play to make this right. Some blinder I have on that I have to lift
.

“Ron?” Sunny scrunched her nose, gave a quick, flustered shake of her head, then tugged the bracelet with a finger, as if to make sure it was real. “Speak to Ron? For what? Go in. See Dart.” Sunny pressed the key card hard in Eva’s palm.

“What’s the setup, Sun? What am I walking into?”
Maybe I can just lay down
.

“Nothing,” Sunny said in the too-enlightened, yoga-instructor cadence she often used onstage. “You are paranoid. Go.”

I
n Dart’s sunlit room, lamps were hot, too.

Water crashed into the bath. Clothes were splayed on the unmade beds, on the floor, on toppled chairs.

“Where’s Sun?” he said.

“I guess in her room.” Eva perched on the one tight bed corner.

Dart dashed around folding clothes, stacking them in a tower on a tall dresser. He was in a sleeveless T-shirt, and hair burst from his damp pits bushy. Dart’s room smelled like Dart, distilled.

Eva walked to the balcony door and slid it open. Then she perched on a littered chair just inside the bright room. Breeze hit her directly.

“Not gonna manage Sun anymore,” Dart said, puffing. “It’s not me. Never was, but she’s my sister, so there you go.”

“You need to watch that water.”

“I’m ‘bout to get in there.” He tore through drawers, then crashed his arm through closet shelves. He bulldozed chairs to see the floor beneath them, yanked a bureau from its place against the wall.

Eva got up and kept moving so he was always in front of her.

“I’m leaving this whole shit,” he huffed. “Need to be in a situation where my best isn’t always called for.” Dart hurled back blankets. Then got on his knees and shoved his arm, to the shoulder, under the bed.

The spigot splash was tough to talk over. “You need to check that water.”

In front of the open glass door he stopped abruptly. Behind him, the sea hung like a fresh painting. “Why did you come up here?” His
voice was suddenly paced, as if to a metronome. The draft carried his sour-sweetness through the room.

“Sunny asked me to.”
And because you’ve been my port in a storm before
.

He shook his head. “I’m not doing what Sun asks anymore.” Then Dart snorted, on his click-beat. “What anyone asks. I am bigger than this industry. I am better than this. So are you.”

Eva’s words fell to the level beat of his syllables. Measured. Reg-u-lar. “You should try to chill.”

“CHILL,” he said, commando style. “It means, act like what you feel ain’t real.”

“It means relax.”
Don’t be crazy. I need to relax
.

He pulled his shirt away from his body, put his nose behind the neckline, inhaled, and then breathed out pendulum-weighted words from behind his pall. “You use this shit—work, Sunny, sex—like a Band-Aid.”

“Work … art. Love. What else does a girl need.”

“I said,” he roared at her, but down into his own chest, face still behind his shirt, “you use it like a
tourniquet
.”

He looked like a bandit. A fuming Robin Hood. Eva was used to Dart’s odd behavior, but he was making her jumpy. Bathwater thundered. Dart was in a mood to define things, shout things, find things. So Eva decided not to touch anything his. Dart moved fast again,
darted
even, and refolded clothes as messily as they’d been folded in the first place. Eva wanted to bolt, but felt bolted to the chair, bound by his odor and voice and fascinated by his motions.

“Been thinking I could live,” he said, “doing what I’ve
been doing
. Be like
you
. But I’m about to get … natural. Feel things that matter.” His voice was low now, and full of dreamy commitment.

“Dart,” Eva got it together to say. “Can you please turn off that water?”

“I TOLD you I was about to GET IN, Eva.” Dart’s voice almost pushed her. “Hotel tubs DON’T OVERFLOW. How many hotels have you BEEN IN, Eva? Would the world end if my bath LEAKED, Eva, if my floor got wet?”
Eva took long steps to the bathroom, Dart at her back. Water trembled thickly below the tub’s wide lip.

“You got it under control?” Dart said. “You see for yourself?”

Eva was shamed, and overcome. She tasted Dart in her throat. Reflexively, her palm went to her belly.
I need
, Eva thought,
to calm down. I need for this baby not to be true. I need for Dart to say something that makes some sense to me
.

He stepped back into his room. She faced him from the bathroom doorway. Cramming clothes into a duffel, Dart paused, felt around, then pulled out a small brownish jar. He set it atop the television and looked at it for a few seconds, to remember he’d placed it there.

Eva was naked and soaking in the tub when Dart came back to the bathroom. Like it had been slit, her right wrist hung limply over the rim.

The bathroom was muggy.

“You’re wearing the bracelet,” he said, surprised.

Eva was relaxed in the water. She could reach the faucets easily. Turn them back on if she wanted, or turn them off.

“I didn’t see it before.”

“What?” Eva said, facing him. “You like it?”

Dart peeled off his clothes. “I’m not having sex,” he said, tone conversational now. “You treat it like it’s nothing.”

He stepped in. Water sloshed. Dart sat crosswise, at Eva’s feet, his knees bent, facing the door. He couldn’t be more folded.

“You’re comfortable like that?”

“Are
you
comfortable,” Dart said, “the way
you
are? I got that bracelet for you because of what you told me in Carmel. About your mom. Your real mom. I saw it at a stand in the airport in Miami. It was … serendipitous.”

Eva looked at the bracelet.
Dart got me this?

Steam rose stinking of dried apricots.

That’s what it is
.

A metallic sugar-vinegar smell of damp drying fruit. The bathroom transformed into a windowless roomful. In his cramped position, Dart was perfectly still.

“Walk out of here,” he said. “With me.”

His words were a soft siren, the story in all her private songs.

Hey baby, let’s get away, go someplace far
.

Let me take you on an escapade
.

Down icy lanes, under a glass blue sky—this is living
.

This is living
.

“Not to a physical place,” Dart said. “A real, true mental one. We can
live
. Get away from this madness. It’s dying anyway. Hip hop’s over. Pop is a joke. We get out before it sucks us down. See who we are without it.”

I got two tickets to paradise
.

Eva hated talk about searches for self; hated searches for self, period, felt they were detours from what one ought to be doing—which was working for a living.
It’s what depressed people do. Imagine there’s some parallel life being played out in which they are the hero. The superstar. The free and good one. They search for it around every corner. What you do is regulate what goes on within, and that what goes on without is to be responded to, dealt with, endured, accepted
. The top of Eva’s head felt thin and hot. Her mind screeched.
Pick something do it, and keep it moving
.

Make a decision, with no advice from anyone
.

She wanted to tell Dart that she wasn’t into daydreaming or disenchantment or restlessness. She wanted to make him understand that staring at the horizon, trying to ascertain one’s place in the world, was vanity. But instead, Eva reached for a loofah. It would be waste of time to explain to him that she wasn’t going anyplace but back to work, back to figuring out what to do about Sunny, and back to deciding what to do about possibly being pregnant.

Eva washed herself and found solace, as usual, in proactivity.

Dart unfolded himself, turned so he was between her legs, his back tight against her chest. The skin on his back was mottled, and Eva was nauseated. She let herself think that Dart’s craziness made him talk about the bracelet. So she felt sorry for him. But then Eva remembered that Sunny had noticed it, too. Her hand twitched, and the bracelet shifted on her wrist.

“We’re
meant
,” Dart said, pressing his back even more tightly against her. “You found the bracelet. I didn’t think anyone would steal it, hanging from the doorknob. Not like it’s worth anything. Except to you.”

Eva pushed him forward a bit, then lifted her hand in front of him. “You left this on the door?” A weak cuff, it dangled from her wrist sunrise side up.

He sneered ugly for a second, but it faded. “I got it for you because the bracelet has the feel of the Out Islands, Eva. Cat Island is where we should go.”

When Dart started in with Cat Island details, it was clear to Eva. The bracelet hadn’t been Ron’s to give.

“… Obeah bottles strung from branches,” Dart said. “Dangling bottles filled with graveyard dirt and hair and fingernails, protecting folks’ property from thieves. We can find a healer. For me, and for … you.”

Ron had given Eva nothing, as her real mother had liked to say, but a hard time.

“… we’ll see goats,” Dart said dreamily. “We can climb—or walk, it’s really just a walk—up Mount Alvernia.”

The bath had cooled. The water seemed suddenly stagnant. Eva pushed Dart far forward.

“Don’t be typical of yourself,” he said sharply. Dart ran a soapless cloth over his face and under his arms and stepped from the big tub. “Don’t you need a relationship? A man? Even for a week?”

Eva climbed from the tub, shivering. He handed her his damp towel. She held it in her fingers.

“Not a buncha niggas,” Dart said boldly. “One. This one.”

“The choice between fucking one and fucking a buncha is the choice between one roller coaster and another.” Eva’s skin rose in goose bumps.

“You’re already riding this one.” He took his towel from her. “You found the bracelet. You think I’m so foul, but you have it on.” He grabbed a fluffy clean towel from the shelf above the toilet and pushed it at her.

“I have to go to the gospel brunch,” Eva said. She toweled her body crossly and way past dry.

Dart bellowed like there was a score of skeptics in the room. “Given how you DIS everything not in your everyday sphere, I shouldn’t even SAY what I’m about to say.” He looked hard at Eva, like maybe she was worthy of special information. He pointed at her like a quirky person on the street calling out a stranger. An eccentric, disheveled person who haunts you because of the copper connection crazy people often have to the truth.

Eva felt ignorant of her own body. Something inside her was speaking up, and she didn’t know if it was her conscience or a baby or if those were the same thing. The not knowing was loud and strong, and even wrapped in the long towel, Eva was abnormally uncomfortable to be naked. Eva wanted Dart to say what he had to say so she could put her clothes back on and get away from him and take care of her personal business. Her breasts ached like a few veins were all that kept iron spheres from falling through her skin and to the floor.

They get sore, though, right before I start my period
.

Dart mistook her discomfort for disdain. It was an error people made about Eva, whether she was pregnant or not.

“Just because it’s the name of a SONG,” Dart said, still pointing, and starting to perspire. “What I’m about to say is NOT automatically stupid.”

“Okay.”
I need a bra on right now. I need to be in my own bathroom
.

“DON’T patronize,” he said in his booming voice. “Don’t.”

“I’m not.” But she’d crossed her arms under her breasts.

“In my estimation, and in the estimation of a lot of other people—”

“Spit it out, Dart. I’m not really desperate for background.”

“—the Age of Aquarius officially began last January, 1997. It was the end of the Age of Pisces. This heralds the beginning of the End Times. Some think it’s the beginning of a New World Order. Opinions differ, but—”

He is crazy
. But she listened.

“—the fact is, things are changing, and I need to be where I can
contemplate that. Come with, Eva. Don’t look at it like a spiritual thing. I know that freaks you out. Look at it like this: Cat Island’s your type of spot—attached to nothing, in the middle of a treacherous ocean, happy to be pretty.”

His voice was coming from far away.

“I know,” he said solemnly, “there’s more to you than what you let everybody see.”

Eva ran the hand with the bracelet over her long belly.

Dart lunged toward Eva, pulled her hand away from her stomach, and kissed her knuckles. He fell to his knees and looked up, her hands in his. Dart’s eyes had dark circles and the circles shone like he was tired of seeing things differently. Eva was overwhelmed and she was convinced.

I’m ‘bout to go see my future. Leave my worries behind
.

E
va, back in her room, glad that it was made up and brand-new.

Eva dressed, on her bed, sitting by the nightstand.

Can’t keep staring at it. Two pink lines on a stick
.

Phone book’s right here. Someone has to confirm this. Have to speak to a professional
.