Hold Love Strong (20 page)

W
hat did I know about love, about being in love and loving? What had I seen between a man and woman that was not forced to wrestle with perilous social predicaments? What love had time not devolved into pain and violence? Where was love undeterred, indestructible, and pure? And of such relationships around me, which were not infected by Ever Park, by the sight of failed and devalued brethren and the abject conditions of our public schools and nearest hospitals, the institutions we placed our children and infirm in the care of? Nowhere else in America did love have to navigate so many emotional, intellectual, and spiritual obstacles.

And yet, although I wasn't mature enough to understand what declaring love meant; although I didn't know love could start wars and end wars and keep fruitlessness battling for years; and although I understood love could be abandoned, just as my father had done to my mother and she had done to me, I said it. I looked Kaya dead in the
face and told her. I loved her. Then we stood in silence. It was dawn, the beginning of November, there was a chill in the air. We were juniors in high school and we were on the roof of our building. I watched her, studied how she digested my declaration aglow in the nearly nonexistent light that buffed the blackness from an Ever Park night and made it day.

“So,” she said, holding the word for a moment. “I mean, now what are we supposed to do?”

She stopped short. I jammed my hands in my pockets and tried to feign as much nonchalance as I could. We had already kissed. We had already held hands. We had already tickled and teased and tested each other. I had already tasted her and she had already tasted me and we had already had sex; that is, we had both thumb wrestled condoms, and I had poked and stabbed and pushed myself through her taut anxiety and into her in the dark of her mother's bedroom, in the dark of the room I shared with Donnel, Eric, and my uncle when no one was home, and once in the dark of the bathroom in Yusef 's apartment.

“Cause you can't just be saying shit,” she scolded. “Because I ain't the type of sister to be bullshitting. And besides, you ain't ever even seen me.”

“Seen you?” I said.

“I mean seen me for real. Like I ain't ever seen you.”

“I see you right now.”

“Naked,” she said. “Nude, nigga. That's what I'm saying. I mean we never even seen each other's whole bodies in the light before.”

A swell of emotions grabbed me by the neck. For a moment, I couldn't breathe. Everyone whom I loved was linked with abandonment. So a precipice was my life. That is, it was just one foot in front of the other; Monday to Tuesday; Tuesday to Wednesday. But one step too far to the left or right, one friendship, one heartbreak and I might be dead. Truthfully. As dramatic as it sounds. As twisted and perverse
as it seems. It was not just my pride, but my survival skills that were on the line. That is, what Kaya said was a test to see how I handled being vulnerable, something that could affect me for days, weeks, years to come. Naked, I thought. Like a baby?

But then I looked at Kaya and she smiled a smile so disarming it severed my bonds with toughness and posturing. Such a cleaving caused parts of me not to lose sensation but to gain it. Coming upon me was a swell of contentment, completion. I gave in. And then, just as doctors and scientists can't explain why one's chest swells or aches when falling in or cut off from love, I don't know how or why but I felt stilled, as if I would never be hungry or thirsty or in need again. Without taking my eyes from Kaya, I lifted my left foot and took off my sneaker. She didn't believe me.

“Stop playing,” she said.

I took off my other sneaker. Then I took off my socks.

“OK,” I said. “Your turn.”

After a moment of hesitation, Kaya took off her sneakers and socks. I took off my coat. She took off hers. I took off my sweatshirt. She un-fastened her belt, pulled it free, and dropped it on her shoes. I took my T-shirt off, stood shivering. She smiled.

“It's cold,” I said.

“Look at all your little muscles,” she said.

I was lean and my muscles were well defined. I was becoming a man. Every day a different hair above my upper lip seemed to darken and thicken. Kaya paused to consider which article of clothing to take off next, her shirt or pants. Then she stripped her shirt off over her head. She wore a black bra, and shivering like me, she folded her arms across her breasts.

“That's cheating,” I said.

“Cheating?” she said. “Nigga, stop stalling. Go.”

I unfastened my pants, let them fall around my feet, and stepped out
of them. As was the style of brothers in Ever Park, beneath my jeans I wore both basketball shorts and boxers.

“Your turn,” I said.

Holding one arm across her breasts, Kaya unfastened the button and zipper of her pants and pushed them down her legs. Then, a bit awkwardly, hopping slightly on one foot, seemingly about to lose her balance and fall, she took them off. She wore red panties. Still hugging herself, she stood tall. I took off my shorts. Kaya took a deep breath. Then, keeping her eyes affixed to me, she reached her arms behind her back, unclasped her bra, slipped it off, and let her arms fall to her sides. Her breasts sat still, like swollen drops of rusty dew suspended from her clavicles. This was it. I had only one article of clothing left.

“You scared?” she asked.

“Of what?” I said.

“Of letting me see you.”

Before that dawn, I would have lied. I would have shouted or laughed or smiled smugly and trumpeted no. I would have used her question, manipulated and molded it until it was an accusation I could use to maneuver from the whole disclosure of myself. But I didn't then.

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, you?”

Kaya considered what I said, dawn parading upon her body, sunlight rising around her, from her, through her thighs, honeying the gentle mounds of her hips and shoulders.

“We can look up,” she said. “Then go at the same time.”

“OK,” I said. “On the count of three.”

We looked up. Above there were three tiers of flight. The first were the birds, fifty to one hundred feet above Ever and Queens, seagulls and pigeons, and small silhouettes that I couldn't name darted, soared in circles, and fluttered through the near morning. And thousands of feet above the birds there were a few planes in the distance, gliding,
lights blinking on their wingtips. And then above the birds and the planes there was the moon, growing fainter by the moment as if it were floating farther and farther away.

Without taking our eyes from above, we counted to three. Then we took off our remaining article of clothing. She slipped her panties off one leg at a time. I slid my boxers down my legs. A naked young woman stood before me. But I kept my eyes on the sky. I was not afraid to look. I was frozen by the thought of what Kaya might see.

“You're beautiful,” she whispered.

I didn't believe her, so I laughed a breath of mistrust. Then, inch by inch, I lowered my eyes from the sky. I expected to find Kaya looking at my body, at my penis, or maybe my outie belly button. But she wasn't. She stared at my eyes. She absorbed how nakedness dressed me, how fear and discomfort came to my face from deep beneath.

“What?” she said. “You don't believe me?”

My eyes fell from hers, tracing her body until they reached her feet. Then I quickly lifted them and looked at her again.

“No,” I said. “It's just—”

“Just what?” she interrupted.

“It's just,” I said. “It's just that I am not as beautiful as you.”

She smiled, rolled her eyes. “Nigga,” she said. “Don't be thinking you're all slick. You're Abraham. It took you years just to ask me out.”

She was right. I wasn't slick. And it did take me years to ask her out. And I also didn't believe her that I was beautiful. Thus, what mattered most was not the shape or sight of Kaya's nudity, nor was it what we did afterward, how we made love with incomparable heat. Nor did it matter most that I was naked or that I had given myself over to fear and thus bared my complete self, not the defense, parceling, or demonstration of it. And what mattered most was not that I needed to see and hear that I was beautiful. No, what mattered most was that I was in love with a young woman whose love for me introduced me to the vastness
of the universe, the infinite and the finite, from Timbuktu to me, the young Ever Park brother who played basketball and wrote secret letters, and who sometimes just happened to, you know, stumble in and find Kaya in the library after school.

S
pring, and it was like I was awakened from a deep sleep. Some teachers and students in my classes talked about college. We could take a free SAT test if we wanted. Some were taking it. Too many were not. It was our chance, Kaya said, and she studied at the library for it. And she'd sit there with an old Peterson's college guide and look up colleges and their students' average SAT scores. And she would read the description about the campuses, the student to faculty ratios, and how difficult it was to be accepted. She developed an encyclopedic knowledge of colleges and universities. She knew their locations, their mascots, their fight songs.

“There's got to be like a hundred colleges in New York,” she said. “There's Fordham and NYU, and all the city colleges, and St. John's, and FIT, where, you know, aspiring clothing designers go. There ain't no historically black colleges though. Ain't that strange? You'd think with all those rich people, like the Cosbys and Puff Daddy, they might have started one.”

Through and through, Kaya was sure she was going to college. Someplace. Somewhere.

“College, Abraham,” she said. “That's what I'm about. I don't got to go to Harvard like Ms. Hakim. There must be a bunch of colleges that'll accept me. But maybe Harvard? You never know. If I score real high on the SAT. I got good grades. Like Mandela said, it ain't who am I to be brilliant? It's who am I not to be, you know?”

Kaya was so about college and that SAT that the window to kiss and make love with her was so small it might as well have been a pinhole in an all black sky. No matter how or what I whispered in her ear, no matter how smooth I tried to move and ease into foreplay, all she wanted to do was talk positive and negative integers, binomials, vocabulary words, and college majors.

“What you think about psychology?” she'd ask me in the middle of my sweetest, gentlest kissing on her neck. “Or sociology? You know Ms. Hakim majored in religion?”

Kaya told everyone within earshot about colleges. My grandma loved it. She listened to Kaya like everything she said was a drip of honey on the tip of her tongue, so sweet its savoring was not to be rushed.

“College,” she'd say to me after Kaya left. “Abraham, you know, you smart enough.”

My Aunt Rhonda humored Kaya, but she mocked her when she was not around.

“That chick talks more white every day,” she'd say. “What the fuck does intrepid mean anyway? And loquacious? Abraham, if I didn't know she loved your ass, I'd swear she was cursing you.”

On the rare occasion when Kaya spoke about college and Donnel was present, he'd look at me and his gaze would grow harder, more exacting, as if he were trying to dissect a delicate insect, a butterfly steeped in fog. His mind was the perfect fit for higher education, pre
cise in its movements, associative. And he wanted to go to college. I saw it on his face. And once he swore he could do it.

And when Kaya spoke about college my uncle watched her the way a man ponders an old picture of himself, a plain and simple expression on his face as if he was not just hearing and seeing Kaya but soaking in the recollections of that time in his life, the many events, and the feelings that swelled in his chest about who he had been and where he could have gone—college. Sometimes my uncle wondered aloud about what it would be like. And sometimes he said he was going to take classes as soon as he got some money in his pocket. But he was also scared of it, as if sitting in an institution of higher education was more difficult than sitting in prison, an institution meant to limit men, even rot them away.

Eric didn't have a job or a social life, and when he wasn't drawing the only things he did were sleep, eat, watch TV, and spend any money he had on scratch tickets. But when Kaya talked about college Eric stopped and listened like a piece of lint being sucked into a vacuum, all up in Kaya's mouth, leaning into everything she said. Once, he got so close to her he repeated her declaration verbatim, with the exact intonation and pronunciation.

“I am going to college,” he announced, launching to his feet from the couch. “Make no mistake about it!”

“Eric,” said my Aunt Rhonda. “All you do is sit in front of that TV. And you ain't even got your GED. Ain't no college gonna want you. You got to get that piece of paper first.”

So Eric said he was going to get his GED. When? Soon, he said. And my grandma and my Aunt Rhonda told him to take Donnel with him. But no one pushed him on it because no one believed he would do it. Not because Eric was slow minded. But because Donnel wasn't leading and Eric had only liked learning once, when he was in art class in elementary school. So he procrastinated and delayed investigating
GED classes. He lied and said he called some schools but the ones that called him back didn't have any room for him.

As for me, I didn't think about college. Rather, I considered it. I paid attention in the school assembly about college that our guidance department held for the entire eleventh grade. I heard them talk about the college admissions process, the applications, preparing for the SAT test. And deep inside, I wanted it. But I neither acted on nor seriously considered my consideration of college. It wasn't ignorance or laziness. It was that I didn't believe I should leave Ever; or that I could. I was just as afraid as my uncle. No, I was more. So, no matter what Kaya said, that free SAT test came and went without me.