Authors: Rebecca Walker
Adé: A Love Story
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2013 Rebecca Walker
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of
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, Inc. or its affiliates.
eISBN: 9781477850626
Cover design by Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover art © Amanda Marsalis
Author photograph © Amanda Marsalis
for Sefu and all who love him
CONTENTS
Yes, I know where that photo was taken. We have crossed that place together. There are fishing traps in the mangroves beneath the water.
—
Adé
WE LIVED BY
the sea, the two of us, many years ago, do you remember? We lived in a small green house that you painted every year after the rains. And in that house we made love almost every day and dreamed about all the lands we would see together, and in that house I imagined writing a book about being there with you. The book would be about love. I knew that then. It would be about living deliriously without all the things and people I held dear. I had you and I had the sea and I had the beautiful blue indigo the women wore on the cloths wrapped around their waists. I had fish and I had the taste of you—salty, musky amber.
OUR STORY, ADÉ
’
S AND MINE
, began one afternoon in autumn. It was the kind of day New Englanders boast about, with red and orange leaves fluttering through an impossibly blue sky. I was walking with a friend, Miriam, down College Street. She was talking about sex with her new boyfriend and playing pinball at a bar on Adams Street. I pulled my coat tightly to my breasts and tilted my face toward the sun. And then the cavernous limestone gymnasium at the edge of campus was upon us, and we skimmed the wide, shallow steps until we were inside, enveloped by the gothic dark.
In the hushed dampness of the steam room, I reclined on the highest ledge, absolutely still on my towel. Miriam sat on the floor with her legs crossed, turning herself around in slow circles without a towel underneath her, her ample butt cheeks spread and rubbing against the faded green tile. She had huge pale pink nipples and smooth, fleshy thighs covered with hairs that made her legs appear tanned even in winter. She was like the zaftig women in the paintings by Ingres I was studying in my art-history courses, voluptuous women with skin like alabaster getting in and out of the bath.
“What about Thailand?” Miriam asked, so out of nowhere I thought she might be delusional. She began twirling faster. “What about Koh Samui and Phuket and Chiang Mai?” Spinning faster and faster, as if the words themselves were propelling her body.
“Mmm, hmm,” I said, joining in. “What about Egypt? What about Karnak and Abu Simbel and Giza? What about Luxor and Aswan?”
“Yes!” Miriam said excitedly, going even faster now, no doubt chafing her buttocks and the backs of her thighs.
“What about the Nile?”
I was nineteen years old to Miriam’s twenty-one. I felt raw and unfinished, where she seemed complete and self-assured. I was a child of divorce and felt like I came from a thousand places—each one holding a little piece of me, and I drifted among them with no way to gather them up. Miriam was from just one place, Miami, and more specifically, the moneyed enclave of Coconut Grove.
At Yale, she belonged to a set I had not known, even in the progressive environs of my gentrified Haight-Ashbury high school. Miriam and her friends built shrines to Madonna adorned with gold spray-paint and rose petals. They loved red wine and postmodern feminist artists like Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Frida Kahlo, and the Guerrilla Girls. They quoted Julia Kristeva, Karl Marx, and Simone de Beauvoir. They read Rilke and Thoreau and Whitman and nodded sagely when I brought a battered old copy of poems by Borges and added it to the makeshift library on the mantle of the old house that Miriam and her four closest friends rented on Howe Street.
I met Miriam in a film-studies class, Power and Politics: The Film of Latin America. We both wept at the end of the Cuban classic
Lucia,
and from that moment, were one. Together we limned the depths of normalcy, pushing the sharp edge of the envelope with our tongues. We crashed parties at elitist mausoleums and secret societies that still held the intoxicating perfume of luxury. We spent drunken evenings at Bar, the hangout of morose comp-lit students we loved to mock. We laughed over whiskey sours while they downed vodka and agonized over the anti-Semitism of deconstructionist Paul de Man.
I was fascinated by Miriam, as if she were an exquisite object, a multifaceted ruby, or a one-hundred-foot-tall Buddha. She paired a diamond ring her father gave her with a ripped polyester skirt bought at a thrift store for two dollars. She sometimes tied a colorful scarf over her dark brown hair and knotted it beneath her chin. She walked with her solid calves turned out slightly, as if she belonged to a village in the Old Country. When the neo-Gothic limestone of our Ivy League grew too much to bear, Miriam picked me up in her dusty red Chevy Nova, pink and orange strands of Mardi Gras beads dangling from her neck, and drove us out of New Haven to Cinema 21, several towns over. Some evenings we watched the sunset from East Rock, a tall bluff outside of town, interlacing our fingers and pressing our cheeks together to keep warm. Miriam was a force. She pursued, adored, and claimed me, and I was desperate to be claimed.
One day Miriam and I kissed, not because we felt passion for each other, but because we wanted to know what it felt like. We were on a ferry going to visit her mother. Our tongues collided as we left Mystic, with all its submarines and tools of war, and the Connecticut coastline trailing behind us. She felt strange and
new in my arms, round and soft where my last boyfriend was tall and solid, moist and yielding where he was firm and sovereign. In that moment, I loved her more than all the rest. She was rooted but unbound. She functioned in the middle of the cacophony. I wanted to devour her and take some of her knowledge for myself.
One night not long after, the girls threw a rather large party, a soirée, at their house on Howe Street, and after too many bottles of wine and too much Bob Dylan and on the third go-round of Truffaut’s
The 400 Hundred Blows
on the muted television set, I whispered to Miriam a little too loudly that I thought a boy across the room named Parker was cute—a little James Dean cum Jackson Pollock, very drunk and emotionally cut off, and thus, very manly. We were lazing on her huge bed, tucked into an alcove in the living room, by then; things were winding down, but many of the guests hung on. I wonder if he can fuck, I said to her as a kind of foreplay, and slowly reached my tongue to meet hers.
Miriam responded enthusiastically, to my kiss or the promise of Parker I can’t be sure, but I accepted it willingly, just the same, with all the frisson of transgression. When we came up for air, the conversation had stopped all around us, and Miriam righted herself on her pillow, then filled the space with a throaty
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
drawl. “Parker, Parker,” she called, patting the mattress of her queen-size bed. “Come sit here, by us, honey.”
It was a turning point, the first time we ensnared an outsider into our web, the first time we created an
us
that preyed upon a
them,
an
us
that, in loyalty and in every other way that mattered, took precedence over everyone and everything else.
Parker strutted over, beer in hand, cowboy boots clacking on the floor, and slid onto the bed alongside Miriam, kicking one leg over her already slightly parted thighs. In response, she ran her
hand over his chest, casually unbuttoning his shirt and finding his nipples. He lurched forward and let out a low growl that made my own nipples stand up. Somewhere behind me I heard the tinkle of bottles and the rumblings of the exiting
salonistes,
but I was riveted by the scene before me, transfixed by what Miriam was creating for my pleasure.
That night we both had Parker, as many times as he would oblige us, and we kissed several times and rubbed each other’s backs and thighs while Parker labored, reminding the other of the tender softness that was there too. But we never made love with each other, not in the conventional sense. There was no mounting or rubbing, no sharing of bodily fluids, though the intimacy of watching was intense. There was a moment so vivid—Miriam with her head back, her hand between her legs as Parker entered her—it could have been etched into my memory with a machete. She reached out her free hand to find mine, then opened her eyes and smiled at me, bridging for me the distance between beholder and beheld.
But then we wanted to sleep, and we wanted to do it without Parker. Suddenly he smelled bad and took up far too much room. We woke him up and told him to leave. He was hurt and looked it, even as his hangover bravado provided some cover. He pushed his face into his pillow, feigning exhaustion and mumbling about the cold, but we were unrelenting, verging on cruel. Finally, he pulled his shirt on, and Miriam slid close to me from behind. She draped her arm around my waist and I felt spent, delicious, and shockingly guilt-free.