Again (23 page)

The words were so sincere, she nearly accepted them as truth. Nearly.

“But you called out her name, David. No, you cried out her name…in your sleep. Rachel. That’s the name you called. So, what am I supposed to think? Because my name is definitely not Rachel. It seems to me that I was just filling someone else’s place in your bed.”

He shook his head for more than a second, denying her accusation with motion, as though he had lost the power of words. But then he spoke. “I—I don’t know what you think you heard, but it wasn’t—Look, I’ve only known one Rachel in all my life and that was my father’s aunt, and I definitely wouldn’t have been calling out her name. It must have been a dream. That’s the only explanation. Tyne, you walked out on me because of a dream.”

She wanted to believe him. Men had fantasies and dreams. But the emotion in his voice when he called out that name was not something arising from a dream. There had been too much passion and pain in his voice. As well as regret. Whether he refused to admit it, he loved…or had loved…this woman. So, he was lying to her; she wasn’t about to be another man’s fool. Raymond had more than ripped away the protection around her heart, and it still hadn’t healed yet.

“David, please I don’t want to hear anymore. Just go now. It’s late.” She walked to the door, opened it and stood waiting. But he didn’t budge.

“No, I’m not going until this is straightened out,” he declared with a finality that bordered on the irrational. He just stood there, daring her, knowing that she couldn’t physically remove him. Which left her with little choice.

“David, I will call the police if you don’t leave now. I don’t know what else to do or say to convince you that it’s over, no matter what reasons or excuses you give. It just doesn’t matter now.”

“Don’t say that,” he pleaded.

“I’m saying it. It’s over. Get out.”

Something strange happened then. Something frightening. One moment David was standing a few feet away, pleading with his eyes. Then he was there, in front of her, staring down.

But it wasn’t him.

Those features, handsome still, belonged to somebody else. He tore her hands away from the door and shut it firmly.

Tyne opened her mouth to scream, but the sound caught in her throat, causing her to choke. The stranger who was David—who was not David—slowly bent his head and settled his lips on hers, first lightly then with a desperate control. The tongue that invaded her mouth tasted of champagne and some other liquor she couldn’t name. A moment stretched out past endurance before he finally pulled back. Tyne gasped for air, realizing she had stopped breathing through the kiss. The eyes that met hers were no longer green or hazel, but some darker color. Brown, maybe, but in the dimmed shadows of her living room, they appeared black. A black that expressed heat and cold, love and hate.

A voice that wasn’t David’s, full of restrained anger said, “I told you that we would be together forever, Rachel.”

As she slipped away, her body sliding to the floor, her last conscious thought was that she had heard that voice before. In her dreams.

C
armen swerved to get out of the way of the oncoming car. It had pulled out of an alley unexpectantly and would have hit her side on, except for her desperate maneuvering. The driver threw her the finger, the silhouette of which she could barely make out in the glare of a street light.

Carmen continued east along Fifty-fourth, relying on the landmarks of her dream to guide her. There, just at the corner was the street sign she had seen so clearly last night—Ellis Street. The corner building was a brownstone just as it had appeared in her vision. She was getting close. A map of the city lay open and neglected on the passenger seat.

“I’ve got to get to him,” she whispered to herself, but the nervousness of her voice only increased her anxiety. “Please, God, let me get to him in time.” She had tried calling him nearly all day, but he never returned any of her calls.

She tried not to think about the gun that she had stashed in the glove compartment. She had bought it in an outlying suburb just this morning with this night in mind.

She desperately hoped she wouldn’t need it. But if she had to, she would use it. To save David from himself. If he was still David anymore.

New York—November 14, 1879

“Keep your mind on the game, why don’ cha?” the dealer bellowed. Joseph, lost in the golden glow of his whiskey, set the glass on the table next to the spot where his cards lay facedown. He’d played three bad hands already and lost nearly half of the money he’d brought with him. He’d had bad nights before but had never been this deep in the hole so early on. This game started off badly, which meant that it would end that way. His luck never turned around once it settled into a pattern.

Losing money was usually a painful experience. But his mind and senses were dulled tonight, partially by the whiskey, but mostly through one of Dr. Lakehurst’s famous (or infamous, depending on what side of the moral road you traveled) egg creams that he had drunk earlier at the bar. The syrup and soda water were a tasty blend, but it was the dash of heroin that made it quite splendid. The good doctor himself sat across from Joseph, having earlier doled out a few packets of the powder to the owner of the establishment as a means of settling an outstanding debt. Smoke from the doctor’s perfecto cigar wafted upward, joining the haze created by the numerous cigarettes and cigars in the ill-ventilated bar room. Clatters of glasses, bursts of raucous hilarity from drunken patrons and the women who serviced them, the mixed odors of unwashed bodies and various intoxicants served as a backdrop to the game in progress.

Joseph picked up his cards and cursed. Two deuces, a trey, a nine and a seven. Another damnable hand. He slammed the cards on the table and winced as Charlie Rhodes set down a straight flush, and groaned as the doctor laid down a full house. At least Roberto Salvatori had a worse hand than himself.

The doctor chuckled. “Looks like the devil’s got your luck tied up somewhere, Joseph. You might think about stopping before you lose everything.”

“And you might think about minding your business,” Joseph shot back, pushing his lost currency to the middle of the table where it was eagerly swept up by the doctor.

“But then my business is good tonight,” the winner said, his face beaming, unoffended by Joseph’s retort. Winning money often made one benevolent. Just as losing often made one vile. Tonight, Joseph felt very uncharitable. An unchecked anger simmered beneath the surface, waiting for a point of explosion. But this moment wasn’t it.

Though he knew that tonight there would be a reckoning.

He abruptly slid back his chair, causing it to scrape against the wooden floor. He stood, picked up the glass, drained it, set it on the table again. Then he grabbed his coat from the hook on the adjacent wall and donned it before bending to pick up his hat from the floor.

“On second thought, gentlemen, I think I will take the kind doctor’s advice, and save myself from abject penury. At least for tonight. Perhaps, tomorrow, Doctor, good luck will blow my way.” He settled the hat on top of his head.

“The way yer been playin’ lately, it’ll be the stink of the Hudson fartin’ in yer face, more like,” Charlie piped in, and the table erupted in laughter. The gap between Charlie’s teeth was a dark vacuum, and his already ruddy skin was blooming a dark crimson in his mirth. Stan O’Brien, the dealer, an old Irish reprobate with a bald pate and sparse, white whiskers, showed his near toothless gums in a smoke-choked guffaw, his cigarette dangling precariously from the side of his open mouth.

Joseph forced a smile. “Gentlemen, I will see you on the ’morrow, and then we shall see where fortune rests her head. Until then, I’ll take my leave of this motley crew for someplace that is less redolent of vermin.”

“Aaahh, I think the rich man, he insults us,” Roberto muttered beneath ponderous muttonchops. Of the four, Roberto was the one with the stench attesting to long hours loading and unloading ships on the waterfront, with too little money to afford a decent dwelling that included indoor plumbing. His hope to extend the few measly dollars he earned in a week was obviously dashed tonight. His black eyes glared at Joseph, settling his life’s resentment on the object of benevolence that had been blessed with fortunes he himself could never dream of.

Joseph had run into his type before, sometimes at a poker table, sometimes on the docks, other times in the dens and whorehouses in the Tenderloin, or on Mulberry Bend in the Five Points district. They all saw a golden boy who had occasion to enjoy the pleasures of both worlds, a world of large mansions and lazy days waited on by dutiful servants, with time to dabble on the less savory side of existence, an existence of wine, women, and drugs. No one man should have everything was their silent and verbal sentiment. More than a few times, some reckless soul thought to act on that sentiment. More than a few times, they lived—and on one occasion, died—to regret it.

Attuned to these resentments, he was always aware of the eyes that followed him, that sized him up. He knew Roberto’s stare cut blades through his back as he walked away. Those eyes were joined by others, predatory and calculating in their scrutiny. But he made it to the door unscathed.

Outside, a chilled November wind scurried the litter along the street. Several Negroes huddled together in front of the opposite building, a dilapidated two-story clapboard that housed one of the few brothels that serviced nonwhites. The irony was that whether a whore was black or not, it was the white brothel owner who determined to whom her wares would be sold. Money was a major factor, money that too often Negro laborers rarely had. Not that there wasn’t a healthy market for black skin, even without Negro patronage. For that matter, there was a discernible and measurable taste for every shade of chocolate, including the more popular caramel and café au lait. Whether the hair was kinky or straight, the nose flared or keen, the face bare or with artifice, white men gathered to taste and feed. And drain. And fill. And feel. And add their own currency to the accounting of mulattoes that inhabited the mostly black denizenship of the Tenderloin and elsewhere.

Until Rachel, Joseph’s taste had not run that course. He was wont to satisfy his needs in the Irish brothels that inundated parts of the Five Points, so named because of the five intersecting streets, Mulberry, Anthony, Cross, Orange, and Little Water. Within those corners was every vice that man or devil had ever invented, as well as an excruciating poverty, evidenced by overfilled tenements that weren’t habitable for the basest barnyard animals. But newly arrived immigrants as well as Negroes, with little choice for accommodations, preferred a leaky, crumbling roof to no roof at all.

Joseph walked briskly down Thirty-ninth Street, then walked north along Seventh Avenue to Forty-second Street, passing dance halls and saloons along the way. The night dwellers were in various stages of inebriation, celebrating another Friday night. In front of La Maison de Plaisir, one of the pretentious French bordellos whose pimps sought out French immigrant women to exploit, two men were engaged in fisticuffs, surrounded by onlookers cheering them on.

He spotted a hansom and flagged it down. The driver slowed the horses, his cabbie hat pulled down over his brow so that his features were indistinguishable, even under the glare of the gaslight. Joseph got into the carriage, and shouted an address to the driver. The cab took off.

Joseph settled back against the leather, wrinkling his nose at a distasteful odor, something with the pungency of rotting onions. His head was throbbing now, and he massaged his brow with his fingers. What he needed was one of his nightly elixirs, wine laced with absinthe, which had a palliative effect against the stresses in his life. One of which he was going to deal with tonight.

He had given her no choice. The letter he’d sent had made it plain that she risked his exposing her secret—to her brother, her minister, and all those good Negro folk—if she did not comply.

He knew that he could not force her back into a relationship. But he needed to see her one last time. Just one more time to taste her softness, smell the scent of her love.

Then he would exorcise his demons once and for all.

Chicago, 2006

Consciousness returned in a haze of lines and angles. Slowly the lines and angles came together to form a face looming over her. The face was familiar, but it took her a few seconds to remember the name attached to it.

“David?” she whispered as he helped her sit up.

The haze moved out of her brain as her eyes focused. She looked around, slowly recalling where she was. She was at home, in her apartment. But for some reason, she was sitting on the floor.

“What happened?” she asked groggily.

David gently helped her to her feet. “You fainted. I don’t know, one minute you were standing there with the door open, then you got this strange look, like you were frightened. I didn’t know what was happening to you. God, Tyne, were you that scared of me? You have to know I wouldn’t hurt you.”

She shook her head slowly, more to clear away the fuzz than in answer to his question. Yet, she did remember fear, but of someone else.

“I don’t know what happened….” But even as she said this, images began replaying in her head. They had been arguing. She remembered his face, hard and angry. Then she told him to get out. She opened the door…and…and…he came at her. After that, everything was black.

Still, what she remembered hastened the rate of her breathing, the pulse of her heart. She had known this fear before, this terror that had consumed her for so many nights in her forever dream-dance of pursuit and evasion, which always ended with her pursuer finally subduing her. But then gradually the dream phantom had morphed into David, and she had found that she no longer wanted to run.

But those had been dreams. This was real. The fear was real. David was real. Her need to get away from him was real, also.

“David, please can you just go?” she pleaded.

He moved to touch her cheek, his face concerned, but she stepped back. “I don’t want to leave you like this,” he said quietly.

“David, don’t you understand, you’re the one making me like this! I can’t deal with you right now! So, please, for the last time, just go!”

For the first time since she saw him on the stairs, his reason seemed to return. His eyes said there was more to be said, but after a moment, he turned to walk to the door. He paused, his back to her.

“It may not mean anything anymore, Tyne, but…I love…” The last word caught in his throat. Her breath caught also. Her tears were unexpected. The tears in his voice were just as painful. She didn’t want to love him.

The phone rang, startling the quiet between them. He turned to look at her, his emotions naked and raw. Both of them stood unmoving, as though the ringing phone tethered them to their spots. As the call went to her answering machine, she expected to hear her mother’s voice or that of one of her sisters. A male voice came on instead. An accented voice. Lem.

“Tyne, I know I just left. But I had to call to let you know how much I enjoyed myself tonight. I was just…well…I thought maybe we might get together again. As friends, of course. I know I shouldn’t be calling so late. You’re probably getting ready for bed now so I’ll just call again tomorrow.”

Tyne closed her eyes. Why did Lem have to call now?

“That’s the man you were with at the party tonight, isn’t it?” David’s voice was so strained, it didn’t sound like his own.

“David, I don’t have to explain anything. You don’t have that right anymore.”

That knocked the anger out of him. “Did I ever have, Tyne?” he asked with sad resignation.

She sighed. “No, David, you never did. I was never yours.”

Something seemed to go through him, something that visibly shook him. She couldn’t take this any longer. She needed him to go, or she would collapse from her own sadness.

She started to the door, then heard a sound that hovered between a breath and a sob. She turned to tell him he had to leave. And stopped in half-motion.

Standing in profile was a stranger, his shoulders sloped, his head bowed, almost mournfully. The stranger said nothing.

The shock of this stranger standing before her broke through Tyne’s memory block. This had happened before, only minutes ago.

Her whole body shook as he turned to her.

He looked at her in confusion, then seemed to remember who she was.

But the name he called out wasn’t hers. Yet it was a name she’d heard before.

“Rachel?”