Bliss (11 page)

“Manufacture, make, whatever. Get it out there.”
Me and the other low-levels are basically an in-house focus group. Look at this album cover, look at this video. Did you see the clothes they’re taking to the shoot? Is it what the kids’ll wear? The higher-ups, so desperate and trying so hard not to show it. I see the mistakes they can’t help but make. Always thinking of the fans as one big stupid swarm. I’m not gonna be like that. I’ll put out music that’s real
.

“You’ve got to get back,” Gayle said as Eva slipped into her Reeboks. “Or the place’ll crumble.”

“I won’t have others blocking my moves,” Eva said plainly. “I’m on my way to being a professional person. In
hip hop
. That’s what I represent. Make my
own
money. Get fired if I’m wack, get promoted when I’m hot. Do you even know how that feels? It’s going to be my living. Dad likes it for me. Ask him.”
Go hard or go home. That’s my motto. And I won’t be coming home. Bad enough I had to be here now
.

Taken aback by Eva’s intense eye contact, Gayle said, “I know what your father likes, thank you.” She put the brush down.

Eva jammed sweats in her carry-on.

“You’re going to take it easy, though, Eva,” Gayle said delicately. “Going to be more careful.”

Condom came off, Gayle. And even if it wasn’t my fault, it’s my fault, and I dealt with it
. Eva said nothing.

“It’s not just the procedure,” Gayle pressed. “It’s the stuff that’s out there now. You know about it.”

“I read,” Eva said.
Why’d I come here? Dad all half disappointed and half approving mumbling about Future this and Future that while I’m padding around in pajamas, holding my gut like it might fall out my
body. And he says nothing directly to me. Pawns all direct conversation off on Gayle. Why does she bring me broth when I’m supposed to be gearing back up? Heard Dad in the kitchen with Gayle talking about, “Why not T-bones, put some iron in her blood? Coffee and purple grapes, get her system moving” He’s right. I got to get moving
.

Eva slipped her passport in her back pocket, put her bag on her shoulder, and then followed her stepmother, who snatched up her keys and pocketbook, through the front door of the house and into the car. Eva stared out the windshield, pulled her hood over her long braid.

“You need your passport to fly to LA.?”

“I always use my passport,” Eva said without looking at Gayle, “in any situation. Supreme form of ID. There’s no questioning it.”

“People question your driver’s license?”

Why is this broad all up in my business?
“My passport is here, right?” Eva laid it on her lap, flipped it open, and then closed it. “In this little clear plastic thing. Little clear plastic thing’s got pockets. In the pockets—driver’s license, insurance card, things like that. Anything anybody needs to know about me.”

“Is there a note in there explaining to all and sundry why you’re so darned huffy?”

“Do I not have a reason,
Gayle
, to be the tiniest bit huffy
today
?”

Eva’s stepmother set her lips tightly. And then in her more usual, chastened manner, Gayle murmured, “Twice isn’t bad,” as they clicked behind belts in the old, clean sedan.

Eva checked her bag for her Walkman and for her advance cassette of PeaceLove&War. She placed the cased tape with the handwritten song list in the zipper pocket of her bag, feeling privileged to have early notice of such a legendary group’s new music. The advance tape was one of many secret badges of Eva’s membership in hip hop. A talking amulet that proved she was damn near a corporal in what was still the few and the proud. She slipped her passport in her jacket pocket and kept her hand in there on top of it.

Mr. Glenn stood with a neighbor on the tiny lawn, Trail Blazers brim pulled down against the drizzly rain. He looked at his daughter,
put skinny fingers to his lips for a long moment, and lifted them. It was his best kiss. Eva looked away, and then up, to keep water from rolling down her cheeks.

“Don’t want you to think twice is bad,” Gayle went on as she pulled onto the gloomy, glistening street. “It would be you, anyway, dealing with the afteraffects. The responsibility. Twice is okay.”

I’ve wasted three lives now. Those twins and now this. Three chances is what?

E
va!” “What?” Eva was standing next to a trash can so clean it could have been sterilized. Near a short palm so waxy and perfect, she wanted to tear off the leaves. Eva’s teeth were in her tongue. She was trying to figure out when she’d lost it, and how she could get it back.

The list in her head went like this: Sunny had started Sonrisa. Sunny was down with Vic, who was probably telling Sunny what an asshole Eva was. Piper was keeping stuff from Eva. Piper was probably fucking Sebastian, had maybe been fucking Sebastian, just as Eva had fucked Sebastian off and on for a year before he hired her at Roadshow. Eva was trying to engineer a comeback for Sunny, and Sunny was creeping off.

Teeth scoring her tongue even deeper, Eva thought about Ron and Dart and how she kept coming back to them, and they to her. Eva felt throttled standing there by the clean trash can, throttled and thirsty and like she’d been assigned lustiness and fearlessness at a meeting she missed. But she embraced the traits because bravery and decision making came easily. And sex could be fun—as numbing or mood altering as any five drinks. Thinking about sex brought Eva right back to thinking about the baby, and that she must in fact be pregnant, because she was vomiting and dizzy, and it had to be the baby throwing her around. Messing her up. Distracting her. It was already in her life, changing her program, weighing her down.

“Why you way over there?” Sunny said. “Come with me up to
Dart’s room.” She’d relaxed. Had overheard parts of Eva’s conversation with Piper.

Eva drank the last of her water.

In saucer-size sunglasses and a lime caftan, Sunny padded through the plastic pasture of bare chairs and tables.

Eva got her stuff and strolled toward Sunny. Eva wouldn’t trot. That wouldn’t do.

The lobby bar in the Great Hall of Waters trembled with a thick line of early birds.

“I’ll rescue you,” Sunny said with a tug at Eva’s elbow, “in fifteen.”

“Ten,” Eva said, eyeing the gauntlet. But Sunny was on her way to the elevator bank. A few people stared at her, but Eva couldn’t tell if it was because of Sun’s billowing aura or because Sun was recognized.

Eva made her way over to the bar.

The O’Jays clicked her brain, and her stride moved to an inner beat.

Nineteen seventy-five, from the album
Survival.
Sampled by Gang Starr for a lame album cut. Sampled by Devin the Dude and EPMD and Keith Murray. And more
.

The searing song in her head, and the idea that she knew every-thing there was to know about it, geared Eva up to face what she suddenly saw as a chain of fools. Backstabbers. Smiling faces that tell lies.

Got to give the people
, went the O’Jays’ classic jam,
give the people what they want
.

E
va walked over and kissed at chunky men clustered around chunky glasses, women with flutes poised over cheeses and pastries. Eva scorned women who ate doughnuts and cakes. It was cowardly, Eva believed, to maintain the shelter of a plump face and dimpled thighs. She thought them cows scared to go head-up with Naomi and Tyra, afraid to beat the famed white girls at their rangy, long-waisted games.

Special Ed’s MC voice rattled in Eva’s head:
I … am the magnificent. Supa-dope
, yelled the voice.
Outta sight
.

“Eva! Miss Everything! Come,
sweetness
, join us for a little pre-cocktail cocktail!”

Smile ablaze, Eva waved at Myra ecstatically. Eva wanted out of the Vince the Voice convention, away from the bar with its blueberry-stuffed French toast and hard curls of peppered bacon. Eva identified with the righteous smugness of the breakfast eaters. The feeling of having finally what was deserved, what was past due for past injustices to past players. The feeling of victory—for taking over rock’s hold on pop culture with a coup d’état that began with the candle bomb of Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith’s 1986 “Walk This Way.” The single looked accidental, and it was a skyrocket around which a zillion circumstances had conspired, but the rap song had been consciously lit by the grungy guitar Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons tagged all over Run-D.M.C.’s third album. Any lingering remains of the rock era were cremated five years later, when
Billboards
charts went computerized, and N.W.A’s
Niggaz4Life
emerged as the album most purchased and stayed number
one for week after incendiary week. Eva still remembered that first week of Soundscan charts with a thrill of vindication.

Yes, it’s glorious. We’re glorious. But we killed it. Biggie and Tupac are gone, and Kirk Franklin and his gospel family are at the top of the charts. It’s like we can’t even see the connection. Choirs sing at funerals
.

“How about
you
, this morning, Eva?” Myra sang out. “How’s Miss Queen of Doin’ Thangs?”

“Working, woman. Getting my head together for the day. What about you?”

“What you
need
to be doing, darling, is telling those Roadshow white folks that Sunny needs to be around some more black people. Do some community stuff.”

Eva sat down with Hakeem and Myra and pecked at a bowl of peanuts.

“Talk about how these Roadshow folks are bitter,” Hakeem said. “How they can’t actually
make
the music, so they gotta dictate everything else.”

Eva rolled her eyes until they stopped on the liquor shelves to her left.

A waitress walked up with two drinks on a tray.

“Myra, can I have yours?” Eva took a glass of whiskey before the startled waitress could sit it down, and sipped it before Myra could answer.
In ev’ry job that must be done/There is an element of fun/You find the fun and snap!/The job’s a game
. Eva took another sip.
The spoken intro to “A Spoonful of Sugar (Helps the Medicine Go Down).” From the soundtrack to 1964’s
Mary Poppins.
Sung by Julie Andrews
. Eva wanted to leave. To talk more with Sunny, get things straight between them, and to see what was so important in Dart’s room.

Hakeem handed Myra his drink, then asked the waitress for another. The three of them sat in silence and waited on Hakeem’s drink like it would help their chat move in a most delightful way.

Eva’d tried to convince Sun to refurbish a recreation center in a housing project in San Diego, had spoken to her about being on the honorary boards of various safety-net-type organizations. These were things that needed to be done, the price of grounding legitimacy as a black pop artist. Sun had talked one time about starting an arts
camp, and Eva’d made sure Sun’s offhand idea had shown up in her bio and press materials. But Sun was about inner peace and poetry and the privilege of indulging passions that came with her success.

This only alienated her from the older set who prided themselves on talking about reaching back a hand, the set who felt they’d kissed white ass for years, and who’d been paid less money for doing more work. At a radio convention like Vince the Voice’s, it was older black execs who’d been the first investigated for payola when they’d accepted or paid out the least. Who’d fought on principle, as well as for personal gain, for more airplay for black artists. This older set—Myra’s contemporaries, and the super-old hands who’d put people like Hakeem on—they’d sons and nieces with Sun posters in their bedrooms and thought her too selfish, too quick to embrace the white pop aura.

But the showcase was a success. Fuck Myra. So why don’t I get out of here?

Myra swept her hand through the air over the table—barspeak for another round.

Eva sipped the last of her first drink, glanced toward the golden front doors of the hotel.
I’m not pregnant. There’s no way
. She looked fifty feet up at the ceiling. A dome lined with gold shells. Eva’s mind filled the looming space with her father, with Ron, with a vision of herself free of work and hating the freedom. Then Eva looked toward the elevators, for Sun.

“She’ll be here, baby,” Hakeem said. He reached over, pushed a piece of hair behind Eva’s ear, and stroked the curve of it. Eva let him. “Something I want you to do for me.”

Eva thought if it thrilled him to touch her, and helped him to feel less threatened by her, then fine. The less threatened he felt, the more he was up to assist.

“Myra hasn’t heard your speech about Boyz II Men, Evey,” Hakeem said.

“She hasn’t heard someone else give it?” Eva looked at Myra. The Boyz II Men homily was common as the N.W.A lecture. Most colored people in the business could deliver it.

“No one says it like you. You know dates and exact sales and all the fun facts. Come on, now,” Hakeem said. “Bring the drama.”

Me. Tell you about boys to men
. “Abbreviated version, only,” Eva said, and she stood.

Myra was suddenly an aunt pleased by a wayward niece’s display of we-are-family. A few other convention attendees turned to watch and listen.