Endless Summer Nights (10 page)

“Wait, did you just go all British 1930s on us? Scoundrel? Are you serious? Did you just call him that?” Antha giggled.

“She can call him whatever she wants. Just make sure you call him fine,” Candice added, airing sentiments half of the women in the world felt for sure. “That tight body? Those eyes? That man has the most beautiful brown skin I’ve ever seen. Hands down! He’s right of Morris Chestnut and left of Idris Elba.”

“All of that’s cool, but I like the fact that the man can actually sing. You know?” Antha said. “And while there are lots of R & B singers going around who look really good, most can’t sing two notes without cracking.”

After more chatter about Marlo’s muscles and an alleged penis size Antha had discovered online, Candice managed to disappear onto the dance floor with the baby-faced dude, leaving Antha, Leticia and me to our budding bar tab and Leticia’s wedding talk. Willow was hugged up with her new club boyfriend at the bar. My cell phone was vibrating so much it seemed to be syncing with the rhythm of the horrible techno music.

I finished my third martini and had just admitted to myself that I was drunk when Antha saw one of her exes on the dance floor and left to dance with him.

“I’m happy you came out tonight, Sunny,” Leticia whispered, leaning over to me.

“Of course,” I said.

“I know you’re stressed.”

“What? I look stressed?”

“No. I mean, you’re always stressed...like with Kimya.”

“I’m fine,” I affirmed. “And tonight isn’t about all that. It’s about you.”

“Thanks, but it’s not me I’m thinking about. It’s you,” Leticia said carefully.

“Why would you be thinking about me?” I asked, feeling my phone vibrating again.

“Just because...you know,” Leticia said just as the DJ switched tracks to Kimya’s last
Billboard
topper, “Love Monster,” and the bass drowned Leticia out. She cut her eyes at the noise and comically covered my ears. We laughed and then I saw her eyes perk up at something over my shoulder.

“What? What is it?” I asked Leticia as the enthusiasm in her eyes slid down to her lips and morphed into a smile.

“What are you doing here?” Leticia’s hands fell from my ears as she hollered happily in the direction of what was behind me.

I turned and there was Clayton climbing over the velvet rope behind our table.

Leticia rose daintily and kissed him. She purred “baby” a few times and then they giggled at something I couldn’t make out over Kimya screaming, “Bloody mess, you’re a bloody, bloody mess!” on the Megatron track coming through the speakers.

I stood to hug Clayton, too. I didn’t know him very well. He and Leticia had only been dating like six months before they’d gotten engaged. He was a single, kid-free, college-educated investment banker she’d met on the same online dating website that kept sending felons, foot-fetish freaks and four-time forty-year-old fathers my way.

“Sorry to crash the party,” Clayton whispered in my ear.

“It’s cool,” I said.

“He came to surprise me since he couldn’t make it to Cipriani,” Leticia whispered in my other ear while clasping my hand.

“I was working,” Clayton followed up. “She sent a text saying you guys were heading over here, so I wanted to surprise her.”

“No need to explain anything to me.” I felt like they were talking to me so fragilely. Like I’d actually be angry or care that Clayton was there.

“Come have a seat,” Leticia said, pulling Clayton in his navy blue Water Street suit to the table.

“I can’t, Lettie.” Clayton frowned a little. “I’m only here for a few. Gotta get back to the office. Came to see if you wanted a dance.”

Leticia smiled graciously as she drank in his words with so much pride she had to be happy I was standing right there to witness it all.

“Do you mind, Sunny?” She looked at me as if I was the veritable ugly friend she was about to leave at the table holding all of the purses.

“Do your thing,” I said.

As they weaved through the crowd, they stopped a few times for Antha and then Willow and then Candice to hug and smile with Clayton in pictures they took with their phones on the dance floor.

My phone was vibrating again. I pulled it out and there was a text from “Da Boss Lady”—Kimya had typed her name into the phone herself:

DA BOSS LADY: I fired Yves. Bitch was crazy. She was stealing from me.

ME: She wasn’t stealing. Why did you do that? I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t do that again until we found someone to replace her.

DA BOSS LADY: Calm down, pussycat. We’ll find somebody. I guess you’ll have to live with me again until we do.
J
Come to the studio. We’re going to do a remix for “Love Monster.” Sean is up here.

ME: What? Why is Sean there? You know what happens with you two. Jesus, Kimya. Didn’t he have that restraining order on you?

DA BOSS LADY: And I got one on his ass, too! You coming?

ME: Fine.

I clicked off the screen and scrolled to Yves’s name in my call log. I pressed the phone to my ear. She picked up quickly and launched right into a diatribe in Creole that ended when I decided to hang up because I couldn’t hear her over the club music. I needed to get her back. I had to. I couldn’t move back in with Kimya. It was bad enough that she’d made me leave my father’s old Brooklyn brownstone I’d been renovating since he’d died, and rent an apartment three blocks away from her in Manhattan.

I went to the bathroom to try to get Yves on the phone again so I could explain that Kimya was just overreacting, and she should return to work in the morning.

Listening to Yves use every curse word available to her in her Haitian Creole, I hard-eyed a lesbian couple necking right on the sink in the bathroom. They rolled their eyes as if I was the problem and headed out as some girl who smelled like a burning marijuana factory entered.

“I know she’s crazy....” was all I could say when Yves finally started complaining about Kimya in English. “But I can get you a raise.”

Yves switched back to Creole and even in a different language I knew I was losing our debate.

“No amount of money. I can’t be bought,” she said in English. “How you do it? You smart. You pretty. Why you stay with her?”

“This isn’t about me. Please work with me. Please, Yves. Come back.”

“I no do it. I find better. You, too. God bless you, Sunshine. You good woman.”

The line went dead and suddenly the loud screaming and music and even the water dripping down the drain in the sink, toilets flushing, the scent of urine on the floor and the weedy woman in the stall beside me, dim lights and fluorescent graffiti on the walls around me flooded my senses in a storm. I had to get out of there.

I found Leticia and Clayton on the dance floor moving too slowly and kissing. I stood there for a second not knowing if I should interrupt them.

And then my phone was vibrating again.

“I have to go,” I said aloud, without knowing I was about to say anything.

Leticia and Clayton stopped kissing and looked at me as if I was a little sister who was bugging them.

“What?” Leticia asked.

“I have to go.”

“But Clayton is about to go. We’re about to have a toast,” she said loudly over the music. “Can’t you wait?”

“There’s an emergency.”

“We understand,” Clayton said.

Leticia sharpened her eyes at him and looked back to me. “But I wanted to spend more time with you.”

“I really have to go.”

“Well, just let me walk you out. Get you a cab,” Clayton offered gallantly.

“No, I’m fine,” I answered quickly before turning to Leticia. “Lunch next week?”

“Sure.” Leticia kissed me on the cheek and hugged me with her arms around my neck. “I love you,” she whispered in my ear.

“Love you, too,” I said. “Tell everyone I said good-night.”

Outside No. 8, the line was growing and showing that the people already inside the club weren’t the real party people. They were the first shift. Black cars were lined up down the block. A police car sat waiting on the corner for the disorderly conduct that would come.

I stepped off the sidewalk and held out my hand for a taxi.

A last gush of winter wind blew in the air and made it a chilly late-spring night. I felt goose bumps immediately pop out up my arms. And then there was warmth. I looked down at a familiar hand on my forearm.

“Leticia, what are you doing out here?”

“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said.

“Okay?” I kind of laughed and lowered my arm when it was clear every cab on the street had stopped to pick up other desiring passengers. “What am I, a nutcase or something? Why do you keep asking me that? Of course I’m okay.”

“You weren’t having a good time,” Leticia claimed.

“I was fine.”

“You hardly said a word.”

“You left me to go dance with Clayton. What words was I supposed to use?”

“I’m sorry about that,” Leticia whined and instantly I knew she’d taken my comment the wrong way. “I know I shouldn’t have left you alone.”

“Left me alone?” I repeated. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was fine with being at the table by myself and—” I paused. “It’s nothing. If I was quiet, it was because of something going on with Kimya.”

“So this isn’t about him?” Leticia asked.

“Clayton?” I responded, totally confused and feeling again that Leticia was handling me with kid gloves.

“No.” Leticia looked into my eyes. “Your father.”

“My father?” I felt everything around me threaten to flood again. As if I was back in the bathroom. “Wh-why?” I stuttered. “Why would you bring him up?”

“It’s been six years...today.” Leticia looked away and then back at me again. “Since he died. You know, that was why I was surprised that you came out tonight. I figured you’d, like— That it would be too much.”

My heart thumped. I felt as if I was hearing something I shouldn’t be listening to. I saw the date in my head. The numbers in a month, day and year and then my throat was closing up.

“I’d forgotten,” I said with unexpected solemnity.

“Sorry,” Leticia offered softly, apologetically.

“Six years,” I said and then I felt tears coming fast to the corners of my eyes. I turned back to the street and raised my hand again for a cab.

“It’s okay to be upset,” Leticia said, reaching for my arm again, but I pulled away.

“I’m fine.” I looked up the street through tears, away from Leticia and her eyes, her soft voice and careful words.

“No one expects you to—”

“It’s been six years. Six,” I said. “I should be fine.”

A cab pulled up and stopped a few steps ahead of us.

“But the way you lost him—the way he died,” she pushed cautiously, “we understand if you’re not.”

I opened the cab door and tossed my purse and vibrating phone inside.

“I’m sorry I ruined your party. I shouldn’t have come. There’s just too much shit with me. Too much drama. Kimya and—”

“You riding or not?” the cabbie yelled, staring at our stalling at the curb.

“One second,” Leticia snarled at him in her Bronx-girl accent, and then switched fast to me. “We all have drama. That’s it.”

“No. This shit with Kimya is taking over my life.”

“Well, quit. You’re talented, Sunny. Your music is awesome. You can go somewhere else. Start your label. Wasn’t that the point of working with Kimya in the first place?”

“I need the money. I don’t have any connections yet,” I said.

“You’re going to figure it out,” Leticia said. “You have to.”

“I know.” I let the tears slip away from my control.

“Well, isn’t that lovely,” the cabbie said sarcastically, leaning out the window beside us. “Now, are you lovers going anywhere?”

I got into the backseat and after waving goodbye to Leticia standing alone in the street and giving the cabbie the address to Megatron’s Brooklyn studio where Kimya was waiting, I dutifully wanted to call her and say I was on my way. But when I lifted the purse I realized I could hardly see it past all the tears in my eyes. My eyeliner and mascara and whatever else I put over my eyes to hide the bags a lack of sleep had created were making swirls and black clouds I could hardly see through in my eye contacts.

I remembered the last time I saw my father. His body so skinny and scaled, disappearing in his bed in his Brooklyn brownstone. All those years I’d begged him to take his AZT. Didn’t he want to sing again? Didn’t he want to see me get married? See his grandchildren? He laughed. “Sunny Baby, every act has a closing. Mine has come,” he said. He’d died the next day.

The cabbie was looking at me in the rearview mirror. His asking me, “You alright?” turned into noise bouncing around the car, mutating from a question to Yves’s comments:
How you do it? Why you stay with her?
I wiped more tears and then there was Kimya yelling at me:
You can’t go. You need to be here with me.
And then there was Leticia:
You’re going to figure it out.... You have to.

“Stop the car,” I ordered. “I have to get out.”

“But we’re about to get on the Brooklyn Bridge. You can’t get out here,” the cabbie said.

“Stop the car!” I hollered and it sounded as if every tear I’d been crying was turned into a dreadful bass in my voice that ripped through the taxi and pushed the cabbie’s foot into the brake so hard we lurched forward and I heard the tires on the car behind us screech against the pavement.

I threw my money over the seat and opened the door.

“You’re fucking crazy!” the cabbie said to my back as I started running.

Horns were honking and people were yelling at me, warning me to get back into the taxi and out of Brooklyn Bridge traffic, but I kept going and soon I kicked off my heels and just started running toward the sidewalk where walkers and bike riders leaned over the edge of the bridge to stare out into the night water that rippled between Manhattan and Brooklyn. I didn’t know why I was running there. I just had to get away.

I dropped my purse on the concrete beside my foot and gripped the cool metal bar at the top of the railing that held people on the bridge. I looked out into the water, into the flecks of the moon skating over the blackness that went down so deep.