Endless Summer Nights (11 page)

What was I doing there? Not on the bridge—in my life? I had no money. Didn’t have the career I wanted. No love. Nothing was how it was supposed to be. I’d taken the job with Kimya to work on my music. To produce. But I was drowning in it. Losing any ability to create anything but a warm shoulder for Kimya to lean on. And nothing, nothing left for me or anyone else to love.

Was this it? Was this what I was supposed to be? Where I was supposed to be?

I looked up at the moon and a breeze came right at my face, pushing my hair back and delivering new loose tears from my eyes.

“What should I do?” I asked aloud. “Send me a sign. Send me something.”

And just like that, my purse started vibrating.

I let go of the metal bar and bent down to get my phone out of the purse.

“Where are you? I’m waiting for you!” Kimya barked drunkenly. “I need you to stay with me tonight. Where are you?”

“I—”

“Hello? Sunny? Answer me!” she demanded.

“I—” I looked up at the moon.

“What? You’re outside the studio?”

“No, Kimya.”

“Well, where are you?”

I closed my eyes and said from inside myself somewhere, “I’m not coming.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I’m not!” I screamed from my darkness. “I’m not coming. I quit.”

“What are you talking about?” Kimya said. “Look, I know you’re upset about Yves, but I’ll let her come back so you don’t have to live with me. Okay?”

“I quit. That’s it.” I opened my eyes and looked at the moon again. “I quit.”

I removed the phone from my ear as Kimya continued to speak and curse and even laugh.

I held the phone out over the railing, looked into the black water and let it go.

* * *

If ever I am retelling this part of the story, I’ll say I was dreaming of Sunsiree Embry that night after I dropped my cell phone into the waters beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. My father. That I was six years old and playing with my holiday African American Barbie in his bedroom again. His cologne, a bottle of English Leather, is on the dresser where Black Ken and Black Barbie are kissing hard in my hands. The cologne falls and when the glass cracks against the dusty wooden floor beside the dresser, I immediately hear my father’s feet coming up the stairs. In the brownstone where I grew up in Brooklyn the steps creak as if they’re snapping in half with just a little step. It’s like a warning. I should run away. Pretend I wasn’t in the room when the bottle broke. But I can’t move. My father is singing as he ascends. It’s one of his songs. One he’d written that same summer I broke the cologne bottle. His voice is beautiful—even under the snapping steps. I am only six years old, but I know this is special.

When he enters the room, he is smiling. Says he was singing about me. I say, “But it was a bird. You were singing about a bird.” He laughs. Sings the chorus and says as softly, “You’re a bird.” I think I smile. He reaches out, picks all of me up as if I’m still five. “Who broke that bottle of cologne?” he asks once I’m in his arms and we can both smell the English Leather. “A bird,” I say. He laughs and puts me back on the floor. “Guess a bird needs to clean it up.” He walks out laughing and singing that song again. I stand there listening.

The truth is I have no idea what I dreamed of that night. I know I took the train home. Got into my bed. Felt the silence of no phone ringing. No expectations. I thought of my father in the Brooklyn brownstone. The English Leather. I slipped into a restful blackness.

And then there was ice. Cold ice.

Very cold ice that pricked into the darkness of sleep like thorns into the tip of an index finger. Only bigger, sharper. I screamed before I even knew what it was. Before I even opened my eyes. I felt as if I was drowning or falling in my own bed. I was wet and cold and in shock.

I opened my eyes as I tried to jump up.

“That’s right! Wake up, Sunny. Get up!”

“What? What the hell!” I hollered at the sight of Kimya straddling my stomach, her knees pinning my arms to the bed. A pitcher with water trickling down the spout.

I looked from side to side and there was water and ice around my head.

“Are you crazy?” I screamed. “Get off me.” I struggled and kicked my legs up at her back.

I heard yapping and looked down beside the bed at her twin white teacup Chihuahuas, Martin and Gina, trying to jump up at me. Montrell in his too-thick MAC Lipglass was sitting in the wicker chair beside the bed, filing his nails and popping his gum.

“Whoa!” Kimya laughed as if I was a skittish horse as she climbed off me with the half-empty pitcher in her hand. “Calm down, now! I had to wake you up. Montrell kept calling your name. You wouldn’t answer.”

“We thought you was dead to the bed, Ms. Thang,” Montrell chimed in dramatically.

I sat up. Water and ice fell to my breasts, wetting my chest and stomach. A few squares hit the floor and Martin and Gina went to licking.

“I know you were out last night. Didn’t know what you’d had—pills or something maybe—the way you were talking,” Kimya said.

“You’re nuts,” I yelled, walking out of my bedroom to get a towel out of the bathroom.

“That’s no way to speak to someone who just saved your life,” Montrell called out.

“Right?” Kimya said, and she and Montrell went on congratulating one another for saving my life as I wiped my face before reentering the bedroom.

“No need to thank me for saving your life,” Kimya was saying. She’d switched positions with Montrell, who was standing in the middle of my bedroom in red harem pants and Chuck Taylors.

He’d picked up Gina and was stroking her little skull while looking at me disapprovingly. “Where did you get that nightgown? Walmart?”

“Why are you here?” I asked, looking past Montrell to Kimya. “And why is he with you?”

“You weren’t answering your phone. Didn’t come to work this morning,” Kimya replied.

“That’s because I quit.”

“And that’s how I knew something was wrong with you, and I had to come here.”

“You didn’t have to come anywhere,” I said. “How’d you get in anyway?”

“You gave me a key, silly Sunny. Remember?” Kimya smiled and held out my spare key.

“Whatever. You have to go anyway...all four of you,” I said, walking to the door and expecting Kimya and her gang to follow me, but no one moved.

“Oh, no, she ain’t trying to kick us out,” Montrell said. “After I came over here to save her life.”

Kimya laughed with Montrell. “Look, I heard what you said last night, but you can’t quit on me,” she said. “I’m having lunch with Mary and Kendu in Jersey today. I need you.”

“I told you I quit.”

“You didn’t mean that,” she tittered skeptically.

“Kimya, I can’t work for you anymore. It’s just taking over my life. I’m supposed to be making music, producing. I’m sorry...but I really do quit.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do about today?” she quizzed, unaffected.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not my job anymore. Take Montrell with you.”

Kimya stood and walked over to me slowly and cautiously. She looked right into my eyes and served me a serious face. “There must be something we can do,” she said.

“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for one, you snuck into my apartment,” I said. “And second, you brought guests.”

“Fine.” Kimya snapped her fingers and looked at Montrell. “You. Dogs. Car,” she ordered sharply.

“Oh, I’ve been kicked out of better places than this,” Montrell said, picking up Martin with his free hand and looking around at my belongings with disdain before swishing out of the room.

When he was gone with the dogs, Kimya took my hands.

“I know I’m impossible. Right?” she said in the most earnest way I’d ever heard come from her mouth. “But I can’t do this without you. You and my brother, Marlo, you’re the only people who understand me. The only people who can deal with me. Who I trust. If I didn’t have the two of you, I’d be nothing.”

“You do realize that’s not saying much about me, right?” I asked.

“You’re like my sister. Like family. I can’t let you go,” Kimya pleaded. “The album is due soon. Everything is on the line. I’m competing with girls who are, like, half my age. I’m hot, but let’s face it, I’m not the only show in town anymore. My album last year, it went double platinum, but that was only because of Megatron. If I didn’t have him making my beats, I’d be done.”

“And you have Megatron working on your new songs. Why do you need me?” I asked.

“I can trust you. I know you can pick me up,” Kimya said and I recalled all the times I’d literarily picked her up. “What do you need?” she added. “What can I give you to convince you to stay with me? Just until I finish the new album and we find someone else.”

My mind immediately went to Yves on the phone last night at the club:
I can’t be bought.

“I have to follow my dreams,” I said.

“Well, your dream is in music. I can help you.”

I actually started laughing. “Help me? After five years, that’s finally coming to mind? That you could help me?” I walked out of the bedroom.

Kimya followed closely behind me in a complete reversal of roles.

“I know how much you admire Megatron. I could hook you two up. Get you some studio time.” Kimya listed the ideas as if they were just coming to her out of the clear sky and I hadn’t begged her for an opportunity three years back.

“Really? Studio time with Megatron? Original. How’d you come up with that? Even if you did actually organize studio time with Megatron—which I know you wouldn’t do—when would I have time to do it, Kimya? I work, like, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”

“You can have one day off a week.”

“One?” I repeated sarcastically, not realizing we were officially negotiating and not speaking in hypotheticals.

But, then, after Kimya responded with “two,” I realized she was actually serious about trying to get me back.

“Two
whole
days off? Are you kidding? You couldn’t survive.”

We sat at the kitchen table across from each other, me in my modest nightgown and Kimya in pricey D&G jeans and a thin tank top that displayed her nipples.

“I’ll get a second assistant again.”

“You treated the last one so badly she sold her story to
Page Six.
Want to go through that again?”

“If it makes you happy.”

“Humm.” I looked away, unimpressed.

“You want more?” Kimya looked horribly perplexed.

“Yes,” I said, leaning into the table like a professional arriving at a poker table in Vegas. I really hadn’t considered what more I could want, because I hadn’t considered Kimya showing up at my place at sunup, pouring cold water on my face and begging me to stay. I figured I’d play the situation as ridiculously as it was. Again, I remembered Yves:
No amount of money. I can’t be bought.

“So?” Kimya glared at me. “What more do you want?”

“My rent,” I said randomly. “Pay my rent.”

“Your rent is expensive,” Kimya complained.

I frowned. I watched her money better than I watched my own. She made a mint in ringtone sales each month.

“Guess we’re done here, then,” I said and yawned.

“I’ll pay half your rent. Is that it?”

“No. A raise. I need a raise, too.”

“Hell, no!”

“You know I’ve been trying to finally pay off my student loans, get my father’s house together. I need a twenty-five percent raise.”

“You’re tripping!” Kimya protested.

“You give me the raise and we have a deal,” I said decisively.

Kimya narrowed her eyes on me, but I didn’t look away.

“Guess you’ll have to hire Montrell,” I joked before getting up from the table for dramatic effect. I turned my back to her and looked into my sink at nothing really. I just wanted to smile to myself. It felt good to have Kimya on her toes.

“Fine,” she murmured and then I heard her stand, her heels clicking against my kitchen floor tile. “But you’re coming to Kendu and Mary’s with me. I’ll be back in thirty minutes. Put on something nice. And burn that nightgown. I pay you better than that now.”

She went to my bedroom and when I turned back to the table, she walked back into the kitchen holding her purse.

“Deal?” she asked.

“De—” I stopped myself. “Wait.”

“What? You said that was it.”

“Nothing big. I just need a vacation. Just a weekend.”

“We just came back from Paris!”

“
You
just came back from Paris.
I
came back from being with
you
in Paris.”

“So, you want to go back to Paris?” Kimya asked.

“No. Somewhere closer,” I said, looking at the collection of state-shaped magnets ganged up on my clanking refrigerator. A little peninsula was hanging near the handle about to fall off. “I want to go to the Hamptons. A weekend. Alone at the beach house.” I looked back up at Kimya.

“But that’s my beach house,” she protested.

“Exactly. So you don’t have to pay for it. I’m saving you money.”

“Fine,” she grumbled, and it sounded as if allowing me to enjoy the benefits of the five-thousand-square-foot beach house she almost never visited hurt more than the raise and days off.

“Fine,” I repeated before shaking her hand. “Guess I’ll be ready in thirty minutes.”

Part II

“Seeking Love on Long Island”

H
ey, Ms. Lettie Special Partner of the Universe. It’s me calling you on this fine Friday morning. You’ll never guess where I am.... And since you didn’t answer your phone, I won’t pause to await a response, so I’ll drop the beans. I’m in the Hamptons, girl! Standing here on Ms. Kimya Lee’s pool deck right now. Just looking out at the ocean... Anyway, I was thinking about you.... Wanted to say I’m sorry for the other night.... You know?... Of course you know.... I’m, ummmm... Hey, I have this big house all to myself and since there’s no special man in my life, I wanted to invite you. Maybe you could come for the weekend.... Drinks. Sun. Fun. Me. You. Call me back. Peace and fried chicken grease.

Long Island.
Growing up, those two words sounded like someplace on the moon. Where white folks lived and vacationed to get away from us poor folks in Brooklyn. The first time I actually visited—I must’ve been, like, ten or eleven—my father packed a heavy bag with these old white towels we got at the Salvation Army and we took the train to a bus and then another bus and walked for what seemed like forever with those bags to Jones Beach.

When my legs were tired of running into the sharp shards of sand mixed in with the grayish waves, I sat on my towel beside my father and pointed up at some of the condos behind the boardwalk. I said something like, “Can we live there?” My father laughed, put out his cigarette in the sand and asked, “You don’t like Brooklyn?” He waited for my answer and after a while, he looked into my eyes and started talking to me as if I was an adult. “I’m an artist. I sing. I write what I sing. I compose what I sing. I’m free. You understand?” I’m sure I nodded, looked away from the condos and out to the sun disappearing at the back of the ocean. “Now, I could get me a job and maybe someday I could afford to move you out here and buy us a little condo. But then I wouldn’t be free.” He looked out at the ocean with me. We never rode that train and those two buses again.

The morning my cab pulled into the circular pebble-paved drive in front of Kimya’s house in the Hamptons, I jumped out like Miss Celie returning home to claim her mother’s house in
The Color Purple.
After the driver pulled my father’s old guitar out of the trunk, I gave a generous tip to get rid of him fast, dropped the three bags I had draped over my shoulders and ran up the drive to the door.

The plan was to write. First, I had to ink out my next ten moves in my six-month “Get the Hell Away From Kimya” plan in the composition notebook I’d purchased and on which I’d written that very title on the cover in red ink. Second, I had to start writing my songs again. It had been too long since I’d actually written any lyrics. Even the ones I hummed aloud in the shower never made it to the page. I was hoping the waves of the Atlantic, the sun shining over me without interruption from concrete skyscrapers or telephone wires, or maybe just Kimya being out of my hair for a few days would spark my creativity.

The first few hours in the house, I walked around, fingering stuff, looking at glass things Kimya had paid too much money for. I also found some men’s boxers on the kitchen floor. A men’s shaver in her bathroom and a blue toothbrush. Big shoes in the bedroom. I figured they were Sean’s things. That one night Kimya had somehow sneaked away with him.

I changed into my favorite sarong that had puffy prawns dancing in circles at the hem and walked out to the back deck to look at the ocean. I tried to think of something smart to write in my book, but ended up just watching a few families playing in the sand and packs of twenty-somethings staggering down the strand in bikinis, probably heading to a day party. Summer was open for business and East Hampton was already getting party fever. Kimya had already gotten a call about some teenagers partying on her pool deck and claiming they lived there when police showed up after complaints from neighbors about loud music.

I went back into the house and I picked up the empty notebook. I sat on the long black ten-seater leather couch in the living room and hummed a melody that was familiar, but nothing I could place. Looked at the guitar case and thought I should open it and play. But then I decided I was too tired. I needed to rest first. Catch up on some missed sleep.

I looked back at the wet bar behind the couch. A little cognac. A nap. I’d wake up by the time the sun went down, unpack, set my alarm and wake up in the morning, ready.

On that short list, I only achieved the cognac and a nap elongated into the night by the house on the beach becoming an unexpected, insulated womb. The scent of the ocean, the breeze whipping through the air and the waves sent me adrift into my dreams in a canoe. I was away
away.
I was floating.

And then something came crashing in. Light sound at first. Just a parade of syllables floating in the flood of water around me.

Then jabbing. The utterances were coming together into a string of shouts that grabbed a hold of me.

“What?” I jumped up in a cognac-licked haze ready to fight Kimya before she dropped another jug of water on my head.

But by the time I was on my feet and holding my fists in front of me in a sloppy fighting stance, I realized there was no Kimya in the living room. The dead sun left my world in the house completely dark, but through the open French doors that led out to the pool deck, I could see some light and hear the source of the sounds that crashed into my dream.

My perpetrator was splashing in the water. Laughing. One of Marlo’s old songs was playing loudly.

And then a female’s voice said before giggling, “Don’t throw me in the pool, Icey!”

Then there was the crash and thrash of “Icey” delivering the opposite of her request.

“Damn teenagers,” I said, remembering Kimya’s police call about the teenagers in her pool.

I grabbed my cell phone off the table on my way out to the deck, ready to turn the rowdy crowd over to police.

“Whoa!” I heard someone holler and then there was another loud splash.

I slid behind the open French doors off the kitchen where a landing led to the deck, and switched on a light.

“Party over! Get out and go home!” I said, stepping out onto the landing and turning off a little radio on the table. “I’m calling the police!”

I clicked my phone on and started dialing 911, but before I hit the send button I wanted to get a glimpse of the poolside squatters whom I was sure were akin to people in those advertisements on Abercrombie & Fitch shopping bags. But the dim lights tacked to the side of the house revealed a very different picture. While I couldn’t make out any faces because everyone was toward the back of the pool where the side lights hardly shined, I could tell there were no teens in that pool. One black woman with huge saline-filled breasts was thrashing about in the middle of the pool where pink bulbs at the bottom of the water sent flamingo-colored dancing strobe lights up all around her.

Two shirtless black men, whose bulging stomachs and A-cup breasts covered in chest hair let me know they were in their mid-to-late thirties, were in the pool, rushing over to her, and a brown muscly guy who was shirtless, but had diamonds dripping from his neck, I could see from the other side of the pool was standing on the deck laughing at the spectacle in the water. A busty black female in Daisy Duke shorts and a too-tiny bra was beside him.

“What the hell is this?” I think I hollered, but anything I was saying was drowned out by the thrashing and cussing of the woman in the middle of the pool, and the men who were laughing and trying to console her at the same time.

“I told y’all not to throw me in the pool!” she screamed. “I just got my hair done!”

“Get out,” I cut in before anyone could get another word into the exchange.

The band of bandits froze and turned to me. I squinted to try to get a look at any of their faces, but it was still too dark where they were standing.

“This house belongs to Kimya Lee. You’re all trespassing.”

“Who is this trick?” the woman in the water asked.

“No—who are you?” I countered. “And by you, I mean all of you.” I held my cell phone out toward the squatters and realized how outnumbered I probably was. For a second, I considered running back into the house and hiding until the police got there, but then I rationalized that it would take the man-boob twins like three minutes to get out of the pool to corner me. Basically, the only thing standing between me and survival was the tall, shirtless brother in diamonds. And that was proving to be a problem because he was actually walking toward me.

I commanded, “I’m calling the police!”

“No, wait, I can explain,” the muscular, diamond-decorated man said, walking to me with his hands out as if my phone was a gun and he was defusing a hostage situation.

“Explain it to the authorities,” I said, pressing Send. “You don’t belong here!”

“But I do.”

“Yeah, educate her ass, man,” one of the guys said.

“I do belong here,” the man added, finally stepping into the light where I could see all of him.

“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” I heard coming through my phone as my eyes decided what I was looking at. “Hello? Hello? Do you have an emergency?”

“
You
do belong here,” I said, stepping toward him.

“Nine-one-one. Please state your emergency. Hello?”

“I do,” he said, and seemingly from the sky a light arrived and highlighted his face even more. “Kimya’s my sister.”

“What is your emergency?” the 911 operator repeated for the fourth time.

“No emergency. I’m sorry.” I lowered the phone to my hip and ended the call. “Marlo?”

He grinned and nodded confidently, stepping so close I felt air being drawn from my lungs. “You know the name?” he asked, like a small-town jock who’d just scored a touchdown at the homecoming game.

“Oh, damn! She knows your name!” someone spouted. “Guess you ’bout to get spanked.”

The crowd in the pool laughed and the leggy girl on the deck sauntered over to Marlo standing in front of me.

“She knows my name,” Marlo said, “but I don’t know hers. Maybe I should be the one calling the police.” He reached for the phone but I stepped back.

I suddenly felt nervous, as if I was actually in the wrong. In a whiny voice, I said, “I’m Sunshine.”

To this, there was more teenagelike laughter from the pool, and quickly I was feeling like the small-town nerdy girl talking to the jock who’d just scored the touchdown.

“I don’t know any Sunshine,” Marlo said, leaning toward me and eyeing me hard, just as the leggy woman set her hand on the small of his back.

“I’m Kimya’s assistant,” I said.

“You can’t be,” Marlo laughed. “Ain’t no way Kimya’s assistant is supposed to be way out here in the Hamptons while she’s in the studio in New York.”

“She let me use the house this weekend. But she didn’t mention you being here. Does she know you’re here?” I quizzed.

“Ohh! Ohh!” the pool party chanted as if I’d said fighting words.

“I don’t need permission. I have blood,” Marlo snapped at me.

“We’ll see about that.” I turned to walk back into the house.

When I stepped over the threshold and closed the French doors, I heard the crowd erupt into laughter and soon the music started playing again.

Standing in the kitchen in my red-and-yellow sarong that now looked completely middle-aged and ridiculous in the company of the women in thong bikinis, I clicked my phone on to scroll for Kimya’s name. I was about to hit the call button when I heard the door behind me open.

I turned around with my hand on the button.

“Wait!” Marlo rushed to me. “Don’t call Kimya.”

“What?”

Marlo came just as close to me as he’d been outside. He grabbed the phone.

“Give me the phone!” I reached, but he slipped it into his front pocket.

“You want the phone?” he asked before grinning slyly.

“Look, I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, but give me the phone,” I said.

“Say ‘please.’”

“I’m not going to ask you to give me a phone that belongs to me. Stop playing.” I reached for Marlo’s pocket, but he stepped back. “Now we’re in second grade?” I asked. “What’s the point? Why not give me the phone?”

“Don’t call Kimya.”

“Why? You said you don’t need permission to be here. What’s the big deal?”

Marlo grinned again and it was fast becoming clear this play was his common route of getting his way. It reminded me of Kimya’s pout.

“Oh,” I added, reading him, “you
don’t
want her to know you’re here?”

“Look, me and the guys, we were at a party and we’ve been drinking. No one wants to drive back to the city. I have a key to the house and my sister is never here.”

“You could’ve called her.”

“For what? It’s my sister. I’m just staying the night. She’s fine with it.”

“Cool. I’ll let her know.” I reached for the phone and Marlo stepped back again.

“Okay. Maybe she’s not fine with it. You know how she is about having people up in her spot. I’m cool, but my boys—you know how she is,” Marlo said.

I crossed my arms to let him know I wasn’t buying into his rationale...or the cute grin. “Of course she wouldn’t be happy with you and those thugs laying up in her house with some hoochies y’all probably met at a strip club.”

“How you know all that?” Marlo looked at me jokingly. “You’re one of those stalking assistants?”

“Fine, Marlo, you can stay, but their asses have to go,” I ordered.

“The hoochies or the thugs?” A new grin.

“I’m not playing with you.”

“Stop being like this. You’re too cute to be evil. Look, we’ll be gone tomorrow anyway. I’m sleeping in Kimya’s room. They’ll be down here on the couches. No one has to know.” Marlo took my hand and got down on one knee. “I’ll be out of your hair and you can go back to doing whatever you were doing in your—” He looked at my sarong. “What is that?”

“It’s a sarong,” I said.

“Okay. I like it. It’s cute.”

“Yeah, right.”

“For real. What are those little things on it, though? Roaches?” He squinted and pointed at the smiling prawns floating in the water in the design at the bottom of the sarong.