Midnight (46 page)

“What are you two doing?” I asked.

“Akemi has some things to say to you. I will translate,” the cousin said, exasperated.

I felt my heart drop. I felt this was it, her good-bye. Afterwards, it would be like everything unique and special between Akemi and I had never really occurred; something that could never be forgotten, to be forgotten.

Akemi sat down in her chair, so closely facing me that her legs were woven into mine. First my leg, then hers, then mine, then hers. The cousin was on the outside of the two of us. I could see her, but Akemi could not, on purpose.

If anyone could have seen the three of us tightly pressed together in such a small space in such a large apartment, they might have thought we were involved in something bizarre and freaky.

Akemi began to speak in her soft, musical, sultry voice.

Her cousin began to translate, sucking the nectar out of Akemi’s Japanese words and placing them into English for me.

“I was twelve years old when my mother died. She always told me to follow my heart and enjoy my life, to do as I please. She was Korean, a great writer, so great that my father fell in love with her words before ever seeing her face or even meeting her.

“The rest of my family is Japanese, but my mother is the one who gave me these eyes and the fire that burns within them.

“My father loved her a lot. So, he holds on to me too tight. I wish he could see that I am as my mother was. Since he loved the freedom in her, he should love the freedom in me also.

“My family loves me and my art, yet they keep trying to
put out my fire. I keep telling them, without this fire, there is no art.” Akemi turned around and shot a mean look at her cousin.

If I could catch a snapshot of that mean look, the squinting of her big eyes to half their size, and the way they slanted across her profile. She was too much.

Akemi jumped up and left the room. Her cousin remained stewing, but eased a little when she saw Akemi return with the gift that was to be given to me so I could get out.

Akemi placed the gift, which was inside of a Bergdorf Goodman shopping bag, over on the tabletop. Then she walked back over to me and bowed down.

Her cousin lost her composure and began screaming at Akemi. Akemi screamed back at her. I stood up, as the second girl fight was about to jump off in my presence.

“She is not even supposed to be bowing down to you,” her cousin yelled. “The Japanese bow down as a display of respect for their elders, or when people are meeting each other for the first time. She is older. You are younger. So why is she bowing?”

I didn’t have no answer for her. She and Akemi were back at it in their language. Akemi must have won, because her cousin dropped back down into the chair. I believed that Akemi must have told her cousin something that she wanted to hear. Even if it was some small concession coming from Akemi, it was enough for the cousin to jump back into the translator’s shoes.

Akemi began speaking as she sat down. The cousin translated.

“Your mother is a goddess,” Akemi said.

The word “goddess” swirled around my head. Muslims don’t use these terms to describe human traits. Yet I understood that Akemi was in awe of Umma. So was I.

“I like your apartment. It is filled with so much love. No one is holding their love back. No one is disguising their love at your place. You three are showing it all the time. I wish I had a mother here to love me the way that your mother loves you and Naja,” Akemi said.

The cousin reached to the table and pulled the shopping bag down after she translated those last words about Umma. Akemi ignored the bag and continued speaking for her words to be translated.

“Thank you for taking me to the wedding. I have never seen more beauty and passion in a people. You never told me that the women from your country are so beautiful. At the wedding I began to wonder why you even bothered about me.”

“No one is like you, Akemi,” I answered. “Not even your own family,” I added. The cousin translated my words to her, I hope.

Akemi responded in Japanese to her cousin.

Her cousin leapt up and her chair fell down on the floor. I stood and picked it up. Akemi jumped up, they went back and forth. By now, I understood that Akemi had said something else that her cousin did not agree with and refused to translate.

Then all of a sudden, the cousin spit out, “Akemi said she wants you to make love to her.” Now her eyes were red and tears were welling up in them. “But I wish you wouldn’t!”

I knew this was it. It was time for me to go.

“Look, calm down, I’ll leave. Just ask Akemi one last thing. Ask her, if she changed her mind about what she said yesterday in the ice cream store.”

“What did she say to you? How
could
she say it?” her cousin asked me.

“It’s nothing, really,” I lied. “Just ask her for me.” I was staring towards Akemi. Akemi’s answer came back through her cousin.

“What I said to you yesterday will never change,” Akemi said.

I looked at Akemi, overwhelmed by her intensity and loyalty. Then I even felt relieved by her forgiveness. I was realizing that I didn’t like the way one small situation could be used to sum a man up and throw him in the garbage without consideration of his truth and his intention. In the Quran, a person’s intention is so important.

For the sake of her cousin, the only one who stood in between myself and Akemi’s uncle, whose home I was standing in, I accepted the gift, picking up the shopping bag, and said, “Sayonara,” walking across the floor to climb the stairs to leave out.

Akemi called out something. I looked back. She was holding a knife in her hand. I dropped the bag and jumped to her. In one quick wave of her hand, she cut her hair off. She stood there holding a tight fist filled with about twelve inches of hair. Now she only had a foot and a half of hair left on her head, shoulder length.

She tied the bundle in her hand into a slipknot, as I had once done for her. She tossed the tied bundle of hair across the room and it fell right into the shopping bag.

Word life, I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Was this some Asian tradition or just a woman thing? I don’t know. I took the knife from her hand and tossed it to the floor. I pulled Akemi into me and kissed her. She relaxed some and seemed relieved. Maybe she and I were both believing that the other would quit trying. In my embrace her body felt soft and warm. She was using her tongue to convince me to stay.

Her cousin stormed up the stairs. I picked up the shopping bag and followed her and left out before she rang the alarm, the phone call to her uncle or the real one.

Walking out through the Queens residences, the white
sun lighting up the light blue sky, I saw a couple of signs lodged on lawns, house for sale. While my family could not afford even this middle-class New York neighborhood, the for-sale signs jarred my memory of the fact that Umma, Naja, and I were
supposed
to go looking at potential homes today. And, I had promised to teach Naja some lessons also. It is family day.

Then my mind drifted back to Akemi.

After the scene in her basement apartment, I knew that realistically, I would need to have some suitable housing in place soon in case she ended up thrown out of the good graces of her family. Also, because to take a wife, I should have shelter set up for her.

I smiled as I thought of how Akemi was saying she liked our apartment in the hood. Maybe Fawzi was right. A woman in love will follow her husband even into a mud hut.

On a sidewalk on Main Street, the main road that runs through Jackson Heights, Queens, I picked up a girl’s bicycle from a sidewalk sale for forty dollars. I would gift it to Naja, to make up for stealing her time on family day to deal with Akemi. I would take her outside for a while, and teach her to ride.

“Bergdorf fucking Goodman,” Conflict said, when I came through the block with the shopping bag from Akemi, and pushing Naja’s small bike.

“Look at this motherfucker,” he said to his man who was sitting on the chain as Conflict stood next to him chewing on a toothpick. I kept it moving at my same pace.

“I heard you came through here last night with some sexy Chinese bitch. Now that’s something we could split two ways,” he called out behind me. “Let me find out you got something moving around here and ain’t telling me,” he said. I was up the walkway on my way past DeQuan’s benches and into the building.

I rescheduled the house appointments till first thing in the morning.

Umma and I practiced the one hundred questions and answers for our citizenship papers. We planned to cram and take the test and recite the words at City Hall next week.

Around four o’clock, when the shifts changed on the block, and niggas who been standing out there all day would
be replaced by a next set of familiar niggas to stand in their exact same spots, I took my sister downstairs and taught her how to ride her bicycle.

She was thrilled. She almost never got to play on our block, unless I was downstairs to watch her. For the first time, she played with two other little girls who were out there on their own, ready and willing to make friends so they could get a ride.

I let her share with them as long as they all stayed within my eyesight. They took it. It was better than nothing.

Standing still on the block always had its price. I saw Heavenly Paradise and a couple of her friends coming out the lobby of the other building. Wearing her spring colors and everything brand new, she left the other two girls waiting, threw on her mean walk, and headed over towards me.

“I feel like I haven’t seen you in months,” she said. “Where you been?”

“Working,” I answered her with one word.

“You got something for me?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Matter of fact, I did see you the other night, right?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her.

“Well I know,” she said coyly. “You know where I stay, right over there in apartment 8F. You should come see me,” she said, shifting her stance to give me a closer look, while I was looking at Conflict pulling up, double-parking and looking at us.

“You better go,” I told her.

“Oh, I got him. Don’t even worry about that. But come through with my gold chain. He bought it for me and he’s been asking about it. If I get a chance to see you, I’ll tell him I lost it, and you can keep it. He’ll buy me another one. If I
don’t see you . . .” she said, waving to Naja as she tried to balance herself on her new bike. Now Conflict was inside his car with the windows down. He was cursing and leaning on his car horn.

I knew it didn’t matter what she said. The worst damage was already done.

After we took the bike upstairs, Naja and I washed up. We all three prayed and enjoyed Umma’s meal.

Afterwards, I took them both to the Open Mind bookstore with me. I was feeling uncomfortable leaving them in the building alone, even in our triple-locked apartment. I had some business to take care of with Marty; in the meantime, they could both find something to read and enjoy.

As Umma flipped through various magazine pages, I asked Marty what he knew about real estate.

“That’s a big question. What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Which newspapers or magazines might advertise houses for sale in a decent neighborhood for a reasonable price?” I said. Marty laughed.

“Planning on moving?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I answered.

“Brooklyn has everything. And I’m not saying that just to keep you close. Although I can’t afford to lose my best chess rival,” he said, smiling. He walked off and returned with a real-estate newspaper. “You might want to take a look at this,” he said. “You just have to decide what your family is really prepared to do. You must want a mortgage with a good interest rate?” he asked.

“What if we didn’t? What if we just wanted to buy the house directly?” I asked.

“Nobody does it. Why use up all of your money buying a house on your own, when you can spend other people’s
money instead and then invest your private money into something smart and make your money make more money?” he asked.

“A mortgage is a thirty-year thing, isn’t it? We would be in debt for thirty years and if we missed a payment or two for any reason our house would disappear like it was never ours, right?” I asked.

“Right you are. It’s the American way.” He was laughing but I needed him to take me seriously.

“There are other options,” he said. “You could rent to own. You could find an owner who is willing to sell you his house, but the owner rents it to you instead and applies a certain percentage of your rent payment to the overall purchase price of his house. This way, at least your rent is going towards you owning the house one day. Then you can keep your private money freed up to do something that makes your money make more money.” He made it sound like it was easy business.

I stood and thought about his words. I always thought that he had to be involved in some other kind of business, because over the years I rarely saw him receiving any customers. Yet he was always here, always smiling like money wasn’t the point. I never understood how he could keep his store door open without multiple daily transactions and sales.

I owed him a game. So we sat down and played chess.

“You are a masterful player, my friend,” Marty said after his defeat on his own chessboard. I thanked him for the compliment.

“No, it is not your chess-playing I’m complimenting. It’s your strategy in life,” he said, smiling.

“What?” I asked, not following his logic.

“Well, I won three games and you won three games,” he pointed out.

“I won the last three games in the last three weeks,” I corrected him.

“Yes, and today you brought your queen along with you to my palace. You knew that no man could concentrate with a beauty like her in the midst. And what a lovely scent she has brought into my store. You created a diversion, captured my queen, and assassinated me all at once.” He smiled, glancing at Umma.

“She is my mother, Marty,” I said solemnly.