My Soul to Keep (8 page)
“What’s the … Depression?” Kira piped up.
David tapped her on top of her head. “It was a long time ago, Duchess. Many years before any of us were born.”
“Now, hold up. I was born nineteen-seventeen,” Uncle Billy corrected him.
“Yes, you’d better speak for yourself, David,” Bea said. She always spoke a painstaking English, her T’s sharp, a result of her upper-middle-class rearing upstate in Quincy.
“We sure got some old folks at this table, don’t we?” Alexis asked. She shared a playful glance with Jessica; she and Jessica looked like twins, though Alex was thirty-four, six years older than Jessica, the same age as David.
“Old enough to know better,” Bea said.
Bea’s skin was a fair shade, though she’d told Jessica she was teased by her cousins as a child because she was the darkest one in her family. Maybe it was through rebellion that Bea married Raymond Jacobs, the darkest man she had ever known. Bea’s pet name for him had been Blue, Jessica learned much later, because he was blue-black. Jessica and Alexis were mixtures of brown, though Jessica couldn’t think of a time when anyone ever once felt a need to discuss the family complexions. In church school, when one of Jessica’s young classmates pointed out that Bea was “light-skinded,” like it was something special, Jessica didn’t know what the girl was talking about.
Raymond was Bea’s second husband. She’d divorced her first husband after ten years because of his drinking, then moved to Miami to begin a new life. She’d also hoped to have children, and her first husband had been sterile. Then, she met Raymond.
Raymond, who was six years younger than Bea and had only an eighth-grade education, won Jessica’s college-educated mother through his sly wit and natural intelligence. His lack of formal schooling shut him out of many jobs, but Jessica had known he was a genius before she really knew what a genius was. She’d always looked forward to the day—maybe in fourth grade or fifth grade, she’d thought—when she could sit down and impress her father with how smart she was too. Fate had cheated her out of that chance.
Raymond had been young when he died, only forty. But Bea was no longer young. Jessica remembered, while sitting at the dinner table, that her mother had just turned sixty-six. She didn’t look it, despite her silver hair; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled, splotched with only a few dark moles. Still, in just ten years, which no longer seemed like an eternity to Jessica, Bea would be seventy-six, close to Uncle Billy’s age now.
Time passed so quickly. Jessica felt the disquieting sense, as she often did, of enjoying a fleeting moment before it was over as a memory, as though she were already reminiscing about Sunday dinner with Uncle Billy and her mother, way back when they were both still alive. Alexis’s excited cry pulled Jessica from her thoughts. “Ooh, girl, I almost forgot,” her sister said. “Tell us about that book you’re writing.”
The question was a surprise to everyone at the table, bringing a round of smiles and exclamations. Except from David.
“I was planning to tell you tonight. It’s not in stone yet. Peter said something to his agent, and he thinks we can get a contract and take a leave of absence for a few months.”
“Peter.” David’s tone was knowing, nearly scornful.
“What does that mean?”
David didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the road as he drove the minivan south on Biscayne Boulevard. It was raining again, unusual for February. Usually, the moody, sporadic storm clouds they’d experienced throughout the week appeared in summertime. It had been a gloomy and wet few days. Maybe that accounted some for David’s sour mood, Jessica thought.
“Block … buster … Video,” Kira said from the backseat. She’d taken to announcing all signs they passed. “I can read. Burger King. See? Star-dust Mo-tel.”
“That’s enough, Duchess. We know you’re smart,” he said.
“David, why are you so down on Peter?”
“We’ll talk about that later.” He tried to sound pleasant.
“Mommy, is Peter coming over?” Kira asked. Jessica allowed Kira to address Peter by his first name because her attempts to pronounce Mister Donovitch were hopeless. “He gave me a doll-baby. ’Member? For Christmas?”
“I remember.”
David sighed shortly, no longer hiding his irritation. Jessica wondered if he was somehow jealous of Peter, if he felt threatened by her friendship with him. True, David was always simply courteous when Peter visited, holding himself at a slight distance only she could detect. But jealousy didn’t make sense; she’d told him she thought Peter was gay. Did David have a problem with whites, then? She’d have to wait until they were home and Kira was bathed and tucked in before she could corner David in the bedroom for an explanation.
She found David spread-eagled across the bed, lying on his stomach. The bed, which David had imported, cost him twenty thousand dollars, he told her the first night they shared it. It was more than a hundred years old, a canopied opium bed that once belonged to some useless lord in China. The rich teak frame was engraved with intricate patterns of dragons. The bed was so high, David had explained, because its original owner probably rarely got up and wanted to meet visitors at eye level. Even now, whenever Jessica sat on the bed, which was built to rock slightly on a hinge, she felt like she’d entered an age-old sanctuary.
“Okay. Tell me what’s bothering you,” she said.
“I hate hearing secondhand about developments that affect our family,” David said, his voice sounding muffled.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I just mentioned it to Alex—”
“I know what it takes to write a book, Jess. And traveling besides? I don’t like it at all.”
Jessica felt a stab of hurt, but it quickly turned to anger. “I planned to talk it over with you. I didn’t know I’d also be asking permission.”
“Apparently not. It sounds very much decided.”
“You wrote a book, David. Remember?”
“Exactly my point. I wrote a book before I had a family or any life to speak of, and it ate up vast portions of my time. Four months, to me, sounds highly optimistic. I’d say at least six.”
“So? What’s six months?”
At this, David rolled over to look her in the eye. “Six months,” he said, “is six months. A very short time, and yet a very long time.”
She didn’t understand him. No matter how long she lived with him and observed him and tried to think the way he did, he always confounded her somehow. Was it chauvinism? Selfishness?
“Peter says—”
David cut her off with a disgusted sound and rolled toward the wall. He was muttering to himself in another language, not Spanish this time, but Amharic or Arabic. She couldn’t tell which. She thought of Ricky Ricardo having a tantrum on
I Love Lucy
.
“English, please,” she said.
Groaning, he lifted himself and sat beside her so that their feet dangled together over the edge of the bed. He rubbed her thigh. “Do you watch my face when I listen to Mozart’s
Eine kleine Nachtmusik?
Or Bessie Smith? Or when I look at you and Kira? Do you see the delight?”
She nodded. She’d seen that expression today, when he talked about music and his lost Jazz Brigade records with Uncle Billy.
“That’s how your face looks,” he said, “when Peter comes. Or any of your other reporter friends. You cloister in a corner and build a bonfire among yourselves, feeding it with analysis and supposition and gossip. The city commissioner’s race. The presidential election. What’s Peter’s specialty? Oh, yes. The Mafia. Santo Trafficante and the rest. The sites of their summer homes, their illegitimate children, and so on. That’s where we lose each other, Jess. You can sit with me and enjoy Mozart. And Bessie Smith. And Kira, of course. And you even tolerate my ramblings about the Crusades, or King Tewedros the Second in Ethiopia, or Francisco Pizarro, or the Huguenots in France—”
“Sometimes—” Jessica cut him off. As college faded behind her, Jessica realized her knowledge of world history was limited to Spain sending Columbus to “discover” America in 1492. When David went off, she felt like a moron.
“Try as I might—and I do, Jess, I really do—I can’t muster that something you feel … that concern, or whatever it is, that drives you and your bonfire. But Peter does. And for that reason, he can move a part of you I can never hope to touch. The world is too much with him, to paraphrase Wordsworth … And I’m …” He paused, but didn’t continue.
“The Brother from Another Planet,” Jessica said, smiling, using Alex’s nickname for him.
“Make light if you want, but I almost fell asleep when Peter was here last week. Bill Clinton, blah blah blah. Jesus Christ.”
“I know,” Jessica sighed, massaging his scalp with her fingertips. David was a history whiz, but he was so indifferent to current events, pop culture, and even racial issues. This barrier between them was getting harder to ignore. She could drop names like Louis Farrakhan or Clarence Thomas and get a blank gaze from David, so he definitely couldn’t deal with discussions about any thing her friends were talking about at work. Nothing. And forget about new music or television—except the sentimental old love stories, like
Casablanca,
that he watched on videotape. David lived in a world of books and jazz music.
She didn’t understand how a man who was so damn smart could choose ignorance. She read her Sun-News and New York Times every morning before going to work, and when she came home she found the newspapers wherever she’d left them, untouched.
“Whether you admit it or not, Peter wants to pull you away. He wants to do it with this first book, and then another. He doesn’t share our priorities, like family,” David said.
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? What does he have? Whom does he have?”
“David …”
“I’m only being honest. He has voter surveys and a yen for buried secrets. That’s all, Jessica. That’s all.”
Jessica was surprised to realize that her eyes were stinging with tears. This was cutting to her core for some reason. She really wanted to write this book. Yes, maybe she did crave the chance to bond with Peter, who gave a damn about the things everyday folks talked about at the beauty shop and on their lunch breaks. So what? Why couldn’t David see that their book might help people and make a difference? Was he really so oblivious to life outside their El Portal street?
Despite their differences, Jessica wanted to believe with her heart that she and David were soul mates. But sometimes their reliance upon each other scared her. Often, at bedtime, instead of making love or going to sleep, they spent hours talking about deep subjects like how the legacy of the African slave trade had transformed the world, or the essences of men and women, or the nature of love. And she learned something new from him every day, whether it was an unusual word in Spanish, the unsung conquests of some African emperor, or a verse from an Elizabethan sonnet. He even knew the Bible and the old-time spirituals inside and out. They had to work at it, but they found their common ground.
Ultimately, though, their differences returned, and she wondered how deeply they ran. How could she continue to overlook them, when they loomed so large?
Jessica didn’t notice at first that David had slipped his arm around her shoulder, and that his head was nuzzled against her neck. “Don’t go write a book now, Jess. Not now,” he was repeating in her ear softly, barely audibly, as though begging for his life.
“Your man is tripping, Jessica.”
“You’re telling me.”
Jessica had tried to reach Alexis at her job at the UM medical school’s hematology lab all morning, and her sister finally called her back at the newspaper at ten minutes to noon. Peter planned to have lunch with Jessica to hammer out details for the book proposal he wanted to send his agent by midweek. She’d just seen him vanish into Sy’s office. Lord, was he going to tell their boss already? Now she was nervous.
“I hate to talk about your husband, but you know what? He’s always tried to monopolize you, from the beginning. I’ll never forget how he carried on that time we wanted to see Janet Jackson. I mean, damn, he couldn’t let you go for one night? And you were so afraid you wouldn’t find a man that you put up with it.”
Ouch. Alex was right, at least partially. Jessica was grateful she wasn’t in her sister’s shoes; Alexis was single now, and still looking. Jessica wondered if her sister would ever get married, or if it mattered to her anymore.
Considering Jessica’s history with black men, David had been a godsend. Jessica and Alex won scholarships to a lily-white private school for gifted children when they were young, so they’d been socialized around whites except at church. When the scholarship money ran out, Jessica’s adjustment to a mostly black public high school hadn’t been easy. Huddles of black football players snickered at Jessica when she walked past, a gangly bookworm. One boy Jessica didn’t even know sneered at her, saying she must want to be white since she was in honors classes with all of those white kids. To fit in, Alex had taken on a homegirl demeanor and found a boyfriend in high school, but Jessica never did. She’d felt like the same outcast in college, even with twenty pounds more shape and a sassy haircut.
Then she met David, who was so different himself. She thought many blacks were so quick to judge her based on nothing; but David never made hurtful assumptions about her, and that had been such a relief.
Alex never saw it that way. Jessica remembered the sting she’d felt after introducing her sister to David in the beginning; Alex had already ripped her ear open for going to bed with a professor, especially so fast, but Jessica had hoped her sister would be as impressed as she was by David’s mind and manners, not to mention his incredible face. Didn’t happen. After spending only one afternoon with her and David, Alex told her later: “Jessica, don’t buy it. That man is running a game on you. He’ll never really care about anybody but himself.”
It had been a mean thing to say, Jessica thought. Mean and unjustified. Just because David had been shy with Alexis there? Because he wasn’t good at chitchat? Or maybe he seemed a little arrogant? What about all of the good things? Alex admitted she still couldn’t give Jessica a concrete reason for her first impression, and sometimes Jessica was convinced her sister had never learned to see past it.
“Look, it’s not like I snapped up the first loser who came along. Is it?” Jessica asked.
Alexis sighed. “No, girl. That’s not what I mean. You know David is something else. He’s fine, he’s intelligent, a model father. And he’s good to you, too, most of the time. I just think you tolerate all his clinging because you don’t think you have a choice.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Jessica said, “I’d rather have him clinging than walking out the door.”
Alexis sighed, but didn’t say anything.
“What?” Jessica asked.
When Alexis spoke, her voice was low and stern. “It just pisses me off,” she said. “Look at the guilt trip that man has put on you. Like all you’re supposed to do with your life is sit and hold his hand. I don’t know where he gets that, but that’s not the way it works. Here you are about to accomplish something meaningful, and instead of toasting you with champagne, your own husband is making you feel like shit.”
“I know,” Jessica said softly.
“You think Daddy was ever like that with Mom? Hell, no. David should be boosting you up, not holding you down. You write that damn book, girl. Do you hear me? You write it. And then you write a whole bunch more.”
Jessica smiled, grateful to have Alexis to talk to. She’d learned long ago not to complain about her husband to her mother, since Bea remembered all slights long after Jessica had forgotten them. Bea would have a fit if she knew how much David opposed the book. Alexis, at least, was a little more objective. Not much, but a little.
“I will,” Jessica said, deciding.
Once again, Peter suggested O’Leary’s. He never got tired of the bar’s greasy chicken wings. Jessica ordered a Ceasar salad and opted for a beer this time. She felt like she needed it. Since it was too hot on the patio, they sat inside beneath a television set playing The Young and the Restless, her mother’s favorite soap. It was reassuring to glance up at the screen and recognize some of the actors playing the same characters she’d known when she was a devotee in high school; they were always there, year after year.
“Len had a surprise for me this morning,” Peter said.
“Who’s Len?”
“My agent. Leonard Stoltz. He mentioned our idea to an editor he knows, and she loves it. Len’s guessing we might be able to swing a forty thousand dollar advance.”
“A …”
“The snag is, we’d have to promise to use a case that’s getting a lot of press up there in New York now, some guy who locked his father in the basement until he starved to death. It’s not exactly within our purview of nursing facilities … and I know forty isn’t a lot, divided in half …”
Jessica’s mind was frozen. Somebody already wanted their book, and they hadn’t even written a proposal. Half of forty thousand was nearly half her annual
salary. “…
Len wants us to overnight the proposal today, so he’ll have something to show her while she’s still excited. Jess? You with me?”
That instant, using her husband’s nickname for her, Peter had sounded exactly like David. “I’m in shock,” she said.
He smiled, and she noticed his face was drenched in red, probably from a weekend on the beach. She could see tiny age lines near those oddly green eyes. “I knew you would be. And I know how I felt when I sold my first book, so I got you something to put on top of your computer while you work—for inspiration.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a paperweight, a six-inch troll with a wild tuft of purple hair, wearing glasses and holding a pencil. WRITE ON, it said.
“Oh, my god … Peter … you’re so sweet …”
“I’m only being sweet now because I’m about to turn into a hard-ass. The editor said our chances for a sale are better if we promise a quick turnaround, maybe even by June.”
“Four months …”
“Exactly. I want you to get to work on that Chicago case, the smothered woman. Maybe you should fly out there. In the meantime, at least get the police report. It’s good material.”
“I can’t even believe this is happening.”
Peter entwined their fingers across the tabletop and squeezed, one of his gestures that had confused Jessica in earlier days. He had a loving nature, like David, and he wasn’t ashamed to express it. Other patrons at the bar could stare if they wanted to at this middle-aged white man clasping the hand of a black woman in the corner under the TV. Jessica would have hugged him if not for the table separating them. She remembered what David had said about Peter trying to pull her away, and she felt a hint of shame. Jessica hoped, fervently, that Peter had someone special and deserving in his life, but she guessed that David was right. He probably didn’t. “We’re going to do this, lady. Together.”
Jessica smiled, but couldn’t speak. Later, when she would think about this lunch with Peter, she would realize that she’d never even told him how much his encouragement and faith meant to her. And how much he’d brightened her life since the first day he introduced himself, showing her how to use the computer system when she was a nervous stranger in the newsroom. How even his friendly gaze, some days, meant the world.
Like a fool, she’d said nothing at all.