Searching for Tina Turner
Read Searching for Tina Turner Online
Authors: Jacqueline E. Luckett
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #FIC000000
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Quotes from
I, Tina
by Tina Turner and Kurt Loder, © 1986 by Tina Turner.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Copyright © 2010 by Jacqueline Luckett-Johnson
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: January 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-55805-1
Contents
To my mother, Bernice Luckett, and my sister, Bernadette…
for being there…
O
n their first date more than thirty years ago, Randall took Lena to an Ike and Tina Turner concert. From the minute they sat
down in the fifth row from the stage, she knew he wanted to impress her even though he hadn’t needed to. She would have sat
with him in the park, gone to the drive-in, eaten Wheaties in the narrow half-kitchen of his studio apartment, done whatever
he wanted; she’d been that eager to be with him.
The Ikettes crowded onto the narrow stage while Ike’s deep bass warmed up the audience; like a chant his words tumbled soft
and low. A hush fell over the auditorium as the guitar riff brought down the house lights.
Blamp.
The trumpets spit. Up, down, left, right.
Blamp blamp.
Suddenly, Tina pranced across the stage swinging her store-bought hair, the mic, the fringe on her sequined dress. Her taut
legs pumped like a runner about to hit the finish line, her short dress coming close to revealing all that was underneath.
The music increased to a faster, throbbing tempo. Girls cried. Men beckoned to Tina. The Ikettes moved with Tina, step for
step, pounding the stage in three-inch heels.
Lena inched toward the crowded center aisle along with everyone else to get up on the stage and dance with Tina. Randall caught
her by the waist, leaned down, and pressed his lips against her ear. “You’re as cool as Tina Turner,” he whispered, he as
cool in a hip, sixties way as he meant she was. Trembling from the heat of his body, the ripple of his chest, the fuzz of
his mustache, Lena kissed him. The clamorous crowd and loud music disappeared into the distance, and for years she remembered
thinking that, as corny as it seemed, they were the only two people in the auditorium.
Now, those memories rush back as she watches a wrinkled TV personality melt in Tina Turner’s smile. Lena lifts her glass;
it would be nice to ooze such charm and self-assurance in a way so subtle and subdued that it ought to be bottled. Randall
believes that good liquor deserves a toast. So here’s to Tina. And Randall.
Tina looks directly into the camera, poised and straightforward; her eyes twinkle with humor and self-confidence. She is a
perfect combination of wild and sexy. Of secure and comfortable freedom. The reporter sees it, remarks on it, and asks if
it comes from celebrity or the people around her, and Tina lets him know that it comes from within. He goes over her history:
regaining her place at the top of the pop charts, her refusal to focus on color or race, a misunderstanding with Elton John.
Tina smiles again and changes the subject.
She talks of life, faith, and love for her man. Her brownish blond hair softens her ageless face, accentuates her full lips.
The camera captures the warm beige and gold of her skin in a tight close-up and pans her hilltop home and the royal blue Mediterranean
beyond. A happy blue, Lena thinks—the opposite of the blue she feels right now.
Without a thought of the fifteen-hour time difference between Oakland and Hong Kong, Lena dials Randall. The international
connection to his cell phone click-click-clicks her to the Far East.
“Who the hell is this?” Randall’s voice is slurred with sleep.
“Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river.” Lena mimics Tina, believing her husband knows good and well who it is. Because,
unless his ears have suddenly lost their perfect hearing, their home number has a special ring tone on his phone.
“Remember that Tina Turner concert we went to?” She reaches for the Drambuie and dribbles more into her glass. “Tina’s arms
spinning, her energy… she’s so beautiful.”
“Is everything all right? Are the kids okay?” The metallic echo of fumbling comes through loud and clear. Lena closes her
eyes and imagines Randall in a fancy king-sized bed, his suite big enough to house a family: left arm stretches out under
the covers, right arm adjusts the pillow to fit in the crook of his neck, his thick eyebrows push toward the permanent wrinkle
in the middle of his forehead. She can almost smell his nighttime musky scent in the whoosh the pillow emits when he finally
settles into it.
“Kendrick is fine. Camille is fine. I know you said we’d talk again in a couple of days, but I got excited when I saw Tina
Turner.”
“What does Tina Turner have to do with me at four in the morning?” Randall clears his throat, and Lena visualizes his neck
lengthening, his Adam’s apple sliding up, then down and up again, his arm bending to show the luminous dial of his watch.
She had not thought of that concert in years or the feeling she’d had of being complete and whole. Stretching her own arm
again to the glass beside her, she glares at the TV and the dip Randall’s body has worn into his side of the mattress.
“She’s on TV. Right now. I wish you could see her. She made me think of our first date. That was the first time we made love,
remember?”
“Of course, I remember, Lena, I was there, too. Are you drinking?”
“It calms my nerves.”
“Maybe you can frivol away the day—and that, coincidentally, is compliments of this trip and all that work you’ve been complaining
about—but I have to get up in two hours.”
For the first time in twenty-seven days, Lena wonders if this abruptness is because she has disturbed more than his sleep;
if some woman has gone to where Lena should have. No invitation had been extended to join him, like other business trips to
New York, Rome, Berlin, and more, savoring free moments between conference calls and meetings. No matter what he has told
her, his work—the complexity of TIDA’s pending acquisition—allowed Randall to escape. He needed to be upbeat, he told her,
to be ready to think clearly, to strategize, to make decisions—or change them on a dime—and he did not have time, or the desire,
to deal with the irritability that seemed to plague her.
Sharon? Not four months ago, at a TIDA dinner, Randall’s colleague insisted he taste her béarnaise-smothered steak. Lena watched
the very sexy Sharon risk a death knell for her career, and maybe her boss’s, by leaning into Randall and offering her fork
to his willing and open lips. Randall is friendly, she thinks, but that gesture went way past friendly.
“Are you alone?” Her lips tighten, shoulders hunch; Lena presses the phone hard against her ear, as disarmed by the question
as she hopes Randall is. Tossing back her drink in one, swift motion, she slams the glass on the nightstand. The table creaks
with her protest, her alarm.
“No, my mistress is here; right beside me: the TIDA contract. Hundreds of pages all over me, all over the bed, all over the
floor. I’m doing her every place I can. Sorry she can’t talk now, but if you want, I can fax her to you.”
“That’s not funny.”
“And neither is your question.”
“I’m going to call your secretary and make our next appointment with the therapist.”
“Fuck no. If that leaked to the board… they’d assume I’m incompetent. That’s all the ammunition they need to keep from appointing
me CEO. Just figure out what’s going on with you.”
f f f
Before Randall left, Lena suggested a marriage counselor to help get to the root of the heightening tension between them.
She described to him what he called her indifference and watched his eyebrows knit together in what she assumed was his indifference.
Both let go of their unspoken routine. Never going to bed angry. Apologetic embraces that turned to lusty sex. Revering the
gem they called love, considering each other’s opposing points of view until they reached truce or, even better, agreement.
“Therapy,” he said, “is what white people do.” Lena reminded him that he had quickly agreed to therapy for their son, and
that, the last time Lena looked, Kendrick wasn’t white. Randall agreed to a session before he left and one more when he returned.
After introductions, Dr. Brustere opened his hands like a priest ready to bestow the sign of peace, to balance the power in
the room, and asked about their marriage. Randall eyed the therapist as if determining a battle-ready opponent. Good brotha,
bad brotha. Dr. Brustere pressed his expensive pen into the dimple in his chin—his signal to Randall that he was expected
to talk.
Randall told the therapist that most people who knew him would be shocked to know that he considered himself a simple man,
given the thick gold bracelet on his right wrist and the Rolex on his left (his only jewelry), his designer suits, and luxury
four-door sedan. He believed goals were essential to success—personal or business—that only through hard work and consistency
could a man, or woman, meet those goals. He valued loyalty as the most important quality in human nature (his father taught
him that, if nothing else) and jazz as an imperative for sanity in an unstable world.
At the age of eight, he had decided he would never be like his father, an unreasonable man who got religion and a sure sense
of self-righteousness about two years after he left Randall and his mother; though he did return to take care of his son after
Randall’s mother died. Randall had basic needs: kids who believed he could do no wrong, the love of his wife, a little attention,
a lot of sex.
He pointed his finger at his wife and, for all his smarts and degrees, the wrinkle in his brow proved that he did not understand
what had caused the change. “Lena is the one with the problem. She has everything she could want.”
“I love my husband. I love my kids, my home. I do not love that they have come to define me or that
what
I
have
has become more important than
who
I am.” She twisted her wedding ring as if the large replacement suddenly itched the finger that she had worn a ring on for
twenty-three years. “My spirit, what makes me me, is dying.”
Randall leaned back deep in the wingback chair. Before that one gesture, before the lips pursed, the brow wrinkled, she thought
she saw a glimmer of understanding, of empathy. He made a loose one-handed fist beneath his chin and moved his head up and
down as though they had all day, not fifty-five minutes. Lena knew that move and all his moves; she could write the dictionary
on Randall’s unspoken commentary. That one meant checkmate. Lena wanted to point out that his reaction was typical of what
was wrong with their marriage lately: the more important Randall became at TIDA, the more he disregarded explanations based
in emotion.
“I love you. I love our family. But, I’ve given myself away, slowly, freely, and now… I want myself back.” Lena dug her fingernails
into the sides of her chair, and somewhere in the back of her mind it became clear to her why they were so frayed. “Otherwise,
I’m going to lose my mind.”