The Importance of Being Dangerous (16 page)

IT MUST HAVE BEEN MUCH LATER
that night when Sidarra and Griff entered the Full Count through the alley door. For some reason it was very important that they work on a difficult shot adjustment on the cue ball called the Cicero Spin. When you tag the cue just right—almost a quick flick-and-retreat of the tip upon the upper left quadrant of the ball's surface—whitey goes crazy. The spin makes it do an impossible arc just like a candy cane—and twice as sweet. But Griff was having trouble doing it consistently. So was Sidarra, and she had had enough of the embarrassment. Nobody else was there. Even the club was deserted.

The pityriasis rosea was gone. Her skin had healed completely.

Tall drinks were already sitting on one of the small tables, her sidecar and his Hennessy. She turned on the lights while Griff put on Marvin Gaye's “Come Live with Me Angel.”

“I love that!” she almost screamed. It was just what she wanted to hear.

He stepped into the light of the table still wearing his browns to the nines, but began eagerly to take off his jacket. Sidarra leaned her body on a corner of the table and watched him shed the coat. Without the mad pox and cloudbursts of mocha distorting her smooth caramel flesh, Sidarra now wore a white netted jumpsuit that squeezed her curves like a wine sack. The lights close above her gave the caramel diamonds of her protruding skin an added shine. Griff's eyes followed.

“I never told you how much more delicious you look with your hair back like that,” he said, twisting the mother-of-pearl handle of his pool cue in his hands. All his cool returned, backed by deliberate intention. “This is where I wanna be, Sid.”

“Me too. We're gonna have to put in a coffeemaker, though.”

The Cicero Spin. That was the object of the game, and it was hard to spin it like that. There was just one cue ball, so they each took turns close beside each other, shooting. Over and over again until it became natural. It's not so much a kiss as the gentlest twist between your fingers, she said. Loving fingers. But the shot is absorbed into the body as soon as it's released, he said. Isn't that a kiss? Their bodies would arch down again over the table together and wait for the angle. No, baby, it's a rub, the gentlest rub, not a kiss.

This went on like that, it seemed, all night. Hours must have passed. The same music always returned, but the room got hotter, and neither of them had ever asked Q how to work the thermostat. So Griff took off his shirt and laid it on the nearest velvet couch. His feet were also bare. She watched him, getting the best look she never had before.

Griff looked across the width of the table at her. “You know I'm sorry about this afternoon.”

“I know, man,” she purred.

Griff did brown a lot better with his clothes off. His body was finally there to prove it. The angles were as magnificent, the sym
metry of the muscles just as she had many times imagined them arranged. But not the tightness of the skin, or the pure invitation of its shine, or how it rippled in the right places. That was better than the wish.

“How come you're not supposed to be home now?” she asked.

Griff looked like he'd been waiting to be asked. “Because she's never in my dreams anymore. We're never together there. So I figured I could.” His eyes were so sure. Sidarra blushed warmly at his words. “And I learned a lot today,” he went on, easy yet determined to explain something.

“So did I.”

“Not just what you're thinking, baby. Your sanctuary upstairs—the whole house, really—but the sanctuary with the red walls is the right thing to do. I see you free there, which is why we had no business going in.” Sidarra sauntered halfway around the table to him. “And that's a little piece of how I start to feel so free here.”

Her breasts were nearly already out of the netting. “In this room?”

“Not particularly,” he shrugged. “With you, Sidarra. Just being with you.”

There was no music. A song had ended. She lay her cue stick down along the rail. Griff rested his against the side of the table. She strolled over and stood in front of his tall frame. In the moment before Stevie Wonder's voice dripped into the soft intro to “As,” Sidarra raised her arms out from her sides and slowly leaned her pubic bone against the swollen tip of his pants.

“Touch,” she cooed from the top of her breath. And the song began.

Griff's long arms swallowed her. His full lips bounced gently against hers. He kissed her cheekbones and tongued the crease of her mouth. He kissed her neck at the vocal cords, and Sidarra began to sing the lyrics. His hands untied the white strings of her jumpsuit and rolled it down, down her curves. That soft mouth
followed the luscious unfolding of her skin, down, down between her breasts. She sang at the top of her lungs. He lapped at the bottom of her breasts. Lower down, his pants were descending. Lower, he knelt down on the carpet, pressed his thick elbows against the slope of her pelvic bones, held her breasts in his hands. Taste, taste, he repeated lovingly into her skin, tasting her hard dark nipples, taste, he kept saying, and Sidarra sang. But when Griff kissed a triangle all the way around her vagina, the song paused in her mouth. She could not control her tongue. She lost control.

He lifted the whole guitar of her open body into his arms, pressed his thick, waving penis up against her nascent wetness, and kissed deep inside the walls of her mouth.

This is a kiss, he said to the body he pulled to him.

This is a kiss, he said to the shoulder he honored.

This is a kiss, he gave to her belly button.

But there's something more, he confessed to Sidarra, laying her naked back gently upon the auburn felt of the tabletop. The song came in and out of her moans. She fingered through his hair as his head dazzled her lips and his sure touch slid inside of her.

This is a kiss, he told the sweet clitoris. But this is the rub, said his fingertips.

To me, baby, she called out. Oh, to me, baby! she could only say. The words to the song escaped her busy senses. The rest of the sentence eluded her consciousness. Her whole body rocked more and more severely under his serious touch, pushing her, moving her more urgently with each stroke of his full tongue and every soft rub of his pinched fingertips inside. Her feet flexed back and forth in spasms. Her toes arched in desperation. Her orgasms screamed with the choir, rising and swirling with the song's momentum. Griff was saying something he'd only been thinking every day before, and she heard him, she heard his whole body say: I'm reaching for the heart of your love.

And when he pulled up his body and suspended the descending armor of his abdominal muscles over her, when his breath shook at the welcome reality of her wet pussy awaiting him, Sidarra twisted her ass around and slid him between her in rhythms. He complied with the frenzy, rocking up and down with her, ravishing the skin on her back, her hips, her ass, and her thighs with wild hands while they smiled. They laughed loud and savored. They dripped sweat and teased madly. Until they twisted back around and their eyes found each other again.

I love you, Sidarra.

She remembers his hazel eyes then, how honest they were, how complete their hold on hers and the tender surrender they let free. She held his face and stared into his feeling as Griff's thickness spread her gently around with each stroke. The sweet pendulum rocked steady like that for luscious days until she abruptly rolled his whole wet body over on the table and straddled the great Y of his pelvis:

I love you, Griff. I
love
you, baby. I love.

The fact that he couldn't stop kissing her. The way his passion pumped enormous up through her. The way his hands washed every inch of her ass. The liberated joy across his face. When he arched upward to suck her breasts again. That she could have fucked him all night and tomorrow forever. That the fine rage of her last orgasm rushed against the explosion of his head in time for her eyes to see the blur of it all before rolling back into her own head to sleep. To sleep. Spent, embraced, completed. Right atop the Amistad, they slept until morning in the cool puddle of their abandon. Griff never left her body.

 

SHE WOULD REMEMBER EACH FEELING
. She would remember every sound. But when Sidarra woke up, the best thing still hers
was the fact that she would not have to go to work that day. It was Labor Day. The night was a dream. She woke in her bed alone, her troubled flesh on fire, and got up to take her skin medication.

 

MOST OF THAT DAY
and just a few blocks away, Tyrell lay bleeding under some metal stairs with his face caved in on one side. Q was helpful, but Raul was more thorough. He had followed Tyrell up the block, sorry he hadn't moved on him when he saw him go up Sidarra's stoop looking sideways. Harlem streets can offer up a variety of loose weapons—a carburator on the curb, a broken telephone somebody left on the street, a tin garbage can top, or bricks near a Dumpster. When Raul prepared his choice, he searched ahead of Tyrell for a suitably discreet place to have him. The encounter was brief with very few words. Raul asked him if he believed in reincarnation. Tyrell pulled a .22. Raul asked if he'd rather be shot with his own gun or find some other way to be somebody new. Tyrell laughed too hard at that one. The one round he got off missed Raul badly. Moments later, his legs were broken in several places below the knees and three ribs were cracked. When Raul was finished there and Tyrell understood the nature of the punishment, Raul dragged him to the stairway and busted him in the face with the brick. Tyrell wasn't supposed to go back to Sidarra's again.

 

AND LATER THAT NIGHT
, at a small bar downtown, Yakoob was once again nearly bombing onstage. He was telling one of the stories about his make-believe fatherhood, and as often was the case, the tiny audience didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It wasn't that they knew Koob's observations about being a dad were fictitious; most believed there really was a boy who did the
things Koob described and said the things Koob said he did. To most it wasn't that he was a wannabe dad. It was more that he was a wannabe comic without faith in his own stories. And since his memory loss as a result of pot smoking meant he could remember a few names but never entire jokes, Koob tried telling stories to make people laugh. Like so many, Monday wasn't a good night for it.

THE FIDELITY INVESTMENTS BRANCH OFFICE
on lower Broadway was smack in the heart of the financial district, two blocks from Wall Street, three blocks from the World Trade Center towers. Yakoob's job as a computer technician was located in an innocuous old building a few blocks from the Ferry Building at the very tip of Manhattan. Every day after he worked, rain, snow, or shine, he would walk several blocks up Broadway, past the Fidelity office, and on to City Hall Park, a few blocks south of Duane and Reade streets. There by the fountain he would meet Marilyn, and they would ride the subway home together.

That Tuesday was important for a couple of reasons. People seem to mark the Tuesday after Labor Day for some of their most serious pursuits. It is the day summer ends and seriousness begins for adults everywhere. For Marilyn it was particularly important, and Yakoob knew it. That Tuesday, Marilyn had an appointment on Madison Avenue to see a fertility specialist, a doctor with an
international reputation who wouldn't accept insurance payments of any kind. A year ago, Koob could never have paid for his wife to see such a person. Only a year ago (and for most of their time before that), Koob and Marilyn's romantic friendship was challenged loudly, sometimes dangerously, by money problems he knew he alone had to solve. He was doing that now. Marilyn had waited four months just to get the rare 6
P.M
. appointment because, she was told, most of Dr. Vershak's patients were either still in the Hamptons or just getting back to the city from there. Marilyn was already thirty-nine, and four months felt like eternity for a woman wanting to get pregnant. Koob even paid the consultation fee in advance. He had put aside a liquid account just to pay for everything involved in conception. For all the fights between them over the years, there was no debate about one thing: this was their final chance to have a child of their own.

That Tuesday was also important because Yakoob had made a decision about his money. The whole idea had been to get some and be smart about it. But it was also to
be
smart, to
show
smart like Griff did. Koob had never in life done that. The Cicero Club proved he could be clever, but it was all down low, and a lot of the knowledge about trades and companies came either from Griff or Sid. Yakoob decided to step into the daylight and be a man with his money. Sidarra had sold off most of her stock to buy the brownstone, and Griff was buying property, too. It was high time Yakoob invested some money the way regular investors did. He wanted to finally walk his own walk and talk his own talk where the big dogs ran. And he would buy Marilyn some security. Preferably in her own name.

He arranged to get off work at three-thirty that day. This would give him time to walk up to the office, meet with a broker, discuss his plans, look at some options, and be done there in about an hour. That might be cutting it a bit close, he admitted to Marilyn,
but he'd still have time to meet her by five easy. At rush hour the express train on the Lexington line would get them to the Upper East Side in more than enough time for their appointment. His hair in fresh cornrows, Yakoob wore a light blue suit left over from the wedding of one of his boys ten years ago. It still fit except for the waistline, but it was better than the casual clothes techs usually wore in their back-office cubicles. In his breast pocket, Koob occasionally passed his fingertips over the edges of a thick envelope that contained fifty $500 money orders he'd gotten from six different check-cashing stores—checking to make sure it was there.

Fidelity Investments was located in the reconfigured lobby of an old bank building. You climbed a short flight of gray stone stairs before you crossed between two enormous pillars and through two glass doors. The place did a quick number on his heart. The ceilings were so high his eyes kept glancing up at them. He wasn't sure at first where to go among the different modular oak desks. A pretty blond receptionist stopped him before he could wander deeper into the place and asked him to fill out a form for new investors. When he was finished he should go back and wait in the seating area by the front window. Somebody would be with him momentarily, she told him with a smile. She was all of twenty-five years old. In his head, he named her Heidi.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, pulled out a pen, and took a seat.

Try as he could, the chandeliers made the words harder to read in a way only being from the projects explained. There were already two other people waiting to be seen by an account associate or broker or whatever the receptionist had called the people who advised you and opened your accounts. The customers were both white, a man and a woman, middle-aged, briefcases at the ready, and they looked a mean combination of busy and bored. If he could help it, Yakoob never wrote a single thing down in longhand. His penmanship revealed too much about going to JFK
High School and his early flight from words. So he turned his body to one side to make sure these two folks weren't watching him fill out the form.

Marilyn was going to be amazed, and that kept him going. That was her job in his life. Only Marilyn understood how Koob explained the difference between his programming ability and poor longhand. He'd achieved a small, often secret brilliance with the one. With the other he was quite obviously another ignorant nigger.

An Asian man in a navy blue suit walked in like a regular, met no one's eyes, and took a seat on Koob's far side. Yakoob's nod meant nothing to the guy, so they both averted their gazes.

As he filled out all the personal background information and asset questions, Koob couldn't help reviewing the reasons he had no business in that room. He'd never gone to college. The GED exam was a struggle. He probably smoked too much weed. Now, folks were looking at him in that suit like he was the ringleader of a circus or a member of the Platters. Just in time, Koob's cell phone rang.

“Where are you, baby? Are you on your way?” Marilyn asked a little frantically.

“Everything is fine,” he said so that the whole seating area could hear him. Cell phones did a good turn for black men. They came along and made a lot of men's idle moments look important and gave them something else to do with their hands. Koob stepped away to a corner. “I just gave them the form they make you sign. Don't worry. I'll be on time. There's hardly anybody here.”

“Koob, you better be here. This is not the day to fuck around, man. I need you with me. I'm not trying to wait out there and be all anxious.”

“It's all good, baby. Count on your boy. You gonna like this. I'll see you in a minute.”

That's when he decided to put the account in Marilyn's name no matter what. Two more people walked through the doors, spoke briefly to the receptionist, and sat down in the waiting area. Yakoob even considered putting a little of the money in a high-risk, high-yield account for his unborn child. He sat back down and waited.

“Mr. Elliman? Mr. Cavanaugh can see you now,” said the receptionist to the first man waiting. It was 4:14 by Koob's Rolex.

Did the receptionist have his name? Of course she did. He gave her the form. It was probably like the DMV, only better, a place as professional as this. They didn't need to take numbers. They weren't selling ice cream. Koob's knee began to bounce a little. He was next after the woman. He would just state his business. He knew what he wanted. He'd been over the script a hundred times in his head. Four twenty-six. The white woman ahead of him was called on. Two other people entered and made their way to the seating area.

If his mother were still alive, he probably would have called her now. Koob took a deep breath at the thought of her and felt the bulge of checks press against his chest. If his mother were alive, he would want her in the empty chair beside him now. She simply would not have believed his words alone and would have to hear what he was about to say.

At 4:35, the receptionist approached the carpeted seating area. Koob started to move out of his chair, but she went directly to a young white man who had come in after him.

“Todd Dukovny?” asked Heidi. “You may be seen.”

Koob looked up at their backs in a question he wasn't about to ask. He was not about to tangle with his image as a six-foot-two-inch dark black man in there. He had a goatee to stroke, so he stroked it. He stroked and strummed, looking out the window at lower Broadway's old-fashioned façades and waited his turn.
Another man, the Asian guy, stood up at 4:42. Koob looked to find the receptionist, but she hadn't called the guy. Mr. Cavanaugh himself was motioning to him from his desk.

“Yes, Mr. Yamaguchi,” Heidi intervened. “Go straight back.”

Koob figured it was an appointment. It
was
almost 4:45. Asian cats come early, he thought. He went back to waiting. Marilyn's voice grew more shrill in his head. He'd be seen when he was seen, but he wasn't gonna make no scene. He had his most serious business to do. When one of them brokers finally saw what was large about his front pocket, he'd never wait again. New guys must wait, he thought. I still got time. Downtown, in this man's world, motherfuckers make you wait.

He couldn't understand why the receptionist never met his eyes, though. Yet he had no words to say anything about it, so he just politely waited. Uptown he wouldn't have waited so well. He would have said something by now. In fact, Koob would have said a lot of shit by now, or be gone. This was different. This he had to do the way they do it.

Marilyn always complained that when Koob was late—which was almost always—he wasn't thinking of her waiting someplace for him. He wasn't thinking about the danger she might be exposed to or how bad it felt to be sitting somewhere wondering what might be happening wherever he was. But he could see her now. He could often see her; she was wrong about that. He knew that by now she was leaving work. He could imagine her clothes, her hand around her purse, and the strides she made in heels all the way to the fountain at City Hall Park. This made him fidget like a boy. Fidgeting seemed to make him sweat. As soon as he realized his brow was wet, Yakoob noticed that no one else's was. Four forty-nine and another person behind him was called by a broker to enter the desk area. Koob watched in disbelief, trying not to show anything irregular, but pissed just the same. He saw a third broker way in the back rise up from her empty desk, push in
her chair, and grab her coat. He caught Mr. Cavanaugh's eye. Cavanaugh was about to be the last one left in the long room of desks. The other remaining broker, an older white woman with white hair, also seemed to be finishing up for the day.

It was just Koob and a white woman left. She was maybe fifty. He caught her looking at him and smiled. She grinned ever so slightly as she turned her eyes toward the window. Five to five and the receptionist promptly came for her.

“Andrea Roisman? Just this way,” Heidi directed.

Marilyn would be there by now, nervous, pissed, and preparing all her disappointment in a rage he really didn't want to hear. The waiting area was his alone now. Koob spread his legs in the chair. His fingers pinched the money in his pocket while he sank into the seat-cushion. Now, he just looked stupid. By the time someone came to speak with him now, he'd have to get right up and leave. His time was almost up. But still he waited quietly.

“Sir,” said the receptionist, who managed to come up from behind him, “I'm terribly sorry, but we close at five on Tuesdays—I don't know if you read the sign as you came in.” Koob looked up into her sparkling face. She looked like one of those “people people” who pretended to ask you something when they were really telling.

“But I been here. I was here before most of those people. You don't remember?”

“That may appear true,” she said, not budging, “but your form required only Mr. Cavanaugh to see you since you're a new account, and he's got to finish with a client. If you like, you can take your form with you or leave it with us for your next visit. We're not taking any more clients today.”

Yakoob looked down at his watch again. Five oh-one. It was already gonna be a sprint to Marilyn. He tried to think, but this was the last place to think.

“Okay, okay. I better come back. Let me take back my form,
like you said. I'll come back to see him. Maybe I'll call.” Koob realized he was trembling slightly and wanted to fly away through the window. “Can you give me something with Mr., uh, Cavanaugh's name and information on it?”

“You mean a business card?”

“Yeah, sure. That would do it. Thank you.”

Yakoob tried, but he couldn't run in a suit to meet his wife. He was already sweating pretty badly. He was already late, and he wasn't sure whether he would ever tell anybody anything about what had just happened to him. She stood alone by the fountain in a light red jacket. He could see that Marilyn had been crying.

“How could you, Koob? How the fuck could you?” she spat in a restrained yell.

“I'm sorry, baby.” He tried to hug her, but she was unhuggable. “Let's just go. We'll be all right. C'mon.”

They hurried toward the train station. “Why didn't you call me? Why didn't you answer your phone?”

Only then he realized that his phone hadn't gone off. He had no answer for her. That was just bad technology or bad luck. She looked at her watch and cursed.

“We're not gonna make it, Koob. They gave me a special evening slot. The doctor goes home. We'll miss my cycle.” They hurried down the street. “You know they charge you the full fee even if you miss the appointment.”

He didn't know that, but he wasn't planning on missing the appointment. “Baby, don't trip. C'mon. We got like thirty-five minutes.” She reminded him they had a five-block walk to the doctor's office once they got off the subway uptown. “Then let's take a cab.”

“Are you sure? It's rush hour, Koob. He gotta go straight up through all that midtown traffic.”