The Last Goodbye (19 page)

I sat there without speaking, watching my resolve fall apart. I won't belittle the beauty of fidelity by excusing what happened. I grew up in the church and I know right from wrong. But need speaks its own language. You can turn yourself off inside for only so long, and what lingers inside you will find a way out in the end. For every moment of carefully constructed perfection, there is a loss of control. Or maybe it's finding yourself again, your true self, the one closest to your soul. All I know is that we talked for a while, and I don't remember much about what we said. I know that it felt safe, and that, caught in the womb of our mutual acceptance, it didn't matter that I was a destroyed man locked in a nothing law practice who still owned a few good suits. And it didn't matter that she was in a loveless marriage, and that she was carrying around a horrible guilt I would only later be forced to confront. Damage met damage, in the vain, utterly impossible hope that two wrongs could heal a soul. It's the lie that drives every love story, whether written, sung, or lived.

I'll tell you something, and you can trust this completely: Men act like the idea of being found out is so hateful that they would kill rather than be exposed. But the truth is they are longing to be discovered, and they are desperate to have their weakness accepted. When a woman does that, there's nothing left to say, because she owns him.

What
, I remember thinking,
are you so afraid of? Why haven't you started your career over again? Why have you been content to sit in Odom's court, doing penny-ante cases? Why haven't you loved anyone in more than two years? Why is your best friend a failed law student and a drunk? Why haven't you found your level again? Why don't you lean down and kiss this incredible woman, and worry about what it means later?
I could feel myself unraveling, bit by bit. While all those questions were passing through my brain, it wasn't a big deal on the surface, just a deeper breath, a flushing of my face. I got it under control in a few seconds, but it was too late.

She saw through me. She was watching me, her artist's eyes looking into mine with a kind of warm precision, and I was exposed, game, set, and match. I don't know at what point her fingers were touching my face. I don't even remember her leaning up toward my mouth. I just know that at some point my eyes were closed, and her fingertips were tracing under my chin, across my cheek. When her fingers touched my lips, I opened my eyes. Her mouth looked so warm, with her lips slightly parted, that it seemed like the answer to every question was hiding just inside them. I leaned down and I kissed her, and my God, I hadn't been with a woman in such a long time that in the back of my mind I was afraid I had forgotten how to do it.

Now, looking back on it, everything means something different. Not just that kiss—everything, I've come to believe, is like that. Distance changes things. But a part of me hangs on to that kiss, to that moment. I don't know how to lie about it. She was married—loveless or not—and it was wrong. But I had no defense, no armor for it. Touching her lips took me into all my upbringing about white and black and fucked it up, rearranged it, spit it out and I was lost in some earthy bayou, devouring her black skin, going back into time to where there weren't any races and there wasn't McDaniel Glen and the War between the States never happened and Jesus, it was like being kissed by Gaia herself. Some moments we possess for ourselves alone, and they cannot be justified in the minds of others. I only know that no man or woman will ever take those sacred, holy minutes away from me, the minutes the great Michele Sonnier set me free.

AFTER THE LOVEMAKING,
there is the shock wave. The plane landed and we reentered not just the humid atmosphere of the city, but the realities and concerns that had seemed so remote at forty thousand feet. There was a powerful force to help us reorient to our newly changed circumstances, however, and that was the city of Atlanta herself. She is a willing accomplice to love. Her heavily treed, upper-middle-class neighborhoods are so vast that they invite the illusion that they exist in a state of grace, cocooned from all harm. In that calculated state of denial, the city is susceptible to the soft southern light of late summer afternoons, the same light that fell on antebellum plantations and warmed promenading debutantes. The natural beauty of the place somehow persists: its breezes are still sweet, its pines slender and tall, its honeysuckle fragrant. Cast in that gentle glow, the city willingly accepts its most treasured illusions. And what happens in a city can happen in a pair of human souls. For new lovers, the beauty of Atlanta can be a nightshade to reality. With Michele by my side, there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be.

We were changed now, a new, complex layer of considerations mingled with an already charged situation. There was married and single. There was black and white. There was rich and tenuously hanging on. There was high culture and low. There were more reasons to run than I could count. And none of them meant half as much as the fact that she had found the lock that opened a door I had successfully held shut since Violeta Ramirez died.

Even illicit love has its codes of conduct, and there was no question that we would meet. If it was too soon to know exactly what it was we were sharing, we both knew it was much more than a moment's loss of control. So we did what every pair of lovers has done, from Romeo and Juliet to this day: we longed for reprieve from the world's concerns, for an uncluttered space in which to simply feel.

We would meet the next day, but not until the afternoon. I sleepwalked through my morning, seeing her naked skin in my mind, the pressure of my fingertips tracing the flushed skin of her body. There was a quick trial for Odom, something which, fortunately, required less than half of my mind to accommodate. I arrived to meet a client determined to fight to the bitter end; unfortunately, being videotaped buying crack from an undercover cop made his approach likely to land him in jail. It was a first offense, and I persuaded him that a guilty plea and a contrite attitude would get him back on the street sooner. It would have been better for my own peace of mind if a lowered, late-eighties Pontiac with rap music blasting out of it hadn't been waiting to pick him up once he was given a suspended sentence and compulsory drug treatment. But I had long ago had to face the fact that I was a better lawyer than savior, and I couldn't change my clients' lives outside the courtroom. I would give them their due diligence, and if they were lucky enough to be free to go afterward, they went with God.

At three I headed to meet Michele at Virginia Highlands, an artsy patch of the city just north of downtown. The Highlands is an essential part of Atlanta's optical illusion, a place that can actually make you believe all the disparate elements of the city are going to fit peaceably together in the end. That day its main street was alive with the rainbow, all God's creatures nodding politely to each other and smiling well-fed smiles: tall Rasta men with their hair pushed up into knit caps; thirty-something women in determined, feminist clothes; young bearded Muslims all in white; lithe, impossibly thin women showing their midriffs and smoking cigarettes. Walking its streets, it was easy to believe that the McDaniel Glens of the world didn't exist.

Michele looked like a rainbow herself, in a loose, flowing skirt of dark purple, orange, and black that made a lovely rustle when she moved. She wore a flimsy, off-white top, and three metal bracelets, all on her left arm. Her hair was pulled back tight and scrunched into a fanning ponytail of cornrows. She hid her eyes behind dark sunglasses, although I doubt there was much danger of opera stars being recognized on North Highland Avenue.

The district specializes in a kind of sanitized, funky edginess that lets people feel progressive without actually risking anything. It's lined with New Age boutiques, vegetarian restaurants, and dimly lit clothing stores that burn incense and have bamboo wind chimes. Michele pulled me into several shops, asking my opinion about this or that; I was out of my depth, since my own taste in clothes is mostly to appreciate the woman wearing them. But she was in her element: here she tried on a pair of Asian earrings, there a belt of indeterminate hide, later, a shirt embroidered with brightly colored rag fragments. It was enough to watch her in her happy extravagances, losing herself in exotic fabrics or watching her show distaste for a pair of preposterous shoes.

I loved every second of it. There, where Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad all seemed to be getting along, we were not black or white. We were free to be man and woman, and that was all we wanted. I remember the hours and the minutes and the seconds of it, the fragile, blessed anonymity we felt. Underneath and intertwined with everything, unspoken but alive, was what we had done the night before. The way she closed her eyes when I pushed my hands down her back, the taste of her shoulder, the crashing moment of oblivion—all of it roamed the edges of our conversation, our fleeting glances, our momentary touches. Each moment had the dizzying rush of our sex on it, and the certain prelude that we would lose ourselves in each other again.

But for now, on that warm afternoon, there was no hurry. We walked the whole district, about fifteen blocks or so, taking our time. Eventually we slipped into the Darkhorse Tavern for an early dinner and a glass of wine. We were ahead of the dinner crowd, and the place was nearly empty. We sat deep in shadows, toward the back. We were giddy, eating off each other's plates. The clock moved, ignored and irrelevant. Gradually, dusk grew outside.

There are times when anticipation is so sweet and exhilarating that it becomes a nearly unbearable pleasure. We moved more slowly as the minutes passed, savoring the unrepeatable moments of new love. We must have been there for some time, because the restaurant had slowly filled around us. We looked up and were surprised to be surrounded by other couples, which pleased us even more. The whole city seemed at peace, and we were comfortably in its center. Over drinks she said, “Your turn.”

“What?”

“To tell me your story. I don't know anything about you really, and it's not fair.” She smiled. “Except how you kiss, of course.”

“How do I kiss?”

“Spectacularly.”

“I would think that would about cover things, then.”

“I'm being serious. Where did you grow up, for example?”

“Dothan, Alabama. It's pretty much like New York, only more sophisticated.”

“I'm being serious, Jack. I really want to know.”

“You know all that crap about charming little southern towns?”

“Yes.”

“It's crap.”

She laughed. “It must have had something good about it.”

“Well, they probably wouldn't beat the hell out of us anymore for kissing in public. Maybe.”

“That's progress, I guess.”

I nodded. “And it had my grandfather, who was as good a man as ever scratched out what passes for a living in that part of the country.”

“What did he do?”

“Tried to turn a few acres of dirt into money,” I answered. “Took a shot at ten different things, from chickens to hogs to corn to alpacas.”

“Alpacas? The ones they make sweaters out of?”

“I think it's just the hair they make sweaters out of.”

“You know what I mean.”

“He was no farmer, but I never heard him complain. Maybe he did when I wasn't around. He would walk five miles to help a neighbor, and he would go hungry to make sure you got enough. He was a gunnery sergeant in the Pacific in World War Two. When I think about him, I can't understand what's happened to this damn country. I go into Odom's courtroom, and it's like a whole generation of men just forgot to grow up.”

She nodded, staring into her drink. “And your parents?”

“Good people. Alabama dirt farmers, like my grandfather. They're gone now. But they saw me pass the bar.”

She smiled. “You're like me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You got out.”

“I suppose I did.”

I paid the bill and we began slowly drifting back toward our cars. In the dusk, our touches became more intentional. Music was drifting out of a passing door; we stopped and listened awhile to a band playing the blues. Michele leaned against me, swaying in time to the music. “Let's go in,” she said, pressing against me.

“Didn't figure this as your kind of music.”

She leaned back and kissed my cheek.
“Everything
is my kind of music, sweetheart. Except for Johnny Cash, of course.”

“What do you have against the man in black? He
loves
you.” While we stood talking, the door opened, and a couple walked out. The music poured out into the street, gritty and soulful. We could see the band up on stage, and a small dance floor crammed with joyous, gyrating people.

We entered and blended into the crowd, moving through it happily. No matter where it travels, the blues remains the regional possession of the South for one unalterable reason: it is the only music that contains equal measures of joy and pain, which is the short history lesson of our part of the world. For that reason, it remains an essential element of the southern soul. So we were at home there, no matter what else might separate us. We found a table in the back, and I ordered some drinks. Michele was moving gently in her chair, and I watched her, lost in her graceful motion. She caught me watching, got up out of her seat, and demanded, “Let's dance.”

“You gotta be kidding.”

She flashed a smile. “Let's see you move your ass, white boy.”

I stood and walked her out onto the dance floor. She was free, and she was beautiful, a powerful combination of seductions. She came up next to me, and we started moving together, disappearing into the pulsating music. Our fingers locked together, and we moved together like mirror images.

The mind has the capacity to fix on a thing to the exclusion of other dangers, and we reveled in that state. We were part of a happy crowd of people, listening to the music that will always remind southerners of what we have in common. There are times when to be truly happy you have to deny certain realities, and with the help of the crowd and the music, we willingly did so that night. There was only that moment, and the beat of the song, and the moving crowd, and the sweet sensation of falling in love. I would have been happy for it to last forever.