An American Marriage(40)

Much of life is timing and circumstance, I see that now. Roy came into my life at the time when I needed a man like him. Would I have galloped into this love affair if I had never left Atlanta? I don’t know. But how you feel love and understand love are two different things. Now, so many years down the road, I recognize that I was alone and adrift and that he was lonely in the way that only a ladies man can be. He reminded me of Atlanta, and I reminded him of the same. All these were reasons why we were drawn to each other, but standing with him outside of Maroons, we were past reason. Human emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of blown glass.





Roy


Standing on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, I memorized her—the shape of her lips and the purple tint of her lipstick, which matched the streaks in her hair. I knew her accent, southern but not too much, and I knew her shape, thick through the hips but slim on top. I had said her name was “something old timey,” but I should have said “something classic.” I could remember the feel of her name in my mouth, like the details of a dream.

“Want to see Brooklyn?” she asked. “My other roommate works at Two Steps Down. If we go there, we can drink for free.”

My first mind was to tell her that we didn’t need free cocktails, but I had a feeling she would be more annoyed than impressed, so I said, “Let’s get a taxi.”

“You won’t get a taxi tonight.”

“How come?” By way of question, I tapped the brown skin peeking out between my camel-hair coat and my soft leather gloves.

“That,” she said, “and it’s snowing. Meter’s double. We better take the subway.” She pointed at a green orb, and we descended a staircase into a world that reminded me of that dark scene in The Wiz.

“After you,” she said, depositing a token at the turnstile, nudging me through.

I felt like a blind man who left his cane at home. “You know,” I said. “I’m here on business. Sales meeting in the morning.”

She smiled in a polite way. “That’s nice,” she said, but she didn’t care at all about my professional standing. Hell, I didn’t even care about it all that much, but the point was to remind her that I had something going on in my life.

I’m not a fan of public transportation. In Atlanta, there was the bus or the MARTA train, and you only took those if you couldn’t afford a car. When I first got to Morehouse, I had no choice, but as soon as I gathered four nickels at the same time, I bought myself the last remaining Ford Pinto. Andre called it the “Auto Bomb” on account of the safety issue, but it never stopped him or anybody else from bumming a ride.

The A train was nothing like you would think from the song. The New York subway was packed with people, and you could smell whatever stuffed their damp sleeping bag coats. The floor was covered with the kind of linoleum that you only find in the projects, and the seats were a fixed-income shade of orange. And do not get me started on the able-bodied men sprawled out, taking up two seats sometimes while ladies were left standing.

For the jerky ride, we stood in front of a black lady who clinched a large shopping bag to her chest and slept like she was at home in the bed. Beside her was a light-skinned dude, the type we used to call “DeBarge.” He had a portrait gallery inked all over his head. Over his cheekbone was a woman’s face, and she appeared to be weeping.

“Georgia,” I said into her hair. “How can you live up here?”

She turned around to answer me, and our faces were so close that she leaned back to keep from kissing me. “I’m not really living here, living here. I’m in grad school, paying dues.”

“So you’re pretending to be a waitress?”

She adjusted her grip on the strap and lifted her foot to show me a black shoe with a thick rubber sole. “Somebody needs to tell my feet I’m pretending, because they are killing me like I’m really working.”

I chuckled with her, but I felt sorry, thinking about my mama back in Louisiana who was always complaining about her arches. She claimed it was because of the high heels she wore on Sundays, but it was really from being on her feet all day, fixing trays at the meat-and-three.

“What are you in school for?” I hoped that she wasn’t getting a PhD, an MBA, or a law degree. It’s not like I had anything against women getting ahead in the world, but I didn’t want to have to explain why it was that I decided to cool my heels with just my BA.

“Fine arts,” she said, “concentrating on textiles and folk art.” I could see from the little turn-up at the corner of her eyes that she was so proud that she could have been her own mother, but I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Is that right?” I said.

“I’m an artisan,” she said, not like she was explaining but like she was sharing the good news. “I’m a doll maker.”

“That’s what you’re going to do for a living?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of Faith Ringgold?” I hadn’t, but she kept on. “I want to be like her. With dolls instead of quilts. I want to get a tax ID and go into business.”

“What’s the name of the corporation?”

“Babydolls,” she said.

“Sounds like a strip club.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said, loud enough that it woke up the lady dozing on the seat in front of us. The guy with the face tattoos twitched a little bit.