Heads of the Colored People(45)

Todd got really mad at me, completely overreacted one day at Venice Beach, and it was the beginning of the end. A few weeks before, he said he didn’t think we should move in together, yet. I noticed the wide space between “together” and “yet.”

He hadn’t been to Venice since before his second tour, and it was one of those days when the beach is so cold, all you want to do is sit close to someone and build a bonfire and make your own humidity.

When he was a kid, Todd’s dad would take him to Venice a couple of times a month to watch the street performers and ride the Ferris wheel. Todd grew up near Huntington Beach, but his dad preferred Venice, “where all the color is.” They’d get hot dogs with extra onions and mustard and eat them while they walked along the shore.

I’d wanted to surprise him, make him feel better after the problems we’d been having, but before we even reached the exit on the 10, he guessed where we were going.

“Babe, what are you doing?” He placed his palm over my knuckles as I shifted gears and merged right.

“We’ll just have a nice day, walk around.” I stifled the urge to correct myself. None of the Todds liked when I did that.

“I don’t want to have to push against a big crowd today,” he said, and I could tell he was in one of those moods, the kind where you couldn’t reason with him much or he’d just shut down.

I already had to practically beg him to let me take him anywhere. “I’ll clear all the people out of the way for you by making a beeping sound like a truck backing out,” I said.

“And I’ll be sure to run over your foot.”

“Come on. We’re here now. We can get some gelato and frozen lemonade, maybe a hot dog. I’ll let you buy me a fake Chanel purse.”

He smiled with one corner of his mouth. I snagged a sweet handicap space between the best side of the pier and the Ferris wheel.

? ? ?

THE WEEK BEFORE the beach, when I stayed over at his place, he’d asked, out of the blue, “Can you stop doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Staring at them.”

I had rested my head on his stomach, examining the cracks in the scar where one of his legs used to be, but I played dumb when he called me out. “What?”

He sat up and wriggled my head away from him. “Would you even date me if things were reversed?”

I sighed, dramatically, because I didn’t want to get analytical. “You mean if I had no legs—” I tried to invert the image of us—me hunched in a wheelchair with ebony trim, like a defeated Blanche Hudson, only black and young and more beautiful, him hovering over me, studying the striations of the wounds.

He interrupted, “I mean if you had no legs, and I always reminded you of it, or if you had, like, really bad skin, and I always stared at it, pretending I’m looking at something else.”

“I don’t do that,” I said. “If anything, I remind you of how special you are, not special-special, you know, but, like, great-special.”

“You don’t get it,” he said.

“Get what?”

“It’s—it’s like you always expect me to be grateful, like you’re doing me a favor.”

Later, I thought, wasn’t that what he did when he bought Chelsea and all the girls before me all those expensive things? At the time, I said, “Grateful for what?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” he said, and rolled over with his back to me. A cold stump bumped against my calf under the covers.

? ? ?

HE BOBBED HIS head and threw a fiver at three break-dancing kids, and I knew we would have a good time. He fit awkwardly into most of the shops, even with ramps, but the foot traffic on the pier parted easily for us, anticipating the space of the wheelchair, making a clearing. People smiled directly at us. I wished Todd had worn his uniform, but he never wore it anymore.

The gasp of a little girl disrupted my bargaining with a street vendor who swore her carvings were made of real balsam. The little girl wore pink barrettes and took her finger out of her mouth to point at Todd’s legs, or the lack of them. “Look,” she said. Her mother nodded without acknowledging Todd. “Look,” the girl repeated, now tugging her mother’s sweater.

Todd said nothing. He could be passive in public.

I intervened. “Look,” I mocked. “Look. What a funny-looking girl. You should really teach your kid how to behave,” I said to the mother. “He’s a real person.”

The mother smacked her lips and got up in my face, but I didn’t hear what she said because Todd grabbed my arm so hard that I almost fell into his lap.

“She’s fine,” he said to the mother. “Sorry about this.”

“Why are you apologizing to her?” I started to get a little loud, but this was justifiable anger. The mother made unintelligible sounds as people stared.

“We’re fine. Excuse me, everyone.” Todd wheeled away. I had no choice but to follow.

We plowed on silently then, the crowd sluggish, blocking the path.

“Can we still get a hot dog?” I asked after a while, bending to look into his face.

Todd pinched his lips together so tightly it looked like his teeth were gone, too.

“Please, it’s all I wanted for the day.”