Ada's Rules (15 page)

Mason was a black man who had lived all his life among
white people and plastic surgery and diets and prosperity—he would expect her to look good at fifty. And now he lived in Tinseltown, La-La Land, Hollyweird. Every little bit she had fallen away from good would be a disappointment.

The pounds she had lost wouldn't change that. Wouldn't change the tags on her neck, the lines on her forehead; wouldn't vanish the age and time freckles on her cheeks or banish the bags under her eyes. I am going because I don't like pipe dreams, she thought. I am going because there is a possibility he will want me as I am now. And the only way I would have him is if he wanted me now—but it is not a large possibility. There is a large possibility he won't recognize me.

On her morning walk she had concluded she would wear the same ole, same ole: Juicy sweats and Burberry raincoat. In honor of the occasion she would lace on her lucky shoes, her high-top Converse All-Stars. And she would break out the unworn underwear the girls had bought their mama for her last birthday. At long last, she would squeeze into the brown-and-black tiger-striped panties and bra. The point wasn't that Matt Mason would see her tiger stripes. He wouldn't. But he might see the oomph they gave Ada. And she would wear the same perfume she had worn when she had dated Matt Mason, Opium.

Wearing the underwear her daughters had bought her with the perfume Matt Mason had long ago picked out for her seemed just a tad disloyal to Preach. Ada liked that. She hoped it would be significant enough transgression to get transgression out of her system.

Their first and only Valentine's Day together Matt Mason
had bought Opium perfume for her and taken her to eat Chinese food. She would wear Opium and they would go to P.F. Chang's and eat a ridiculously high-calorie, high-carb lunch, and he would see she had turned into an old cow, and this whole thing would be over.

Right. She was ready for over. She was tired of everything. Tired of going out to the lake to see her parents, who didn't see her. Tired of staying married to Preach and not asking the hard questions about what he was doing elsewhere that he wasn't doing at home. Tired of the fantasizing to get through reality. Tired of the diet. Tired of the exercising. Tired of the worrying about the girls. Tired of living in a house they did not own. She was tired of all that, and she wasn't afraid of dying. She wanted to climb up to the top of her green metal roof and jump off—except that would be too exhibitionistic. She wondered if cuddling into a curvy road on a wet night and a tree was not a more dignified way of dealing with exhaustion and unexpressed mourning than feigning amnesia. Whatever. She simply was not pretty enough to see her old beau yet. And the man who thought she was pretty enough, Preach, she was about to wrong. It was all messed up. But there was not a power on earth that would have stopped her from meeting Matt Mason at the P.F. Chang's at eleven o'clock.

For once she was letting herself be impatient. She had to know now. Her beauty clock was ticking down.

She had wanted to get to the restaurant first. She wanted the table to hide some of her blutter. If he didn't see her standing until he had fallen under the spell of nostalgia, she might pull
him into her rebound infatuation. Unfortunately, he had arrived before her. She was early. He was earlier. Perhaps he too was eager.

She recognized him, at once, from across the room. She told the hostess she was with a party already seated. The hostess had said she didn't have one. What she meant was, she didn't have one she thought Ada belonged to. Ada silently said, That fixes you fine for thinking about cheating. Out loud she said, “I'll just dash into the bathroom while I'm waiting.” Her plan was to veer near Mason's table and get a closer look. If he didn't recognize her, she was leaving. After she was safely in her car, and safely out of the parking lot, and safely back into the center of her boring life, she could call Mason from her cell phone and chirp, “Church emergency, I'm so sorry.”

She started her slow walk toward him. He was seated as she had planned to be seated, on the banquette side looking out. His coat, also a Burberry, was neatly folded beside him as she had planned to fold hers. And he was wearing Converse All-Stars, just like hers. She tried to remember if he wore them back then. She didn't think so.

Matt Mason sat at a table with a smile so bright white it had to have been created by a cosmetic dentist. He looked like a cross between a professor and a cowboy, like someone Ada watched on late-night talk television waiting for Preach to come home.

He wore jeans and a blue blazer and a white shirt. His unlined face was tanned a browner shade of chestnut than Ada remembered. She imagined the burnished skin came from the years of practicing his capoeira
ginga
and leg sweeps and knee
strikes in public parks beneath the western sun. He looked almost alarmingly young and fit. He didn't seem to recognize her. Proof. Finally she had proof. The years had been too unkind. She decided to risk getting close enough to get a good long gaze at him and perhaps a whiff of his cologne. Then she would walk on. Or maybe her perfume, the old perfume he had bought her years before, would tremble a memory.

It didn't. He was alternating texting and gazing about, but he took no notice of Ada. She had veered away from his table and was almost to the toilets when he called out her name and stood. She had to walk twenty feet with Mason smiling right at every pound of her.

As she approached, he opened his arms wide. She stopped walking. He gave her a “what's this?” shrug, then opened his arms wide again. She didn't run to him, but she got to him quick. He wrapped her in his arms and squeezed. Then he dropped his arms and stepped back so he could stroke her chin with his index finger, just like he had done when they were young and in love and in public. She blushed, and she knew it. This heat on her face was not a flush or a flash.

He took her by the hand, then he kissed that hand. She found herself standing on her tiptoes and giving him a peck on the lips to stop him from kissing the other hand.

“Woman! It is
good
to see you!”

“It is?”

“For sure!”

“I didn't think you'd recognize—”

“I would forget my name before I forgot your face.”

“You promised me that once.”

“And I keep my promises.”

Ada took a half step back from Mason. He immediately closed the distance with a step toward her. They were closer than they had been. She could smell him. He smelled like Lifebuoy soap, and Altoids and smoke, like her college days.

“I didn't think you'd be a promise-keeping man.”

“You didn't give me a chance to find out.”

“I didn't give you a lot of things.”

“Virginity at the top of the list.” Ada blushed and hot-flashed at the same moment. She felt a thousand degrees. Mason grinned. “I guess people don't use those kind of words when they talk to the preacher's wife.”

He leaned in and kissed her on the cheekbone. He pulled out her chair; she sat down and he sat down. She smiled tentatively. She was trembling.

“It's nice someone can forget I'm ‘the preacher's wife.'”

“As long as you don't forget.”

“No worry there.”

He reached for her hands across the table. She gave them to him for half a second, then squeezed his hands and dropped hers safely into her lap. She told herself he was under a delusion she and Preach had some money to contribute to the alumni fund. She told herself not to believe what she was seeing—that Mason was seeing Ada with old eyes.

“You always be my Baby Boo.”

“Boo grown old.”

“Boo grown lush.”

“I thought you liked skinny little girls.”

“A long time ago.”

“Your wife is tiny.”

“Ex-wife. She got me over itty-bitty women.”

“I heard you divorced, I'm so sorry.” Ada said this sincerely, said it in her preacher's wife voice.

“Don't be. She turned into one mean skinny hungry heifer.”

“I'm still sorry.”

“How's Lucius?”

“Wonderful.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Great.”

“You had kids.”

“And you didn't.”

The dangerous moment had passed. It was just behind them. But it was there, a shared giddiness neither had anticipated. The funny way they were wearing the same coat and the same shoes had sparked it. The way he recognized her perfume kept the fire going.

“You know, I've bought so much of that perfume trying to get other ladies to smell like you.”

They both ordered lettuce wraps and eggplant and chicken and green peach tea and white rice and a plate of orange slices to be served early. When he opened his chopsticks, she remembered him teaching her how to use chopsticks. That was another dangerous moment. When Ada had mastered the sticks, Mason let her eat rice with chopsticks off his belly.

They had done many kinds of “everything but”—and food had been at the center of the best part. They had played with body paints and bubbles, but they liked the food—from a plastic
honey bear, to warm doughnuts, to popsicles, to the rice and chopsticks—best.

Until the moment Mason kissed her cheekbone, Ada had put these memories away. Or rather Preach had pushed them away. After marriage, after feeling Preach push into the center of her, after feeling an orgasm that began in her cervix, a yielding that was not begun on the surface of her—on the tip of her tongue or the pink curve of her most sensitive lady parts—but in her soul, she dismissed all the sex play of earlier days, all sex play begun on her surface, as babyish.

Watching Mason deftly pick up a section of orange with his chopsticks, she was no longer sure. She and Matt Mason had bathed each other, and painted on each other, and licked and bit and wrestled, had cuddled and rocked and dreamed in each other's arms, and they had woken up to kiss for hours. Twenty-five years later she believed she wanted his penis but had been afraid to have it. Even way back then, she knew he'd be a hard dog to keep under the porch.

Now she knew all men were.

Mason was starting to talk about the research he was planning to do in Indianola when the food arrived. Between bites of their shared lettuce wraps she told him that one of her daughters was living down in Cleveland, Mississippi. He said he had a house in Greenville.

“That explains it.”

“What?”

“How you got so … southern.”

“What was I before?”

“Something different.”

“I started listening to the blues after you broke my heart.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It's the truth. All you left me was a stack of records and a record player you didn't want, and I started listening and pretending you were in the next room.”

“Western, you were western.”

“I'm still western. You are a blues royalty. Your grandfather's people lived on the Dockery Plantation.”

“Yep.”

“And you were born in a cotton field near Mound Bayou?”

“Yep.”

“How did I let you get away?”

“Back then it didn't matter I was blues royalty.”

“And …”

“You were too aggressive.”

“Is that a way of saying too wild?”

“It's a way of saying too
sumthin'.
”

“If you were
sumthin'
too, we could ride down to Moorhead, wait for darkness, and do what we didn't do way back when, on the crossroads.”

“Now you sound straight Delta crazy.”

“Naw, for real, all I'm saying, Lucius is a lucky man.”

“You tell him that.”

They smiled and got back to eating and smaller talk. He kept her cup full of green peach tea. They picked at the eggplant and the chicken. They were too busy smiling at each other to eat. They were taking the meal real slow. Ada had read that eating slowly helped you lose weight. She had never tried it before. Now she knew. Slow is a good way to eat.

Eventually the waitress brought the check, Mason grabbed it, and the conversation turned back to Memphis Minnie and Mississippi John Hurt and Little Milton and where to find the best tamales in the Delta.

When he finally checked his watch, when she told him there was no time to bop on down to her parents', that he should hit the road, an electric conversation came to an end. He said maybe he'd catch her on the flip-flop when he passed back through Nashville to fly back to Los Angeles.

“Absolutely,” Ada lied.

She closed the car door after she hugged Mason good-bye, excited by lying—and taking a new pleasure in her pounds.

The years had not been kind to her, but her almost lover's eyes had been kind. He saw her through the eyes of their history. A female wanting to be coaxed across a line. He saw her as she had been to him at their very beginning. And he let her see that he saw all that. Silently she thanked him for noting she wanted something.

The world might think him a professor, an expert on blues ethnomusicality. She knew he was a frontiersman. She saw him. And he liked what she saw. And now, with more than half a century on her, and her days of passionate gifting rapidly passing, she liked seeing herself in his eyes.

But Ada wished he had not come just then. She had liked sitting with Mason over a Chinese meal wearing the same perfume he had bought her thirty years before too much. She wanted it still ahead of her.

After tugging on her seat belt, she touched both the places he had kissed on her cheek. She let herself feel the echoing
tingle at her waist, the place where his fingertips had caught hold of her sweet brown belly, as she wondered how seeing him again, when she had lost the next twenty-five pounds, could possibly get any better.

Then she knew. As she pulled out of the P.F. Chang's parking lot, she imagined Mason gazing at her naked large body and smiling. She imagined him entering it. On her way to KidPlay she stopped at Burger-Up and ate an Olive and Sinclair brownie with homemade ice cream and hot fudge sauce. She would be a blimp before she was a slut.