Keeping Secrets (23 page)

Well, but he
is
black, Emma.

Jesus Christ, I’m not blind. I can see that. My God, I bet he tastes like homemade chocolate ice cream.

Was the man next to him, the man he seemed to be arguing with, no, now they were laughing, was that his father? No, the older man was much too dark. But maybe the handsome man’s mother was white.

Oh, Emma, you’re such an expert, aren’t you? Why, in your whole lifetime you’ve dated one black man. How many blacks do you even know, except at school?

This isn’t a sociology lesson. This is sex.

Well, in that case, let’s get down to it. Do you think he’s so handsome
because
he’s black? Because he’s forbidden?

Forbidden by whom? This is 1970. This is California. This isn’t West Cypress, for Christ’s sake.

Come on, Emma. Don’t you think he’s kind of scary? So big and dark? Doesn’t he conjure up your every little-white-girl fantasy?

Oh, no. I bet he’s intelligent, even brilliant. I bet he’s a nuclear physicist over at Livermore.

You do not. You think he looks like something you’d like to wallow in for a few days even if he couldn’t say an intelligible word. And you think he probably has a lovely cock.

At that Emma burst out laughing, sitting there alone holding a soup spoon.

A few minutes later, having paid her check, she was racing back up the steps of the restaurant. As if she weren’t already late enough she’d left her satchel of papers under the table.

Inside, Jesse and Clifton were walking toward the door.

“Think about what I said.”

“I will, old man, but lighten up. You’re double-dogging me.”

With that, Jesse shoved the front door. On the other side, Emma dropped her keys, leaned over to pick them up.

“Jesus, are you okay? Are you hurt?” The pretty blonde was crumpled over with a hand to her forehead. “Here, let me help you up.”

“No, really, I’m fine.”

Jesse didn’t think so. He gripped her with an arm around the waist and lifted her to her feet.

“Do you want to lie down?”

“No.” But inside she was reeling. It was true you saw stars.

“Let’s take her inside and set her down.” Clifton suggested. “And we’ll call a doctor.”

“No, no…I mean…yes, I’ll lie down…but no doctor.”

She was even prettier up close, soft, and this moment, in his arms, limp, loose as a goose. He had heard her Southern accent. Weren’t all Southern women helpless?

Clifton caught his eye, and was that? Yes, it was, a wink. Jesse looked down at this woman. Holding her didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Then Clifton opened the door wide, and Jesse swooped Emma up in his arms.

“No, I can—”

“Shhhh.” He carried her up up up the foyer steps.

My God, he was strong. What a lovely voice he had. She felt giddy. Miss Scarlett, she thought, you’ve just had a bit of brain damage, you silly.

* * *

Jesse ordered another drink. Across from him Emma shook her head. They were still in the bar of the Claremont House. She was playing with the straw in her ginger ale.

He didn’t want to move. He was afraid even to excuse himself to the men’s room, for fear he might break the spell. He wanted to keep her talking, so he crossed his legs, held his water and his breath.

Her blue eyes, bright and clear as Crater Lake, were truly, as the people who said those things said, mirrors of her soul. She had nowhere to hide behind those eyes. As she talked, weaving stories the likes of which he’d never heard, through them flickered as clearly as subtitles on a screen joy, hope, fear, disappointment, pain. Behind those beautiful blue windows lived a woman who could never pull her shades, tell a lie, and get away with it.

He watched her slender hands flutter. She could tell stories for the deaf. Every once in a while her fingers crept up and brushed her long pale hair. She flung it back behind her ears, grabbed it with one hand and twisted it atop her head, then let it fall like water down into a golden pool on her shoulders again.

He didn’t think she knew she did that.

“You’re a very pretty woman,” he said.

She brushed the compliment off as if it were lint. But he saw, for just a moment, inside those eyes, Emma smile, blush and hold her breath. Me, pretty? Yes, you, his eyes smiled back, but the moment was gone, had passed, as Emma’s words raced on, the honeyed sounds filling the bar’s smoky air with the smell of magnolias and hot summer evenings until she hit the word “New York.” Only New Yorkers said it like that.

“How long did you live there?”

“Two, three years.” She waved a hand as if a year, more or less, made no difference.

Jesse had visited New York, of course, its museums, galleries. He had always found it exciting. But he could never imagine leaving California for all that frozen unyielding and judgmental concrete.

But look at this golden girl before him, sipping ginger ale through a straw. She’d lived in New York as if it were nothing and had survived to tell the tale.

“And why did you move to New York from…Atlanta?”

“Correct, Atlanta.” She nodded and he felt her approval for his having listened well.

He was already memorizing her words so that he could take them home with him, run his tongue over their sounds late at night.

“It’s a long story.” She hesitated.

“Go on.”

“Well. Atlanta seemed so big when I first got there, after I left West Cypress.”

She said her hometown’s name as if she were saying “Ibiza” or “Saint Moritz.”
West Cypress
. The initiated would know that hamlet. It was an in-joke, between Emma and herself.

“And then all of a sudden, after three years, it started to feel like a small town.”

“How can you keep ’em down in Atlanta after they’ve seen New York?”

“That
was
part of it. But then, too, I needed to get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Do I smell a rat in this scenario? Or just a broken heart?”

“A little of both, I guess. The second year I was in Atlanta, I was teaching composition at this downtown college, and one of my students, she was about a year younger than I, said, ‘My brother Will’s coming back to town, and when he does, you’ve got to meet him.’ Sure, sure, I said, and then one day I was waltzing down the hall toward my office, and leaning against the door was the—” Emma stopped herself then, as she rarely did, for usually she just blundered on, never letting tact get in the way of a good line.

“Yessss?” Jesse asked with a grin. Though he wasn’t so sure he wanted to hear the rest of this story.

“Was the handsomest man I’ve ever seen,” was how she usually finished that line. But sitting there, looking at Jesse, she’d have to say handsomest white man.

And, lordy, Will had been that. Tall and lanky and blond, his hair almost white, with deep-green eyes. It had been Katie-bar-the-door-love-at-first-sight throughout one of those springs in Atlanta, well, Emma thought every spring was like that there, with the lilacs, azaleas, wisteria and dogwood blooming all at one time until the air was so heavy with their perfume that the whole city smelled like sex. Springtime in Atlanta made Emma crazier than thunderstorms in West Cypress ever had. And watching Will enter a room was ten times more exciting than lightning flashing. She was positively disoriented with love, perfume and lust. Between the spring and Will, all she did was sit on her back steps with him and kiss, spoon, then together they’d lie naked in her bed under the moonlight. Every once in a while she’d get a fit on her, jump into her little beat-up convertible and drive hell for leather until she got to the Chattahoochee River. She almost drove off into it several times after Will announced one morning that he thought he’d be moving on.

“I guess I deserved the broken heart,” she said now to Jesse. “Reckon in the balance of things it was my just desserts for Bernie.”

Jesse remembered Bernie. She’d mentioned him about twelve stories back.

“But I tell you what. I like to have died.” When Emma reminisced about old times she reverted to Southern.

“Cut you up bad?”

“Something terrible. It drove me nuts, see, that I never could convince Will that I truly loved him. He said he always felt that I was holding something back. That I really had something else in mind, was on some other track.”

“Was that true?”

“No. It wasn’t.” She looked Jesse squarely in his big brown eyes and wondered, Why the hell am I telling this man this? Then, “Will was the love of my life. But I know what he was talking about—well, I sort of know.”

What Emma knew, even at twenty-one, was that she had the ability to confound the bejesus out of men. But she never quite got the mechanics of their quandary. She’d tell them exactly what was on her mind, good or bad, Emma was frank, up front, forthright, way beyond a fault. And that either unnerved them completely, so that they turned and ran immediately for the shelter of some softer, gentler, easier woman’s skirts, or, like Will, himself no uncomplicated man, they thought the honesty was itself a cover.

“It’s a weapon, Emma,” he’d said, frowning at her. “It’s all about control. It’s a way of keeping it all in your hands, calling the shots, and in the end nobody really gets close to you.”

Well, Jesse thought, I know what
that’s
all about. But he couldn’t imagine that he’d ever admit it, not the way Emma did—or was that not exactly what she was talking about?

“I really wanted to let Will in,” she said to Jesse.

“So why didn’t you?”

Emma shrugged. Her smile was wry. “I guess I didn’t know how.”

“And since then?”

“Since then I’ve rarely met anyone that I didn’t, in the middle of the first date, think I’d rather be home washing my hair.”

Didn’t she know, Jesse wondered, that she should never
ever
say things like that to a man, who would ask himself, as he did, whether she wished she were home washing her hair right now?

“So you left Atlanta because of Will?”

“Well, I was still mourning for him a year later, couldn’t figure out what the hell I wanted to do, so I spent a lot of time feeding the ducks in Piedmont Park, pining and thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

“Where I wanted to be. I just felt so restless. By then Will had married somebody else and I’d sat behind them once at the movies. When she stood up and I saw she was pregnant, I was sick. I said to myself, Girl, this is over, done, you’ve got to figure out your next step. What do you want? Who the hell are you? I decided that if I went somewhere else, somewhere big like New York, one day I would turn a corner, run into someone on the street, and it would be me.”

She still carried a calling card that read: “Emma Fine, Traveling.” It was a Holly Golightly conceit, but it had fit then, and did yet, for Emma was still traveling and still looking.

“So Atlanta wasn’t the place to find yourself?”

“Nope, never bumped into her like I bumped into you.” They both smiled, and Emma touched the lump on her forehead that was turning purplish black.

Jesse waited. He had already learned, in the past almost three hours, that she would come full circle if he’d just wait. Was this Southern, he wondered, her way of talking that flung bits of a story way out like a wide net and then took its own sweet time in pulling them back? Or was it Emma?

“But before I pulled up stakes, and I don’t think this was very logical, nor was it very kind, I back-pedaled a little before moving on down the road that third spring. I went to see Bernie.”

“Can we blame it on the azaleas? Were they blooming that spring, too?”

“They were,” she laughed. “We could say I was blossom crazed.”

“And what happened? Bernie shot you? Told you to jump off the Chattahoochee Bridge? Was married?”

Emma ignored him, refusing to ruin a perfectly good story by rushing the punch line. She took her own sweet time telling him how she’d visited Bernie in Miami, how he’d told her that he had a fiancée, thank you, and didn’t need her stepping on his heart and mashing it flat again, how he thought she ought to be talking with Herman anyway, not him.

“I think you got the wrong Graubart here, sweetie,” was how he put it. “It’s my old man, not me, who answered your questions when you were confused. You ought to go see him anyway.”

For Herman was still alive; he hadn’t died as Mary Ann had predicted, but he wasn’t well.

“So you went to see Herman?” Jesse asked.

“No, I didn’t. And that’s something I’ll always regret. I didn’t feel like going to West Cypress. So I went back to feeding those goddamned ducks in Piedmont Park. They were beginning to look like blimps. And only a week later the call came from Bern. It was forever too late to ask Herman’s advice about anything.”

Emma stared off into space for a while, picturing Herman in his white baseball cap.

“And then?” Jessie’s voice was soft.

“When he died? I went crazy. Got in my car and ran away up to north Georgia. Ever been there?”

Jesse shook his head.

“Beautiful country. Foothills of the Smokies, blue-hazed. Not, of course, that beauty made much difference in the state of mind I was in.
Berserk
. I bought half a case of bourbon and a sackful of Hersheys, crackers and tuna fish. I checked into a motel in a town called Helen, stayed there for a week, drinking, listening to the radio, mourning Herman who was like my dad, I mean, not like
my
dad, because Herman talked to me and my daddy hardly does, but you know what I mean. Anyway, outside the sign flashed off and on: otel, otel, otel. Herman would have loved it, the way I sat shivah for him. But then he always thought everything I did was wonderful. Except instead of bourbon, he’d have preferred schnapps.”