Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 58

But she still took care of her business, the paper work and all, you know. Once, I saw Charles come into the store and she needed him to sign a few things, if you please, and he took them papers and bragged to the fellas in the store that "See, I got to sign things around here to keep things goin." He didn't even read them, just waved his hand and signed them and handed them to Mary without even looking at her, like she was a secretary or something, and went on out and drove off with a big grin looking 50 worth of importance, to me anyway.

Well, Mary just kep getting worse off. I told her to see a doctor and she said she had in the big city and she had something they couldn't cure but she wish I wouldn't tell n.o.body, so I didn't. But I felt so bad for her I loved her. I knew whatever was killing her was started by a heavy sad heart, shaking hands, a sore spirit, hot tears, deep, heavy sighs, hurtful swallows and oh, you know, all them kinda things.

Soon she had to stay home in bed. Wasn't no long sickness though, I could see she was going fast. Near the end, one day I saw her out in her back yard picking up rocks and I knew the dear soul must be losing her mind also and I took her back in the house and tried to get her to let loose the rocks and throw them away, but she wouldn't let go. She was sick but she was strong in her hands, from all that work, I guess, she just held on to them, so I said, "s.h.i.+t, you ain't never had too much you wanted to hold on to so hold the rocks if that what you want!" And she did.

Now, she asked Charles to take Maybelline back to the city to get the rest of Maybelline's things to move down there and Charles didn't mind at all cause I had seen him looking that Maybelline upways, downways, and both sideways and I could tell he liked what he saw and so could Maybelline cause she was always posing or prancing. Anyway, they went for a day, one night and back the next day. Before they went, I saw Charles sit on the side of Mary's bed and, first time I ever saw him do it, take her hand and hold it, then bend down and kiss her on the forehead. Musta been thinking bout what he was going to do to Maybelline while they was gone, but anyway, I'm glad he did do it. It brought tears to Mary's eyes. Then, they were gone and before they got back, Mary was gone.

I have to stop a minute cause everytime I think of that sweet woman . . .

She had told me what to do, the funeral and all, so I had taken care of some of those things and Mary was already gone to the funeral home and the funeral was the next day.

When they come home or back, whatever!, all they had to do was get ready to go to the parlor. I don't know when or nothing like that, but when Charles went to the closet to get something to wear, the closet was bare, except for a note: "Dear Charles," it say, "They gone to the Salvation Army just like you always say you want. Yours truly, Mary."

Now that man run all over trying to find some way to get them back but they was nice things and somebody had done bought them or either kept them, you know what I mean? Then, he rush over to the bank to get some money and found out his name wasn't on the account no more! The manager gave him a letter say: "Dear Charles, You told me so many times you don't need me or nothing that is mine. Not going to force you to do nothing you don't want to do! Always, Mary."

His named was replaced with Maybelline's so naturally he went to see her at the store. She say sure, and give him $50 and he say, "Come go with me and help me pick it out," and she say she ain't got time. So he told her take time. She say. "I got to take care this business and close the store for the funeral." He say, "I'll close the store, this ain't your business to worry about." She say, "This my store." He say, "Are you crazy?" She say, "I ain't crazy. I'm the boss!" He say, "I'm Mary's husband, what's here is mine!" She say, "That's true, but this store ain't hers, it's mine! I bought it from her!" He say, "With what? You can't afford to buy no store as nice as this!" She say, "Mary lent me the money; it's all legal; lawyer and everything!" He say, "How you gon' pay her back? You got to pay me, b.i.t.c.h!" She say, "No . . . no . . . when Mary died, all debt clear." He say, "I'll see about that!" She say, "Here, here the lawyer's name and number." He s.n.a.t.c.hed it and left. He musta found out she was right and it was legal cause I never heard no more about it.

Now everybody bringing food and all, the house was full, but I was among the last to go and when Charles got ready to go to bed he say he wasn't going to sleep in the room Mary died in and he went into the third bedroom. I heard him holler and went in there and the covers was pulled back and the bed was full of rocks . . . and a note say: "Dear Charles, Tried to get what you wanted, couldn't carry no boulder, honest. Yours, Mary." Me, I just left.

Next morning he opens the food cupboard and it was almost empty, but for a note and note say: "Dear Charles, here is 30 days supply of food. Waste that too. Yours, Mary." I'm telling you, his life was going upside down. He and Maybelline stayed in that house alone together and that old Charles musta had something going on that was alright cause pretty soon they were married. I knew he thought he was marrying that store again, but let me tell you, Maybelline was pretty and fleshy but she couldn't count and didn't like to pay bills or the workers on that little piece of land of Mary's and pretty soon she was broke and the store was closed cause nothing wasn't in there but some old brown dead lettuce and turned up carrots and empty soda bottles and tired squashy tomatoes didn't n.o.body want. Charles didn't have nothing but an almost empty house. They cussed and fought and she finally left saying she wasn't really his wife cause she didn't have no divorce from her last husbands! So there!

Now, that ought to be all but let me finish telling you this cause I got to go now and see bout my own life.

Exactly a year pa.s.sed from the day Mary had pa.s.sed and a white lady and a black lady came to Mary's house with some papers and I heard a lot of hollering and shouting after a bit and Charles was putting them out. They waved those papers and said they would be back . . . and they did, a week later, with the Sheriff. Seems like Mary had give Charles one year to live there in the house and then it was to go, all legally, to be a orphan home for black children.

Welllll, when everything was over, I saw him sitting outside in his car, kinda raggedy now, just sitting there looking at the house. I took a deep breath and went to my dresser and got out the envelope Mary had give me to give him one year from her death, at this time. I looked at it awhile thinking bout all that had happened and feeling kind of sorry for Charles till I remembered we hoe our own rows and what we plants there, we picks. So I went on out and handed him the envelope through the car window. He rolled me red eyes and a dirty look and opened the envelope and saw a one hundred dollar bill and . . . a note. He read it with a sad, sad look on his face. "Dear Charles, here is $100. Take all the nothing you want and in a year you'll have everything. Yours truly, your dead wife, Mary." Well, he just sat there a minute, staring at the money and the note, then started his car up and slowly drove away without so much as "good-by." Going somewhere to spend that money I guess, or just stop and stare off into s.p.a.ce . . . Whatever!

Are You Experienced?

BY DANZY SENNA.

Way back in 1969, there was this girl named Josephine, a Negro by race, but pale as b.u.t.ter, with straight black hair that fell to her waist. Everybody called her Jo.

She was married to a pretty boy named Charles, a failed musician, whom once upon a time she had loved something awful. Now she only needed him.

One cold week in December he decided Jo wasn't pretty enough, white enough, woman enough for him. He blew her week's earnings on the horses, and disappeared. Rumor had it that he had run off with a white chick named Barbara, which was certainly possible. White girls were always falling for him.

He left Jo without even a dollar for food or diapers for their three year old son, Diego.

She trembled with rage as she called the person she always called in moments like this: her best childhood friend, Carol Anne, who lived in the city.

"Girl," Carol Anne sighed when she'd finished her story, "You gone and married a bulls.h.i.+t artist. You need to leave his a.s.s. You need to get your behind to the city, today."

"But what about the kid?" Jo said, sniffling, eyeing the boy where he sat banging blocks across the room.

"Leave him with Charlie's mother," Carol Anne said, without pause. "That's what grandma's are for. She'll spoil the child senseless and he won't notice anything's wrong. Give yourself a few days, Jo. I'll show you what you're missing. I'll show you a good time."

So Jo, whispering curses under her breath at her missing husband, did as her friend had told her. She packed a bag of clothes and diapers for Diego and brought him to his Grandma Louise on the other side of town. The old woman did not ask questions. She knew her son was no good. Jo told her she'd be gone a few days. Would the kid be okay with her? The old woman was happy to take him in. And he seemed content to sit in front of her black-and-white television, shoving cookies in his mouth. He did not pull his eyes away from the cartoon to say goodbye.

Jo left for New York that afternoon without man or child and, when the bus pulled away from the depot, she felt her rage transform into a giddy, girlish excitement, something she had not felt in a long, long time. She glimpsed her face in the window beside her and remembered that she was not bad looking. She said to her own reflection, "Two can play at this game."

Jo's girlfriend, Carol Anne, lived the life she had not chosen. Carol Anne was happily unmarried, childless, and worked designing costumes for rock musicians and Broadway musicals. She was a caramel colored girl with a light brown afro and the long muscular legs of a track star. The two women had grown up together in the nation's capital. They'd spent their teenage years plotting their escape from what they called "Boojie-dom." They considered themselves sisters-fellow conspirators in their escape from that high yellow prison.

They were both considered good looking, in a similar hinkety way. Lucky for them they had never had the same taste in men. No cause for conflict.

Carol Anne had loved white boys from the beginning. In their arms she could be anybody, a mystery girl with no past and no discernable future. While brothers could see right through her, with white boys she could affect accents, don costumes, rewrite history for herself-and never be called out on her lies. With this one she was the daughter of a Brazilian sailor. With that one she was the half-caste child of an Indian aristocrat and a Nigerian princess. With white boys, her life could be theatre. They encouraged her antics. Brothers, on the other hand, were always trying to make her behave.

Jo stuck closer to home. She had never much liked white boys. They had always seemed to her an alien species-their bodies could stand out in the dark. She had always had a preference for brothers. Not the uptight, Boojie boys she had grown up with, but men two shades darker than she, revolutionaries, who could teach her a thing or two about the world, the streets.

And so it had seemed strange that in the end she'd married a brother who wasn't dark at all. The moody and mysterious Charles Moore was paler than a brown paper bag. But what he lacked in melanin, he made up for with att.i.tude. He was a jazz musician when she met him, with high ideas about how he was gonna conquer the world without ever trying. He was a first generation mulatto, the son of a brown-skinned housecleaner mother, and an anonymous white father. Jo had seen romance in his tragedy, splendor in his split roots.

Jo's family saw none of the allure. They had worked so hard to raise Jo up right, to send her to college, and at the end of the day, she had come home with this ragam.u.f.fin, bohemian, misfit b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Everything about him rubbed them wrong: the way he smoked those small brown cigarettes incessantly, cupped his mouth when he inhaled, the way he talked in a soft vague murmur about "the trouble with whitey." Jo's mother told her after dinner the night they met him: "Josephine, you can't trust them mixed bloods. They have too much anger, too much conflict running through their blood. Find yourself a good colored boy."

But Jo would hear none of it. She'd had enough of those over-bred puppy dogs her mother trotted out for her inspection-nice boys who were dry as toast at the end of the day.

When she'd told her mother she was marrying Charles, and dropping out of college to become a jazz singer, her mother seemed tired of fighting. She'd simply wrung her hands, looked heavenward, and said with a miserable smile: "Well at least he's got good hair. At least you'll make pretty babies."

In the early days of their union, Charles and Jo had been a team making music around the outskirts of the capital, and later in Boston at a small crowded jazz club on Tremont Street. But from the beginning it was clear: Jo's voice was better than Charles's playing. It wasn't that Charlie didn't have talent. He did, but it was talent without discipline. And he didn't s.h.i.+ne the way Jo did on stage. The moment she took the stage, a hush would fall over the audience and her voice, smoky and androgynous, would fill the s.p.a.ce with a remote yearning that could never be filled. Listening to her sing made one long for something indecipherable. Charles's horn, behind her, was just a background tune for her voice, nothing in itself. After a set, the boys and the girls would flock to the stage to compliment her. Charles would sit at the sidelines, rubbing a dirty cloth against his horn, glowering at his wife.

At first Jo had wanted to believe Charlies's failure was due to the alcohol or some inner torment that prevented him from being his best. She wanted to believe the reasons for his failure were complicated, traced back to his absent father and poverty-stricken youth.

But then one day, after a particularly bad show, it struck her: Charles was lazy. That was why he would never be great. He fancied himself a genius, and maybe he was, but he would never be more than mediocre. She had seen it so clearly she stopped breathing for a moment. Some people, she'd realized with a flash of lucidity, fall with a crash. Others, like Charlie, fall slowly, gently and slowly as a feather to their demise, so gradually they barely notice it happening. One day, they wake up, and they've hit the bottom. She thought, staring at her husband across the smoky nightclub air, that she would rather crash and burn any day of the week. There was nothing more horrifying to her than mediocrity. Nothing worse than a slow demise.

But she was loyal. She stuck by his side. Even when she had to stop singing, start working as a music teacher at a local public school to support them both and Charles had gotten a job as a cab driver (he said he wanted to feel he was moving somewhere, though he never got out of the car). Most nights, though, she came home to find him lying on the couch with a bottle of triple sec in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Sometimes, when he was sober and they would take the cab out and drive to the country, pretend they were really going on a trip. They would blast music, pa.s.s a joint between them, and giggle about the people they'd known in their club days, the wild things they'd seen.

But most of the time it wasn't like that. Most of the time they were fighting.

It didn't turn violent until after Diego was born.

The first time it happened she thought he'd lost control of his hand. She thought it had convulsed and ended up flying across her face. Holding her cheek she had stared at him silently as he turned away and shuffled back to the living room, muttering, "s.h.i.+t," under his breath. The second time it happened was outside a club, where he'd just given his lousiest and last performance. Like before he'd back-handed her, but this time when she fell he gave her a swift kick in the belly for good measure.

It was evening when Jo arrived at Carol Anne's crumbling studio in the Bowery. Carol Anne gave her a big perfumey hug and told Jo to forget about the Failed Musician, to lighten up and smoke a joint. "Girl, we're goin out tonight. A party. New York style baby. I'm gonna show you how the other half live."

She did Jo's makeup, dressed her up in a rainbow mini dress that showed off her slight figure, and braided her hair so she looked like a Navajo princess. Jo missed her baby boy with a pain that gnawed at her stomach, but she did as Carol Anne told her, and tried to feel her freedom.

The two women shared a joint and reminisced about their girlhood in D.C.-the clothes pins on their noses, the plaits in their hair-how far they'd wandered from all that. Linking arms, they'd leaned in towards one another against the icy wind, as they went out to meet the night.

As soon as they arrived at the party, in a tall doorman building overlooking Central Park, Jo felt out of place. The people there were in another league-dazzling and decadent, famous or at least pretending to be. She felt small and brown and dingy. As she stared at a blonde woman spinning circles in a sequined mini dress, she thought that she belonged at home, with her Failed Musician, and her little boy, Diego, who smelled of strawberry's behind his ears. But when she looked for Carol Anne, she was gone, swallowed up in the throngs, so Jo stood in a corner and anxiously sipped her champagne.

Later, somewhat tipsy, Jo wandered down the hall in search of a bathroom. Peeking in a door she saw a gaggle of white people surrounding one black man who sat like a king on a throne, his head tilted back and an expression that teetered between amus.e.m.e.nt and boredom. Jimi Hendrix. She recognized him immediately. She had listened to "Foxy Lady" fourteen times in a row one night. She had wanted to go to Woodstock, but the Failed Musician had said he didn't want to hang around with a bunch of filthy, greasy haired honkies who smelled like wet dogs.

The people who surrounded him looked like industry types, sycophants and handlers. They were talking to him excitedly, but he looked bored, smoking at tiny stub of his joint and tapping his foot impatiently. His heavy eyes caught hers at the door. He smiled, a strange, familiar smile, as if he had known her already, for years. The gaggle of white folks turned around and smiled at her as well, waved her toward them, as if they were offering her up to this sullen prince. She stepped inside the room and stood before him speechless. Everyone else was silent too, as if they were waiting for his verdict. His eyes roved up and down her slim yellow body, until, finally, he winked and said, "Hey sister. You lost?"

They slept together three times. Once that night, in the king sized water bed of the stranger who owned the apartment, and twice the next night, in his hotel suite at the Ritz. He said she reminded him of a world he had nearly forgotten. He traced his finger over her wide brown nipples and said she was a lovely little slip of a thing. She told him she was married to a Failed Musician who drank too much and sometimes slapped her upside her head. Naked beside him in the big slos.h.i.+ng bed, she showed him pictures of her little boy, Diego, and he admired the child, and said, giggling, he looked like a wet back. Before falling to sleep each night, she sang to Jimi with that smoky boy's voice of hers, and he told her, sleepily, that she had a voice that could make a grown man cry. On the third night, he asked her to come with him on the road. He told her he could make her a star. She only laughed, sadly, and told him it was too late for all that. She had a boy to go back to.

Then he was gone, and Jo was on a bus back home, where her husband had returned, tail between his legs, white girl discarded, ready to make peace. That first night back, she picked Diego up at his grandmother's house & the boy crawled all over her, kissing her face and pulling her hair, as if he were a hungry bird, and for a moment she was glad to be home.

The Failed Musician, strangely, did not suspect anything had gone on in his absence. He thought she had been pining for him at Carol Anne's apartment. Only later, much later, after her face had been smashed and put back together, would she utter the name of Jimi Hendrix.

Nine months pa.s.sed, and Jo grew. When the Failed Musician slapped her, she didn't even think of her own face, but only of her belly, s.h.i.+elding this child. On a wet September night in 1970, the baby was born at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Jo had been to that hospital two other times during her pregnancy-once at four months, for spot bleeding, and once, at six months, for a broken nose. Now, on her third trip in nine months, she gave birth to a red faced, howling, slippery, squinty eyed little thing who she wanted to name Cheyenne, but whom her husband insisted on calling Mabel, after his great aunt.

The child was nothing like her brother. She did not like to be touched, for one thing. While Diego clung to his mother, begged to sleep beside her at night, the little girl wiggled and squirmed from both her mother's and father's touch, as if she had her eyes on some other destiny from the start. While Diego hid under the table, sobbing and begging, "Stop, stop," whenever the Failed Musician went after Jo with his fist, the little girl would just watch them, study them, solemnly, unblinking, in such a way that seemed to shame even the Failed Musician himself.

Jo noticed that this was how the girl watched everybody: her friends, her teachers, the whole world-from a distance, wide-eyed, unblinking, as if committing an image that would soon be gone.

Jo loved the little girl, but feared her gaze. Whenever the girl stared at her, Jo would see herself-painfully clear-the way she walked perpetually tilted to the side, as if warding off an invisible blow. Watching herself through that child's eyes she saw that she was doing what she had swore never to do: she was falling slowly, in an endless gentle descent toward a place where she could not recognize herself.

Over the years, she studied her daughter closely for signs of the dead musical genius, looked for the features that would prove her royal lineage. And sometimes, when Jo was drunk and bruised and angry, she would drag the girl down into the darkened living room and make her dance with her, sleepy, confused, to "Purple Haze," until the sun came up and the high wore down and the truth shone through the curtains-revealing the Failed Musician in her daughter's pale face.

Group Solo.

BY SCOTT POULSON BRYANT.

Dad?" asked my son James. "How should you tell someone you don't love them anymore?"

James is an actor. He's on an afternoon soap opera that airs after the game show which, ironically, just fired me from my job as host. His character, named Radcliffe, is a spy who speaks seven languages (none of which, I like to tease him, is Ebonics) and Ebony magazine says he is rumored to be one of the highest paid blacks on TV. This explains the luxurious expanse of his lowerFifth Avenue apartment overlooking the entire southern tip of Manhattan on one end and the entire northern tip of Manhattan (and some of New Jersey) on the other end. His mother and I worked the Chitlin' Circuit for years before prime-time TV ever thought to call us; James went right from our house to Va.s.sar to daytime drama and this elaborate spread. During his four years at Va.s.sar, as a black boy in thrall to "art" and "acting" and "the cla.s.sics," he was, I thought, completely, adolescently loathsome. But I loved him, as I love him now. Besides, I believe the long hours and aesthetic vulgarity of daytime television have humbled him. Which was clear to me when he said, "Dad, how should you tell someone you don't love them anymore?"

This was the first time James had ever brought up his love life to me. Other than the day he told us he was gay when he was eighteen years old, he's never talked about his romantic involvements. I said, "Your mother is the only woman I've ever loved and I never had to tell her that."

"But Mom-"

"What?"

"I just thought you and Mom had, uh, done things."

"We have," I told him, offering a smile. "With each other."

"Oh."

James is a good actor, but he is not a good liar. He is not good at hiding things; he is not good at keeping secrets. I've spent a lot of time at James' apartment since I was fired from the show, my way of still spending time in Manhattan instead of brooding in Long Island. I like the track lighting, glaring like spotlights, and the silk curtains draped over the windows like they're hiding a stage; the dazzling stereo set-up where I play my Motown hits at full blast, the wall of fame hung with magazine covers featuring James' handsome face. I love it here. But I haven't spent a lot of time with James, considering his long hours on the set. Now here we were talking, spending quality time together and he wanted to talk about how to end a relations.h.i.+p. My handsome son, who is not a good liar, was trying to tell me something.

"This isn't about you, is it?" I said to him. "You trying to tell me something?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know."

He flipped a page in the script he'd been studying. Finally he said, "You need to find a job, Dad." He s.h.i.+fted on the couch, pulling his bare feet up underneath his behind. "Everything flows from work. You used to tell me that, remember?"

James had been speaking to his mother. "You been talking to your mother?"

"You need to get a job, Dad."

That was two weeks ago. My name is Dennis Manning, but the woman who cuts my hair calls me Nissy, "short for Dennis, you know, like a nickname," she says, smacking orange-scented gum in my ear. "You know what I like, Nissy? You're kind of famous and you're the only guy who comes in here and asks specifically"-p.r.o.nounced "pacifically"-"for me. I really like that." She talks the whole time she cuts my hair, offering long-winded tales of domestic life, about her pit bulls Kinky and Joe, and the constant loss of the remote control at the hands of Cyril, the three-year-old second cousin she baby-sits three nights a week. I don't know her age, but I a.s.sume she must be older than twenty-one, yet younger than twenty-five: She goes to a bar named The Misty Blue every weekend for dancing and drinking, and she refers to her boss Lyle (the quarterback to my tackle senior year of high school, Cla.s.s of '64) as the Old Guy.

"Now that you ain't working, Nissy, you should come by the Misty Blue. You'd like it. You'd see all those guys from your high school days. They can dance." She draws out the word dance until it actually seems to be dancing on the surface of her tongue. "You know what record I love? That old record by the Miracles. 'Tears of a Clown.' I bet you like that record. You should see the brothers getting down at the Misty Blue, man. I didn't think old guys would be able to get down like that, but oh"-and her voice goes up and up, as the razor buzzes closer to my right ear, drowning out her words, and I wonder if the glory of over-fifty carousers will some day cause me to become right-earless. But soon her voice softens and the razor subsides, and Jackie-that's her name-is extending a mirror behind me with one long-nailed hand and spinning the raised chair with the other, providing me with a multi-angled view of myself. She knows that I'll be satisfied-I'm the only guy that asks "pacifically" for her-but those are the rules and I follow them as I follow the ebb and flow of her outlandish stories, as I followed Lyle onto the field in those autumns long long ago. I pay Jackie, tipping her five, and she winks. "See you in ten days, Nissy," she's says, dropping the bills into the pocket of the billowy smock she wears. For a second I wonder what her body is like underneath that sheath of cotton speckled with the detritus of my graying temples. "Who's next?" she says, looking around the crowded shop. But there won't be a next, because the too-cool teenagers sprawled across the patent leather benches, flipping through the pages of sports magazines and inky tabloids, wait for Lyle, old-school football hero and style-cutter to the hip, high school elite. So, with no takers, Jackie just sweeps away the leftovers of my trim, picks up her own magazine-usually a car rag-and settles into one of the low-slung, beauty treatment chairs that tilt back toward a sink, and waits, I often wonder, through the ten days until I return.

"Come dance sometime," she says to me as I head out the door. "I'm gonna miss you dancing on TV." She's referring to Group/Solo, the game show I hosted for fifteen years, until last season, they, amid tabloid rumors of my forthcoming nervous breakdown (rumors that I only wanted to dance with the guests and had no interest in hosting the show), the new network regime-a green, ragtag a.s.sortment of twenty-eight-year olds who'd decided my style of hosting was, not "current" enough-put an old horse out of his low-rating 'ed misery. And I had no defense. The best part of the show did come at the end, when there'd be a group solo, in which I'd dance with the grand-prize winner. The house band would strike up some old standard and the winner and I would twirl away, as the credits rolled, past the gift displays and flashy game board. The new host, my youthful replacement who came to fame as a male cheerleader at USC, continues to dance, but he dances with younger contestants who swing and jack their taut, toned bodies into more current forms of social posturing. I couldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I am not like Lyle, who thinks he hasn't aged, who has parlayed his years of experience and local celebrity into fas.h.i.+oning those young heads into visions of state-of-the-art black teenhood. Then again, growing old gracefully might work in the 'hood, but it has no place on TV.

After I leave the barbershop, I drive through the ragged remains of my hometown, down Water Street, the main drag, teeming with empty storefronts and devoid, it seems, of the life that existed there in my youth. I pa.s.s the old fabric store my father once owned, where the first publicity stills of Gail and me, the dancing couple, were taken years and years ago. (I still have the local newspaper clipping: "From Football Star to TV Star"). The "Black Astaire and Rogers" we were called, two hoofing black high school sweethcarts, drawn together by an obsession with dancing and great books. We tapped and tangoed our way across the nation's stages, through the Civil Rights movement and Black Power, through blaxploitation filcks and disco, dressed in the sequined and spangled two-pieces my mother sewed in my father's back room. After my father died the fabric store became a Jamaican roti house, then a bustling Chinese take-out joint people don't any more but they do go out to eat. Now it's just a hollow building, waiting for its next incarnation as a Latin grocery emporium. I drive past the curving line of workers and shoppers waiting for the first early-morning Water Street bus to carry them away from this listless relic of a town to more upscale places burgeoning with opportunity and some taste of liveliness. Then I'm on Exceptional Boulcvard, once the sight of a colorful and bouyant parade in my honor, heading toward the home-some say mansion-I have in the hills of the next town.

My wife's morning cab sits in the very center of the circular driveway. I pull in behind it and blow the horn. Gail comes out of the house, pauses on the steps to put envelopes in the mailbox, yells something back to Agatha, the maid, then comes over to the car. "Don't forget dinner tonight," she says. Her body and voice are here with me in Long Island, but her mind is already in the office in Manhattan, her heart somewhere I'll never guess. "Are you listening to me, Dennis? We're meeting James at seven. We agreed this should happen tonight, so have Agatha set the alarm so you'll be up by five." She smells of lilacs; her pearls tap against the half-raised car window as she leans to kiss me good-bye, turning her ear to me to avoid smudging her makeup. "Don't forget. You said you'd be there." Then she turns, tall and graceful on the edge of her heels, and gets into the cab, off to make the 9:15 am train. I watch the cab drive away, then head into the house, through the dark foyer swathed in the fragrance of Gail's lilac perfume, to the skylighted kitchen, where Agatha stands at the stove and moves bacon around a frying pan with a long-tined fork. The sizzle of the grease competing with the blare of the TV on the counter. Agatha smiles at me, as she often does these days, a little sadly it seems, like she knows that the war's over and she has to serve bacon and eggs to the lone casualty right on the site of battle.

"You're on again today," she says, with a hand on her hip and a nod toward the loud TV.

There I am, on the Game Show Network, a celebrity guest on The $25,000 Pyramid, sitting in the Winner's Circle, facing an anxious-looking, red-headed woman in a polka-dot dress. I'm leaning forward in my seat, yelling out a list of words to her, "groceries," I say, "dry cleaning," some "ums" and some "uhs," and then, in a burst of inspiration, I say, "a spare tire," and she shouts back at me "Things in a car trunk!" And I nod, and she jumps from her seat and we're hugging and d.i.c.k Clark (who never ever gets old; how old was he when we taped that?) comes over to the Winner's Circle and offers his congratulations. Cut to commercial.

"That was 1979," I tell Agatha.

"I know," she says. "You ripped that corduroy jacket right after you got home."

Cable TV, the funhouse mirror that talks back to retired TV performers like me, televising like some kind of cathode-ray Dorian Gray portrait brought to life. In the months since my firing I'd seen my younger self on The Love Boat (as the jewel thief cousin of Isaac the bartender), Charlie's Angels (as the prosecutor whose wife is seeing another man), on Hollywood Squares ("Which state is the Iditarod in?" I'm asked. "A frozen state," I reply, and the audience roars with laughter.) There I was on Match Game ("Freddie believed that the only way to make dogs like him better was to dress up as a BLANK." The contestant's answer was "A can of dog food." My answer, along with Richard Dawson and Brett Sommers, was "Fire Hydrant"). And there, between Patty Duke and John Astin and Mr. and Mrs. Phyllis Diller, were Gail and I together on Tattletales ("What's the one thing you hate most about your husband?" the wives were asked. Gail's answer: "The way Dennis snores." We got one hundred points for the Blue Section.) Who would have thought, I'd asked Gail one night-while we watched ourselves on a Carol Burnett Show rerun on the Comedy Channel-that Cable TV, this threat to the Big 3 Networks that had kept us in business, this wave of the media future, would actually become a clearinghouse for the old network shows it threatened to replace? She just shrugged her shoulders and said, "Can you please turn the channel? s.e.x and the City's about to come on."

I eat Agatha's bacon and eggs and drift up to bed to sleep until noon, to have one of the mean daytime dreams that I've been having lately.

My dream.

Picture this: a woman, my wife, honey-colored, just over fifty years old. She's wearing a tapered plaid skirt with a matching jacket, padded shoulders accentuating the cinched waist that she tends to diligently with daily sit-ups and diet pills. Her hair is swept up from her neck, poised there with a barrette that she'd covered herself the night before with the remaining sc.r.a.ps of her outfit's fabric. She likes everything to match. She stands in the center of a moving subway car, the A train swoos.h.i.+ng downtown toward her son's Greenwich Village apartment, hanging onto the metal pa.s.senger bar so as not to tumble into the unsuspecting lap of the gentleman reading the Post seated directly beneath her. She wants a seat. She's tired from the daily PR grind of lunches and conferences and the metaphorical prost.i.tution it entails, but no one offers her a seat-not the gentleman with the Post, not the teenager in hightops, nor the man she recognizes from the suite of offices next to her own expensive suite of office s.p.a.ce. This lack of courtesy doesn't really bother her though; chivalry died, she told me once, with the interment of King Tut. She realizes (or rationalizes) that with her heels and her brown auburn-tinted hair and slightly tight-fitting suit hiding her age she could easily pa.s.s for thirty, thirty-five even. But sometimes she wishes she weren't so, so-a word doesn't even come to her. She wishes that the youthful zest that gets her extramarital affairs and whistles on the street could disappear the moment she appeared on the subway train. Because no one offers a young woman a seat. But this also refreshes her, catapults her into new reasons for striving harder . . . or so she says.

She likes everything to match. But, as she said to me, she and I don't match anymore.

Just after my dismissal from the game show, Gail (and I) had a party, a c.o.c.ktail thing to which everyone came: television people glued to their Nokias like the tiny cell phones held the secret of life; vulgar young music business-types that Gail a.s.sociates with at work, their boxer-clad a.s.ses gaping out of baggy jeans; nosy starstruck neighborhood boors bent on being impressed; and the new breed of nameless, free-drinkdrinking wannabes looking to make names for themselves.

It really was Gail's party; no one wanted to talk about my recent departure from their professional entertainment ranks. While she waltzed around the house, floor to floor, guest to guest, I planted myself near the bar, chatting mainly with the nervous catering administrator who often interrupted our boundlessly empty conversation with snide orders to his celebrity-gazing staff. Gail glowed in these situations, and because she glowed, occasionally surrendering herself to the music and spinning like a b.u.mp-and-grind pixie, the house glowed, as did I, as best I could, feeling old and unwanted, but mainly just bored. (Gail doesn't dance with me at parties anymore. "I like to dance the way the kids dance," she says. "You want to get too close. I'm not in tap shoes anymore.") That night, she danced with our son, James, making a not unawkward fifty-four-year-old's stabs at the latest crazy dance steps, her head ajerk with the beat, her mouth wrapped around the lewd lyrics, and everywhere the house breathed her lilac odor echoed her laughter. It was the generous chortle of a young woman, reckless, ma.s.saged by the knowledge that her whole life lay before her like a road repaved solely for her to travel upon.

I wanted to see Jackie.

The energy emanating from the Misty Blue almost made up for the lack of life in my old hometown. The parking lot out front was thick with cars and people preparing to party. I could smell the tangy odor of marijuana to my left; could hear the drunken shouts of a thick-thighed woman in high heels and a short purple skirt coming from my right. I turned that way, and there was Jackie, holding up the woman, helping her toward her car.

"Is that you, Nissy?" She sped up her step, now dragging the woman along with her as she approached me. "Look at you, Nissy. Looking all cute." The drunk woman in her embrace looked up at me, as if the sight of me and my possible cuteness might snap her out of her daze. She seemed to recognize me for a second, but her buzz had a grip on her memory; it held it away from her and she couldn't grab it back. She gave up and let her head loll back on her shoulder.

"Be right back," Jackie said. She hurried the woman to a Taurus that was parked just ahead of my car and shoved her inside. Then she stood, pressed down the front of her own miniskirt and turned back to me, her face all bright eyes and smile.

At our table inside, Jackie pointed out some old-timers and updated me on their lives since I knew them in high school. She'd dated the sons of at least seven guys I'd known when I was younger than she is now.

"And one daughter," she said, with a grin illuminated by the vodka c.o.c.ktails she sucked down. "But that was just an experiment," she added. "You know how it is, Nissy. You've seen the world."