Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 59

"But I still live near here," I told her. "The world is overrated."

"I'll believe that when I see it." She took a sip of her drink, then shouted over the thump of the music, "Why aren't you home with your wife?"

"She's entertaining a houseful of people I don't like or know," I said.

"Maybe if you got to know them," Jackie said, "you'd like them."

"I'm too old for them," I said.

"But not too old for me?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

I didn't know how to answer that at first. But I thought about her cutting my hair and I thought about her baby-sitting her second cousin and I looked at her dreadlocks and miniskirt against a background of old men with whisky gla.s.ses and smiles that had known what frowns felt like and cars that knew the lyrics to the songs that I loved and I said, "Because my wife will never forgive me."

She had started to sip again but paused, holding her gla.s.s before her, cutting me a look that could have shattered the c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s she was holding. "You cheated on her?"

"Nope."

"Then what did you do to her?"

"I got old." My mind's eye was on Gail dancing at the party. "I got old first."

"And that's unforgiveable?"

"She never thought that would happen," I said, suddenly warming to this conversation, warming to a theory I'd never spoken aloud and only rarely thought in any substantial way. "No," I said, and I took a long, deep gulp from the gla.s.s of wine that had been sitting there, untouched, in front of me. "No, that's not it. It's not that I got old. It's that I like it."

"You like being old," Jackie said.

"I love it," I told her. I wasn't exactly sure that I believed that last comment, but it felt good to say, so I said it again. "I love it and that's what my wife can't forgive."

"Wow," said Jackie.

"Wow, indeed," I said. "Let's have another round."

It was the first second round of many second rounds that I would share with Jackie, who became my best friend of sorts. We went to movies and basketball games. We shared ice cream at the Carvel on Water Street near my father's old fabric shop. We went to the amus.e.m.e.nt park in East Meadow where Jackie won me a teddy bear that looked, she said, like me when I came in for my haircut. One night, as we were driving back from a movie, a song called "I Think I'm Goin' Outta My Head" came on the radio and the falsetto tones of Little Anthony lifted me up inside. "I love this song," Jackie said. She grabbed my hand and yanked me out of the car and as drivers pa.s.sed us, the radio turned to the highest volume, the headlights outlining our two-step, Jackie and I danced along Exceptional Boulevard.

Another evening, another party at our house, this time for our son, James, and his new contract. I invited Jackie.

She showed up in an apple-green dress and strappy high-heeled sandals, her dreadlocks piled high atop her beaming face. We talked for a while, I introduced her to Gail and some of the rappers Gail represented, then she swooped into the party, a whirl of green.

"She could be your daughter," Gail said.

"What are you talking about?" I said.

Gail just rolled her eyes at me and turned, melting back into the party.

Later I found Jackie on the dance floor and said, "Take a bow."

"What?"

"Follow me."

We went out onto the back patio. The stars were like tiny spotlights poking through the thick black fabric of the sky.

"'Take a bow,'" I told Jackie, "is an old family saying. Whenever someone was overreacting or overdramatizing or just cutting up, we'd say, "Okay, take a bow."

"Like, when a director says 'cut'?"

"Exactly," I said.

"The sky is beautiful, isn't it?"

"It is," I said. "My wife thinks you and I are having an affair."

"What?" Jackie's laugh was like a loud bark. "Should she be thinking that?"

"No," I said. "She shouldn't. But she wants to, I think. I think it would make me more interesting to her somehow."

"She's beautiful, your wife."

"Yes," I said. "She is."

"Have you told her that lately?"

"I haven't told her much of anything lately. We don't really talk to each other much."

"You need to tell her she's beautiful. Then she won't think you're jumping my bones."

"Maybe you're right," I said.

Jackie leaned onto the back of a patio chair. "I saw y'all on TV the other day."

"Who?"

"You and your wife and your little boy."

"He's not little anymore."

"I know that. Tell your wife that's the Manning I need to be having an affair with."

I had to laugh at that.

"I was watching this show about celebrities before they were celebrities and they showed an old TV show where you and your wife and your little boy were singing Christmas carols with some white lady."

I nodded. "Marlo Thomas," I said. "She had a Christmas special years ago. That was James' first public appearance."

"Y'all looked so happy," Jackie said. "Like a perfect little family."

"Yes," I said. "We did. We were."

"Which is why you need to go and tell that lady in there that she's beautiful. She wants somebody to tell her. Unless you waiting for one of those rappers to tell her." She pushed herself up from the chair and brushed off the back of her tiny apple-green dress. "That's all I got to say about that. Now I'm going back to the party. You coming?"

"I'm coming."

Toward the end of the evening, with twenty or so drunken dancers gripping each other in the center of the dance floor, Reuben Mays, James' agent, raised his gin into the air and began to recite Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth at Dunsinore, in garishly drunken tones. I picked up my own drink and looked around for Gail, who wasn't entwined with a partner on the floor. James, snuggled up to his latest flame, an Asian man he'd met in college, said he hadn't seen her. Mays was still warbling as I went down the three steps towards the kitchen. The last of the catering staff was struggling out with two huge bowls. Agatha stood, holding the back door for them, a stern territorial grimace tickling the edges of her lips.

"Good riddance," she said, slamming the door.

"I'm looking for Gail," I told her. Agatha seemed to ignore me. "Did you hear me, Agatha?"

"Upstairs."

I pa.s.sed three people leaving as I fumbled my way up the stairs toward the bedrooms. In ours, on the bed, on the Mexican print James had given us last year, was Gail, in the arms of a tall, famous balladeer she represented. I watched them watch me before I turned and left the room.

I found Jackie downstairs in the foyer, draping herself in a big green poncho. Her sly eyes questioned me before she said a word.

"You tell her?"

"I told her," I said.

"See, man? That's all a woman wants to hear sometime. Just wanna know her man thinks she's the best-looking chick at the party." She pushed me playfully with her shoulder. "You seen the world. You know that. Now that you told her? You take your behind right on up those stairs and you show her she's the most beautiful woman at the party."

"Take a bow, Jackie."

"I know, I know. I'm leaving."

After everyone was gone, Gail said we didn't match anymore. "You're old and you're tired and you're bored, Dennis. You know what? I'm glad you caught me. You let yourself get kicked off the show because you refuse to change," she said. She pressed her lips together; fastened her gaze on some point directly above my head. "When we got married, I was still Little Miss Harlem, carrying around those silly blue ribbons from fas.h.i.+on shows, and tap-dancing behind you on the Ed Sullivan Show. You were doing your thing-"

"We were partners-"

"-now I'm doing mine and you just don't seem to be following. We don't match, Dennis. I'm going up and you're going down and I just can't accept that. I can't. I suggested you do a guest shot on James' soap. You turned that down. They wanted you-James wanted you-and you turned it down. I don't know what you want to do, Dennis. Sleep all day?" I didn't argue with her. Her speech sounded so rehea.r.s.ed, I wanted to hear the climax and denouement.

"I guess," she said, as if on cue, "you're happy with your little barber who calls you nicknames."

"Jackie only cuts my hair. You know that Gail. We go to basketball games."

"I'm sure."

"Don't make your guilt into my guilt." I didn't know what else to say to her. So I said, "I love you Gail."

"It's not there anymore, Dennis. We just don't match."

How completely blissful it is to love a person who doesn't love you anymore. The drink flows; the possible onset of depression lifts you into a netherworld of fantastically ugly, bourbon-soaked reveries of revenge, and the lonesomeness created by betrayal seems to be a dangerous, inviting playground. Such thoughts occupy me as I search for a parking s.p.a.ce along Ninth Street, pa.s.sing young people and old who I believe to be happily entrenched in twosomes, untouched by the blemish of hidden romantic deeds done on the beds they shared with their partners. And, I say, as my son opens the door to his apartment, "How completely blissful it is to love a person who doesn't love you anymore."

I haven't been here since I started hanging out with Jackie. I haven't been here since James tried to warn me that his mother wanted to leave me.

"Mom's not here yet," he says, stepping aside, his head c.o.c.ked to one side as I head over to the bar. "What did you say when I opened the door?"

"Never mind."

"Whatever. Nice haircut, Dad." There's something in his voice, if not his words, something sly and mean and haughty. But I can't be completely mad at his condescension, and for a moment I wonder if that's something Gail and I taught him. His eyes are blurry and I can smell vodka on his breath, though I'm not completely sure it's not my breath bouncing back off of him and ricocheting back to me.

We don't say much to each other as we wait for his mother to arrive. I look out the window, watching couples pa.s.s by. Soon I see Gail getting out of a sleek black Lincoln Town Car. My dream was incorrect. She hasn't taken the train, she's beaten the lack of chivalry, courtesy of one of the record companies that keep her in business.

James goes to the door when the bell rings. "Hey, Mom. Dad's already here."

"I'm starving," she says. "Where should we cat?" I can smell alcohol on Gail as well. It seems we all need to get drunk to spend any time together, just the three of us with no revelers to share in, to experience, the raging success of the Manning Family.

We go to the Front Row, a trendy little Italian boite on Sixth Avenue. James chats with an actress friend two tables away. Gail goes to the ladies room to fix her face. I sit at the table and smile back at the stares we get. When James and Gail join me at the table, we share a bottle of wine and small talk, like it's finger food to be picked over before the main dish arrives. All the while we are watched by patrons at other tables. One woman exclaims, "That's him, Jim," and runs over to our table, flinging a napkin down. "I love you, Radcliffe. You are my favorite. I swear." James signs his name on the napkin. "I swear," the woman yells to others as her husband escorts her out, "that boy is my absolute favorite."

We tell him as the waiter puts the clam sauce on the table between Gail and James. "I'm leaving your father," Gail says in careful, modulated tones, as if she's saying "I'm taking on a new client." But not for another man, she tells James. "Things are just different now." An astounding performance, this is. My son's performance is on par with his mother's. He stares at me as if he's seeing me for the first time, as if I'm someone he's only seen on TV who's come to life before him, just as people in the restaurant stare at him.

Gail says to James, "Your father has a crush on his barber."

And there it is. Her trump. I lost my job and now I'm cheating with my barber. I've given up my fame card and I'm dating a barber more than half my age.

"How old is he?" James asks.

At first I think James is asking about me.

I say, "Don't be absurd, Gail. She's James' age."

"My age?" James starts to laugh, loudly. He sets his wine gla.s.s on the table as he controls himself.

"And she has a nickname for him," Gail says, laughing now as well.

"A nickname?" James asks.

"She calls me Nissy," I tell him.

"Nissy?" he asks, as if he doesn't understand, as if spitting it out will lay the word on the table for us to decipher, like one of those extra-large family puzzles we used to do together on vacation.

"Short for Dennis," I say, smiling.

"Nissy?" James says it again. I notice that the sound of his laughter has grown louder as people at other tables turn to see what the celebrity is laughing at. "Oh, Dad." His words sound as if they're on display, as if this is some variety show and he's projecting to the balcony. I get it now. We're on stage. "Nissy? You let her call you Nissy?"

"I do," I tell him. "And she loves to dance." And suddenly I'm laughing as well, partner to my own abuse. Taking one for the family.

"You let Mom divorce you and you let your barber call you Nissy? Oh, Dad. Oh. Dad . . ."

Gail shakes with laughter, her hand on her stomach, the barrette bouncing as she moves forward and back. "Nissy," she repeats. "And she just loves to dance."

Soon, we're all at it, hitting the table for dramatic emphasis, inviting onlookers to share in our fun. "Nissy." I'm shouting now. "She calls me f.u.c.king Nissy."

"Oh, Dad . . ."