“There are no rules like that here, Easy.” When Hannah looked into my eyes, I thought it better to let her have the last word.
“Hannah,” I said, starting a new conversation. “This is Ida Lorris. A good friend.”
“Very beautiful,” Hannah complimented. “Both of you are. I will have to seat you where others can appreciate your charm.”
We were led to an elevated table that was to the right of the jazz band. After seating us side by side, Hannah smiled, then went away to pamper her other guests.
The band played on.
“I don’t, um, well, it’s not that I don’t understand,” Ida said. “It’s just that I’ve never been anywhere like this.”
“Most people have never been anywhere like the back rooms of S and S.”
This observation earned a smile.
“Are you trying to impress me?” she wondered aloud.
“Yes and no.”
“Meaning?”
“Like my old mentor’s wife used to say, I been in a mood for a while and then I met you.”
She grinned and said, “What kinda mood?”
“Like everything was the same and nuthin’ new on the horizon.”
“But I’m the one who asked you out,” she said, exploring any possible chinks in my explanation.
“And here we are.”
Ida touched my forearm and smiled. It was a genuine smile, telling me that there would be no more social and political tussling that night.
“Are they going to bring us menus?” she asked.
“Not exactly.”
There was confusion on my date’s face and a question on her lips that didn’t have time to become words.
“Good evening, Mr. Rawlins,” a man said. “Miss Lorris.”
He was standing by my side of the table. A tall man in an impeccably tailored black suit. His skin was copper brown and his eyes black.
“Horvat,” I greeted.
“How did you...” Ida began. But then she went silent, remembering, I think, that I’d introduced her to Hannah by her full name.
“Do you eat meat?” Horvat asked Ida.
“Yes, I do.”
“And do you have any allergies?”
“Not that I know of.”
Horvat’s face was long and severe, expressing little. But I saw a hint of a smile on his lips.
“Any foods you abhor?” the waiter out of Plato’s cave inquired.
“Not really.”
Then Horvat went into his spiel. “We will start with vichyssoise, followed by a lime sorbet for the palate, then lamb shank in a red wine sauce along with roasted baby potatoes, green beans amandine, and tempura-fried squash blossoms. For dessert we will serve a simple French apple pie.
“Does that sound acceptable?”
“Yes,” my date said. “Very acceptable.”
Horvat nodded and backed away.
Our meal came in the order the elegant waiter promised. The jazz was so good that, in my mind, it almost conflicted with the exquisite feast. At times I felt guilty eating while the clarinetist and trombonist were helping each other climb to the heights of their potential.
“Where you from?” I asked Ida just after the main course was served.
“Washington.”
“The state?”
“DC.”
“Your people in politics?”
“In a way.”
“What way?”
“They were domestics for an eastern senator who came from wealth and expected to be served.”
I had no quip for this confession.
“They made good money and took good care of me and my younger brother, Ira,” Ida said, maybe with a little defensiveness in her tone.
“And you went to Howard?”
She leaned toward me, smiling broadly.
“Good guess,” she said. “But no. I went to Spelman College.”
“Atlanta.”
“You’re a continual surprise, Mr. Easy.”
“As are you,” I replied, holding a champagne flute for her to tap with the rim of her glass.
When we got back to her place I parked in front of the house.
“Can I walk you to your door?” I asked.
Her response was a full-mouthed kiss that had no intention of quitting. Her hand was on my neck and, after five minutes or so, the middle and ring fingers of my left hand had found their way to the center of her left inner thigh. The digits moved, ever so lightly, in circles until she moaned aloud, “Easy.”
“Yes?”
“I have to go.”
9
The ride home was wonderful. I felt excitement in my heart, mind, and nether regions too. It was a feeling akin to how I felt about my first true love, Anger Lee, the stolen-goods-monger of the Fifth Ward. Back then, when I was fourteen and Anger seventeen, I was at peace with the world. For the longest time, many months, Anger treated me like a little brother. It wasn’t until I got stabbed trying to save her life that she promoted me to temporary boyfriend status. The time I had to wait for Anger’s love seemed to echo inside the space I’d have to occupy until I could be with Ida again.
Cosmo Longo came out of the little sentry hut that stood before the gate to the entrance of the mountaintop I called home. The Sicilian had a powerful build, with hair everywhere. He was probably the gentlest of the brothers. The kind of man you wanted as a babysitter for your child.
“Mr. Easy,” he greeted.
“Hey, Cos, how are ya?”
“You have a visitor,” he said instead of answering.
I looked toward the lighted door of the shedlike guard post. At that moment she emerged, as if waiting for me to turn that way.
“Amethystine,” I think I said. Maybe the name only reverberated in my mind. I had been wanting to see her every day since the day I told her that I’d never see her again.
“Hello, Ezekiel, can I come up?”
I knew what I should have said and what I wanted to say. But instead, I said, “Okay.”
The Sicilian caretaker unlocked the gate to the inner property, revealing a short pathway that led to the bottom of the mountain. He opened the sliding door of the fancy funicular car and then bunged us in.
When the machinery engaged and began to drag us up the mountainside, we kissed. It wasn’t me kissing her or her kissing me. We came together naturally, after two years of being apart. It was alchemy and gravity. What was to be without a doubt.
Walking along the pathway, which was blue in sunlight and gray at night, to my tower of a home, we stopped here and there to resume the kisses and touching, unbuttoning and caressing. When we got to the front door, disheveled and hot, I fumbled around, finally working the key in the lock. I pressed the door open and ushered her in before I remembered Prince Valiant, the 180-pound killer guard dog.
“Watch out!” I shouted, but it was too late.
Valiant leaped out of the darkness, knocking Amethystine to the floor. He’d jumped on top of her before I could react. But when I got to him, he was already licking her face as she was tousling the thick fur below his ears.
She was laughing and he was crying — he was that happy to see her, a woman he had last seen as a few-weeks-old puppy.
“Oh my God,” Amethystine exclaimed. “He’s wonderful.”
“I don’t understand it,” I said, pulling at his collar. “Every other time he’s ever met a stranger, he growls and bares his teeth.”
“He must smell you on my hand,” she said. “He knows what this is.”
She was the kind of woman who knew and didn’t mind the fantasies of men. We’d almost made it to my top-floor bedroom when she mounted me on the stairs.
“Feather’s not here, is she?” she whispered, rising from and descending onto my lap.
“She’s in — in France.”