“Oh, what do you know? You’re just a boy.”
“I’m not quite a boy,” I said, feeling oddly defensive. She was probably correct, but I bristled.
“Just because you’re rich doesn’t give you license to speak.”
“That’s true.”
“Just because you’re extremely handsome and look like Sidney Poitier, who most women would pay good money to sleep with, doesn’t give you the right to say anything.”
“That’s true, I guess.”
“You are very handsome,” she said, her tone shifting.
I looked around for our waiter.
“I apologize about this. I’m sure you’re every bit a man.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s only that when I’m around you, I have these … these feelings. I feel all tingly on my arms and thighs. Do you know what I mean?” Her voice was low now; one might say sultry, one might say crazy. If cigarettes had been allowed inside and if she had had one, she would have lit it. “Do you like older women? I mean, women my age? Not old, but older than you?”
“I suppose. My mother was an older woman and I liked her.”
“No, I mean, are you attracted to older women?”
“You’re very … ” I stopped, thinking that I might have flattered myself into a corner or worse. “Can you just tell me how much money the college needs?” I was sweating. My shirt felt sticky.
“What about my needs?”
“All I have is money, Ms. Feet.”
“Gladys.”
“Gladys. Really, all I have to offer is money.”
“I don’t want money.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.” Whereas at one point in our relationship, back when everything was about money, I had felt, if not in control then on equal footing, I was now lost, confused, in over my head.
“Would you come upstairs with me and rub my temples?” she asked.
“Upstairs?”
“I got us a room.”
I wish I could say that I said something clever, pulled back her chair, and escorted her up to the room where I left her alone at the door. I wish that I could say that I said something cool and aloof and excused myself gracefully from the table and hailed a taxi as the sky began to drizzle. But I can say neither. I knocked my chair over as I stood too quickly and sprinted suspectlike from the restaurant as if I was on fire, like a seven-year-old little boy confronted with his first kiss, like the coward I was. Gladys Feet would have to go up to her room alone and imagine me or Sidney Poitier; it apparently didn’t matter which.
“And here I was going to invite you over to my place for Thanksgiving,” Everett said.
“Really?”
“No.”
We were sitting in the student center. He picked at a muffin.
“I’m sure you’ll have a fine and memorable time in Washington. Young Ms. Larkin seems very nice. I think she’s quite bright, though I’m not a good judge of such things.”
“Her old boyfriend will be there,” I said.
“He has to be someplace. Why does that make you nervous? He’s the old boyfriend.”
“What if she still has feelings for him?”
“Better to find out sooner than later.”
Of course he was correct, but I was finding little comfort in that fact. “It’s just that I like her so much.”
“You’re rapidly becoming a boring fellow,” Everett said. “Have you had sex with her?”
“I believe that’s my business.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“I really don’t think we should be talking about this,” I said. I looked out the window.
“Okay, okay, relax. Don’t get your no-doubt-patterned bloomers in a clove hitch.”
I drummed my fingers on my thigh, upset that I was not relaxed, but said, “I’m relaxed.”
“What about her parents? Are you nervous about meeting them?”
“Extremely.”
“Well, don’t tell that you’ve seen their baby naked. That’s my best piece of advice.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“And be yourself.”
“Who else would I be?”
“I don’t know. You might decide all of a sudden that you’re Sidney Poitier. You’re not, you know. Though you do look alarmingly like him. Tell me, whom do I look like?”
I looked over his facial features. His sad but alert brown eyes were too close to his face. His lips were strangely thin. His large nose looked like it had been broken several times. I could think of no one he resembled. “I don’t know many actors,” I finally said.
“What about Roscoe Lee Browne?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Come on, you know Roscoe Lee Browne. He was all over the television. Maybe he still is. He was in The Cowboys with John Wayne. I don’t much like John Wayne, but Roscoe Lee Browne was great. Anyway, you’d know him if you saw him,” he said. “I know you would. What about Bill Cosby?”
“You look nothing like Bill Cosby,” I said.
“Thank the lord,” Everett said, “if only there were such a thing. But seriously, you have to know that you look more like Sidney Poitier than Sidney Poitier ever did. Have you ever seen In the Heat of the Night?”
“No.”
“A beautiful love story, that movie. Let me hear you say, ‘They call me Mr. Tibbs.’ ”
“They call me Mr. Tibbs,” I said.
“No, say it as if a crab is biting your ass, as if someone is peeling an unpleasant and undesired memory from your core, as if you’re feeling a little bitchy, as if you might be gay but even you don’t know.”
I said it again.
“Uncanny. You ever do drugs?”
I shook my head.
“Huh. That’s too bad, but hardly surprising.” He stood, looked out the window at a Spelman girl in a short skirt and then down at me. “Enjoy your break. And remember, be yourself. Unless you can think of someone better.”
CHAPTER 4
Maggie and I could not manage seats together on the flight to Washington, and so I sat in 23B watching her head bob and turn in apparent bemusement and laughter with her neighbor in the nineteenth row, a guy who might have been an upperclassman at Morehouse, but I never found out. I couldn’t even find an escape in a nap on the relatively short flight because of the constant washroom trips of the woman in the window seat. About the fourth of five times she offered an apology in the form of a quick explanation by whispering, “UTI.” I didn’t know what she meant, but it sounded awful and I found complete and sudden compassion for her, even though she would not trade seats with me because she didn’t want to give up the window. And so I was in a bad mood when we landed at National Airport, though, as was my wont, I did not let on to Maggie. One might ask then what was the point of the bad mood, and I can only answer, the satisfaction of personal suffering.
The cab driver kept craning to glance back at me in his mirror. “I know you,” he said. “Are you from Nigeria?”
“No.”
“I know you. You look like that Sidney Poitier.”
“I hear that. Thank you.”
“You are not him, are you?”
“I’m not him, no.”
“Where are you from? You look Nigerian.”
“I’m from Los Angeles,” I said. Somehow that didn’t feel true. “That’s where I was born.”
From the taxi window Maggie pointed from the 14th Street Bridge out over the Potomac. “Do you know anything about boating?”
“I’ve sailed,” I said.
“Daddy will like that,” she said.
The house was large, a midsixties’ split-level with a three-car garage and an expanse of lawn that seemed somewhat ridiculous. The taxi left us out in the holly-hedge-lined driveway. I carried my bag and the heavier of Maggie’s two as I followed her past the beige Cadillac to a side porch where she unlocked the door. We stepped into an anteroom, what might have been called a mudroom in a farmhouse. It was a room that might have been bright and cheery if not for the heavy red drapes covering the windows on either side of the door. From that room I could see into the kitchen and beyond that into what I would learn later was the breakfast room. The walls were painted red, the tiled floor of the kitchen was red and white, the refrigerator and stove were red.