“I was pudgy, had thick glasses, wore a short bob cut. Velma isn’t a mantle you attain. Velma is thrust upon you. I just embraced it, wore matching clothes. It wasn’t called cosplay, then. It was just called, ‘That Fat Girl Is a Loser.’ ”
As the computer boots up, I give Sunita Habersham a tour of my father’s house. This is the old tent I make my daughter sleep in, it’s conveniently located in the dining hall. This is the part of the ceiling that hangs down from water damage, despite repairs. That flash is from the fuse box outside. This is the dining-room table; it’s made from a door. The chairs are empty buckets of primer paint. There’s a couch over there: it’s from the thrift shop. All the furniture is from thrift shops except the mattresses, which were new when I had them delivered. Tal won’t use hers, which is upstairs, because she prefers the tent. Even though my father died in it.
“This place is huge. It’s like an abandoned bus station. Don’t you get lonely here? Just you and Tal?” Sun asks. “I mean, I think of these old houses as being small, built for small people. But these ceilings must be fourteen feet high. And the rooms are wide, too. Even bigger than they look from outside. You could fit a small army.”
“The British Army, during the Battle of Germantown, actually. The upstairs, those rooms are smaller. I’m in the master bedroom and it’s tiny. Let me show you,” I say, and I genuinely mean that. Still, I hear how it sounds, even before I see Sun turn her head at my directness. Just the tiniest of reactions, but I see it, and I want to say, That was not an attempt to get you up to my room so that I can have sex with you. Why would I need to do that? People have sex in living rooms, and we’re standing right next to one.
Then there’s the sound.
It comes from upstairs.
Sun looks at me. “Did you hear that…?” she begins, but answers her own question. “Yeah, let’s go upstairs. Adventure time.”
I shake my head. “No.” I am perfectly fine not to go upstairs. I am perfectly fine never to go upstairs again in the history of all that is everything. In fact, I’m okay to seal off the entrance to the upstairs altogether, keep it like that from now till the moment it all goes up in char and red ember. But Sunita Habersham starts walking. She walks up. Why walk up? But she walks up. Toward it. We are supposed to be going in the opposite direction. It’s time to run. I follow behind her.
“Hey, hey, remember that joke? About black people, that they’d run away in haunted-house scenarios? I think it was Eddie Murphy. Or maybe it was Paul Mooney, one or the—” I stop when Sun flings her arm back at me. We’re at the top of the steps. The plaster from the ceiling hangs down into the hall in shreds. The walls, murals of water stains. Five doors. All closed. Each one hiding something. One’s to the bathroom. One my room. Three, bedrooms I don’t go in, I never go in them. There’s been no reason to, there’s no reason to now either. Sun stares, at the doors, then at me. She wants me to shut up so she can see which room the sound came from. So she can swing a door open and whoever’s in there can be, I don’t know, surprised. I don’t want them to be surprised. I want them to be gone. No, I want us to be gone.
“Well, you know that joke? That black people would just leave at the first creepy sound? I’ve been thinking about that. Escaping? That’s actually normative behavior. Staying, when you know there’s a ghost, that’s what makes no damned sense. So when you think about it, that’s really the pretense of all ghost stories: white people are so confident of their omnipotence that they’ve lost their goddamn minds.”
“Sunflower bullshit,” is Sun’s muttered response, but she’s barely paying attention.
When the next sound hits, she grips me. My palm is mush and hers a solid object contracting.
It’s coming from behind my bedroom door.
“Don’t,” I say, so light, just the idea of a word, but Sun hears it. She looks back at me, even. She keeps walking, but she looks back. Her face pulls away but her eyes are on me.
Sun looks away when her fingers reach the knob. She just turns it, no fanfare, no pause. It’s so loud, the metal mechanism doing the same job it has for the last two hundred years. My room, it’s how I left it so many days ago, when the alarm went off. The blankets still on the floor. The box spring and the mattress not much higher above it. The window’s open. Did I leave the window open? I don’t remember.
Sun walks on toward the open window. I come in behind her. I don’t look around, because I don’t want to look around. I just want to look at her. And it’s so easy to just look at her. Sunita Habersham leans her head out the window, bends down to do so. Her shirt goes up, her shorts stay level, and the result is a view of her Sesa tattoo once more. The bottom of her back, that soft place.
I reach for her. Just to say, Don’t go any further. To say, Don’t go out the window. But I reach for her flesh. And then I’m holding her, by her hips, and the previous logic is eclipsed by the reality of the intimate position I’ve placed myself in. I don’t know what’s come over me.
I literally don’t know what comes over me, I just see something dark floating right above my head and out the window, leaving behind only a physical chill I can feel even under my arms.
I hug Sun from behind. She thinks I am doing it because I desire her, which I do, but I hold her because I’m fucking scared.
I hug Sun’s waist. She moans, or groans, I don’t know which, but she definitely makes a sound before she closes the window. The breeze stops, and I feel warm again.
I saw a moving dark shape, and it felt cold, because of a window. Logic shifts back into position. Reality reseals all its tears. I got spooked. I got scared. By a shadow.
Sun turns around, looks at me, concerned.
“I was cold,” I tell her. She grabs my arm, lightly. This action makes me keenly aware I have not released her midriff.
I kiss her as if this was always my intention. I tell myself that it was, that it always was, that the last five minutes have no meaning. I kiss her but I think about that shadow, which was probably caused by a car riding by outside, something I would have never even noticed before.
I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m scared of being wrong, but I don’t believe in them. Ghosts are what we want to see when our brains have no rational story. I want to tell Sunita Habersham this. Before I can, though, Sun says she has her own confession to make to me, and I grip her hard at her waist to tell her to give it to me.
“I really do have an open relationship, and a boyfriend. I don’t want another one. We do this, it’s just tonight, and then that’s it. Just once. For fun.”
“You’re funny.”
“No really, Warren. I’m serious.” And there’s no humor there. “This is what I told Jessie, and he didn’t believe me. I didn’t mean to hurt him, and I don’t want to hurt you. So if you’re willing, you have to understand that I’m serious.”
“Who’s Jessie?”
“ ‘One Drop,’ ” she says, and my grip loosens.
The “boyfriend” doesn’t bother me; I’ve loved a woman with one of those before. The whole “open relationship” part doesn’t upset me either; it’s just a concept, a dislocated notion. But I know what One Drop looks like. I see him, big, pale, that mockery of locks. I see him with Sunita Habersham. I’m not possessive. I don’t consider myself possessive, but I can see him and her and don’t see myself fitting into that image. As my hands lightly pull away, hers grasps them.
“Come on,” Sunita Habersham says, pulling me even tighter, drawing me into her. “Let’s pretend desire isn’t the first stage of despair.”
—
I lust. I know this. I lust all day and in ways that seem to transcend my otherwise limited imagination. I desire endlessly, and constantly encounter women that fill me with want. If I was bisexual, I’d have wasted away pining for all of humanity. My body is promiscuous in its hunger. But my heart has no such appetite. It wants only one. It understands only the equation of me plus her. Sunita Habersham touches the bare flesh behind my hip and my mind wants only Sunita Habersham, in that moment and every moment that will follow. There’s no more Becks. I don’t believe Sun, that she wants just one night. I don’t because I can’t imagine that to be true. When I kiss her neck, and she moans, I can’t believe that it’s just the physical act of having teeth lightly bite her flesh, the flicker of the tongue between the pain; I have faith the pleasure is solely because it’s my mouth that does this. Already I have a vision of Sun, me, Tal, together going nuclear with family. I am a fool. Even Brer Rabbit gets stuck in the tar baby. I know this, even as I fall into her. There are few kisses. There are just my kisses, then her biting my lips back. Sunita Habersham kisses with her teeth. She turns from me, leans on the windowpane once more, signals me to take her from behind, and I get a flash that this is because she doesn’t want to look at me but when I’m back inside her, my fear is gone. Minutes later, she pulls away, guides me toward the mattress. There she picks up my pillows, drops them on the floor, pulling me down to the floor with her to rest on them. There is less intimacy on the hardwood than on the bed, or less romance, but again I’m in her so it’s a paltry symbol of detachment. Sun’s lips are close enough to kiss once more, and I do, and she’s too distracted to deflect me. Our lips meet in our second actual kiss, and stay there through long seconds of the rhythm.