I fought a grin. “I don’t mind health issues. It’s just your home life I’m trying to avoid.”
“So am I,” she said weakly. “This’ll work out great.”
________________
At 10:30, Jean reached my door. Reflexively, I moved to the intercom, then caught myself.
“You can just buzz her in,” Madison told me with forced neutrality. “She keeps trying the knob until it opens.”
That made sense, but when it came to all things Jean-related, the girl had no credibility. I played it safe and fetched her myself.
Jean practically bounced in relief. Her text was already written out for me.
Thank you! Thank you! I was going crazy!
“It’s all right. She’s fine.”
I led Jean into the apartment. The reunion was not touching. Madison barely looked up from her magazine. Jean’s face turned stern and dark. It didn’t take an interpreter to read her orders. Get. In. The. Car.
Madison held up the magazine. “Can I borrow this?”
“Keep it.”
With demonstrated pomp, she shook my hand. “I look forward to working with you.”
“I told you. That’s up to your mother.”
Catching that, Jean looked at me. Excuse me?
Once Madison exited, I explained it all, stressing numerous times that it was entirely at Jean’s discretion. She was more amazed than anything else.
Scott, you just went from being abnormally decent to disturbingly saint-like. Why would you do this?
A fair question. The answer I gave her was that I could use someone to do Web research for me. This was true. Once the shit hit the fan with Hunta, Madison could save me hours by keeping a beat on the Internet news sites, summing up the general tack. She was more than qualified. The more sensitive reason, which I also explained, was that a new outlet for Madison just might be the call of the day. She wasn’t exactly a French-club kind of girl. This could do her some good.
But those were still surface thoughts. The deepest answer, which I didn’t share, was that it felt nice. I tried to avoid vanity at all costs, but it was just so damn nice to be looked at the way Madison and Jean looked at me. These were two people I had a perfect record with. If my life ever got put on trial, I’d now have two character witnesses to counteract all the Deb Ishams who’d line up to testify against me, all the Iras and Mirandas who wouldn’t commit beyond labeling me “a not too terrible guy.” And being a great believer in third-party endorsements, wouldn’t it be nice if Jean shoved her handheld right in Maxina’s face, screaming through all-caps: HEY LADY! YOU GOT HIM ALL WRONG!
As nice as they felt, these feelings worried me. Affirmation was a drug I kicked years ago. I didn’t want to get hooked again. On the other hand, I had the strong hunch I’d need external reinforcement in the very near future, when I’d be pushing an innocent young woman into the fiery mouth of the Great American Bitch.
8. HARMONY
To anyone who knew her, there were three indisputable truths about Kelly Corwin: the girl was dark, the girl was gorgeous, and sweet Jesus, the girl could sing.
Back in 1996, rap was at its peak of profitability, but these were also the golden days for reigning sexy pop divas. At seventeen, Kelly wanted nothing more than to become one of them. She knew she couldn’t do it from the genial suburbs of Richmond, Virginia. Nope. Hollywood was the place she ought to be. So she loaded up her car and moved to Southern Cali. Palms, that is. Crappy area. Not the safest.
But fate was ridiculously kind to her. After one audition, she got a job as the regular chanteuse at a Venice Beach coffeehouse. After two performances, she found representation with a high-powered talent manager. He believed in her so much, he paid out of his own pocket to put her in a high-end recording studio. After three weeks, she had a completed demo tape boasting a fine selection of rhythmic croons, all of which Kelly had composed herself.
Her karma stopped at the front door of the music labels. While being shopped around to every major outfit, she got the same baffling rejection over and over. She’s incredible. She’s original. She’s daring. We love her. But I’m afraid she’s just not for us. Best of luck in the future.
Kelly didn’t get it. She had the face, the body, the pipes, the whole package. And yet she kept hitting the same invisible wall. What the hell was the problem?
Finally, a brave promotions executive just came out and said it: it was the skin. Kelly was simply too black, even for black audiences. Look, a few years ago exotic was in, but now, as far as fuckable singers go, the buying public likes a little cream in their coffee. We didn’t make it that way, but there it is. Best of luck in the future.
Desperate times, desperate measures. If she couldn’t shake the “exotic” label, her last-ditch effort was to ride it all the way. Soon after her eighteenth birthday, Kelly — who had never been to Africa in her life — changed her name to Simba K. Shange, an awkward mix of Zulu and Swahili that aurally translated to “the lioness who walked like a lion.” On the aesthetic advice of her manager, she eventually dropped the “K,” but in Swahili, “ke” was a feminine suffix. So not only was she left with an inappropriately masculine moniker, but she was now officially “the lion who walked like a lion.” To a native Kenyan, the name would sound as nutty as Bucky McDeerhop. Her manager quickly reminded her how very little her future success rode on the approval of native Kenyans.
Using the same demo tape, Simba got a record deal with one of the very labels that had rejected Kelly Corwin. The songs were rerecorded with a world-beat flair, and by December 1998 the album was on the shelves of record stores everywhere. Well, the East and West Coast. Actually, Seattle and New York. But it was well received by the scholarly Afrocentric population of both cities, even if they were perplexed by her name.
In the end, the album tanked. The label went bankrupt. Her manager moved on to lighter pastures. And Simba settled for life in the background, earning a semi-decent living as a studio backup singer. On the plus side, she got to work with some interesting talent. One of them she married.
While her husband had more than nine dozen fan sites devoted to him, somewhere in the corner of the Internet there was a single typo-ridden Web page that lovingly chronicled the all too brief career of the artist formerly known as Kelly Corwin.
I had discovered this at 7:30 a.m., on the gray Sunday morning of February 4. Already I knew I was in for one of those existential off days, the kind where you wake up a little bit wrong and don’t completely reacclimate yourself to reality. In my dreams, I’d spent the night with Simba. Nothing carnal. It was more Lifetime than Cinemax. We were curled up in my bed. She was talking. I was listening. But after her long diatribe about something (I couldn’t remember what), I interrupted her with a question that had been nagging me for some time. “What do you do?”
That was when I woke up. Poorly. I still had my dream goggles on, so much so that it wouldn’t have surprised me to find Simba in the kitchen, in my shirt, cooking eggs for two. Sometime over the course of my shower, I found my way back to this plane of existence.
Obviously, I felt bad for her, to be held back by such a narrow mindset in this day and age. On the other hand, I knew that — like it or not — she was about to get plucked out of limbo, and soon. I wasn’t sure which way things would turn for Hunta and his stand-in accuser, but Simba “Rodham” Shange would come out of this shitstorm smelling like a garden. Hell, it might just resurrect her career, even if her husband’s dies on the vine. Wouldn’t that be a Hollywood twist?