I worked at that envelope until I thought she’d take it from my hands and open it for me. I got the card out at last. Ter had made the thing herself, a cartoon of two tigers warily chasing each other around what looked like a palm tree. Inside, the same childlike scribble read “I will if you will.”
It might have sat unopened on the hutch forever, waiting, for all time, for my hand to graze hers, even by accident. But it was ready the moment I did. The hidden patience of her hand-drawn prediction broke over me and I sat on her sofa, crying. She led me to her bed and put me in those sheets that smelled of saltwater taffy. She slipped from her clothes and stood open to me. I could not stop looking. I sat high up on a rock bluff, looking out on a surprise, twisting river valley. I’d thought she was cream, muslin, porcelain. But her body — her slender, sloping, undulating body — was all the colors there were. I moved over her, tracing with my fingers, my face up close to every inch of terrain, the light cerulean of her veins below her neck, the terra-cotta of her breasts’ tips, the pea green smear of a bruise just above her hip. I gorged myself with looking at the spreading rainbow of her, until, shy again in the face of my pleasure, she leaned over and doused the light.
All that night, she brought me back to myself. I was in bed with a woman. I’d never before heard the whole tune, beginning to end. But I knew enough bars to fake it. I felt the muscles just under her thighs hunch up in surprise under my hand. Our skins pushed up against each other, shocked by the contrast, even in the dark. She hummed, her mouth to my belly; I couldn’t make out the song. Her mouth opened in awe when I went into her. Her throat kept timeless time, and every one of her murmurs was pitched.
Afterward, she held on to me, her discovery. “The way you play. I knew it. Just by the way you play.”
“You have to hear my brother,” I told her, half-asleep. “He’s the real once-in-a-lifetime musician.”
I fell unconscious and slept the sleep of the dead, Teresa’s hands still thawing out the crevasses of my back. When I woke, she hovered over me like Psyche, a glass of orange juice in her hands. The room was blazing. She was fully dressed, in her candy-factory clothes. My honeysuckle rose. I made space for her on the bed’s edge. “I’m almost late. The key’s in the music box on my dresser if you need it.”
I took her hand as she stood. “I have to tell you something.”
“Shh. I know.”
“My father is white.”
It wasn’t what she expected. But her surprise vanished quickly enough to surprise me. She rolled her eyes. Solidarity of the oppressed. “Tell me about it. So’s mine.” She leaned back down and kissed me on the mouth. I could feel her lips, wondering how mine felt to her.
“Are you coming tonight?” I asked.
“That depends. You playing the good stuff?”
“If you’re singing.”
“Oh,” she said, heading out the door. “I’ll sing anything.”
I dressed and made the bed, pulling the sheets over our still-fresh stains. I walked around her apartment, happily criminal, just looking at this new world. I stared at her collections, taking my own private tour of a distant ethnographic museum. Her life: ceramic frogs, a clock in the shape of the sun, purple bath soaps and sponges, slippers with crossed eyes stitched into their tops, a book on the picturesque barns of Ohio, inscribed “Happy Birthday from Aunt Gin and Uncle Dan. Don’t forget you promised to visit soon!” Each of us is alien to every other. Race does nothing but make the fact visible.
I opened her closet and gazed at all her clothes. A line of slips hung on hooks against one wall, black and white sheathes whose edges I’d seen sticking out under her dresses, clinging to and imitating her. I went into the kitchen and sliced last night’s ham for breakfast. I ate it cold, afraid to dirty her pans. I’d been here often, but never alone. I knew what the police would do if some law-abiding neighbor tipped them off to me. Just being here by myself in this alien woman’s rooms was a life sentence. Safety meant leaving. But I had no place to go except back to my life.
I went to her record collection, the safest ground in this booby-trapped place. There wasn’t a piece of classical music on her shelves except the hepped-up thefts of tunes long out of copyright. I started from the tops of her charts, looking for a song to play her at the club that night, something I might learn just for her. I slipped on a disk of Monk’s and knew that everything on it was beyond my meager fake technique. Oscar Peterson: I laughed after four measures, exhilarated and demoralized. I played an Armstrong Hot Seven recording that Teresa had worn almost smooth. Everything I thought I knew about the man and his music vanished in a river of sound. I sampled people I knew only by reputation: Robert Johnson, Sidney Bechet, Charles Mingus. I stood surrounded in the wall-wide, rapturous choruses of Thomas A. Dorsey. I broke into Teresa’s cache of blues: Howlin’ Wolf, Ma Rainy. Junior Wells’s harmonica cut me into thin strips and passed me through the reeds. Up at the very top of the collection were all her master women spell-casters. Carter, McRae, Vaughan, Fitzgerald: In each one, I heard Teresa twirling and wailing, losing herself in imitative ecstasy every night that she came home from the factory, singing her real image into being, alone in the dark.
I listened for hours. I switched tracks so fast, they piled up on top of one another. The whole claustrophobic classical catalog could not surpass this outpouring for breadth, depth, or heights. A massed hallelujah chorus poured out of Teresa’s speakers, a torrent flowing over every riverbank the country could invent to hold it. This wasn’t a music. It was millions. All these songs, talking to one another, all insinging and outsinging, back and forth at the party to end all celebration, into the wee hours of a suppressed national never. This was the house at the end of the long night, inviting, warm, resourceful, and subversive. And I was standing on the stoop, locked out, too late to bluff my way through the party’s doors, listening to the sound roll through the windows and light the streets in all directions. I heard the play of voices through the shutters from the back alley. I eavesdropped shamelessly, not caring if I got arrested, caught in a sound that, even at this muffled distance, was more vital and urgent and jammed to therapeutic capacity with pleasure than any I’d ever make.
In that voyeur’s elation, a single-word song on a 193 °Cab Calloway and His Orchestra recording stopped me cold. I read the title twice, fumbled the disk out of its jacket, put it on the player, and managed to bring the needle down on the cut without gouging the vinyl. There was Calloway, doing what sounded like a bad Al Jolson imitation, wailing away on a song called “Yaller”:
Black folk, white folk, I’m learning a lot,
You know what I am, I know what I’m not,
Ain’t even black,
I ain’t even white, I ain’t like the day and I ain’t like the night.
Feeling mean, so in-between, I’m just a High Yaller…
I listened through three times, learning the song as if I’d written it. I don’t know what possessed me, but I played it that night at the Glimmer Club, after Teresa arrived. Hope is never more stupid than when it’s within striking distance. She took her seat, up close to the piano, glowing with our new secret. She looked heart-stopping in a short brown tube dress I’d seen in her closet. I slipped the song late into the last set, when nobody was left to hear but her. I watched her face, knowing in advance what I’d get. Those lips that mouthed along with every other tune that evening, lips that had hummed wordlessly as we made love, held still and bloodless throughout my rendition.