Diary of a Blues Goddess (23 page)

Friday morning at ten o'clock, my phone rang. It could only be:

1) a telemarketer; or

2) Rick, because everyone else I knew was as nocturnal as I was, or lived in the same damn house as I did. I groped for the receiver from beneath my comforter.

"Hello?" I groaned.

"Tell me you're not angry at me."

"Why?"

"Are you?"

"Yes."

"What if I told you I was wrong?"

I longed to tell him how wrong he really was. OF Hiram had engaged in some serious lip-lock with his companion all night. But outing Hiram to his lawyer wasn't my intention or style.

"I don't need you to tell me you were wrong."

"Why?"

"Because I know how wrong you were."

"Harsh, Georgia."

"
You
were harsh." I slid up higher on my pillow. "My friends are really terrific people. If you can't handle it, that's your problem. Just like it's your sister Catherine's problem if she doesn't like someone with a mixed racial heritage blending in with the River Road set. You know… I was reading my aunt's diary. You sister's attitude isn't far off how bad it was in 1939."

He exhaled loudly. "What about when it's just me and you? I've never had this kind of connection with anyone before. So if we need to iron out how your world and mine fit together, that's not an insurmountable problem as long as when it's just us things are the way they have been. I'm sorry, Georgia. Really sorry."

I thought about how I stuck up for Terrence to Dominique. I was always for giving people second chances. Rick sounded completely sincere… maybe the Shirleys were a little hard for a lawyer to get used to the first time out.

"Apology accepted."

"Can you have dinner with me tonight?"

"Wedding."

"What if you came over after the wedding and slept over? I can't sleep without you there. I'm afraid of the dark."

"Chicken."

"Come on, Georgia."

"I can't. It'll be way too late, and I get a ride with Jack. How about tomorrow we have breakfast together."

"What time? Nine o'clock?"

"I was thinking about one."

"That's lunch."

"Not to me."

"Okay, to show you that I
can
get used to your life and your friends, I will make you breakfast tomorrow
afternoon
. I'll pick you up at twelve-thirty."

"Deal."

I hung up the phone and leaned back in bed and smiled. Make-up sex is always the best.

The next afternoon, aka afternoon, Rick did not disappoint. When he picked me up, he had a red rose as a "peace offering." Back at his place, warm beignets, the Creole version of doughnuts, waited with a fresh pot of coffee and a pitcher of Bloody Marys with bits of horseradish and black pepper swirling around.

"I realize that maybe the Bloodies don't go with the beignets, but you're a New Orleans woman. Spicy and sweet can go together."

He slid up behind me and began nuzzling my neck. I spun around, and we kissed.

"I've missed you," he breathed. "You're spicy and sweet. Makes me think about tasting you."

"I've missed you, too," I murmured.

He knelt down on the floor and lifted my dress. He slid his hands up to my panties and then slowly pulled them down. I slipped out of my shoes, and then out of my panties. Lifting my dress still more, he put his tongue on me, licking me until I shuddered.

Slyly looking up at me, he whispered, "Does that make up for how naughty I've been?"

Still breathless, I said softly, "Not quite."

He led me to the bedroom, and I came again, harder than I ever had before with him. Each time we were together, I felt the subtle barriers of mistrust I had after years of dating disappointments fall away. Each time I straddled him, my breasts in his mouth, or him begging me to let him finally come, we seemed to move as one.

After we made love, we had breakfast around two-thirty. We reheated the beignets in the oven and drank several Bloody Marys. Then we went back to bed, and he curled around me as we napped. The last thing I remember before the heaviness of sleep fell over me was a soft whisper of a kiss and the words, "I'm falling for you, Georgia."

The make-up sex had not disappointed.

The next week, Rick took me to dinner at a French restaurant. We ordered a bottle of white wine and talked about his week at work, and then the various bookings I'd sung at, including a marriage between a seventy-year-old man and a twenty-something former stripper with double-Ds to put the drag queens to shame.

"That's a hell of a lot more interesting than settling the Morgan account."

"Exactly. His children are all
way
older than she is, and I thought when they took to the dance floor for their first dance as man and wife that one of them would trip her."

"How do you keep a straight face through all that?"

"I've seen it all. Fistfights at the reception. Sides of the family who won't speak to each other. Even—
even
—saw a groom making out with the maid of honor in an upstairs hallway."

"Holy shit!"

"My thoughts exactly."

"Can I ask you something?" He looked at me, his face illuminated by the candle on the table.

"Sure."

"All this is fascinating, but do you ever think you want to live a more normal life? You going to sing in this band of yours forever?"

"No. I'm working on my blues act. Eventually, I want to make a CD. Sing in small clubs."

"You don't feel any pull to have a real job?"

I looked across the table. "I have a real job."

"But I mean a more conventional life… The reason I ask is a friend of mine is the headmaster at St. Andrew's Episcopal School. Very exclusive school. They're looking for a music teacher. I told him about you."

"A teacher?"

He picked up a piece of bread and started buttering it. "Summers off. Benefits. Day hours. It's not a bad idea. You have a college degree in music."

"In music
performance
. Maybe to you it's not a bad idea, but I don't want to be a teacher."

"You don't feel at some point it's time to… I don't know… ?"

"To what? Give up on a dream? End up like the rest of the world, sleepwalking?"

He put his hands up. "It was just a thought."

"A bad thought." Tony, Red, they'd never think of me giving up. Giving in.

"I'm sorry. I think like a suit. I thought you were going to break me of that." He smiled at me. That smile of his had gotten him out of trouble his whole life, I guessed.

"And I think like a woman who lives in a haunted house."

"With a drag queen."

"You have a problem with Dominique?"

"No. You have to admit, he's not a typical roommate."

"
She
is a wonderful roommate. I just have to safeguard my lipstick. And my favorite eyeshadow. My tampons are safe, though."

He laughed. "I'm sorry, Georgia. I don't want you to change."

"Good. Because I think you're pretty well stuck with me the way I am."

We ate the rest of our meal, drinking wine and laughing. But later that night, as I listened to the heavy, rhythmic breathing of his sleep, I got up and padded around his apartment, looking at all the art on the walls. I had been different all my life. Even before my father left, he was always out late playing, and his friends used to jam in our living room, moving the furniture (and annoying my mother), the music traveling upstairs to my room. Everyone else's fathers that I knew were nine-to-fivers.

I thought about the teaching job. I had sometimes contemplated a life without drag queens and narrow bedrooms filled with the brokenhearted. But I couldn't quite picture myself in a house like this, part of the day world. My lineage was, as evidenced by Honey Walker's diary, filled with the blues and the night. It was a moon-and-stars world, not a sunshine world. My mother, I realized now, who had grown up with a gambling, bootlegger father, later a scion of a legitimate liquor company who routinely hosted illegal casino nights, and a mother who didn't mind dancing and a few scuff marks on the dining-room table, had tried to shoehorn both her and me into the day world. I had no idea how it was she even thought she could stay married to my father. But she had never ignited in me a desire for this life.

I ran my finger along Rick's dining-room table. Not a scratch on it. I turned on the dining-room light, the chandelier reflected in the sheen of the wood. What Dominique could do to that table with her size twelves.

General note to the male population:
If your girlfriend is a wedding singer, don't show up at weddings in the same city with another woman
.

Six weeks of bliss had gone by. Rick and I saw each other every minute we could schedule it. I even—albeit with a groan—met him for an early—as in eight o'clock in the fucking morning—breakfast before his first appointment of the day.

Then a Saturday night had arrived and the band and I were playing a big wedding at Louis XVI Restaurant Français. I had almost forgotten about it. Rick had even asked me if we were playing a wedding that Saturday. I told him no, we were playing a podiatrists' convention, but I had gotten my weekends confused. It's all the same to me. Electric slide with foot doctors. Electric slide with grandmas in sequins and bridesmaids in pink tulle. Does it really matter?

The restaurant has a beautiful courtyard with fountains, and people can stare up at the stars while saying their vows. The bride, a raven-haired beauty in a Vera Wang gown, and the well-built groom had chosen a Frank Sinatra standard, "I've Got You Under My Skin," as their first song as man and wife. I was singing my heart out, feeling a little teary as I always do, looking at the happy couple take to the floor, her arms around his neck. He kissing her on the forehead, then on the lips. I pictured Rick and I dancing to the same song. Maybe not at our wedding but at
a
wedding. I had been finding myself longing for a more normal life. A life of Friday and Saturday dates with the man I was so very seriously falling for.

As I sang the words "deep in the heart of me," out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rick trying to manipulate a tall, elegant blonde in a Versace—I'd seen it in Vogue—dress to the back of the crowd.