Friends and Lovers (26 page)

I said, “What does Leonard and his friend have planned for the rug rats?”

“They won’t be there.”

“Just us?”

She nodded. “It’s a closed-door girl and woman thing today.”

“Why aren’t Leonard and his friend speaking?”

“Leonard’s in Hawaii.” A slice of time went by. Debra said, “Tyrel’s taken a promotion and moved. He left L.A.”

Something in me throbbed. The world swayed out of focus.

I did my best to sound blasé when I asked, “Where?”

“Oakland. But he’s working out of San Francisco.”

“Good for him.” I felt demoted. She told me he left while they were in Europe. Again I said, “Good for him.”

It had taken me forty-five damn minutes to do my stupid makeup this morning. I’d run all over to find the right hose.

Debra was running her mouth. I tuned in when she said, “Tomorrow me and you are going out into the Inland Empire.”

“Where?”

“Glen Ivy. We’re getting mud baths and getting pampered and massaged by strange men from head to toe. My treat.”

I faked a perky “All right, all right. Sounds good.”

Debra said, “Bobby asked about you.”

“How’s his business doing?”

“Fine. He’s on a photo shoot in Cabo for the next few days.”

Debra was babbling about her cousin, my play brother, telling me he’d moved from Palmdale to Pasadena and opened a studio in Old Town—shit I already knew. Every now and then I threw in a soft “uh-huh” just to make her think I was so damn interested in hearing about weird-ass Bobby and his successes.

Tyrel had moved.

Without a thought I opened my purse and made sure I had the receipt for the new suit I had on. Nobody worth knowing was going to see it, so I might as well send it back to the rack.

In the bottom of my bag I found the receipt for the Hugo Buscati ankle-wrap pumps I was wearing. Then I fumbled across two three-week-old movie tickets from when I’d gone out with Richard.

I wouldn’t have gone to a second movie at Horton Plaza with Richard, but after the first matinee he sent me two dozen long-stem roses. And on a rainy day, going to dinner was much better than sitting around playing with the lint in my navel.

My heart wasn’t in it, and it felt like I was cheating. I wouldn’t have gone out with him again, but little country-and-funky-ass Miss Chiquita got a booty call from Raymond and left me high and dry in the thick of the night. She’s sprung, she’s a flake, and will never be my friend. I deprogrammed her number from my phone. I’m thinking about blocking her number too.

But she did make me appreciate what me and Debra have cultivated and nourished. Until now. Debra knew Tyrel was gone before I came up here. Heifer could’ve told me long before now. Just because I’d asked her not to mention Tyrel’s name around me
ever
again, didn’t mean she had to do what I said.

Tyrel had moved. Call the fat lady and start the music. This party was definitely over.

Leonard flew up to do a show in downtown Oak-town at Geoffrey’s Inner Circle. I told him to cancel his room at the Carlton in San Francisco and have his limo driver bring him over the bridge to my place when his plane touched ground. From here I’d feed him, chauffeur him to the show and back to the airport.

At my door he said, “We’ve got some things to discuss.”

We hadn’t talked much since I’d moved. He was never at home, and when I was, I wasn’t answering the phone. And I didn’t call as much because he was married. After the way Debra had let me down, I avoided being in contact with her. Most of our correspondence had been messages sent back and forth over the Net.

It seemed like a lifetime since we’d hung out. I was damn happy to see him. Even for men among men, absence does make the heart grow fonder.

While I lit up a cherry incense to kill the smell from the fish I fried the night before, Leonard cursed me out, smacked me upside the head, then gave me a brother-to-brother hug.

He tossed his luggage in the bedroom, then checked out my new life, gazed from wall to ceiling with a grin of approval.

“This is dope. Who decorated for you?”

“This girl named Jodie.”

“This place has more colors than a cartoon.”

“I was trying to make it look friendly. Should I change it?”

“Your Melrose Avenue flair works.”

“I brought some of L.A. to the Bay.”

“Hey, you know what I wanna do?”

“You want to call Debra and check in.”

“Besides that. Where’s the phone?”

“It’s on the sofa. What did you want to do?”

“Go to Frisco and ride the trolley.”

“We can park and ride the trolley into Chinatown and eat.”

“Bet.”

This would be one of those days where we could act like the boys we kept locked inside, let out some of the juvenile delinquency we kept tucked beneath age and responsibility.

“Tell Debra I said hello.”

“I just left her and Shelby.”

Hearing her name made time stop. No matter how far I went, that damn name kept coming up. I shrugged away the bitter feeling and asked, “What were they up to?”

“Going to see a play.”

“Which one?”

“
Talented Tenth.
I might understudy, so Debra’s gonna tell me what she thinks about it, then we’ll decide.”

I noticed how much the word
we
was in his vocabulary.

He called home. No one answered. He left a flirty message. Leonard went to the pine bookcase that was filled with the same old pictures. I waited for him to see the new one.

Leonard’s face lit up, he said. “Hey, that’s us.”

“Yep.”

It was a photo of me, Mye, Leonard, and Daddy. Mye had mailed it to me as a housewarming gift. She’d come across it and was about to rip it to shreds. I’d had the original blown up poster size, matted, and framed. In the Kodak moment, we were in South Central, on the sidewalk of Vermont Avenue, posing in front of Daddy’s first store. We’d captured that memory a couple of days before we walked in on him and that woman. Mye was on Daddy’s lap, hugging his neck, smiling like Daddy was the man of her dreams.

Leonard cringed and said, “Look at our greasy shag
haircuts. Man, what the hell were we thinking? Damn, your daddy looks young. With that black fedora and Elton John shades on, he looks like the Mack. Me, Mye, and you look like we were in the Sylvers. You talked to your old man?”

“I called and left a message.”

Leonard moved on with the conversation, “Don’t let me forget to leave you a copy of the pictures me and Debra took in Europe.”

“All right.”

Leonard kicked off his shoes, grabbed a handful of gourmet jelly beans out of the glass jar on the coffee table, moved from sofa to loveseat to bar stools, butt-tested everything.

He said, “You got all new furniture. And you got enough workout stuff in that room to start your own gym.”

Leonard strolled into the guest room, came back with my new photo album under his arm. It was a photographic journey of my delirium, a gallery of the transitional team.

With each turn of the page, he bobbed his head, occasionally shot me a look, and griped, “Yep.”

“What’re you tripping off of?”

“I’ll show you in a minute.”

“Hope you don’t see somebody
too
familiar.”

“You know I don’t live my life like that.”

He moved my glass planter, the one filled with a rainbow of marbles, lined up about ten pictures on the coffee table, then made one comment as his finger tapped each one.

Leonard said, “They all look like Chocolate.”

“Who?”

“Shelby. You know who I’m talking about. All of ‘em. look like her.”

“Bullshit.”

“They all got itty-bitty, cute, tiny little pug noses.”

“They don’t.”

“Different skin tones, taller, shorter, but they’re
Chocolate. Damn. Look at the booty on this girl in the negligee.”

“Which one?”

He pointed at a photo of Lorna. He said, “If that ain’t a Shelby booty, I’m a white man with a day job.”

We laughed.

“How did you get these sisters to pose damn near naked?”

“I asked.”

He flipped through the album again.

He was serious. “All right. How would you feel if some guy had pictures like this, and it was Mye. Or your momma.”

“Leonard—”

“Think about if you had a daughter, and some shit like this was going on. You’ve been in Oakland, ostracized from society, and nobody knows what you’re doing. You don’t have any accountability for your actions.”

“Stop preaching.”

“Not preaching, teaching.”

I said, “You still go to Bible study?”

“Every chance I get. Damn right.”

“You sound like you should be tutoring the preacher.”

He stood and grabbed the business section of the newspaper.

I said, “Where you going?”

“Bathroom. You got incense?”

“Hall closet.”

I flipped through the pictures while he was gone. Checked out the dark skin and different hairstyles. Photos catch the person in the moment, but can’t capture the real personality.

I felt bad. Some of my enthusiasm for passing on the heartbreak was gone. Nobody on the pictures meant a thing. If none of them ever called again, I wouldn’t miss a single voice.

Leonard joked ninety percent of the time, but the other ten percent was too deep for most to handle.
Especially when it dealt with family matters. Like me, he knew when things were worthy enough to be important. I was part of his extended family, so right now I was important enough for him to be serious. His tone always told me I mattered.

Thirty minutes later, we were playing Super Nintendo on the big screen. I’d been sucked into some sort of therapy session.

Leonard said, “Mye told me to give you a message too.”

“What is it?”

He opened his overnight bag and handed me a Thrifty bag. Inside was an over-the-counter home HIV test. I didn’t think it was funny. Not at all.

“Hey, don’t look at me like that. Your sister told me to buy it for you.” Leonard laughed. “She said, ‘A tisket, a tasket.’”

“You two have launched a conspiracy.”

“C’mon. Enough of the bullshit. Let’s talk.”

I rested my bare feet up on the glass coffee table, rubbed the back of my neck, and admitted the anger I had for Shelby. Anger for Lisa. Anger for a few others. Running amok was the only way I knew how to respond to the animosity that had germinated in L.A.

“If you asked me, I’d say you’re trying to solve your problems through geographical distance and physical duplication.”

“Don’t get anal.”

“Work with me. Now where was I?”

“In the middle of intellectual masturbation.”

“Shut up. Listen. You and Shelby broke up.”

“She clocked out and walked. That goes without saying.”

“Right.
We
didn’t break up. Not you and me, or you and Debra. My wife is pulling her hair out over this shit.”

“I hear your diagnosis, so what’s your prescription, black man?”

“Choose between one of these babes or call Shelby. Ask her to meet you and talk. Find out where you stand.
It’s on you. But three out of four doctors recommend Shelby.”

I made that stupid I-don’t-know sound.

He said, “I can try to get her phone number or address, and you can contact her yourself, or I’ll tell her to call you.”

I shrugged.

“I know you ain’t scared. Don’t turn into a punk on me.”

“You know better. I never cross the same river twice.”

“But you don’t have to burn the bridge either. At least, you know, be cordial. You don’t have to be her friend and send Christmas cards, but clear the air. Put some closure to it and go on. I don’t want it to get to the point that if I was gonna have a pool party or something at the house, I’d have to decide who
not
to invite because of friction.”

“What you trying to say?”

“I think I said it.”

A few moments went wherever unnoticed moments go. Moments I lost because I was staring at the gallery of photos Leonard had left spread out. Staring at the transition team.

I said, “Get me Shelby’s number. I’ll call her to say hi.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a card.

* * *

After Leonard finished his show and I dropped him off at the airport, I sat on Shelby’s number. Sat and thought.

Lorna came over for a Friday night dinner. We caught a movie down on Lakeshore. It started to rain like rain was never going to end. She ended up spending the night.

By ten p.m. she was asleep, and I was restless. Earlier in the evening a plane had crashed and killed everybody on board. Until I heard it wasn’t Shelby’s airline I was high-strung, and most of that feeling of dread hadn’t fled. It was an old feeling I used to get most of the days Shelby went to work, sort of the same feeling a police
officer’s spouse lived with as soon as their mate went to work. Thought I was over her. Not yet.

I was standing around in my pajamas, thinking about my life. I’d done that every night I’d been home alone. Every morning like clockwork, I’d wake up at one thirty and four a.m.; wake up, pace for a while, straighten up the place, then walk across the room, stare out at the lake, check out the Big Dipper and Orion.

And the moon.

The wind was so hard it looked like the rain was falling sideways. The sky rumbled its storm warning. Sounded like the heavens had an ulcer. Lightning flashed across East Oakland.

Lorna twitched. Stirred. Didn’t wake up. I stood over my bed, stared at her. Felt like a stalker in my own home. An hour ago she was climbing the walls, making noises that could deafen a thunderstorm. Now she glowed like a cocoa angel on break.

On my dresser was one of those “Love Is” cartoons she had clipped out. She’d dropped it off in the lobby of my job along with a book she’d picked up at Marcus Book Stores,
Think and Grow Rich
, that and a personal, sexy note of invitation that had a red-inked devil’s horn on the top of a yellow smiley face.

Lorna is a petite sister with an everlasting smile that brought pleasant feelings into any room. She could replace Shelby. And if Lorna didn’t, she could diminish my psychological net worth for that shrew. Could lighten the baggage with a kiss and a smile.