How We Fall

Evening was heavy orange, hot and humid, deep blues high over treetops and rooftops in a close neighborhood of close houses on close streets. At the foot of a slight incline, in a three-story brownstone with an enclosed porch, in a close room under a half-open window, the thinness of worn white sheets clung slippery wet to brown bodies, brown bodies breathing hard and moving strong.

In many homes in this close neighborhood, dinner dishes were being put away, countertops wiped down, floors swept. Children enjoyed their last few hours of play before it was time to run baths and get ready for bed. Men dozed in favorite easy chairs watched by reruns of television shows originally broadcast before their children were born. Those who had air conditioners ran them. The rest made do with fans. It was too hot to be outside. It was too hot period, except to the brown people at the bottom of the block. Their mattress groaned. The bed frame whined. A rickety headboard rickety-rocked, banging occasionally against ash-colored paneling. The heat inspired them.

Afterwards, the brown woman wanted to but didn’t have the energy to will her body up, stretch out her arm, and reach for the remote to turn on the portable fan she had made the dark brown man turn off when the ineffective draft began to annoy her. The dark brown man stared at a ceiling the color of sun-bleached creases in old white tablecloths.

“What are my neighbors going to think?” She had sweated the sheets stuck to her skin.

“We weren’t that loud, Claudia.” He was just as hot.

“And this headboard?”

“Do you have a screwdriver? I’ll tighten it up.” He kissed her fingertips, liking the salty, saucy, pungent residue of their lovemaking on them.

“In the kitchen. Not now.”

Claudia liked and feared his gentleness. It disarmed her, forty-two, never married, no children, no illusions the same would not be true at fifty-two, sixty-two… for the rest of her life. This was it. From now on, she would take a lover, they would be vaguely a couple until they definitely weren’t, another lover would come and go. Sacrifice and commitment would always be relative to convenience. They always had been. She was just slow to catch on.

“There’s a unicorn on your ceiling.” He showed her the horn, wings, and outlined the body in rays of light and shadow cast long through oak leaves and lace curtains.

“I’ll tell the neighbors it made all the noise.”

The one man who may have loved her the way her father loved her mother, she had sent away. He bored her. This was after she lost her job at Rodgers & Hornsby Books. She met this man on her way home from the unemployment office, the year before that whole process went online. Calvin was his name. It was too soon. Poor timing.

Claudia had worked without a break since three weeks after college graduation. She didn't know when the next break would come. She had a little bit of money. Lots of women her age still referred to themselves in the mirror as girls. They were still going out to see and be seen, splash parties, cookouts, cabarets, office parties, ski trips, bowling, softball games. Calvin's only fascination had been her. Now, she wanted to see what else she could experience and how it would add to the black woman she wanted to become.

“Your neighbors may not even be home.” The way this Jesse kept holding and touching her would’ve been suffocating not that long ago, especially in this heat.

“We should’ve gone to your place.” She fanned herself with her free hand.

Dry cleaning was on the back of her closet, still in plastic. There were clothes on a director’s chair that needed to go to the cleaners, three pairs of shoes on the floor that should’ve been put away, an art exhibit catalog spread on its face. She couldn’t get out of her mind that Jesse was probably this attentive to every woman he had ever been with. It was a part of him or a talent. Yet she couldn’t help but respond. It had been so long since someone had been so gentle with her.

“My neighbors would’ve called the police.” He was watching the eyes of an African weaving on the far wall. There were plants in the window. The lamp on her nightstand was heavy brass, its shade covered by a blue fishnet with cowry shells trapped inside of it.

“I thought you said I wasn’t that loud.” She rose to put something under a glass of melting ice before the condensation left a watermark.

“You’re not. I like how you are.” He caught her arms and licked between her shoulder blades. It tickled.

“Hungry?” She lay back against him. They fit inside the shapes of one another with a familiarity she’d forgotten she could want.

“Hot.”

“Don’t think you’re the man or that you rocked my world or anything. I didn’t give you anything. I took what I wanted.”

She loosed herself from this man she’d met Wednesday at rush hour, under a giant, brilliantly oxidized, iron sculpture of a clothespin. She was on her way home from her job at the African American Museum. Jesse was coming out of the subway. She saw him looking at her and said hello. Now it was Friday evening. They were supposed to be out on their first date. She scooted to the edge of the bed, clicked on the fan and closed her eyes to the oscillating breeze, more effective now.

His head rested on a hand propped up by an elbow the way a photographer might pose him. “I gave you a canvas and became the paint your broad strokes used to create a self-portrait.”

She hurled a pillow at his face. “I’m really not into Nietzche, staring into the abyss and the abyss staring back and all of that. What if the person isn’t a cynic and harbors no bitterness? Nietzsche assumes the nature of the soul is a monster, probably because his was.”

“Come here.” He set the pillow behind him as though it was obstructing the view he wanted her to have.

“No.” She was looking at herself in a mirror over the dresser on his side of the bed. She still liked her figure, though not as much as he seemed to like his.

“Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

They would not have met if she had not said hello. Even so, he had almost kept walking. He stopped, but not so much to strike up a conversation. He didn’t know what to do, shook out of that private limbo that commuters form around themselves, the particulars of that journey long having become instinctive. The heat. The multitude. A dissonance of voices competing to be heard above the roar of a train. Concrete vibrated through the soles of his shoes, and he became aware of muggy air and a taste of mildewed decay that he normally tuned out.

Tonight, he had arrived on her doorstep, promptly at six, dark glasses, a black polo shirt, pleated khakis, and Italian loafers. She said he looked pretty cool on this hot evening. He looked her over in her low-cut little red dress, slightly bowed legs, toes painted red, T-strap sandals, and told her she didn’t look too hot either. She smiled, nodding to a beat that wasn’t playing anywhere he could hear and asked if he was clever enough to open a bottle of wine. He asked for a corkscrew. She went into the kitchen to get it, came back with bottle and corkscrew dangling from one hand, two glasses filled with ice in the other. When he offered to help, she asked if he could unzip her dress.

“Please come here. I need to show you something.” Now he was lying on his stomach, his head resting on folded arms, his behind high and tight.

“Show me from there.” She thought if his hips weren’t so narrow, he would look almost as good as she did in a dress. His masculinity mostly came from his upper body, even more so than from what swung between his legs. It was in the way he held, looked at, spoke to, and moved with her. She had never let go of herself the way she did this evening. If she had, she believed past relationships might have gone differently.

“Let’s go somewhere. I’ve got a taste for ice cream.”

“I’ve got Häagen-Dazs in the fridge.” She wondered how much of this evening was brought on by finding out that the last man in her life, for whom she spent three years waiting to overcome his fear of commitment, was getting married to someone he met just three months ago at his sister’s wedding. She’d met the fiancée, bad skin condition, terribly myopic, slovenly. Her ex was a shallow soul. So even if this new woman had something she didn’t, her ex wouldn’t have appreciated it. Yet he appreciated something. Maybe this new woman let go the way she’d let go tonight.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She climbed back in bed. “Just hold me.”

“Are you awake?” She was wrapping, unwrapping, and rewrapping a thread she pulled off of his pillowcase around her index finger.

“Emm-hmm.” His head lay on her.

“Whatcha thinkin’?” She dropped the thread and stroked his face.

“That I still owe you dinner.”

“It’s too hot for a heavy meal. Can I get a rain check?”

“When and where do you want it?” He tapped above her breast in rhythm to her heart.

“When is good for you?”

“Whenever you’re hungry.”

“Do you anticipate being hungry tomorrow night?”

“That’s safe to assume.” She closed her eyes and said to herself that at least he wasn’t going to be a one-night stand. Then she pinched his nostrils. He licked her face. Laughter reverberated against his cheek. He bit her nipple. She slapped his buttocks, not wanting to think about not wanting to regret not making him wait. This encounter was something she chose for herself. It was not necessarily supposed to be about him, and for all she knew he may never call again, in spite of his promise to call again, and she didn’t want to have to pretend not to be waiting for his call. This was supposed to be about wanting to feel sexy. If only for right now, she wanted to be the most important thing in someone’s life besides her own.

“Ouch.” He was on his back, hands around her waist, looking up into eyes searching his.

“Too much for you?” Most of her weight was on her hands against his chest, kneading sinew.

“Too much for who?” He hadn’t been chosen as much as he had come along looking not so much like her idea of Mr. Right as her idea of someone she could have her way with and forget. His submission had an hypnotic effect on her. She couldn’t remember feeling so powerful. This time, she didn’t let anything escape. She freed it. She threw something on him.

“I could really go for some of that Häagen-Dazs, if the offer is still open.”

It was dark now, humid, not as hot, tolerable as long as the fan was directly on them.

“I’ve got vanilla bean or butter pecan.” There was an air conditioner in the basement. This summer, Claudia had found no one to put it in for her. In the morning—it would shock her if Jesse left before then—she would ask him.

“I’ll get it. You look so comfortable. Stay right where you are.”

“I’d better. You’ve never been in my kitchen. You don’t even know where it is.”

“Relax. If I get lost, I’ll call your name like you called mine.” He reached for, clung to, and kissed her as though he knew that was what she needed.

“Your overconfidence isn’t healthy.”

“If you’re implying you faked any of that, I don’t care. Just keep on doing what you do.”

“Is that a limp?’

“Don’t flatter yourself.” His left calf was giving him slight discomfort. That morning he’d tried to go out and run ball as though he was still in his twenties and could fall out of bed, lace up a pair of sneaks, and fly up and down the court from sunrise to sunset.

When Jesse was younger, he had barely bothered to stretch, thought vitamins were for growing children, and thought diet meant eating whatever he had a taste for whenever he had a taste for it. His body never complained. It did what he needed without him having to think about it. Now, at forty, it needed to be coaxed and pampered, or he ended up with nasty little tweaks like he had in his calf. But a tweak would not make him favor his step. He decided she had to be kidding about the limp and moved out onto the unlit landing.

There was a closed door to a spare or guest room and another across from him. He’d been inside the adjacent room, a bathroom, several times. The hall stairwell was narrow. The railing was loose. The steps creaked. He made a note not to let her forget that screwdriver. He’d tighten up the railing too. Moonlight off the porch was bright enough that he easily avoided her living room furniture and found the entrance to the kitchen.

As soon as his bare feet met the fresh-waxed floor, a pleasant lemon scent became apparent. The kitchen floor was slightly higher than the rest of the downstairs, more solid, like it had been resurfaced. The sharpness of cabinet corners. The quick sounds door catches made. The smoothness of surfaces. The refrigerator, all the appliances, were new. Claudia must have recently had her entire kitchen redone.

He looked out the back door. She had a flower garden in front of a new picket fence. A homemade birdhouse hung off the lowest limb of the only tree. What he first thought was a squirrel were garden gloves lying in a lawn chair. She tended a garden. He would have walked outside, naked, to see what she grew, but the moon was too bright. He could feel her stronger out in the yard, and it drew him like the salt on her skin after they’d made love. Somewhere it registered that the upstairs railing was rattling, the stairs creaking, but when her chin pushed against his arm and her body came warm against his back, he jumped.

She stepped back, as if her touch was the cause of his tension. “What are you looking at?”

“How come there are no flowers in the house?” He was still facing the backyard.

“There are three plants in the bedroom.” She came back to him.

“That’s right.”

“There’s a big fern in the bathroom. I’ve got a money tree and plants in the living room too… not that we stayed in there long enough for you to notice.”

“You are a very beautiful individual.” He reached behind him for her hand before turning toward her.

“Thank you.” She heard her voice falter, cleared her throat, and said, “But now I’m just allowing you to use me as the canvas upon which you paint your self-portrait.”

“A true artist allows each canvas to bring out the best in them. She reveals herself. He doesn’t create her.”

The way he kissed her, she thought, made her feel she was the most important thing in his life. It would be easy to forget that she was only supposed to feel this way right now. But why couldn’t right now last? It would be so easy. This was a man who could see a unicorn in twilight across a ceiling. He should feel a draft making her uncomfortable. She waited for him to lift her eyes to his, smile in that soft way he had, and tell her a poultice from the horn of a unicorn could cure an ailing heart. Then their feet would begin to move, almost imperceptibly at first. His fingers would spread around the curve of her waist, and her hand would press into the small of his back. To the moon, through the backdoor, they would look like they were dancing. Only there would be no music, just brown shapes moving slow across a kitchen floor bathed in a tiny golden glow.

For the last fifteen years, she had been giving back to her community through the artists she fought to bring to the museum. The look on the face of a little girl in barrettes reflected to her from a Sonya Clark tapestry of a little girl made entirely out of barrettes. An old man standing in the front of a Tuskegee Airman’s uniform with tears in his eyes. Yes, your people did this! You can do this! She'd grown so much. She didn't want credit. This was who she should've been all along.

But, please, Lord. Hadn't she paid her dues? She didn't know what else to do. If there was more, show her, lead her. She would do it gladly. Then what? Only a fool believed she could pick up her mat and walk, and that’s all there was to it. The desperate had faith that was no match for their prayers being answered. If only there was some way to put in a little vial that desperate feeling. You could wear it around your neck and clutch it every time you felt yourself with just a little too much pep in your step. But that wasn't how things worked.

“Something’s on your mind.” Jesse used his knuckle—she felt it under her chin—to raise her eyes off the floor.

“Dance with me,” she said.