Then we made love again.
Philomena would have married Axel if he’d asked her to. She would have had his children and hosted his acid parties with catered meals and champagne chasers.
“But you never said you loved him,” I said.
“Love is an old-fashioned concept,” she replied in university-ese. “The human race developed love to make families cohe-sive. It’s just a tool you put back in the closet when you’re done with it.”
“And then you take it out again when someone else strikes your fancy?”
Then we made love again.
“Love is like a man’s thing,” she told me. “It gets all hot and bothered for a while there, but then after it’s over it goes to sleep.”
“Not me,” I said. “Not tonight.”
She smiled and the sun came up.
I forced myself to get dressed and ready to go.
“Do you have to leave?” she asked me.
“Do you love me?” I asked.
It is a question I had never asked a woman before that day. I had no idea that the words were in my chest, my heart. But that 2 7 6
C i n n a m o n K i s s
was the reply to her question. If she had said yes I would have taken a different path, I’m sure. Maybe I would have taken her with me or maybe I would have cut my losses and run. Maybe we would have flown together on the bearer bonds to Switzerland, where I would have taken a flat above Bonnie and Joguye.
“Sure I do,” she said with a one-shoulder shrug. She might as well have winked.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief and went out the door.
i p a r k e d m y l o w - r i d e r car across the street from an
innocuous-looking place on Ozone, less than a block away from Santa Monica beach. It was a little after seven and there was some activity on the street. There were men in suits and old women with dogs on leashes, bicyclers showing off their calves in shorts, and bums shaking the sand from their clothes. Almost everyone was white but they didn’t mind me sitting there. They didn’t call for the police.
I drank my coffee, ate my jelly doughnut. I tried to remember the last good meal I’d had. The chili at Primo’s, I thought. I felt clean. Cinnamon and I had taken four showers between our fevered bouts of not-love. My sex ached in my pants. I thought about her repudiation of love and my surprising deep need for it.
I wondered if my life would ever settle back into the bliss I’d known with Bonnie and the hope for happiness I had discovered in Cinnamon’s arms.
These thoughts pained me. I looked up and there was Jackson Blue walking out his front door, his useless spectacles on his face and a black briefcase dangling from his left hand.
I rolled down the window and called his last name.
He went down behind a parked car next to him. At one time seeing him jump like that would have made me grin. Many a 2 7 7
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time I had startled Jackson just because he would react like that.
He dove out windows, skipped around corners — but that day I wasn’t trying to scare my friend, I got no pleasure witnessing his frantic leap.
“Jackson, it’s me . . . Easy.”
Jackson’s head popped up. He grimaced but before he could complain I got out of the car with my hands held up in apology.
“Sorry, man,” I said. “I just saw you and shouted without thinkin’.”
The little coward pulled himself up and walked toward me, looking around to make sure there was no trap.
“Hey, Ease. What’s wrong?”
“I need help, Jackson.”
“Look like you need three days in bed.”
“That too.”
“What can I do for ya?”
“I just need you to ride with me, Blue. Ride with me for the day if you can.”
“Where you ridin’?”
“I got to find a white woman and then her daddy.”
“What you need me for?” Jackson asked.
“Company. That’s all. That and somebody to bounce ideas off of. I mean if you can get outta work.”
“Oh yeah,” Jackson said in that false bravado he always used to camouflage his coward’s heart. “You know I’m at that place sometimes as late as the president. He come in my office and tell me to go home. All I gotta do is call an’ tell ’em I need a rest day an’ they say,
