than yours.”
After that, she bought a small icebox for the bedroom where she slept, though she continued to keep the larger items in the kitchen refrigerator. He bought a separate telephone, because he complained that she wasn’t giving him his messages from his “associates.” “I have never been a secretary for whores,” she said, watching him set up an answering machine next to the hide-a-bed couch where he slept. “Oh, don’t get me started ’bout whores. I’d say you wrote the damn book.” “It was dictated by you.”
Their one child, Alonzo, lived with his wife and son in Baltimore. He had not been close to his parents for a long time, and he could not put the why of it into words for his wife. Their boy, Alonzo, Jr., who was twelve when his grandparents moved into Sunset, loved to visit them. Horace would unplug and put away his telephone when the boy visited. And Loneese and Horace would sleep together in the bedroom. She’d put a pillow between them in the double bed to remind herself not to roll toward him.
Their grandson visited less and less as he moved into his teenage years, and then, after he went away to college, in Ohio, he just called them every few weeks, on the phone they had had installed in the name of Horace and Loneese Perkins.
In 1987, Loneese's heart began the countdown to its last beat and she started spending more time at George Washington University Hospital than she did in the apartment. Horace never visited her. She died two years later. She woke up that last night in the hospital and went out into the hall and then to the nurses’ station but could not find a nurse anywhere to tell her where she was or why she was there. “Why do the patients have to run this place alone?” she said to the walls. She returned to her room and it came to her why she was there. It was nearing three in the morning, but she called her own telephone first, then she dialed Horaces. He answered, but she never said a word. “Who's this playin on my phone?” Horace kept asking. “Who's this? I don’t allow no playin on my phone.” She hung up and lay down and said her prayers. After moving into Sunset, she had taken one more lover, a man at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, where she went from time to time. He was retired, too. She wrote in her diary that he was not a big eater and that “down there, his vitals were missing.”
Loneese Perkins was buried in a plot at Harmony Cemetery that she and Horace had bought when they were younger. There was a spot for Horace and there was one for their son, but Alonzo had long since made plans to be buried in a cemetery just outside Baltimore.
Horace kept the apartment more or less the way it was on the last day she was there. His son and daughter- in-law and grandson took some of her clothes to the Goodwill and the rest they gave to other women in the building. There were souvenirs from countries that Loneese and Horace had visited as man and wife-a Ghanaian carving of men surrounding a leopard they had killed, a brass menorah from Israel, a snow globe of Mt. Fuji with some of the snow stuck forever to the top of the globe. They were things that did not mean very much to Alonzo, but he knew his child, and he knew that one day Alonzo, Jr., would cherish them.
Horace tried sleeping in the bed, but he had been not unhappy in his twelve years on the hide-a-bed. He got rid of the bed and moved the couch into the bedroom and kept it open all the time.
He realized two things after Loneese's death: His own “vitals” had rejuvenated. He had never had the problems other men had, though he had failed a few times along the way, but that was to be expected. Now, as he moved closer to his seventy-third birthday, he felt himself becoming ever stronger, ever more potent. God is a strange one, he thought, sipping Chivas Regal one night before he went out: he takes a man's wife and gives him a new penis in her place.
The other thing he realized was that he was more and more attracted to younger women. When Loneese died, he had been keeping company with a woman of sixty-one, Sandy Carlin, in Apartment 907. One day in February, nine months after Loneese's death, one of Sandys daughters, Jill, came to visit, along with one of Jill's friends, Elaine Cunningham. They were both twenty-five years old. From the moment they walked through Sandy's door, Horace began to compliment them-on their hair, the color of their fingernail polish, the sharp crease in Jill's pants (“You iron that yourself?”), even “that sophisticated way” Elaine crossed her legs. The young women giggled, which made him happy, pleased with himself, and Sandy sat in her place on the couch. As the ice in the Pepsi-Cola in her left hand melted, she realized all over again that God had never promised her a man until her dying day.
When the girls left, about three in the afternoon, Horace offered to accompany them downstairs, “to keep all them bad men away.” In the lobby, as the security guard at her desk strained to hear, he made it known that he wouldn’t mind if they came by to see him sometime. The women looked at each other and giggled some more. They had been planning to go to a club in Southwest that evening, but they were amused by the old man, by the way he had his rap together and put them on some sort of big pedestal and shit, as Jill would tell another friend weeks later. And when he saw how receptive they were he said why not come on up tonight, shucks, ain’t no time like the present. Jill said he musta got that from a song, but he said no, he’d been sayin that since before they were born, and Elaine said thas the truth, and the women giggled again. He said I ain’t gonna lie bout bein a seasoned man, and then he joined in the giggling. Jill looked at Elaine and said want to? And Elaine said what about your mom? And Jill shrugged her shoulders and Elaine said O.K. She had just broken up with a man she had met at another club and needed something to make the pain go away until there was another man, maybe from a better club.
At about eleven thirty, Jill wandered off into the night, her head liquored up, and Elaine stayed and got weepy-about the man from the not-so-good club, about the two abortions, about running away from home at seventeen after a fight with her father. “I just left him nappin on the couch,” she said, stretched out on Horaces new living-room couch, her shoes off and one of Loneese's throws over her feet. Horace was in the chair across from her. “For all I know, he's still on that couch.” Even before she got to her father, even before the abortions, he knew that he would sleep with her that night. He did not even need to fill her glass a third time. “He was a fat man,” she said of her father. “And there ain’t a whole lot more I remember.”
“Listen,” he said as she talked about her father, “everything's gonna work out right for you.” He knew that, at such times in a seduction, the more positive a man was the better things went. It would not have done to tell her to forget her daddy, that she had done the right thing by running out on that fat so-and-so; it was best to focus on tomorrow and tell her that the world would be brighter in the morning. He came over to the couch, and before he sat down on the edge of the coffee table he hiked up his pants just a bit with his fingertips, and seeing him do that reminded her vaguely of something wonderful. The boys in the club sure didn’t do it that way. He took her hand and kissed her palm. “Everything's gonna work out to the good,” he said.
Elaine Cunningham woke in the morning with Horace sleeping quietly beside her. She did not rebuke herself and did not look over at him with horror at what she had done. She sighed and laid her head back on the pillow and thought how much she still loved the man from the club, but there was nothing more she could do: not even the five-hundred-dollar leather jacket she had purchased for the man had brought him around. Two years after running away, she had gone back to where she had lived with her parents, but they had moved and no one in the building knew where they had gone. But everyone remembered her. “You sure done growed up, Elaine,” one old woman said. “I wouldna knowed if you hadn’t told me who you was.” “Fuck em,” Elaine said to the friends who had given her a ride there. “Fuck em all to hell.” Then, in the car, heading out to Capitol Heights, where she was staying, “Well, maybe not fuck my mother. She was good.” “Just fuck your daddy then?” the girl in the backseat said. Elaine thought about it as they went down Rhode Island Avenue, and just before they turned onto New Jersey Avenue she said, “Yes, just fuck my daddy. The fat fuck.”
She got out of Horaces bed and tried to wet the desert in her mouth as she looked in his closet for a bathrobe. She rejected the blue and the paisley ones for a dark-green one that reminded her of something wonderful, just as Horace's hiking up his pants had. She smelled the sleeves once she had it on, but there was only the strong scent of detergent.
In the half room that passed for a kitchen, she stood and drank most of the orange juice in the gallon carton. “Now, that was stupid, girl,” she said. “You know you shoulda drunk water. Better for the thirst.” She returned the carton to the refrigerator and marveled at all the food. “Damn!” she said. With the refrigerator door still open, she stepped out into the living room and took note of all that Horace had, thinking, A girl could live large here if she did things right. She had been crashing at a friend's place in Northeast, and the friend's mother had begun to hint that it was time for her to move on. Even when she had a job, she rarely had a place of her own. “Hmm,” she said, looking through the refrigerator for what she wanted to eat. “Boody for home and food. Food, home. Boody You shoulda stayed in school, girl. They give courses on this. Food and Home the first semester. Boody Givin the second semester.”
