My heart was thundering by the end of the report. I wondered if the randy porter Warren had put together the delivery Negro at the back door and the death of his tenant. I worried that I might have left a fingerprint or maybe my wallet fell out on the toilet floor. I actually reached for my billfold to make sure that I still had it.
As bad as I felt, I was still able to beat Brown. That gave me hope. Maybe fear gave me clarity.
“Another game?” Brown asked.
“You good, man,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
Brown stuck his tongue in his cheek and smiled. The grin stopped at his mouth, his eyes bearing no relation to mirth. That’s how it was for so many displaced southern, and even midwestern, Negroes in those days. Coming to California, they had to dig out from under nearly a century of white oppression. Everybody, black and white, was a potential enemy. People that had been mired so deeply in poverty that that’s all they could ever expect. And so when faced with hope, many became distant and watchful. Even when relaxing, people like Brown were on guard, ready for any threat.
“MR. HENDRICKS,” CHARLOTTA CALLED AT MY BACK.
I was halfway down the hall, headed for my room. You know I had to be shaken by that news report to have forgotten her in the sitting room.
“Hey.”
“Did you forget our drink?”
“No, baby,” I said. “I just didn’t want to give people the wrong idea. I mean, what would it look like if I just walked up to you and said let’s go upstairs?”
Charlotta was slightly taller than I and a few pounds heavier. She pressed me up against the wall and kissed me, hard. She knew how to kiss. The worry was still in my head but all the details fell away. When she stepped back to see my reaction, she had a smile on her face. I took a stutter step to keep on my feet.
“I like bein’ treated like a lady,” she said.
We kissed down the hall and up the wide stairway. It took me three minutes to unlock the door because Charlotta had worked her hand down the front of my pants. When she found what she was searching for her eyes opened wide.
“Is that real?” she asked me.
“Does it feel real?”
“Yeah.”
“Then it is.”
There are only three things that I’ve ever had pride in: my intelligence, my bookstore, and my sexual endowment.
Charlotta and I barely made it to the bed. Once there, we hardly let go of each other.
Somewhere in the middle of our passion I realized how much I needed the release. It wasn’t lovemaking, but that was all right. I needed to be pushed around in a situation where I could push back. She didn’t need to love me but just what I was doing—how hard and how long.
“Again,” she whispered for the third time.
“You got to gimme a couple’a minutes, girl,” I said. “Just a couple.”
Charlotta smiled at me. She held both physical love and victory in her mien. It was a battle I didn’t mind losing.
I got up and lit two cigarettes, placing one of them between her lips. Then I lay down, putting my head on her thigh. We smoked for a while in the afterglow of our passion.
“You used to come up here when Kit had this room, huh?” I asked as nonchalantly as I could.
“What you mean by that?” She flexed the hard muscle of her leg.
“Nuthin’ really,” I said. “I mean, it’s just that when I opened that door and looked at you, I thought that whoever it was you were comin’ to see was a lucky man.”
“Oh.” Charlotta’s leg relaxed. “You don’t have to be jealous, Paris.”
“Wha, what did you call me?”
“That’s what your driver’s license says your name is.”
I had only gone to the toilet once since we’d been together. I couldn’t have been out of the room for more than a few minutes.
“Yeah, well, you know, honey. Sometimes a man needs to be a little on the sly. I know I told Miss Moore I was marrying somebody, but really I’m tryin’ to get away from some guys wanna do me harm.”
“I knew it,” Charlotta said.
“How you gonna know all that?” I asked just to put her a little on the defensive.
“I didn’t know about no men or nuthin’, but I could tell by the way you loved me that you wasn’t engaged.”
“How?”
“A man gettin’ married don’t have it stored up like you do, baby. I done had men just got outta jail less hungry than you.”
“Where you think Kit went?” I asked. She probably thought that I was changing the topic because of being embarrassed by the way she had mastered me sexually.
