former lover, told him a week or so after the funeral. And he never told me. I will bet he never told Mariah, either, who would have added that information to her conspiracy theory, and immediately blabbed it to me.
“Sally?”
Only snoring.
I sigh and settle in the chair. Exhausted, I immediately doze, a terrifying dream of perdition.
My eyes snap open. A moment’s disorientation, and then everything comes flooding back in. I am still chewing on cotton, my cousin is still asleep on the bed, and it is now well past eleven.
“Sally, hey, wake up. Sally, you’ve got to go. Sally!”
More snoring. The hard, alcoholic kind. The kind I used to hear coming from the Judge’s study at night in those terrible days after Abby died; maybe the kind that Addison heard when he got back to the house after seeing Sally home on the night Colin Scott fought with my father. Or maybe he just walked her to the S4 bus.
My brother, the late-night talk king. Oh, Sally has his number all right. Do anything, say anything.
“Sally? Sally, wake up. Come on, Sally!”
I stand up and cross to the bed. Asleep, breathing through her slightly open mouth, her small fists curled near her throat, Sally Stillman has a vulnerable look; it is easy, now, to see the cute teenager she once was, back when I spied her with Addison at Vinerd Howse. I touch Sally’s bare shoulder, my fingers lingering a few seconds longer than they should. Her flesh is warm and dangerously alive.
“Hey, Sally, come on.”
She mutters something and curls away from my hand. I doubt that I can wake her, not without physically shaking her, which I am not about to do. The events of the last few weeks have left me emotionally sick, and what I want to do most is snuggle close to Sally’s ample body, wrap my arms around her, and lose myself in her warmth.
I am so, so tired. Of so, so much. Of worrying about conspiracies, of running from phantoms, of fighting with my wife. So tired. And so lonely.
I decide to let Sally stay. Even if I could wake her, I can hardly send her home like this. Which means she will have to stay here in my hotel room and sleep it off.
For her own good.
Temptation. The trick is to avoid it.
“It’s not that easy, Dad,” I mutter, sitting gingerly on the edge of the rumpled bed where my cousin slumbers on, oblivious to my distress. I remind myself that I am a married man, but the room feels so terribly small, the bed so terribly large. My throat is dry. My fingers, without my quite willing it, reach toward Sally’s round, inviting shoulder once more.
Then they fall back.
Avoid it.
I go to the closet for an extra blanket, which I drape over Sally’s somnolent form. I remove my tie, slip out of my shoes, and return to the desk chair to keep vigil.
What a mess.
CHAPTER 24
If you drive along Seventh Street near Howard University, you discover a little college town of remarkable complexity, buried in the heart of Washington, D.C. It is only a couple of blocks long, so it is easy to miss, but it is there. It features fast-food outlets instead of delis, Southern-style kitchens rather than pizza parlors, but you also find the usual scattering of small office buildings, apartment houses, and photocopying outlets. To be sure, this particular little college town also includes an unhealthy proportion of boarded-up windows, empty, weed-choked lots, and warehouses surrounded by razor wire. But, if one wants to look beyond the expensive brochures my own university sends out, Elm Harbor has many of the same sordid features; and if we disguise them better, it is only because we have that much more money with which to purchase camouflage.
It is to the tiny Seventh Street corridor that I go on the last day of the conference, to have lunch, as Kimmer teased me when I told her, with another woman. The woman in question is Lanie Cross-formally, Dr. Melanie Cross, F.A.C.O.G., but she always asked the Garland children to call her Lanie, much to my parents’ chagrin. She and her late husband, Leander Cross, a prominent surgeon of the darker nation, were, in my childhood, perhaps the leading hosts of the Gold Coast party circuit, a circuit my parents traveled often, because it was, in those days, what one did: glittering dinner at one house on the Friday, champagne brunch at another on the Sunday, caterers, cooks, even temporary butlers at the ready as the best of black Washington charged about in mad imitation of white people’s foolishness. Yet it was not, really, so mad. In the old days, my mother used to say, there were only a hundred black people who mattered in America, and they all knew each other. A bit of snobbery, but also an intriguing proposition. The social scene, so inexplicably wasteful and pretentious to its critics, refreshed and reinforced those who whirled through it, strengthening them to face another day, another week, another month, another year of expending their prodigious talents in a nation unprepared to reward them for their abilities.
As a child, I loved to come downstairs early Saturday morning when my parents had entertained the night before. I would wander through the not-yet-cleaned first-floor rooms, sniffing the glasses, handling the place cards, looking for fresh scratches on the huge polished rosewood table in the dining room. Sometimes, as my parents slept off their partying, my siblings and I would play, sitting around the table, raising our glasses in toasts we imagined were clever, trying through this little drama to figure out exactly what all those adults did so long into the night that kept them laughing raucously and shouting each other’s names with such glee as we crouched in the stairwell, listening and trying to learn. More than thirty years have passed since those days, and I wonder still what the secret was, for the unspoken magic of integration is the way it has made the spirit of those long, happy nights disappear. True, there is still entertainment, and there are even still parties, but something of their character has been lost, their role in bolstering community has grown less certain, perhaps because community itself is beginning to die. Kimmer and I live in an otherwise all-white neighborhood, and few of the friends of my adolescence live anywhere near the Gold Coast, unless one counts the fancier suburbs of Washington itself.
Lanie Cross is a connection to that earlier era. She lives, in a sense, between the two worlds, then and now. Perhaps it is her age. Her husband was of my father’s generation, but Lanie herself was something around fifteen years younger-nobody mentions that they married when she was his student at Howard-which puts her, today, in her late fifties. She is a tall, handsome woman, with long bones in every part of her body, from her legs to her cheeks, and skin that maintains its smooth brown beauty even as it begins to wrinkle around her face. Her gray eyes flash playfully with energy and intelligence. When I was a kid, all the boys had crushes on her.
Like all her working days, this one is busy, and when I hunt down her office in one of those whitewashed, blocky, low-rise professional buildings, her stern but polite receptionist, another woman of years, a West Indian, commands me to wait. I sit on a hard wooden bench amidst her patients, women running in age from early teen years to significantly older than I. All are of the darker nation. Most seem, from their manner or their dress, comfortably middle-class, for Lanie Cross maintains a clientele from the old days. But a few display outward signs of impoverishment, and a couple seem little more than an economic rung or two above the patrons of the soup kitchen. Lanie, by reputation, treats all of them the same, and my affection for her is such that I would like to believe it is true.
Lanie was surprised to hear from me when I called a week ago, the way anybody would be at sudden protestations of friendship from an individual with whom she has not exchanged a word in probably five years except for a token hug at the funeral. I reached her at home, having obtained the unpublished number from gregarious Mariah, and I heard a child crying in the background. Lanie told me that her daughter and son-in-law were visiting, and I tried, and failed, to remember how many children she had. (The number turned out to be three, all adopted: Lanie and her husband could have no children the old-fashioned way.) When I explained that I wanted to talk about my father, she grew more cautious still. In the end, she agreed to see me for lunch, I suspect because
