At the beginning of this story, I spoke of Shaun Lyle, whom I met in the season of Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much.” In the end, he doesn’t qualify as a real boyfriend, but he was a first for me. I’d known him long before he’d ever noticed me and long before that fateful night we kissed on a balcony overlooking the city. I’d already spotted him. I was a freshman in junior high school and he was a senior. Like spring, Shaun arrived late in high school years. The first time I spotted him he stood outside on the top steps of my school. He wore a fashionable brown tweed tailored suit, which was uncustomary and sophisticated for a student in our small town. His face was turned away in profile smoking a cigarette. He resembled the Romans or a Greek God, a bronzed statue you’d see turning pages of an ancient history book, face turned away in profile with a sharp European nose, only Shaun was Black, mixed-race, with caramel skin, hazel eyes, and hair a mosh of soft brown ringlets. He hadn’t noticed me, but I’d noticed him and his beauty. I was deeply desirous and promised myself, one day he’d know me.
In fact, from that day forward, I went out of my way to walk downstairs in the high school to the ground floor near senior lockers, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I prayed our eyes would meet and truly he’d see me. Besides being in different classes, we were in different leagues. I’m sure in his eyes I was some gangly young freshman, no one who could be of consequence and merit to him. So based on these facts, neither of us could have guessed he’d be the man introducing me to destiny, would be the vehicle I drove and ultimately arrived at myself. He was my introduction to a new world.
Shaun was that beautiful, but he had problems that had to do with family and history. There were scandals and rumors that preceded and followed wherever he went. His family, the Lyle’s, were the most notorious of our small town and surrounding ones. Some of the problems had to do with his mother, who was also beautiful, a white porcelain-colored Black woman with the elegance and chiseled features of an Egyptian Nefertiti. It was suspected she was addicted to prescription painkillers, often in car crashes, and spent months out of work, living like a reclusive heiress. She seemed interested in men only for what they gave and had the erect posture of a kept woman. I felt there was something incestuous between Shaun and her, never actualized but an uncomfortable union. There was also his sister Roberta who’d been in and out of jail, notorious for hooking up with criminal men. Then, there was Shaun’s slightly younger brother, Scott, who might have been beautiful, but in stark contrast to his flamboyant family, was remote and lifeless. Shaun, in his early twenties, had been in and out of jail, which was the reason he’d never finished high school and had to go back. He rarely talked about his past, but these were the rumors surrounding him, mystery that created fear of him and his entire clan. I heard his father shot someone.
So, perhaps the Shaun I’d met after our brief visual encounter on the high school stairs was a young man trying to redeem himself, trying as hard as he could like a prisoner or slave to break away, escape from family and the air that surrounded him. Perhaps he was attempting to master his own destiny by going back to finish high school and attending the same church as I did, where his grandparents were prominent figures. Perhaps church was his very public attempt to turn his life like a vehicle around, to gain the acceptance he and his family had never had.
On the day he and I officially met, he was sitting in church with his back to me in a front pew. It was a Saturday rehearsal for baptismal candidates, people who had in very traditional terms accepted Jesus as their savior and were willing to follow the path of Christianity. I have no idea what caused me to be baptized. I can only say it seemed like the thing to do. I was moved one Sunday (as much as I was moved hearing Luther Vandross) when the preacher extended his arms and asked the congregation as he did every Sunday, “Won’t you accept Jesus as your personal savior?” There was something very theatrical about it all for those like me, numb to the ways of Christ, when the floorboards opened, the pulpit moved, and you stepped into a shallow pool with a preacher fully clothed in white robes, who dunked you into the water.
However, I was now eighteen years old and a high school senior. I was also thinking about plans for the prom. I was certainly not the first pick as a 6-feet-2-inch tall, dark-skinned Black girl amongst white boys. Prospects for a good prom date were slim. I had asked James, someone’s cousin of a cousin, but as time grew closer, I explained to my cousin Lisa that Saturday in church, “I’m not so sure about the prom because James is waffling in his answer.” Perhaps it was spring and I had purposefully planted information, because it was right then that Shaun turned to me and said, “It
