The Illest, page 7
“I don’t even know why I’m telling you any of this. I just know when Aunt Flo asked me if I wanted to housesit for her, I didn’t hesitate to accept her offer. After all, this is Brooklyn. Maybe not Brooklyn like Bed Stuy, but it’s still the borough. It just felt like the place I was supposed to be. And then you came along, and it was beautiful.
“And now you’re leaving, and I guess it shouldn’t matter, since I’ll be heading back to Gloucester before the end of the month, but it does. It cuts me deep that you think you can’t take me at my word. And I realize there’s nothing I can do to convince you otherwise at this point. If this winds up being the last time we talk, I just want you to know that you have given me one of the most wonderful times of my life. The whole situation is the illest, though. I always found certain words to be funny because they mean opposites, like sanction and sanction, and the word ‘ill’ is like that. It’s good and bad, and when I used that word with you earlier, it was all good. Now, it feels like it could go either way, because I’m happy for the time we’re spending, but I’m sad that you feel you can’t trust me about my feelings for you.”
Just then Eris’s cell phone rang, and she quickly answered. Once she hung up, she said, “The car is downstairs. I have to go.”
Troy nodded. “So you don’t have any response to anything that I’ve said?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Say that you’ll give me a chance.”
Eris walked down the stairs and Troy followed her. As she reached for the front door, Troy grabbed her hand and stopped her, pulling her body to his, and kissing her deeply. She allowed him to enter her mouth, and she quickly reciprocated. Then almost as quickly as it had begun, it ended.
“You were always a good kisser,” she said, opening the door and walking across the sidewalk to the car. Troy stood in the doorway watching her.
He waived to her as the car pulled away from the curb, but due to the tint on the windows, he couldn’t see if she returned his wave or not.
He wanted to believe that she had seen him, but he was no more convinced of that than she had claimed to be of his feelings toward her.
She would figure out he was telling the truth, he knew. He just hoped that she did so before he was gone.
10
Denouement
In the days that followed, Troy found himself staying close to home, in hopes that Eris would call or perhaps stop by the brownstone. But with each day silent, no different from the last, it dawned on him that maybe this was the end. Maybe the arc of their story had climaxed around the same time their bodies had. The slow days leading toward Aunt Flo’s return were the denouement, unsatisfactory as it was.
He used her phone number once during the second day after her departure and left a message, where he reiterated some of the same points that he had the last time she was there. He never received a call back.
He had also spent a few hours out of each day wandering the promenade, hoping to cross paths with her.
Their ending had come too abruptly, and he was ill-prepared to spend his last days in Brooklyn alone and was astonished that he’d allowed himself to be there for nearly a month and only make one friend the entire time. He knew that he was not the most sociable of people, but this was totally unlike him to not meet anyone outside of Eris Perry.
His loneliness gave way to fatigue, and during the day before Aunt Flo was to return (and he was to leave), he packed up all of his things, choosing to spend the final twenty-four hours of his Brooklyn Heights adventure living directly from his suitcase.
For lunch, he walked across the way to Fulton Street, where the cacophonic blend of music and street activity was the antithesis of the quiet, peaceful streets of Brooklyn Heights. The shopping area reminded him of 125th Street in Harlem. Posters and t-shirts of Biggie hung in windows, vendors spread out bootleg movies on blankets in front of stores, and every manner of oil-based fragrance, handmade jewelry, and artwork could be found along the sidewalks. He had only been to this neighborhood a few times, but he knew he wanted to at least come back one more time—maybe just to say goodbye. He grabbed a sandwich from one of the bodegas lining Fulton, bought a t-shirt of Biggie standing on a corner in Bed Stuy throwing dice, and headed back toward Brooklyn Heights.
He had already given up checking for Eris in the ocean of black people filling the neighborhood. Instead, he observed every conceivable shade of brown, a tableau of the uniqueness of a people, moving about. If Eris were out there somewhere, Troy chose not to separate her from the milieu of Afrocentricity that lay before him.
By the time he made it onto Montague, he had already begun to visualize what was coming in the next few weeks. He would only be home in Gloucester for a few weeks before he flew out to California to begin the next phase of his life.
The idea of being a student filmmaker in Los Angeles was intimidating on a number of levels. All of the major movie studios were within half an hour of the school, and he had heard that it was not uncommon for directors and producers to drop by the schools (some of them their alma maters) to see what was new—or better yet, who was the new talented kid on the block. And with it being 1997, the word on the street was that black directors were on the rise. The industry had clearly come a long way from the days of Oscar Micheaux.
When Troy had first taken an interest in film, it had been because of Spike Lee’s School Daze. It had started there, but he would eventually go back and watch all of the films made by Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks, too. There was even a kid named Matty Rich who had made some noise in New York with Straight Out of Brooklyn. John Singleton, however, was the reigning black director on the block when Troy made it to Ellison-Wright. Boyz in the Hood had been a classic that, for better or worse, inspired a number of other films with darker urban themes, like the Hughes brothers’ ultra-violent gangster movie, Menace II Society.
Troy had not yet decided what types of films he wanted to make, only that he wanted to make them. Having grown up on a steady diet of Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe, he was leaning towards more macabre content, but he was open for the moment. He couldn’t point his finger to any famous black directors who had done horror movies, other than Rusty Cundieff with his movie Tales From the Hood, a film that bordered on being comedy just as much as it was billed as horror. The absence of any other known black directors in the genre was more of an invitation than a turn off, as far as Troy was concerned. He would just need to make the film that would open doors for other young black directors.
His mind was still racing with thoughts of his filmmaking future when he arrived at the brownstone. He half-expected to see another note attached to the front door, one where Eris apologized for what happened and offered to make amends during his last evening. That idea didn’t make much sense, though. She had gone more than a week and a half without contacting him, and he was unclear of when she was leaving for Vancouver to shoot her new film. It was like he was never a part of her world. The three times he had been with her seemed like moments where their worlds had just happened to collide—with a fury—and afterwards it was like the moments never even happened.
Troy hated the idea that he could share an intimate moment with a woman he truly liked only to have her disappear into thin air the next day. If this were a movie, he figured, there would have been some kind of happy ending. For example, there would have been a note on the door, or as he walked into the brownstone, there would have been something there waiting for him, an apology of sorts—or even a chance for him to apologize (for what, he was unsure). Or maybe there would have been a voicemail for him (of course there wasn’t). Yeah, if this was a movie, he figured, that audience would have walked out of the movie pissed off that real life had trumped the fantasy of predictability.
He walked upstairs to his bedroom and marveled at how clean the space was. When he had arrived, it looked like an unused guest room. He had quickly transformed it into a lived-in room, one that bore more of his particular style. Now the room had gone full circle, and it looked as it had when he first arrived. He had already washed all of the dishes and cleaned up the sections of the room that he had frequented. He wanted Aunt Flo to return to an immaculate place, and once he removed his suitcase and backpack, it would be as if he had never been there.
He would miss the brownstone, true, but he was also ready to leave. He missed Gloucester and his parents, and the friends he had grown up with. He needed that time to be loved and doted on before he left for his new home on the West Coast.
He was so absorbed in his thoughts, that he almost missed the ringing of the phone. He picked up the cordless on the dresser in his room.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this Troy?”
“Yes.”
“This is Regina, Eris’s assistant. I’ve been trying to call you for a few days now, but I accidentally mixed up the last two numbers in your phone number. I just realized it this afternoon, and I wanted to reach out to you and pass along a message from Eris.”
Troy thought to himself, “Not this shit again.” Regina had to have been the most incompetent personal assistant in the entire industry who still had a job. Getting the delayed message was akin to standing outside in the heat, sweating through his dress shirt, waiting outside a club where the bouncer took pleasure in his discomfort.
“Hi, Regina. What’s the message?” His voice was flat and pained. He felt like he was on the verge of getting on the merry-go-round again: Eris charms him and makes him feel incredible; she then abandons him and then comes back to pick him up off the ground, but she has trouble contacting him before finally finding him; and the cycle repeats.
“She wanted me to tell you that she’s on location in Vancouver right now but she will be in L.A. in October. I believe she said you’d be at USC this fall. Anyway, she wanted to see if you’d be interested in getting together for dinner.”
Troy laughed.
“I’m sorry,” Regina said. “Did I say something funny?”
“No, I’m just trippin’ that she can book a dinner months in advance.”
“That’s just Hollywood,” Regina said. “You plan out as far as you can.”
“I see.”
“She has an opening on October 17th at six o’clock. Should I pencil you in?”
Pencil me in, Troy thought. So this was how it was going to be with Eris? That did not sit well with him. He wasn’t Eddie Murphy, she wasn’t Robin Givens, and this wasn’t Boomerang.
Still, he couldn’t deny there was still a big part of him that longed to see her, if only for a moment. Maybe he could build with her that trust she so desperately needed with him to move forward. Clearly, she wanted the same thing as he, or she wouldn’t have bothered reaching out to him.
He thought about lying in bed, back-to-back with her, hearing her moans creeping up his back into a thunderous, orgasmic punctuation. He thought about standing beneath the hot spray of the shower, washing her, his hands caressing her naked skin. He also thought about the feeling of her head lying on his chest, her soft breaths tickling him. There was definitely something there. She didn’t have to take him to dinner or take him to the fashion show or even spend the night with him, but she had done all of those things. She was just trying to get herself into a space to feel better about what they were doing.
Maybe that was it.
Or maybe this was a game to her. She knew she could treat him any type of way and get away with it, because he was totally into her. She knew how to turn on her charm and how to manipulate him, if she needed to. There was not a single thing that had happened since Troy met her that was not in some way controlled by Eris. In many ways, he felt like an enthusiastic puppet.
He was torn, his ambivalence clouding his thoughts, as his fingers adjusted themselves around the phone.
Was there a future with Eris Perry, or did only confusion and heartache lie ahead?
Troy glanced around his bedroom, seeking traces of Eris within the space.
She had been there, right?
It was now difficult to tell. He closed his eyes trying to remember the taste of her kisses, the kisses that she claimed to have liked as much as he.
“Troy, are you still there?” he could hear Regina say. Her voice was not brazenly abrasive, but beneath its smooth, somewhat smug, timbre was the scraping quality that served as a reminder of this ever so slight hierarchical stratifier. Her boss was famous; he, however, was not.
“Yeah, sorry about that. The phone connection was a little weak where I was standing.”
“Oh, okay. Well, is the 17th of October good for you?”
So this was what it all boiled down to, he thought, as he slowly paced back and forth across the hard wood floor of the room. This was the solitary thing that stood between him and Eris.
Seemingly simple. A one-word answer, at best.
He held the receiver close to his mouth, his lips parting, aching desperately not to betray his sense of self. He deserved a respect Eris had not entirely shown him, and he thought briefly about holding out, forcing her to be more respectful of his time and feelings, to stop playing games, and to even give him the benefit of the doubt that he would not be the asshole that her last boyfriend was. Surely he could demand at least these few things of her before he committed any more of himself to this situation, but who was he kidding? This was Eris Perry.
Maybe she had been right when she said that he would be unable to see her as anything other than famous—well, maybe not in those exact words—and he had wanted to reject that idea a hundred times over, but with Eris’s assistant on the phone scheduling a date months in advance, he could not help but be reminded of this basic, incontrovertible fact.
He knew before he heard the sound of his voice, nearly bass-less from mild disuse and almost a muddled tinny whisper, that his response to Regina’s question would be simple, plain, and unadulterated: “Yes.”
Bonus Story
Dancing in My Dreams
* * *
Originally published in
Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS, edited by Kelly Norman Ellis
The city was just as I had remembered it in my dreams.
The taxi drifted serenely up the West Side Highway, sailing past the silhouetted skyline that had once been our playground. As I caught a view of the Hudson River glimmering from the reflections of a million lights rippling across its surface, I could see Serena’s face. I could feel its warmth against my fingers as I pulled her into our last kiss that November day three years ago. Her perfume still tickled my nostrils like a phantom haunting me in the most delicious sense of the word.
There was no acceptable explanation for why I had left. Sure there was the opportunity to study on the West Coast, but love should have made me unpack my bags. Her tears alone should have forced me to defer for at least another year—just until she could get her own situation worked out. But my own dreams called out in voices so strong that I could hear nothing else.
She had begged me not to go; I had asked her to come. When she refused to accept my invitation, I took it personally, and from there our relationship disintegrated, and our love, once a ripe fruit bubbling with the sweetest nectar I had ever tasted, withered slowly on the vine from neglect.
Why I had chosen to pack a bag and fly across the country late in the evening to see her wasn’t even all that apparent to me. All I knew was that I had to let her know that I didn’t want to move forward in this life without her by my side.
I had no specific idea of what I would do next if she were to commit herself once again to our love, but I was prepared to stay in New York until we were able to figure that out.
The e-mails had been short and sweet, reminiscent of the way things were when we were together. She said that she missed me, that she still loved me. I told her that I had made the ultimate mistake when I left her. Even her melodic voice over the phone soothed the ache of regret I had come to know in the solitude of her absence.
“We can try again,” I stated emphatically in our last conversation.
“But you’re there. And I’m here,” was her response.
I didn’t know if that was an excuse or an invitation.
And now in the depth of the evening I was seated in the back of a taxicab headed to Harlem, a solitary duffle bag resting beside me and a heart full to capacity of a love that refused to die amidst the trials of three years.
I imagined her as she appeared in the pictures she e-mailed me: her hair short and naturally curly, her eyes wide with tenderness, her smile framed by dimples, her teeth glistening pearls, her skin a flawless sheet of silk dipped in caramel and draped around an exquisite and well-formed frame. How could I have ever walked away from her?
The taxi eased into her neighborhood, a neighborhood in which I had spent many nights intoxicated from our lovemaking only to stumble back onto the train in the morning and barely make it to work on time. With the reflection of the street lamps against the brownstone, I felt as if I were gazing upon a castle, and inside that castle was the woman fate had revealed to be my queen.
Moments after I pushed the buzzer, the intercom rang to life with her sleepy voice.
“Serena, it’s me. Kyle,” I said.
“Kyle? Oh my god!”
Over the intercom I could hear her shuffling things around and then the door buzzed and unlocked, allowing me entrance.
The building hadn’t changed much, but my mind registered every picture on the walls as something brand new. Reaching for the handrail, I ascended the stairs slowly, unsure of what her reaction to my presence would be.
