A Deeper Love Inside (54 page)

“Thanks for letting Elisha practice on you,” I said. “I could tell by the way he made love to me last night and this morning that he practiced on some bitch till I got home.”

“Fuck you, Ivory!” she said. I smiled again.

“That’s the thing about being an understudy. Everyone feels cheated when the understudy performs. Everyone wants the real thing,” I told her calmly.

She pushed me. I pushed her back. She fell against Sheba. I went in my black Gucci bag, my fingers deciding on my box cutter or my bag of Back the Fuck Up, which I always carried. Luckily for her, Sheba held her still. Sheba straightened Audrey out and walked her away from me. When I looked up, Elisha was watching me. I don’t know what his eyes were saying right then. So we just stared at one another as he strummed out the finale of his session. I didn’t take my eyes off of him. He didn’t take his eyes off of me. Maybe that’s what he wanted. Maybe he was hypnotizing me. I was willing.

When he disappeared from the stage, the next group appeared. The crowd got a little restless while they set up. I felt a mixture of emotions. I felt the feeling you feel when you got beef with a next girl on lockup, and everyone’s moving in population. You must keep your eyes moving and watch all hands and mouths, too. It was so easy
for another girl to just stick you and keep walking. You wouldn’t even know what happened until you saw your own blood bleeding. Then I also felt too pretty to get low like a prisoner. I was wearing the dress that Elisha chose from my wardrobe, a black Christian Dior. I was standing high on my Giuseppe Zanotti heels. I didn’t want to fight, but then again I never did—but I would if I had to.

An emcee introduced what he was calling a go-go band. He wilded up the crowd and said, “This is how DC do it!” I got excited seeing all of the drums, really excited. They started tapping em. The music wiped away everything else. The drumming that began just grabbed me. What was it? Why did it sound so good? Why wasn’t this music familiar to me? The beats jerked my joints and my body. My hips began to move and bounce. The beats wouldn’t allow the body to flow. The way they were being banged out, the body had to shake. My hands and arms began dancing. My shoulders and breasts began vibrating, my butt and my thighs bounced. I bent my right leg and bounced it up in the air. I could make my thighs shake and inch open to the beat. Even my calves were excited. I felt so aroused, it was crazy. I couldn’t fight the drum when a drummer touched it up right, and I never wanted to.

A body pressed me from behind and an arm went around my waist. I bounced on that body backwards, and took my hips all the way down to the floor and back up again. When I turned rhythmically, not losing one second or one beat, I saw what I knew. It was Elisha. I pressed in on him close, still making my whole body shake against his. When he danced with me, them DC girls caught the fever, but not all of ’em could catch those sexual magnetic beats with each groove of their bodies. The ones who could, the ones who obviously grew up hearing that go-go, pulled up on Elisha. He was dancing with me. I was dancing with him. They were dancing with us, showing him just how wild and open they could get. The dense crowd surrounded us, watching. The band was playing to us, and the crowd was chanting like crazy. The temperature in the room was rising so hot, even the walls were sweating. The only way I could stop was when Elisha carried me out of there. He did, leaving the go-go girls shaking and bouncing back there. I didn’t fight him of course. I just wrapped
my arms around his neck and tried to slow down my pulsating body and racing heart. I would’ve kept going till the lights came on or to the last tap of the drum.

• • •

“Celebrity rule: we always arrive on the set after the party starts. We always leave the set before the party ends,” Elisha said. We were all gathered in the reserved roped-off area of the parking lot where our vehicles were parked. Elisha had his right arm around my neck, my body in front of his body, which was pressed against my back. He was speaking to his team; many were faces that were not with him at NYU. Azaziah, Sheba, and Audrey walked up and joined in a minute late.

“She is my wife,” Elisha announced. “For the men, look at her once so you know. Then don’t look at her no more.” They laughed some. Elisha didn’t laugh. “For the ladies, treat her good. She’s wearing my rings.”

• • •

“You must’ve fucked her. That’s why she’s mad,” I said with heated words, spoken softly.

“You have been gone two years. I never once accused you,” he said. “And you’re wrong. If I would’ve fucked Audrey, she wouldn’t be mad. She wouldn’t say or do nothing. She’d just wait for me to fuck her again.” That was the convo and the feeling on our way home Saturday night, or Sunday morning round 2:00 a.m.

• • •

His mother was standing over us. A dream, I figured, cause I was naked-naked, lying beneath Elisha who was definitely naked. We
were glued together by our now-dried fluids. His strong sleeping body pressing me deep into the mattress. Through the fog of my sleepy mind and eyes, I became aware that my pussy was still pounding, again. What a strong feeling our lovemaking had heaped on top of the deep feelings we already had for one another. And an argument, no a disagreement, didn’t cause us not to love. It pushed us further, further inside of each other. I wrapped my arms around him, caressing.

“Ivory,” his mother said. But she wasn’t really there. What would she be doing in Elisha’s room while he and I were sleeping in a so-intimate way?

“Ivory,” she said again. “Get dressed and come out to the reading room. Don’t keep me waiting long. I’m on my way to the service.”

I gasped, for real. I gasped again. “Momma Elon . . .,” I said, tucked beneath her son, but she was already on her way out the bedroom door.

• • •

Monday morning Elisha married me. Momma Elon thought it was “all too fast.” She believed that we should have a big religious wedding. “Why not wait four months until you turn eighteen, Elisha?” his mother had asked him. Elisha confided in me that Momma Elon said, “Sixteen is the legal marrying age for women, but
you
still need my signature,” she had warned Elisha.

“Pop will sign for me. He has already agreed to it,” Elisha told his mom. “He might not have mentioned it to you yet, but me and him talked it through thoroughly. He knows I will handle it. He knows it’s what I need,” Elisha had told her. “But I don’t want to do it that way. I want you to see my heart and understand and give in to me,” he said to his mother.

When Momma Elon summoned me to their family reading room on the second floor to speak woman to woman, I felt nervous. It’s peculiar how it makes a girl feel in the presence of the mother of the man who has been feeling all over her body. Especially, when a girl knows that his mother knows for sure, and that it’s happening right under her nose and beneath her roof.

“Ivory, do you know the saddest thing in the world that a mother could ever feel?” she asked me. I was fresh out the shower, the three-
to-five-minute kind of shower, and the only kind that could’ve awakened me that Sunday morning.

“Not exactly,” I said, pulling at the hem of the skirt I had thrown on. My thighs were pressed closed and tight, my calves one over the other, embarrassed and tense.

“It’s when a mother loses her son or daughter.”

“Loses,” I repeated.

“Loses him in any way, to the world, to senseless violence, to racism, to illness, or insanity. It’s when a mother’s child passes away at any age, and leaves this earth before she does,” she said sadly and serious-faced. I understood the words she was saying, but truthfully, I didn’t get it.

“The second saddest thing for a mother is watching her son or daughter suffer, especially when there’s nothing the mother can do to fix it. Like when I was seeing my son heartbroken,” she said. I felt the accusation. Now I got it.

“Good mothers raise their sons and daughters well, with continuous prayers that other mothers will do the same. This way, when my good son meets another mother’s daughter, he will know to treat her with the utmost respect and to love her well. If the young lady has also been raised well, she will do the same towards my son. She will treat my son with respect. Mothers know that once a girl who our good son loves takes root in his heart, we can no longer protect him from the hurt of heartbreak.”

“Mrs. Immanuel, I respect and admire you, and I like you a lot. I know that you like me, too, although I am not sure how come. I know that Elisha is your good son and that he is way better than me. But I do love him strong and true. I don’t think I can say that I was raised well. But I am sincere. My mother was a good mother, but sometimes even that has a time limit. My mother passed away three weeks ago. It was a pain so great in me and it still is. I’m so grateful to Elisha because he is healing me from my hurt.” Her faced softened some when she heard of Momma’s death. I was lightened to see that she had feelings enough to consider Momma. That made me like her some more.

“I know you saw how Elisha and I were this morning. I apologize for you seeing us. We didn’t mean to show that to you. We were stupid
and sloppy for doing it that way. Truthfully when we finally saw one another starting on Friday afternoon, we both have been so happy. Friday night was our first time ever loving one another in that way,” I confessed.

“Elisha wanted me to see the two of you in that way. He showed me the blood on his sheets for that very reason. He was creating a preponderance of evidence in your defense. My son is very much like myself. When he wants something, he wants it. He fights until he gets it. But he has never fought with me, until this. Since there is no talking to him about you, I’ll talk to you. Nothing is more important to me than my family. So you and I need to get on the same page,” she said.

I thought I saw her turning from Momma Elon into a prosecutor. I wanted to keep her in momma-mode. I didn’t think I could handle the prosecutor. So I said the things that I thought were the answers to all of the questions and thoughts that she might have for or about me. I wanted to say it, before she asked, which would’ve been too much pressure for me.

“My father is a famous hustler doing life in prison. My sister is doing fifteen. Somehow, my two youngest sisters and I are all okay. I’m glad you invited me up to speak to you, because I didn’t want you to think that I deal in duplicity. I know you make good money and you might think that I came back here for Elisha’s money. But Mrs. Immanuel, I returned to Brooklyn for my momma’s funeral. Before that, I had been in Germany. I came to find Elisha because I love him and he loves me. I don’t need his money at all, but I think it’s so dope that he knows how to make it, and that he made a movie like he always said he would.”

“Would you sign a paper saying what you just said about not wanting his money?”

“If you want me to, sure I’ll sign it. Even if Elisha didn’t make a movie, I would still love him like crazy. You introduced me to your son when I was eleven.”

Smiling, she said to me, “I have two handsome good sons, so this house has been filled with plenty of pretty faces looking for the both of them. I chose you for Elisha because, when I first looked at you, I
saw that your heart was good and somehow your soul was glowing. After I chose you for Elisha, his heart chose you for himself.

“You and I should always work together. Even separate from our men, you and I have to have some harmony. I am accustomed to having a very close, happy family, although I can’t get any of them to go to temple with me.”

“Temple?” I repeated.

“We are Hebrew,” she said. “See, there are so many things that I should talk to you about. It’s nice to see that you are humble and willing.”

“I promise to make your son happy. I won’t disappear. If I’m alive, I’ll be right beside him. I can cook and I clean. I work really hard. I can’t promise you anything about temple or religion. I don’t even know what
Hebrew
means. What I know is, I am already happier than I’ve ever been,” I said softly. “And I agree to the first and the second marriage ceremony. And I won’t break Elisha’s heart on purpose ever,” I swore. “And Momma Elon, you don’t know this yet, but my promise is as good as gold.” I smiled sincerely.

I wanted to be a good daughter-in-law to her, truly. I had every reason to love her. She was everything I ever wanted from my momma. She loved Elisha the way I wanted Momma to love me. I also thought that just maybe, at our second private wedding ceremony, in her church or temple or whatever, I would get to invite Midnight, Lexus, Mercedes, Riot, and maybe even NanaAnna somehow. I would send invites to Onatah’s whole family. They would definitely show up, including her brother, my drummer, and his wife. Maybe as a wedding gift, Riot would bring Lina to me and allow two of her puzzle pieces to attach themselves to one another for a change. I fantasized about having the Diamond Needles as my bridesmaids, all eleven of them, including Siri, of course.

Lastly, but really importantly, there is the elegant Mr. Sharp, Big Johnnie, Esmerelda, and my whole who-over-forty crew. Mr. Sharp would outfit the entire event and place some of our photos on his wall at The Golden Needle.

“Ivory!” Elisha’s mom seemed to have raised her voice. “You daydream, don’t you?” she asked me.

“Sometimes,” I admitted.

“Do you have any idea whose car that is parked in my garage?”

“It’s mine,” I told her.

Chapter 51

As we left City Hall—Elisha, Momma Elon, Poppa Jamin, Azaziah, Sheba, Mr. Sharp, and myself—we were met on the steps by at least fifty reporters, who were joined by a swelling mob of fans. I can’t say I was surprised. I saw the excited looks of the women working behind the counter when we first arrived, and believed I saw the girl who phoned in the fact that Elisha Immanuel was in the building getting “hitched.”

“Elisha! Have you seen this?” a reporter asked, holding up the
New York Daily News
headline, which read,
Elisha Gets the Gold!

“Nah, I was focused on getting the girl first!” he said, smiling. He was still holding my hand. I was standing hidden behind him.