Bliss (30 page)

He lifted her off of him right before he yelled out.

Eva sat facing him, on the lounge between his knees. “There’s no worry of me getting pregnant,” she said, able to be light about it for the first time.

“I know. I just … I don’t want anything … impure to touch him.”

“You’re impure?”
Rhyme
. She wanted him to come inside her, on purpose, to seal the deal. Because of its slimy, sheer physicality, and the possibility of death and life in the same shot, the act had become to Eva a symbol of her emotional, if not actual, commitment.

“Just the imbalance.”

“You’re making no sense.” She became aware of her leg throbbing again.

“I don’t want any part of my essence to be in your body with him. His home needs to be unspoiled. I’m never having kids, Eva. I’m not passing this shit on. It was passed to me.”

“But it doesn’t make you impure,” Eva said. “Or bad.”

Dart’s mood shifted quick to cold. “Well, you know I’m not passing no diseases.” His nostrils flared. They were covered with shaky peas of sweat. “Only person I had sex with in the last three years is you.” He was angry about it.

She believed him, but Eva said, “Unlikely.” She thought Dart might like some doubt in her mind about his confession, so she left him some space in which to be big and nonchalant.

“Not on purpose. But truly. I was on that doctor dope. My sex thing was way off. Bi-fucking polar. I didn’t want to climb in the bed with some chick who’d clown me.”

“Good ol’ me,” Eva said. Now she was tart. “Service with a smile.”

“With an attitude, more like. But you’ve understood.” He pulled her to him. “You always did, in your cold-ass way. Things would be better if I could be … more for you.”

“You’re fine for me.”

“Your expectations are low. I’m fine for you on Cat Island. Here, the spirits are paving our way.”

A
pink sun stalked the last lavender shadows and simmered the sea to umpteen shades of green. A breeze teased dangling petals from flowers. Eva and Dart hadn’t moved from the lounge on the patio.

Dart’s hand moved in her, and then touched her where she craved to be touched. Then her belly and brain clenched like a fist and opened like a star.
Light, star bright
. She saw the last few, in the brightening skies, and started crying. Her leg hurt.

Too many things are happening at the same time
.

Dart was tuned into Eva enough—the fingers came out smoothly—to say, “I’m not here to hurt you.”

Eva was inundated. She was wiping out.

“It’s okay,” Dart said. “Be louder. You’re killing yourself.”

It humbled her that someone could know, instinctively, or have cobbled together some psychic memory strong enough to move his finger a certain way, or say a certain thing. Eva wondered how some people knew what to do. Ron’s wide face entered her mind. She pushed at it, and the effort made her face more wet, her neck and ears wet. Every morning second on the patio was Billie Holiday-Solomon Burke fierce with truth. Ringing, and wringing. She’d had orgasms of different kinds with connoisseurs who knew how to make them. But it was Dart’s solemnity that encouraged a sparkly open-sky, light feeling—mind blank, but completely stimulated, a shimmering sheet that shakes and shakes everything out.

“You did good,” Dart said. Eva was ashamed that she took such comfort in his confirmation of her self.

Gold star for me
.

“Your arms are so pretty.”

She nodded.

“Your hands are soft like a baby’s.”

“Thank you.”

He put salty body-scented fingers near her mouth. His nails soft and bitten down to the quick. Then more Eva tears at the coziness and affection she hadn’t felt since Italy, on the road with Imperial Court and Trix, and Ron. She thought she could smell Ron in the dawn air as Dart kissed her toes and then tried to put his face inside her. She shrieked, tried to let him in farther, and in a Ron-like move, Dart squeezed Eva’s butt so hard it went beyond pain to pure loveliness to her saying stop and not meaning it.

They lay there in the sunlight, naked, heads opposite, feet near the other’s face.

“Tiny,” Dart said, cradling her feet like they were precious. And Eva got that ecstatic, embarrassed feeling strong women get when any part of them is made to seem delicate.

E
va’s cell rang. It was a long scratch on her vinyl day, but she ran for it.

“It’s Eva,” she said with relief in her voice.

“Ciao! It’s Pritz. Where are you?”

“Where’re
you
?” Eva made herself sound enthusiastic. She had to for Giada.

“In Miami, about to come where you are. I’m fired. Paid out and happy.”

“Fired. Damn, Giada.” In 1998, to get fired in the record business was no big deal. If you were in urban music, and if you’d branded yourself—with an evocative nickname like Dutch Dillinger, or World Wyde, or Punch Villa—you’d be hired someplace else, even within the
same conglomerate, quickly. And even without a nickname, you could misuse your expense account, set cherry bombs off in your office as part of a professional meltdown, or beat a coworker’s ass, and your prospects were still passable, if not enhanced, as long as you’d kicked a rapper’s or R & B singer’s sales high up the charts. So there was no need for empathy from Eva. In fact, she envied Giada—now known as “Pritz,” after the character of Maerose Prizzi as portrayed by Anjelica Huston in
Prizzi’s Honor
—for her vacation between gigs. “I’m far,” Eva lied. “I’ll be in Miami probably tomorrow.”

“Then we’ll come back together. Tell me where you are staying.”

“Are you with—”

“I saw Leetle John and Sun and Hakeem and your whole crew. Now tell me, where are you?”

“Why’re you pressing me?”
We’re friends, but we’re not
friends.

“Why is it a secret? I know you are with Sunny’s brother.”

“I’m fine.”

“No one said different.”

“I’m on Cat Island. That’s only for you to know.”

“Okay. You sound bad. I will be there, probably … maybe by noon tomorrow.

No!
“It’s after noon now, Pritz. There’s no way—”

“I know what time it is, Eva. I have been to the Biminis. I have been to Turks and Caicos. I know where is Cat Island, what it is to get there. Two baby planes from Miami. Easy. I will call you from their airport.”

“Pritz! Don’t.”

“Ciao.”

Eva hurried to the bathroom and threw up.

1992

E
va didn’t want to call Ron, so she did what was easy. She went to a place she knew he’d be: Thursday nights at Mr. Kato’s, in Beverly Hills. A schmantzy Japanese place that smelled like scallion and pineapple, like just-Windexed lacquer, and colognes with names like Escape and Spellbound.

On Thursday nights, record industry people who worked urban acts flocked to Mr. Kato’s to expense dinners for ten. They got rowdy and waved colleagues over. The place didn’t take reservations, even for large parties—the key was to get to Kato’s early enough to snag a prime, secluded-but-still-visible table, but to get there not so early that you looked like a desperado.

The place was extra hectic on this particular Thursday because so much was going on in Los Angeles. Eva was in town for two awards shows, three new-talent showcases, and a series of meetings with her Los Angeles coworkers about cross-promoting the West Coast leg of a tour for the least possible label money. She walked into Kato’s at 8:45, feet free of New York socks and boots, body bare of sweaters and hats. Eva had dressed carefully. It was new for her, an attempt at what she figured to be sophistication. In addition to her new style goals
was the fact that Ron had only seen her in road clothes, her hair always snatched back in a ponytail. In the few short months since Italy, Eva’d used the money and confidence that came with yet another promotion (Trix had two platinum singles; Imperial Court had gone platinum in the United Kingdom) to patronize the chic boutiques on New York’s Madison Avenue. Because she’d perused oversize catalogs from boutique department stores, read them like guides to foreign countries, Eva felt briefed—if not fluent—when she walked the hospital-like, minimalist floors.

Eva was looking for a way to be. Even before Italy, she’d jocked the few black female vice presidents and senior vice presidents in the industry, and she invited them to quiet lunches. If the dining was outdoors, or in the East, or if the senior vice presidential woman had gone to Wesleyan or Brown, the woman lit a Marlboro Light (it was a Newport if the woman had gone to Hampton or Howard or tended to fall back on or take pride in formerly or diffused ghetto ways). The cig usually accompanied a shared apple tart and a third vodka gimlet, and a spiel from the woman about how people hated her for her accomplishments, and about the ongoing remodel of the place in Sag Harbor. Eva was mostly in awe of the fortyish women who went back in the music business to before hip hop started. Women who’d worked the last L.A. days of Motown, who’d been down with Prince on his ascent, who’d slaved at the labels to which powerhouses like Bootsy and Earth, Wind & Fire and Parliament Funkadelic had been signed. Once tipsy on admiration and alcohol, these rare women—some austere, some flamboyant—gladly schooled Eva in the ways of getting shit done and the clothes to wear while slogging through it. Motherless Eva soaked up their habits like a sponge.

Three months before the big night at Mr. Kato’s, Eva met with Meri Heath, a woman she’d nicknamed Ms. Exception. Ms. Exception’s pumps were usually French, not because French shoes were so much more expensive than Italian or Spanish, but because French shoes were so much more distinctive.
Singularity, attitude, panache—the currency of style
. That’s what Ms. Exception often told Eva.

Ms. Exception was a general manager, and she managed not just the business of urban music, but the business of white music, as
well—hence her moniker. Ms. Exception headed up a label Eva’s competed with. She told Eva of Eva’s impending promotion on their cocktail date, which was two days before Eva’s promotion was announced, so Eva’s perception of Ms. Exception as an all-seeing goddess among music professionals was etched in stone.

Ms. Exception talked about a lot of things that evening, and talked around alliances made long ago in boardrooms and bedrooms with men and women now in positions to keep her in her venerated position even when her profits were so off they made the business page of the
New York Times
. Ms. Exception talked about her son at the second-rate private college in Maine, talked about how spoiled her child was, and about how the spoiling was done now, and so what was the use crying about it. Ms. Exception told Eva straight-out that it was the white women in this business who needed to be watched. Ms. Exception told Eva that so many of the white women in the music business were pathological in their quest for black men, yet protective of their position with white men, that white women would fight you—secretly, while smiling in your face, while overcomplimenting you on your hair—with the kind of bucketing intensity associated with typhoons.