Bliss (32 page)

Ron switched on the car, buzzed open the moon roof. Rafters and a concrete ceiling above them.

“I know you’re not judging me.” Eva’s own heat kicked in where the liquor would have.

“You judged me,” he said. “When you didn’t call to say what was
going on. You judged me in Europe. At the airport. Shit, before the airport.” He was looking straight ahead.

“You were talking about a sex house,” Eva said. “Are we sitting under it now?”

“You’re the one—”

She sat up, ready. “One what?” She stopped before she called him a
motherfucker
, since this time it was literal.

“The one that was carrying my baby and aborted it.” The word
aborted
’was a fart from his mouth. He wouldn’t look at her. “That’s the one you are.”

Eva reached onto the floor, picked up her shiny pocketbook. Held tight to what was hers—lipstick, phone, passport—and to what the $800 bag meant, to the security it stood for. “I don’t owe you jack, really,” she said.

“Owe? How could you owe? You gotta take something to owe. At least accept something. What could
you
owe
me
?”

Speak the truth, white boy
, she thought
. You know it like I know it. I couldn’t owe you a goddamned thing. Under any circumstance
. She patted door leather for the handle and opened the car. Eva stepped onto the spotless floor, walked through the open garage door and into the moonlight. She teetered a bit. The heels of her sandals felt like ballpoint pens.

She thought of Ron with loathing. She didn’t see him as one of those cartoonish white-boy gangstas from Idaho. She didn’t think of him as a caricature of a caricature. She didn’t go that far. She allowed, as she usually did, that Ron at least tried to have something of his own.

But what is it to be white? To have that, as your base? And on top of it to be all up in me. All up in my business
.

These are the things she thought, because she was angry at herself, and guilty. She had been in the studio, with A Tribe Called Quest. Q-Tip, the lead MC, recording his part of a new song called “Award Tour.” She’d been there, just hanging, because she loved the trio and because she’d dated the DJ, Ali, for a while. There was a line …
You can be white and cool but don’t prep the role
. Or it was
You can be
white and blue but don’t crap the roll
. Eva wanted to know the exact words of the song right then. She scraped her mind for Q-Tip’s exact words, his phrasing, his cadence, everything.

This night, the night she told Ron about her abortion, the night she was feeling as low-down as she’d felt strapped to the gurney, she thought of Ron like she thought on any given day of most white males in hip hop: that down to his drawers and up to his buzzed haircut, Ron was a biter.
All of him one big bite of black people—not of what we created, even, but of what we actually are. What we in hip hop have become. Ron and his wack-ass compadres take big bites of our evolution. Not even chewed and regurgitated! They slap us still bloody and dripping on their sorry selves
. This is where her mind went. She counted his faults. She was aware of what she was doing, and thought,
That’s what they do. They get mad at themselves and they count the stereotypes. So, cool. But really I don’t even need that justification. I don’t need justification for anything I do or don’t do in terms of this or any white boy. He’s thinking black girl right now. He’s thinking nigga that killed the baby with no remorse
.

Ron and Eva were both quiet.

White boy
, Eva thought.

Got your fucking nerve
.

You didn’t build no city on rock ‘n’ roll
.

You ain’t built shit
.

Then Ron laid on his horn. It ripped through the silent enclave. “You climbing down this mountain in those heels, Eva? Where you going?” He leaned on the horn again, for five long seconds. Rested. He honked again. And rested. Eva didn’t move. He opened his door, put one foot out, and called to her. “Get in the car,” he said, half-command, half-plea. “I’ll take you where you need to go.”

Trying to tell me about myself. Trying to tell me anything
.

She got in his car. Every curve in his face puffed and pissed off. She thought he was going to peel out like a maniac, but he backed out like he was on his way to work, and early enough to beat the traffic.

“I’m not saying we were in love, Eva.” Matter-of-factly. “I’m trying to talk to you.”

“Talk, then.”
Who’s to say that I’m in love with you? But who’s to say that I’m not?
Eva’s mind sang and tagged.
Janet Jackson, “Miss You Much,” 1989
. Tagged and sang.

“If you could just chill for—”

Chill?
“Fuck you.” She looked at him and she wanted to spit on him. He’d said
chill
a thousand times to her, around her. Right then she hated the way he sounded saying
chill. Chuck Chill-Out
, went Eva’s brain,
New York City radio DJ, veteran, been on air since 1982. Groove B-Chill from
House Party
. Chill Will of the Get Fresh Crew
.

“Chill” belongs to
me.
I could never
, Eva thought,
owe you shit
.

Ron glanced at her. “How are you looking at me? I’m your white boy now? That’s it? Me being a brother right now, though, I could say what I wanted.”

“Don’t mention brothers to me.”
What right do you have to mention a black man, even a hypothetical one, to me?

He turned up the radio. A talk radio host introduced callers.

• —We’re back and still discussing the continuing effects of the Los Angeles uprising. Tomorrow night we have a special guest, Sister Souljah on Bill Clinton and on Ice-T’s “Cop Killer.” On the line right now we have Linda, from West L.A.
  

• —It was stupid we tore up our own neighborhoods, yes! But were people
  thinking?
  NO! People are enraged! Can you understand the words,
  long simmering resentment?
  Can you understand that video? Can you understand the last three hundred years? Where do you think that goes? Nowhere but up in flames on the right day.
  

• —Linda, appreciate your passionate response. Gonna go straight to Brad, now, from Rancho Cucamonga.
  

• —I’m LAPD. I’m a white cop. Blacks hate us. They can say that. We can’t say how we feel about them, even the criminals. If we do, we’re racist assholes.
  

• —Brad, good to hear from you, but we’ve got to go to Paul from Venice.
  

• —I’m homeboy to my heart—straight-up second-generation
  Mexicano, and you know what? I can’t be racist. Blacks can’t be racist. I don’t know what to say about the Koreans, but it’s not about the color. It’s about the power. Why can’t white people understand that. My wife’s a white girl, and I ask her that all the time. It’s a willful ignorance, that’s what I tell her. Sometimes she agrees with me.
  

From the steering wheel, Ron switched the station. He found a Sade song. This was a consolation to Eva. Ron knew it.

When she was in college, Eva thought Sade held the map for heartbreak. Eva buzzed down the window.

I still feel the chill as I reveal my shame to you/I wear it like a tattoo
.

She let Sade wash over her, let the sea air hit her face.

“Where’re you staying?” Ron asked.

“The Peninsula.”

“Aaah,” Ron said. “With the big dogs.”

Eva nodded her head like,
Albo-fucking-lutely
.

She didn’t look Ron’s way.

E
va kicked off her sandals. Held her purse in her lap as they cruised Wilshire, the perpetual L.A. boulevard a socialist millionaire forced the city to name for him, the sometime stomping grounds of crews like Uncle Jamm’s Army. Kids used to pop-lock at Maverick’s Flat on Crenshaw Eva had roller-skated at World on Wheels on the Westside and at Flipper’s in Hollywood. Flipper’s was a Rite-Aid now.

This world moves fast
, Eva thought.
I’m gonna be twenty-seven this year. Too young to be mulling over how things used to be
.

Eva thought about her rented car, still at Kato’s. She thought about what time she had to be at soundcheck in the morning (early), about how to tell Lois from Trix that if she went with the video director of their dreams, Trix would need to go triple platinum before they ever made a dime. Eva thought about the strapless bra she needed for the next night’s gig. She thought about which of her acts, recording at
various places around the country, needed a call, a prompt, an apology, a something. Eva thought of the man she was dating in New York City, a Spanish guy older than Ron in this business. Eva tried not to think of the indictment on Ron’s face, but it was difficult when he was right by her, suddenly and obviously taking the long way to her hotel.

For all the ire she’d expressed and hidden in Malibu, Eva had wanted, in a passing fantasy, to tell Ron she might be pregnant back when she first suspected. Eva’d wanted to call him when her period was three weeks late, but Eva thought of being pregnant as a justification for calling him that she wouldn’t yield to. He’d see through the pregnancy, to her having wanted to call—the call being an expression of her missing and wanting him.

Until the moment Eva decided against having the baby—on her own, and with no advice from anyone—she weighed the idea of having it and never telling Ron. Weighed the idea of telling Ron it was his—after the baby was born. Never did she consider adoption.

Once I carry it, it’ll be mine to raise
.

Not giving the baby up for adoption was the only absolute Eva had when it came to pregnancy. Though logically she knew that giving it up after it got here was less ultimate than getting rid of it, the fact of her arbitrary rule made her think of herself as a person with an off-kilter morality gauge, which led her to imagine what kind of off-kilter mother she would be, which led her to think of how a baby would fit—or not fit—into her life, which led Eva to think of herself as selfish and shallow for even having had the previous thought, which led her to reflect on the kind of narcissistic, cold mother she would be, which led her to visit a female doctor on New York’s Upper West Side who “performed the procedure” at a small hospital nearby. The visit confirmed for Eva (it was, technically, her third abortion and fourth child) just how about work and about self she could be. Eva had the money, after all, to raise a child in the good nanny-private school-organic veggie-music camp way that would give the kid a head start over almost everyone.

The doctor, though, was kind. The doctor didn’t refer Eva to aides or techs for the ultrasounds and the blood work. “Some women
prefer general anesthesia because they’ve had it before and liked it,” said the doctor, like general anesthesia was a fruit-acid facial, a real glow-getter. “Some want it because they’ve experienced sexual assault or trauma, and so being unconscious will make the abortion easier. Some women simply have a low threshold for pain. Local anesthesia is fine for early term abortion, but some women have fears about pain, period, so general is an appreciated option.”

Eva nodded, so the doctor continued.

“Some women want to be unconscious so they have no memory of the procedure.”

It promotes amnesia. But they can’t give you anesthesia, general or otherwise, for this part of it. This is the part you need it for. This, and the last ten weeks. The “so much” that was “ahead of me” is here. I have no excuse. I just don’t want to have a kid
.

How am I doing this?
Eva asked herself
. How is this even legal?

Eva chose general. She felt she qualified for it due to the doctor’s first statement, and her last one. The woman asked no questions about Eva’s marital status, or about the father. The doctor’s waiting room was nonexistent, just a receptionist’s desk, and then you were led to one of three examination rooms where you could ponder your and your baby’s fate in private, surrounded by
Metropolitan Home
and
The New Yorker
, by framed Cape Cod shore scenes and Caribbean travel posters.

Eva thought to call Ron after the initial visit, in the week before the procedure. But she didn’t because she didn’t want Ron to think she needed anything—not input, or money, or emotional support. Even if she had this baby, she wouldn’t ask him for a goddamn thing. Some of it was pride—Eva had that, though she also had discipline and fear.

Her desire was to have a kid some future day she couldn’t picture. She mostly wanted, as she had since as long as she could remember, to be free. To be independent. To not need anything but what she could provide for herself. Free to her meant having money to do what she wanted. Free to Eva meant not being married. It meant making sacrifices (for herself) and making tough decisions. It meant being
able to pick up and go when she felt like it. Freedom meant being able to do this and still put forth a face that spoke of lightheartedness and a lack of complication. This was the freedom to which Eva had aspired and acquired. She was sharp enough to get what freedom had meant to people born before hip hop. Freedom meant no more back-of-the-bus. Royalties supposedly paid fairly to artists. No more church bombings. No more trees with strange fruit. No more back-alley, wire-hanger abortions. Better jobs. Equal pay for equal work.
Oh yeah
, Eva thought.
Let freedom ring. I can get a goddamn abortion for seven hundred and fifty dollars and I can get bitch-ho lyrics played on the pop stations
.