Bliss (33 page)

In Eva’s favorite fantasy she would pick up her phone one sunny day and have it be Ron. She could sound breezy and busy but down to hang out. She would not be pregnant. She would seduce his body easily, and his heart eventually, and if the black-white thing didn’t rear its head, they could be one of those interracial couples that seemed untouched by the effect their presence had on others, the kind that had surmounted the insurmountable issue of race, the kind that acknowledged the gulf between them as just another kind of gulf, and gulfs existed between couples all the time—cultural, sexual, emotional, regional—and people dealt with them, stayed together through them. Eva and Ron could be the kind of couple that had a nice house in a nice neighborhood, the kind that understood each other’s jobs and dreams. Eva had never been in a relationship that lasted longer than eight months in row. She’d never argued about domestic issues. She’d never fought over anything except punctuality, hip hop, her job, and her right to be her. Eva felt that if she and Ron floated on the gulf between them, coped with it, got to know it, all other squabbles and temporary crises would seem like just those. Trivial and not worth the time it took to argue over them.

This wasn’t the way she was thinking in Malibu, though, or on Wilshire Boulevard.

Eva didn’t call Ron during the week before the procedure. She didn’t call him on the day of, when she took a cab to the hospital, got
herself admitted as an outpatient, stripped, and put on a backless gown and paper slippers and paper bonnet. Eva didn’t think of her artists or her coworkers or her competitors as the registered nurse wheeled her in—catheter inserted and taped to her hand again. She didn’t think of how she was going to con the doctor into letting her get alone into a cab when they’d asked for the name of a person who would pick her up and see her home. On the form, Eva’d written C.R. SUMMERS, a girl who’d sat next to Eva at one of her high schools, a girl Eva’d shared a cafeteria table with once or twice and who had gone off to college somewhere in the South, and whom Eva had never seen again. On the gurney, Eva’s teeth chattered and her lips were dry and the only thing she really thought was
How will I look at myself two days from now when the bleeding has tapered off and the pain pills are no longer necessary? How will I look at myself even when I pass a glass pane on the street? How will I look at myself—I’m about to count backward from ten; I know the drill, that’s how low-down I am—when I wake up, and what was there is gone? What was alive, now dead
.

Think about it!

That’s what Eva said to herself as hall doors snapped open automatically to receive her.

Think about it! It’s the least you can do, considering the physical pain is minimal. Think! The embryo—no, the baby—will be vacuumed out. Killed. Disposed of And you will ride away with imaginary Carleen Summers. You’ll be free of what would have been your responsibility
.

That’s when she thought hard about Ron.

And Ron’s
is what she thought.
His responsibility, too
.

But she wouldn’t have called him then, even if she could have. Her last thought before the anesthetic solution relaxed her muscles and took her into a quick coma was that this was her problem. She was the one who was pregnant.
Every boy
, Eva thought,
is not my boyfriend
.

T
hey pulled up on the black brick drive of the Peninsula Beverly Hills. Eva got out quickly. She was almost through the glass front
doors when she heard another car door shut, heard one of the white-suited valets say, “How long, sir?”

Ron answered, “Not sure.” As he came around the car and walked toward her, he said, “We’re not finished.”

“We are.”

“Not because you say so. You do owe me,” he said, pushing the door for her, “the courtesy of a conversation.”

They got on the elevator, and then got to her Grand Deluxe room. A Grand Deluxe room was better than a Deluxe room, though not as big or as fly as the Patio Grand Deluxe or the eleven-hundred-square-foot Executive Grand Deluxe, and not near as big as the Grand Deluxe Suite or the private, stand-alone garden Villas to which Eva aspired. Her Grand Deluxe Room did have Italian linens and French doors and her choice of domestic newspaper delivered daily and a minibar and three telephones. It was what she and Ron knew together—hotel rooms. This one was nicer then the ones they’d been in Italy. But it was the same impersonal vibe. Nothing of hers, nothing of his. Clean sheets twice a day.

He sat, and she did.

“So the way it is,” Ron said, “is you come to the restaurant to tell me you had an abortion of our baby, and now you’re mad at me.”

Our
. This gave her courage. “Why didn’t you call me,” Eva said, “after the tour?”

“You had an abortion because I didn’t call you?”

Eva resisting blowing up, resisted saying she could never explain to him why she had the abortion, why she’d had any of them, but thought instead,
No, you asshole, it’s not because you didn’t call
. “I’m asking you,” she said, “like a point of information.”

“Rules of order. Okay. I didn’t call you because when we were in Italy, you acted like it was all fun for you—fun only. And when we were at the airport—”

“And you were talking about the sex house.”

“You love sex. Or you act like you do. The way we were over there, I thought I was saying some shit you wanted to hear.”

Ron said, “I wasn’t trying to play myself.”

“If I was a white girl,” Eva said, “you would’ve called.” She didn’t even know if she believed that. It was a test.

“Since it seems to matter, I haven’t been with a white girl in … eight years.” Saying it, not the fact of it, distressed him. He looked her in her eye, though, as he declared what Eva thought had to be a hatred of himself.

“Why? That’s your thing?” She thought he was pitiful.

“It is what it is.” Suddenly proud, and ashamed a little that he was proud, he looked down and wiped at the white quilt like there was lint on it. “It’s who pulls me. I don’t fight what naturally pulls me.” Then he looked at her again. “It’s who gets pulled to me, too.”

“You have superiority in your head. Built in. So you go in on top, in your head.”

“Yeah. I’m always three steps ahead of every black girl.”

“And black male. Don’t say it like it’s impossible. Like it’s some kind of urban legend.”

“I know what you’re trying to say, what you’re saying. I know how the world is. But one, you’re changing the subject—”

“This is the subject.”

“You had the abortion,” he said, “because I’m white?”

Eva looked at him.
I was not ready. I am not ready. I had it because I could
.

“And if anyone feels superior in this situation,
our
situation, not the world’s situation or the country’s situation, it’s you.”

Our
. Eva wanted to say,
This is the third abortion I’ve had, the fourth baby I’ve gotten rid of, and this is the first time the father has been a white man
. But what she said was, “How I feel is nothing in the face of how things are.”

“You don’t believe that. If you did, you wouldn’t have found me at Kato’s. I never would have known about you being pregnant.”

She hated the word
pregnant
. Like
positive
, it had equally horrible and wonderful meanings. And the first syllable sounded big and round to Eva. Full and absolute. “Do we have to keep talking about it?”

“You showed up to talk about it.” He paused. “Or did you want to see me? Too. Do you feel—”

“Bad?” She nodded, felt like a freak. A dumb slut. Selfish and not worthy of anything she owned or any break in the wall of disgust by which she was surrounded.

“Can’t share nothing else,” Ron said, “so you decided to share the guilt.”

The fact of what he said made her angry.

“Make me an accessory after the fact,” he said flatly and quietly, as if agreeing with himself. “You want me—” He moved nearer to her on the bed and put his arm around her shoulder like they were chums. They sat there awkwardly. Eva finally leaned into him.

“I’m probably not one,” Ron said, “for carrying in soup on a tray. But maybe I could have flown out there. Something. Did it take … long? I mean, did it hurt?”

Eva pressed into him closer. She wanted to hear his voice so sweet, but not the words coming from his mouth. Ron leaned her back on the bed, and she rolled onto her side. He got up, pulled a pillow from under the coverlet, pressed it against her stomach and chest. “Hold onto it,” he said to her.

Ron lay behind her, his chin on her head, an arm around her waist and the pillow, his chest against her back. “Hold onto it,” he said again.

Eva pressed her back into him, clutched the cushion, and felt a frantic, unearned gladness. It was good to hold onto something. Good to be held.

Ron’s arm tightened around her. The mute pump of his heart sucked hers closer. His blood was awhirl, anxious to take back its living place in her body. For lists of reasons that matched in some places, both were ashamed of who they were. The ashamedness was imbedded and unacknowledged, wholly American and completely un-American: each believed they had to be who they were with no choice in the matter. And they were on their way up.

Listen to my heart beat
, went the song in Eva’s head.
For you
.

Eva and Ron didn’t have sex. To each of them, and with a draining intensity that pulled them into a deep sleep, it felt like love.

I
n the morning, Eva woke first.

“Ron,” she said, and shook him gently. “Lil’ John. I got sound-check in ninety minutes. Way out in Universal City.”

Ron’s eyes opened. In his sleepy state, he looked at her with contentment. Her words seemed to hit him after a delay. He wiped his eyes. “Soundcheck,” he said. “Right.” He twisted, stood, and adjusted his clothes.

Eva felt better. She felt she’d done the right thing by telling Ron everything, when she hadn’t told him much at all.

“That’s how you’re playing me,” Ron said.

“Huh?”

“Not so much as a good morning. Cool. So, tonight? Dinner at the new spot on Sunset. It’s where everybody’s at on Fridays. Oh no, we both got the awards thing tonight, so maybe drinks after? And then we can come back up here. Order more Scotch from room service, then make it hot. Right? PeaceLove&Money tour, all over again.”

“Why’re looking at me like that? So evil?”

“I’m on your program.” And after a quick glance in a mirror, he was out the door.

E
va saw Ron at the awards show that night, but he was far across the room talking to artists, talking to women, talking to the spruced up Tampa MC. When Eva was backstage, Ron was out front. When Eva was out front, she saw Ron busily, casually heading backstage. Eva’s pager didn’t chirp with Ron’s number, and Eva didn’t beep Ron. Eva did go to a bar after the show, alone. Drank Glenmorangie because the name sounded dramatic and because she saw high rollers ordering it. She stretched one Scotch out for thirty minutes. Stretched another. And another.