Blonde Faith (8 page)

When the doors came open, the guard scuttled around me, making a beeline for the podium where a young woman was writing in a big reservations log. She was white, with long blond hair and a horsey face. Her high heels made her taller than the guard; her teal gown put her in a completely different class from him.

The guard talked quickly, and I took my time approaching them. When I finally got there, she was saying, “I’ll go speak to Mr. Green.”

The guard smirked at me, and again I wondered at all the minutes and hours and days that I’d spent on meaningless encounters like this one.

I wanted to say to the little white man, “Listen, brother, we’re not enemies. I just want to go up in an elevator like anybody else. You don’t need to worry about me. It’s the men that own this building that are making you poor and uneducated and angry.”

But I didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have heard me. I couldn’t free either one of us from our bonds of hatred.

The young woman returned with another white man behind her. This man was tall, ugly, and impeccably dressed in a dark green suit. He glanced at me and then turned to the guard.

“Yes?”

“This man says that he has an appointment with you, Mr. Green.”

“What is your name?” Green asked the guard.

“Michaels, sir. But this guy —”

“Mr. Michaels, how many times a day do I receive people who have made appointments?”

“I don’t know… a few.”

“And how often do you ride up the elevator humiliating those people?”

“Um…”

“If a man or woman or child tells you that they have an appointment with me, I’d appreciate it if you would allow them to come here and discharge their business.”

“I just thought —”

“No,” Green said, interrupting the excuse, “you did not think. You saw this man, this Negro man, and decided that you would play the hero, protecting a restaurant where you couldn’t afford even a lunch from a person you don’t know a thing about.”

I felt bad for Michaels, I really did. Green didn’t say another word. Michaels knew enough not to argue. The horsey woman watched her boss with inquisitive eyes. We all stood there for more moments than we should have. I don’t know about them, but I felt that I had somehow lost my way in life, ending up on that high floor embroiled in a conflict that made no sense.

Michaels finally got the message and went back toward the elevator.

“Mr. Rawlins,” Hans Green said, “it’s so nice to see you.”

We shook hands as the young woman watched, trying to understand what was happening.

“Come back to my office,” Green was saying.

As I followed him, I smiled and nodded at the hostess.

How could she know that eighteen months before, Hans Green was being framed for embezzling money from the last restaurant he worked for, Canelli’s. Melvin Suggs, an LAPD detective, was a friend of his and he passed my card along. I took a job as a dishwasher at the restaurant and discovered that the chef and Green’s wife were cooking the books, and each other, at Hans’s expense.

THE BIG WINDOW of the restaurant manager’s office looked all the way from downtown to the Pacific. I liked sitting there. The only thing I would have liked better was Bonnie back in my arms.

Green’s ears and nose were way too big for his face. Red and blue veins had risen to the surface of his cheeks. His teeth were too small, and his thin lips were loose and flaccid. He was a caricature of a man.

“What can I do for you, Easy?” he asked when we were both seated and I had turned down a drink.

“I’m coming tonight with a very special woman. I’d like a good seat and perfect service.”

“What time?”

“Eight.”

“Done. On the house.”

“I can pay for it.”

“If Michaels is any indication, you pay for it every day of your life.”

B
y the time I got home, I had plotted and abandoned six different ways to get to Bonnie and convince her to come back to me. I considered everything from just apologizing to buying her a house in Baldwin Hills where we could start life anew. I even flirted with the notion of killing Joguye Cham.… That was when I understood that I was truly, madly in love.

Frenchie was waiting on the other side of the door this time, growling and baring his teeth. He snapped at me when I crossed the threshold into my own home.

“Hi, Dad,” Feather said, coming out of her room. Easter Dawn came after her, wearing a pink kimono and carrying an ornately crocheted purse that looked something like a briefcase with a red silken shoulder strap.

“Hey,” I said to the children, the crush of melancholy just below the surface of my greeting.

Feather stared at me a moment and then turned to the tiny child.

“E.D., go into my room and set up all the dolls the way you did for me so Dad can see them.”

The child’s eyes glittered. “Okay,” she said excitedly, and then she ran for the back of the house, the shoulder-strap briefcase flapping at her side.

It was the first time I’d seen Feather manipulate a situation with a third person in order to get her way. She looked intently at my face and came up to me, putting her hands on either side of my head.

This gesture made me very uncomfortable. It wasn’t the father-and-daughter relationship I’d had with Feather for close to a dozen years. She was almost a woman and I was nearly a man.

“We have to talk,” she said.

I wanted to find the child in her, to tell her a joke or tickle her. I wanted to dismiss her serious stare, but I could not.

I sat down on the love seat in the small room that divided the living room from the kitchen, and she sat there beside me.

“Juice and I are going to Bonnie’s wedding,” she said.

“So I’ve heard.”

“We have to do it,” Feather continued. “Bonnie is as much our mother as you are our father.”

Did she find you two in the street like I did? Would she have brought you to live with her with no father to help her? Would she have risked her life to save you?
I thought these things, but I did not say them. Bonnie was a wonderful woman and of strong mind. She might have done more than I could have imagined. As far as I knew, her affair with Joguye was to ensure that Feather had the medical treatment that saved her life.

“I know you love her,” I said. “And I would never stand in the way of that.”

“And you should come too,” Feather said. “She needs you to tell her it’s all right.”

I don’t think that the experience of losing my mother at the tender age of seven hurt as much as Feather’s request. I looked up with a blank expression on my face and absolutely nothing in my mind.

“She has to move on, Daddy. She can’t wait forever for a man who doesn’t have forgiveness in his heart.”

I’d been called a nigger many times in my life. It was always a painful, enraging experience. But it was nothing compared to the simple truths that Feather was speaking. I wanted her to be quiet. I wanted to stand up and go into my bedroom, take out my .38, and just start shooting: the mirror, the wall, the floor under my feet.

“She waited for you to call,” Feather continued. “She told me that she loved you more than any other man. She knew what happened with her and Uncle Joguye was wrong, but she got all confused when she was watching him make those doctors work on me. She wanted to come back home, Daddy, but you wouldn’t let her.”

Maybe, I thought, there was a God. He wasn’t some gigantic and powerful deity but just the vessel of all knowledge and therefore a judge of truth. Now and then he inhabited some person and made them say the words that had gone unsaid. At this moment Feather was the expression of that God. He was using her to condemn me for my wrongdoing.

“You can’t expect us to choose between you,” Feather was saying. “We can’t help what happened.”

I wanted to say that I understood what she was telling me and that it was true. I opened my mouth and a sound came out, but it was not words. It was a small mewling utterance, something that had never before come from me or anyone else I’d heard.

When Feather heard this muted cry, a look of shock crossed her face. She was my daughter again. I could see in her alarm all the things she was feeling.

Feather had been mad at me for making Bonnie leave our house. She identified with Bonnie’s broken heart and her need for love in her life. Now she felt guilty about going to the wedding and angrier still that I would feel betrayed about her going.

I was her father. I never felt pain or weakness. I never got tired or brokenhearted. I was invulnerable and could therefore hear her anger without danger of being hurt.

But the moment that sound came from me, Feather understood the pain that had been festering inside me, the pain I had never shared with her.

She put her arms around me and said, “I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay, honey,” I said in constricted little words. “I know you love both of us. I know I was wrong. You do whatever you feel is right, and I will love you no matter what.”

“Mr. Rawlins,” Easter Dawn said, running from Feather’s room. “I have all the dolls set up for you to see.”

IT TOOK ME ALMOST an hour to get dressed for dinner. I closed my door and sat on the bed, trying to will myself into normalcy. Feather’s words had cut so deeply that I couldn’t even think of a place that wasn’t filled with hurt.

Deciding on a pair of socks took me five minutes; putting them on took ten.

FEATHER AND E.D. kissed me good-bye at the door. My daughter looked at me, feeling for the first time what it was like to be in my mind. It was a curse I wouldn’t have wished on my worst enemy.

O
n the drive to Brentan’s, I tried to imagine myself at Bonnie’s wedding. I got stuck on what color and kind of suit to wear. I knew that I would never be able to go, but I wanted to
imagine
being there at the ceremony, watching them kiss after promising each other forever. If I could see it in my mind, maybe I could get past it.

I parked on the street and climbed out of my car. It was 7:48 by the gold-and-copper Grumbacher watch on my wrist.

A police car was passing by. The cops slowed down and stared out their window at me. Me: dark as the approaching night, tall, in shape enough for one good round with a journeyman light heavyweight, dressed in a deep gray suit that fit me at least as well as the English language.

The car slowed down to three miles an hour, and the pale faces wondered if they should roust me.

I stood up straight and stared back at them.

They hesitated, exchanged a few words, and then sped off. Maybe it was close to the end of the shift for them, or maybe they realized that I was a citizen of the United States of America. Probably, though, some real crime had come in over the radio and they didn’t have the leisure to bring me under their control.

In the first-floor lobby, another white guard, this one tall and lanky, came up to me.

“May I help you, sir?” he asked.

Manners before insults. Little blessings.

“Goin’ up to the twenty-third floor to grab a bite,” I replied.

“Do you have a reservation?”

“Is the pope Catholic?”

“What?”

I walked past him to the express elevator door. I pressed the button, conflicted about whether I wanted the guard to come over to me so that I could break his jaw, or just to be left alone.

The car came and the doors slid open. The guard was nowhere in my vicinity.

ANOTHER WHITE WOMAN in a lovely gown adorned the podium. The dress was scarlet, and her face contained the beauty of youth. It was full, with green eyes and a nose that stood out like a petite lever on a whole world of laughter.

When the woman-child saw me, the potential for laughter dimmed a little.

“Yes?” she asked, giving me only her insincere smile.

“Rawlins for dinner for two at eight,” I said.

Without looking at the log in front of her, she asked, “Do you have a reservation?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

The pretty thing looked down and moved her finger around.

“Excuse me a moment,” she said very politely.

As she walked away, I lit up a cigarette. Jackson Blue had once told me that cigarette smoke constricts the veins and raises the blood pressure to a dangerous degree. But all I felt was calm. The smoke took off the sharp edge that I’d honed on the way to that restaurant.

A white couple came up behind me.

“Excuse me,” the tall white man said. He wore a tuxedo and had a white cashmere scarf around his neck. He was my age. She was twenty years younger, platinum from head to toe.

“It’s a line, man,” I said, no longer wanting to placate a world seemingly filled with my adversaries.

Hans Green arrived a minute or two after that. He was attended by the young scarlet-clad beauty. The man in the tuxedo went around me and said, “We’re here for our reservation.”

Hans turned to the hostess, saying, “Go change your clothes, Melinda.”

Tears appeared in her eyes and she hurried away.

The man in the tuxedo said, “Excuse me, sir, but we’d like to be seated.”

“Don’t you see this man standing in front of you?” Green asked. “Are you blind or simply an ass?”

The Tux backed up and Hans said, “Come on, Mr. Rawlins, let me show you to your table.”

On our way, Hans touched a waitress on her shoulder and whispered something to her.

“Right away, Mr. Green,” she said, and then made her way to the podium.

THE TABLE Hans had for me was perfect. Removed from the other tables, we were still in sight of everyone. The western view looked down upon an LA that was coming alive with electric light.

I sat and so did Hans.

“How do you do it?” he asked me.

“What?”

“I’m a white man,” he said. “An Aryan. I golf, belong to a men’s club. My parents came to America in order to be free and to share in democracy, but ten minutes with you and I’ve had arguments with four people about their bigotry. If that’s what I face in ten minutes, what must life be like for you twenty-four hours a day?”