Femme Noir (6 page)

Darcy flew through her nervous tics, which seemed odd for this wall of a woman. It would’ve fit her flyweight girlfriend better. Jack had gone to negotiate with the DJ for some better songs.

“All I know is, you better talk to Max Abbott. The number is in the book. Max can tell you everything.”

“Max Abbott.” I wrote it on a napkin wondering why in the hell Darcy couldn’t have told me this on the goddamn telephone. What a motherfucking waste of time. It didn’t occur to me until later that Darcy was lonely and wanted to be the first in town to lay claim to a new friend. I never considered that Darcy just wanted a night out and used me to get it. I continued, “Okay, what about this character…” I dug in the pocket of my navy sport coat for the scrap of paper I had saved since Michelle’s desperate call. “What about this Sloane Weatherly?”

Darcy motioned for me to shut up. Then she looked around and shook her head. “Don’t go looking for Sloane. Nobody wants to be found by Sloane. Leave it. Let that be, okay?” Darcy gathered my unused matches and tried, with her thumb, to light them, one after the other.

“Sloane is
baaaad newwwwws,
”
Jhoaeneyie said, then held up her hand. “But I can’t tell you why.” Ava-Suzanne just clenched up angrily, like a fussy fist.

I shrugged. “Okay. Listen, thanks for everything. It was nice meeting all of you. I can’t tell you what a help you’ve been,” I lied. “I’ll buy the next round. I’ve got to go.” I sucked the remaining foam from my beer and helped myself to another of Jack’s cigarettes, automatically flicking my thumbnail across the head of a match I removed from my pocket and applying it to the tip. “Not as easy as it looks,” I murmured. I motioned the bartender over, gave her the money for my own tab, a large tip, plus the next round for Jack, at whom I winked before sliding off the stool and into the night.

Chapter Seven

I struggled to get a deep breath. It had been easier to breathe in the bar. The atmosphere was like being under the ocean, the heat was like the center of a volcano, and the air was heavy and sodden. I called Max Abbott. A woman answered and told me that yes, Max would still receive visitors at this time of night. I hung up and even though I had been told she was dead, I tried to call Michelle. Still nothing. I wiped my face, which was slick with oil and sweat. I asked someone in the car next to mine how to get to Max’s address. Oklahomans were nice, obliging people and I liked most of them so far.

After continually wiping sweat from my face just to have it reappear, I fidgeted in the marble entryway of Max Abbott’s house. Maybe I should just leave this alone and go home. What the hell was I doing, anyway? A fool’s errand. Michelle would laugh at me. I was just removing the keys from my pocket to leave when a noise at the top of the stairs startled me.

As the woman descended the stairs, I felt two things: one, a flash of shocked recognition. This was the redhead from the club earlier tonight! The one who had called me a pickaninny and blown me off. So, she was in a sham marriage to this dude Max Abbott and liked lesbian action on the side. Well, I wouldn’t play that. The second thing I felt was a flush creeping over my body. It was especially prickly where my slacks met.

The woman was the sort who had three expressions: about to have sex, having sex, and just finished having sex. She was the kind whose hair was always mussed and tousled just right, her sloe-eyed glance more sultry and sparkling, her lips fuller and redder, her cheeks pinker and her voice huskier than anyone else’s. She was the sort who loved a good roll in the hay and good food, and anything else in the world was a bothersome bore. More than that, she was beautiful. To many, God gave a bounteous, voluptuous body. To many, God gave a pretty face. To very few did he give both, and Lord have mercy, she was one. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a painting.

She wore a floor-length black filmy robe cinched so tightly at her waist, the knot was disciplinary. She had legs to her throat and long auburn hair to the small of her back. The voluminous fabric that belled out around her on her descent revealed nothing but emphasized everything. She had a bosom that rose off her chest like a young boy’s bottom. Her breasts swayed and pulled against the thin gown, seeming as if they would climb up her neck any second. I kept my eye on them in case they did. She stood in front of me, waiting for me to look up and meet her eyes. I knew it and didn’t. I stared straight at her breasts. I watched two spots of material on her chest gather, harden, and protrude as if pouting. I realized my mouth was dry and I swallowed with difficulty. Oh, God, for a lollipop, a sucker, a pen, a pencil, a straw, a cigarette. I would smoke ten at once. My heart beat faster as I restrained myself from grabbing this woman and knocking her to the floor. My mouth would fasten hard onto one of the pouty nipples, pinching the other to silence it. I would quench that nipple with my saliva. Deep sucking and a silvery kiss left on one, as I would switch to the other, biting it, chewing it like an eraser and—

“Come in.” She twirled, turning away and walking into the living room.

I silently coached myself. Snap out of it. Don’t go slobbering and drooling all over Max’s wife. This chick is as straight as they come. Calm down, she’s just a woman. I breathed. I fondled my matches. Just a woman like me. With that thought, I laughed out loud and smothered it by saying, “Thank you.”

Okay, so she was dangerous. But she’s Max’s and where is he? And what the hell was she doing at the club earlier? I must have a certain attitude with a chick like this. Don’t let her get to you, I coached myself.

“Sit down.” She gestured to a tiny footstool before seating herself languorously on a chaise. I rejected the footstool and chose an overstuffed wingback and cleared my throat. I was thinking of her big, ripe ass, like melons bouncing on two strings. I had admired it as she walked toward the chaise. Oh, what I couldn’t do with an ass like that. Smacking, slapping, spanking, grabbing, fucking, licking, biting, maybe I would just spread it and dive in. Just imagining the fragrance made my breath catch. I cracked my knuckles, feeling my fingers throb. A cigarette, goddammit. Please, please, just one and all this would be okay. I watched her open a box on a side table and extract a cigarette and put it in her mouth. Dunhill cigs. Poseur. Show smoker. But still, it was smoke. I leaned forward to catch a whiff. Obligingly, she blew smoke right into my face, never showing a single sign of recognition from the bar.

All right, I can be cool. “Aren’t you going to offer me anything?” I asked.

She smiled. “You have to really, really want it.”

I needed my mouth to close around a cigarette. The dry, smooth roundness of a good cigarette. The weight of it on my lips, its shape expressing my anticipation, its readiness to surrender itself to smoke in my mouth as I sucked on it with my breath, the firm balance it had, the fire in the tip… My mouth was dusty and my lips were aching, but I shrugged and said, “I don’t want anything that’s not given to me.”

She grinned approvingly. “Then you must have very little.”

“On the contrary, I have more than I need.” I removed my lip balm from my pocket and smoothed it over my mouth. I let my hands rest on my knees. I caught her glancing greedily at my strong, graceful, square hands.

“Guess you’re the furniture,” I said. Our eyes met.

“Guess you’re the Negro,” she answered tranquilly.

“Why don’t you go off and do your girly stuff with some of your little friends? Go study your vaginas, have a tickle fight in your panties, play with hair bows, whatever. Just leave so I can talk to the man of the house. Where’s Max? I came to speak with Max.”

“Who are you, Shaft?”

“Damn right. Can you dig it?”

“Shut your mouth, fool.” We shared a brief laugh.

She stretched her legs in front of her on the chaise and then crossed them delicately at the ankles, causing the gauzy robe to split and fall open at the tops of her thighs. “I’m Max.”

I stood angrily. “You’re shitting me. Everybody in town has told me to talk to Max Abbott and
you’re
Max?”

“Yes, sit down. It’s a family name that I’ll never tell you what it’s short for, and don’t
ever
call me Maxine.”

I sat, trying to calm my mind. “I didn’t expect you to be a woman.”

“I didn’t expect you to be African American.”

“So what now?”

“I offer you a drink and you stay awhile…Suzy Q?”

“The name’s Nora Delaney.” I growled in response to the lighthearted insult. “And no…no…I can’t drink right now. I need to smoke too much already.”

“All right then, you ask me your questions and I bat my eyes and tell you I know nothing.”

“Nice place you got here.” I needed to change gears. Stay in control. I noticed even here inside an expensive home that the room, though cool, seemed marshy. I saw magazines that must have been exposed to the outside sitting on a counter curled into rolls and fat with wet swelling.

“Yeah, I’m a kept woman.”

“Kept? Really? I didn’t know anybody still did that.”

“Yes. Find any butch dumb enough and rich enough and a girl can have everything and great sex too.” Max inhaled on her cigarette slowly and deeply, stretching as she exhaled.

“How fortunate for you,” I said woodenly. “I sure can’t think of anything else to do with you.”

“Oh, so you’ve thought of it?” Max said, all satin.

“Isn’t that arrangement sexist? And archaic?” I didn’t care if it was or not. I just wanted to keep talking.

“Tell that to this.” Max opened the top of her robe to reveal two large scoops of breast barely sheathed in a black lace bra between which lay a diamond and emerald necklace, winking lasciviously. Max closed the robe again, clutching the neck as if she were a prude schoolmarm.

“So what does a girl like you have to do to get a cubic zirconia bauble like that?” I grinned, baiting her.

“I’m sure CZ is all you’re familiar with,” Max said. “Why, all I had to do was smile.” To prove it, Max smiled.

I rolled my eyes. “Bitch musta been outta her fuckin’ mind,” I muttered.

“Butches are easy. Even easier than men. Remember how easy butches are?” Max said, laughing genuinely, making her one and only reference to our previous meeting at the bar. She then inhaled so her chest lifted and the rosy curved tops of her cleavage were visible for a few seconds.

“I imagine the butch who would cough up for that would extract a mighty high payoff.”

“Yes, why don’t you imagine that?” Max stretched her toes. “What else can you imagine?” She tipped a grin to me.

I bent and retied a shoelace. Then I cleaned a smudge from my shoe with a wet thumb. I shook my trousers as if they’d picked up dust and I stroked my damp scalp. All devices to betray the evidence of my imagining. Sure, I imagined it; I imagined it all: Max’s legs wrapped around me, urging me on, faster, faster, harder, harder, Max’s breasts bouncing like punching balls as I made Max beg me, as I made Max contort like a monkey, as I grabbed fists full of Max’s hair and Max straightened and curved like an archer’s bow. I imagined the wet gliding, the slipping and sliding, Max’s full white bottom pink, her nipples hot and puckered, her mouth dusky and calling out to me, please, please, please more. I imagined every muscle in that lush body taut, reaching for me, for what I could do. I saw Max laid out before me, frosted with sweat and glistening, the entire naked whole of her, Max’s belly completely exposed and poised for me to do as I wished. I saw Max quivering and trembling and panting and growling and finally… No, not yet. Not quite yet.

I checked my watch and turned the ring I wore round and round my finger. I cleared my throat again and said acidly, “I’m just disappointed that a strong, liberated woman would prefer this sort of arrangement.” Dumb, but when lacking any words, falling back on righteous feminist outrage always worked.

“Where are you from, 1979? Lesbians as a collective are experiencing a new wealth. And with new wealth, the dykes who are collectors collect bigger and bigger treasures.”

“So that makes you a ho—”

“
Trophy,
” Max corrected, her eyes snapping. “Believe it or not, it’s a full-time job. Shopping, getting my hair done, getting my nails done, facials, massages, waxing, plucking, working out, getting made up and dressed up, it’s exhausting.” Max turned and laid on her hip, facing me. “And that’s just the behind-the-scenes work before the job really begins.”

“I’m sure,” I said dryly. “So you can do this, what else can you do?”

Max licked her lips and made her answer heavy. “Nothing.”

“Ohh, your life is so hard, I bet you’d trade it all in for a doctorate of your own.”

Max’s laugh was like the tinkle of ice in a glass of gin and tonic. “Don’t be silly. Skilled femmes get everything in the end.”

I shifted impatiently. Watching Max suck luxuriously on her cigarette was almost unbearable. Time to ask the hard questions and get out of here. Get some fresh air. Pull it into her lungs like a drowning woman finally breaking the surface. It would be good enough to just get some Max-free air. Who was I kidding? I would run to the bar and decompress with a pitcher of beer and a binge of cigarettes. I would nick a bright red cherry out of the garnish tray. Then I would exorcise Max with that cherry I would crush between my teeth. I would enjoy the smashing, feeling the pop. Feeling it burst as I bit down. Grinding the soft flesh to pulp and feeling the slippery fruit slide down my throat and tasting the lingering sweetness. To be drunk. Seeing Max twirl a lock of her hair as she stared at me, I realized there weren’t enough cherries in the world.