Seen It All and Done the Rest (3 page)

Whenever Zora came to see me, we always traveled this way. We’d show up in Paris or Madrid or Havana and call my friends from our hotel. They invariably chided me for not letting them meet us at the airport. I would apologize and tell them to join us for dinner, where all would be forgiven before we had opened the second bottle of champagne. Zora would have a Shirley Temple.

“I’ll call you when I get in.”

“My schedule is crazy at the center,” she said, “and sometimes I have to turn off my cellphone, so if you don’t reach me, just catch a cab to the new Paschal’s and I’ll meet you there.”

The old Paschal’s restaurant had been a popular Hunter Street watering hole for forty years before they moved to a new location a few blocks from the concrete and glass monstrosity that is the Georgia Dome. Legend has it that the late Mr. Paschal single-handedly kept the Atlanta office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from starving to death by keeping them supplied with his famous chicken sandwiches whenever the staff was broke and hungry, which was often.

“No problem,” I said. “That way I can get a glass of champagne and something to eat until I lay eyes on you.”

I could hear the faint cackling of the Wicked Witch of the West, who had just landed in Munchkin Land in a puff of green smoke, highly pissed, and looking for her sister.

“Get back to your movie,” I said.

“Travel safe,” Zora said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll just click my heels together three times like I always do. Love you!”

“I love you. Mafeenie?”

“Yes, darlin’?”

“I really am glad you’re coming.”

“Me, too,” I said. There was nothing on Zora so broke we couldn’t fix it.
Together.
That’s what grandmothers do.

THREE

A
rriving at the airport early to comply with all the new regulations and security measures, I breezed through all checkpoints, flashing my passport like the good American citizen that I am. When I presented myself at the gate for my flight to Atlanta, the agent shyly requested an autograph and told me the flight was almost empty so she could upgrade me to first class. I signed:
To Chloe, with great appreciation for your kind assistance. Peace & Love, Josephine Evans.

“My granddad used to sign his letters like that back in the sixties,” she said, smiling as she tucked the paper safely away in her uniform pocket.

“We all did,” I said. “Some of us just never stopped.”

She walked me all the way onto the plane and handed me over to the smiling young women who were greeting the first-class passengers and offering them pillows and a beverage before the back cabin had even begun to board. I settled into an aisle seat with no one scheduled to claim the window beside me and accepted a glass of champagne and a pillow. There were only three other people in first class and a dozen in coach. There was a man one row up and across the aisle from me who ordered a double scotch on the rocks, drank it, and fell asleep almost before the captain turned off the
FASTEN SEAT BELT
sign. The bright-eyed flight attendant tucked a blanket around him like he was a toddler known for kicking off his covers and asked me if I’d like a magazine. Of the ones she offered,
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
were the ones I chose, but I wasn’t really interested. I flipped through a preview of spring fashions that was heavy on baby doll dresses and ballet flats, scanned an article on “the new Hollywood,” which looked a lot more diverse than the old Hollywood but had the same penchant for big-breasted blondes with bee-stung lips and heart-shaped behinds.

I closed the magazines and snuggled a little deeper into my soft leather seat. I wasn’t really sleepy, but it was late, and the hum of the jet engines and the soft snoring of the man-baby across the aisle were hypnotic. I turned off my reading light, leaned back, and let my mind mull over the events of the last few days. The truth is, this wasn’t the first time I had felt that anti-American thing nipping at my heels. It’s been building ever since the invasion of Iraq when the president started trying to bend the rest of the world to his will the way Rudolph Valentino’s tyrannical father does in that silent movie
The Sheik.
It’s one of my favorite oldies. Zora loves it, too.

It takes place in some unnamed desert somewhere. At the beginning, the dad is really pissed off about something, so he takes a length of pipe that just happens to be lying around his tent and folds it over like a pipe cleaner. This gesture is intended to demonstrate to his son, played to smoldering perfection by Rudy himself, who is in charge. Valentino, of course, takes the pipe, dark-rimmed eyes blazing in defiance, and straightens it right out again to show his father that times have changed around the oasis.

I think that’s what happened to our president, too. After 9/11, he started bending every pipe in sight, while people whose blazing eyes have nothing to do with the skill of makeup artists and creative lighting, bent them right back. I was in Paris doing one more
Medea
just before the invasion, and there were massive antiwar demonstrations every day. Early in my career, I played the idealistic Princess Antigone, up against the amazingly stubborn King Creon, more times than I can remember, so I had a clear understanding of the implacability of power. Watching the news conferences and angry speeches, I knew there was a strong chance that we were already beyond the possibility of diplomacy and persuasion.

At first, Howard and I just watched from the balcony of the hotel, but after a couple of days, I decided I had to be a part of it. Howard, who had only come in for a long weekend to see the show and do some shopping, thought I was crazy for getting involved. When I reminded him that it was, after all, our country against whom they were protesting, he just snorted.

“Speak for yourself, Miss Betsy Ross,” he said. “If I wanted to march up and down the street, hollering at white folks, I would have kept my black ass at home in the first place. No thank you!”

So we arranged to meet for dinner after the show, and Howard went back to catching up on his beauty sleep. I joined the throngs of men, women, and children who were carrying signs that said, “Stay out of Iraq!” and “U.S. Out of the Middle East!” and some fairly angry things about George Bush, his father, and one about his mother that I won’t repeat since she never ran for office and so is of no concern to me. They were also carrying posters with various photographs of the president, sometimes altered so that he had little devil horns like goat bumps on his forehead or blood dripping off his little pointed teeth. There were some classic peace signs, white on black background, and one saying “war” in a red circle with a line through it.

I fell in with a group of young women who had skipped the day’s classes at their university to join the marchers. We all got along great. Everybody spoke English and French so we could really talk in both languages, which we did. When people recognized me, they would smile and applaud, or come over to shake my hand, or take a picture and compliment the artist while striding along beside the activist. That was back when the demonstrators were really mad at our government, but they still had faith in us to change it, which we did. But people around the world still don’t see enough evidence of that change, which is why they’re losing patience with us.

So I wasn’t really surprised by what happened at the funeral, or by the board’s decision to replace me. It hurt my feelings more than anything else. But now all that is in the capable hands of Howard Denmond, whom I trust to make it right before I run through my savings and have to figure out how to make an honest living doing something other than acting. Howard was right. We had been through all manner of dramas over the past twenty-plus years, and he has never let me down.

Comforted by that thought, I must have dozed off because when I woke up, they had lowered the lights and the only activity in the cabin was taking place a few rows ahead of me, where a young couple with identical shiny blond heads was giggling together between kisses. From where I was sitting in the dark across the aisle behind them, I could see the boy whispering in her ear and hear the girl laughing softly as she shushed him. He took her hand and pressed it to his lips in an urgent, sensual way that made me know exactly what was coming next. And why not? Making love on airplanes is practically a sexual rite of passage in the modern world, and this flight was so empty, they didn’t even have to crowd into the tiny bathroom to escape their fellow passengers’ prying eyes. The snorer had not moved a muscle and I’m sure they had no idea I was even awake. The girl’s head dropped out of sight and the boy groaned softly and leaned his blond head back against the seat.

I was never a big sex-on-the-plane kind of girl, although I had my moments. It’s much easier for women to give pleasure in such close quarters than to receive it. Upright airplane seats seem tailor-made for fellatio, while trying to find a way to reciprocate would challenge even the most determined and flexible suitor. I knew I was invading their privacy by not turning away, but somehow I felt like they didn’t really care. Half the thrill of this kind of thing is the idea that somebody might be watching.

After a few minutes, the boy let out a little gurgling half groan and pressed his head against the seat. For a moment, neither one moved; then the girl sat up, pushed her hair behind her ears, and looked around. When she saw that I was awake, she grinned conspiratorially. I grinned back just as her beau pulled her back down into his arms for a long grateful kiss.

I was grateful, too. Not for a chance to play the voyeur at thirty thousand feet, but because that’s one of the things I really like about people. We don’t care how many rules you make, we’re going to find a way to fall in love and have sex on airplanes and make babies and laugh and cry and live free. That’s just something we do, and all the wars and all the governments and all the armies you can put together to stop us won’t make one bit of difference. Especially when you’re moving along effortlessly at five hundred miles an hour and the flight attendants are half dozing and the cool-looking older lady that’s watching has probably seen it all and done the rest. That’s how she got to be so cool.

FOUR

P
aschal’s had changed its location, but the food was exactly the same: high in calories, high in cholesterol, and absolutely irresistible. My flight arrived on time and I caught a cab into the city, arriving at just before nine. I left a message on Zora’s cellphone, as instructed, and took a small corner table in the bar area where they had the television turned to CNN. I ordered a glass of champagne, but when I hadn’t heard from Zora by the time I finished it, the smiling waiter who said his name was MacArthur, “like the general,” had no problem serving me the same great meal I would have gotten in the dining room.

A half hour later, while I waited for my peach cobbler and a cup of coffee, I thumbed through a copy of
Dig It!
, the homegrown gossip sheet that had been Zora’s nemesis since her name surfaced in the scandal. Jasmine had told me how furious Zora had been to find herself in its pages, but I had never seen a copy before. It was free from the box right outside the front door, sandwiched between
The New York Times
and
The Atlanta Sentinel
, both of which were sold out.
Dig It!
was free. The paper made its money in ads.
Looking Good While Being Bad!
the headline screamed across the front in big red letters. As I flipped through it, there were many people I didn’t recognize. I wondered if that was because I’d been away so long or just that so many of these “celebrities” looked barely old enough to vote, much less to be called stars. Most of them seemed to come from the world of very recent pop culture with an emphasis on reality television and rap music.

I was beginning to wonder if Zora had gotten my message, when I turned the page, and there she was, splashed across the cover feature on “Looking Good While Being Bad.” They got that right. In every photograph of her, Zora looked absolutely beautiful. There she was, dancing with an attractive young man in a crowded nightclub. There she was, having drinks with him the same night, smiling seductively. She obviously had no idea she was being photographed. There were also several of her entering or leaving the campus at Spelman, wearing huge sunglasses and shielding her face with her hands. One photographer even secretly snapped her leaving the West End News. In that shot, she looked drawn and tense.

MacArthur brought over my pie and coffee and I smiled my thanks, but I couldn’t stop staring at Zora. She hadn’t even looked that unhappy at her father’s funeral, but I guess that was a moment for which she had time to prepare. This was a violent disruption of her life that she didn’t see coming until she crashed into the middle of it and found herself surrounded by enough paparazzi to be a Hollywood starlet out with Paris Hilton for a night on the town. Poor baby. She didn’t even know that the worst thing you can do is try to hide your face. It just makes them more determined to get the shot of you hiding.

The copy read: “Even in the middle of one of the most scandalous moments in Atlanta’s recent history, Zora Evans, the mystery coed of last year’s biggest, sexiest murder mystery, managed to look good enough to eat!”

“Mafeenie, I can’t believe you’re reading that trash!”

Zora’s voice sounded indignant and embarrassed just above my head. I looked up to find her standing behind me, frowning like she had caught me performing a very unnatural act in a very public place. She was alarmingly thin and her hair was pulled back tightly from her face.

“My darling girl,” I said, tossing the offending tabloid aside and rising to embrace her. “You’re here at last!”

She felt like skin and bones.
How much weight had she lost?

“And not a minute too soon,” she said, hugging me tightly in spite of my choice of reading material.

I leaned back and looked at her without breaking the circle of my embrace. “How are you, darlin’?”

“I’m fine,” she said, squirming a little under my unrelenting scrutiny.

She had lost fifteen or twenty pounds easily and her usually creamy smooth complexion looked sallow and muddy. With no hair to soften her newly narrow face, her cheekbones jutted out, sharp and heartless.

“How much weight have you lost?”

“Can I order a drink before you begin your interrogation?” she said, wriggling free and flopping into the seat across from mine.

“Of course you can,” I said. “Jet lag has ruined my manners! Are you starving? Order something to eat!”

“I’m not hungry,” she said as MacArthur hurried over with a menu. She barely glanced at him. “Stoli on the rocks.”

“Coming right up,” he said.

Zora ordering vodka was even more of a surprise than her weight. I had never seen her drink anything stronger than a glass of opening-night champagne. The copy of
Dig It!
I’d tossed on the table had fallen open to the editor’s column, which ran beside a photograph of a handsome young man with big brown eyes and very white teeth. Zora tapped the picture with her fingertip.

“I threw a drink in that guy’s face once.”

“You did?” I was impressed. Drink throwing is a dying art in the modern world.

She nodded. “I walked in here one day and there he was sitting at the bar watching the Braves game and drinking a beer. Next thing I knew…”

She shrugged her shoulders as if what happened next had been beyond her control.

“That’s a difficult gesture to pull off,” I said. “How’d it go?”

She shook her head and grimaced slightly. “Not so well, actually. I felt a little silly afterward.”

“That’s why it’s a hard one,” I said, understanding completely. “It always feels good while you’re doing it, but once it’s done, there’s that whole moment after to deal with when you’re standing there, still trembling with righteous indignation, and the other person is sitting there with stuff dripping off their face, looking at you like you have just lost your entire mind.”

“Exactly!”

I nodded sympathetically and took one more bite of my peach cobbler. It was harder to lose an extra pound or two these days so moderation was key, but this pie was too good to resist.

“That’s why you can’t just stand there after you’ve done the deed,” I said. “Toss the drink, put down the glass, and go. One smooth motion.”

“How many times did it take you to figure that out?” she said, closing the magazine and tossing it down on the chair beside her. It fell open again to the page that was crowded with her picture, but she ignored it, so I did, too.

“Oh, two or three, I guess.”

She was looking at me like she used to when she was a kid and everything that came out of my mouth surprised her.

“What?”

“Most grandmothers can’t critique your drink-in-the-face moves like that.”

“I’m not most grandmothers,” I said. “And thank God!”

She almost smiled at that, but she seemed to have forgotten how.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get your message earlier,” she said. “My supervisor makes us turn off our cell phones if we’re talking to a vet.”

“Good for her,” I said. “Cell phones are the work of the devil. I was doing
Fences
last year and right in the middle of Rose’s big scene where she finally gets to tell Troy all about his sorry self, a cell phone went off right in the front row.”

“You make it sound like a bomb or something.”

I resisted the impulse to tell her that in my world, it was close enough. Her tone surprised me. I had thought she would find it funny, but her response sounded more like a reprimand.

MacArthur reappeared with a little white cocktail napkin and set her drink down in front of her. As thin and bedraggled as she looked, he couldn’t help stealing a little glance. Even on her worst days, Zora’s beauty shines through.

“What did you do?” she said, taking a big gulp of her drink.

“I stopped the show.”

“Oh, God! You didn’t.” She still sounded more annoyed than amused.

“I waited. I tried to talk over it, but it just kept ringing. Finally, I turned around and just stood there until this fool finished fumbling through her coat pockets and found the damn thing.”

Zora took another swallow of her drink. She grimaced a little, as if she didn’t really like the taste of it, but whatever it was she did like was worth the sacrifice.

“The worst thing about it,” I said, “other than completely wrecking my big scene, was that her ring tone was playing ‘Little Red Corvette.’”

“I love that song,” Zora said, like I had just slammed Prince’s artistic genius.

“I love it, too, but not in the middle of my big scene!”

Zora drained her glass. “Did she turn it off or answer it?” She was shaking the glass gently back and forth in a gesture that reminded me of her father more than the dimple in her chin or her hazel eyes.

“I wouldn’t be sitting here today if she had answered it,” I said. “I’d be in jail for assault and battery, and you’d be marching around with a sign saying ‘Free Josephine Evans.’”

At least she smiled at that, but she was busy looking around for MacArthur. She wanted a refill.

“How long have you been drinking straight vodka?” I said, knowing she was a grown woman and could drink whatever she liked, but unable to hold on to the question any longer.

“Not long,” she said.

“You like it?”

“Not much, but Dad said with vodka, it’s better to take it neat so you can keep track of how much you’ve had.”

Now I truly loved my son, but taking advice about alcohol from a man who drank himself to death seems unwise. For most of his twenties, my son thought staying drunk was the way to address the emptiness. When he married Jasmine and they had Zora, I think he hoped family would be the cure. He even joined AA and went to meetings before rehearsals, but he always went back to drinking. After a particularly horrendous weekend, Jasmine went to the bank, withdrew her half of their savings, packed up her daughter, and left. She drove to Florida and invested her money in a tiny beachfront motel, where they rang a bell every night at sunset to honor the end of another day and tended to attract a laid-back clientele of regulars who didn’t require pampering. Zora grew up there, raised by a mother who adored her and a father who visited occasionally.

When he got so sick he couldn’t work, he came to the front door of the motel one evening, like he was just another traveler looking for a few nights’ rest, and never left. When he died, Jasmine and Zora invited me to come for the service and I did. We rang the bell at sunset and scattered his ashes in the ocean behind the motel. I wept a little for the distance I had allowed my work to create between my son and me. I couldn’t deny that I had chosen to live my life without making any real space for him in it. There were reasons then, and there are reasons now, but the end result was he left his daughter behind with Jasmine, the same way I had left him in his father’s care, without a backward glance.

She deserved better, I thought that day, watching Zora standing beside her mother in a long white dress, eulogizing her father as if he couldn’t have been more perfect if he tried. The next morning, I invited Zora and Jasmine to come to Amsterdam for the New Year’s Eve celebration that would usher in the new millennium. That way, I explained, if the doomsayers were right, at least we’d be together at the end. Jasmine said that was a pretty depressing reason to fly thousands of miles across the ocean, and how about if they came because there was no place else they’d rather be? They stayed a month and the three of us got closer than we’d ever been.

Maybe that was why the way Zora was looking so hard for MacArthur to refill her drink order made me feel so sad and so scared that I opened my mouth to tell her that whatever she was looking for probably wasn’t hanging around in the bottom of a cocktail glass, but I hadn’t seen her in so long. It would probably be better to head home and get settled in before I started dispensing unsolicited advice.

“Well,” I said, “you’re grown. You can drink whatever you want, but can we do it at your place? I’ve had all the pie I can afford to eat, but if we sit here much longer, I’ll have to polish off the rest.”

I spoke quickly because MacArthur was headed toward us and Zora was already wiggling her glass in his direction. My request took her by surprise.

“What?” She looked at my half-eaten pie and back to me.

“You ready to show me your house?” I said, reaching for my credit card as MacArthur waited patiently for instructions.

“Oh, yes! I’m sorry. Of course we can go. Sure, sure…”

MacArthur left us to run the card; Zora tipped her glass back one more time to sip the watery remains of her drink and stood up.

“Is this all you brought?” she said, glancing at my small pile of luggage.

“Travelin’ light,” I said. “Just like always.” She slung my carry-on over her shoulder and tucked the garment bag over the pulling suitcase’s extended handle like a pro. I taught her well.

I signed the check and included a generous tip. MacArthur repaid my largesse by holding my coat in a courtly gesture I’m sure he learned from a gentlemanly grandfather or an old copy of
Playboy.

“Thank you,” I said, slipping my arms into the silk-lined sleeves quickly. Zora was standing beside the table and I couldn’t help noticing that even her hands were too thin. She looked tired and tense and irritable.