chalk-faced waves and wan-toned voices surrounding them disappeared. The background turned into what she’d seen the weatherman standing in front of when they’d gone to the TV studio on a field trip in fourth grade. “WGN’s Roger Twible,” she had kidded herself then, “and the pure, blank blue he keeps behind him.” And now she thought again, “Ain’t mad at him.” Then she realized how uneasy she was on this street because she was doing it again. Her eyes strained against her peripheral vision as she followed a man’s progress across the street without turning her head to watch.
The bus disappeared into the darkening distance and she saw the young man undo the denim flap on his jacket. He inserted a tightly wrapped packet of plastic in his breast pocket. He appeared to her and then disappeared. He had something in his face she wanted to trust. Everything about it was even; there was nothing soft, nothing hard, nothing too round, nothing too sharp. He fell through her sight into the easy, curved play of light on lines and the spectrum of brown out of which she built everything she knew about how, what for, and why to look at people. All the possible ways of being came inevitably from these basic shapes and shades in faces. When there was no human face like that around, those patterns appeared anyway. They turned to her out of trees, clouds, waves at the beach, the froth of a cappuccino. All that led to a static she wasn’t going near. She carried that space hidden inside. In that static, a kind of noiseless noise, drifted something she refused to know but knew was true: it’s the people you know, that you trust—leave love alone—that hurt you the worst. People you don’t know or trust can kill you, or maim you; but that’s it. The real injuries that leave you touched and staggering around hiding from yourself come down the hallway, they invite you to come along and you follow. Afterward, they hang there in the torn-open wound of your trust. The arrival of trust is subtle and dangerous, its perils are intimate, vertical, bottomless.
This young man’s eyes were deep without the masked howl that she usually saw in the faces of black men with deep-set eyes. Her father’s face flashed and went away. Every hair on this young man’s head and in his wispy goatee was in place. But he didn’t have the razor-coiffed precision of the cuff-linked men at work who stalked about the Loop like perfection itself. She’d see these professional men at lunch meetings; she knew their smell. They walked like they were fresh from the weight room and flashed corporate AmEx cards like they were swords in a divine battle scene in some museum painting. The young man—truth be told he was a boy in her mind—struck her with a grace, an elegance in his stride and the perfect break of his jeans over tooth-white sneakers. For a flash, she replayed her long exile from Chicago in her brain and, against that second’s blur, she gave herself to this young stranger. She kept her eyes twenty miles out over the lake and him in her peripheral vision. It was an old technique, let the body ache but refuse to feel it. Wonder your way around the pressure of the moment. Let it sing.
This kind of openness felt very new to her. It had been a long time.
A pastel of music melted in her body. It did a slow, counterclockwise lap in her brain passing by her right ear: I’ve got things on my mind. It disappeared until it reappeared in her left ear and she heard, I’m not too busy for you. She knew the song, knew its moves. She loved the song so she turned it off before Kenny Lattimore had his chance to croon her favorite line, If you’re feeling a-lone.… She could trace the gentleness of that line as it moved through her body like a long swallow of hot chocolate at the bus stop in the winter. The kind of warmth that you feel when you swallow, the kind that makes it seem like anything you look at will melt. The song laid the words perfectly along the lines and shades in the faces she saw pass her on the street. With lines like this, she could abstract her way past the masks men wore in public and even past the others she’d found stuck to their faces in private. “Male privacy!” she thought. “It’s up there with companion for life and soulmate in the bait-and-switch way of the world.”
She mourned the secret war black men fought, must fight anyway, in places far away from her, quite possibly far away from everyone, with those gentle lines and the fantastic beauty in those shades of brown they carry through life. “Let’s not ee-ven talk about eyelashes.” Black men’s beauty and the near-cosmic arrays of violence leveled against it. She began to smile, then felt a rush of tears pressing into her eyes and a lump in her throat. Then she put it all away: “Brain broom, must pan, thought box.” She had a hundred tricks like this.
To hasten away the romance, she considered the casualties of this gentleness. This was no trick. She felt her scalp sweat and her eyes harden. The casualties of that gentleness were women. Every time. “And it ain’t ee-ven gentle,” she thought. She remembered something Shame had said to her that first night, out in front of Renée’s party on the Fourth of July. They could hear the music slow down, and the dusty sound rose like floodwater in the basement. She was halfway into praising Jesus that she’d come up for air and was outside when the music got low. It was an old song. She knew because the words were overpronounced in a way that made her feel eighteen years old. Dream about you ev-er-y night-tah, every day-ah: a city soul singer with a country preacher’s punctuation.
“Smoke City,” Shame said. “Remember them? I knew this singer, ain’t seen him in years and years, but that’s a whole ’nother story.” Then he said,
–I love music that starts with how life is and then opens up like this and makes life seem like how it has to be and at the same time makes it all sound like you know it can’t never be.
He concluded the thought scowling at the ground:
–All at once.
And she, trying to follow the logic as she repeated what he’d said to herself:
–I’ll have to think about that.
–Naw, just listen is all. Otherwise, well, never mind the otherwise.
And she thought to herself, “Who the hell is this?” and to disguise the thought, she asked the singer’s name.
–Never mind, that’s part of the otherwise.
As he said this, Shame’s eyes rose up. He’d been staring at the ground. When he looked to the sky his eyes passed over her face. Ndiya felt a strong pull, or was it a push? As their eyes passed each other, she thought she heard a voice in her ear say, “Careful with that.” She must have said it to herself out loud because Shame asked,
–Careful with what?
–Oh, never mind.
–Oh, right, “never mind,” that’s part of the “otherwise.”
But Ndiya thought, just then, that party didn’t count as a meeting or a date. So, she was under no obligation to deal with it.
■
Despite being soaked and conspicuous, Ndiya tried to maintain her equilibrium in this unfamiliar street. She thought, “Weather and the blank blue behind it,” and blurred her ears from the inside. The song was no more and the young man was greeting another young man and a woman who’d each been shifting their weight from one foot to the other at the corner since she’d passed by them on her way. One eyebrow up, she felt her top lip fold inside her mouth, her teeth scraped across it twice before it popped back cool in the air. OK, here goes.
Date number two. Late July? A Friday? The twenty-third? She’d been invited to a birthday party for Maurice from the firm. Maurice Thomas, Esq. Morehouse, Phi Beta Sigma, Northwestern Law, office 2402. She knew him mostly from editing his briefs. Immediately after they’d been introduced, she named him “That Maurice.” She couldn’t have been back in Chicago for more than six weeks. She was new at the job. Afraid to unpack most of the boxes in her provisional, no-lease townhouse sublet. She had regular urges to tape up the few she had opened, call the movers, and spend half her savings on a one-way move to a brand-new nowhere in the big old ABP, her personalized acronym for USA.
Her job was to keep records in the firm, sit in on depositions, prepare forms, motions. The computer did the formatting and the abstract, opaque legalese the lawyers used came naturally to her. “Naturally” meant it was a skill she’d practiced unconsciously in order to