“And you get to feel like everybody’s fairy godmother, handing out favors to black folk.”
“What’s wrong with that? So long as I use my fairy powers for good.”
“Just don’t let it get to your head, is all. God gives us all kind of ways to make others feel small.”
“Say.” I set down my drink. “That didn’t bother you, back there. Did it?”
“Of course it bothered me. Like the man said, I don’t want to be a member of any club that won’t have me. I did it for the publicity, is all. And now I like it better right here among my own kind, where I know folks can appreciate me.”
“You think I’m stuck on myself, don’t you?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know anything about you, Miss Macallister, except you’re the kind of woman who likes to have her own way.”
“Most men like to have their own way, and nobody faults them for it.”
Barbara laughs and says that’s true, sure enough, if by most men you meant all men, which is why she stays away from them generally. Speak of the devil. The orchestra then starts filing back to their instruments. Each man—they’re all men, of course—holds a drink in one hand, full enough to make you guess it isn’t his first. I jingle my ice and consider them as they tune and riff.
Barbara leans over. “Something on your mind? Besides that.”
What I mean to say is Nothing. What comes out is My sister.
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” she says.
“I think she’s in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble? Man trouble? Baby trouble?”
“Both, I guess, but those are just the root cause of her main trouble. I don’t know for sure, though. I haven’t seen her in twelve years.”
“Twelve years!” Barbara chokes on her gin. “What kind of idiot child you be, Miss Macallister?”
“Now, that’s not fair. Maybe my sister’s the idiot.”
Barbara shakes her head. “Don’t matter. Blood is the only thing that counts in this world, boss lady. Don’t you know that? I don’t care what you done or what she done, you both need your heads knocked together. Ain’t nobody in the world understands you like your sister. Ain’t nobody ever will.”
At that point, the orchestra swings into action, thank God, swallowing up all the other noise in the room. I don’t want to continue that conversation and wish most fervently that I hadn’t started it to begin with.
The trouble is, you can drown out a conversation like that and even stop it entirely, but you can’t forget it. The words keep beating inside your head to the illicit syncopation of the music outside, until you’re half convinced you might go crazy with them.
A spring chicken I am no longer, and by two o’clock in the morning my jaw splits wide open with yawning. Barbara tells me to hand over the five bucks, and I actually ask her What five bucks?, because I’ve lost count of the lime rickeys I’ve drunk to drown out the syncopation of Barbara’s wise advice.
Our bet, she says, and Oh right, I answer.
I pay her the five bucks and pay the bill, too. Prepare to rise, and that’s when Barbara puts her hand on my elbow.
“I’m guessing he’s yours?” she says, nodding to a man sitting alone at a table in the corner.
I follow her gaze and squint. Big, wide-shouldered man, face too shadowed to properly see. But two things are perfectly clear, even to my addled eyes. Number one, he’s a white man, as fair-haired and pink-skinned as they come. And number two, he’s watching me.
“Hell’s bells,” I mutter.
Barbara offers to find me a ride home, call me a trustworthy taxi or something, but I figure I’m not going to start being a coward at this particular moment. I march right up to him and ask if he’s ready to leave now.
“Certainly,” Sumner Fox says politely.
He pays his bill—I have the feeling he left a large tip—and takes my elbow like a gentleman. I don’t look back, just sail between the last few tables and out into the lobby and then the open air of West 125th Street. Fox signals to a taxi waiting by the curb, a half block away. I waste an entire moment thinking I’ve been very stupid indeed.
But there’s nothing underhanded about the way he helps me into the taxi and gives the driver my address before he settles on the other side of the back seat, acres of cloth between us. As I settle against the seat and watch the buildings skim by, I experience this feeling of levitation, as if we’re actually flying instead of driving, but the sober part of my brain—if one can be said to still exist—knows this is only an illusion. I anchor myself to the pocketbook in my lap, which happens to contain Iris’s missives, both of them, postcard and letter. I don’t know why I carry them around with me like that. Maybe it’s a talisman—maybe my subconscious is trying to figure out what I should do with them and considers it’s best to keep the objects on hand in case of need.