Blues Dancing Read online

  Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Blues Dancing

  A Novel

  For Greg

  Contents

  One

  This night air was filled with low-hanging clouds. The kind…

  Two

  Verdi eased into the bedroom and listened for Rowe’s snoring,…

  Three

  Johnson punched the dashboard in the rented maroon Grand Am…

  Four

  Kitt creamed her fingers for the new back she was…

  Five

  Already Verdi could feel the levity inside of her that…

  Six

  Rowe and his estranged wife, Penda, were at it again…

  Seven

  Johnson got to Sage’s party first. Before Posie who had…

  Eight

  There was space between them. This pair of lovers who’d…

  Nine

  Kitt and Posie communicated across the dining-room table as they…

  Ten

  Verdi called Kitt the first chance she got the day…

  Eleven

  Verdi’s chest closed at the thought of sharing a meal…

  Twelve

  Verdi ended up taking the whole day off. Called her…

  Thirteen

  Johnson held Verdi for more than a little while. Held…

  Fourteen

  This time Verdi told Rowe that she’d gone to Kitt’s.

  Fifteen

  Verdi went on like that for the next month. Vacillating…

  Sixteen

  This Friday evening in May and Rowe was headed home…

  Seventeen

  Posie would live at least through the night. They didn’t…

  Eighteen

  The maroon Grand Am was familiar to Johnson now as…

  Nineteen

  Hortense rushed into the hospital waiting room and the quiet…

  Twenty

  Rowe didn’t know for how long he’d even been standing…

  Twenty-One

  Verdi left Kitt and her mother keeping their vigil over…

  Twenty-Two

  The bedroom reverberated with Sage’s nighttime breaths and the air…

  Twenty-Three

  Sage woke all at once with the sensation that a…

  Twenty-Four

  Verdi slept like a lamb with Sage curled up against…

  About the Author

  Praise

  Books by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  This night air was filled with low-hanging clouds. The kind that softened everything they covered with a smoky blue haze that felt like a dream. Like this neighborhood way west of the river that had declined over the years from a place of majestic three-storied rows to intermittent blocks of good and bad and devastated; like the too-young boys in too-loose clothes hanging on these corners doing deals that would make the devil beam; even memories of a time when a girl becoming a woman had thrown away her promise as if it were a tattered rag, and descended into a drain lined with syringes, bent spoons, and long-sleeved shirts dotted with her innocent, middle-class southern blood. It all took on a floaty, shimmering effect inside these clouds and became appealing in a way that was both sultry and safe. Especially through the back window of this yellow cab. Especially to Verdi as she gave in to the softening powers of the fog.

  She nestled against the cracked leatherette seat as the air swayed in and out through the window. Two-faced March air, chilly yet impatient for spring, so it had a filmy warmth to it, she picked it apart for the warmth rather than close the window, siphoned through the myriad aromas trapped and kept close by the low-slung clouds as the cab rolled past the gone-to-bed homes and businesses of West Philly: someone had liver and onions for dinner here, turnips there; she could smell chicken grease from the take-out wings place on Fifty-second Street; curry from the Indian restaurant as they got closer to the University City section where Verdi lived with her life mate, Rowe; nutmeg, thyme, from the House of Spices. And there it was. Butter. No mistaking it, the smooth milky aroma concentrated under this fog. It went straight to her head, swooned her because her aunt Posie was superstitious about things like that, said that a whiff of collards on a Wednesday means you’re getting ready to get paid, or the scent of lemons when it’s snowing means somebody close is pregnant, the hint of fish frying on a Thursday means you’re having overnight guests for the weekend, and the smell of butter on a foggy night means you’re getting ready to fall in love.

  “You smell that?” she said excitedly to the back of the cabdriver’s head.

  “I don’t smell nothzing, my cab clean, lady.”

  She yelled at him to stop then and she rarely yelled at people like cabdrivers, elevator operators, the ones who vacuumed the carpet at the special-needs school where she was principal. Figured she’d be working thus if Rowe’s large hands hadn’t rushed in and broken her fall when she’d tumbled from her heightened station in life. Told the cabdriver to stop right now, let her out, she needed to get out.

  “You sure, lady? Here? That lady who tip me said I wait till you in your door.”

  “She worry too much, I’ll be fine,” Verdi said, talking about Kitt, her close first cousin, her aunt Posie’s daughter with whom she’d spent the evening, who’d walked outside with Verdi and stuck her head in the cab as it was about to pull off.

  “You call me if that arrogant pompous professor you shacked up with gives you any shit about staying out so late,” Kitt had said.

  She’d waved Kitt away like she was trying to do to the cabdriver now. But he just sat there reluctant to leave her out here like this. She didn’t know what it was about herself that made people want to watch over her, thought maybe it was her eyes with their downward slant, or how she wore her hair relaxed bone straight and cut close the way Rowe liked it, or her thinness, he liked her thin too though she preferred herself when she’d had a curve to her hips.

  She leaned into the cab window, whispered into the driver’s face, “My aunt says if you smell butter on a foggy night you’re getting ready to fall in love.” She made her eyes go big, lowered her voice even more the way her aunt would do. “And if you’re walking alone when you smell it—”

  “Yeah? Yeah? What happen?”

  Verdi didn’t know the rest, when her aunt got to this part her face would glaze over in an oily sheen, she’d start fanning herself and shaking her head. Lord have mercy is all her aunt could say after that. “It’s just better that’s all,” she said to the cabdriver as she turned and started walking toward home.

  She took measured steps though she knew she should be rushing if she were going to stick to the story she’d fed Rowe earlier. She hated that she’d lied, such a harmless thing too, spending the evening at Kitt’s house. But Rowe despised her cousin so. Went on and on about her lack of degrees and couth whenever Verdi let on about her visits there. So rather than hear him rant about her first cousin with whom she felt closer than a sister, Verdi told him that she was going in town to get her nails done, to get chocolate-covered-coconut eggs for the baskets she was doing for the younger ones at her school. Not Godiva but better than the Acme brand; ran around after work then to at least get the eggs, then begged Kitt for a manicure after they’d pushed back from another one of Kitt’s culinary masterpieces.

  This air was too creamy to rush through anyhow as it settled on her forehead now, stroked her, slowed her steps even more. She needed to walk, not for the sensation of the buttery aroma swimming around in her head, nor for falling in love, she’d been in love once, loved Rowe most of the time now. Right now she walked because, because why? she asked herself. Because. She just wasn’t ready to go h
ome yet.

  And already she was close to home on this quiet street of ornate wood-and-stained-glass doors where the houses were big and old on the outside, newly restored on the inside with center-island kitchens and updated wiring to accommodate home offices and theaters and sophisticated security systems because crime had increased sharply in the 1990s in this once cushy part of Philadelphia. Rowe wanted to move, wanted to get more upscale and live in town, but so far Verdi had resisted, she preferred living on the fringes where the cluster of blocks like hers inhabited by university bigwigs and offspring of original old-money Philadelphians almost met the not-so-affluent blocks, the war zones, Rowe called them. How livid he would be if he knew that she was walking alone out here now as if she were taking a Sunday stroll through Rittenhouse Square.

  The air was getting thicker the closer to home she got, making like a corset around her, binding, still soft though, enticing. She didn’t blame Rowe for being the way he was, reasoned that he needed to be so protective for himself as well as her, he truly believed that without him she’d fall again. So she inched along now, allowing the air to do to her what Rowe usually did: feel so good, even as it bound her up.

  She stopped at the corner, waited for the light to turn green though the street was absent traffic. She was the newly appointed principal at a private school for special learners and was careful about things like crossing the street, staying between the lines, making sure that the temperature on the hot water heater was set to below eighty-five, the kinds of things to keep her students safe. Especially the ones like Sage, Kitt’s beautiful seven-year-old who’d yet to speak her first word, whose mutism was a puzzle to the medical community because speech was controlled by such a small part of the brain and damage there rarely existed in a vacuum. Except that although Sage suffered some developmental delays, she’d far surpassed even the most optimistic prognosis. Her slice of sunshine, Verdi called her. Was seeing Sage’s face all over again as she’d tickled her chin earlier today and unpinned a note from Sage’s pearl-buttoned sweater sent by Kitt, who often communicated with Verdi that way. Was just about to see her cousin’s loopy handwriting again too, sprawled across the red construction-papered note, the contents of which had tilted Verdi off her center, but right then she heard a rush of tires, felt a set of headlights drench her back.

  She kept walking, balled her hands tightly around her briefcase, the chocolate eggs; could fling one or the other and then run if she had to. She wasn’t afraid though, in these kinds of situations that had the potential to be life or death, she was rarely afraid, exasperating to people who cared about her, like Kitt, like Rowe.

  “Hey, hey,” the driver of the car called and she was both relieved and disappointed that it was the cabbie’s voice. “I feel too guilty. Wolf packs hang around here. I ride next to you till you get to your house. Maybe I smell butter too, you and me, we fall in love.”

  Cute. She didn’t laugh though, didn’t try to dissuade him either. Let him roll along with her and at least enjoyed the play of his headlights against the three-storied twins and singles that looked like castles with their gabled tops poking through the tops of the blue-gray clouds. And now the cabdriver was whistling an off-key, offbeat “Strangers in the Night,” and Verdi had the thought that what if he were really a serial killer who did his victims in in the most heinous ways? Her breath quickened at the notion. That was frightening to her in the way that encountering maybe some gangbangers was not, evil cloaked under the guise of doing good. She didn’t dwell on it though, didn’t want to get herself all riled up, and now she was in front of her house anyway. She threw her hand to tell the cabdriver she was home, listened to the remnants of his tune hanging as the cab drifted on through the fog.

  She just stood there then. Looking up at her own ornate door, and all those steps she had to climb as if they led to some tower where Rapunzel was kept. Tried to push through the air that had gone from cream to molasses, strapping. Couldn’t. It’s almost midnight, she told herself, what are you doing, get your ass on in the house, even as she stopped, put down her briefcase, the chocolate-covered-coconut eggs, then sat down herself—ordinances against step sitting where Rowe wanted to move. She folded her hands in her lap, focused on the castle across the street, comfortable as the butter-tinged air stroked her forehead, told her to go ahead and think about him. No harm in just thinking.

  “He’s back,” Kitt had whispered in the note Verdi unpinned this afternoon from Sage’s pearl-buttoned sweater, “Johnson’s back in Philly, girl.” And the blood rushed from Verdi’s head and bombarded her heart at the thought of his return, her long-ago love who’d helped her navigate the wiles of city campus life more than twenty years ago when she was freshly here with her downward-slanted eyes that he called enticing, and the southern smile that he said sweetened all that was bitter about his life; the one who introduced her to Soul Train dances and encouraged her to pick her pressed hair out into an Afro and gave her patient instruction on the art of holding her liquor. The one who’d gotten all inside of her head, between her legs, transformed her perspective. She cultivated in him an appreciation for gospel music, he took her to see Santana; she strung him out on caffeine, he introduced her to Boone’s Farm Apple wine; she insisted he dine with a napkin in his lap, he taught her to roll a joint. And before things went lumpy between them like vomit from too much drink, he was saying yes ma’am to his elders and she could say fuck you without a drawl.

  She saw a light jump on in the third floor of the house across the street. Hoped they were just going to the bathroom, hoped they wouldn’t look out the window, see her, then call Rowe, tell him Verdi was weirding out sitting on the steps alone this time of night, only March after all, chilly out. She didn’t know why Johnson’s presence here was affecting her like this. He’d been back before; she’d refused to see him each time even though Kitt had begged her, prodded her, reminded her that in all these years Rowe hadn’t even married her so what was the harm, an hour, an afternoon with a former beau. But Verdi knew that she wasn’t strong enough to see Johnson and resist him, a host of angels wasn’t that strong. Plus Kitt hadn’t been privy to the darkest scenes in Johnson and Verdi’s togetherness when they’d cha-chaed with the devil. Didn’t know the particulars of how he’d sat next to Verdi on the beanbag pillow in the center of her dorm-room floor, cooed cooed his love in soothing bursts of hot breath against her face, tied her arm above her elbow, taught her how to ball her fist, how to find her vein, hit it, plunge it, how to nod off into the milky blue. Miraculously Verdi had kept the shades drawn on that descent into hell thanks to Rowe and to her family’s entrenched denial that wouldn’t allow them fathoming such a thing about their Verdi; they’d instead gobbled up excuses about the stresses of school, or a bad case of mono, impacted wisdom teeth, even dehydration, sleep deprivation, rather than accept the truth of how Verdi had spent her junior year.

  So Verdi refused to see Johnson again. Even though Kitt had let Verdi go through three entire courses of her meal and hadn’t mentioned the note she’d pinned to Sage’s sweater and it was only as they languished over a dessert of Jell-O and angel food cake that Verdi couldn’t stand it anymore and said, okay, cousin, stop being coy, spill it, the note, you know you want to push me straight into his arms.

  And Kitt sighed and twisted her locks and said that nothing would make her happier than seeing Johnson and Verdi together again, but that she would respect Verdi’s feelings on the subject that she assumed hadn’t changed, had they?

  And Verdi forced out an emphatic no, no, she wouldn’t see him this time either and Kitt said that it was settled then, no pressure from her, she promised. And Verdi told herself that it was settled too, even now, sitting on her front steps feeling the chill in the concrete work its way through her trench coat.

  Except that there was something different about this time, maybe because when she’d read Kitt’s note she’d just ended a harrowing meeting with her staff that had her questioning her ability to be a l
eader, and thoughts of Johnson right then were like a salve rubbing her in the places where she’d just felt so attacked. No. More likely it was that his visits were getting fewer, more spaced out—it had been almost eight years since the last time he was here, she was sure because Kitt had just birthed Sage, was in the hospital, weak with severe post-partum depression, and Johnson had flown in to see Kitt. What if he waited ten more years before he came again, or twenty. She felt a brick drop in her stomach at the thought, she’d be sixty in twenty more years. She stopped herself. Felt silly, felt guilty too because once she started with her obsessive counting she’d have to factor in Rowe’s being twenty years her senior, meant Rowe could be dead the next time Johnson came back, felt as if she were betraying Rowe, he’d been so good to her. Really. Grabbed her hand and held on tight when she was slipping into hell.

  She should go in the house now, she told herself as she watched the room in the third floor window across the street return to black. She swallowed a final gulp of the butter in the air, pushed through the fog to get up the steps even as she sensed Johnson’s presence back in town with a mix of titillation and dread the way an abandoned lover feels unforgotten footsteps in the middle of the night getting closer and closer to the bedroom door.

  Two

  Verdi eased into the bedroom and listened for Rowe’s snoring, an enormous incongruity about Rowe was his snoring, as if he’d let loose at night in ways that he never did during the day; his snoring had a raucous quality that should bellow from a drunk sailor, or a bad-boy rapper, not this highly respected professor of history at the university with his polite unobtrusive features, and proper academic speech patterns, and mannered pretensions that lent a deliberateness to everything he did, even when he blinked it was as if he had first given the matter careful consideration. But right now, as Verdi pushed the door all the way to open, Rowe wasn’t belting out those inharmonious sleeping breaths even though he believed in early to bed, early to rise and it was just about midnight.