Getting to the Good Part Read online

  I was silent, still peering out of the window.

  “I can see you from here,” he remarked with quiet confidence. “I’m coming up, but I want to hear you say you want me to come first.”

  I scrunched my face up in response to his audacious statement.

  “What makes you think that I want you to come up?” I demanded. “I didn’t even ask you to come by!”

  “You willed me here,” he answered. “You’re running from me, but you want me to follow.”

  Damn. That was a trip thing for him to say.

  It was a trip because, as jacked up as it sounded, I think it was true.

  “So go on,” Helmut whispered. “Say it. Do you want me to come upstairs?”

  I stood there at the window, silent, nervously shifting my weight from foot to foot.

  “Reesy, do you want me to come up? Speak now, or Jarrod and I are pulling away.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  I saw the headlights flash on brightly, lighting up the street ahead.

  “All right,” he whispered. “I’m leaving. Go ahead, Jarrod.”

  The car began to pull away from the curb.

  “No!!” I blurted in a quick, small voice.

  “Don’t leave? You want me to stay?”

  I was quiet.

  “Helloooo?” he teased in that quirky brogue.

  “Yes,” I murmured. I hesitated again, studying the shimmering diamond bracelet on my arm. “I want you to come back.”

  I clicked the phone off before he could say anything more.

  Before I could change my mind.

  I saw the car back up to the curb and the lights flick off.

  The door opened and Helmut stepped out. From where I was, I could see that he held a bottle in his right hand.

  He looked up toward the window. I backed away, my heart racing at what I was about to do.

  I thought about Dandre with his sweet, caring brown face, and something inside me went soft.

  Just as abruptly, I pushed the thought away.

  I bent my head down, then slung my braids back, smoothed down my big T-shirt, and walked to the front door.

  I clicked the lock and waited with the door cracked so I could listen out for the elevator and hustle him inside as quickly as I could.

  I peeked out into the hallway, looking for my neighbors.

  The last thing I needed was for them to see me let a white man into my place in the middle of the night.

  I was lying in bed, my body entangled limply around Helmut’s.

  We had polished off a massive bottle of Dom, and bounced around that apartment and bedroom like a couple of wild hyenas.

  For me, it was the excitement of something taboo and forbidden.

  Verboten, as Helmut called it.

  (He’d actually used the word in reference to how whites usually considered blacks as sexual partners. He had been talking about why that very mystique had piqued his curiosity about the darker-skinned versions of the opposite sex.

  Never once did it occur to Helmut that verboten was exactly what I considered him.)

  I was fucked out and limp, knee-deep in a dream about me and Dandre sitting on a beach, the foamy water lapping playfully over our feet.

  His arm was around my waist, and I was happily telling him about what I’d just done with Helmut.

  In my dream, Dandre was laughing.

  Laughing like he was my best girlfriend. Laughing like I could tell him anything, good or bad, and he’d still be right there, by the water’s edge, sitting peacefully with his arm around my waist.

  The roar of the ocean was our soundtrack, and it played on in a melody that was, at once, savage and soothing.

  I felt Helmut shift around in the bed, but I was too deep into my slumber to be consciously aware. I rolled away from him, over to the other side. I balled up tighter and pulled the covers over my head.

  I could heard Dandre speaking in my dream so clearly.

  “So you actually fucked him?” he asked with a grin.

  “Yeah!!” I exclaimed, seeing myself with crystal clarity as well. “Can you believe it? I don’t know what possessed me to do it! I think it was that final frontier thing. Something that I never thought I’d ever do in my life, so it became the most obvious thing for me to do in my life. Does that make any sense?”

  We both laughed at that. The salty water lapped across our toes.

  “I feel ya, baby,” Dandre chuckled, “witcha silly azz. I still love you, though.”

  I glanced over at his brown face, shining under the summer sun.

  “Do you love me?” I questioned.

  “I love you like no other. Remember, you’re up in my spot. I ain’t never brought nobody here.”

  Happy, I leaned my head against his shoulder and we stared out into the sea.

  The roar of the ocean played on in my head, as he and I stared at the horizon and watched the ships and seagulls pass us by.

  The roar of the ocean grew stronger, and, after a while, it began to drown out even the caw-caw-cawing of the seagulls overhead. We couldn’t hear the murmur of the boat engines for the roaring of that sea.

  We sat there like that, close together, trying to revel in the stillness. However, we were both rapidly growing annoyed at the rising frenzy of the ocean roar.

  In my dream, I closed my eyes, trying to focus on just being. In the dream, I chanted a mantra.

  Nam myoho renge kyo… nam myoho renge kyo… nam myoho renge. . .

  … DAMN!!!

  All right, now. That roaring ocean was getting quite outta hand. A sistah couldn’t even meditate for the distraction it became.

  The sound filled my ears with such chaos, growing higher and more erratic, that it forced my eyes open. I rolled over in the bed, groggy, barely functioning, and felt around for Helmut.

  His spot was cold.

  I could hear the noise in the living room, muted, but still roaring. The bedroom door was closed. My eyes were as weak as a newborn’s. I managed to struggle up and sit on the side of the bed.

  I felt like I had been asleep for a thousand years. My eyes were so cruddy, they were practically stuck together.

  In fact, for all intents and purposes, I was still asleep. I had been sleeping so hard, it would take me at least twenty or thirty minutes, and a couple of cups of black, black coffee, to wake the hell up.

  I pushed up from the bed and made my way awkwardly to the bedroom door. My eyes were so sensitive, they were barely open at all.

  I groped for the doorknob and pulled the bedroom door open.

  The blinding light made me squench up my eyes even tighter, and, in a stupor, I stumbled into the living room.

  “Helmut?” I whispered, groping around for something concrete, like the back of the couch or a chair. “Helmut!!”

  Whatever it was that had been roaring came to absolute silence when I walked naked into the room.

  “Brrrrrrrr!” I shuddered. “It’s cold in here! Is the door open?”

  My teeth were chattering. I wrapped my arms around my torso.

  “Yes, it is,” an angry voice declared. “Maybe if you kept your ass covered, you no-good trick, you wouldn’t have a problem, now would you?!”

  My heart stopped on a dime.

  I’d know that voice anywhere in the world.

  It was roaring all right, but it definitely wasn’t the ocean.

  That voice belonged to Dandre. Oh snap!!! How’d he get into the building?! That buzzer system, apparently, wasn’t good for shit.

  “What did you just call her?” Helmut asked.

  “If I was you,” Dandre snapped, “I’d shut the fuck up, white boy. Just watch your mouth. You’re a breath away from a beat-down as it is.”

  Not surprisingly, Helmut was quiet.

  I really couldn’t make out either of them, because my eyes were much too weak from the champagne, the deep sleep, and the torturously bright light in the living room.

  And there I was, as naked as
Cooter Brown, standing right in front of Dandre. I couldn’t go away. That would be an admission of shame and that I had done something wrong.

  No. I had to take this like a woman.

  I had to play this one out the way that it was going. Just stand there like I was in my own house, which I was, and act like I could be there naked with another man if I wanted to.

  Which I could.

  It was nobody’s business but mine.

  Dandre didn’t have no damn papers on me.

  Well… this was the moment I’d been waiting for. I had finally humiliated Dandre the way that he’d humiliated me.

  In front of somebody white, just like he’d done to me.

  Made him look like a fool.

  Just like he’d done to me.

  I could hear him over there breathing like a loosed bull, hurt and livid.

  “I hate you for this, Reesy,” he hissed in a deep, bitter voice. “This shit was uncalled for. You coulda just been a woman and told me to back the fuck off!”

  I stood there, my arms folded tightly across my chest.

  Inside, I felt a twinge of success.

  So why didn’t any of it feel so good?

  What I was most surprised about was that he was being so calm and dignified about it. I expected him to just bust out and start whipping azz. If not mine, at least Helmut’s. And I definitely expected him to give me a reason to go off.

  So far, he hadn’t.

  “So you were trying to play me the whole time, huh?” he asked through gritted teeth. “All this time, all through everything, you were just playing me for a chump, right?”

  “Apparently so,” Helmut remarked sarcastically.

  “What the fuck did you just say?!” I heard Dandre shriek.

  “Do you have a hearing deficiency?” Helmut asked. “If Teresa wanted to be with you, you’d be the one in bed with her tonight, don’t you think? Instead of standing here screaming like an idiot!”

  I don’t know if Helmut was finished talking or not.

  Point is, he was finished talking, whether he wanted to be or not.

  A bone-crushing blow landed somewhere on his jaw. I couldn’t tell where, because I couldn’t see it. All I could make out from where I stood was that the blow was delivered from the black-hand side.

  And I heard an ugly popping noise that I can only guess must have been the place in Helmut’s face where bone met cartilage somewhere along the jaw.

  I heard Helmut stagger back a bit, slump to the floor, and quickly recover. He leaned on the back of one of the chairs and raised himself up.

  “Reesy!” he demanded. “Let’s call the police, right now! If this brute won’t leave, we’ll get him thrown out!”

  My eyes were clearing a little.

  I noticed that Helmut was totally naked.

  Goodness! He looked like a big block of Philly cream cheese standing next to Dandre’s brownness like that.

  “She ain’t got to throw me out,” Dandre snapped, his voice thick with hurt. “I’m leaving. And don’t worry about seeing me again, Miss Magic City. I thought you were different. Special. But I see I was wrong. Once a hoe, always a hoe.”

  Now, that hurt.

  Dandre knew damn well it did, too, because I’d confided to him once in bed that the only thing I hated about exotic dancing was the fact that people sometimes mistakenly thought I was a prostitute.

  He had assured me that he’d never believed such a thing about me. Told me that I had class.

  The lying muthafucka. I guess it took something like this to find out how he really felt.

  Fine. At least now I knew up front where I stood in his mind.

  “Get the fuck out my house!!” I snarled.

  I walked over to a bowl where I kept my keys. I opened my eyes as wide as I could and tried to make out the ones that went to the Boxster and his brownstone. I pried them off my keyring and threw them at him.

  Dandre stepped slickly out of their way.

  “Keep the car,” he said coldly. “You earned that shit. The sex was worth it, if nothing else. And I’m changing the locks at my crib and reconfiguring the alarm system, so I don’t need the house key, either.”

  He reached for the doorknob. I thought the door had been open, but it was only a little cracked. That was how the draft had gotten in.

  “I’m audi, y’all,” he said evenly. “But tell me this, white boy. What’d you give her for the sex? Clothes? Money? Jewelry? ‘Cause if I was you, I wouldn’t get too attached to her. She’s a trick-ass bitch if there ever was one.”

  He snatched the door open and, without ceremony, politely walked away.

  Helmut just stood there, looking a whole lot like I felt.

  Stupid.

  Dandre had flipped this whole thing around on me. While I was biding my time, to make him flail around in humiliation, he had walked away dignified.

  I, however, was standing there naked, cold, and embarrassed once again.

  Wondering why the hell I was smarting so much about the fact that Dandre had reduced me to a whore.

  Helmut was standing there, rubbing his jaw.

  “I think it might be broken,” he murmured. “Who was that man to you?”

  My eyes were blurry with tears. I felt like Dandre had just wiped his ass with my face.

  I wanted to be by myself. The sound and thought of Helmut in the room made me want to vomit with disgust.

  “I need for you to go,” I announced.

  “What?! You don’t mean that, darling. You’re just upset.”

  “Get out, Helmut,” I repeated calmly, tears beginning to splash down my cheek. “Just get the fuck out now, before I call somebody to make you go.”

  “That wouldn’t be a good idea, Teresa,” he said just as quietly. “You forget who I am and what I can do.”

  “I don’t give a damn who you are!!” I hissed. “Just get your shit and go!!!”

  I ran into the bedroom and grabbed up his clothes in my arms. They were in a heap beside the bed. He had stepped out of them so fast earlier, they’d practically come off in one continuous motion, like the skin off a snake.

  I flung them at him.

  “Now get out!!!” I screamed.

  “You’re going to regret this, Teresa,” Helmut warned. “You forget, I’m a starmaker and a starbreaker. You either do it my way, or there is no way, do you understand?”

  I walked toward the phone. Tears were now streaking down my face, and my heart felt like it was being crushed to smithereens.

  I put my hand on the receiver.

  “Go now,” I threatened, “or I call the police.”

  “What are you going to tell them?” he laughed. “That we just had a great night of wild, passionate sex, and now you want me to get out?”

  “I’ll make up something if you don’t go,” I said in the most serious tone I could muster. “I am not afraid to lie.”

  Helmut began to step into his clothes quickly, realizing, I think, that I was not about to play. He didn’t bother to tuck the shirt inside his pants, and he casually threw his jacket over his shoulder.

  “This is the dumbest thing you’ve ever done,” he remarked.

  I stood there, my hand still on the phone.

  “I’ve done a whole lot dumber than this,” I commented. “So ain’t nuthin’ you can say to scare me. All you can do is just raise the hell up out of my home. Now.”

  Helmut walked out of the door, pulling it tightly closed behind him.

  I expected him, too, to leave with more sound and fury than he did. Instead, his quiet, quick departure made me feel all the more stupid standing there naked and alone in the middle of my living room.

  I walked over to the couch and flopped down. I had a pink and green afghan that Grandma Tyler had made for me years ago. I wrapped it around me tightly, and let the tears flow freely down my cheeks.

  I sat there like that, hurting, heavy, hollow on the inside, wondering how all my shit had suddenly backfired on me, all in on
e abrupt night.

  The telephone rang.

  I jumped at it. Maybe it was Dandre.

  Because, even though he had called me a hoe, a bitch, and a trick (and, truth be known, I couldn’t really be mad at him for doing so), I still wanted to hear from him. His dismissing me that way had hurt more than anything.

  I didn’t want to believe that he really thought I was just some cheap hoe. He’d actually had me believing for a while that perhaps, just perhaps, he was really beginning to fall in love with me.

  “Hello?!” I answered in a frantic tone.

  “Reesy,” Helmut began, “if I were you, I’d think about this. You have until tomorrow at 9 A.M. to let me know. Otherwise, you’re not going to be a very popular person with your fellow castmates.”

  “Let you know what?!” I demanded. “What does what happened here tonight have to do with the show?”

  “It has everything to do with the show,” he replied in that now-diabolical accent of his. “If you and I stop seeing each other, and if I can no longer have access to you for sex, there is no more Black Barry’s Pie. Not for Broadway, anyway. Gordon and his partner will just have to find another backer to take them there.”

  I sat there on the phone, seething, listening to him talk.

  “So many hopes would be dashed. Gordon’s. Yours. Your good friend Julian. He was most excited, I believe.”

  “You can’t make me sleep with you,” I snapped. “That’s blackmail.”

  “Is it?” he asked derisively. “You know, perhaps it is. But I wonder how far your career would get if anyone at the Times or the Village Voice ever found out about that lovely past of yours. What’s the name of that place? The Magic City, I think it was?”

  My skin was beginning to flush.

  “And, good Lord, the One Trick Pony in Times Square sounds like a particularly sordid place! I’d hate to have that leak into the paper and be the reason Gustav and I have to back out of supporting the production. After all, we have our reputations to protect.”

  I could barely breathe.

  “How do you know about those clubs?” I whispered.

  “Because I have investigators who work for me, Teresa,” Helmut chuckled. “Never underestimate a man who knows what he wants. He covers all his bases, and makes sure all the exits are sealed.”

  I couldn’t even speak anymore. I just sat there, clutching the phone, feeling everything falling down all around me.