Gathering Clouds

  We didn’t start dating immediately. After our day on the beach, we returned to the college in the evening. Those girls who saw me get out of a car with Lynette didn’t think much of it. I had gone places with her and her boyfriend before, and Larry was not that obvious to them. He remained in the station wagon. We said good-bye and I told him much I had enjoyed the day with him, but he didn’t ask me if I wanted to do anything else with him. He simply said he was pleasantly surprised at how much he enjoyed the day as well.

  When I closed the car door, I felt a deep sense of disappointment. I imagined that he didn’t enjoy himself with me as much as he had claimed. I also remember thinking, Oh, well, perhaps this is best. After all, how could I bring him home to Mother?

  I was so quiet that Lynette thought I had not had a good time.

  “Don’t be upset, Megan. From what Marcus tells me,” she said, “Larry isn’t all that comfortable around girls of his own color, much less rich, pretty white girls. He becomes a real turtle.”

  “No, he wasn’t like that at all!” I exclaimed, perhaps with more enthusiasm than I had intended. Lynette’s eyes widened and she smile.

  “Oh, really. What was he like?”

  “He was . . . real,” I said. “Sincere, and he recited some of his poems, too.”

  “He did that? What did you do, girl, because whatever it was, Marcus is going to want the copyright or the pattern so he could register it.”

  I shook my head, skeptical of anything I had done to bring him out of his usual shell.

  “Maybe he was just trying to avoid being bored. Sometimes that’s the reason I do things that make other people think I like them and want to be with them.”

  She looked at me askance.

  “What, you think he didn’t want to be with you?”

  “I heard you on the phone and heard how hard it was for Marcus to get him to come along.”

  “Forget that. It wouldn’t have mattered who was with us. He’d be that way even if it was Venus herself.”

  “It’s all right. I had fun.”

  Uncharacteristically, I dove into my schoolwork the remainder of the week, and only when Marcus called Lynette or she talked about something they were going to do together did I stop to think about Larry. Actually, I thought about him a great deal at night after we put out the lights and lowered our heads to our pillows. I saw his smile, heard his poems, felt his hand.

  What’s wrong with you, Megan Hudson? I asked myself. Why are you behaving like a teenager girl who’s having her first crush?

  Maybe it was because this was the first real crush I had, I thought.

  On Friday morning the phone rang in our room just after Lynette had left for her class. I had an extra hour before my first class began.

  It was Larry Ward.

  “Hi,” he said. “I was hoping to catch you before you went to your morning classes.”

  “How did you know when that would be?” I asked.

  He was silent a moment. It was obvious he had gotten my schedule from Marcus who had gotten it from Lynette. Sneaky Lynette, I thought, but fondly. She knew he was planning on calling me after all, but acted dumb all week.

  “I asked the dean,” he finally replied and I laughed. “Maybe you’ll think this is out of line,” he continued, “but there is a jazz concert and a poetry reading tonight at a club I frequent, and I was wondering if you would like to go along. It’s kind of different, but it’s not boring,” he added quickly. “There are some great characters there and the music –ˮ

  “It’s not out of my line,” I told him. Again he laughed. I heard how nervous he was. “Sure,” I said. “I’d like to go. Where is it?”

  He gave me the address.

  “I don’t have a car or I’d – ˮ

  “I do. Do you want me to pick you up?”

  “Um . . .”

  “It’s a simple yes or no,” I said and then added, “so forget maybe.”

  He laughed.

  “Sure. I’ll be finished at the library about eight tonight. I can meet you – ˮ

  “Outside the library them,” I said quickly, making it clear I didn’t expect him to go to some clandestine place where no one we knew would see him get into my car.

  “Okay,” he said. “Thanks. Oh,” he added.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t be late for class.”

  I laughed and hung up. Even I, when I looked at myself in the mirror, saw the radical change in my face. There was a brightness and an excitement I my eyes that had been dormant too long. I even went at my schoolwork and lectures with more enthusiasm. It was truly as if I had been injected with a shot of what the French call joie de vivre. The sun was brighter, the sky bluer, the breeze warmer and softer, and all the birds more melodic. I felt like a butterfly emerging and I longed to try my wings.

  Lynette kept coy. She asked me nothing and I teased her by not telling her a thing as well. When she saw me start to dress that night, I could see she was full of curiosity. Did I have another date with one of the fraternity boys or had I agreed to do something with Larry?

  “Where you going?” she finally asked.

  “Nowhere special.”

  “You don’t doll up like that for nowhere special, girl. I’ve been your roommate long enough to tell.”

  “Oh, really? Well if you must know, I’ve been asked to go to a jazz club.”

  “Jazz? You?”

  “I like all music.”

  “Suer, you know jazz. Name one jazz musician, one jazz singer. Go on,” she ordered, her hands on her hips.

  “I’m in the process of learning.”

  “A-huh. And who would the teach be?”

  “Someone named Larry Ward,” I said and she laughed. “Like you didn’t know.”

  “Me?”

  “You can fake them out on the basketball court, Lynette, but not on my court. Girl,” I added.

  She laughed and we hugged.

  “You sure you want to do this?” she asked turning serious.

  “That’s what scares me the most.”

  “What?”

  “That I am sure,” I said.

  She suddenly looked frightened for me.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be fine. And so will Larry,” I added before I walked out.

  He was waiting in the shadows in front of the library. My car took him by surprise.

  “Brand-new?”

  He stood there holding the opened door and looking in at me.

  “Yes,” I said. “Graduation present.”

  I saw the hesitation.

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not a snob,” I said and he smiled.

  “Yeah, well,” he said getting in, “you’re the richest non-snob I know.”

  The club we went to was really off the beaten college path. There were mostly black people there, but there were other whites and most everyone knew Larry. I found out he had read some of his poetry there and one of the musicians had put a poem of his to music. He was asked to do it again and I thought it was wonderful.

  “This is like stepping on another planet,” I told him. “I know what jazz is, of course, but I never listened to it like this.”

  “I’ve always been into it,” he said. “I play a little on the saxophone.”

  Again, he surprised me when he was asked to do just that before the evening ended. He looked like he was blowing every note just for me. The melody was lovely, sensuous. Listening to him and watching him, I felt as if we were already making love.

  Once again, I had a wonderful time. When we left, I didn’t want the night to end.

  “Do you live in the dorm?” I asked.

  “Dorm? No, that’s too expensive. I have a couple of rooms in the back of an elderly lady’s house. She was a good friend of my grandmother’s. I have my own entrance and a small kitchenette. Half the time she doesn’t even want the rent money. I have to leave it on her kitchen counter.”

  “I’d love to see it.”

  “Wh
at? C’mon,” he said. “It’s nothing. A few pieces of furniture, an old television that’s not even a color set. I sleep on a pullout.”

  “I don’t think I ever have.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Are you ashamed of where you’re living?”

  “I certainly am not. It’s clean and – ˮ

  “Then you’ll take me there,” I said. “Where do I turn?”

  “Do you always get what you want when you want it?” he asked.

  “Yes, why? Are you going to be the first one to stop me?”

  He smiled and shook his head.

  “I know when to step back,” he said. “A long time ago my grandmother taught me that a branch that doesn’t bend, breaks.”

  “Then she must have known I was coming,” I said.

  When he looked at me, his eyes were no longer full of laughter.

  They were full of love.

  After I parked, we walked through the shadows as if we were shadows ourselves, neither of us speaking, holding hands and listening to the pounding of our own hearts. The world around us had suddenly become that silent.

  The back of the house wasn’t much and the rooms were half the size of my closet at home, but I didn’t say anything. He put on a lamp and then another because there was no central ceiling fixture. I looked at his shelves of books. They were obviously his most precious possession. It looked like he spent all his money on books, in fact.

  “Looks like you eat and sleep books.”

  “If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader,” he told me as I studied the titles.

  He showed me the magazines that had published his poems.

  “You’re really good, Larry. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t read a poem, but I like yours very much. They’re serious but they’re not written so you have to decipher them.”

  He laughed.

  “Maybe they’re too simple.”

  “We spend too much time disguising our feelings as it is,” I said and he looked at me sharply.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Neither of us spoke. He stepped closer. I could feel his desire, but also his hesitation so I reached out and took his hand, bringing it to my breast.

  “Feel my heartbeat,” I said. “It’s got a mind of its own.

  He smiled, kept his hand on my breast, and then slowly brought his lips to mine.

  “Don’t tell me I’m the first white girl you’ve kissed like that,” I warned him.

  He laughed.

  “I wasn’t going to tell you that. I was going to tell you that you were the first girl period I kissed like that.”

  “If that’s true, you’re a natural.”

  “I don’t need practice?”

  “You need lots of practice,” I said and we kissed again. “You’re getting better,” I whispered.

  He looked at me, searching my face for some sign that said yes.

  If he didn’t see it, he heard it. Every part of me was crying out. He glanced at the pullout and saw my willingness.

  Our lovemaking was gentle, each move either of us made tentative, waiting for confirmation or acceptance, expecting the other to do something to stop it, to draw back. Neither of us was willing to surrender or retreat. I wanted to be naked and to have him naked beside me as quickly as possible. I don’t even remember how our clothes peeled off our bodies, but we were soon embracing on his pullout, clinging to each other, every part of ourselves longing to be touched, caressed, kissed. I opened to him as if I had been waiting for him from the moment my sex had risen from whatever place inside me it had been kept waiting. It was though nothing before, no kiss, no lovemaking, no whispers of love had ever happened. I was a virgin again.

  And most of all, I was boarding a rocket ship after all. My heart was thumping so hard, I remembered Petra Loman’s warnings of a potential heart attack, but I welcomed it as if I knew that in death’s embrace I would always be with Larry. Nothing but these moments mattered, not my heritage, my name, my future, anything. It was truly as though I had discovered that fairy tales and fantasies could be real.

  Afterward, we both fell into a sweet silence. Neither of us spoke about what we had done. It was as if we both believed we had dreamed the entire thing, that we had both fallen into a coma while we were there and had just regained consciousness. He walked me to my car and reviewed the directions back to my dorm for me. Then he leaned in and kissed me good night. We made no plans to meet again. We didn’t have to. We knew it was inevitable.

  Lynette was back before I was and asleep. She heard me come in and stirred, but she didn’t wake up and start pummeling me with questions as the roommates of other girls in other rooms would surely do. I slept so deeply and so long into the morning, she was already gone when I awakened. I had breakfast in the dorm cafeteria and talked to some of the other girls, but I didn’t tell any of them about Larry or where I had been. It was easy not to do that with these girls. They were too consumed with telling me about what they had done. I smiled to myself thinking how ironic it was that I could keep my secret easier among these girls. They were too conceited to be interested in anyone else.

  “You had a phone call,” Lynette told me when I returned to our room. She had been to the school library and had started work on a term paper.

  She handed me a slip of paper that simply read, Larry, will call again.

  She sat at her desk and worked, keeping her back to me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Don’t pretend you’re not full of curiosity.”

  She turned and smiled.

  “About what?”

  “Very funny. You know, about my date.”

  “Date? Meeting someone at a jazz club and listening to poetry and music?”

  “I didn’t come right back,” I said.

  She stared, looked at her book, and then turned back to me.

  :If you leave out a single detail, I’ll never forgive you,” she said.

  I laughed.

  I was really and truly bursting with the need to tell someone. I had no other close friend here and I certainly couldn’t confide in my sister.

  I didn’t know it then. I wouldn’t know it for months and months, but Lynette Robinson was the only person who would know the name of the father of my child.

  FIVE

  Nature plays a mean trick on us. She fills us with the capacity to feel great passion, to love someone even more than we love ourselves, and She puts all this into something seemingly as spontaneous as a tornado, our raging love. You could be riding along on what looks like a clam, quiet day and suddenly, without warning, the air begins to swirl around you and before you know it, a tempestuous funnel is threatening to carry you off. Maybe it’s just that passion has the power to blind us, to make us forget so many things, the least of which is what we’re about to do.

  My love for Larry was so strong and growing stronger every passing day we spent together that I was willing to risk anything to be with him. He was the one who wanted to be careful, to not, if possible, stir up any gossip and discussion, to raise any flags, worry my family, cause any problems at all. I loved and hated his sensibleness. I wanted him to be as reckless as I was, to be as carefree and uninhibited and defiant. Of course, I had more shackles to throw off. I was the one born in a privileged world, the one who carried a prestigious name. As he had said, he was his only family now. He had no one to disappoint but himself. Ironically, I eventually cared more about him and the possibility of his being disappointed in himself than I did about myself and my family and our reputations. Protecting Larry and his future became more important than anything, and because of that, I kept a secret I thought he would never learn. I suppose now when I think of that it makes me feel even guiltier.

  How cold something so wonderful become so dark and terrible.

  Those were my wild days, the days Daddy unknowingly had predicted for me, days when you let the wind blow through your hair and you didn’t worry about time, tomorrow, obligations, anything. Only the mom
ent mattered. I would wish the hours away until I was able to be with Larry, whether they were the hours filled with classes or his having to work. I even offered to give him money so he could quit his job and spend more time with me, but he was not only shocked by my offer, he was offended. I quickly pretended I had been joking. He knew otherwise, but said nothing. The words lingered in the air, however, and I hated ever having given birth to them. I could hear his pride ringing in my ears. Of course I couldn’t buy him, and he had been so independent his whole life that the very thought of being kept by a rich white girl was abhorrent. He knew instinctively that it would destroy who and what he was.

  “I’m not afraid of being uncomfortable or tired. I am not afraid of hard work and the struggle, Megan,” he told me. “My English teacher, Mr. Madeo, tells me it’s the journey that’s the goal.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You always think if I had this, if I were this, if I made this, I’d be happy. The happiness, the joy comes from the pursuit of the things you want.”

  “That sounds silly.”

  “Yes, it does, but it’s not. When we’re old and gray and sitting on some porch somewhere, we’ll think back not to the achievement, but the struggle, the roads taken to get there.”

  “Maybe you will. I’ve always been in a limousine,” I said and he laughed.

  “That’s what I like about you, Megan.”

  “What?”

  “Your ability to satirize yourself. It gives me confidence, faith, that in the long run you know what’s important and what’s not.”

  “Do I? I hope so,” I said. I didn’t have as much confidence in myself as he had in me.

  In the end I was right.

  We did so many noncollegiate things together. He didn’t attend any of the basketball games to sit with me and watch Lynette play nor did he come to any dances at my school. We didn’t even walk my campus together. Most of the time, he had to work, but when he didn’t, I would take him for rides out of our area so we could go to restaurants and other places where no one who knew me would see us.

  Occasionally, when he was off work, we spent weekends together at a motel near Richmond. Each time my parents thought I had gone to Lynette’s parents’ home. It was easy to deceive because I kept telling myself the deception was only temporary. Someday, I would find the way to reveal Larry to my parents and we would be accepted. When I mentioned it to him, he simply smiled or he would say, “It’s not important right now. We have time.”