“How can I explain it to you?” She gave him a look, then seemed to come to a decision. “Stay,” she commanded, then left him for a moment and returned with her portfolio, the one she would not let him touch.
She unzipped the case slowly, peered at him, still weighing her decision, then opened the flap. “I’m going to show you sketches. Ideas. You understand? Ideas.”
He reached to touch a page, but she pulled the book away. “No, no. Your hands are greasy. I’ll turn.” While he listened, she turned the pages and explained each sketch, all done in lead pencil. She pointed out the differences in sleeves, why these were hard and those were easy. She showed him necklines, cuffs, darts, and pleats, and he sat and listened to every word. She was completely animated until she came to a particular page that she turned quickly.
“Hold on,” he said, wanting to grab her arm, but he didn’t. “Not so fast.”
She let go of the page but covered the sketch with her hands as it lay flat on the table.
Now he had to see it. “Please?” he asked.
Tant Rosie stood up to see what was going on.
Ysa removed her hands.
It was a drawing of a carnival dancer in full mas. The previous sketches had been drawn in gray pencil, but this was done in colored pencils. Reds, golds, turquoise. The dancer sprouted white and gold wings. She wore a jeweled bra and matching mask. Even though the limbs and neck were exaggerated, Thulani could tell the body was Ysa’s.
“This is…wow.”
“You like it?”
He nodded.
“My country never has a float in the parade. If we did, we would not wear costumes like this. We would wear the long skirt, maybe. But carnival should be free! A grand spectacle. I would wear this!” she said of the drawing.
“I’d never let my girl wear that.”
Ysa closed the case and pulled the zipper.
“I’m not your girl,” she snapped, then put the case aside and turned her back to him.
This was too much work. It was too hard. And as she put it, she wasn’t his girl. Thulani rose and pushed his chair in.
“Look, girl. I’m going to leave you alone.”
“That’s good,” she said. “Leave me alone.”
He said, “Good-night and thank you” to Tant Rosie, who was at the door, eager to see him off.
“Yes, good-night,” Tant Rosie said. “Good-night.”
THIRTEEN
He made sure he caught her eye in homeroom and again in third period and in fourth. He meant to approach her after class, but she and her girlfriends made a quick exit to the cafeteria. Probably to secure their lunch table. They sat in the same spot and had to get there early.
He stood on line for a turkey sandwich and milk. They were already sitting and talking when he spotted them. He thought he stared too long until Julie gave him a big smile. He made his move and took his lunch tray to her table.
“Mind?” he asked.
Julie smiled and tilted her head. She had pretty hair. A beauty parlor style. Straight with curls on the end. She was neatly put together. A shade of rose pencil outlined her lips. She had light green shadow around her eyes. Mascara. Manicured nails. A girl.
“Julani? Bulani?” Janine snapped her fingers between each guess.
“You know my name.”
Julie came to Janine’s aid and whispered his name.
“Oh, oui. Pardon,” Janine said. “Tusoso.”
“THU—LAN—EE.”
“Yes, that’s it,” Janine said. “It’s just…I don’t hear it so often in class.”
“No, no, we always hear that name,” another girl, Mona, cut in. “‘Thulani, no homework again? Thulani, absent again? Thulani, speak up. Thulani, detention.’”
One by one, Janine, Mona, and Yvette threw questions and petty insults at him while Julie hung back, speaking only with her eyes and an occasional laugh that came out through her nose. He didn’t mind their game. In fact he expected to endure her friends’ humiliation ritual before he could talk to Julie alone. Janine told him he looked better without those hoods he used to wear. Mona said his dreadlocks were getting too long and he should cut them. Yvette asked if he would ever cut his lashes. They were too long and pretty for a guy.
He came quick enough with his responses but was careful not to go too far. He was allowed to defend himself, but he could not mortally offend any of her friends in the process. When Janine felt they had done their duty, each girl picked up her tray and left Julie alone with Thulani for the remaining twenty minutes of the lunch period.
As they talked, or he told her what she wanted to hear (how she stood out among her friends; how he was waiting for the right time to approach her), she told him what he wanted to hear. Mainly that she would not make things hard for him. This she did with her eyes.
He fell into a rhythm with her, feeling the ease of talking without the fear of saying the wrong thing. As he sat with this very willing, flirtatious girl, he learned the truth about him and Ysa. With Ysa he dreamed and wanted, pushed and pushed, but Ysa never asked for any of it.
On the other hand, Julie, who took his hand to critique his nails and scribbled her number on a scrap of loose-leaf paper, was his for the asking. To be sure there was no misunderstanding, he later asked her in homeroom, “Will someone mind me talking to you—besides your girls?”
She laughed. “Yves and I broke up.” She waited for some reaction, but he gave none. “Yves. Soccer team Yves. Do you play soccer?”
He shook his head no. Truman had always been the cricket and soccer star in the family. His mother used to make snacks for Truman and his teammates when they came to the house after soccer matches. That was a long time ago. Sports never appealed to Thulani, particularly if his mother wouldn’t be there to cheer him on.
“No? No soccer? What do you play?”
“Nothing.”
Then Julie took him by surprise. She pushed up his jersey sleeve and felt the biceps on his right arm.
“So hard. Firm.”
He had been seeing Julie for a few weeks. He and Julie walked home together, trailed by her girlfriends. Each time he hoped they would run into Ysa and catch jealousy on her face. She was never anywhere in sight.
He was messing up at work, always late or always asking for days off to spend with Julie. The last time he asked for a day off, Mr. Moon threatened to let him go.
He learned to be prompt where Julie was concerned, and he always treated her friends to soda and french fries. He learned that movies made for a safe date, as he never had to make too much conversation, and he usually let her pick the movie.
He ate dinner at Julie’s a few times, sometimes with her family, though they were seldom home. Her parents worked off-hours, and her brother was in college. Julie gave him his first kiss, and after a month, and a Christmas gift (an ankle bracelet that she pointed to in a store window), she took his virginity in her bedroom while Janine, Mona, and Yvette stood guard downstairs. He removed his pants, but she removed only her panties, keeping on her skirt. She put the condom on him and guided him inside her. When it was over, Julie came downstairs and hopped on the sofa with her friends as they began rapidly talking in Creole. Thulani followed, fully clothed. In English Julie said, “Three, four minutes,” to Janine’s question, and the girls laughed.
“She is pretty,” Shakira said, holding Eula belly-down across her thigh. She rubbed small circles on the baby’s back to burp her. “But she’s not the one.”
Thulani cut his lashes at her. How do you know?
Delighted that she might possibly know something, Shakira explained, “The way you bring her here. Introduce her to me. Have her sitting watching videos out here in the open.”
“Yeh, so?”
“If Thulani has a piece of music, he plays it on his Walkman for self and self alone. If Thulani has some special ting, a photograph or clipping, he hides it in his heart away from the gazes.”
This was all true, for the one thing he would
not share with Shakira or anyone else was the cloth of a hundred eyes that still hung on his wall. Even when she saw it, he refused to explain what it meant or how he got it. Only one person would instantly know what the cloth was, and she would never see it again.
“Julie is something special to me,” he insisted, though they both knew he lied. He kept her out of his room because he could not bring himself to take down the skirt.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Shakira said. “The girl is nice. Just not the one you’ve been sick for.”
He had to laugh, his only way to dismiss her. As far as he was concerned, Shakira knew nothing.
“Remember?” she said. “‘Sistah Luv, suppose I’m stuck on one girl, but another girl won’t leave me ’lone?’ Remember I told you? Leave the silly girl to her silliness, be a man, and step to the real one. Then I went to the hospital and push out Eula.”
He laughed hard, throwing his head back. He hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in so long.
In the nearly two months that they saw each other, Thulani never mentioned his roof or his birds to Julie. When he had to open the dovecote, he’d say, “Look. I have to do something.” He brought her to Yong Moon’s only twice after school. If he took her to his house, she’d sit in the living room where all could see her. When she hinted about seeing his room, he had his excuses ready: Shakira would not allow it, or it was a mess.
Once he got the hang of sex, he thought he could screw Julie forever. They had ample opportunity at her house, and she enjoyed it. Even though his body was always ready, the want of her faded. The thinking of her. The list of things he liked about her did not seem so extensive. Her treasures. These all faded. So even as he entered her, joined with her, and rode her until he was finished with her, he did not want her.
Julie was not completely without dignity, nor was she blind to his lack of interest. She was back with Yves shortly before Valentine’s Day. From his rooftop Thulani saw them walking arm in arm when he went to close the dovecote. He wished he cared.
FOURTEEN
“Shouldn’t his family do this?”
Thulani had just come in from taking another large garbage bag out to the Dumpster. Going out in the rain didn’t bother him as much as what they were doing, raking through Dunleavy’s things. Before the sun came up, Truman pulled him out of a warm sleep and said, “We have work to do, braa.” No further explanation.
Truman threw another stack of magazines onto the pile but offered no reply to his brother. They had been in Dunleavy’s apartment since the hard rain started falling early that morning, clearing out cupboards and closets. In that time they accumulated two heaps: one of clothing that would be donated to charity and the other of what Truman called junk.
“This isn’t right,” Thulani said. “Us being here. Throwing out the man’s things.”
It was the third such remark he made about being in Dunleavy’s apartment and the third time Truman didn’t answer. Finally Thulani got the message. Mr. Dunleavy must have died in the nursing home, and there was no one else to dispose of his things. Why Truman couldn’t have said in the first place that Dunleavy had died, Thulani didn’t understand. It was like Mommy dying. One minute Thulani was talking about her, counting the days until her return; then suddenly he learned she had long been gone. The difference was he felt sorrow about Mr. Dunleavy’s death, but no pain, and he was glad of that.
Truman tossed a cardboard box onto the heap that would be bagged as garbage, spilling some photographs on the floor. Fascinated by the photos and bored with the task of bagging garbage, Thulani stopped to pick them up.
There was not one color print among them, just old brown and yellowed prints, not even black-and-white. The surfaces of the photographs were matte, and some of the borders were scalloped. To Truman’s displeasure, Thulani sat cross-legged on the floor and thumbed through stacks of photographs in the cardboard box. He’d feel the surfaces of the prints, then turn over each photo to see the dates stamped on the back. The fairly recent pictures, at least twenty years old, had been taken in Brooklyn. He recognized the shops and streets. The older photographs, however, were of Jamaica. Even without the greens and yellows he knew his homeland. The place where his father lived and where he had run free as a little boy. It seemed an unspoiled place.
He came across a photograph of three schoolgirls in their best pinafores, gathered on the steps of the school with their teacher and principal. This was not the kind of picture that would normally interest him, except for the middle schoolgirl in plaits, who had his eyes and Truman’s nose. Surely this was his mother or at the very least an aunt. He pointed out the girl to Truman.
Truman gave the photograph a passing glance and said, “The Salvation Army will be here by one to pick up the furniture and clothing.”
If Truman didn’t want to see it, that was on him. Thulani put all the photos in the box, except the one of the schoolgirls. He placed that picture on top of the box lid.
“These should go to someone,” he told Truman.
Truman shrugged.
“Dunleavy wrote to someone from home.”
Truman said, “No one claimed his body. I doubt if they will claim these tings.”
Thulani expected as much from his brother. He combed through the garbage heap to find a bunch of letters that had been thrown into the pile earlier. He sorted through what envelopes he could find, setting aside two with recent postmark dates. He would pack up the pictures, minus the schoolyard photo, and send them off to the person who had written to Mr. Dunleavy last.
Truman tossed a kidney-shaped chestnut brown leather case onto the heap. Thulani had to investigate.
“You’re supposed to bag this junk, not play with it.”
Just as Truman could turn Thulani off, Thulani could do the same to Truman. He unbuckled the leather case. The letters ED were embossed in its leather above the huge brass buckle. Edmund Dunleavy.
Inside the case were a camera and a lens. It was a thirty-five millimeter, but not like the new ones he had seen in stores. This one was encased in metal, not plastic, and the lens was separate from the camera. He attached the lens, then raised the camera to the light to look through the viewfinder.
“It’s junk,” Truman said. “It doesn’t work.”
Nonetheless Thulani set the camera aside with the box of photographs, the letters, and the schoolyard photo.
It continued to rain throughout the week. Thulani’s birds did not care much for the April rain, but he liked it just fine. The rain cleared the air when he ran through the park or stood on his roof. It made the fruit in the market smell strong. It was raining, but not hard, when he saw her among the green mangoes. Actually he saw her skirt first. Multicolored stars, planets, and comets against a black background.
Mr. Moon sighed. Yeeeh.
Thulani made his way to the mangoes, where she waited for him. He knew this because she did not avert her eyes as he approached.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hello.”
He was stuck for something to say and could only look at her.
She said, “Don’t look at me like you miss me. You don’t miss me. You have a girlfriend the next day. I know.”
He blushed. “You—”
“Oh, yeh, I see you. And her. I said, ‘Good for him.’”
“Is that what you said?”
“And I said, ‘Let him worry her to death.’”
A woman shoved a bunch of grapes at him. He weighed them and handed the bunch to the woman without really looking at her. Mr. Moon grunted.
“I’m sorry if I worried you to death,” he told her sarcastically. “I only cared about you. Wanted to be your friend.”
“Friend. Ha.”
“You invited me into your house.”
“It was late. Cold. What, I’m rude? You think I’d say, ‘Go home, boy, in the cold?’”
“Oh,” he said. “It was cold and you were polite. You weren’t glad to see me.”
“What you want me to
say? ‘Yes, Tulani, I’m so happy you came to my house with flowers’?”
“Was that so hard?”
“Look, I didn’t want to like you. But there you are with your flowers. Tiny, little flowers with no smell. I don’t want to like no one that way. You don’t understand. I have things to do. I’m trying to graduate early. Get into a top design school. Boyfriends don’t care about that. They want girlfriends to do this. Be here. Don’t do that. They say, ‘My girlfriend doesn’t wear this. My girlfriend wear what I tell her.’”
He also remembered that night in her home. Seeing her sketches of the carnival dancer’s body. A barely clothed body that was Ysa’s, glistening in gold, red, and blue. For a second he saw her body, nude and bleeding. For more than a second he wanted her even when he should not.
“That sketch…it showed too much,” he said. “I didn’t want to share you with no one.”
“Ha. I didn’t want to share my sketch with you,” she said. “I covered it. But no. You have to see everything. Know everything. Then when I show you, what do you say? ‘It is dirty. You are dirty. Hide, Ysa. Shame.’”
“Maybe I wasn’t ready,” Thulani said.
“Maybe I wasn’t ready,” she said back. “But you want, want, want.” He was about to protest, but she cut him off. “No, you don’t touch me, but I can feel you want, want, want. I said to myself, ‘He doesn’t even see what you can do. How does he know who you are?’”
“Ysa, I was pushing you. I’m sorry for that. I should have known you’d be afraid.”
“Afraid? Me?” She became loud. “I’m not afraid of nothing. If it’s something I want, I’m not afraid.” She lowered her voice but spoke passionately. “I want to apply to college, so I had to take a complete physical with AIDS test and everything. You think I’m afraid? I fear no one. Nothing.”
Mr. Moon reminded Thulani he had customers. Thulani ignored him, though he could not answer her. She was right. He wanted her but did not know her.
When it was apparent that he had nothing to say, Ysa took her items and stood on line while the other women in the market stared at her. She put her mango, four green plantains, two green peppers, and thyme on the counter for Mr. Moon to ring up. Then she left.