Rising Tides (10 page)

“Mr. Benedict?”

“Would you like to dance?”

“Sorry. I only dance alone.”

“Why not make an exception?”

She looked toward the table, where Cloudy was watching
them. “What about your lady? She still going to fund your next book if you dance with me?”

“Nobody tells me what I can do.”

“I don’t dance with the guests, spade or ofay. That way nobody’s unhappy.”

“I’m unhappy.”

She felt something sparking inside her. She’d heard a thousand lines and had a thousand funny responses. She couldn’t think of one.

“I’ll pick you up after work.” He moved a little closer. “We’ll have breakfast.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Suit yourself.”

His teeth gleamed white against his skin. His face seemed strangely exotic to her, broad and mysterious, a supremely African face, with all the lure of tribal warriors and mystic rituals. “I’m
going
to suit myself, Nicky Valentine.” As Cloudy watched from the table, he lifted her hand and kissed it.

He was a poet, with several critically acclaimed volumes and a contract for another. He was a part of the Negro Renaissance centered in Harlem, the peer of Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois. She entertained in a bar, dancing the Charleston.

They had dark-roast coffee and croissants on the terrace of Le Dôme in Montparnasse, sandwiched between tall boxes of red geraniums and the table of a couple who never exchanged a word. Nicky had gone home first to bathe and change into a skirt and sweater. As light streamed through the geraniums, she removed her cloche hat.

“It’ll be hot by noon,” she said, helping herself to an other croissant. “In a month or so we’ll be closing down.”

“Closing?”

“Sure. No one stays in the city in August. You’ll find it hard to eat or shop if you stay here.”

“Where do you go?” He sat back. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her since they arrived. She wasn’t used to intense scrutiny. She found herself squirming under the heat of it.

“Here or there. Spain once. The South of France. Clarence has friends with a house in Antibes. Maybe we’ll go there.”

“You call your grandfather Clarence?”

“Odd, isn’t it?” She gave no explanation.

“I called mine Old Man.”

“Tell me about him.” She had already listed the basic facts of her own life. Her years in Paris, her education, a hazy, fabricated account of her life in New Orleans. But Gerard had said little about himself.

“You were wrong about Alabama. I was born in Georgia, but we moved to Harlem when I was ten. My father didn’t make his crops two years in a row, and the white man took our farm. We left with nothing but a mule and an old wagon. We worked our way up north, mile by mile. By the time we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, we didn’t have the mule. Old Man got sick and died in Maryland, and we didn’t have the money to lay him to rest.”

Nicky already knew that Gerard was not a man who would appreciate sympathy. She just nodded.

“Some church people took pity and saw Old Man got buried. Then they bought us train tickets to New York. By that time there wasn’t much left of my daddy. He drank up what pennies he managed to earn. We moved in with a cousin, and she raised us until we were old enough to go out on our own.”

“What about your mama?”

“Dead early. Real early.”

“Was Harlem better than Georgia?”

“No place’s better than any other.”

She toyed with her coffee cup. “Then you’ve been everywhere?”

“Just about.”

“You’re a real hard-boiled egg, aren’t you?”

He smiled, and the shadows lifted. “You haven’t seen enough of the world to understand.”

“If I haven’t, why are we having a conversation?”

“There’s something about you.”

His voice was resonant and deep. The words, as clichéd as they were, lingered in the air, settled provocatively against her skin, bored inside her to places that had never been touched. She tried to be flip. “Yeah. Yeah. Long, long legs. Sea green eyes. A smile that lights up the darkest corner of a room.”

“Sounds like you’ve heard it all.”

“And more.”

“But you’ve never heard it from me.”

She faltered for a moment, aware—although she fought it—that he was moving quickly to some place she had not yet inhabited. “Why should that matter?”

He reached for her hand. His was wide, with short, sturdy fingers. A farmer’s hand with no calluses. He en closed hers and held it tightly. “Because I’m going to matter,” he said. “Starting right now.”

She was terribly afraid he might be right.

Nicky spent August with Gerard, in the third-story apartment of a tiny building in the rue Campagne-Première. The apartment was tiny, too, one room just large enough for a bed and desk, another with a love seat, a chair and two arched windows looking out over Paris rooftops. The kitchen had a
stone sink and one gas burner; the toilet and tub were down the hall.

As if to make up for its truncated size, the apartment was a short distance from the beautiful Luxembourg Garden, with its graceful statues and Médicis Fountain. She and Gerard strolled there sometimes in the late afternoon and stood under the shade of chestnut trees, watching children sail toy boats at the edges of the pond.

They explored Gerard’s neighborhood, too, moving slowly through the narrow, winding streets of Montparnasse, stopping for crusty baguettes at a corner bakery, a small wheel of Mont d’Or from the shop next door, tart purple grapes from the greengrocer at the end of the block. Paris was sleeping, its residents and guests dreaming away their summer in other, cooler places. But Nicky dreamed only of Gerard.

She awoke each morning wrapped in his arms, too warm in the windowless room, and yet never quite warm enough. She had been raised among musicians. She had come of age in an era when jazz trumpeted the battle cry of sexual freedom and in a country where Prohibition was only a word in another language. But through it all, she had retained a stunning naiveté. Until Gerard.

He was all the things she hadn’t known enough to wonder about. When he filled her, she understood the words to love songs she had learned years before and never really believed.

He was complex and often moody. In sleep his face was kind. She could see the man he might have been, a man untormented by the devils of racism and rejection. Awake she could see his struggle to transcend his pain. He was a strong man, a man who took pleasure in his body and in hers. A man gentle enough to take her virginity and passionate enough to take her innocence.

He was also a man who drank too much, who brooded for days at a time and sometimes raged uncontrollably. But in his best moments he was adept at driving away the doubts that beset her. When she was with him she believed in their future together; she believed that they could hold the world away and make a life here in her adopted country. Although he never made promises or talked about the days to come, she believed.

When she told Clarence that she was moving in with Gerard for the summer, he had accepted her decision, but he hadn’t been happy. He had immediately accepted an offer to play at a nightclub in Nice until the fall. On the afternoon when he came to say goodbye, he pressed their apartment key in her hand, closing her fingers around it. He said nothing, but she understood. She had a place to go if she needed it. She was sure she wouldn’t. She was crazy in love, self-confident and wise in matters of the heart. She kissed Clarence on the cheek and told him how much she would miss him. Then she buried the key under her clothes.

Gerard worked on his poetry from midmorning to afternoon. Sometimes he wanted the apartment to him self, and she went to one of the cafés to drink coffee and write letters. At other times he wanted her beside him, willing her vitality to flow through him and wash away his self-perceived failures. He never let her see what he was working on. He had told her it was an epic poem about slavery and the new chains of racism and Jim Crow. But he had never read her so much as one phrase.

Gerard admired the Bolsheviks, and he told her stories about the trip he’d taken to Russia. He was filled with enthusiasm for social experiments he had seen and for Joseph Stalin’s vision, but he claimed that his enthusiasm was also a stumbling block
for his career. He was a Negro and a Communist sympathizer. In his native land, one was as damning as the other.

Gerard was certain that if he were white, his words would be met with understanding and interest. One day she had tried to gently disagree with him, pointing out that not so long ago the U.S. attorney general had rounded up anyone suspected of socialist sympathies, no matter what their color, and imprisoned or deported them. And two men named Sacco and Vanzetti—Italians, not Negroes—were probably going to be executed soon, as much for their leftist ideals as for murder.

“You don’t know anything about it! You don’t understand!” he had insisted. “You don’t have a real connection to what’s going on at home. You don’t even have a connection to the people you claim! Look at you. Pampered, petted, hidden away in a foreign country like some washed-out, watered-down nigger debutante!”

She had been shocked and hurt, and when he’d had time to calm down, he had apologized and gathered her close. But there had been other incidents that left her un easy. Gerard’s poetry and his pride were inextricable. At best, a writer’s life was a cycle of success and failure; at worst, there was nothing but the latter. She had glimpsed writers like Robert McAlmon, Scott Fitzgerald and others at the worst of times. On the nights when Gerard dragged her from bar to bar until nothing was open and she had to guide him home, she thought of them, and she worried.

One evening in late August, when Gerard seemed to be riding a wave of achievement, she dressed for dinner. They were meeting friends of his at Chez Rosalie, just down the street. Rosalie’s was a favorite haunt for both the expatriates and neighborhood working people. The food was some of the finest in Montparnasse, in expensive and satisfying. Gerard’s friends were neither.

Nicky had met the Trumbles before. They were a middle-aged couple from New York who had come to Montparnasse to soak in the atmosphere and buy a little culture. Amy Trumble sculpted, and Garth Trumble fancied himself an art connoisseur. The family fortune was so vast that Garth could purchase anything he liked. Nicky suspected that most of his “finds” were works the artists had intended to dispose of less profitably in their trash.

She dressed with care because Gerard was in such a good mood, and she didn’t want to spoil it. She hoped they would eat with the Trumbles, then part company with them, but she was afraid she was in for a boring evening. She would have preferred to have Gerard to herself, but for most of the past week they had spent time with his friends, who were drifting back into the city after their summer holidays.

She was arranging her hair when he came to stand behind her. “I bought you something.”

She looked at him in the mirror, surprised. Minimal living expenses were all he could manage on his royal ties and the small grant he had received before coming to Paris. She helped out with money she had saved from tips at Les Américains, but neither of them had anything extra to spend. “I know,” she teased. “Butter for tomorrow’s breakfast.”

He held out a small box. She took it and removed the top. Inside was a bracelet of ivory and mock jade in the popular African style. “Oh, Gerard.” She held it up. “It’s lovely.” It was also expensive. Guilt seized her. “But you shouldn’t have. You don’t have to buy me things. I’ve got you.”

“And now you’ve got this. Hold out your arm.”

She did, and he slipped the bracelet over her hand, clasping it at her wrist. She felt the weight immediately, as if she were tethered to the earth in a way she had never been before. She
stood and threw her arms around him. He held her close. “I saw it in a shop window and couldn’t resist. Do you know why?”

She shook her head. She was strangely close to tears.

“It’s old ivory, nearly as golden as your skin. And the green’s exactly the color of your eyes. It was designed here, in France, but its roots are African. How could I pass it by?”

She hugged him harder. The best part of the gift was that he had been thinking of her when he saw it. And in his own way, he was apologizing for the insults he’d hurled at her about her heritage. “I’ll treasure it.”

“Like you treasure that locket you always wear?”

The major events of her life were defined by jewelry, although she had never thought of it before. The gold locket given to her by the friend of her mother’s. A silver ring that her father had bought for her in their first days in Chicago. A long string of crystal beads that Clarence had given her after her first performance at Les Américains. And now Gerard’s gift.

She wondered why she had never told him about the locket. Why had she never told him the truth about her self? “The locket was a gift from a friend of my mother’s. I never knew my mother. In fact, I don’t know anything about her.”

“Nothing? Clarence can’t tell you anything?”

“Clarence knows less than I do.” She met his eyes. “Gerard, Clarence isn’t my grandfather. He’s no relation. Just a friend. He brought me to Paris because he was afraid for my life. He changed my name to his in case anyone was still looking for me. He convinced everyone I was his grandbaby.”

“Looking for you?”

“My father was murdered in Chicago. Whoever killed him would have killed me, too, if he’d had the chance. I didn’t
have any family—at least, none that I knew about. So Clarence decided the best way to keep me safe was to get me out of Chicago. He’d been offered a job here with a friend’s band. So he hid me for a while at a friend’s house. Then, when he thought it was safe, he applied for a passport for both of us. He told the authorities I was his granddaughter and he didn’t have a birth certificate because I’d been born at home out in the country somewhere and both my parents were dead. They didn’t care. They were sending two more coloreds off to France, and good riddance.”

“Why would someone want to kill you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s true. It was the middle of a race riot, and they were white men. They shouted my father’s name when they shot him. I was only a few feet away. They shot at me, too, but my father managed to protect me. I don’t know if I was just a convenient target or if the same people who killed him wanted me dead. But Clarence was sure I wasn’t safe.”