in his skin, two fingers wide on left rib number three. Shame plays. The Surface song in her head, Only you can make me.… The voice in her head, just then, going under, Ndiya has left the building … far below the surface. The stool spins. He turns around but the music continues. Shame’s hand Shame’s hand on Shame’s hand on her back. Up under her shirt. Her sudden panic that he’ll touch the scars. That he’ll stop. That he won’t. That he’ll ask. That he won’t. How he both does and doesn’t. The music doesn’t pause, moves from the past to the present and back. Notes fall and stick to her like an April blizzard blown through a fire escape. Her head turns toward the ceiling. The open Y of his thighs narrows against her legs. Her body overhead. The room in her mouth with a voice of its own.
She woke up on the floor. Midway to the bathroom, she paused on tiptoes and turned back to look. Shame laid out immobile on the rug like a crime scene. After she nearly stepped on it barefoot and a stack of books tumbled over, she slammed a thick hardback volume down on a huge, glossy, black spider. The spider hadn’t tried to run. Ndiya had a moment’s sense that it may have turned toward her just before the book smashed to the floor. She stood up and read the title of the weapon from above: Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis. She left the thick tome there on the floor, covering the murder.
■
Ndiya forced her eyes open as the shot hit the net and bright rain sparkled out from the tinsel and sequins. Melvin raised both hands and said,
–Boo-ya!
Lucious Christopher:
–Lee Williams, the ever-if-only-from-time-to-time-sermon-iferous, I say that’ll be legal tender the equivalent of one American quarter, or do I put it on your tab?
And Lee Williams stood up and stretched his back:
–Let it ride.
The players chanted “On and on and on and on.” The ones against the wall raised up their hands and called out, “Like a—say what?!” And the chant repeated. They all began to move toward the other end of the alley. The three against the wall got up and joined them as they walked south toward Sixty-Fourth Street. Ndiya saw that it was the young woman’s arm they had been staring at on the side of the court. As they walked away, the woman held it out in front of her and each player bowed and kissed the underside of her forearm. Ndiya noticed that the extended arm was multiple shades lighter than the woman’s other arm.
At least that’s what it looked like to her and, “At this point, why not?” she thought. Melvin looked up at Ndiya:
–Could you take me back to Nana, now?
Tingling in the music, Ndiya realized that most of her was still back on date number two. She shook her head to get Shame’s fingers off her spine and replied,
–Ah, yes, let’s go.
Though she had no idea where to go. She stood up to go somewhere. Lucious Christopher said,
–If you can’t find Mrs. Clara, just take Melvin up to Shame’s with you, Ndiya Grayson. We’ll tell the old bird to come get him when we see her but she’ll probably check there first herself.
Ndiya, minding, nodded in silent disbelief.
As she stood up with Melvin’s hand in hers, she felt like she’d been off the bus and on that bench for hours if not days, maybe years. But she knew it hadn’t been long because her shoes and skirt were still soaked. And it was still twilight. She knew very well that all of this was crazy: “Dripping wet, the whole damned neighborhood’s high, Melvin, Mrs. Clara, Lucious Christopher, and Lee Williams who seemed to know where I am going, to say nothing of where I’ve been, better than I do?” She knew it was crazy somewhere, but it didn’t feel crazy here which, she knew, too, made it all the crazier. Melvin looked up to her and said,
–I’ll take you to Shame’s house.
With a security wall of hard-won tricks and tactical anger beginning to fail and leaving a person she barely knew exposed, Ndiya walked with Melvin toward 6329. If nothing else, she knew it was within easy earshot, whatever that meant. At the very least, she thought, it meant Shame lived nearby.
■
When she turned toward whatever was nearby, Ndiya encountered a memory that had been following her around for days. On the morning one week after the house-arrest night, she sat alone at her sublet’s drop-leaf kitchen table with a bowl of oatmeal. She replayed the triangle of Shame’s reaction to Malik’s busted bracelet. And before that, there they were in the street outside the party on the Fourth:
–Where do you want to meet?
–I don’t know, neutral corners? OK?
–Fair enough; I know just the place.
She sat at the kitchen table, crossed her legs, and felt herself slip as she corralled the last pool of melted butter and brown sugar into her final lump of oatmeal.
She couldn’t decide. So she paused with the bowl in her left hand, elbow on the table, the spoon held in her right. She uncrossed and reverse-crossed her legs and felt herself, again, as her legs moved over each other into the new position. As if she’d snuck around the back of her self and looked in the window through the split in the curtain, she thought, “Ndiya, my girl, that’s different.” Fear followed the pleasure. “That was a date all right,” Ndiya thought, and looked at herself in the window. She nodded in the moment and planned to deny everything later.
She balanced Shame in her memory like the spoon in her right hand. Sugar melted into the tiny veins in each swollen grain of oatmeal. The final bite was light brown, sweet and perfectly hot. She thought, “Last bite in the bowl, perfectly hot and the first bite hadn’t burned my mouth. Is that possible?” She glimpsed 9:15 on the clock as she figured the possibles or not of a perfectly hot, honey brown, last bite of oatmeal in the bowl. “Improbable, at best,” she thought. Fifteen minutes to get dressed and get on the 9:30 bus to work. “But possible?” she weighed the one thing against the other.
Her eyes narrowed, she stared at her reflection in the window. Her bedroom door ajar, its reflection hovered like a dare above the street behind her reflected face. “Yes, OK, it’s possible. It’s also possible that I’ll get the 10:30 bus and Ms. Yvette Simmons”—she’d just begun to think about Yvette-at-work’s actual name—“can do like this,” she said to her double. A thin blade of anger flashed. She knew it was her fault, not Yvette’s. She decided not to care, took a deep breath and puffed her cheeks into her best Dizzy Gillespie in the window until a laugh burst out and fogged the glass. She turned and, in a bright rain of descending minor thirds, Evelyn King chimed her brain. She left the bowl where it was on the table, sing-whispered, All the way down, and walked back to her room. Just then a heavy pendulum swung suspended from a long wire and for a slow moment Ndiya’s body came near, then closer, almost within her reach.
■
Fifty yards from Shame’s door, Ndiya said to herself, “Just get it over with.” She held Melvin by the hand while they walked. An instant from the first date at Earlie’s hung in her mind like a portrait. For the rest of that evening they’d talked. They did all the things that couldn’t be avoided. Ndiya watched herself listen while Shame talked around things, trying as she did, to fill space but reveal nothing. The kind of things people say when they first talk. Granted that those conversations don’t usually begin with a ruptured
