from them with the high-pitch, first part of the S curve and then back toward her as they leaned away from the lake on the second curve. The engine cleared its throat, lowered its voice, and the city disappeared behind her back and into the wind. She remembered the sweet-salt smell inside his helmet that she wore and the texture of the way tiny points of hair lay down smooth against his shaved head. She felt her hips learn how to balance on the cycle without falling off the back. Meanwhile her arms tried to avoid holding on to his waist tight enough to feel his belt buckle and his torso beneath his jacket. She feared if she got too close and he hit the brakes she’d butt him with the helmet in the back of his bright, bald head and they’d crash. She remembered biting the upturned collar of his worn leather jacket.
Memories flipped in a series of images, some of them blank. Sunpool on his scalp. Burnt-down candles on an old piano. A Frank Lloyd Wright–looking daybed with mat-thin cushions. The warm, amber-and-blue glow from the thing he called a tube amp on a low table across the room. She remembered almost nothing else about the room except that it was filled by the sound of some oud player Shame seemed to worship. She thought it was strange that he turned off the music when he got home. She can’t even remember exactly what he’d said an oud was.
“You gotta love that, playing tsunami,” Ndiya thought, as she walked down the block beyond the old woman crocheting prophetic comments into a doily in her brain. She passed Melvin with his plastic boats in the gutter. A young man slipped through a set of double doors across the street. His denim jacket opened in the warm breeze and interrupted her recollection. Surprised at her pleasure in the even rhythm of her memory through which flowed a level of detail she could taste, she noted the slightly electric, morning-coffee and cigarette effect. She decided date number two couldn’t have started out as bad as she’d recalled. Maybe. But it got that way. Then she wondered: Maybe disasters happen in reverse? They wash over you, move back into your past and then flow forward dragging it all along with them like historical flotsam into the future. “Maybe we don’t have a chance, maybe we’re all playing tsunami,” she thought.
Eyes straight ahead, what you do is focus on something about twenty miles away. This allows you to see everything and gives no one the impression that you’re actually looking at them. Having found it an effective way for a single woman to negotiate city streets at night, Ndiya had actually learned to do this confronting dining halls at college. “Whitecaps today,” she’d chant to herself as she blurred her vision and looked for a round, dark pool that would be one table of black students with whom she’d eat. While eating, she’d focus so hard on each face that the chalk-faced waves and wan-toned voices surrounding them disappeared. The background turned into what she’d seen the weatherman standing in front of when they’d gone to the TV studio on a field trip in fourth grade. “WGN’s Roger Twible,” she had kidded herself then, “and the pure, blank blue he keeps behind him.” And now she thought again, “Ain’t mad at him.” Then she realized how uneasy she was on this street because she was doing it again. Her eyes strained against her peripheral vision as she followed a man’s progress across the street without turning her head to watch.
The bus disappeared into the darkening distance and she saw the young man undo the denim flap on his jacket. He inserted a tightly wrapped packet of plastic in his breast pocket. He appeared to her and then disappeared. He had something in his face she wanted to trust. Everything about it was even; there was nothing soft, nothing hard, nothing too round, nothing too sharp. He fell through her sight into the easy, curved play of light on lines and the spectrum of brown out of which she built everything she knew about how, what for, and why to look at people. All the possible ways of being came inevitably from these basic shapes and shades in faces. When there was no human face like that around, those patterns appeared anyway. They turned to her out of trees, clouds, waves at the beach, the froth of a cappuccino. All that led to a static she wasn’t going near. She carried that space hidden inside. In that static, a kind of noiseless noise, drifted something she refused to know but knew was true: it’s the people you know, that you trust—leave love alone—that hurt you the worst. People you don’t know or trust can kill you, or maim you; but that’s it. The real injuries that leave you touched and staggering around hiding from yourself come down the hallway, they invite you to come along and you follow. Afterward, they hang there in the torn-open wound of your trust. The arrival of trust is subtle and dangerous, its perils are intimate, vertical, bottomless.
This young man’s eyes were deep without the masked howl that she usually saw in the faces of black men with deep-set eyes. Her father’s face flashed and went away. Every hair on this young man’s head and in his wispy goatee was in place. But he didn’t have the razor-coiffed precision of the cuff-linked men at work who stalked about the Loop like perfection itself. She’d see these professional men at lunch meetings; she knew their smell. They walked like they were fresh from the weight room and flashed corporate AmEx cards like they were swords in a divine battle scene in some museum painting. The young man—truth be told he was a boy in her mind—struck her with a grace, an elegance in his stride and the perfect break of his jeans over tooth-white sneakers. For a flash, she replayed her long exile from Chicago in her brain and, against that second’s blur, she gave herself to this young stranger. She kept her eyes twenty miles out over the lake and him in her peripheral vision. It was an old technique, let the body ache but refuse to feel it. Wonder your way around the pressure of the moment. Let it sing.
This kind of openness felt very new to her. It had been a long time.
A pastel of music melted in her body. It did a slow, counterclockwise lap in her brain passing by her right ear: I’ve got things on my mind. It disappeared until it reappeared in her left ear and she heard, I’m not too busy for you. She knew the song, knew its moves. She loved the song so she turned it off before Kenny Lattimore had his chance to croon her favorite line, If you’re feeling a-lone.… She could trace the gentleness of that line as it moved through her body like a long swallow of hot chocolate at the bus stop in the winter. The kind of warmth that you feel when you swallow, the kind that makes it seem like anything you look at will melt. The song laid the words perfectly along the lines and shades in the faces she saw pass her on the street. With lines like this, she could abstract her way past the masks men wore in public and even past the others she’d found stuck to their faces in private. “Male privacy!” she thought. “It’s up there with companion for life and soulmate in the bait-and-switch way of the world.”
She mourned the secret war black men fought, must fight anyway, in places far away from her, quite possibly far away from everyone, with those gentle lines and the fantastic beauty in those shades of brown they carry through life. “Let’s not ee-ven talk about eyelashes.” Black men’s beauty and the near-cosmic arrays of violence leveled against it. She began to smile, then felt a rush of tears pressing into her eyes and a lump in her throat. Then she put it all away: “Brain broom, must pan, thought box.” She had a hundred tricks like this.
To hasten away the romance, she considered the casualties of this gentleness. This was no trick. She felt her scalp sweat and her eyes harden. The casualties of that gentleness were women. Every time. “And it ain’t ee-ven gentle,” she thought. She remembered something Shame had said to her that first night, out in front of Renée’s party on the Fourth of July. They could hear the music slow down, and the dusty sound rose like floodwater in the basement. She was halfway into praising Jesus that she’d come up for air and was outside when the music got low. It was an old song. She knew because the words were overpronounced in a way that made her feel eighteen years old. Dream about you ev-er-y night-tah, every day-ah: a city soul singer with a country preacher’s punctuation.
“Smoke City,” Shame said. “Remember them? I knew this singer, ain’t seen him in years and years, but that’s a whole ’nother story.” Then he said,
–I love music that starts with how life is and then opens up like this and makes life seem like how it has to be and at the same time makes it all sound like you know it can’t never be.
He
