she wonderful?” Lanie exclaimed with delicious little shudders of appreciation all over and under the leotards. “So real. So alive.”
“So dangerous, you mean,” Elgar said with shudders of his own, violent ones in the vicinity of his stomach.
“She knows what love is all about, Elgar,” Lanie said, pouting. “Which is more than you can say.”
“The time is coming, Miss Elaine K. for Know-it-all Lacey, when you will wish you had shown some respect for me.”
“Respect isn’t the issue, Elgar,” Lanie said gravely. She was beautiful when serious, the hazel flecks in her eyes lighting up to match her freckles. Shadows in the room softening the long horsy planes of her face. “I was simply stating a fact about you, the fact that you cannot love, a fact you know very well. I wish you could learn to keep your tender ego out of our discussions.”
She stretched, swinging the heavy curtain of dark red hair that hung to well below her shoulder blades. She reminded Elgar of a bay mare he had once owned: coarse red mane, long graceful legs, large dark eyes like wet leaves. And good strong teeth: she had bitten him more than once.
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I don’t know what love is all about either. Oh, I have lots of ideas, but no experience.”
“It’s a grim struggle to the death,” Elgar said, “if I can believe your minstrels.”
“Yes, but that’s only part of it, Elgar. Why are you smiling that strange, smug way?”
“I was merely anticipating your reaction,” he told her, “before telling you that today I enjoyed a command performance by your collector’s item.”
Lanie was up in an instant, neighing excitedly. “Marge Perkins? In person? I don’t believe it! Where, Elgar? Where?”
“Well, perhaps enjoyment is not the precise word. I was, after all, a captive audience. And unfamiliar with the lady’s reputation.”
“She’s only the Sepia Nightingale, Elgar. The Queen of Blues. The Tragic Voice of the Twenties and Thirties. She started out in New Orleans. When she came to Harlem, the lines stretched for five blocks outside of Small’s Paradise. The cover charge went to ten dollars, and still they stretched. She had rooms full of orchids. Cars a block long. Proposals from European royalty. She only made a few records. And then she disappeared. Elgar, where is she?”
“If you will take your claws from my throat, and behave like a proper hostess, for once, and show some hospitality, for once, and get me another drink, maybe I will tell you. But only then,” he cautioned, “and only maybe.”
“Oh, oh,” she said, withdrawing. “Great White Father wants the service due his whiteness. Yassuh, Marse Elgar,” she said with a low bow as she picked up the glasses. Repeating the bow with her back turned on her way to the kitchen. “Yassuh, boss. Right away.”
There it was. Every evening had to be spoiled at least once by her intruding the race thing like a two-edged sword between them.
“Lanie, please cut that out,” he growled. “I’ve asked you before, now I’m telling you. It’s unnecessary, especially with me. And it’s ridiculous. Why, you have freckles, for God’s sake!”
“On you it’s freckles, boss,” she said, returning with the drinks on a tray and elaborately offering one to him. “On me, it’s melanin. Dat ole debbil pigment.”
Raising the glass to her lips she looked at him solemnly, large brown eyes level below coarse auburn fringe. “Here’s to pigment and its mysteries. For instance, its mysterious relationship to music. One more drink, and maybe I’ll understand why it takes melanin to produce melody.”
“I suppose you have never heard of English madrigals?” Elgar inquired coldly, refraining from joining in the toast. “Scottish bagpipes? Irish jigs and reels? Forget about those. I have an extensive musical education, I can refute you all night long. What about German music? Are you going to try to convince me Beethoven was a Negro?”
She did not answer; her eyes were hopeless black holes in a long, ironically chalky face.
“Anyway,” he added angrily, “I’ll believe it about all three B’s before I’ll believe it about you. Not that it matters, Lanie, you know it couldn’t matter to me, but once and for all, are you colored, or not?”
“People see in me what they want to see,” she answered.
“No fair!” Elgar shrieked, with the same frustration he’d suffered in the hide-and-seek games years ago when he was It and his brother Schubert, discovered behind the old oak tree, simply streaked across the lawn to another hiding place.
Lanie took a long, satisfied inventory of the way the red knit fabric clung to her long, satisfactory curves before looking up at him lazily and saying, “Actually I’m Greek and Creek. If you must know. A Greek father and a Creek Indian mother. How’s that for a combination?”
“But that changes everything. Hooray!” he whooped. And started down on his knees to propose to her, as he already had, vainly, to all of his other girls.
“It changes nothing, Elgar,” she said coldly, withdrawing from his touch as from contact with a crocodile, untwining herself from a black leather butterfly chair and rising. “I just said that to see how you’d react. Of course I’m colored. My grandmother is as black as that chair.”
Still on his knees, he looked up at her in horror. “Lanie!” he pleaded. “Tell me the truth! My God. I don’t know what to believe now.”
“No, Elgar,” she said, stepping over him neatly as she would a turd on her living room floor. “Why should I? As you said, it doesn’t matter to you.”
“Lanie, come back here!” he howled. One part of him hating, the other admiring the clean, athletic, independent stride, the muscles dancing under receding red jersey.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Elgar,” she said as she returned with a clinking glass. “I only went for more ice.”
“Tell me the truth, Lanie,” he said, still on his knees, hollow-voiced and desperate.
“Some other time, Elgar. When it’s not so important.”
“I think I get the point,” he said, rising shamefacedly, feeling embarrassment tint his face to match her tights.
“Do you, Elgar?” she asked sweetly.
“Do you mind if I have another drink?”
“It’s your gin,” she said. “Help yourself.”
If she had called him “boss” that time, he would have slapped her. And, what with the payload of rage he always carried around inside him, Elgar feared any slapping might get out of control.
“But Lanie,” he began, waving his hand with frustration. Then he thought better of it. He paused a long time while considering the next question. “Do you like me, Lanie?”
“Of course I do, Elgar. You’re a sweet guy.”
“I am not!”
