"Old. Older than you."
One day when I was in his house, I sneaked a peek at his driver"s license and saw the year that he was born. He was my mother"s age, maybe a month or two younger.
"They say men look distinguished when they get old," I said.
"Easy for you to say."
"I believe in the young at heart."
"That"s a very mature thing to say."
It was always sad to leave him at night. I wanted to go to hear him play with his band, but I was afraid of what my mother would think.
He knocked on my door very late one night. My mother was away, working the whole night. I came out and found him sitting on the steps out front. He still had on his black tuxedo, which he had worn to work. He brought me some posters of the legends who were his idols: Charlie Bird Parker and Miles Davis.
"Sophie, you should have heard me tonight," he said. "I was so hot you could have fried a plantain on my face."
We both laughed loudly, drawing glares from people pa.s.sing by.
"Can you go out to eat?" he asked. "Somewhere, anywhere. I"m so high from the way I played, don"t let me down."
I called my mother at the old lady"s house, on the pretense that I was wishing her a good night. Then we drove to the Cafe des Arts on Long Island, which was always open late, Joseph said.
I drank my first cappuccino with a drop of rum. We shared a tiny cup; he was worried about driving back and finding my mother at home, waiting for me. He told me to raise my head through the roof of his convertible, as we sped on the freeway, hurrying to make it home before sunrise. I felt like I was high enough to wash my hair in a cloud and have a star in my mouth.
"I am being irresponsible," he said. "Your mother will have me arrested. Thank G.o.d you are over eighteen."
He held my hand on the doorstep, swaying my pinky back and forth.
"You do wonders for my English," I said, hoping it wasn"t too forward.
"You"re such a beautiful woman," he said.
"You think I am a woman? You"re the first person who has called me that."
"In that sad case, everyone else is blind."
I leaned my head on his shoulder as we watched the morning sky lighten.
"Can you tell I like you?" he asked.
"I can tell."
"Do you like me?"
"You will not respect me if I say yes," I said.
He threw his head back and laughed.
"Where do you get such notions?"
"How do I know you"re not just saying these things so you can get what you want."
"What do you think I want?" he asked.
"What all men want."
"Which is?"
"I don"t want to say it."
"You will have to say it," he said. "What is it? Life? Liberty? The pursuit of happiness?" He quickly let go of my hand. "I"m not about that. I am older than that. I am not going to say I am better than that because I am not a priest, but I"m not about that."
"Then what do you want with me?" I asked.
"The pursuit of happiness."
"Are you asking me to be with you?"
"Yes. No. It"s not the way you think. Let"s just go to sleep, solitaire, separately. Fare thee well. Good night."
He waited for me to go inside. I locked the door behind me. I heard him playing his keyboard as I lay awake in bed. The notes and scales were like raindrops, teardrops, torrents. I felt the music rise and surge, tightening every muscle in my body. Then I relaxed, letting it go, feeling a rush that I knew I wasn"t supposed to feel.
Chapter 10.
My mother came home early the next night. "We"re going out," she said. "We have not done anything, the two of us, in too long."
A musty heat surrounded us as we stood on the platform waiting for a subway train to come.
Inside the train, there were listless faces, people clutching the straps, hanging on. In Haiti, there were only sugar cane railroads that ran from the sugar mill in Port-au-Prince to plantation towns all over the countryside. Sometimes on the way home, some kids and I would chase the train and try to yank sugar cane sticks from between the wired bars.
As the D train sped over the Brooklyn Bridge, its lights swaying on the water below, my mother kept her eyes on the river, her face beaming as if she was a guest on the moon.
"Ah, if Manman would agree to come to America, then Atie would see this," she said.
"Do you think you"ll ever go back to Haiti?" I asked.
"I have to go back to make final arrangements for your grandmother"s resting place. I want to see her before she dies, but I don"t want to stay there for more than three or four days. I know that sounds bad, but that is the only way I can do it. There are ghosts there that I can"t face, things that are still very painful for me."
I waited for the train to sink below the city so I could have her full attention.
"I am past eighteen now," I said. "Is it okay if I like someone?"
"Do you like someone?" she asked.
"I am asking, just in case I do."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Who is it?" she asked.
I was afraid to tell her right away.
"Nothing has happened yet," I said.
"I would hope not," she said. "Who is it?"
She waited for me to speak, but I wanted to hold on to my secret just a bit longer.
"Let me tell you a few things," she said. "You have to get yourself a man who will do something for you. He can"t be a vagabond. I won"t have it."
"He is not a vagabond."
"How do you know? Do you think he will walk up to you and say, "Hi, I am a vagabond"?"
I trust- "You are already lost," she said. "You tell me you trust him and I know you are already lost. What"s his name?"
Henry was the first name I could think of.
"Henry what?"
I thought hard for a last name for my Henry.
"Henry Je ne sais sais quoi." quoi."
"Don"t you dare play with me."
"I was just joking," I said. "I know his last name. It is Henry Napoleon."
"Of the Leogane Napoleons?" My mother closed her eyes as though there was a long family registry in her brain.
The Leogane Napoleons? Why had I chosen them? There were more ill.u.s.trious Haitian families. I could see my mother"s mind working very quickly. Were they rich? Poor? Black? Mulatto? Were they of peasant stock? Literate? Professionals?
"I want to meet him," she said.
"He is not here." I thought quickly. "He went back to Haiti after graduation."
"is he coming back?"
"I don"t know."
"I want to meet his parents. It"s always proper for the parents to talk first. That way if there"s been any indiscretion, we can have a family meeting and arrange things together. It"s always good to know the parents."
"The parents are in Haiti with him."
"Are they ever coming back?"
"I don"t know."
"Find out. I want to meet them when they get back."
I leaned over and kissed her cheek to show her that I appreciated her trying to be a good mother. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, but the words would not roll off my tongue. I had to be more careful now that my mother knew I had a love interest. I cooked all her favorite meals and had them ready for her when she got home. I even used the mortar and pestle to crush onions and spices to add those special flavors she liked. I got A and Bs in chemistry and tried to hide my chagrin whenever Joseph was on a gig in another part of the country.
My mother waited very patiently for Henry Napoleon of the Leogane Napoleons to come back from Haiti. Every time she asked about him, she took advantage of the moment to give me some general advice.
"It is really hard for the new-generation girls," she began. "You will have to choose between the really old-fashioned Haitians and the new-generation Haitians. The old-fashioned ones are not exactly prize fruits. They make you cook plantains and rice and beans and never let you feed them lasagna. The problem with the new generation is that a lot of them have lost their sense of obligation to the family"s honor. Rather than become doctors and engineers, they want to drive taxicabs to make quick cash."
My mother had somehow learned from someone at work that the Leogane Napoleons were a poor but hardworking clan. She said that in Haiti if your mother was a coal seller and you became a doctor, people would still look down on you knowing where you came from. But in America, they like success stories. The worse off you were, the higher your praise. Henry"s mother had sold coal in Haiti, but now her son was going to be a doctor. Henry"s was a success story.
Joseph was away for a month. He sent me postcards and letters from the road. Each day I rushed to the mailbox, making sure I got them before my mother did. I put his jazz-legend posters on my walls and stared at them day and night.
Whenever my mother was home, I would stay up all night just waiting for her to have a nightmare. Shortly after she fell asleep, I would hear her screaming for someone to leave her alone. I would run over and shake her as she thrashed about. Her reaction was always the same. When she saw my face, she looked even more frightened.
"Jesus Marie Joseph." She would cover her eyes with her hands. "Sophie, you"ve saved my life."
Chapter 11.
His first night back home, I went to hear Joseph play. My mother was working. I took a chance. I put on a tight-fitting yellow dress that I had hidden under my mattress. Joseph wore a tuxedo with a tie and c.u.mberbund made of African kente cloth.
"You look like you"re all grown up," he said.
"A lot of time has gone by," I said.
"What"s time to you and me?"
"Out of sight, out of mind."
"Not your sight and not my mind."
He always knew all the right things to say.
In the car, he told me about how all the towns looked alike after a while when he was traveling and how he kept thinking about me and feeling guilty about my mother, because he was wanting to steal me away from her.
The whole evening was like one daydream. I had never imagined myself in a place like the Note. There was a large dance floor with pink and yellow lights twinkling from the ceiling. That night Joseph played the tenor saxophone. There was a whimpering sound to it, like a mourning cry.