Part Two:

JAMES

Gisela Reiz

It was almost April. I had paid half of March's rent with the money Wayne gave me and had been living, or rather smoking off the prorated payment I'd received for Shawn's two weeks in March. I also owed Andy a hundred and thirty dollars for sandwiches and cigarettes he'd bought me over the past few months. I decided to repay him by pawning the computer, a crazy move since this machine was my last link to working or writing. But I had tacitly given up on both and now it seemed more pressing just to clear up my credit with Andy and to have a few dollars to maintain myself. Andy and I set out with the iMac on the D train. It was a sleek object, easy to carry. We took it to a pawn shop on 149th Street near Lincoln Hospital, where I received two hundred fifty dollars and a ticket. The iMac had cost almost two thousand a year ago but I didn't mourn. I figured I had four months to redeem the ticket; surely I could come up with such a small sum of money by then. It was a relief to pay off Andy, which left me with a balance of a hundred twenty dollars. Andy and I transferred from the 4 train to the D at Yankee Stadium. As we rode uptown, a plan was forming in my head. James worked on Fordham! I knew I shouldn't spend this precious money on crack but the call of the drug--and of James, I had to admit--was irresistible. Because I'd sacrificed the computer I felt I deserved a reward, so as the train passed Burnside, then 183rd Street, I told Andy I had an errand to run and got off at Fordham Road. I figured James dealt cards on the busier east side of Fordham but I had no idea which block. I had to thread my way twice through the crowds on the main street until, turning on Valentine, I ran straight into James, wearing his maroon Du-rag and black winter jacket. We stared at each other for a minute in surprise.

"I got money!" I whispered, not wanting the men he worked with to overhear.

"Word?" he exclaimed. "Let's go."

We found a taxi which sped us up Webster and dropped us at 205th Street, where we called Bicycle from the pay phone outside Frank's store. Then we went upstairs to wait.

We had seven dimes each. James sat in the leather chair where he'd slept since Shawn's arrival; I sat on the sofa. We each lit our stem and commenced smoking.

"You know, the other night I be thinking you got a nice shape, G," he began.

I blushed.

"Thank you," I said softly.

He went on, "When you found me on Fordham it was like love."

I knew what he meant--not that we were in love or even that we loved each other as friends, although probably we did, but that the moment had been perfect in its element of luck and surprise. We continued to smoke and it was a long time before we slowly embraced.

They say once you go black you never go back and this moment with James signaled my total crossover. But more fitting than this cliche was a song called "Lions and Tigers and Bears", playing on the radio we had in the living room:

"Just cause I love you

and you love me

That doesn't mean

that we're meant to be

Swim 'cross the ocean,

sing for the Queen,

But what scares me

is you and me…"

It was a song of longing and impossibility which captured me more than any promise of duration. I wanted nothing from James except what I had at this moment. We lay on the floor after we finished making love. I thought we'd finished smoking, too, but he brought out one last dime he'd stashed and filled our stems.

"Cheers and chandeliers!" he said, clinking his glass against mine.

"Where'd that toast come from?"

"A lady who died, my brother wife."

"Oh."

James got up from the floor and got dressed while I retreated to my sofa. That night he slept in the chair as usual but something important had passed between us, an initiation which changed subtly the character of our family. What had happened was secret. I had not become James's lover but a sort of shadow wife, ready to do his bidding when he asked. Nor was I Denise's rival. I was James's handmaiden, and Denise's sister, a servant in our private crack cult. What I did I did for all our shared pleasure. This was different from the thankless servitude I'd experienced with Tone. James was my type, a man that in a former life I would have fallen in love with and wanted for myself. But now there was Denise to cover the work I was bad at, the work of permanence. I didn't know it yet, but through tricking I was unlearning the lifelong dream of perfect love, which had never come true but only damaged my real accomplishments and talents. Now the multitude and availability of men in my life freed me from the need to become fixated on one. This was power. My earnings were slender but every day I remembered how in Manhattan I had paid to get laid, not to my lovers directly, but to all the therapists, hairdressers, yoga teachers, and yes, plastic surgeons I'd hired to fix me, to make me barely acceptable to a male population which fetishized both models and moms, or rather, an impossible hybrid of the two. I was a different species altogether, an intellectual, a difficult identity for a woman which fortunately did not even register with the men of the Bronx. To them I was just a pretty, plump, older white lady, probably from a good family, who lived in the hood for reasons of her own. My femininity was never questioned nor did my education threaten men who barely knew what it was. Now, and here, I could fuck whom I chose and think what I pleased.