Bliss (21 page)

“So I’m asking.”

They were talking toward the television cabinet. Their shoulders were touching, and if they faced each other, they’d be kissing. Eva thought for a second about the last person she’d had sex with, Imperial Court’s manager. Brother called Fred Truth, after Hampton and Sojourner. He couldn’t make the trip. Jacked his back up in a minor car accident, plus his girl was about to have their second baby.
Truth was all up in mine, though, like he loved it
.

“You think you’re fly,” Lil’ John said, and tugged a bit of her hair.

He’s corny
. “I am fly.”

“Kiss me, then.”

“Kiss you.”

“Yeah. Think you can condescend,” John said, “to that?”

E
va had to wipe her mouth after each kiss. Wipe her chin and even the tip of her nose.

He’s the most slimy kisser in the world. I like the way he handles me, though. I hate a tentative toucher
.

The sex was over.

So fun. Sex twice with two condoms. Sex all flirty and fancy. Oh, and with liquor. So no shyness. I had on my Big Bad attitude. All nasty and daring
.

John pulled on his drawers, grabbed his jeans and undershirt, and went to the bath.

The way he looked, sitting against the headboard. Way I stood up and dropped my skirt to the floor—smooth. Lifted my shirt over my head and I was unhooking my bra and walking toward him and climbed on top. Yeah. Feeling good, feeling high, feeling like I wanted my body touched. Not thinking, Does he like me? Does he respect me? Should I be with him? Am I doing too much? Too soon? Too nastily? YUCK. Never that
.

Was more like, Homeboy looked fine as fuck, and he was confident even with his gut a bit too thick. He’s got that sexy scar on his chin, looks
not that pasty, straight clean teeth, a grown-out buzz cut, girl lashes, top and bottom … Gray eyes—I think they’re gray. Him looking at my lips, checking the boobs, stretching out glances, feeding me drinks. White boy
. White boy
from Strong Island trying to represent! I wanna just close my eyes, replay the sex in my head … Have I ever been so nasty with any man? Have I ever been so … free?

Yeah, I have, if I’m honest. But with Lil’ John, goddamn. It don’t seem like role-playing. The shit seems real
.

He stepped back in smelling like soap, toothpaste, and Eva’s body. She was naked still, except for her boots. Lil’ John fell onto her. She bit his lips, he sucked on hers. Eva used her forearm to mop her face and he didn’t remark on it.

Both wanted to lie in bed and talk and kiss and have more sex. Neither knew how to communicate that without seeming needy and already too infatuated. Eva shifted clumsily, reached for her panties and shirt. John hopped up and pulled on his hoodie.

“I’ll see you on the road, though,” he said, like she’d mentioned something that would make seeing him on the road difficult, when she’d said nothing at all. “At Ravenna or wherever.”

“I might not make that stop. They got this chick from the London office. She’ll deal with Trix and I.C. I got shit to do back in—”

“You make me laugh,” John said.

“That what I do.” She said it hoping she’d not betrayed herself with a rise in her voice on the
do
. She thought, too, that while he was talking shit, Lil’ John was extending, even if it was just for moments, his stay in her room.

“Not in a bad way, but you take yourself crazily serious.”

“I am crazy,” Eva said, “and I am serious.”

“Especially,” John said, “for a girl.”

Black girl? Or white girl? Wise girl? Or wild girl?
“I’ll wake up tomorrow with a new attitude. Promise. Just for you.”

“You should have a new one now. After how you were just acting.”

“You mean how
you
were acting?”
White boy!
she thought,
please. It was good, but please
.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“Tell me.” Eva liked this game.

“Thinking, ‘White boy, please.’”

She smiled a little. “You’re familiar with that sentiment, then.” A dis, an endearment. A two-word stooping-down-to, a welcome.
Like “nigga
,” Eva thought,
but without slavery and Jim Crow and red-zoning and separate water fountains and shit behind it
.

“It’s come up before,” John said smugly.

“And what’s your usual response?”

“My response is, that’s not what you was saying an hour ago. ‘White boy, please.’ Ain’t gonna get into all that moaning you were doing. Way you were bouncing. My thumb all in your mouth.”

She felt fucked with. He was fucking with her. But this is what she liked—a skilled bluff-caller.

“Why just the thumb?” he wanted to know. “You don’t like it? Head? Or you don’t give head to white boys?”

“I don’t give head to white boys.” She hadn’t. She’d had sex with two or three, but to suck a white boy’s dick was further than she wanted to go. To go down on a white boy was too generous. Seemed enough of a treat for a white guy to be in the bed with her.
And he gets head, too? From this mouth? Nah
.

“You have. And if you haven’t, you will.”

Future tense. Caught it
. “I love a dreamer,” Eva said, daring to toss out “love,” as he’d dared to speak of tomorrow. His eyes stared into hers, and then plainly at her breasts, and then back in her eyes. Eva liked John’s nerve.

“You’ll do it in Ravenna,” he said.

“Dude. Make no assumptions—”

“I’m not your ‘dude,’ dude. And you know damn well you’re going to Ravenna, and to Bologna, and every other place on the tour.”

“You been tested?” She asked it quick, like it didn’t matter.

Took him a second. “Yeah.”

“Why?”
I know this fool isn’t in a high-risk group
.

“Because I fucked a lot of people.”

A lot of women
.

“A lot of females,” he said. “If we were home, I’d show you the test slip.”

She looked at him for some proof that he was virus free. For
proof that he’d find her again, so they could have sex and get to know each other better, even if it was just for the tour.

“You’re gonna do it,” Lil’ John said, back on topic. “You’re gonna go down on me.”

“You didn’t ask me. If I was tested.”

“You’re tested. Because you asked me if I was.”

“That’s your method? Real scientific. I hope you’re careful.”

“I was just careful with you.”

Careful with me
. Eva’s insides surged in his direction. Because she wanted badly for him to come back to bed, and she didn’t want him to have that power over her, she exercised discipline: “It’s time for you to go, Lil’ John.”

“You know my name’s Ron Littlejohn.”

Of course she knew. Ron Littlejohn’s father had negotiated on behalf of too many Motown artists to name. Big Lil’ John (called that as hip hop began to dominate, and as his son rose in the business) had untangled publishing rights behind the Philadelphia Sound and worked for charting black stars whether the charts were top-heavy with disco or Duran Duran, whether the hit songs were about being born in the USA, about girls named Mandy, dogs named Brandy, or hot fun in the summertime.

The Littlejohn mystique ran deep. Ron’s grandfather was rumored to have been the man next to the man who booked Billie Holiday when Holiday was with Basie. Some said Ron’s grandfather cooked mendacious books for Decca in the 1930s and ‘40s. Some thought the biggest Littlejohn had pimped Louis Armstrong for almost all Armstrong’s early money. But the truth was that in the forties, Ron’s father’s father had sold heroin at Harlem spots to jazz drummers and blues singers, was run out of town for reasons both played down and overblown, and ended up on the scandalous team that launched California’s biggest jazz festival.

So Ron’s Long Island family had for three generations made money, one way or another, mostly off black music and had had for those sixty years the kind of comfort level around blacks that white people in the American South tend to have—the kind that comes from
exploiting, but comes also from being in close quarters with (and believing that close quarters lead to an understanding of) the negro.

Some extremely tight relationships had existed between the Little-johns and their clientele. There’d even been love. Ron’s uncle, also a lawyer, was still married to a Dominican woman who’d been one-third of a girl group in the early sixties. Ron’s mother had taken a three-year leave of absence from his father and spent it with a burly seventies soul singer. Eva wondered how any feeling between the Littlejohns and their black associates could have been real. How could any partnership, friendship, or love affair escape the ill dynamic of whites paying to see blacks interpret joys and pain? Of blacks interpreting for and selling grief to those whose father’s father’s fathers shaped and honed or stomached it?

Us allowing it. Participating. Us fighting it, and mostly losing
.

Where’s the goddamn purity?
Right there in the Italian hotel room. Eva’s mind swirled.
Their dominance, just their sheer numbers make me sick sometimes. Always at the head of everything in this business. Behind this, above that. The few of us that rise up as owners or CEOs or chairpersons, why do we all seem like puppets? Does it
seem
like that, or is it really, actually
like
that? I can work within it. Shit, I win within it, but no one can claim a black-white relationship in which race isn’t a factor, if not the factor. A relationship in which the dope sold, the spot booked, the record made, the song marketed, the hire made, the drunkenness shared, the addictions managed, the love made ain’t shot through with who did what to whom when and who allowed what to go down because. Who could come to the table, let alone a relationship, with hands unmuddied or unbloodied?

Eva shook her head at her rhyme.

No one
.

On bad days, she thought there was nothing worse than a white person who was rich due to rap, and who walked like he or she’d earned a right to be in hip hop. But on worse days, when Eva dealt with dilettantes of any color, she appreciated any person who had some experience, however skewed, with creative people not used to being loved by the masses, or to having money. Eva knew who Ron
was. She knew what Rons were. Eva had known the deal when she saw Ronald Littlejohn in the amphitheater. And she’d thought he was sexy as hell.

“You know who I am,” Ron said, “and you like me, so let’s be back in the bed.”

“Go on, Ron Lil’ John. I’m going out. Me and Giada.”

“Giada is a snake,” Ron said before he stepped out, but before the door closed he walked back in, gently pushed Eva flat, drench-kissed her, and then spoke directly to her mouth. “Gonna put my dick right here,” he said.

“Dream about it.”

“Already have,” he said with a hitch-up of his jeans. Then Ron wiped her chin and mouth with his palm, and he was gone.

Showered and scented, Eva stood on the sidewalk in front of the small lobby. It was a little after 1:00 a.m. Lois from Trix stood by. All the taxicabs were Benzes. Giada flagged one.

“Where’s your crew?” Eva asked Lois.

“About theirs.”

“Why you ain’t about yours?”

The cab pulled up and they got in the back. “I’m trying to be,” Lois said. She surprised Eva by naming a club to the driver, and as he pulled off, Lois said, “I didn’t know you and Lil’ John were down like that.”

“He’s all right.”

“You don’t work for that white boy, yet you threw that stuff up, fools went crazy. More fights could’ve happened. Already two dummies hurt. You get blinded by the hype. I thought that’s what we artists were supposed to do.”

Giada watched the driver.

Eva felt reprimanded. “They got hurt before I threw those flyers out.”

“Whatever,” Lois said. “Just more money for Lil’ John and Min.”

Giada looked at Lois and said, “Does the money come out of your purse?”

Eva was glad the cab came to a stop. Once in the cavernous club,
Giada located tall chairs for Eva and Lois, walked away, and then brought three cups of wine.

“Don’t like red,” Lois said.

“G.’s off the clock, Lois. And she wasn’t your slave when she was on it.”
She was mine
.

Giada motioned like she needed the ladies’ room, and Eva followed her. Once in the minuscule booth. Giada pulled out a cigarette, slit the paper with her thumbnail, and emptied the tobacco into a small plastic bag with weed crumbs and coke dust in one corner. Giada shook her mixture around, and then poured some of it into her own paper. Giada used the cigarette filter—hooked up the cavvy completely, then lit it with a lighter old and heavy enough to have belonged to an ancestor. Flame blazed up three inches.

They smoked.

Giada said, “Your lips are making me happy.”

“Why?” Eva blew smoke. She tilted her head a bit. She knew what came next.

“I just like. The shape.”

Someone knocked on the door.

“Glad you approve,” Eva said. She waved back the cavvy, done.