Searching for Tina Turner (27 page)

Four hours pass, and when the bill comes, Bruce and Harmon insist on dividing the entire tab between the two of them.

“I did some research. Our options are a nearby club with disco music and dancing or the casinos in Monte Carlo,” Bruce says,
surprising Lena not for the first time this evening and causing her to reconsider him as playful and prepared.

“I pass.” Lena pushes back from the table.

Harmon catches her left hand. “Stay. Have a glass of wine with me.”

“Yes, stay with Harmon.” Cheryl winks in a way that says she wants to do more than dance. “He’ll make sure you get back to
the hotel.”

f   f   f

When the waiter appears at the table, Harmon orders another bottle of wine. “For savoring,” he tells Lena. “And reminiscing.
I’ve thought of you more times over the years than I can count on my fingers and toes.”

“You should have been thinking about your wife.”

“Did you ever think of me?” His face is momentarily innocent, like a young man’s.

Harmon’s birthday is two days after Randall’s. Around that time the occasional thought of him entered into her mind and left
just as easily; an empty thought more self-reflection or karmic happenstance than anything else. Although she would never
tell Harmon this, doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction, wants to keep the illusion going.

Then why is she sitting in this romantic restaurant with this man, this former lover, who thinks she is happily married?

“I worked in public relations for the city of Oakland for a while. I had a husband, kids, a household to run. When, or better
yet,
why
would I have time to think about you?”

“Not even a little?”

She admits to the time she took Camille and Kendrick to the circus and an elephant pooped in front of them.

“What does it matter now?”

“I regretted marrying Natalie long before I found her in bed with Jessie. What do you think of that?” Harmon tells her that
before their friendship ended, he questioned his buddy about Lena from time to time: Is she married? What’s her husband like?
Does she have children? What does she look like? Does she still take pictures? “I felt like a fool. I lost the chance to make
it up to you.” He tells Lena that he saw her once, sitting alone in the lobby of a Chicago hotel. He headed in her direction,
but before he reached her, a man—he assumes that it was her husband—joined her and took her hand in his. Harmon considered
speaking, meeting Lena’s husband, but they appeared to be so much in love, the look on their faces told him they weren’t interested
in anyone or anything other than each other. He walked away. “I was young, dumb, and horny. Tell me who you are now.”

“You’ve had entirely too much wine, and I need to leave.”

“Ah, the elusive Lena. Always so secretive.”

Secretive enough, Lena thinks in the silence of Harmon’s pause, to never tell him she’d had his baby sucked out of her a month
after she pushed him out of the car. Never regretted her decision. Never told Randall. That wasn’t secretiveness. It was their
agreement: the past stayed in the past. They were born-again virgins, he said on their honeymoon. No one else mattered.

Harmon reaches for her hands. His are warm, hers cold. She cradles her hands in his for a moment until she tightens and pulls
away. “Where’s your wedding ring, Lena Harrison? You’re not planning to cheat on your old man, are you?”

Isn’t she behaving like a married woman? Is there an aroma, a pheromone that says she’s no longer married? she wonders. She
could change the subject, tell Harmon about Tina, about Camille and Kendrick.

“What the hell, Harmon. I never could lie. I’m divorced, or will be by the end of January.”

“Why lie at all?”

“I wanted you to believe my life was perfect. And it was, almost, at least up until this year.” She wants to tell Harmon that
she hasn’t harbored love for him—fondness maybe, but not love. There is a tender spot in her heart for him, but her love was
always, is always, Randall. “Too much truth in wine.” She raises her glass in a toast and takes another sip of the rich wine
that tastes of blackberries and currants.

“I missed you.”

“Bullshit.”

“Truth.”

“How can you claim to miss someone you
happened
to run into on the other side of the world?” She rolls her eyes, finally understanding the intent of her children’s favorite
response. “If this is your best line, Harmon Francis, you need to go back to the drawing board.”

“I should’ve married you.”

“I made my life, you yours.” She can’t help but chuckle. She wants to tell him that maybe the next time around he’ll think
with the head on his shoulders instead of the one between his legs, but he doesn’t know what she knows. “You’re not telling
me that after all this time you’re still pining for me, are you?”

“I can tell you that if you’re game, I am.” He divides more wine between the two of them.

“And if you hadn’t seen me today, tomorrow, whenever?”

His face takes on that little boy look again. “You’re the one that got away.”

“Let’s talk reality. Or at least if you’re trying to seduce me, do it with fewer clichés.” When Harmon smiles, Lena turns
away to avoid his infectious humor.

“Then start by telling me who you are now.”

H
armon and Lena exchange stories of their lives like two fighters: shadowboxing, ducking, sparring, parrying.

After his divorce, he took a sabbatical from the law and moved, with his sons, to the Caribbean.

Her description of her present life is simple: she is in Nice to see Tina Turner in concert, and she will do whatever it takes
to meet her, get an autograph, and take her picture.

He spent three years as a consultant in St. John, studying the potential for start-up technology businesses before he moved
to Chicago.

Once she returns to Oakland, there is a new job at the museum and photography classes. She borders him in a frame using the
thumbs and forefingers of both hands. Thinks of what angle might best capture the waning candlelight.

The restaurant is empty; the bottle before them half full. The wait staff, in their impeccable French way, stand at a distance
yet close enough to anticipate a signal of what to do next. Harmon winks at the waiter, who hands him two clean glasses, corks
and wraps the bottle in a white napkin.

f   f   f

Outside, the sky is black. The lamps glow yellow along the promenade, lighting the path like mini moons. A cool breeze dusts
Lena’s shoulders with chill bumps. They walk not hand in hand but close enough to brush against each other and continue their
conversation in disjointed phrases.

He loves Shakespeare, reads it, memorizes passages—a relief from the stiffness of legal language.

She takes pictures of buildings, architectural details, vertical lines. Inanimate things: doors, rusty fences, nails. This
trip is about finding Tina Turner, about finding herself.

The promenade is edged with planked wood benches with wrought iron arms that swirl and curve and invite. Harmon waits for
her to sit before he does.

“I don’t want to be seen as spineless. My choices so consumed me, I lost all respect for myself.”

“I find that hard to believe,” he says, splashing wine into their glasses.

“In retrospect, so do I. But that’s behind me now. I’m moving on.” She knows this is a lie, or not quite a lie, but a good
misrepresentation of the truth when she still thinks of Randall and their life together nearly every day. “Or trying to.”

“So, what’s your next step? I mean after Tina?”

“Must you ask so many questions?”

“It’s how I make my living. And I’m nervous.”

“Nervous? You’re a big hunk. Why would you be nervous around l’il ole me?”

“It’s good to see you. Good to be around you. You always made me a little nervous.” Harmon is serious. The lines framing his
mouth say take him at his word.

Between the chilly night air, Harmon, and the flittering in her stomach, Lena feels twenty all over again. On a first date
with no idea of what to do except stifle a giggle. “I think I should get back to the hotel,” she says without moving from
the bench.

“You were always a little unpredictable and very demanding. I don’t mean that in a negative sense. I mean that you make a
man step up his game. Your standards were pretty high. Maybe that’s why your husband couldn’t handle you.”

Now she does laugh. Laughs at the thought of Randall’s inability to handle her or anyone. No one has called her unpredictable
in a long time. She left it at the altar when she said, “I do,” and let unpredictability morph into indecisiveness. “And what
about you?”

“I love the law, but I’m tired of it. When you’re a litigator, you fight every day. My sons called the knots that come up
here,” he says, touching the wide space between his eyebrows, “‘meanies,’ because whenever I was in trial I wore them night
and day. I’m looking to make a change. I want to make this next part of my life as good as but as different from the first
as I can.”

If this were a date, Lena thinks, they would rush to fill the gaps in their conversation. Neither makes the effort. They sip
their wine and allow themselves to mull over topics too silly to repeat out loud; the tacit free association of couples comfortable
with silence. A family strolls past them oblivious to the late hour the way Americans might be. The parents hold flashlights
while the children rush to dig and dump sand into small pails.

“You remember the night I told you that I was going to choose between you and Natalie?” Harmon waits for Lena to signal yes.
“Stupid, huh?”

Lena thinks of her own dependence on Randall and shakes her head no. “Most men wouldn’t admit it, that’s all.”

“I’ve been divorced for thirteen years. I like my independence, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to something I feel right
now, something I thought I’d forgotten. You wear your sadness on your sleeve. Did you know that?” He wants to see her photographs,
take her to bed, rid her of that sadness. Make up for his mistake. Create something new. See where it goes.

He is the litigator, she thinks, forger of compelling arguments, and her face smarts in the intensity of his words. She feels
it. He feels it. She understands that her first step must be to slow down and not be swept away by supposition. Anything she
does, any new relationship she starts, must be on her terms.

“I’m sure I never told you this—I’m only beginning to understand it myself. My theory has evolved over the years; I believe
everything that happens is part of a master plan, a divine plan created by a higher being. God, Allah, whomever.” He divides
the last of the wine between their glasses. “I’m not a religious man, but I consider myself a spiritual one. I’ve practiced
law too long to believe in coincidences.”

“You Leos can be philosophical and idealistic about how life should be.” Not caring much for astrology until she met with
Vernon, Lena looked up the characteristics of the sign to try to understand her Leo husband better. The similarities and differences
in the two men are recognizable: they both love the finer things in life, yet uncontrolled impetuosity is a characteristic
Randall could never be accused of.

“Don’t dismiss me, Lena, I’m serious.”

“This is coincidence, Harmon.” Lena points at everything around her. “We happen to be in the same place at the same time,
and I don’t view it as anything else but that.”

Harmon explains that if she were to look at coincidence as mere happenstance, random events, or factors colliding, then yes,
that would be true. But if she views coincidence as the coming together of a set of predetermined circumstances controlled
by a hierarchical being, then no. “This is no coincidence. This is fate.”

The beach is far from empty. The crowds are sparse along this path, but groups of roving young people, couples, and a few
solitary figures walk the beach and the promenade. The energy, the socializing, the celebration of the warm weather she observed
on her first day in Nice continues late into the night. The lights, the wine do not mask or allow Lena to avoid Harmon’s intensity,
the possibility of his theory as truth.

“What happens when a person doesn’t believe in a hierarchical being? What controls fate then?”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe or not. Freedom of choice guides us to our inevitable fate. You could have very easily chosen
another heroine.” Harmon lowers his voice to a level just above the whoosh of the breaking sea. “Then where would you have
gone, or would you have gone anywhere? You think fate has nothing to do with us meeting again?”

Someone from your past is waiting for you. Vernon’s words, his prediction. Is Harmon that someone?

Tina’s performance, that first time around, brought Lena and Randall together; their separation brought her back to Tina,
and Tina brought her to the south of France and Harmon. Is that, she wonders, coming full circle, coincidence or fate? “I
know that for the longest time, I let someone else make my choices, and when you do that you lose your power. Even though
some choices were made from love, there was an element of control, too.”

“Yet here you are in charge of you,” Harmon says.

“This is my fate because I planned it.”

“Or because your plan is part of a larger one.”

f   f   f

Harmon provides the opportunity, the dimly lit hallway the ambience. He holds her for a long time. Lena relaxes into his shoulder.
Her body aches with his touch, makes her feel her need. It is the touch of his hand on her neck, his hand against her cheek,
her arm, his thigh against her thigh. It has been months since a man has touched her—with passion or not. Months since a man
has tasted her.

“Invite me in.” A meaningful medley of warnings swims around Lena’s head: blood tests, condoms, HIV screenings, complications
from one-night stands for baby boomers unaccustomed to playing the field after such long timeouts. Harmon holds her; his lips
soft against her own seem to fit her mouth. He leans against the doorjamb, holding her hand, and Lena feels like a teenager
at the door of her parents’ home.