The Between (3 page)

Dede blinked rapidly and squeezed Hilton’s fingers hard. She was looking toward Kaya and Jamil, whose heads were bent hungrily over their food. “Not now,” she said. “I’ll let you know, Curt.”

As an afterthought, Curtis pointed to Hilton. “How’s that girl with the baby doing? Danitra?”

“She’s great. In fact, that’s where I was today, man. I got held up moving her into The Terraces.”

Hilton was so distracted by his concern over the secret Curtis and Dede shared, wondering what would be so pressing that she would consider filing a police report, that it didn’t occur to him until after he’d spoken that this wasn’t the way he’d intended to explain his late arrival. In fact, this way was dead wrong. He’d all but decided Kaya had a point, that it might be better to stretch the truth a little bit this time. Dede might see something in his eyes when he talked about Danitra, and the last thing he needed was to rouse in her the beast they’d spent hundreds of dollars in marriage counseling to quiet.

“I should have known,” he heard Dede mutter, and he knew the beast was stirring already.

Anyone who lives in Miami or a subtropical climate knows that the color black draws heat, so it’s best to avoid it or else squirm with discomfort; in this way, Dede Campbell’s dark mocha complexion drew Hilton James. He saw her walking beside a duck pond on a pathway winding across the Coral Gables campus of the University of Miami, a woman with height and nicely proportioned heft and a natural shaved nearly to her scalp in 1978, when brothers and sisters were still growing Afros as high as they could reach. Her loose-fitting dress was bright yellow, dangling against her body’s gentle curves past her knees. Even from where he sat on a bench across the pond, Hilton could see she was wearing sandals and had a sterling silver bracelet draped around her left ankle. Silver glistened against her skin as though the precious metal were mined for that purpose alone. Her gait foretold all her ambition, all her confidence, all her promise. Hilton had come to grad school for two things: his master’s in public administration and to find a wife. Not even necessarily in that order. The sisters he’d met in the working world during the two years he’d spent as a teen counselor in Liberty City just hadn’t been doing it for him. They could boogie on the dance floor, and he’d found his own sweet corner of ecstasy between hot thrusts in his bedroom, but when it came to conversation and vision he was coming up dry. Forget about sisters, some of his friends told him when he complained, their arms wrapped around white women with blond locks and imaginations fixated on the Congo.

Forget about sisters. He wouldn’t forget about this one. He found the bench every day at the same time, waiting for her to pass. Most days she didn’t. But some days, especially Wednesdays and Fridays, she did. He followed her at a distance and watched her take steps two at a time into the law school. He’d braced himself to discover that she might be an actress or a music major with her head untroubled by the worldly concerns that consumed his thoughts, but she wasn’t. Damn if she wasn’t a law student. This was fate, he decided.

He had them married with two sets of twins before he’d even spoken to her or asked her name. After three months he was kicking himself because he hadn’t found the nerve to stop her on the path and introduce her future husband.

When he was invited to a black graduate-student mixer at the union sponsored by UM’s Black Student Society, he chuckled at the invitation, thinking there wouldn’t be more than a half dozen people there. But he knew she would come.

Seeing her there in a white sundress with thin straps, Hilton mustered the resolve to walk up to her. Her name tag identified her, so he tried to sound familiar: “DeeDee, it’s great to see you. I’ve noticed you around. Can I get you a drink?”

She looked at him skeptically, not the way he’d hoped. Her face was wrinkled with a confusion over who this fool was pretending to know her; then she remembered her name tag and raised her long, unpolished fingers to touch it. “DAY-day,” she said. “It’s pronounced DAY-day. It’s African.”

Strike one against him. He had to be especially smooth now. “Are you from Africa?” he asked, already counting that question as strike two. Of course she was, with that glorious skin and her natural face pure of makeup and the traces of a clipped accent under all that America.

“My mother is. She’s from Accra.”

“Ghana,” he said quickly, too quickly, trying to impress her.

She smiled, seeing all this at work in his mind. “Yes. Ghana,” she said.

Uncomfortable pause. “Would you like a drink?” he repeated.

“Fruit juice, if they have any,” she said, looking his face over and then glancing at his name. “And when you come back—Hilton—try to be yourself. I’ll like you better that way.”

After a year’s worth of Earth, Wind & Fire concerts, poetry readings, and black-student meetings, they were engaged. A year after that, no sooner than she’d taken and passed the bar exam, they were married at Overtown’s St. John Baptist Church, where Dede had come up. Lionel Campbell, her father, owned a small black weekly newspaper and knew everyone, so the church was filled beyond capacity. Well-wishers who couldn’t get in fanned themselves and cackled on the front steps, their voices floating through the walls as Hilton and Dede said “I do.”

Years later, describing their introduction, engagement, and wedding, and most especially Dede’s rainbow-kissed African ceremonial wedding dress, Hilton related the story like a fishing yarn, remembering each detail, treating it like a dream. He would cling to those details in coming years, when the dream began to fall apart and daily realities took root between them.

Neither of them changed. Dede had always been more quick to anger and had a tendency to snap when annoyed. Hilton had always retreated into silence when confronted, and he’d always had a full schedule of meetings and appointments, squeezing his time with Dede around them. And she’d always felt a need to keep track, asking him where he was at five o’clock, at six o’clock, an implicit reminder that she did not trust him to roam alone. This annoyed him like nothing else.

It didn’t help him that his life was full of women. His boss at the Miami New Day Recovery Center, where he had started a job as the head social worker, was a woman; many of the counselors were women; the workhorses at the Miami Action Coalition, a civil rights group, were women. They called him at home and on weekends, and when Dede complained, Hilton tried to explain that he could not simply tell them, “I don’t care who’s having a seizure or which building is burning down, my wife doesn’t want me to take calls on Sunday. Sunday is our time.” Perhaps he should have said it, but he didn’t feel he could. He wanted—expected—her to understand that.

Dede had her own brand of commitment, but she was more adept at saying no than he was. Her inspirational speaking appearances or participation in free legal clinics were carefully selected, and she made it a point to inform Hilton each time she turned something down for the family. For the family. It sounded like a curse, the way she said it.

He tried to make it up in other ways, by surprising her with exotic dinner recipes when he could (he was a good cook, as good as she), by arranging flowers and candles in their bedroom, by cornering her for midafternoon lovemaking in the walk-in closet while Kaya watched cartoons in the living room. But all it took was one phone call and Dede’s announcing “It’s some woman for you” in a tone that painted him as a dog to unravel all the work.

It got worse after Jamil was born. His son’s birth coincided with his promotion to assistant director, so just when Dede wanted him at home the most he was staying at the office until eight o’clock most nights. He cut out much of his other volunteer work, he called her on the hour to update her on when he would be getting home, but it couldn’t slice through the awful silence when he returned after dark and leaned over his new son’s crib and wondered what once-only achievements he’d missed while he was away.

The cutbacks didn’t last long, though. As Jamil grew, so did Hilton’s schedule of meetings in Overtown, in West Perrine, in Liberty City, wherever the disenfranchised tried to organize and asked for his help. One week he never made it home before eleven. He was spared Dede’s wrath only because she was sleeping.

“Why don’t you just tell me who you’re seeing and get it over with?” Dede said to him when he was in bed one night, dumbfounding him. She was holding a white dress shirt he’d just tossed into the bathroom hamper, her fingers closed tightly around the collar. She pushed the shirt into his face, and he saw the faint smudges of brown makeup, like dried finger paint.

At first he was numb with confusion. What woman had gotten close enough to him that day to muss his clothes? Then he remembered Beatrice Price. “Oh, Jesus,” Hilton said, and he couldn’t help it: he laughed.

His laughter enraged her. She whipped the shirt into his face so hard that one of the buttons bit into his cheek. “Don’t make me out to be a fool, Hilton,” she said in a deadly tone.

He might have read her tone and simply apologized, but he was angry at the accusation and at his smarting cheek. “You’re making yourself out to be a fool,” he said. “I won’t answer that. This is bullshit.”

“And then you lie,” she said in a sweeping vibrato, as though this is what she’d always expected. “You can’t be a man. All this time, all the time you spend away, a meeting for this and that every night, all the times I call your desk and you’re out—”

“Have you ever heard of field work? I’m supposed to sit on my ass behind a desk all day?” he shouted. Hilton knew Kaya would hear him from her bedroom across the hall, but he couldn’t bring his voice down: “So you’re checking up on me? Do you follow my car in the mornings too?”

“Whose makeup is it?” Dede screamed back, her dark lips pulled tightly across her teeth. “I don’t wear that goddamned paint on my face. Whose is it?”

Hilton leaped to his feet, and Dede drew back from him without fear softening her face. He tossed the shirt to her feet, wishing it could make some awesome noise; he was more angry than he could remember being at someone he loved. “The commission meeting was today, and we got our funding. Commissioner Price gave me a hug, if you want to be jealous of an old bitch who could be my mother. She was congratulating me, which is more than I get from my fucking wife.”

The fights began this way, but they didn’t end. As Jamil grew from infant to toddler, their fights grew more heated, more painful, until they were a part of the household. The choices were between silence or shouts, and often they chose silence.

Part of the problem, he knew, was that Dede had worried about her father’s fidelity before he died a year after Jamil was born; the community’s gossip was vicious, and most blacks in town had heard a story about some woman Lionel Campbell had supposedly set up in an apartment. Mr. Campbell knew of the rumors himself and denied them in print before he died, but they were always there. Dede must have had some reason to believe them.

And when Hilton tried to reason her out of her jealousy, asking her what he’d ever done to deserve her distrust, she countered by asking why he couldn’t simply come home at night.

Here they reached an impasse. She knew when she married him what his schedule was like, what his commitments to his community were, he said. What did she think the riots were all about? He’d already given up his literacy tutoring, he’d given up his vice president’s position at the Miami Action Coalition. Was he supposed to give up everything?

The mood inside their house seeped to every corner; Kaya, at seven, became more irritable, teasing her brother to tears for attention. Hilton began to spank her with a belt, never hitting her hard enough to hurt her, but the ritual of the lashes to her palm made her howl and then sob for hours in her room. Kaya was crying, Jamil was crying, Dede was unreachable.

One Sunday, sitting in front of a television set he was staring at but not watching, Hilton knew he could not stay like this any longer. He found Dede typing at the desk in the den and stood watching her with tears in his eyes. She looked up at him. He simply shook his head, a surrender. She turned away, expressionless, and continued to type. He heard the electric clacking as he walked to their bedroom and began to pack a suitcase, tossing in random shirts and slacks.

“So where should I tell them their father is?” Dede asked from the doorway in a voice unlike the one he knew. He didn’t know how long she’d been there.

He couldn’t answer right away. He didn’t know. “If we can’t do better than this, Dede, we can’t be together.”

“What happened?” Dede asked. “Did we fall out of love?”

Love was the least of his worries; love was burning a hole in his stomach and sucking his mouth dry. “I didn’t,” he said.

“Neither did I.” A whisper.

He clicked his suitcase shut. “Then it must take more than that,” he said.

“It does.”

Her friends at the prosecutor’s office and his friend Stu, a physician at Miami New Day, intervened and insisted they get marriage counseling before he spent all his money at the Holiday Inn and things went too far to turn back. After eight years of marriage, two children, and three days of separation, Hilton and Dede visited the Biscayne Boulevard office of Dr. Raul A. Puerta, Ph.D., family and individual counselor.

Hilton was unhappy with the arrangement, partially because Dede did the choosing, but mostly because he wanted a black therapist—and if not black, certainly not Hispanic. The entire flavor and language of Miami had changed since thousands of Cuban exiles flooded the city from the Mariel boat lift in 1980, and this was the one time he couldn’t afford communication problems. While they waited in a room filled with tall stalklike plants and Spanish-language ballads on the radio, Dede told him to be quiet and consider it a compromise because she would have preferred a woman therapist. She’d been told Puerta was good, one of the best in town. And, she added, we need all the help we can get.

Puerta was young and overthin, in his early thirties, with a moustache and round-frame glasses. He was dark-skinned, but not as dark as some of the Afro-Cubans Hilton had seen, who were indistinguishable from any brother on the street. Puerta wore a short-sleeved shirt with a loose tie, keeping cool with a small fan on his desk. He asked them a few standard questions: their names, what they did, about their children, how long they’d been married. Hilton noted his thick accent and grew distracted by the cars he could see through the window, passing by. He began to perspire, slouching in his upholstered seat.