Celestial
Is it love, or is it convenience?” Gloria asked me that Thanksgiving Day after my father had stormed upstairs and Andre went to gather our coats. She explained that convenience, habit, comfort, obligation—these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes. Did I think this thing with Andre was maybe too easy? He is literally the boy next door.
If my mother were here now, she would see that what we had chosen was anything but convenient. It was Christmastime, and I own a business with a staff of two, and now my wrongfully incarcerated husband is released and I have to tell him that I’m engaged to another man. The situation was a lot of things—tragic, absurd, unlikely, and maybe even unethical—but it was not convenient.
As Andre ran his lines, rehearsing the speech that we agreed would explain ourselves to Roy as gently as possible, I looked up into the empty branches and wondered aloud how long Old Hickey had been here. Our houses were constructed in 1967. As soon as the last brick was mortared into place, our parents moved in and commenced making babies, but Old Hickey predated all of that. When workers cleared the land to build, scores of pine trees were cut down and the stumps blasted from the ground. Only Old Hickey had been spared.
Andre slapped his hand against the rough bark. “Only way to tell is to cut it down and count the rings. I don’t want to know that bad. The answer is old. Hickey has seen it all.”
“You ready?” I asked him.
“There’s no ready,” Dre said, leaning back on the tree and pulling me close. I didn’t resist and pushed my fingers through his dense hair. I leaned to kiss his neck, but he gripped my shoulders and held me away so we could see each other’s faces. His eyes reflected back the grays and browns of winter. “You’re scared,” he said. “I can feel shaking beneath your skin. Talk to me, Celestial.”
“It’s real,” I said. “What we have is real. It’s not just convenience.”
“Baby,” Dre said. “Love is supposed to be convenient. It’s supposed to be easy. Don’t they say that in First Corinthians?” He held me close against him again. “It’s real. It’s convenient. It’s perfect.”
“Do you think Roy will come back with you?”
“He might. He might not,” Andre said.
“What would you do if you were him?”
Andre let me go and stepped over the raised roots of the tree. The air was chilly but clean. “I can’t say because I can’t imagine being him. I’ve tried, but I can’t even walk around the corner in his shoes, let alone a mile. Sometimes I think that if I were him, I would be a gentleman, wishing you well and letting you go with dignity.”
I shook my head. Roy wasn’t that type of man, although he had dignity in spades. But for a person like Roy, letting go wasn’t a self-respecting option. Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst. For herself, she identified her ability to adapt. “I’ve likely rolled with punches when I should have hit back,” she said. “But I rolled my way into a life I love.” She told me that since I was very small, I have embraced my appetites. “You always run toward what you want. Your father always tries to break you of this, but you are just like him, brilliant but impulsive and a tiny bit selfish. But more women should be selfish,” she said. “Or else the world will trample you.” Roy, in my mind, was a fighter, a characteristic whose double edges were gleaming and sharp.
“But I don’t really know,” Andre said, thinking aloud. “He feels like everything was taken from him—his job, his house, his wife—and he wants all his shit back. He can’t get his job back; corporate America waits for no man, let alone a black man. But he’s going to want his marriage back, like you have been in cold storage all these years. So now it’s my job to snatch the fantasy away.” He motioned to take in our houses, our bodies, maybe even our city. “I feel guilty as hell. I can’t lie.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“For what?” he asked, slipping his arms around my waist.
“Since I could remember, my father has told me how lucky I was. How I never had to struggle. How I eat every day. How nobody has ever called me ‘nigger’ to my face. He used to say, ‘Accident of birth is the number one predictor of happiness.’ Once Daddy took me to the emergency room at Grady, so I could see how poor black folks are treated when they got sick. Gloria was mad when I came home, eight years old, shook to the bone. But he said, ‘I don’t mind living in Cascade Heights, but she needs to know the whole picture.’ Gloria was furious. ‘She is not a sociological test case. She is our daughter.’ Daddy said, ‘Our daughter needs to know things, she needs to know how fortunate she is. When I was her age . . .’ My mother cut him off. ‘Stop it, Franklin. This is how progress works. You have it better than your daddy and I have it better than mine. Don’t treat her like she stole something.’ To which my daddy said, ‘I’m not saying that she stole it. I just want her to know what she has.’ ”
Dre shook his head as though my memories were his own. “You deserve your life. There are no accidents—of birth or anything else.”
Then I kissed him hard and sent him on his way to Louisiana, like I was sending him off to war.