Twenty-Eight
ON A LATE JULY WEEKEND morning, I near Lionel’s apartment, “Earth Angel” spilling out from his open door.
The song’s been out for a year and a half but no one in the neighborhood’s tired of it.
Al’s in the living room, standing by the record player, holding the dust jacket, saying, “If I had to name one man who is doing the most for the community, I’d hands down choose Dootsie Williams.”
I drop my purse on the coffee table, sit next to Lionel on his sagging, scratchy sofa as the Penguins croon and harmonize. “He sure has brought us some good music,” I say.
“He’s doing that and so much more. Raised here in Watts,” Al says. “Cut his teeth at the Central Avenue clubs.”
Lionel raises an eyebrow. “Odette, did we ask for a history lesson?”
“Just listen,” Al says. “This is important. Dootsie watches as his fellow musicians are seduced by white managers. By the big record labels—including our own, Odette. These fine musicians are wooed with promises of fame and fortune but instead the companies take their songs and give them to white musicians to arrange and perform and make money from. Dootsie knows this isn’t right—and he sees an opportunity—so he decides to do something about it. ”
“We know the rest,” Lionel says. “You can spare us. We drive by the studio every day.”
It’s just around the corner from here in a house with an enclosed front porch, a sign fixed to it that says Dootone Records. It’s been there for a few years, but ever since Dootone put out the Penguins’ single, it’s taken on a new magnitude.
“Al,” I say. “I know what you mean. A major hit like this, by boys from the neighborhood, recorded here in the neighborhood, by a colored man who’s from here, too … It’s significant. It really is.”
“Thank you,” Al says. “At least I married into some sense.”
Lionel laughs. “Okay, okay. I’ve assembled you two for a reason. In three months, little man is turning eleven.”
Al whistles. “Eleven years old.”
A wave of the old guilt comes back, the impossibility of a time I hadn’t wanted him. I push it away, and Lionel says, “I’ve decided to give him a bird for his birthday. A fine quality bird, to breed. And a couple more, to keep the good one company. As long as it’s all right with you.”
To imagine Clément with his own birds. “Lionel,” I say. “This is incredible.”
“Little man’s got a passion.”
“Thanks to you,” I say.
“Oh no,” he says. “Maybe I introduced him to the birds but he’s the one who fell for them. Rudy barely gave them a second glance. So you’re happy with the plan, then?”
“Yes,” I say. “Do you remember that day you took us to see the birds for the first time? ‘A boy can dream’?”
“Won’t ever forget it,” Lionel says. “So, Al. Here’s where you come in.”
Al’s eyebrows rise. “Nope,” he says.
“We’ll need to build him a coop.”
“Adele would murder me. No projects until I get some done around my own house.”
“It’s for Clément,” Lionel says, as though that’s all the persuasion he’ll need.
“I understand. I’m in full support. But I’m a married man and I’d like to stay that way.”
“I’ll help,” I say. Lionel scrunches his face. “I will. I’m perfectly capable of following instructions.”
Lionel sighs. “We’ll make do. No thanks to my big brother over there.”
Two days later, Ginny passes me in a hallway at work, asks if I have a moment to talk.
The first words she’s said to me since she caught me watching her in the parking lot.
She leads me through the Production warehouse, into a room off the side that I didn’t know was there.
It’s a break room of sorts, rougher than the spaces we have in Finishing and Listening.
She sits on an overturned crate and I do the same.
She stares at the floor for a moment, rubs the back of her neck with her hand. I have a sudden urge to tell her I’m in love with her. How out of nowhere it would seem. How overdue.
“Lionel asked me if I’d help build the coop for Clément,” she says. “I’m happy to help him. I like that sort of thing. But it would mean I’d be around your place, and I don’t know if you’re comfortable with that.”
“Yes,” I say, “that would be fine.”
“I’d stay outside, of course. You don’t even have to come say hello.”
“Ginny,” I say. I want to crawl into her lap. “This is so kind of you. I…” I don’t know how to go on. Another word and I’ll burst into tears.
“You probably assumed already, but just to make it clear, Lionel doesn’t know about anything, with you. I would never tell him.”
“Okay.”
“So now it’ll just be up to me to act normal around you when I’m there.” She smiles but her eyes are sad and she stands to go.
We have four weeks until Clément and Nathalie get home. Lionel’s plan is to build the coop and then cover it in a tarp, wrap it well, say there’s a garden shed underway. I tell him it sounds perfect, to just tell me what I should do.
“Paint,” he says. “It’s your one time all year to do it. Ginny and I will be up here building. We’ve got it under control.”
They unload the wood and chicken wire and tools from Lionel’s truck the next day.
They’ll build three solid walls, one of them with a door.
In the place of the fourth wall will be a sheet of one-inch chicken wire.
The floor will be wood, not dirt. Otherwise, Lionel explains, snakes might come in to take the eggs and the squeakers.
Ginny gets straight to work, laying the tools out on the patio.
She gives a brief wave when she sees me.
This will work, I tell myself. If I keep moving, never linger, careful not to glance at her hands so as not to remember how she touched me.
If I go from home to work to the studio—just quickly into the house to change my clothes or fix something to eat.
I’ve conceptualized a new painting. Even stretched a canvas for it, my biggest yet.
It came to me soon after I thought I saw Felix in the grocery store.
I woke in the night and thought about my chair.
Thought about the wildness of the yard, the seclusion.
Of incongruity. Of green. Of solitude. I found myself outside in the dark, eyes adjusting, making my way past the studio and to the forest part—so long since anyone’s called it that—and pictured the chair out there.
Clean lines, smooth oak. Behind it: the palm, leaning in the way that it does, and the jasmine vine.
I imagined an early evening sky, tall grass, clusters of poppies, dandelion weeds.
The feeling that follows a scream: raw, bereft, relieved.
It’s the weekend now, early afternoon, and Ginny and Lionel are working on the second wall and I’m trying to not look.
I have lunch fixed for them in the refrigerator, waiting.
I won’t join them. I’m carrying my chair outside, stepping carefully so I don’t trip over their tools, past the studio to the edge of the forest part.
I set it down, its brass-tipped legs on the grass and the dirt, as incongruous as I’d imagined.
From the deck off the studio I have the perfect view of it.
And now I’m squeezing paints from the tubes, mixing so many shades of green.
Bright red and cream and the rich brown of soil and the blue of sky until I have enough to begin.
I dip my brush in green, almost touch it to the canvas.
The sound of Ginny and Lionel laughing carries down.
Too close. I need music. I set my brush down.
Miles Davis is on Columbia now. I’ve spent many hours listening to his records in my booth, and he still makes me want to paint.
I walk into the studio and find ’Round About Midnight, put it on the record player and turn up the volume.
There it is—the croon of his trumpet, starting soft and slow. I let it carry me into the painting.
And hours pass, and the shape of the chair and the shrubs and the trees and the sky are blocked out, turning into more than shapes, turning into something—something poetic and alluring—coming through me. Thank God I have this to focus my mind, to stop me from pacing and fretting and wanting.
I barely eat or sleep, have to drag myself away from it and to the plant when the weekend’s over, barely stop in the house when I get home, just change into my painting clothes and work until the colors turn muddy in the last of the light.
A few evenings later, it’s finished. In the morning, I wake and go to the plant, stop into the house when I get home, Lionel and Ginny already hours into their building work.
I’m afraid my painting will seem faded or dull when I go to see it.
Still, I slip on my shoes and walk down the stairs.
Steady myself, step into the studio. I stare for a full twenty minutes.
“Lionel,” I call. He appears from above, white T-shirt and work pants, sweat at his collar and under the arms. “Come see.”
“Damn,” he says, inside. He’s staring. A long moment passes. Another. “You made this?” I laugh. “Ginny,” he calls. “Come down here.”
She peels off her work gloves. Sun low behind her, bare shoulders, open. Waiting for some sign from me.
“Do you want to see my painting?” I ask, and she nods.
She enters my studio for the first time.
Looks around at the walls and my paint-laden palette and my jars of turpentine and linseed oil and my stacks of rags and piles of records and jars of brushes and mountains of paper.
Looks at the bottle of bourbon and the pitcher of water.
Looks at the banner my sisters made me. At the wall where I’ve pinned up colors torn from magazines and reproductions of paintings I love.
At my artist monographs, opened to various pages on the long tabletop under a window.
Then Lionel steps aside for her, tips his chin to my painting.
She sucks in a breath, looking. Her openness turning somber, eyes welling.
“Sorry,” she says. “I just—” She turns her face away.
“Hey,” he says, concern flashing, touching her arm.