The Wide Circumference of Love Read online

  Also by Marita Golden

  FICTION:

  After

  The Edge of Heaven

  Gumbo: An Anthology of African-American Writing

  And Do Remember Me

  A Woman’s Place

  Long Distance Life

  NONFICTION:

  Living Out Loud: A Writer’s Journey

  The Word

  It’s All Love: Black Writers on Soul Mates, Family, and Friends

  Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey Through the Color Complex

  A Miracle Every Day: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers

  Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World

  Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write About Race

  Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues: Black Women Writers on Love, Men, and Sex

  Migrations of the Heart: A Memoir

  Copyright © 2017 by Marita Golden

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-735-7

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-736-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  The words hurl through his lips with a familiar bad taste. His fingers clutch the cool, round object filling his palm. He twists it and pulls. Releasing the orb that he no longer understands is a doorknob, he kicks the stubborn thing looming before him, kicks it hard over and over, then turns from its unmoving gaze. He paces in circles, in straight lines, frenetic and relentless movement. This feeling, dizzying now, pumps into his blood, unearths a fury of words he cannot marshal. Words that are slimy, slippery, burn inside him like a house on fire.

  The tattered calendar in his mind reads March 2, 1978. That day. A story that he sees in a million little pieces. There is no beginning, middle, or end to that day; there is only what he would say if he remembered.

  He is late for the meeting.

  He imagines Mercer cursing in that slow-cured Virginia drawl, “Where the hell you at, Slim? If I can get my black ass here on time, then I know you ain’t making me wait.”

  Their proposal to design an office building in the U Street corridor—still boarded up, on its knees, and destroyed in the days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—is finally being considered. Today. Caldwell & Tate needs a break. A big one. He has to make this meeting. He has practiced what he will say. This is the project. He is ready to go.

  A pain tightens his temples. To soothe the invasion, he rubs his hands over and over as though washing them and paces the wooden floor in slippered feet. The words now a mumble. Fatigue paralyzes each attempt to move and he slumps on the floor as the words dissolve into a creaky whisper. There is wetness on his cheeks. His mind is the devil. Tears.

  He no longer knows what they are.

  Chapter One

  SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

  The footsteps echoed all night long. Her husband, wandering through the terrain of the house they had shared for thirty-five years. A house that for him no longer held memories. A house that he no longer recognized as home.

  Locked in the bedroom they once shared, Diane Tate lay in the dark listening to the stuttering dance of footsteps that revealed the path of her husband’s halting circumnavigation.

  Even at sixty-two, she still possessed a young mother’s ears. Once able to hear three rooms away, a quarter mile in the distance, or among the voices of a dozen others for the singular cry of her children, Lauren and Sean, now with the same instinctive precision, she heard Gregory anywhere in the house. Silence was the fear now, for if Gregory was not beside her or near her, then he might be gone.

  Midnight: his feet hit the hardwood mahogany floor in the den where he now slept. Twelve forty-five: a muffled stomping shook the carpeted floorboards of the living room, its side tables and mantel crowded with photos of the children Diane had borne and they had raised, faces imprinted with Gregory’s high forehead and strong jaw. One o’clock: she heard the lighthearted jingle of the small bell attached to the front door as Gregory tried to leave the house.

  Punching in the four-digit security code to impose a preventive lockdown was Diane’s final nightly ritual, begun months earlier when her slumber was severed by a flood of premonition. A throbbing, cataclysmic knowledge had roused her and she’d run downstairs, opened the front door, and raced barefoot in her nightgown beneath a still dark, early morning April sky to find Gregory, his pajama-clad frame rounding a nearby corner.

  Now, Diane tossed aside the lightweight thermal blanket and prepared to get out of bed when she heard the bell stop its tinny vibrations. The silence that followed was interminable until finally there was the sound of Gregory’s defeated footsteps heading away from the door.

  Diane granted herself a reprieve and slid back beneath the sheet and blanket. She surrendered to the embrace of the bed that was hiding place and refuge. Yet sleep was impossible as early morning raced toward dawn.

  Two forty-five: the oven door slammed shut. Each evening before she went to bed she unplugged the microwave and the stove. Sharp knives were locked away in a drawer to which only she had the key, an action taken the day she found Gregory shaving with a paring knife, oblivious to the blood trickling down his neck. Three thirty: the gurgling, boisterous flush of the toilet down the hall echoed. This did not mean that Gregory had used the toilet. Four o’clock: the leather-slippered feet padded back to the den. She imagined rather than heard Gregory lay down. Half an hour later, sleep now firmly out of her grasp, she rose from her bed and walked barefoot down the stairs, past an array of photographs—their wedding in the sanctuary of Metropolitan AME Church; Lauren, back then bespectacled and toothy in her Girl Scout uniform; Sean at his high school graduation in black robes, his eighteen-year-old smile self-effacing and unsure, arms hugging Gregory’s and Diane’s shoulders; the framed Washington Post article about Gregory and his partner Mercer, standing before their award-winning signature building, the city’s main library, only eight blocks from the White House; Gregory kissing Diane at the conclusion of her installation as a judge for the family court division of the D.C. Superior Court.

  The photos trailed to the den where Diane opened the door and saw Gregory finally asleep, swathed in a wrinkled checkered shirt and khakis, an outfit he had insisted on wearing every day for the past week. She had consigned her husband to this room and slept behind a locked bedroom door ever since the afternoon he struck her, nearly giving her a black eye. The room’s walls were filled with paintings bought during their travels, separate and together, masks from Nigeria and Ivory Coast full-lipped with feathers and carvings designed to evoke and invoke spirits springi
ng both from heaven and hell. Mementos from Cuba, Turkey, and Israel filled the shelves along with the awards Gregory and Mercer had won over the years. A faded blueprint of the first building they had designed occupied one wall.

  Diane padded over to the fold-out bed. Gregory lay asleep atop the rumpled sheets, mouth open, his lips caked with spittle. He snored, a volcanic staccato that seemed to threaten to choke him. His arms were wide—either in supplication or defeat, she could not tell which, for either captured what lay before them. She gently sat down on the bed, stunned as always, by the sight of his massive, thick shock of hair that had turned white in the four years since the diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer’s. She buried her fingertips in the gray and white beard that she could not convince him to let her help him shave or trim. She gazed upon this stranger. This husband. Gazed at him in the early morning quiet with pity, love, revulsion, guilt, and shame, steeling her eyes shut for a moment to quell that reflexive storm of emotions that often singed her heart.

  Scattered around Gregory like finds from an archeological dig were his “friends”—a small teddy bear with a checkered ribbon around its neck that had arrived last year with a bouquet of roses sent by a friend for her birthday, a pad of bright orange Post-it notes, an egg-shaped marble paperweight, an inch-tall wooden carved elephant, and a set of keys. During the day, Gregory obsessively moved the objects from windowsill to mantel to kitchen countertop.

  The teddy bear was now odorous, dirty and soiled, with an eye and the nose missing, the Post-it notes on which Gregory had scrawled crude markings that resembled nothing more than a figurative nightmare, were scattered like crumbs around his body. Numbers and letters, the set of keys to his Lexus, his office, and this house were objects whose purpose he no longer knew.

  The beginnings of dawn filtered through the curtains, warming the room. Diane sat and dared a long, courageous look at her husband. In several hours she would take him to Somersby where he would become a resident of the facility’s memory care unit. She did not want to cry but felt the tears where they always began, in her groin, a tight-fisted, fierce tumult. She did not want to cry, was aghast that there were tears left, but just like that, her eyes were damp and she was bobbing in the undertow of a torrent of terror and sadness.

  Chapter Two

  Lauren stood staring out the floor-to-ceiling window that showcased the Capitol dome captured against the gray sky. All morning, since she’d risen two hours ago to meet this dreadful day, she had been cold and trembling, yearning for a warmth that had nothing to do with heat or temperatures.

  She’d been spending twelve-hour days at Caldwell & Tate followed sometimes by twelve-hour nights watching over her father, protecting and feeding him, to relieve her mother, who had already performed her shift. Tying a bib around the neck of Gregory Tate. Wiping spittle from the lips of Gregory Tate. Leaning on the man who had held her up. Helping Gregory Tate remember a plate from a fork.

  It was through his eyes that she scaffolded and defined her place in the world. He had made her who she was. Who she wanted to be. Daddy’s girl, the architect. By the age of ten, she’d possessed an intuitive sense of the beauty in structures, how to judge it, how to know when it wasn’t there. At sixteen, her father had taken her on a trip to Chicago where he was to make a presentation for a mixed-use development in Hyde Park. It was spring in the city, but winter had been unyielding and the lake was pockmarked with small islands of ice. A boat tour unveiled the elegance of the Chicago skyline, and as she sat beside her father, snuggling against him for warmth and love and approval, the skyline looked grand above and around them, each building in dialogue with its neighbor, their symmetry, color, width, and depth shaped into a perfect statement of intelligence and art. That was the happiest moment of her young life. A world of skyscrapers whose hold she never wanted to leave. That was the moment Lauren knew she would follow her father into his world.

  A test in high school confirmed what she already knew, that she loved math and art and found them compatible and codependent. Her classmates read books, watched TV and movies; she drew floor plans for houses and rooms that bloomed in her imagination. Blueprints fascinated her—the minutiae, the hundreds of details on the page that represented everything from a door or a light fixture, to a wall or a screw an eighth of an inch wide. Creating them, she was intellectually fulfilled, sublimely lost and eternally found.

  She told her father she wanted to be an architect and that’s when they created a world of their own, in which she was daughter and mentee and he was father and mentor. A world that set them apart in the family circle. A world with its own language and vision, passions and rules. She listened quietly and studiously at the dinner table as her father talked about fellow architects, complained about shoddy workmanship, discussed the bids he and Mercer prepared. By her junior year in high school, he allowed her to sit inconspicuously in meetings at Caldwell & Tate where she watched him make presentations.

  When she graduated from Cornell University’s School of Architecture, the following evening over dinner at a restaurant in Manhattan’s Little Italy, her father had leaned toward her, kissed her on the cheek, and whispered, “You aren’t just my daughter now, you are my eyes, my memory, and all my hunger, too. Now you know who I am.”

  And who was he? She had indeed become his eyes, his memory, and everything else. And what she remembered about him from years before was hers alone, but what she saw now was too unbearable to claim. Yet she claimed it every day because he was her father. He gave her life. He’d given her his life. Eventually, she’d stepped into her father’s shoes and joined his firm. She had to learn how to walk in his path.

  Today, a phalanx of caretakers and strangers awaited her father at Somersby. This day was a severing that already felt bloody and raw.

  Lauren reached for her cell phone on the kitchen counter, wondering if she had somehow missed her mother’s call. When she checked her phone and saw that she hadn’t, Lauren went into the living room and slumped onto the sofa. Her mind brought forth the day she found her father standing in the middle of the bedroom he and her mother then still shared. He stood urinating, staring in wonder at his flaccid penis, which he was shaking up and down to dislodge the final drops as they fell onto the carpeted floor. When he sensed her presence, he merely wiped his palms on his pants, left his member poking out of his unzipped pants crotch, and gazed at her in unmasked triumph. Lauren shook her head, but still remembered the twinkle in her father’s eyes as he’d stood there, the puddle inching closer to his stockinged feet.

  Closing her eyes against that memory, Lauren hugged herself tight. The feel of her own staunch embrace conjured thoughts of Gerald. She woke this morning alone but not alone like before. Her sheets, body, and bed were drenched in the perfume of what she had daringly begun to call love. Gerald had dressed and kissed her good-bye sometime around midnight. He was her lifeline. Until they’d met, everything had felt like the end. Every day an unwilling act of closure. In the past three months, he had given her the courage to think that nothing ever really ended. Every conclusion was finish line and launching pad. That’s how he thought. That’s how he talked.

  “Call me as soon as it’s done,” he’d whispered last night as he kissed her good night and good-bye, leaning over her prone, sated, and sleepy figure. “Even if I don’t answer because I’m in a meeting, text me. I want to hear how it went.”

  The shaved gleaming head, the gold earring in one lobe, the musculature primed by hours in the gym. All that poise and sensual assurance had been the first line of his offense when they’d met in a smoky, dark club in Northeast. One of those cavernous places, all noise, sound, sofas, and table islands—a setting for fake intimacy. She’d been there with Whitney and Marla. He’d been watching her, staring at her really, from the crowded circular bar. What had he noticed? The black sequined top she wore, low-cut and inviting, or her eyes, which Marla had made up so dramatically that Lauren had not recognized herself in the mirror?

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p; Gray suit, black shirt open at the neck. He was friendly, almost brotherly, as he slid onto the plush purple sofa and introduced himself, asked their names, and repeated Lauren’s several times as though testing it out before he extended his hand and asked if he could buy her a drink, if they could find, as he called it, “their own oasis” somewhere in the club.

  Gerald had taken her hand and did not let it go as he navigated a path for them through the wall of bodies. Their oasis was in a patch of open space on the crowded balcony overlooking the warehouses, budget motels, and traffic along New York Avenue. They were outside, beneath a dark sky whose face, Lauren noticed as if for the first time ever, was flecked with a multitude of stars. They sat at a table being cleared by a dreadlocked waitress.

  She hadn’t had a date, a kiss, or sex in over two years due to the demands of caring for her father and her increased workload at the firm. All the men at Caldwell & Tate were married or already taken and she lacked the nerve for online dating. It was easier to be alone. Lauren had thought all of this as she settled into the seat facing Gerald. She was parched, on edge, self-conscious.

  “So you know since this is D.C., my first question has to be what do you do?”

  “Does it have to be?” Her heartbeat thudded at the sound of herself, ironic and sassy. Who was this woman?

  “No, but that’s as good a place as any to start, don’t you think?”

  “My mother would probably say a background check would be better.”

  His laughter was a thunderclap. She laughed in response and uncrossed her legs beneath the table. The waitress appeared, anointing them both with an intimate smile. Had she heard their banter? Did the waitress know that Lauren was nearly whirling inside with delight?

  “I’ll have a bourbon—and you?” he’d asked.

  “White wine.”

  The waitress placed tiny white napkins before them both and went to the table behind them.