The Wide Circumference of Love Read online

  They talked about the end of white rule in Rhodesia and the prospect of majority rule. Diane was optimistic. Gregory, as he lathered his fries with ketchup, wondered if black despotism would replace white tyranny.

  “In the end, Nkrumah became a dictator,” he reminded her.

  He thought America had lucked out with Jimmy Carter as president and didn’t deserve him and predicted one term. They both confessed with whispers and laughter to watching the nighttime soap opera Dallas.

  Parked outside her apartment on Newton Street, Gregory asked Diane for her phone number and she scribbled it on the back of one of his business cards. When she reached for the door he lifted her hand away and kissed her, long, hard, and convincingly.

  Diane had dated fellow attorneys, an ex-client who she’d gotten out of a charge of embezzlement, and a lot of men who were separated, unavailable, or brought with them messy emotional baggage. She was skittish, felt supremely orphaned as she carried grief for her parents and brother in her bones, despite the resolute face she turned to the world.

  Gregory Tate was dangerous. He had stirred in her an original and unfamiliar desire not just for him but for a new version of herself. And besides, she thought, as she slipped into her nightgown that night, she was probably too dark for his family. He was Sixteenth Street, she was southeast. Still unsettled by Gregory’s kiss, and by the memory of how her hands had held his cheeks, wedding his lips more firmly to hers, Diane fumed.

  He was so sure of himself. That confidence, she decided as she brushed her teeth, was vanity and arrogance. The ghosts of her mother and long-gone father would surely walk with her into any room she and Gregory entered and upset everything. By the time she slipped beneath the sheets and plumped her pillow, Diane had convinced herself that she hated Gregory Tate.

  The first call came on Sunday afternoon, twelve hours later. Elusive, fitful sleep had confirmed Diane’s desire to overturn the decision to give Gregory her phone number, and with it, entrée into her life. When he asked her, in a voice full of expectancy, if he could take her out on Saturday, she simply said no.

  “No? Why not? We had a great time last night. I know we did. I wasn’t faking and I know you weren’t either.”

  “I’ve had time to think about it and I’d rather we didn’t go any further.”

  “I’m not proposing; I’m asking you out on a date.”

  “I have a right to my feelings.”

  “All right, if that’s what you want.” And he hung up.

  Implicit in Gregory’s parting words was a promise that he would not call again. But he did. He forced her to lie, to tell him she was preparing for a trial, that she had to go out of town, and he trapped her in the lies saying, “So it’s not really that you’d rather not go any further?”

  “Just leave me alone,” she told him the last and final time he called, and then broke down in tears as she sat looking at the inert phone.

  He had not called in two weeks. Now Diane wondered what she had done.

  “Put that little girl, the one scared to be loved, in check, Diane,” Paula Briscoe said, leaning forward forcefully across her desk. “She’s not who you need to be listening to right now.” As usual Paula was multitasking, lecturing Diane with a withering stare, then standing to search for a law book on the shelves behind her desk.

  “Spare me the psychobabble.”

  “Spare me the bullshit,” Paula said, turning to face Diane, book in hand. “You asked me what you should do and I told you. Give the brother a chance. Unless you don’t think you’re good enough for him, that is.”

  “I never said that and you know it.”

  “I know what you said, and I’ve seen what you do. You’re all tied up in knots. That little girl whose mother was raped and died too young and whose father disappeared, she gets no vote on this. If I can still believe in love, you can, too.”

  “I told you that in confidence, Paula, I wish you wouldn’t use it against me.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t hide behind it.” Paula’s secretary, Louise, entered the office and told her a client had stopped by unannounced. Paula, a small, wiry woman with her hair brushed back in a bun, cast one last long stare at Diane before she followed Louise, pointing a finger at her. “Don’t move, I won’t be long.”

  It was times like this that Diane resented Paula. Paula had established her family law firm in a house in Logan Circle, one of the first female-headed firms specializing in cases of spousal abuse and incest. Diane had mentioned to a friend, who had mentioned to another friend, that she wanted to leave the public defender’s office, and they had arranged for Diane to meet Paula.

  Paula had grown up in West Virginia, married at seventeen, and endured a decade-long marriage of brutal abuse. She’d finally gotten the courage to leave the marriage and move to Richmond, Virginia, where she stayed with an uncle and attended Virginia Commonwealth University and law school at the University of Richmond. It was a brilliant and inspiring story, one that Paula often shared with women’s and judicial groups.

  Eventually, Paula won a three million dollar judgment against the D.C. government on behalf of a group of girls abused in a juvenile detention facility. She wrote articles, gave speeches, and worked with a national group of lawyers to create the language and laws turning spousal abuse from a “family matter” into a crime.

  As Diane sat waiting for Paula to return, she thought how amazing it was that this woman, eight years older, had become her colleague, mentor, and friend. It was Paula who had finally made her a lawyer.

  Working with Paula had helped her to fully embrace family law not as an occupation but as mission. What else could you call standing up for children who had been abused, neglected, or forgotten? She had wanted this. To make an end run around the misery. To staunch the slide into disaster at its source. Not to get a client off, but to secure a space where the courtroom would not become a second home.

  It was demanding work, navigating the nexus of bureaucracies designed to salvage children in need and children in danger and to connect those children with foster care, mental health programs, good schools, counselors, and support for their parents. As guardian ad litem, Diane would represent some children’s interests in the courts for years, along with handling divorce and custody disputes, bloodlettings as awful as some abuse cases.

  Paula’s entrance broke into Diane’s thoughts about a ten-year-old she was representing in court in two hours and about how she had come to Paula to lay down the weight of the enormous desire and fear Gregory had inspired.

  “Where were we?” she asked. “Oh, that’s right. I remember. You forget, I was at that party, Diane. I saw the man. Witnessed the chemistry between you, heard snatches of your conversation with him. I saw your face. Don’t make him pay for something he didn’t do.”

  Several weeks passed. One day, as Diane got off the bus and watched it groan noisily down Fourteenth Street, she looked across the street and there he was, sitting on the steps outside her office. Crossing the street, she clutched her briefcase and marshaled a formidable stride that belied her emotions.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You left me no choice. I couldn’t forget you. If I have to stalk you I will. I don’t usually jump through hoops, but you have brought me to my knees. I’m not ashamed to say it.”

  There was only longing and desire etched on his face. It was the same longing and desire raging inside her, the same longing and desire so different than any other she had felt.

  What was she afraid of? Whatever it was, she stood before Gregory fully in its grasp.

  “You aren’t used to being rejected, are you? To someone telling you no. Not in that safe, secure world you come from. Because of what you look like, who your parents are, who you know.”

  Gregory’s skin flushed, anger warming his face. “I own a business, so forgive me, but I hear no all the time,” he shouted. “‘No, your firm doesn’t have enough experience. No, you don’t know the right person in the mayor�
��s office. No, we can’t trust you with a project this big.’ What are you talking about?” Gregory stood up and gazed at her in befuddlement and disgust. “You are stereotyping me, putting me in a box, when I swore I’d never do that to you. And you don’t even give me a chance to make my case. What kind of lawyer are you?”

  As she watched Gregory walk away, Diane corralled her fast-fading strength, reached in her bag for the keys to the door, and entered her office. This was where she belonged. This was where she was in charge. Her desk was stacked with folders, and she tossed her briefcase into her swivel chair and placed her hands on the desk. She suddenly felt sick. She thought of his laugh—that big, bright, bold laugh—and the feeling of his arms around her waist and suddenly bolted out the door, nearly twisting her ankle running down the front stairs. But he was gone.

  The next day, Diane called information and asked for the phone number of Caldwell & Tate.

  “I want to see you again. Really, I do. I’ll understand if you say no, if you think I’m crazy. It may not seem like it, but I couldn’t forget you either.” This was what she said instead of hello when he picked up.

  “Should I tape this conversation in case I need it in the future?” Gregory laughed.

  “I’d like you to come over for dinner this weekend. More than anything I’d like to start over.”

  “Why should I come? Are you sure you don’t plan to poison me?” She heard the jest in his voice and nearly wept with gratitude.

  “I have to tell you something. It’s about my mother and my father. The night we met I didn’t really tell you the truth.”

  The story was actually a simple one, and as she told Gregory what little she knew, and how long it had taken her to know it, the waters parted between them.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m the scar left from all that,” she said. “The evidence that remains.”

  “And the man was never found?”

  “No. I’ve talked to some local cops about the case but its ancient history to them, a cold case no one’s trying to solve.”

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I’m not that man who hurt your mother and I’m not your father. I just want to get to know you.”

  Chapter Seven

  1978–1979

  When she stopped blockading her emotions, Diane fell in love easily. Love like this was an unknown quantity. She had long assumed she would be an amateur in an expedition like this but soon proved herself a hardy explorer. Gregory and everything about him seemed so expansive. The way he had pursued her. The way he walked into a room with an unsettling flair. The large-scale smile. The handshake that felt like a confidence and a caress. The voice, deep, rich. One that, Diane soon learned everyone told him, belonged to a radio DJ or a crooner of “baby-making music.” When Gregory introduced her to his friends, his arm around her shoulders, Diane stood with him beneath their private spotlight.

  Still, she wondered if Gregory saw the flash of surprise on the faces of some of his female friends when he introduced her. Despite her credentials—Spelman, which counted for a lot because it was a famed HBCU, and NYU, because it was a prestigious white university—Diane despaired of ever possessing the sense of entitlement that Gregory and his friends possessed. They were black like her but their parents and kin had prepared them for the leadership of the race and ownership of their private worlds. It was only in Gregory’s embrace that she did not feel like a tourist.

  Still, in time, Diane settled into loving Gregory as though she had finally crossed the finish line of a marathon. Maybe, she thought, I can be happy.

  Happy like Gregory, beloved by his accomplished family, certain that he would blaze a trail as an architect or die trying, and blessed with a friendship with his partner that he had told Diane had enlarged and ennobled him.

  Of his partner, Mercer Caldwell, Gregory told her, “He is my brother.” And although Gregory told Diane that they shared responsibilities in the firm, he also told her that he felt Mercer was the stronger designer. Mercer was a small man, almost petite, with large, languid eyes. While Gregory was often dressed with a casual ease in tie-less shirts, worn but expensive jackets, and scuffed shoes, Mercer was fastidious, in a business suit each time Diane saw him. His moustache clipped and shaped to give depth to his long chin and sculpted face, Mercer could listen so closely it would seem as though he was deep in meditation.

  One day, Diane stood in the shadow of the steel loins of a Caldwell & Tate project. The new municipal office building would stand at the crossroads of one of the city’s busiest neighborhoods. The showcase building would house the new offices of the city council, and the mayor had decided that he wanted it to be located in the city’s once vibrant black core, as a precursor of what he promised were good times to come. A tailor shop, shoe shop, diner, boutique, jazz club, record store, beauty parlor, and liquor store all occupied the street where this building would stand.

  Gregory had told Diane that he and Mercer were chosen from a pool of over two dozen architects. “We don’t have a crown yet, but so far this is the jewel in it,” he’d said.

  Watching Mercer and Gregory consulting with the project manager a few feet away as workers drove cranes that hoisted beams into the air, Diane now felt a swell of pride knowing that someone she knew, someone she loved, was responsible for all this.

  Gregory had unfolded the blueprint for the building on the hood of his Volkswagen Beetle and explained how what she saw on that paper would become a building. But it was unclear and unfathomable to her. All she knew was that a building would soon stand on this corner and that a sign on the site read: A PROJECT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AND CALDWELL & TATE ARCHITECTS.

  Afterward, the three of them walked across the street to a soul food restaurant. Today Diane had come with an agenda. She had met Mercer before, but they had not talked much and she wanted to find a way for him to tell her who Gregory was. As an attorney, she spent a great deal of time listening to her clients for what their words, their silences, and their expressions told her about their cases; to judges, whose eccentricities and personalities dictated their decisions as much as the law. She knew how to listen, and today she wanted to find a moment when she could ask Mercer questions only he could answer about Gregory.

  They were just about to settle into a booth in the back of the restaurant when Gregory bounded out to visit with a friend he spotted parking his car outside.

  “How did you and Gregory meet?” Diane asked. “He told me his version, but I’m a lawyer so I know there are always multiple versions of the same story.”

  “Am I under oath?”

  “If you want to be.”

  “I studied in the architecture program at Howard a couple of years before Gregory. I had graduated by the time he came in, but I met him at an AIA convention. He and I were damn near the only black faces in the place, and believe me, there were a couple of thousand architects there. Somehow Gregory and I latched on to two other brothers and one night, the four of us skipped the panels and sessions and went up to my hotel room and played poker and ordered room service. We were doing our own networking, not just connecting with the white boys. We were trying to find a way to make a different set of connections. I liked the way Gregory played poker. He played it brash, yet smart. I liked his hunger. Wasn’t too many men I knew who talked about what they were gonna do like they had already done it.

  “I had a little architectural company in Philly I was struggling to make work when I met Gregory. After we met at AIA, I packed up and drove to D.C., stayed with him a couple of weeks till I found my own place, and we set up shop. Caldwell & Tate. I liked that he didn’t just want to design and build, but that he wanted to make a mark, wanted to play in the same sandlot as the big boys. I’d felt the same way for a long time, but I gotta tell you, I hadn’t gotten to the place where I could say it as smooth as Gregory, say it and not give a damn if other Negroes thought I was ‘smelling myself’ or thought I was better than them.

  “Some black ar
chitects feel like they got to stay in the community and improve it one building at a time. They act like if you focus on major projects in a city center you’re turning your back on the people. But Gregory could see that if we could get our name on a major project in the high-rent district, that would reverberate back in the places where our people live. Gregory didn’t see any Mason-Dixon Line in the city. Except to cross it. He’s got that ‘I belong here, wherever here is’ air and potential white clients like that shit. He’s a glad-hander. I come in, slide in really, to close the deal, sign off on everything. And he’s the better designer.”

  “He told me you were the better designer.”

  “I guess that’s the hallmark of a good partnership. All I know is his motto is, ‘Get the job. Get the job. Get the job.’ He’s made it mine. If you can’t get the job, you ain’t got a damn thing. I saw my daddy work for other people all his life, and he told me to be my own boss. Gregory Tate helped me put words to what I was feeling. What I wanted.”

  Mercer leaned forward animatedly, a wry, battered smile flickering across his face. “We decided when we set up shop we weren’t gonna be only Georgia Avenue architects. We plan to leave our mark on this whole city, and especially on the real estate downtown. There’s easily a billion dollars’ worth of boarded-up housing and property in this city right now. All the decay and filth you see downtown, it won’t be like that for long, and we want to be positioned for the turnaround. After being locked out of the action for generations, now we’re getting some of the major building work in this town.”

  Mercer settled back against the booth and eyed Diane closely. “You gave him a real run for the money, sister. At one point, he was talking about me coming over to your office to plead his case. Vouch for him with references and such.” Mercer laughed.