We got one of them fancy-ass phones that chimes out a different music tone for every digit you tap. It aggravates me every time I ring out on it, but it come with the apartment, and we ain’t suppose to change nothing. I tapped out 1-2-1-2 for New York City and traced my finger down my file card to Joy’s number which I don’t know off by heart, ’cause she changed it quite regular, and I didn’t know the new one. But I lost my confidence after it rang once and put the receiver back. ’S‘pose Rex picks up the phone?’ the devil in me said, though I hadn’t ever known it to happen during all the years Joy’d been knowing him. Spoiled as he was with secretaries and assistants and God-knows-who-all he employed to wipe his nose and his behind, he probably ain’t picked up his own phone in them twenty years. All that fame and money can affect a man like two worms boring their way through a apple and leaving it rotten to the core, so ain’t no place for it but the garbage heap. Which is what must of happened to Rex.
When he was young, I understood what Joy saw in him ’cause he was a nice looking boy, being half Comanche. That rudey color he had in his cheeks all the year round made them strange turquoise blue eyes of his stand out even though they was set way back in his deep eye sockets and seemed even more so cause of his high cheekbones. But as he got older, he got gaunt looking and the big dark circles ’round his eyes made him look sickly to me, though it seems that half the white women in the South would shout me down disagreeing.
There’s been times when I’ve seen him singing on the television wearing a cowboy hat and it’s been hard to tell that he’s past forty. But when his gray hair is showing his age is a dead giveaway, though like Joy says, he’s had some gray strands since she met him when he was twenty-five or so. But nowadays when I take a close up look with my magnifying glasses at pictures of him in the Enquirer, it shows that his skin is starting to sag around the jawline, and all the cowboy hats in Texas can’t hide that.
In the beginning I was relieved that Joy took to somebody that was as nice to her as Rex was, ’cause he was always buying her things though not expensive and had that limo of his pick her up and drop her off anytime she was with him. But like I reminded Joy at the time, don’t go falling in love with no limousine, ’cause it won’t never propose to you. But when Tammy told me not to discourage Joy from going around with Rex, I knew all Tammy was seeing was them dollar signs hanging over Rex’s head. ’Cause I agreed with my baby sister Helen who said wasn’t no white guy with that much money gonna do nothing for Joy but fill her full of baby and run off. And to tell the truth, she’d of been lucky if he’d of done that much.
Joy should have found herself a nice colored fella and been married and driving a stationwagon full of her own children. But she was always trying to appease her mama somehow, though as far as I could see Tammy didn’t try to do nothing to please Joy. Tammy didn’t want daughters, she wanted stars: somebody to make her feel important, so she could act like she was a big shot herself. I could see that soon as the girls had their hit ‘Chocolate Chip’, and all ’a sudden she was bragging about ‘my three daughters this, and my three daughters that’.
I stood looking out my kitchen window with the phone at my ear, and I was feeling both mad and numb. Looking but not seeing and listening but not hearing, and whereas the sight of folks seven stories down heading for their work usually got me raring to get into gear and start my chores, I didn’t feel up to doing nothing. It seemed like there wasn’t enough strength in me to tap out Tammy’s phone number and I was staring blank not wanting to talk or be talked to. So when I did finally ring Tammy’s, I was praying her line would be busy. But it wasn’t and I got agitated to hear a man’s voice saying, ‘Hello. O’Mara residence.’
‘Is that you Jesse?’ I asked.
‘Baby Palatine?’ I normally liked to hear Jesse’s furry Southern voice, because something about the tone reminded me of my brother Caesar’s voice. Though Caesar’s been dead sixteen years, I can still remember what he sounded like everytime I talk to Jesse.
‘Baby Palatine?’ Is that you?’ Jesse asked again, ’cause I still hadn’t answered.
I didn’t want to talk to him and had to try to think of what to say. I can’t stand for somebody I don’t know good to be giving me sympathy, and I was nervous he would say something mushy about me losing Joy.
Meaning to sound spry, like wasn’t nothing upsetting me, I said, ‘I thought Tammy said you wasn’t home?’
‘A few of us retired dudes that used to go to school together have a regular rummy game on Monday nights, and if we have a few beers, I sometimes feel like I shouldn’t get behind the wheel to drive home.’
Joy once told me that the only thing that irritated her about her mama’s husband was that he wanted to do everything by the book and never stopped being a cop. Not even at the breakfast table, ’cause the things he wanted to talk about that he spotted in the morning papers was all cop stuff. And she said he was always going on about being law-abiding and wanting his family to be. And while Joy wasn’t one to rush around breaking rules for the sake of it, she didn’t pay taxes, nor parking tickets and would speed anytime she thought she could get away with it. ’Cause she didn’t never do nothing that she wasn’t sure she could get away with.
Jesse’s voice wouldn’t quit in my ear. ‘I’d knocked back a few scotches and thought I should bed down on my buddy Edgar’s sofa which is where I was sleeping when Tammy tracked me down, so I don’t know why she made such a big deal of my not coming home like some great mystery was involved. I often don’t come home or call after the rummy game, and leave the number of whoever’s house I’m playing at on the kitchen table. Just like I did last night before I drove the car out of the garage.’
He could have rambled on talking about nothing for a hour, as long as I didn’t have to answer. For one thing, I was relieved not to have to talk to Tammy … until he explained that I couldn’t even if I wanted to.
‘I gave Tammy a sedative and put her to bed,’ he said. ‘She laid there watching the news before she finally dozed off. I think she’s expecting to hear a report about Joy dying, and I didn’t want to tell her that I think that with the girls not having a hit in ten years, it’s unlikely that anybody even remembers them. Let alone will report it on the television.’ For somebody who, according to Joy, was supposed to be quiet, I was surprised Jesse didn’t draw breath. ‘Tammy told me that you’d be phoning and that she’d managed to tell you the shocking news. Sad. So sad, when young people die.’
Tammy’s husband or not, I hadn’t never set eyes on Jesse and though I didn’t want to be mean and think on him as no stranger since him and Tammy’d been married over two years, I wasn’t ready to think on him as family neither, and definitely didn’t want him telling me the details about Joy.
So when he said, ‘I can only tell you what I know myself which is not a hell of a lot,’ I wanted to stop him, ’cause he didn’t know Joy good enough to have real feeling for her. Though Richmond ain’t far from New York City, she didn’t bother to visit him and her mama but three times in as many years. What I was wanting to say didn’t come out though, ’cause another lump was welling up in my throat so I couldn’t speak, and while I pretended to listen to Jesse mouth on, what I was actually thinking about was that he was the only man I knew of that Tammy let into her life or her bed after John Dagwood up and left her in the middle of the first year when her and the kids lived opposite me and Freddie B in Oakland. She never said as much, but a blind man could of seen that she pined and nursed her broken heart like somebody normal would nurse a coronary thrombosis. I thought it was selfish and a waste with them children needing them a nice stepdaddy … somebody decent to help her give them the extras that they had to do without unless they got ’em off me and Freddie.
All these thirty years, I haven’t breathed a word to nobody about the reason Dagwood disappeared or what I’d said to him to make him leave. As it was me, who didn’t have no choice