When You Dance With The Devil Page 2

  By supper time, she had become well acquainted with the view from her window. The park that faced her, a wide open space with scattered trees, a pond, flowers, a narrow, river-like stream that was host to a small bridge. And she could see the edge of the bay. It was a place where a person could be free to embrace the world.

  “Don’t be so fanciful,” she admonished herself as twilight set in and, in the distance, she could see fireflies and hear croaking bullfrogs. “It looks good, but it may turn out to be like everything else: something to sap your will, eat up your energy, and consume you. I’m not getting attached to anybody or anything.”

  She dreaded supper, for it meant meeting ten strangers, and after having seen three of them in the lounge, she’d as soon eat her food in her room. But that wasn’t an option, so she washed her face and hands, added a lip gloss, combed out her hair—mama had insisted that she braid it or wear it in a knot at the back of her head—and trod down the stairs. The laughter and talking reached her before she got to the bottom step. After a deep breath, she laid her shoulders back and headed for the dining room. At the door, she saw an empty seat at one table, judged that to be her only option, and took it.

  Total quiet ensued, and she gazed at the empty plate before her, certain that all ten of the boarders were staring at her. But when Fannie finished saying grace, the chatter resumed.

  “That’s my biscuit, Miss,” a man beside her said. “Yours are over there on the left where your fork is.”

  Heat flushed her face and neck. “Sorry,” she murmured.

  “Oh, that’s all right. Where’re you from?”

  “Hagerstown.”

  “That’s a nice city. How long you staying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “My name’s Joe Tucker. What’s yours?”

  “Jolene,” she said, barely loud enough for him to hear it. Joe turned his attention to Judd Walker, who she’d seen in the lounge that afternoon. What kind of man slicked his hair with conkaline? Her mama would have dismissed as worthless any black man who straightened his hair. She glanced at Joe’s fingernails and wondered; they looked like the work of a manicurist. He was a big man, too, she mused, at least six feet four inches tall, and wearing a red corduroy shirt, at that. She shook her head from side to side. “Mama always said, ‘It takes all kinds,’ and maybe it does.” She concentrated on her plate.

  At least the food was tasty, Jolene thought and, even if it hadn’t been, at least she didn’t have to cook it. She focused on the food and didn’t allow her gaze to meet anyone else’s. As soon as she finished the strawberry shortcake, she left the table with the intention of escaping to her room. However, she remembered having seen newspapers in the lounge and went there to get one.

  “Where’re you going?” Fannie asked, effectively waylaying her. “We all sit here in the lounge after supper and have coffee or tea and watch the reality shows.”

  “Well . . . I’ve, uh . . . had a long day and—”

  Fannie’s knotted right fist went to her hip. “Listen, Jolene, if you’re going to stay here with us, you must try to be friendlier. You walked in tonight and didn’t say hello or anything else, and then you walked out without saying excuse me, good night, cat, dog or pig. And Jolene, please don’t blot your lipstick with my napkins. It’s hard to get it out.”

  Jolene’s stomach began to churn the way it had when her mother berated her. She swallowed the liquid that accumulated in her mouth and reminded herself that Emma Tilman was gone.

  “If I’ve done something to offend you, Fannie, please find a better way to let me know.” She reached down, scooped up the newspaper and headed up the stairs. Nobody is going to tongue lash me, and if Fannie tries it again, she’ll find out what it’s like. She hadn’t remembered that the napkins were linen because her mama used paper napkins, and she’d wiped her mouth automatically. Embroiled in misery, Jolene sat on the edge of the bed, holding her belly with both hands and rocking herself. She didn’t remember having eaten in the company of that many people before. What was she supposed to do and say? It had required all the courage she could summon just to walk to that chair and sit down. She took out her tablet and made some notes. If I have to learn how other people live, she said to herself, I’d better start now.

  Thousands of miles away in Geneva, Switzerland, Richard Peterson sat alone in his elegant wood-paneled office eating lunch at a mahogany desk that sprawled across more than one-quarter of his thirty-foot-wide office. Alone and staring at Mont Blanc, a rare picture-perfect vision on a brilliant sunny day. Alone in the flesh and alone in the spirit. Although born in Brooklyn near the bottom of the heap, by the age of forty-five, tall, handsome, and polished, Richard had scaled the top. However, on the way to becoming an ambassador and, subsequently, executive-director of one of the largest and most prestigious nongovernmental organizations, he ruthlessly trampled his competitors, ignored underlings who needed his help, and used women for his own ends without regard to their feelings or needs. He also became a snob, a trim, six-foot-four-inch, good-looking and flawlessly dressed snob.

  Richard recognized the justice of his own tragedy: a powerful man with no interest in or will to use his power. He glanced at the copy of the New York Daily News that his secretary placed beside his luncheon tray and saw the notice of Estelle Mitchell’s marriage. The account merely confirmed what he had known for months: she was lost to him forever. He stopped eating, leaned back in his swivel desk chair, and made a pyramid of his fingers.

  Hadn’t he brought it on himself with his craftiness, his insistence on treating her as he had all other women, as a person undeserving of his integrity, a woman to be used? This, in spite of the fact that she was his equal in status and position. But Estelle Mitchell had not succumbed to his charm, nor was she bamboozled by his lovemaking, and it was she with whom he had fallen in love—and too late to correct his behavior. She wanted no part of him.

  “Come in.” He sat up straight, brushed his fingers through his semi-straight curls and angled his square-jawed face toward the door.

  “Mr. Pichat from France is here to see you sir. He has a two o’clock appointment,” Marlene Gupp, his secretary, said.

  He wiped his mouth with the white linen napkin, and gestured toward the tray. “Would you remove this, please, Marlene? What does Pichat want? I don’t remember.”

  Her eyebrows shot up in an expression of disbelief that he had witnessed often in recent weeks. “Sir, it’s about our contribution to the five-year plan.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He didn’t see how he could continue the façade, the superficiality, the automatic grins and empty smiles, the shallow women. He no longer cared about the job. He dealt with important world problems that deserved more able attention than he or his cohorts were bringing to it. Oh, what the hell! It wasn’t working, and he wanted out. Maybe he would regret it, but he was tired of it all. And to think of the things he’d done in order to sit in that chair, eat at that desk and see Mont Blanc from that window. He’d give anything if . . . He couldn’t tolerate the man he had become.

  He pasted a smile on his face and stood when Yves Pichat entered. “This is a pleasure, my friend,” he said. “Would you like coffee, a glass of Chablis or something stronger?” More shamming. He’d done it so long and so well that he wasn’t sure who he was.

  Pichat took a seat. “Chablis would be fine. My wife wants to go to the Caribbean before it gets too warm, and you were ambassador to Jamaica. Where should she go and what should she take along?”

  Wasn’t it always the same? Important men in important jobs running errands for their wives when they should be working to relieve the world’s poor. He let a grin expose his white teeth. “How’s Michelle? I’ve got some fliers and brochures here that ought to do the trick.” He opened the bottom desk drawer, gave the man the material and prayed that he would be satisfied and leave.

  “I presume you’ve accepted the invitation to our official reception for the prime minist
er? If you’re not there, the single women will want Michelle’s head. Some of the married ones, too, I imagine.”

  Richard lifted his right shoulder and let it fall in a show of diffidence. “You give me too much credit, man.”

  Pichat left without mentioning the five-year plan or waiting for his Chablis. The man’s visit reminded Richard of the reasons he had begun to alter his way of life. Sick of its shallowness, he had begun to reject the high social life that he had once relished, indeed thrived on, to eat his lunch alone at his desk and to confine social interaction to what the job required. He stood at a precipice looking down at the great unknown, his life’s great divide into periods BE and AE, the era before Estelle rejected him and the period after she walked out of his life for good. A watershed, and he had to live with it. If he had known the price would be so high, would he have lived differently? He thought so.

  “What do you mean, you aren’t going to seek reelection?” The executive-director of a sister nongovernmental organization asked Richard as they strolled along the banks of Lac Leman one March evening at sunset.

  “Just that. I’ve had enough. I’m going back to the states.”

  “Hmm. Wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain assistant S-G in New York, would it?”

  “Only indirectly. She’s in the past.”

  “Yes. I know. Where’re you planning to settle?”

  “A small town somewhere, preferably near the ocean or at least near a large lake or big river. I need to live near the water.”

  “I know just the place. It’s a small town in Maryland right on the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve vacationed there a couple of times, and when I retire I’m going to settle there.” He wrote something on a card and handed it to Richard. “Don’t let the name fool you. It’s a great place if you don’t want your own house or apartment.”

  “May be just what I’m looking for. Thanks, friend.”

  Lean, fit, and self-confident, as usual, Richard stepped out of the taxi—a bedraggled vehicle that had seen better days—and looked up at the big white green-shuttered house before him. If he got back in that automobile and headed for the luxury he knew he’d find in Ocean City, he would defeat the purpose of his trip. He’d try it for a few days.

  “It’s a nice place, sir,” the driver, an aged and whiskered black man, assured him. “We all know Miss Fannie, a good God-fearing woman who’ll mother any human she comes across. She’ll take good care of you. If I had time, I’d go in and see if I could buy a few biscuits.”

  Richard counted out the fare and added a five-dollar bill for a tip. “She’s a good cook?”

  “Somebody there is.” He tipped his old seaman’s cap. “Thank you kindly. If you need a ride, just ask Miss Fannie for Dan. She’ll call me.”

  Richard put a bag under his right arm, picked up another one with his right hand, took a third one in his left hand and headed up the walk. Just before he reached the door, Fannie stepped out.

  “Glad you got here safe and sound, Mr. Peterson. I’m Fannie Johnson.” She reached for the bag in his left hand.”

  “Oh, I can manage this,” he said, startled that she would attempt to relieve him of his heavy load. The women to whom he had become accustomed wouldn’t consider relieving a man of a burden. “You just hold the door.”

  “I’ll show you your room. We can talk on the way upstairs.” She punched what proved to be an intercom button. “Rodger, would you please come and take Mr. Peterson’s bags up to his room.”

  He appreciated a business-like person, but the litany of regulations that rolled off the woman’s tongue made him nervous. “At least I’m allowed to have wine with my dinner,” he said, offering a mild protest.

  “It’s late for lunch, but I can get you a sandwich. Ham or turkey?”

  “If you have any warm biscuits, I’d like the ham.”

  “Be downstairs in fifteen minutes. Your food will be on the dining room table. We use first names here. I’m Fannie. May we call you Richard?”

  Taken aback by her casual use of his first name, a frown clouded his face. “Uh, well . . . yes, of course.”

  She looked hard at him before adding “Been a long time since I had a full house.” With that she strode out of the room and swished down the stairs singing, “How Great Thou Art,” a religious song that he’d heard his mother sing at least a hundred times.

  He looked at his suitcases and remembered that for the last ten years, his butler had packed and unpacked his bags, hung his clothes and seen to his laundry and dry cleaning. With a quick shrug, he walked over to the window for a view of his surroundings and gasped. There before him lay the vast expanse of ocean, or maybe it was a bay, but beyond the shore, he could see nothing but water. His gaze took in the room, a neat and graciously furnished, though not luxurious, chamber. Beige and white. He liked that. After inspecting the bathroom, he decided that if everything else suited him as well, he’d stay a while.

  Richard ambled downstairs and wandered around until he found the dining room. He stood transfixed at the door, for seeing the twelve places set for a meal discombobulated him. He hadn’t counted on being a member of a community of strangers. His plan had been to stow himself away in a quiet place, write his memoirs, and figure out what to do with the rest of his life, a life that didn’t include Estelle Mitchell.

  “Come on, sit down before these biscuits get cold,” a plump and heavy-hipped black woman in a white dress and apron said to him. “You must be our new boarder. I’m Marilyn, and if you want to eat good, you got to treat me right.” She flashed him a smile. A flirtatious smile. The weapon of a woman who knew how to handle men. “What’s your name?”

  “Peterson.”

  She put her hands on her hips and looked at him from beneath lowered lashes. “That your first name?”

  As his gaze swept over her, he remembered that they didn’t know who he was or how he was accustomed to being treated. “My first name is Richard.”

  Her white teeth glistened, and the dimple in her left cheek winked at him. For a woman who had to be in her late fifties, this one was a piece of work. But she was also the kind of woman he’d played with in his philandering days, and before he realized what he was doing, his right arm went around her shoulder and the grin that had always accompanied his bursts of charisma captured his face.

  “I plan to eat well,” he said. “Very well.” What the hell am I doing encouraging this woman? This sort of thing is behind me. He pulled a curtain of solemnity over his face. “I’d better get to those biscuits while they’re still warm.”

  “Not to worry, honey. I can always heat ’em up.” She left and returned with a glass of iced tea and a dish of raspberry cobbler. “Do you have any diet problems like no fat, no salt, vegetarian?” she asked.

  “Uh, no. I eat anything except rhubarb, chitterlings, and brains.” He thanked her for the food and, after eating, looked at the two new keys Fannie gave him and struck out for the beach. He’d heard it said that a leopard didn’t change its spots but, by damn, his days of taking women for the sport of it were behind him.

  With his shoes in his hands, Richard stood on the sandy beach and stared out at the ocean. He couldn’t see anyone or anything but water. Shading his eyes from the sun’s rays, his thoughts went to Estelle and what he wouldn’t give to frolic there with her knowing that she was his. He shook himself out of it and headed back to the boarding house.

  What did a man do with his spare time in Pike Hill? As he walked back to his new home, it occurred to him that he hadn’t seen a building more than three stories high, no public transportation, and that there were very few moving automobiles. Well, he had wanted a change, and he had one now. The problem was what he’d do with it.

  Over the last ten years, he had dressed for dinner every evening, and fifty percent of the time he wore a tuxedo. He shook the sand out of his socks, threw them on the closet floor, washed up and looked through a suitcase for something to put on. He settled on a blue dress shirt with the co
llar open and an oxford gray suit. He put a red tie in the pocket of his jacket in case he needed it, grabbed the second section of The Maryland Journal and walked down the stairs—he had always loved a winding staircase—to the dining room. A peep from where he stood at the door assured him that he didn’t need the tie, that, indeed, a pair of Wranglers would have been adequate.

  He looked around for a place to sit, saw an empty table for two in the corner and rushed to claim it. Rodger, the porter who carried his bags to his room, had become a waiter, and he nodded slightly to the man who greeted him as would an old friend.

  “How far’d you go down the bay this afternoon? I tried to ketch ya to tell you not to get your feet wet. We got a lot of jellyfish right now, and I tell you those buggers can sting. Fore you know it, you’ll be hobbling back here with your feet feelin’ like they on fire. Cook’s got some mighty good shrimp soufflé to start, or would you rather have oyster chowder?”

  “What? Does she serve things like that every evening?”

  Rodger’s broad grin exposed his gold left bicuspid. “If you like fish and seafood, the eatin’ here is real good. Soul food ain’t bad either. Marilyn’s a fine cook, and she’s got a real good helper.”

  “I’ll take the chowder.” Rodger left, and Richard opened his newspaper, as he would have done if dining alone in a restaurant.

  A brown skirt appeared beside the table, and he looked up into Fannie’s frowning face. “Richard, everybody’s looking at you. This isn’t a restaurant. We’re all family here, and we don’t read the paper during meals; we talk to each other. I’m gonna say grace, and then I’ll introduce you and my other new boarder. A glance around the room and his gaze caught the other uncomfortable person in the room.