Rising Tides. Emilie Richards
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her arms akimbo as she shouted the lyrics and began to Charles ton. Her feet flew, her hands flew, her short, dark curls whipped against her cheeks.
The room broke into applause as she shimmied her hips and a thousand glass beads on her dress sparkled in the spotlight. She smiled her naughtiest smile as she hammered out the words. She touched her hips and turned for a backside view. Her feet flew in double time, her hands and knees crossed with rubbery grace; then she locked her fingers behind her head and started all over again. By the time she was finished, the dance floor, which she’d had to herself, was filled with hot-blooded sheiks and shebas.
She accepted compliments before she retreated to Clarence’s side. She would sing and dance again when there was a lull.
“You’re a hit, Nickel.”
She waited until her breathing slowed to nearly nor mal. “You sure make me earn my keep.”
He chuckled, and she kissed his grizzled cheek.
“I saw you making eyes at that man.”
“Making eyes my foot!”
His hands flew over the keyboard. “I’m not gonna be here forever to watch out for you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Don’t go doin’ nothin’ foolish.”
“I’m nearly twenty. I’ve outgrown foolishness.”
“You’re smack in the middle of it. Wish your father was here to make you behave.”
He almost never mentioned Rafe. “You’ve been like a father. Sometimes I forget you’re not.”
“You never forget.” He looked up. “Things would have been different if your daddy’d lived.”
“Miss Valentine?”
She swung around to find Gerard Benedict behind her. She moved away from the piano. The music slowed to fox-trot tempo. More dancers crowded the floor. A successful night at Les Américains was truly under way.
“Mr. Benedict?”
“Would you like to dance?”
“Sorry. I only dance alone.”
“Why not make an exception?”
She looked toward the table, where Cloudy was watching them. “What about your lady? She still going to fund your next book if you dance with me?”
“Nobody tells me what I can do.”
“I don’t dance with the guests, spade or ofay. That way nobody’s unhappy.”
“I’m unhappy.”
She felt something sparking inside her. She’d heard a thousand lines and had a thousand funny responses. She couldn’t think of one.
“I’ll pick you up after work.” He moved a little closer. “We’ll have breakfast.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“Suit yourself.”
His teeth gleamed white against his skin. His face seemed strangely exotic to her, broad and mysterious, a supremely African face, with all the lure of tribal warriors and mystic rituals. “I’m going to suit myself, Nicky Valentine.” As Cloudy watched from the table, he lifted her hand and kissed it.
He was a poet, with several critically acclaimed volumes and a contract for another. He was a part of the Negro Renaissance centered in Harlem, the peer of Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois. She entertained in a bar, dancing the Charleston.
They had dark-roast coffee and croissants on the terrace of Le Dôme in Montparnasse, sandwiched between tall boxes of red geraniums and the table of a couple who never exchanged a word. Nicky had gone home first to bathe and change into a skirt and sweater. As light streamed through the geraniums, she removed her cloche hat.
“It’ll be hot by noon,” she said, helping herself to an other croissant. “In a month or so we’ll be closing down.”
“Closing?”
“Sure. No one stays in the city in August. You’ll find it hard to eat or shop if you stay here.”
“Where do you go?” He sat back. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her since they arrived. She wasn’t used to intense scrutiny. She found herself squirming under the heat of it.
“Here or there. Spain once. The South of France. Clarence has friends with a house in Antibes. Maybe we’ll go there.”
“You call your grandfather Clarence?”
“Odd, isn’t it?” She gave no explanation.
“I called mine Old Man.”
“Tell me about him.” She had already listed the basic facts of her own life. Her years in Paris, her education, a hazy, fabricated account of her life in New Orleans. But Gerard had said little about himself.
“You were wrong about Alabama. I was born in Georgia, but we moved to Harlem when I was ten. My father didn’t make his crops two years in a row, and the white man took our farm. We left with nothing but a mule and an old wagon. We worked our way up north, mile by mile. By the time we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, we didn’t have the mule. Old Man got sick and died in Maryland, and we didn’t have the money to lay him to rest.”
Nicky already knew that Gerard was not a man who would appreciate sympathy. She just nodded.
“Some church people took pity and saw Old Man got buried. Then they bought us train tickets to New York. By that time there wasn’t much left of my daddy. He drank up what pennies he managed to earn. We moved in with a cousin, and she raised us until we were old enough to go out on our own.”
“What about your mama?”
“Dead early. Real early.”
“Was Harlem better than Georgia?”
“No place’s better than any other.”
She toyed with her coffee cup. “Then you’ve been everywhere?”
“Just about.”
“You’re a real hard-boiled egg, aren’t you?”
He smiled, and the shadows lifted. “You haven’t seen enough of the world to understand.”
“If I haven’t, why are we having a conversation?”
“There’s something about you.”
His voice was resonant and deep. The words, as clichéd as they were, lingered in the air, settled provocatively against her skin, bored inside her to places that had never been touched. She tried to be flip. “Yeah. Yeah. Long, long legs. Sea green eyes. A smile that lights up the darkest corner of a room.”
“Sounds like you’ve heard it all.”
“And more.”
“But you’ve never heard it from me.”
She faltered for a moment, aware—although she fought it—that he was moving quickly to some place she had not yet inhabited. “Why should that matter?”
He reached for her hand. His was wide, with short, sturdy fingers. A farmer’s hand with no calluses. He en closed hers and held it tightly. “Because I’m going to matter,” he said. “Starting right now.”
She was terribly afraid he might be right.
Nicky spent August with Gerard, in the third-story apartment of a tiny building in the rue Campagne-Première. The apartment was tiny, too, one room just large enough for a bed and desk, another with a love seat, a chair and two arched windows looking out over Paris rooftops. The kitchen had a stone sink and one gas burner; the toilet and tub were down the hall.
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