“Where’s he going?” Jules stopped himself from running out the cottage door in his towel to tell Brooks to be careful. To watch his back. The kind of thing Jules’s father would’ve done.
“I don’t know. Out,” Leslie called from the bedroom. “I put your new suit on the bed. But you’ll have to wear your old loafers. Maybe we can get a pair in town tomorrow. Ooh, and I want to get my hair blown out.”
Leslie had been spending money like it grew on the rosebushes he’d pruned in the garden that morning. Boxes of new clothes she brought home from town. Shiny new items that seemed to pop up daily. A red tricycle for Eva. And for Brooks, a new stereo and turntables and speakers as tall as Eva. But Leslie had promised Jules, thanks to her inheritance, there was enough money in their bank account to buy a dozen speakers. He had considered going to the bank in town himself to make sure but knew he needed to trust her.
She had made an excuse about having to replace all they’d left behind and he wanted to remind her of all the stuff still boxed up in the Castle’s six-car garage, including their books—books Leslie had given him soon after they’d met. Copies of Invisible Man and Native Son and James Baldwin’s collected works. The essays he had read again and again so the pages were creased and yellowed; the covers softened. He and Leslie had spent hours on snowy days way back when, in Cambridge, in bed, naked, smoking joints and sipping hot cocoa, debating what Baldwin meant when he wrote: The really terrible thing, old buddy (and, God, didn’t Jules feel like Baldwin was talking straight at him, right up in his face), is that you must accept them … For these innocent people have no other hope. Innocent whites? How could Baldwin write with such outrage, quote God cursing Noah with utter destruction—No more water, the fire next time!—and blame not the bigots and lynchers but their innocence? Decades later, he was still trying to figure out what Baldwin was getting at and, sometimes, he felt close. But since they’d moved to the island, well, he figured it was time for a refresher.
He had wanted to reject Leslie’s gifts. The absurdity—a rich white girl giving him a bag of books about the black experience. It should’ve been his pops who handed him those books tracing the history of the black man from slave to free man, but his father had been too stuffed with bitterness to find redemption on paper. Jules’s teachers at Dalton, his mostly white private high school, had assigned plenty of books about struggle—The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, Moby-Dick. Sure, they’d read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but that was a whole other story. Leslie’s gifts, shopping bags full of used books, had reflected Jules back at himself like a mirror. She’d given him the words to understand and explain himself.
Now they were trapped in cardboard boxes in the garage. He’d considered bringing them into the cottage, creating his own impenetrable walls with stacks of books. Along with the forgotten FREE SOUTH AFRICA and END APARTHEID posters they’d brought home from an antiwar rally two decades back—their first purchase together. The posters had traveled with them from Cambridge to New York City, had hung on the walls of half a dozen studio apartments until they were frayed at the edges.
“Who’s going to watch the baby tonight?” Jules asked. “While we go to the dinner thing?”
“The Wilson girl. Completely reliable.”
“We could bring Eva with us,” Jules said, trying not to betray his fear of letting a stranger watch his little girl. “Ooh, lawd,” he crooned in the voice he’d been using more and more since they’d moved to the island, an amalgamation of all the dialects he’d heard actors use in movies about slavery. He knew Leslie couldn’t stand it. She’d even accused him of being racist, which only made him lay it on thicker. “How all the white missuses will be squealing over our sweet little pickaninny!”
“Like I said,” Leslie said, “you are a troublemaker.”
She struck a femme-fatale pose in the doorway, one naked arm stretched above her head, a hand on her hip. She wore a sheer, vanilla silk gown. It tied at the neck and clung to her like liquid. With her blond hair swept to one side, she was a bona fide bombshell and made him think of Veronica Lake. Made him want to tear the dress off.
“I decided to screw the panty hose and go au naturel.”
He kissed her and let his towel fall from his waist.
“Screw me instead, baby.”
“Well, that didn’t take much.” She wrapped her fingers around his penis. Then pushed him away. “Jules, you’re all wet! I paid a fortune for this dress at Saks. Good thing it wasn’t my fortune.”
He laughed along but didn’t like the way she spoke of her mother’s money like it was a big joke, making it out like they were crooks.
She tiptoed to the second bedroom—they’d decided Brooks should have his own room, but Eva took her naps in there. Leslie listened, her ear pressed to the closed door.
“Come with me,” she said. “I have a surprise.”
He felt that familiar tugging in his abdomen when she hooked her fingers in his and he saw the quilt folded under her arm.
“But the baby.”
“She’s fast asleep.”
“I don’t know.” He was worried about Eva waking, getting lost in the serpentine maze.
Leslie kissed him, the tip of her tongue pushing his lips apart and entering his mouth. Ending the conversation. He grew hard so fast it hurt. Two decades they’d been together and she could still make him feel that. What a fool he’d been to think he’d could say no to her. About moving to the island. About anything.
They ran through the hedge maze. The tang of fresh-trimmed wood filled the green corridors. She tugged him forward at every turn, which made the towel slip from his waist until he was using it only to shield his penis, his ass bared.
“Pop quiz!” Leslie shouted. “What’s the code to get back to the cottage?”
Jules sang the “Heigh-Ho” tune, “Right, left, right, right, left, right.”
“Good boy!” Leslie cheered. “But there’s another code if you want to get to the secret garden tucked in the heart of the maze.”
“Oooh, a secret garden,” Jules teased. “I ain’t no na?ve little boy falling for your tricks, Ms. Leslie Marshall.”
Her laugh was like coins tumbling from the blue sky.
“You’ll see,” she said. “Listen up. ’Cause I’m only going to tell you the code two times. You ready?”
“Yessiree, ma’am!”
She slapped his bare ass and he whooped. They ran faster.
“Left, right,” she said. “Left, left, right, left.”
“Left, right,” he repeated. “Left, right…”
“No! Repeat after me, you big dummy.”
“Shit, girl, it took me three tries to memorize the way to the cottage. I’m a science man, not a math man.”