Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

THE NEXT morning, before he left, Dezi told Tia that maybe she should go home. It baffled her; he’d seemed so intent on making her stay. He tried to give her money, but she refused. Dezi paused at the door’s threshold, taking her hands in his, and seemed like he was going to tell her something, but didn’t.

The previous night, Tia had slept on the couch, Dezi on the bed. She’d thought she’d woken once and seen him staring over her. The only light was that of streetlamps, filtered through the window blinds so that Dezi’s face seemed to be caged. But in the dream, when she tried to speak, she couldn’t say anything, and when she tried to move, she was unable to. She assumed it had been a dream, assumed that if it weren’t a dream, he would still be standing over her come morning, but he wasn’t.

After she showered, Tia took out her clarinet and began playing from The Marriage of Figaro . She loved fingering the succession of B-flat — C combinations that sounded like a tickle. The succession began to go up a half-scale that fluttered into a series of alternating D’s and E’s. Then the waterfall of the music began. The trumpets had the main part for a while, and she had never had a need to play it. In band, the clarinets sat back and played whole bars of tut-tut-tut-tut while the trumpets did their thing, then the flutes, then the baritones. Tia tried to play the trumpet part. She pressed variations of the silver side keys that looked like the lazy flats they played; she tested the round finger keys that circuited the tube’s holes in halos of thin metal. Within an hour, she had figured out the trumpet part and played it, then replayed it. She went into the bathroom so that she could look in the mirror as she played, but she was so proud of herself, she couldn’t get through three bars of music without seeing a goofy smile creep up around her mouthpiece.

She left the bathroom and was about to put the clarinet away when she saw a woman sitting on Dezi’s sofa. She did not know how the woman got in, but there she was, swallowed up in the velour folds of the couch, shins spread like a colt’s. She wore a purple fitted jacket with a tiny purple skirt, a set of keys fanned out against her thigh. Her hair fell about her shoulders in thick black waves, and her pockmarked face was covered in makeup a shade lighter than her neck. She looked up at Tia, not startled so much as studious, as though Tia were an enigmatic painting.

“Who are you?” Tia asked. She realized she was holding the clarinet like a spear.

“Who am I? Who the hell are you ?”

Tia waited a while before answering. “I’m a friend of Dezi’s. Are you a — customer?”

The woman pushed herself from the couch and stood up, walking into the kitchen. “Naw, I ain’t no customer. What the hell make you think that?” Water ran from the faucet, the fridge opened, bottles and jugs and wrapped packages sounded as if they were being thrown onto the counter.

She came back into the living room, where Tia was still standing, still holding on to the clarinet. The woman had a good half of a bologna sandwich hanging from her mouth. Through the bread and meat she asked, “How’d you meet Dezi?”

Where one might have expected a blouse underneath the purple jacket was nothing but an expanse of chest and cleavage. Her earrings dangled, grazing her shoulders. She laid what was left of the sandwich on the arm of the couch and began to unbutton her jacket.

“I’m hot . You hot?” She undid all five buttons and took off her blazer as though Tia were merely a curious pet. She stood nonchalantly in a lacy purple bra, sighed, then picked up the sandwich again. During bites she muffled, “I don’t even have to ask if you hot. Black folks always hot.” She swallowed another bite of sandwich. “Plus you dressed like you fell off the Amish wagon.”

Tia looked down at her blouse and skirt, but before she could even think of a response, the woman fanned herself with the sandwich hand and said, “Good God, I wish that boy’d get some AC up in here!” She stopped fanning and eating long enough to pick up Dezi’s forgotten Newports. She peered down the hole ripped through the top, pried one out, then crumpled the empty pack in her fist.

“I met Dezi a few days ago when I was looking for a job. He said I could stay for a while.”

“Ohhh ho.” The woman smiled, lighting the cigarette. Two columns of smoke swirled from her nostrils. Her head bobbed up and down, amused.

“He didn’t tell me he had a girlfriend.”

The woman laughed, then pushed Tia’s shoulder as though they were longtime friends. “Baby, you don’t even know which end is up!” She laid the burning cigarette against the saucer of the coffee-table plant and steered Tia to the couch, sitting her down. She sat next to Tia and made a smiling pantomime of introduction, daintily offering a bejeweled hand. Tia shook it, sending the woman’s bracelets rattling.

“My name is Marie. What’s your name, Miss Lady?”

“Tia. Tia Townsend.”

“All right, Miss Lady Tia. You didn’t exactly answer my question, so let’s start over. How did you meet Dezi ?”

Tia blinked hard, trying to remember. Although it had only been two days ago, it seemed like much longer. Her head flooded with many lies she could have told, but the way the woman sat, in her purple bra, her eyes the sort even liars couldn’t lie to, she blurted out the truth. “I ran away from home. And I didn’t have a place to stay and he said I could stay with him. If he’s your boyfriend or something, I didn’t do anything. I swear — I mean, you’re not supposed to swear , but I promise I wasn’t trying to be his girlfriend or anything.”

Marie picked up her cigarette and stared at the airbrushed skyline on the wall, then embarked on a long series of thoughtful puffs. She quickly turned to Tia and said, “Wanna sandwich? I didn’t even offer you no food, girl!”

Tia declined.

Marie put out the Newport in the plant’s saucer where it sizzled in the water and died. “Well,” Marie said, turning to Tia as though she was trying to make her understand something she should already know, “Dezi and I are business partners. And I don’t push no drugs, either.”

Tia nodded her head slowly, now comprehending, but to be sure, she used the delicate term she’d heard her great-aunt Roberta use. “Are you a lady of the evening?”

This sent Marie howling, her head shaking back and forth like women in church getting happy. “Girrrrl! I ain’t heard that word since I was sporting pigtails in Savannah! Who taught you that!”

Tia said quietly, “I just learned it somewhere.”

Marie kept laughing, finally ending it with the luxuriant sigh of one who’s had a good time. “‘Lady of the evening,’” she said in bright soprano. “You must a come a long ways from home.”

BEFORE TIA left the apartment, she folded up the sheets and blankets she’d slept on and placed them in a soft cube on the couch. She left a note for Dezi saying that she thought it was time for her to go back home. She did not mention that she’d found out that he was not only a drug dealer, which was bad enough, but a pimp. She knew she was not going back home, but she had to tell him something to explain why she’d left. She thought about going back to the park, then going to the far south side of town where well-off black people lived. Surely someone there would take her in.

She sat in the park but hadn’t the energy to play music for money. She watched for what seemed like hours as the park groomers cut the lawn; in the wake of huge riding mowers, the grass stretched in a carpet of green, reminding her of the cemetery near her home in Montgomery. She looked down at her open clarinet case, the pieces of the instrument glinting limousine black in the sunlight. She was filled with a sickness and longing, wanting to hear the simple sound of air blown through a wooden tube. Her clarinet case and backpack were too cumbersome to carry around the city, and she tried to think of a place to store them while she searched for somewhere to sleep for the night.