James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

Fifty more dollars per night, he said, but you’re worth much more than that.

Immediately on arrival, they made gasping, feverish, and clumsy love for the first time in the dry bowl of the Jacuzzi, then Nat playfully hosed the two of them down with the shower attachment and bathed their partially clothed bodies. The evaporating water tickled them as they air-dried, and flushed Darlene with a creamy sense of well-being. Lying exhausted on the comforter, they peeled off the rest of their clothing. They held each other’s faces and basked in the buttery warmth of skin against skin.

Once they tired of such luxury, they agreed to go to dinner. The thought seemed to Darlene almost as outrageous as their lovemaking. They had once run into one of Nat’s teammates at their off-campus diner and become paranoid about being seen together in public, creating the appearance of what happened to be true, but this far from campus they found an alternate universe in which their desires could thrive. Darlene started to find their increasing anxiety silly and frustrating. No one really belongs to anyone else, she thought as they locked up the Raphael and descended the Victorian’s lopsided staircase. Your heart takes you on a journey. People move around of their own free will nowadays. Women are liberated — it’s all over the news, in the sitcoms, on everybody’s lips. If people choose to be together, they agree on the terms.

She accepted this idea even though she detested the thought of sharing Nat with Hazel, now that she’d admitted to falling in love. Hazel, she sensed, without thinking the words, would most likely see his infidelity as confirmation of her belief that men — black men in particular — had no scruples, and finding out about their affair might encourage her to drop Nat and try women, if she hadn’t already. A crueler, foggier portion of Darlene’s imagination wondered if, for the girls’ basketball team, an away game didn’t imply a whole lot of late-night bed-hopping anyway. Yes, people were free to do as they pleased with whomever they wished. Men couldn’t own slaves, or servants — they couldn’t even own women anymore. And women had never owned men, that’s for sure.

They entered the foyer, where Darlene stood marveling at the front door, a magnificent original with its pastel-colored stained glass restored to glory, until Nat took her hand and guided her across the shadowy verandah. She basked in the fantasy of wealth and romance almost as much as in the incredible sense that for this weekend they belonged together, that the beauty and elegance of this moment was pleading with them to turn it into their everyday reality.

They arrived at the front steps — only ten or so. Still, she exclaimed that she couldn’t see well enough to descend them without breaking her neck, so he stood in front of her to demonstrate the location of each one. As the sky became visible to her above his head, silhouetting him against a tapestry of sickle-shaped clouds, contrails, and faint stars, this profound gesture of help framed his character so perfectly that she leapt momentarily into the future, to their possible daughter’s wedding day, when she would speak to the crowd about this moment of kindness and use it to define their relationship.

At which point a familiar voice slashed through the dark. The person had been sitting in one of the wicker chairs on the verandah, Darlene realized with a start, carefully and motionlessly positioned in a corner where a high laurel on the other side of the railing created an impenetrable shadow. Probably not even breathing.

The fuck is this? the voice said. Y’all think you’re fucking slick?

Hazel peeled out of the darkness as they turned their necks. She stood akimbo behind and above them. Kenyatta told me, but I didn’t believe her, ’cause she’s so trifling. I guess my girl got some cred after all.

Darlene’s and Nat’s hands fell to their sides like they’d suddenly regressed to embarrassed children. Nat opened his mouth and made an uh sound, ready to justify everything with his deep voice, a resonant bass that could smother anything unpleasant in molasses. Darlene stepped to one side, hoping to stay irrelevant to the discussion for as long as she could.

Didn’t you have an away game? Nat asked stupidly.

Canceled at the last minute, Hazel said. Turned the bus around. I got back just in time to follow your ass out here. Almost ran out of gas. Nice place. Real nice. When were you planning to take me to some Renaissance bed-and-breakfasts?

Listen, Hazel—

Don’t even, she snapped. She stepped forward into a position where the evening light cut diagonally across her torso like a sash. There’s no bullshit you can say to me that will make this not this. She waved a hand back and forth dismissively and ended by raising a finger into Nat’s personal space. So do not let it escape your lips.

He said it anyway: Hazel, Hazel. We’re just friends, honestly.

She repeated his words, mockingly, in the voice of a cartoon character, then hauled back and slugged him in the chin. Hazel’s fist packed a lot of force and speed. Nat raised his arms too late to block her jab. He stumbled at the stairs and lunged for the railing but lost his footing and tumbled to the pavement, twisting his ankle.

What else you got to say, Mr. Big Stuff?

He had bitten his tongue.

Darlene leapt down the stairs and bent over Nat’s injured ankle just before Hazel triumphantly clomped down the steps in her heels — roach-stompers, everybody called them — her breasts swinging defiantly under a loose blouse.

Cocking her head, she finally addressed Darlene. And you, you ain’t nearly got a inkling of what’s coming on you. You hear?

Hazel reached into her pocket. She squatted over Nat and, as he rose up to his knees, brought a cupped hand to her lips and forcefully blew some kind of acrid dust into each of their faces, enough of it that they had to close their eyes against the stinging grit. Hazel stood up and shouted a French phrase that Darlene did not understand, then raised her hands, flicked them at Nat, and brushed them free of dust above Nat and Darlene. The substance turned out to be a puzzlingly dirty, possibly volcanic soot that stuck to their cheeks and lips; Darlene thought in horror that it might be somebody’s cremated corpse. In another moment, Hazel clunked across the main road and disappeared, leaving them to clean up and regain their wits.

Ridiculous gris-gris, Nat grumbled to Darlene, though he couldn’t see how gory he looked — a squiggle of red liquid at the corner of his mouth, and his teeth soaked with blood from where he had bitten his tongue. It doesn’t work. She carries it with her all the time. You’ve never seen it? Stupid.

Yet when they returned to school, it did seem as if some bizarre spell had taken effect. Not on the two of them, but on everybody they knew. News of the scandal had spread rapidly, no doubt hastily pollinated by Hazel’s own sharp tongue. By the end of the weekend an unspoken banishment had begun. Suddenly their identities were hollowed out; they were nobodies. Even Nat’s status had fallen somewhat, if not as far as Darlene’s. As she clacked across the dorm lobby, lugging her suitcase, people who used to smile, even the ones who didn’t know her, studied the floor as she passed. None of them offered help as she bumped up the stairs. When Darlene got to her room and pulled back her bedclothes she found a dissected frog in the center of the mattress, bleeding formaldehyde.

One of Nat’s roommates, a man whose girlfriend spent a lot of time with Hazel, jumped him, knocking the wind out of him. Three weeks later, a different guy Nat didn’t know asked him for directions to the student union, slugged him in the stomach, and ran. The guy hadn’t seemed like a Grambling student — Nat and Darlene wondered if Hazel had relatives or dangerous connections outside the university and had started calling in favors. Their paranoia soon reached a high pitch when Darlene became the victim of many ugly pranks.