The Sexy Part of the Bible Page 7

  I didn’t yet, but I nodded anyway.

  Dr. Juliet took a deep breath and went on, painful as it was. “Eternity, a black man has nothing of value to protect, especially not his physical blackness, because his race and color are seen as inferior—therefore, he rarely faces any objections to marrying and procreating with a woman who isn’t black, because if anything, the world sees the lightening of his progeny as an improvement over his darkness—a gain in status. Do you still follow?”

  I nodded, growing angry.

  “A white man has to protect his whiteness, because his whiteness is the most valuable thing in this world, and he can only be born from or procreated by a white woman. No others.”

  A tear ran down my cheek.

  “I want you to remain with James, if that’s what you want. But as your mother, it’s also my responsibility to make sure you realize exactly just what cards are in the deck. As a black girl—especially a girl as pure black as you are—there is the awful likelihood that his interest in you might only go so far, that it might have a ceiling. No matter how much he adores you …”

  I bowed my head, unable to hear the rest of her words. It was and is the truth—that the eyes of the world do not consider me to be a good mate for any man.

  I am not the one who the world revolves around.

  OPEN CEILING

  Hope had died and I had no soul.

  That was a big part of the reason I stayed with James. But also because he reminded me so much of Stevedore, spoiling and doting on me. Naturally, people believed that I put up with James’s indiscretions because he was a white man first and a rich man second. It wasn’t true, but what else could they think?

  I shivered with tears of gratitude whenever he returned to his lair and made love to me. Our best conversations always came after sex. I learned to cook, learned to play his favorite game, chess, learned as much as I could about the history of cryptozoology, kept myself as beautiful as I possibly could, and then one day, in all my bored loneliness, I accidentally changed my entire life by deciding to board the tube at Oxford Street. A famous German photographer was on the train that day and it’s as simple as that—he saw me.

  “You look like a mannequin!” the photographer blurted out in amazement as I searched for an open seat. “A doll, wound up and walking around like a human!”

  His aggression startled me, and I halted in insectlike repose.

  “Mother got-damn, hold that pose!” he screamed, pulling out his camera. “You look like an alien! Don’t move.”

  Within a matter of weeks I was on a billboard at Piccadilly. They had a photo of me in the Mirror with the caption: Famed photographer presents his latest creation—Eternity.

  It happened so fast. Like connective tissue coming together.

  The photographer—whom I immediately realized was gay and therefore okay to run around with—took me to the BBC studios where he personally directed me in a television commercial for Second Moon Cosmetics. Tall, wire-skinny, and white as chalk, with a dramatically black Louise Brooks—like bob that he constantly had to flick out of his blue eyes, the photographer tortured me by making me say this one line over and over again: “It’s me … Eternity … accept no imitations.”

  “Goddamnit, bitch, you sound like you’re reciting the multiplication tables! Say it again—with passion!”

  “It’s me … Eternity … accept no imitations.”

  “No, no, NO!”

  “It’s me … Eternity … accept no imitations.”

  “Can someone put on a Diana Ross tune? Something larger than the sun and glamorexic? Quiet on the set!”

  “It’s me … Eternity … accept no imitations.”

  “Goddamnit, bitch. What’s your boyfriend’s name again?”

  “James …”

  “Pretend you’re in the doorway of your bedroom— catching James in bed with some sexy Japanese chick. And he’s got exactly three seconds to make a decision as to which one of you he wants to spend the rest of—”

  “It’s me! … ETERNITY …” I nearly cried. “Accept NO imitations.”

  “There you go! And cut … and print!”

  The studio crew applauded.

  James was in Hiroshima searching for ancient bearded lizards. He didn’t know a thing about what I was doing. By the time he returned to London, I’d been magically transformed into the fashion world’s most sought-after model, a trio of gay men teaching me everything—how to walk, how to put on makeup, how to pose without looking like I’m posing. After they were finished, I did my first catwalk in Paris, flew in and out of Milan’s Baccarat show, and shot a photo spread for Miss Priss magazine against the Moroccan desert.

  James came home exhausted and frustrated from not finding his bearded prune lizard. During those first few hours, as we lay on the bed watching television, me giving him a blowjob, on came the most startlingly beautiful charcoal woman, luxuriating in the pond of a tropical garden—and James mumbled, “I know her from somewhere.”

  The music blared as the camera panned in for the close-up. The figure arrogantly declared, “It’s me … Eternity … Accept NO imitations.”

  James jumped up. “Hey, what the—”

  I started giggling as the voiceover announced: “Earth’s Eternity, the new mud moisturizer for younger-looking skin.”

  James nibbled on my ear, whisper-laughing that I was gorgeous, and kissed and poked up inside me until that whole night stretched out like some dreamy magic carpet ride.

  We even went horseback riding the next morning. But when we returned home for lunch there was some woman calling, giggling on the answering machine about how much fun she had with James in Japan, and that she loved her necklace and looked forward to seeing him in Australia. It was like he wanted me to know about his cheating.

  Later that night, as we dined at the Savoy Steakhouse, he took my hand and slipped a very modest diamond engagement ring on it. “I want us to get married, Eternity. But before that takes place, I need to get the humping wolf out of my system. I need two good years to just fuck around—and then I’m all yours.”

  I didn’t say anything about the ring on my finger. I simply looked down into my steak, the pinkish meat juicy with blood.

  “Will you wait to be my wife?”

  Out of desperation I nodded affirmatively.

  The next morning I talked on the phone to my mother, who charged right in: “You’re not being very scientific about this. Have you even met his parents yet?” There was a long, dead silence before she continued. “Well, have you? Eternity, James is not going to marry you. You’re just another rare cryptid to him. You’re a hostage in his home and he enjoys fucking you and wants you to put up with his global spotting. And even if he did marry you, once you let a man cheat, he’ll always cheat. I’ll bet that Japanese bitch has an engagement ring bigger than yours. I know men, Eternity—I used to be one!”

  “That’s your marijuana talking, Dr. Juliet.”

  “So what if it is? Grass brings the truth out. And you know what else? This is what you get for fucking your father all those years. Stevedore was my husband and I had to look the other way—”

  “You and Stevedore raised me to do that! I didn’t ask for it!” I slammed the phone down.

  Two days later, a slew of pale fashion people had me perched on an antique chair, all dressed up in a satin ball gown with Jell-O-red, Russian sapphire rubies fastened around my collarbone, as they shot a layout for Symphony perfume. I suddenly caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that beckoned from across the way. I saw how to someone like James I might be a cryptid, no less exotic and mysterious than a bearded prune lizard or the Loch Ness monster.

  Modeling is a jittery, jumping affair. It requires you to be vicarious, to perfect a certain brand of fakeness. Good with evoking the naïve coat hanger, I was sent for shoots in Milan, Copenhagen, Barcelona, and Paris. It was in Paris that James caught up with me. At Club Djoon X, we danced to Snake Girl’s techno smash “I’ve Never B
een with a Black Man Before,” then fucked like bunnies in my hotel room.

  The next morning, when James was sitting up in bed so that I could feed him like a baby, he finally blurted out what he’d come all the way to Paris to say: “I had a very strange dream about us.”

  I stopped feeding him, but I remained silent.

  “You were pregnant with my child, and I was happy about it.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m on the pill.”

  “Then maybe you should get off it.”

  We stared at each other for a very long moment. Then I said, “Yeah, I can just see myself strutting down the runway with a stomach out to here, posing and pivoting. I’m one of the few black models getting steady work, and I’m new—I have to fight to secure my career.”

  “So tell me, my future wife, what’s next after Paris?”

  “Home,” I said, “to Africa. There’s a journalist from M magazine coming to do a feature article about me, and then I’m taking two weeks to do nothing but rest at a resort. Visit my mother.”

  “Sometimes I wonder what your real story is.”

  “I’m a woman, James. That’s always my story.”

  I’VE NEVER BEEN WITH A BLACK MAN BEFORE

  On some nights the moon in Africa can burn down on a person’s shoulders with all the intensity of the sun. And tonight, at last, I’m going to dare to do what I thought I’d never do—cheat on James Lord. Sea Horse and I both know that I’m going to let him fuck me out in the coastal shadows where it’s dark and rocky. He knows this because we’ve been running into each other at the shoreline for a few nights now, saying little things back and forth, our black bodies glistening like dolphin hides as we spear ourselves beneath a periwinkle moon.

  “You’re an Ajowan,” Sea Horse had teased a few nights ago. “Do you still pray to the ocean?”

  I told him that I was raised by whites and Oluchi people, and therefore didn’t know much about the Ajowan clan. But I did remember Nana Oluchi taking me for long walks on the beach. She’d kneel beside me and say, “The Ajowans believe that the ocean is a black woman— the Goddess Ajowa. The Ajowans believe that they came from the sea, and that in ancient times their tribe could live underwater for days at a time. You, Eternity, are an Ajowan.”

  I sure believe it now as I take to the water, my body entering the rolling see-through lavender of both sky and moon, the heat of the night caressing my flesh no matter how deep I go. Then I hear King Sea Horse Twee calling to me from the dunes—“Eyyy, mermaid, wait!”—and look back to see his tall, naked chocolate body diving in.

  I hear his voice again from the other night: Do you still pray to the ocean? The decimal of chambers had formed the cadence in his coca-boy accent as though he’d been praying when he asked it. Oddly enough, I crave prayer, ritual, and religion—the naked ocean sex like moments in a baptized fever; the illicit ecstasy and sinfulness of cheating, kissing, caressing, licking, and fucking—saltier than the waves in a wet dream. I want it so bad—to experience a black man’s penis up inside me, deeper than my cervix. Yet the butterflies in my stomach threaten to weigh me down to the moon spots on the sea floor, and as I contain all that rage and soul, cooking like molasses in the folds of my pussy’s sweetest ever cat-wishing, I plunge beneath the warm depths, my imagination descending as well into a kind of chant-prayer. My body is swimming as far out as it can—to escape him and get beyond the coral reef garden, beyond the clear waters— to the dark, murky deep ocean where sharks are known to patrol at night searching for baby tuna or dolphins to bite, rape, and drown.

  And just as I fear that I might be going too far out, I glance up and see the purple robes of sky flowing like ribbons into my eyes, into the sea, and into all the edges of the world. I notice the white light from every prayer that is being prayed around the world twinkling within those robes. There, in the starry ocean-sky, I get goosebumps, some intuitive part of me touched at the nerve endings by what I can only describe as spirits (feelings), ancestors (hunches), the salted breeze watching over me, the realization that though I was lost in the animalistic preamble of the wilderness lust—both inside me and in the wilderness—it suddenly seems that the ocean indeed is a woman, her sloshing black face and her sparkling dips and swirls activating some primitive knowing intensity within me. It is ever-mysterious and holy, holding and handling me like a mother rocks her child, the beat of my heart slowing from a pulsating heat to a near-deadly stillness. Right then—at the point of stillness, my body going unconscious, the skeleton of my silhouette sinking fast into the satiny black waters surely to drown—Sea Horse torpedoes up, snatching me from hypnosis, and rocks me back into wakefulness. It’s a manly moment.

  My eyes blink, my flesh and bones reignited by the warmth of his own, his sheer power breaking the surface of the sea as he handles me roughly, completely unaware of the telepathic chill I’ve just experienced. He presses his body against mines, the rock-hardness of his penis forceful against my leg as his mouth struggles, hungrily, to find and get control of mines. And although he’s just saved my life, I don’t understand why one of his hands is groping at my breasts.

  “Stop it,” I say, unexpectedly.

  But he doesn’t stop—so I slap the shit out of him.

  “I said get the fuck off me!”

  “You play games! Every night you’re a different woman. Where’s the one who wanted me to fuck her?”

  Suddenly cold and awkwardly ashamed of myself for having teased him the last few nights, I turn and swim away toward one of the small coastal slave islands where in the daytime Ajowan children congregate to feed the birds and dolphins that frequent the lagoon.

  I emerge from the ocean as though leaving a womb to perch against the rocks. I lean back against the solid boulders, oblivious to the lizards and insects that live within them. My skin imitates the surface of the night sea, shimmering under moonlight, and I realize that I’m not yet experienced enough to use someone for sex. But Sea Horse is heaving his big chest, his lustful eyes stroking the naked contours of my perfect body, his penis pointing down but still stiff as a shiny new rifle. He says in a deep, violent voice, “I ought to fuck you right here. Make you suck my dick.”

  “Is that what you are—a rapist?”

  “You don’t know me, bitch. You’ve been playing with fire, so whatever I am—that’s what you asked for.”

  He covers me like a blanket, and even though I’m six feet tall, his height still makes me feel small. I refuse to accept his mouth in a kiss. The harder he presses his chest and knees and penis against my nakedness, the more I freeze and slither our bodies out of sync, making it obvious that he will have no choice but to take me by force.

  “If you try to fight, I could fuck up your face,” he whispers in my ear menacingly.

  “That’s why I’m not fighting, you son of a bitch.”

  “You want me to rape you!”

  I look straight up in his eyes and say with all the sincerity I can muster, “I’m begging you … please don’t.”

  “Why have you been playing games?”

  “Because … I’ve never been with a black man before.”

  Amazingly, that makes him back up. He stares at me and says, “I should have known. You African supermodels are all known for being the white man’s whore.”

  “Your wife is white!”

  “That’s different,” he says, beating his chest. “I’m a man!”

  “Oh please! Doesn’t one of your lyrics say that we Africans need to get rid of the King Kongs? Well look at yourself, Kong!”

  His voice thunders now. “Millicent is not white—I know her, she’s just a woman!”

  “Well, the only man I ever loved is white. And just like Millicent, he’s English. But I’ve never had sex with a black man before, and since I found you so incredibly sexy and since you’re already married to several women, I figured I could use you for sex. But I couldn’t go through with it.”

  “You said loved. So you’re not with this white man now
?”

  It’s as though his complete opinion of me is riding on my answer. And for some reason, I want so much for him to forgive me and like me, so I lie and say, “No, we’re not together.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  I continue, “He never introduced me to his family, and he cheats, so I had to break it off.”

  “You never did answer my question,” he finally says. “Do you ever pray like your people to the ocean?”

  “Do you ever pray like your people to the sky?”

  “No, God would never listen to me. I’ve done too many sins. But since you’re an Ajowan woman, I thought from the moment I saw you that maybe I could get you to pray for me.”

  HOW TO PRAY FOR A HAPPY ENDING

  I have an awful lot to hide from people. So although we will leave this night believing that we’ll never see each other again, I feel compelled to present only an illusion of myself to him. At the lagoon shore he builds a fire so I can go about pretending I know how to pray to the ocean—I am filled with the sadness of knowing that while Sea Horse is someone’s child, I am not a child, but a duplicate.

  In spite of this, I take his hand and ask him as Nana Oluchi once asked me, “Have you ever been taught the correct way to pray?”

  “No,” he shakes his head. “What is the correct way to pray?”

  “With the knowledge that nothing in this world is as it was meant to be.”

  “Pray for me,” he says low but urgent. “I’m about to enter a bad oven. I need the ancestors of every tribe on my side, because I’m about to wrestle with scorpions and snakes—I’m going to fight for the people!”

  Somehow, with our government’s Spy Control watching his every move at the resort, I know what he means. A shudder goes down my spine because the stereotype I have is that people like him are known for self-destructing.