Passing Love

by Jacqueline E. Luckett

Genres: African American; African American Historical; African American Women's Fiction; Family Life

Synopsis

Nicole-Marie Handy has loved all things French since she was a child. After the death of her best friend, determined to get out of her rut of ordinary living and experience something new, she goes to Paris, leaving behind work, ailing parents and a proposal from her married lover. While there, Nicole chances upon an old photo of her father--lovingly inscribed, in his hand, to a woman Nicole has never heard of. What starts as a vacation for Nicole quickly becomes an investigation into her relationship to this mystery woman. Moving back and forth in time between the sparkling Paris of today and the jazz-fueled city filled with expatriates in the 1950s, PASSING LOVE is the story of two women dealing with love lost, secrets, and betrayal . . . and how the City of Lights may hold all of the answers.

Release date: January 25, 2012

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 311

Sample

The phrase depuis quand? (how long?) is used to question actions or events started in the past and still going on in the present.

She’d waited all her life to go to Paris.

As for the reasons why the dream of speaking French in France, of standing beneath the Eiffel Tower at the stroke of midnight, of lingering in sidewalk cafés took so long to come about—she chose to evade, not explain them. Her greatest fear, the one she carried like a locket close to her heart, was that in taking too close a look at the days that composed her fifty-six years, the dam that confined her existence might break and release a river of regret for all the places she’d never visited, the books she’d never read, the things she’d never done.

With the given name of Nicole-Marie Roxane, she believed the choice was not her own. Bowlegs, a widow’s peak, and French, her inescapable and defining particulars. People asked if she was from Louisiana, teachers inquired how she (a Negro girl, they said) could have not one but three French names. Her neighbor to the left of their stucco bungalow (who never let anyone forget her Louisiana roots), Mrs. Albert—ahl bear, no hard T, chérie, spoke Creole French whenever she wanted Nicole to walk her miniature poodle or inform gentlemen callers that she was otherwise occupied. Merci. Her father, clicking through false pearly-whites, used his military French to teach his daughter basic phrases when he wasn’t absorbed in one of his beloved books. “Comment-allez vous, Mademoiselle Handy?” A greeting so formal for a little girl. “Comprenez-vous, Nicole?” Nicole, never Nicki, not from her father. Oui, oui.

All of that, and the blue book.

Years ago Nicole discovered it, slightly bigger than her nine-year-old hand, in the trunk at the foot of her parents’ double bed. Secrets in a cedar box. A sampling of their lives before she came along—a wispy bed jacket, a woman’s suit covered with an enraged dragon spitting embroidered threads of red, orange, and yellow flames, a soldier’s cap and jacket bound in sheets of brown paper and pungent mothballs, a manila envelope filled with her father’s Army discharge papers, their birth certificates and marriage license, dozens of crisp hundred-dollar bills, a military patch with the three stripes of a staff sergeant stitched in parallel rows beneath the pointed top, a worn French paperback—Cyrano de Bergerac—and the blue book.

Saturdays when her handyman father had an emergency repair and her mother ran errands best done alone, Nicole was left to entertain herself the way only children were in the sixties—without ever feeling lonely, neglected, or scared. The minute her father’s run-down truck bumped the curb at the end of the driveway, Nicole bolted down the hallway to her parents’ bedroom and claimed it as her own. Eventually, her snooping refined itself into a routine that never varied: check the dusty space beneath the bed, her mother’s panty drawer and jewelry case, the cedar chest, and, close to Christmas, the deepest corner of the one closet in the compact bedroom. Without fail, she inspected the antique hope chest to see if the contents had changed. She slipped the peach bed jacket over her shirt, its fluffy sleeves swallowing her thin arms, and daydreamed about the meaning of such a sheer and dainty garment. She marched with the soldier’s cap tilted on her head. Left. Left. Left. Right. Left. Her fingers traced the embroidered dragon on the gabardine suit in search of the reason her mother no longer owned a single outfit as elaborate as this one.

Nicole never touched the money, but she took the blue book—a French dictionary. Under the cover of night and fuzzy blankets, she practiced the phonetic pronunciations, whispering French phrases instead of girlish secrets into her feather pillow. Every noun and verb transported her to a place miles from Berkeley and its dreary summer fog: bonjour (bone zhoor), comment allez-vous (come mawn tah lay voo), bien merci (be in mare see). Every phrase meant passage to another reality. Paris (pah ree).

Weeks after the discovery of that blue book, confidence settled in. Three weeks before her tenth birthday. When, at last, Nicole decided to surprise her father, she waited by the back door. It was easy for Nicole to love him. Tall and trim, he was strong enough to lift her with one hand and interested in her—had she memorized the short Langston poem he gave to her; eaten lunch alone or with friends? Nicole lived for the light of his smile, his approval, his explanations of poetry and politics. He was the parent who played hide-and-go-seek indoors, told her she was beautiful, read to her, and described the Eiffel Tower, tallest of all structures in Paris. To her nine-going-on-ten-year-old self, he was handsome and fascinating, an expert on the world, on Paris.

When he came through the door, Nicole jumped into his open arms. “Tiens, Papa… la famille… est ensemble… maintenant.” Spoken to another aloud, her sentence had a choppy, yet musical tone. Tee ehn, pah pah, la fah meel eht ahn sambluh maa ten nawh. Astonishment beat out her father’s toothy grin. He never questioned how she learned this new phrase—“the family is together now”—without him. He replied as if the most natural occurrence in the world were his daughter chattering in the language that he, too, practiced. “Vous avez raison, Mademoiselle Handy. Je comprends.”

Her mother snapped at child and husband celebrating the newfound vocabulary. “That nonsense needs to stop,” she yelled, not looking away for one minute from the chicken frying in a cast iron skillet. “Best to make sure you’ve got your arithmetic finished, missy. French won’t do you any good in this life.”

And then the blue book was gone.

Nicole searched high and low. She refused to ask her mother the dictionary’s whereabouts, understanding that the mention of it was an admission of theft. Had she brothers or sisters, she would’ve pummeled them with her fists or pinched them until they confessed. In the following hours or weeks that seemed an eternity in her young mind, her father stopped speaking French. He avoided her hazel eyes and shushed his child when she demanded why. Pourquoi? When, at last, he answered, his harshness surprised Nicole. “When you’re a big girl, you can go to Paris and speak all the French you want.” But she missed this connection to her father. Le français. No phrases whispered behind her mother’s back. No practice. No spinning the black globe in the living room to seek out the patch named France, as if no other countries had existed.



Paris. Not how she’d intended, but Paris nevertheless. Sixty-one hours before boarding the nonstop flight from San Francisco to Charles de Gaulle. Twenty-nine whole days in France, plus one to get there and one to come back. Vacation hoarded over the years. Nicole poured a tall shot of one of Mexico’s finest añejo tequilas into a crystal glass. Years ago she’d bought the hundred-dollar bottle for a special occasion. If this trip didn’t count as special, she figured she didn’t know what did.

A smattering of travel paraphernalia topped the coffee table: luggage tags, an airline itinerary, a shuttle service schedule, emergency numbers and security codes for the rental apartment, her brand-new passport, five hundred euros in denominations of five to fifty. And a notebook, Tamara’s gift—a combination journal, address book, and log of miscellaneous events and information. A means to capture Paris. Nicole ran her fingers over her friend’s angular cursive.

Even as they planned their trip, Nicole realized Tamara must have had a clue that her health wasn’t the best. The last time she saw her, Tamara had looked years older than her forty-three: bloated middle, face drained and spent. Beneath Tamara’s loose gown, her collarbone jutted and a bone poked where a rounded shoulder should have been. A white canister hung from a slim pole on the opposite side of the hospital bed. It beeped—a persistent and unwanted reminder—and administered intermittent doses of morphine, a nurse in a plastic box.

“I’m not afraid, Nicki.”

Nicole pressed a glass of water to her friend’s lips. Over the course of a few months, weight had dropped from Tamara’s heavy frame. After her biopsy, the doctor pronounced the diagnosis with certainty—pancreatic cancer. The discovery was too late, and the insidious disease had reached her liver.

“Did I tell you my daddy preached? I delivered a sermon every now and again. I was pretty good. Tonight, I’m going to preach to you. I figure me in this bed, acting pitiful, is the perfect setup to get you to change.” That was when Tamara pulled out the notebook and wrote on the inside cover, Be wild. Dance in the streets. Take French lessons. Walk the wrong way home. Don’t play it safe. “This is your mantra, Nicki. Promise me you’ll go to Paris, no matter what.” Determination edged Tamara’s tone like a mother’s counsel to a confused child.

Nicole sat on the edge of Tamara’s bed, straightened her back, and repeated the pledge. “I promise to go to Paris, no matter what.”

The shock, the cancer’s rapid consumption of her friend’s body, and the isolated grieving accelerated this decision. The afternoon of Tamara’s funeral, the dam burst sure as the rain started when the pallbearers lowered the casket into the ground. Tamara’s death did what years of procrastination hadn’t. Nicole got the lesson—live; play, don’t watch.

She settled on the floor beside the fireplace’s deep hearth and stuffed newspaper under the manufactured logs. Four matches held to the edges and smoke burst into dancing flames; a frolicking light show of yellow, orange, and red tipped with blue. The real estate agent had hesitated to show her the run-down 1940s bungalow, but she fell in love with the house, the garden filled with hydrangeas, the turquoise blue lanterns tacked under the eaves, cooing rock doves, and the morning sun shining through the windows. The fireplace cinched the sale; visions of frosty nights stretched out in front of it, the toasty scent of burning wood, crackling flames, and her man’s arms around her. Married, divorced, or single, she could count the evenings she had snuggled there in the twenty-one years she’d owned the place; not one man had turned that image in her head into a long-term reality. Hand to heart, she held the place that ached with the need to rest against the shoulder of a full-time someone who cared.

The tinny ding-dang-dong of the doorbell’s chime broke the quiet and caught Nicole off guard. Only one person had the gall to stop by this late at night without calling ahead.

Nicole first met Clint Russell when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-eight, compact and husky, irresistible and charismatic beyond his years. He’d sized up the volunteers at the conference registration desk, then swaggered to her station. “You know you have simmering eyes,” he’d whispered and requested directions to a meeting clearly posted on a sign behind Nicole. “You mean shimmering,” she’d corrected, thinking he referred to her makeup. “I meant exactly what I said: simmering. Bubbling underneath that crisp blouse.” Not her first love, but her first lover, they spent ten months together.

Three and a half decades since he left Oakland for the East Coast and his failed promise to return and pick up where they left off. Even though her beloved friend was no longer present, Tamara’s voice was in Nicole’s head, nagging, as she often had. “Forget Clint. If you kicked him out of your life, you wouldn’t even know he was gone. What does he do for you?” Never had she answered her friend and now Nicole sat motionless, while the doorbell chimed nonstop, frustrated that she could both love and not stand (or resist) this man. Forgetting him, her ex-husband, all the men who’d failed her—awkward loose ends of her past—was what she needed to do. Maybe she’d figure out how in Paris. Maybe not. Nicole poured a second shot of tequila into her glass, sipped, and considered a third.

Maybe she wouldn’t open the door.

Five years ago, she’d heard the chatter when he came to the law offices—not his name, simply the description of the attractive lawyer collaborating on a case with one of the partners. Clint recognized Nicole when he passed the word-processing bullpen. Time had been generous. Clear skin. His shaved head defied a receding hairline. His suit shouted power and money. “You have simmering eyes, Ms. Handy.” He played with the line that caught her attention back in 1975. “And I do mean your eye shadow.”

They went from lunch to dinner to an expensive hotel to bed. Bored and fighting the lingering loneliness from her divorce, Nicole surrendered to his spell and let Clint fill that hole without his ever mentioning and her never inquiring about a wife.

After five minutes passed, she opened the door.

“What took you so long? I came to check on you.” Clint passed his suit jacket to Nicole and headed straight for her bedroom, ignoring the fire, the papers on the coffee table, newspapers and assorted junk mail spread over the dining room table that he usually complained about until she organized or tossed the whole mess out. She followed and watched him stretch out on her queen-sized bed and pick at the striped duvet. Nicole stood at the side of her bed, crossed her arms, and breathed in his faint smell—cologne mixed with hours spent polishing the fine print of contracts, and pressuring any associate and administrative staff within reach of his booming voice.

He fingered the elastic waistband of her flannel pajamas. “Such practical nighties.”

What, Nicole thought, would he say if she asked if his wife wore flannel pajamas or slinky negligees or tied her hair up in satin scarves at night? “You came to apologize?”

“No, baby. You owe me an apology. I’ve been waiting for it.”

“My timing was wrong. I’m sorry, but you should be sorry, too.”

In the five years since they’d taken up with each other again, Nicole had convinced herself that Clint kept a separate phone for her calls, one left in his car or office, free from discovery or suspicion. Raindrops had sprinkled the mourners during Tamara’s funeral and flattened Nicole’s spirit. Later, she’d checked her bedside clock on the hour, every hour, from eight o’clock on. By midnight, she’d tossed and turned herself into a blanket cocoon. By one, she was wide awake, and by two, her whole body ached for comfort. Clint’s cell phone rang until his husky voice came on the line.

“If this is an emergency, it better be good.” He fumbled with the phone, creating an echo, but not before Nicole heard a lilting voice, and in that moment that woman in bed with him was no longer simply the wife, but Eleanor.

“Tamara’s funeral was today.” Nicole stuck to her rules. Not even in boozy hazes or feeling pitiful had she succumbed. She sensed he’d moved from the bed to a safer place to talk.

“I’m sorry your friend died, Nicki, but I can’t talk. You’ll ruin everything.”

Tonight, without noting the six weeks since her crazy middle-of-the-night breach, Clint whistled a mindless tune. Nicole had resisted phoning him. Anger, she supposed, was why he hadn’t called her. Six weeks ago, she might have welcomed this impromptu visit.

“My friend died… the least you could’ve done was call me back.”

“Eleanor grilled me the rest of the night. When I got to the office in the morning, all hell broke loose. I know Tamara meant a lot to you. I’m sorry. I really am.” Turned out that his firm, he, had lost a multimillion-dollar client and he was left with no opportunity to debrief before another contract was in the works. “It’s been crazy. You know I would have if I could have.”

“But you didn’t, and I guess that says it all.”

Nicole stared, watching Clint take in the room. Piles of clothes covered the floor, the bed, the sofa bordering it—each item awaiting a packing decision. He pursed his lips. “What are you doing? What’s this mess?”

“I’m going to Paris. I leave in two days.”

“Paris? I figured since Tamara passed, you’d change your mind.”

“I made a promise.” She had the passport, the tickets, the place to stay. No refunds. No turning back. I promise to go to Paris, no matter what.

“I love you, baby, but you’re not a woman to be in Paris on your own. You’ll never make it.”

“When I planned to go with Tamara, you implied she wasn’t sophisticated enough for a trip to Paris.”

“She wasn’t.”

“Have some respect.”

“I call it like I see it—that’s what I’m paid to do. And my opinions haven’t worked out so bad for you.” Clint pulled her on top of him. Nicole squirmed out of his hands and shifted to the other side of the bed. “Stop complaining and admit you like having me around.”

“Sometimes I wish I didn’t.” She wanted to say, “Watch and see,” but doubt inched up her throat—the same uncertainty that had kept her from Paris for so long. He was her rock. His opinions were as important to her as water to the lavender shrubs lining her garden. She’d taken every tip he’d given and doubled her investment accounts, replaced her aging car, refinanced her mortgage, and made herself trustee of her aging parents’ will. He listened when she fussed about her job, sent flowers, wined and dined her at dimly lit restaurants. Even though he’d never met her, he had a knack for helping defuse her mother’s subtle tantrums and nagging over her daughter’s single status, her hair, or her weight.

“If you wait, I’ll take you to Paris.” Clint wiped his face with his palm and sat up straight. “I shouldn’t have lost that deal. Incompetent associates. Contracts. Wheeling and dealing. I think I billed ninety hours last week, and it’s getting worse. I can’t bear another of Eleanor’s black-tie, five-hundred-dollar-a-plate, dry chicken dinners.” He ignored Nicole’s stiffened pose and slid his hand onto her thigh. “You keep me grounded, Nicki. I don’t know if I can keep it together. Don’t go to Paris. Stay here. I can get away for a long weekend. Santa Barbara? You love nice hotels.”

One second. For one second she allowed a semblance of joy to spread along the width of her mouth. She marveled at him, as important as the big-shot partners she worked for, wanting to take care of her. Nicole envisioned a rare, entire weekend—forty-eight hours—the ocean, the salt air, strolling aimlessly, holding hands without the worry of discovery, and luxuriating in an expensive hotel room.

“Do you think I’m stupid?” She slapped Clint’s hand and shoved him back against the pillow. You want me to change my plans because… your wife didn’t appreciate my call? It got you in trouble? You’re addicted to your work?”

Her pajama bottoms loosened with one quick yank as if she’d planned her next move. She pounced on top of him and adjusted her frame. Neither fat nor thin, Nicole held him under her. He whistled a single, long note, and released to her control. She bit his lip. He turned away. She was sick of him, his bribes and his part-time love. Sick of his big white house on a hill. His Saturday night tuxedo dinners and Sunday brunches at restaurants with one-hundred-eighty-degree views of the Bay. Sick of his four kids in private school and his damn latest-model Jaguar. His law partnership. His dimples, his idea of what made her happy. She unbuttoned his shirt, unzipped his pants, and marked him, left red imprints on his belly, forcing him to do his best to avoid the evidence of his infidelity. Without hesitation, Nicole pressed him into her, and rode him, tightening and squeezing her thighs to make him feel her pain. She rode him, her buttocks slapping against his thighs, her hands forcing his shoulders into the pillow. She rode him without kisses or foreplay. He never spoke, never shouted for her to stop. He moaned. He came. She didn’t. Nicole backed off of Clint and ran to the bathroom.

In the shower, she rubbed her skin until it colored under the hot water, soaped and scrubbed her graying pubic hair until every drop of Clint’s quick release slid between her legs and down the drain. Without bothering to towel dry, Nicole threw on her robe, took a cigarette from the pocket, and went back into the bedroom. She watched Clint zip up his pants, tuck in his shirt, and smooth the creases. His face was flushed and blank and covered with satisfaction.

“What got into you?” He smirked and waved away the smoke Nicole blew into his face.

“You got what you came for.”

Arms open, he moved to hug her. When Nicole stepped aside he tugged at her again, holding her in his arms. “I’m sixty-three, Nicki. Losing this deal, after the work I put into it, was a heartbreaker. Baby, we have no guarantees in this life. Think about it. I am.”

“And that means what?”

“Stay and find out. Paris is a tough city—you can’t speak French, you don’t like to travel, and certainly not by yourself. You can’t be alone.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you. You have routine, baby. Not spontaneity. Stay.” He held her hand. “I need to see if this, us, will work more than three nights a month. I love my kids. I won’t hurt them. I respect my wife, but I don’t love her. I haven’t for a long while.”

“Why now?”

“Because the clock is ticking fast. Stay. With me. We can go to Paris on our honeymoon.”

Mississippi, Spring 1944

Martha told RubyMae, at least twice yearly, that the day she was born, the afternoon sun had carried a red hue over its round self as if Jesus’s blood had dripped onto the brightest star to welcome her newborn babe. To RubyMae, that peculiarity of red sun meant she was born to be exceptional. It augured a fate to live and die beyond Sheridan where her parents were born and bound to die, where her grands and great-grands and the greats of the greats—ancestors, the slaves she had come from—lay in the red dirt still waiting for Jesus’s hand to lead them to freedom.

She was one of those women born under the sign of dissatisfaction. Nothing mother, father, or friend did brought her happiness. When she reached thirteen, she complained of a burning deep within—she came to call it longing. Her mother called it restlessness. Now and then, RubyMae swore it kept her fingers from pushing buttons through hand-stitched holes on starched white blouses, somber skirts, and dresses full on high to her neck that her mother, Martha, made her wear. The impulse pushed, nigh on to a living creature. On hot nights she squeezed it, rocked herself quiet with its ache. It pushed her to not come when she was summoned and run wild in the street where the neighbors whispered behind their hands.

The longing kept her in front of the mirror where she stared at her face, tugged at her skin, ran fingers through her hair and pondered how it must be to stand at the head of a line, to be addressed by voices filled with respect, not lust. To be white; lady not gal. Later, after first blood stained her panties, she pondered the feeling of a man’s lips on her own. Her thinking stretched to a world without a staid big sister, a demanding church with lengthy sermons, and commandments that kept her from breathing. Had Martha known, these feelings were the kind best done away with the stick behind the kitchen door or the back of her hand. Instead, RubyMae was marked a lazy child, a dreamer.

But there was meaning to a blood-covered sun. Though she had never seen that huge ball of light covered in such a way, RubyMae knew it was different and so, too, was she. So instead she made friends with the moon that showed itself whole every month. The moon was her kin, and RubyMae gave herself to the waxing and waning of its love. She watched it turn from yellow to silver as it moved from the trees to winter puddles or summer blossoms past Sheridan, past Jackson and Clarksdale and past Tennessee to places her schoolteachers marked on a yellowed wall map. With the waning moon her head spun, her heart pumped fast, the soles of her feet itched.

On this night, the moon was at its roundest, primed for the eccentricities that came to pass when its surface was so close to earth. The air bristled against the fine hairs on RubyMae’s arms with the breeze of possibilities. The longing goaded her out Lurlene’s window, through Martha’s garden, the scent of ready-to-pick radishes spicy in the air, past the caged rabbit and down the darkened street toward a waiting car. At the black sedan, RubyMae tucked and tugged at the dress Lurlene lent her. The curve of her breasts burst from the low neckline.

“Hurry!” Lurlene’s whisper blended with the wind rushing through the tall pines. She opened the back door of the sedan, slid to the far side of the leather seat, and motioned for Ruby to get in. The two mustached men grinned not at the women’s eager faces, but to what was spilling out of the front of RubyMae’s dress visible in the car’s dim interior light. The girl had worked her manipulations on Lurlene for weeks to . . .