Her sister's shrill voice flew out of the open living room jalousie windows, a reminder of childhood. That was the same window where Jessica had stood vigil, waiting for her father to come home from his job working on the telephone lines; she'd probably been waiting by that window when he drove to Burger King in his billed Oakland Raiders cap, the one night he never came back. Jessica saw Alex's hazy figure in her place, in a bright-purple dress. Kira was beside her in the window, a ball of white taffeta and lace. "Dinner, Mommy! Dinner, Daddy!" she echoed. As usual, Kira needed to be a part of the production, whatever it was.

Bea Jacobs had fixed baked chicken, collard greens, cornbread, and two desserts, a sweet potato pie and a lemon pound cake. Jessica was amused by her mother's sudden culinary finesse. She'd never cooked this way for the family before, but she started in earnest after Kira was born, a.s.suming a grandmother's role, and Uncle Billy had pa.s.sed along some down-home Georgia recipes since he moved in, like peach cobbler and chicken feet stew. Bea was a neurotic cook, obsessed with kitchen details the way she'd fretted over the books before she retired as business manager of a chain of beauty shops. Like her daughters, she was a perfectionist. And she caught on fast.

"Where's David?" Bea asked, pulling her chair up to the head of the table after setting down the plate of cornbread. She'd always been thin, and she wore her hair in a silver natural, cut short the way Alexis wore hers. Only Jessica relaxed her hair, letting it grow in a straight page-boy style just past her ears.

"He's washing up," Jessica answered.

"Let's go on and say grace, then."

In a clash of wills with his in-law, David had once made a production of refusing to sit through grace at her table. Jessica thought her mother would bite through her lip, she was so angry. All things considered, Jessica thought with a smile, Bea was adjusting well to having a heathen in the family; both her father and grandfather had been pastors.

They grasped hands; Bea taking Jessica and Alexis's hands on either side of her, Jessica holding Kira's tiny fingers, and Alexis reaching over to Uncle Billy's wheelchair to touch his ruined left hand. Uncle Billy still couldn't move his left arm since his stroke. They murmured their amens in unison.

"You finished fooling with that car yet? I got something you need to listen to in back," Uncle Billy said when David joined them at the table. He'd dressed again and smelled of fresh cologne. The scent, whatever he'd found, suited him.

"Don't tell me you rooted out that old Jelly Roll record."

"Told you I had it somewhere up in all them boxes. Original recording, nineteen and twenty-five. Got me some Satchmo too." Uncle Billy's words slurred slightly, the stroke compounded by missing front teeth and a heavy Georgia accent. Sometimes Jessica couldn't understand him, but David never had a problem. A relative from Bea's mother's side, Uncle Billy had been born near the grounds of the same plantation where the family had been slaves for years.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned, Uncle Billy," David said, smiling. "I may just have to sneak in here one night and steal those away. And that old Victrola of yours too."

"Oh, no. You ain't stealin' nothin' from this old man. And I'ma still find that Jazz Brigade recording. My daddy left me that from when we was in Chicago, right *fore the Depression. He used to watch those boys rehea.r.s.e. Said they could cook. Seth *Spider' Tillis, Lester Payne, all of them."

Something like rapture pa.s.sed across David's face. He loved music. Whatever shelf s.p.a.ce on their walls and in the closets that wasn't filled with books was dedicated to his vast record and CD collection, exclusively cla.s.sical, blues, and jazz. He'd once told her that his CD collection alone numbered more than four thousand. But it was much more than a hobby to him; the New York Times had called David's book on the early jazz age, which he'd written at Harvard as his doctoral dissertation, the "definitive history of jazz."

David leaned closer to Uncle Billy, his chin resting on his palm. "Uncle Billy," he said slowly, "if you could find The Jazz Brigade ... I lost all my originals. And it's so rare-"

"What's the ... Depression?" Kira piped up.

David tapped her on top of her head. "It was a long time ago, d.u.c.h.ess. Many years before any of us were born."

"Now, hold up. I was born nineteen-seventeen," Uncle Billy corrected him.

"Yes, you'd better speak for yourself, David," Bea said. She always spoke a painstaking English, her T's sharp, a result of her upper-middle-cla.s.s rearing upstate in Quincy.

"We sure got some old folks at this table, don't we?" Alexis asked. She shared a playful glance with Jessica; she and Jessica looked like twins, though Alex was thirty-four, six years older than Jessica, the same age as David.

"Old enough to know better," Bea said.

Bea's skin was a fair shade, though she'd told Jessica she was teased by her cousins as a child because she was the darkest one in her family. Maybe it was through rebellion that Bea married Raymond Jacobs, the darkest man she had ever known. Bea's pet name for him had been Blue, Jessica learned much later, because he was blue-black. Jessica and Alexis were mixtures of brown, though Jessica couldn't think of a time when anyone ever once felt a need to discuss the family complexions. In church school, when one of Jessica's young cla.s.smates pointed out that Bea was "light-skinded," like it was something special, Jessica didn't know what the girl was talking about.

Raymond was Bea's second husband. She'd divorced her first husband after ten years because of his drinking, then moved to Miami to begin a new life. She'd also hoped to have children, and her first husband had been sterile. Then, she met Raymond.

Raymond, who was six years younger than Bea and had only an eighth-grade education, won Jessica's college-educated mother through his sly wit and natural intelligence. His lack of formal schooling shut him out of many jobs, but Jessica had known he was a genius before she really knew what a genius was. She'd always looked forward to the day-maybe in fourth grade or fifth grade, she'd thought-when she could sit down and impress her father with how smart she was too. Fate had cheated her out of that chance.

Raymond had been young when he died, only forty. But Bea was no longer young. Jessica remembered, while sitting at the dinner table, that her mother had just turned sixty-six. She didn't look it, despite her silver hair; her skin was smooth and unwrinkled, splotched with only a few dark moles. Still, in just ten years, which no longer seemed like an eternity to Jessica, Bea would be seventy-six, close to Uncle Billy's age now.

Time pa.s.sed so quickly. Jessica felt the disquieting sense, as she often did, of enjoying a fleeting moment before it was over as a memory, as though she were already reminiscing about Sunday dinner with Uncle Billy and her mother, way back when they were both still alive. Alexis's excited cry pulled Jessica from her thoughts. "Ooh, girl, I almost forgot," her sister said. "Tell us about that book you're writing."

The question was a surprise to everyone at the table, bringing a round of smiles and exclamations. Except from David.

"I was planning to tell you tonight. It's not in stone yet. Peter said something to his agent, and he thinks we can get a contract and take a leave of absence for a few months."

"Peter." David's tone was knowing, nearly scornful.

"What does that mean?"

David didn't answer, his eyes fixed on the road as he drove the minivan south on Biscayne Boulevard. It was raining again, unusual for February. Usually, the moody, sporadic storm clouds they'd experienced throughout the week appeared in summertime. It had been a gloomy and wet few days. Maybe that accounted some for David's sour mood, Jessica thought.

"Block ... buster ... Video," Kira said from the backseat. She'd taken to announcing all signs they pa.s.sed. "I can read. Burger King. See? Star-dust Mo-tel."

"That's enough, d.u.c.h.ess. We know you're smart," he said.

"David, why are you so down on Peter?"

"We'll talk about that later." He tried to sound pleasant.

"Mommy, is Peter coming over?" Kira asked. Jessica allowed Kira to address Peter by his first name because her attempts to p.r.o.nounce Mister Donovitch were hopeless. "He gave me a doll-baby. 'Member? For Christmas?"

"I remember."

David sighed shortly, no longer hiding his irritation. Jessica wondered if he was somehow jealous of Peter, if he felt threatened by her friendship with him. True, David was always simply courteous when Peter visited, holding himself at a slight distance only she could detect. But jealousy didn't make sense; she'd told him she thought Peter was gay. Did David have a problem with whites, then? She'd have to wait until they were home and Kira was bathed and tucked in before she could corner David in the bedroom for an explanation.

She found David spread-eagled across the bed, lying on his stomach. The bed, which David had imported, cost him twenty thousand dollars, he told her the first night they shared it. It was more than a hundred years old, a canopied opium bed that once belonged to some useless lord in China. The rich teak frame was engraved with intricate patterns of dragons. The bed was so high, David had explained, because its original owner probably rarely got up and wanted to meet visitors at eye level. Even now, whenever Jessica sat on the bed, which was built to rock slightly on a hinge, she felt like she'd entered an age-old sanctuary.

"Okay. Tell me what's bothering you," she said.

"I hate hearing secondhand about developments that affect our family," David said, his voice sounding m.u.f.fled.

"You're right. I'm sorry. I just mentioned it to Alex-"

"I know what it takes to write a book, Jess. And traveling besides? I don't like it at all."

Jessica felt a stab of hurt, but it quickly turned to anger. "I planned to talk it over with you. I didn't know I'd also be asking permission."

"Apparently not. It sounds very much decided."

"You wrote a book, David. Remember?"

"Exactly my point. I wrote a book before I had a family or any life to speak of, and it ate up vast portions of my time. Four months, to me, sounds highly optimistic. I'd say at least six."

"So? What's six months?"

At this, David rolled over to look her in the eye. "Six months," he said, "is six months. A very short time, and yet a very long time."

She didn't understand him. No matter how long she lived with him and observed him and tried to think the way he did, he always confounded her somehow. Was it chauvinism? Selfishness?

"Peter says-"

David cut her off with a disgusted sound and rolled toward the wall. He was muttering to himself in another language, not Spanish this time, but Amharic or Arabic. She couldn't tell which. She thought of Ricky Ricardo having a tantrum on I Love Lucy.

"English, please," she said.

Groaning, he lifted himself and sat beside her so that their feet dangled together over the edge of the bed. He rubbed her thigh. "Do you watch my face when I listen to Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik? Or Bessie Smith? Or when I look at you and Kira? Do you see the delight?"

She nodded. She'd seen that expression today, when he talked about music and his lost Jazz Brigade records with Uncle Billy.

"That's how your face looks," he said, "when Peter comes. Or any of your other reporter friends. You cloister in a corner and build a bonfire among yourselves, feeding it with a.n.a.lysis and supposition and gossip. The city commissioner's race. The presidential election. What's Peter's specialty? Oh, yes. The Mafia. Santo Trafficante and the rest. The sites of their summer homes, their illegitimate children, and so on. That's where we lose each other, Jess. You can sit with me and enjoy Mozart. And Bessie Smith. And Kira, of course. And you even tolerate my ramblings about the Crusades, or King Tewedros the Second in Ethiopia, or Francisco Pizarro, or the Huguenots in France-"

"Sometimes-" Jessica cut him off. As college faded behind her, Jessica realized her knowledge of world history was limited to Spain sending Columbus to "discover" America in 1492. When David went off, she felt like a moron.

"Try as I might-and I do, Jess, I really do-I can't muster that something you feel ... that concern, or whatever it is, that drives you and your bonfire. But Peter does. And for that reason, he can move a part of you I can never hope to touch. The world is too much with him, to paraphrase Wordsworth ... And I'm ..." He paused, but didn't continue.

"The Brother from Another Planet," Jessica said, smiling, using Alex's nickname for him.

"Make light if you want, but I almost fell asleep when Peter was here last week. Bill Clinton, blah blah blah. Jesus Christ."

"I know," Jessica sighed, ma.s.saging his scalp with her fingertips. David was a history whiz, but he was so indifferent to current events, pop culture, and even racial issues. This barrier between them was getting harder to ignore. She could drop names like Louis Farrakhan or Clarence Thomas and get a blank gaze from David, so he definitely couldn't deal with discussions about any thing her friends were talking about at work. Nothing. And forget about new music or television-except the sentimental old love stories, like Casablanca, that he watched on videotape. David lived in a world of books and jazz music.

She didn't understand how a man who was so d.a.m.n smart could choose ignorance. She read her Sun-News and New York Times every morning before going to work, and when she came home she found the newspapers wherever she'd left them, untouched.

"Whether you admit it or not, Peter wants to pull you away. He wants to do it with this first book, and then another. He doesn't share our priorities, like family," David said.

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it? What does he have? Whom does he have?"

"David ..."

"I'm only being honest. He has voter surveys and a yen for buried secrets. That's all, Jessica. That's all."

Jessica was surprised to realize that her eyes were stinging with tears. This was cutting to her core for some reason. She really wanted to write this book. Yes, maybe she did crave the chance to bond with Peter, who gave a d.a.m.n about the things everyday folks talked about at the beauty shop and on their lunch breaks. So what? Why couldn't David see that their book might help people and make a difference? Was he really so oblivious to life outside their El Portal street?

Despite their differences, Jessica wanted to believe with her heart that she and David were soul mates. But sometimes their reliance upon each other scared her. Often, at bedtime, instead of making love or going to sleep, they spent hours talking about deep subjects like how the legacy of the African slave trade had transformed the world, or the essences of men and women, or the nature of love. And she learned something new from him every day, whether it was an unusual word in Spanish, the unsung conquests of some African emperor, or a verse from an Elizabethan sonnet. He even knew the Bible and the old-time spirituals inside and out. They had to work at it, but they found their common ground.

Ultimately, though, their differences returned, and she wondered how deeply they ran. How could she continue to overlook them, when they loomed so large?

Jessica didn't notice at first that David had slipped his arm around her shoulder, and that his head was nuzzled against her neck. "Don't go write a book now, Jess. Not now," he was repeating in her ear softly, barely audibly, as though begging for his life.

6.

"Your man is tripping, Jessica."

"You're telling me."

Jessica had tried to reach Alexis at her job at the UM medical school's hematology lab all morning, and her sister finally called her back at the newspaper at ten minutes to noon. Peter planned to have lunch with Jessica to hammer out details for the book proposal he wanted to send his agent by midweek. She'd just seen him vanish into Sy's office. Lord, was he going to tell their boss already? Now she was nervous.

"I hate to talk about your husband, but you know what? He's always tried to monopolize you, from the beginning. I'll never forget how he carried on that time we wanted to see Janet Jackson. I mean, d.a.m.n, he couldn't let you go for one night? And you were so afraid you wouldn't find a man that you put up with it."

Ouch. Alex was right, at least partially. Jessica was grateful she wasn't in her sister's shoes; Alexis was single now, and still looking. Jessica wondered if her sister would ever get married, or if it mattered to her anymore.

Considering Jessica's history with black men, David had been a G.o.dsend. Jessica and Alex won scholarships to a lily-white private school for gifted children when they were young, so they'd been socialized around whites except at church. When the scholarship money ran out, Jessica's adjustment to a mostly black public high school hadn't been easy. Huddles of black football players snickered at Jessica when she walked past, a gangly bookworm. One boy Jessica didn't even know sneered at her, saying she must want to be white since she was in honors cla.s.ses with all of those white kids. To fit in, Alex had taken on a homegirl demeanor and found a boyfriend in high school, but Jessica never did. She'd felt like the same outcast in college, even with twenty pounds more shape and a sa.s.sy haircut.

Then she met David, who was so different himself. She thought many blacks were so quick to judge her based on nothing; but David never made hurtful a.s.sumptions about her, and that had been such a relief.

Alex never saw it that way. Jessica remembered the sting she'd felt after introducing her sister to David in the beginning; Alex had already ripped her ear open for going to bed with a professor, especially so fast, but Jessica had hoped her sister would be as impressed as she was by David's mind and manners, not to mention his incredible face. Didn't happen. After spending only one afternoon with her and David, Alex told her later: "Jessica, don't buy it. That man is running a game on you. He'll never really care about anybody but himself."

It had been a mean thing to say, Jessica thought. Mean and unjustified. Just because David had been shy with Alexis there? Because he wasn't good at chitchat? Or maybe he seemed a little arrogant? What about all of the good things? Alex admitted she still couldn't give Jessica a concrete reason for her first impression, and sometimes Jessica was convinced her sister had never learned to see past it.

"Look, it's not like I snapped up the first loser who came along. Is it?" Jessica asked.

Alexis sighed. "No, girl. That's not what I mean. You know David is something else. He's fine, he's intelligent, a model father. And he's good to you, too, most of the time. I just think you tolerate all his clinging because you don't think you have a choice."

"Well, I'll tell you what," Jessica said, "I'd rather have him clinging than walking out the door."

Alexis sighed, but didn't say anything.

"What?" Jessica asked.

When Alexis spoke, her voice was low and stern. "It just p.i.s.ses me off," she said. "Look at the guilt trip that man has put on you. Like all you're supposed to do with your life is sit and hold his hand. I don't know where he gets that, but that's not the way it works. Here you are about to accomplish something meaningful, and instead of toasting you with champagne, your own husband is making you feel like s.h.i.t."

"I know," Jessica said softly.

"You think Daddy was ever like that with Mom? h.e.l.l, no. David should be boosting you up, not holding you down. You write that d.a.m.n book, girl. Do you hear me? You write it. And then you write a whole bunch more."

Jessica smiled, grateful to have Alexis to talk to. She'd learned long ago not to complain about her husband to her mother, since Bea remembered all slights long after Jessica had forgotten them. Bea would have a fit if she knew how much David opposed the book. Alexis, at least, was a little more objective. Not much, but a little.

"I will," Jessica said, deciding.

Once again, Peter suggested O'Leary's. He never got tired of the bar's greasy chicken wings. Jessica ordered a Ceasar salad and opted for a beer this time. She felt like she needed it. Since it was too hot on the patio, they sat inside beneath a television set playing The Young and the Restless, her mother's favorite soap. It was rea.s.suring to glance up at the screen and recognize some of the actors playing the same characters she'd known when she was a devotee in high school; they were always there, year after year.

"Len had a surprise for me this morning," Peter said.

"Who's Len?"

"My agent. Leonard Stoltz. He mentioned our idea to an editor he knows, and she loves it. Len's guessing we might be able to swing a forty thousand dollar advance."

"A ..."

"The snag is, we'd have to promise to use a case that's getting a lot of press up there in New York now, some guy who locked his father in the bas.e.m.e.nt until he starved to death. It's not exactly within our purview of nursing facilities ... and I know forty isn't a lot, divided in half ..."