Searching for Tina Turner - By Jacqueline E. Luckett Page 0,16
Randall just turned twenty-four, that summer she walked into the party and noticed him. It was the cock of his head, the bass in his voice, and the confidence in his hands as he gave the high sign to his buddy, Charles, that first attracted her. She walked to his side of the room, lingered close to where he stood, and popped her fingers to the music. She figured he was bright, or she obvious, when he turned to talk to her and flaunted his credentials like an Easter litany: almost done with his MBA at Wharton, new GTO, the only summer intern in an all-white corporate communications firm, just shy of being a token, because he was smart. His stance, his articulation, assumed she would swoon over his budding potential.
Instead she told him a joke. A stupid joke. “Knock, knock.” She tapped on his arm and made him ask who’s there. “Orange,” she answered. “Orange you glad I came over here?”
Lena sashays to the end of the customs exit corridor and lifts onto her toes to meet Randall’s face four inches above her five-eight frame. “Welcome home!” She sniffs: pepper, cinnamon, and a hint of the fifteen-hour plane ride. He is her first love. Her love is centered in that place of emotion, not words; she will always love him. At this moment, she longs for that old heart-to-stomach-to-toes tingle she used to feel with the very thought of him. She angles her head in what she hopes is a seductive tilt and stretches her arms around his neck.
“Well, this is a surprise.” Randall makes a smacking mmm-wha sound as he brushes her lips. “What got into you?”
“You!” Lena grins and lowers herself, but not her expectations, for there is a bottle of Duckhorn merlot in a sterling silver wine bucket at the foot of the six-foot bathtub at home. The Gentle Side of Coltrane, one of Randall’s beloved albums—a compilation much like the one that played after the memories of the Tina Turner concert faded, and he seduced her—is on the stereo queued and ready to play.
That night was romantic, one of a kind. There was a shadow of beard on his chin then, like the one there now, but that was the silky shadow of a young man not in need of the daily use of a razor. Lena slides her fingers down Randall’s cheek and over his prickly overnight stubble. “Tired?”
“Bushed.” He stretches his empty hand and wavers momentarily; his hand stuck between handshake and hug, between peace offering and affection. His lips form a tight smile; fatigue or disinterest Lena cannot tell. Her hand goes up while his goes down, brushing only at that point, that fulcrum of mismatched timing, capturing only electricity and knobby knuckles.
Sadness and sameness run from her heart to her stomach to her toes. She picks up the lighter of his two bags, a leather duffle she gave to him one Christmas, and heads for the parking lot. “That’s all?”
“If I said anything more, I’d have to sing, and I thought you said I should leave the falsetto to Smokey.” He chuckles and stretches his arm around her shoulder; the airport, the exiting passengers, the gigantic monitors and patrolling security guards, anything but her eyes the focus of his attention.
At the exit of the crowded parking lot, Lena pulls onto the freeway and floors the accelerator until the speedometer twitches close to ninety and the gray marble facade of San Francisco International Airport looms far behind them. The last time she dropped Randall off, he chided her, all the way to the airport, for her racecar antics and the three or four hundred dollar moving violation that the highway patrol would issue to a black woman in a very expensive, very red convertible.
This evening, silence is a third passenger in the car. Lena rehearsed the scene, this ride home, in her head: she would say she missed him, he would say he missed her, too, and that he wants her to have the sense of self-reliance she seeks. No decision necessary.
Tina’s voice rings out from the radio’s speakers. Like the lyrics that slipped off the printer, this song is perfectly timed. Tina sings what Lena wants to say:
Two people gotta stick together
And love one another, save it for a rainy day
Lena looks from the road to her husband’s profile; his broad nose and full lips—the thick salt-and-pepper mustache above them—are fixed in a stern pout. The car is a finely tuned