Mahogany's Dream Page 12

  “As long as it’s not for a rain check,” he said.

  They had made a left onto Chestnut Street where they eventually ended up in front of the Omni Hotel. Dyson gave a yellow ticket to the valet, who immediately dashed off to the garage.

  “How did you know about my dream? It’s really been bugging me.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t be satisfied if I said that it was just a really good guess.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “If I told you the truth about it, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  “When the time is right.”

  “When will that be? How do you even know we’ll get that far?”

  “I’m not sure and I don’t know,” he said, looking directly into her eyes.

  She averted her gaze. After a pause, she said, “I have to admit, it scared me a little.”

  “If I scare you, then why are you here?”

  She pounced on the question. “You mean besides the fact you’re handsome?”

  “That does sound like a line,” he said affably.

  Then the valet pulled up with his car.

  And rich, she thought.

  __________

  On the way to the restaurant, she couldn’t help but ask, “What kind of car is this?” She’d never seen one like it.

  “It’s an Aston Martin,” he said. “There was one in that old Nelly video with Kelly Rowland.”

  She was stunned. “You listen to hip hop?”

  He turned on the stereo, which was preset to Power 99.

  “What kind of music did you think I listened to?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I figured you listened to classical music or something uptight like that.”

  “Sometimes I do,” he said. He favored Bach and the viola mastery of Debussy. But he also enjoyed The Roots and Jay-Z. He’d never understood why people found it so hard to believe that he could simultaneously embrace his intellect and his culture.

  He took her to a French Creole restaurant in South Jersey called Melange Café. Hidden off Route 38 in Cherry Hill, it was an exquisite little eatery where the chef always personally greeted the diners. She would have never found it in a million years of searching on her own. She had lobster bisque that was so delectable it made her stomach feel like royalty.

  The conversation was even better. They told each other their stories.

  She found Dyson to be an enigmatic mix of charm and sagacity. He was obviously brilliant, but he rarely came off as pedantic. He had a childlike fascination with knowledge that she found unbearably sexy. He was funny too. When she asked him which languages he spoke, he said, “English, Mandarin Chinese and Ebonics.” And then there was that resistance-melting smile. She would have to be careful around that weapon.

  He was equally enamored with her. He had been with his share of attractive women, and he had learned through trial and error to look beyond the manicured façade for the real person. And what he found beyond Janaya’s lovely exterior was a nurturing spirit. She had talked almost exclusively, yet insightfully, about the needs of the important people in her life. It wasn’t a charm school kind of trained attentiveness, but genuine concern. She practically radiated compassion. And she was homesick. She hadn’t outright said so, but it was clear. He made a calculated guess that she was only in Philadelphia because someone here needed her more than the people she left behind in Washington. He would have to find out who that was.

  Towards the end of their meal, Michelle Hillman walked in with some partners from her law firm. Dyson immediately came over to greet them. Michelle hugged him like she always did. While they were embraced, she saw Janaya at Dyson’s table.

  “Who’s that?” she asked. “The flavor of the month?”

  “Something like that,” Dyson answered carefully.

  Michelle’s mood changed faster than a sprinting cheetah. “Grow up, Dyson.”

  “Is that how you talk to all your big clients?”

  “Only the ones with commitment phobia who I occasionally have sex with.”

  He looked hurt. “I hate it when you say that.”

  “I wonder why.”

  He smiled. “Do you still love me even though I’m not perfect?”

  “As a friend?” she asked.

  “No, as your dick-in-a-glass. Of course as a friend.”

  “You know that I do.”

  “Then that’s all that matters.”

  Back at the table, Janaya asked, “Who was that?”

  “My business lawyer.”

  “Oh. Do you always hug your lawyers?”

  “Not usually, but I felt like hugging Danny after my proffer session the other day.”

  Janaya let that slide. That wasn’t how Brian felt about the meeting.

  “I think we better head back,” she said.

  Dyson paid for lunch, even though that wasn’t the deal.

  __________

  When they pulled up in front of her office, she said, “Make a deal with me.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “If I tell you a secret about yourself, then you’ll take me to dinner Saturday night.”

  He grinned. “I don’t usually make deals with strange women.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Now I’m not strange anymore.”

  He said, “But what about my secret?”

  She lifted her palm in the air. “Put your hand in mine.” He did.

  She closed her eyes. “You had a dream that you took me to see Bad Boys 4.”

  “Is that right?” he said, smiling.

  “Oh, wait,” she said, closing her eyes again. “No, I’m sorry, that’s the dream you’re going to have tonight.”

  They shared a laugh before she hopped out the car and went back to work.

  That night, Dyson slept peacefully and dreamlessly.

  CHAPTER

  31

  Rock walked up to his front door to find a yellow post-it note flapping in the wind. The note said:

  A woman asks her husband, “Do you love me only because my father died and left me a fortune?”

  “Of course not,” he says. “I’d love you no matter who left you the money.”

  Rocked smiled at the joke. From behind him, Mancini said, “Mr. Anderson!”

  Rock’s smile vanished. He and the detective had a history together. A bad one. Over the years, Rock had been a suspect in three of Mancini’s homicide investigations. He had never been convicted of any of them. But that didn’t mean Mancini thought he was innocent. After Rock was acquitted the third time, a frustrated Mancini pressured the Assistant D.A. to prosecute Rock for making terroristic threats. Rock had spent two years in state prison for that.

  “I show up here looking for somebody else,” Mancini said, “and I bump into you. Small world.”

  “I don’t know shit about nuthin’,” Rock said.

  “Whoa, King Kong, I haven’t even asked you anything yet. Why don’t we go in and have a seat.”

  Rock put his colossal arm across the doorway. “Not without a warrant.”

  Mancini was startled. “A warrant? The Deed says Dyson Conwell owns this house. Move out of my way.”

  Rock didn’t budge. “Dyson Conwell is my brother. We’re legally, uh…tenants-in-common in this residence. Yeah, that’s it, tenants-in-common.”

  Now Mancini was shocked. “Tenants-in-common? Who the hell are you, Johnnie Cochran now?”

  Rock didn’t respond and he didn’t move.

  Mancini said, “That must’ve been one hell of a G-E-D course you took in the joint.”

  “What?” Rock asked.

  “Yeah, I mean, one day you’re a common street thug, then the next thing I know, you’re using words you can’t spell and reading Scientific fucking American.”

  Rock looked down at the copy of Dyson’s magazine he had just retrieved from the mailbox. He told Mancini, “If you gotta problem, talk to my lawyer
.” Then he pulled a crinkled business card from his back pocket and gave it to the detective.

  Mancini read the card. “Your lawyer is Reed Hoffman at Rome, Ballard?” he asked in utter disbelief. Mancini stepped back and looked at the house. “What the hell is going on here, Rock? You’re living out here in Mt. Airy like you’re Bill Cosby’s nephew and you’re telling me Reed Hoffman is your lawyer. You couldn’t afford Reed Hoffman if you robbed Johnnie Cochran. And where the hell is Dyson Conwell?”

  Rock repeated himself. “Talk to my lawyer.”

  Then he went in the house and slammed the door.

  CHAPTER

  32

  Bad Boys 4 was sold out, so Dyson and Janaya saw the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie instead.

  On the way home, Janaya made the innocent faux pas of telling Dyson that she found Philadelphia dirty and boring. It was not the first time he’d heard someone assess his hometown that way. It perturbed him to no end. He gently offered his view that Philadelphia is really a collection of neighborhoods, most of which outsiders never experience.

  That very night, he took her to the Fairmount Water Works behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art and told her poetry by Edgar Allen Poe. Then he took her to Edgar Allen Poe’s house on Spring Garden Street and told her his own poetry. He asked her to define A Love Supreme, then took her to John Coltrane’s house on 33rd Street and explained why he disagreed.

  The next day he took her to the Awbury Arboretum in Germantown. The gardens were a spectacular sight in their own right, but Dyson forever etched it her mind by taking her to a secluded spot and doing something strange with a wand that made the lightning bugs briefly spell her name in the air. He said the wand gave off ultraviolet light and the bugs were a unique species native to the park that responded to the light’s specific wavelength. When she got over her amazement at the bugs’ synchronized flight, she asked him how he would know such a thing. He said only that he spent a lot of time in the arboretum as a child.

  A few nights later he showed up at her apartment with a pair of worn out shoes slung over his shoulder on a shoestring. She asked, “What are those?” and he said, “Dancing Shoes.” She had expected him to take her to the clubs along Delaware Avenue, but instead he took her to the Black Lily in Northern Liberties, where they grooved to live NeoSoul. That same night they visited the Caribbean dancehalls in the West Indian enclaves of West Oak Lane, where they danced until their feet hurt. She never imagined a theoretical physicist could have so much rhythm.

  In the following weeks there was rock climbing in Fairmount Park and horseback riding in the far Northeast. There were British sports at the Philadelphia Cricket Club and Italian Water Ice on Stenton Avenue. They learned to make fresh ginseng tea in the Japanese Tea Gardens of West Philadelphia and cavorted on real trolleys in Chestnut Hill. She dazzled her co-workers with stories about places in their own city they’d never heard of.

  When she got homesick, he took her to South Street and told her to pretend it was M Street in Georgetown. He took her to Penn’s Landing at night and had her it pretend it was Haines Point. They ate at the Cheesecake Factory in King of Prussia and acted like it was the Cheesecake Factory in White Flint. They shopped at Franklin Mills, hitting all the stores Janaya loved at Potomac Mills.

  Not once did he feed her a cheesesteak or guide her through a boring museum.

  Every week brought the discovery of a new place. He taught her to see Philadelphia through his eyes. What she once saw as dilapidated, she now saw as historic. What she previously considered mundane, she now considered cosmopolitan.

  And it wasn’t just Philadelphia that he helped her rediscover. Dutifully listening to tales of his wide travels, she learned that he viewed the whole world through a magic kaleidoscope inside his mind. She thought it was extraordinary that he found wonder everywhere he went.

  ________

  Dancing and dining were easy. Her grandmother had told her that the best time to evaluate a man was on dog days, not date days. It was at such times that Dyson’s star seemed to shine brightest.

  Once, he’d called her at work and she snapped at him for no apparent reason. After some prodding, she admitted that she felt overworked and had PMS. He’d said, “I know just the thing for that.”

  A few hours later she received a delivery.

  Brian heard his secretary laughing unusually loud. He came out of his office to see what the commotion was about, but Janaya quickly covered up something with her arms and told him it was nothing. He told her she was acting weird and retreated back to his office. When her boss was out of sight, she lifted a black T-shirt out of a gift box. In big white letters, the shirt said:

  DON’T ASK ME FOR S#!T

  __________

  Not long after that they made love where Dyson really lived.

  On a narrow backstreet near Kelly Drive, Dyson blithely drove towards what appeared to be a dead end. “Are you lost?” Janaya asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m home.”

  She thought he was joking, but then the garage gate lifted.

  From the outside, Dyson’s house looked like a small, three-story factory. The front façade was dominated by two rows of large tinted windows resting in a sea of red brick. The building was clean and well maintained, but nondescript. There were no markings or signage of any kind, not even an address plate.

  But that was the exterior.

  On the inside, it was unimaginably luxurious. Driving under that lift gate was like passing into another world.

  The entire ground floor was a garage for Dyson’s collection of vehicles. She wasn’t a car fanatic, but she recognized the Range Rover and the Aston Martin from their previous outings in them. The other two looked like some sort of antique racing vehicles. In a far corner was a spiral staircase rising to the next floor. She couldn’t make out the intricate detail in the railing because Dyson insisted they take the elevator instead.

  “You have an elevator in your house?” she asked.

  “It’s hard to get furniture up a spiral staircase,” he said.

  When the glass doors closed with a soft hiss, a pleasant female voice asked, “Would your guest like coffee?”

  Dyson looked at Janaya. “Well?”

  “Who is that, your housekeeper?”

  “No, that’s Oasis, the computer that manages most of the systems in the house.”

  Janaya just stood there blinking.

  Dyson said into the air, “No, we’ll skip the coffee, Oasis. But turn on all the lights, we’re going to take a little tour.”

  They stepped out of the elevator into a vast open space that looked like an interior decorator’s version of Heaven. Everywhere her head turned she saw rich woods and exotic fabrics. It was sparsely furnished, but every piece was well placed. “This is my living room,” he said.

  The centerpiece of the living room was an enormous rectangular rug that colorfully depicted an ancient Egyptian ceremony. Janaya stood at the edge admiring the detail, afraid to step on it. “This carpet once belonged to Nubankhre, a Pharaoh of the Sixteenth Dynasty,” Dyson explained. “It had three big holes in it when I bought it, but I found this old woman in Cairo who restored it using the original weaving technique. If you look over here—” He stopped, suddenly aware that Janaya wasn’t listening. She hadn’t heard a word he’d said because she was staring at the ceiling with her mouth agape. He looked up and smiled.

  “Is that…a rainbow?”

  “It is,” he said. “My skylight has a special double pane with enlarged hydrogen molecules trapped between them. The skylight constantly rotates to make the correct refraction angles, which makes the water molecules act like prisms. I designed it myself.”

  Janaya was captivated.

  The rest of the second floor was divided into five sections: the kitchen, the bedroom, an Exercise area, a home theater and an immense library.

  Janaya thought that library was an inadequate word to describe the place where Dyson stored his collection of bo
oks. Hundreds upon hundreds of books lined the shelves of the towering, circular room. No ladders were needed because the library brought the books to you. What appeared to be a curved wall was really an advanced conveyor system that could reconfigure itself to offer easy access to any book in the room. A single stuffed chair and a reading lamp were the only furnishings. Midway between the floor and the ceiling, a backlit gap in the shelves framed a sign that said:

  A mind expanded by new ideas can never return to its original dimensions.

  -Oliver Wendell Holmes

  After the library, he showed her the terrace on the top floor. Hidden behind twelve-foot walls were a bonsai garden, a bank of solar panels for power and an office enclosed by glass walls.

  Everywhere they went in the building, the air was preternaturally fragrant. As they moved from section to section, the scent changed from citrus to oleander to spearmint. He told her that Oasis constantly filtered and scented the air based on his location in the house.

  But the smells were not as pleasing as the artwork the adorned the walls. She had never seen such a collection of fine paintings, not even at the Smithsonian, where she had once worked. Dyson stunned her when he said that they were all fakes. “But the colors,” she protested, “are so rich. How can they not be real?”

  “They’re real,” he said, “but they’re just copies.” She was baffled when he said that not only were none of the pieces original, they were not even paintings. “They’re actually fog screens—digital reproductions projected into clouds of water vapor.” He stuck his finger into The Lovers by Jacob Lawrence and it came back wet. “Digital rights are much cheaper than the real thing.”

  “They’re all so bright and vibrant,” she remarked, sticking her own finger into the screen. “Maybe they’re better than the real thing.”

  “Not by a long shot,” he said. “I’ll take you to Paris so you can see the originals with your own eyes. These screens are artificially bright because I’m in a good mood.”