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hips.
    “I’m in the process of learning.”
    “A-huh. And who would the teach be?”
    “Someone named Larry Ward,” I said and she laughed. “Like you didn’t know.”
    “Me?”
    “You can fake them out on the basketball court, Lynette, but not on my court. Girl,” I added.
    She laughed and we hugged.
    “You sure you want to do this?” she asked turning serious.
    “That’s what scares me the most.”
    “What?”
    “That I am sure,” I said.
    She suddenly looked frightened for me.
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be fine. And so will Larry,” I added before I walked out.
    He was waiting in the shadows in front of the library. My car took him by surprise.
    “Brand-new?”
    He stood there holding the opened door and looking in at me.
    “Yes,” I said. “Graduation present.”
    I saw the hesitation.
    “Don’t worry about it. I’m not a snob,” I said and he smiled.
    “Yeah, well,” he said getting in, “you’re the richest non-snob I know.”
    The club we went to was really off the beaten college path. There were mostly black people there, but there were other whites and most everyone knew Larry. I found out he had read some of his poetry there and one of the musicians had put a poem of his to music. He was asked to do it again and I thought it was wonderful.
    “This is like stepping on another planet,” I told him. “I know what jazz is, of course, but I never listened to it like this.”
    “I’ve always been into it,” he said. “I play a little on the saxophone.”
    Again, he surprised me when he was asked to do just that before the evening ended. He looked like he was blowing every note just for me. The melody was lovely, sensuous. Listening to him and watching him, I felt as if we were already making love.
    Once again, I had a wonderful time. When we left, I didn’t want the night to end.
    “Do you live in the dorm?” I asked.
    “Dorm? No, that’s too expensive. I have a couple of rooms in the back of an elderly lady’s house. She was a good friend of my grandmother’s. I have my own entrance and a small kitchenette. Half the time she doesn’t even want the rent money. I have to leave it on her kitchen counter.”
    “I’d love to see it.”
    “What? C’mon,” he said. “It’s nothing. A few pieces of furniture, an old television that’s not even a color set. I sleep on a pullout.”
    “I don’t think I ever have.”
    “That doesn’t surprise me.”
    “Are you ashamed of where you’re living?”
    “I certainly am not. It’s clean and – ˮ
    “Then you’ll take me there,” I said. “Where do I turn?”
    “Do you always get what you want when you want it?” he asked.
    “Yes, why? Are you going to be the first one to stop me?”
    He smiled and shook his head.
    “I know when to step back,” he said. “A long time ago my grandmother taught me that a branch that doesn’t bend, breaks.”
    “Then she must have known I was coming,” I said.
    When he looked at me, his eyes were no longer full of laughter.
    They were full of love.
    After I parked, we walked through the shadows as if we were shadows ourselves, neither of us speaking, holding hands and listening to the pounding of our own hearts. The world around us had suddenly become that silent.
    The back of the house wasn’t much and the rooms were half the size of my closet at home, but I didn’t say anything. He put on a lamp and then another because there was no central ceiling fixture. I looked at his shelves of books. They were obviously his most precious possession. It looked like he spent all his money on books, in fact.
    “Looks like you eat and sleep books.”
    “If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader,” he told me as I studied the titles.
    He showed me the magazines that had published his poems.
    “You’re really good, Larry. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t read a poem, but I like yours very much. They’re serious but they’re not written so you have to decipher them.”
    He