When they left the Golden Onk that night she’d fallen off the barstool from too much finger fucking. Leroy had given her a piggyback ride to Fifth Avenue, before he asked, “Girl, don’t you have any clothes or personal belongings?” Cypress jumped off his back, remembering all her marvelous Chinese silks, her kaftans and silk stockings with seams, the combs of sea shells and feathers, her satin slips and camisoles. She wanted to scream “What kind of woman do you think I am,” but she realized she’d been in the same peasant skirt (the blue one with roses and violets) and a yellow Mexican blouse with lace on the sleeves ever since she’d left Idrina’s. Now she did wash it out on occasion, but that had been a while, too. Was Leroy saying she was dirty? Was this one of those times to weep for forgiveness, or was this a time to have a shocked faint? Cypress looked somewhere other than directly at Leroy or herself, though she covered her bosom like a thirteen-year-old who’d gotten her period at the movies.

“They’re in a bunch of lockers at the East Side Terminal. No, that’s not true. They’re on the 9th Avenue side of Port Authority.”

“Okay then. Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“To get the runaway’s things.”

“Well, where am I gonna take ’em?”

“You don’t have any sense of romance, do you? No stars in your eyes or sensations of magic, humph?”

Cypress saw the Empire State Building do a slow drag at that very moment. She thought there were lilac trees on the corners of 9th Avenue and 14th Street. The meat-packing houses turned into aquariums for giant fishes the colors of sunset in Puerto Rico. She was being taken home; she was finally going to her house in New York. When they’d lined up all her boxes and baskets of things from her closets in California, Leroy just smiled at her.

“Can ya carry all of these parcels on your head the way the women in Haiti do?”

Cypress tried because she wanted so much for Leroy’s every dream of her to be true, but when the fourth attempt failed, they took a cab to the loft.

SURPRISE #2

One day she was improvising in the mirror while getting dressed, so that each movement was the reverse of a strip-tease, because she was putting on more and more things. And Leroy would hand her strange objects: a box of hominy grits, Jet magazine, or Nadinola skin cream . . . they were dressing her at an incredible pace. Finally she took on the stance of a tango, with a mass of feather combs streaming from her mouth. This had been Leroy’s idea, and now he sat just beneath her, feeling her calf.

“You know sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, you move like Idrina. Did you know that?”