Brown Sugar 3 by Carol Taylor

Author:Carol Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

MILES MARSHALL LEWIS

Diva Moves

Lori asked him to wait for her, as she settled her bill with Dyaspora hair salon. She had already accepted a business card from DJ, a summer associate with the law firm Dewey Ballantine, and hoped to continue their flirtatious banter on their way to the Columbus Circle train station. Ordinarily, she would have hailed a taxi back to her Greenwich Village dorm, but styling her curly brunette tresses left its usual dent in her purse. (“It’s naturally curly,” she’d told him. Naturally expensive, she’d thought.)

An hour earlier, Lori was sitting at a hair dryer, waiting to be moved up front, when she’d first noticed him. DJ sat in a high chair some thirty feet across from her, laughing with a beautician whose fingers fidgeted deep in his thick bundle of shoulder-length locks, twisting new growth at the root. His conspicuous male presence in the beauty parlor was amplified by his good looks. Lori thought he resembled Maxwell, the R&B singer, with his slight frame, almond-colored complexion, angular jaw, and the straight teeth in his bright smile. She’d once read that Maxwell had his hair styled at Dyaspora, and here was his doppelgänger, smiling widely at her.

His fixed gaze drew Lori into the conversation, about some recent movie or other, and it continued when they were seated next to each other a half hour later. He said his name was Djidaje, DJ for short. He was a native New Yorker, from Park Slope in Brooklyn, and a Hampton graduate. He was about to enter his final year at nearby Fordham Law School in the fall, and had been growing his locks for the last three years.

Lori wondered if DJ was a regular at Dyaspora, and if anyone there knew his real story. His tales of Fourth of July vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, time spent studying abroad in Paris, and partying at record industry soirées were almost too good to be true. Her experience with brothers in New York City included its fair share of boasting and wishful thinking, especially when they found out that Lori hailed from Opelika, Alabama. Still, the chemistry was there, DJ was fine, and Lori wanted to ride the wave. There’s nothing wrong with a summer love, she’d thought, and she definitely wouldn’t mind fucking “Maxwell” till fall semester. So Lori Tony reinvented herself.

“I work in the A&R department at Sony Music Entertainment…. My uncle is Sidney Poitier and he pulled some strings for me…. I went to Hampton for a while, too, but I wasn’t really checking for it, so I transferred…. Yeah, I pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha…. Actually, I’m a singer—like a cross between Sade and Fiona Apple—but I wanna get my sound perfected…. Sony keeps trying to offer me a contract…. I’ll probably change my name from Lori Poitier; I don’t really want the industry to know….”

Then she threw in a friendship with Lauryn Hill, for goodmeasure. If DJ could be a globe-trotting, Cosby-bourgeois, talented tenth template, then Lori had the right to redesign her own world as well, she’d felt.

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