Goodbye Without Leaving by Laurie Colwin

case.
    â€œThose English boys stole ‘Little Red Rooster,’” he would say mournfully. “When will this ever stop?”
    I always wanted to say, “Cheer up, Reverend Willhall. No white girl group is ever going to remake Gertrude Perkins’ ‘Black Snake Moan’ with violins.”
    No one else, however, was very happy about my job.
    â€œI worry about your welfare,” Johnny said.
    â€œFor a guy who likes rock and roll,” I said, “you sure are funny about spades.”
    â€œI love spades,” Johnny said. “I just don’t like my woman hanging around spade-infested areas in the late afternoon.”
    Of course, this job was more than just the job of a lifetime. It was a loaded gun and it kept everyone off me, no matter how they nagged. One false move about this, the terrible look in my eye said, and there will be NO WEDDING. My mother knew it, and Johnny knew it. For the first time in my life I had some leverage.
    It didn’t take much to make me happy. I discovered a singer called Mrs. Verlie Waters, about whom little was known. She made three records, six sides in all: “Big Thumb Blues,” “Empty Head Blues,” “Bad Weather Blues,” “Low Down Dirty Dog,” “Under the Bed Blues” and “No One Can Sing It But Me.” Her voice was sweeter than Bessie Smith’s, but not as rich. For a blues singer it was almost girlish. I sat at my console listening to “No One Can Sing It But Me.”
    I looked her up in the library. She turned up in a discography which revealed that she had been one of the first female singers to write her own material. In a book entitled Mama Do No Wrong: Black Lady Singers of the Twenties and Thirties by Liam L. P. Hunt, I found a paragraph about her. Her parents had been teachers. She had graduated from a colored music academy and then ran off to New Orleans. Her career lasted six years and she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. As the song said, Life sure is rough, it sure is tough, but of that sweet sound I never get enough. No one can sing it but me .

15
    It turned out that unlike my fun-loving and gregarious lover, I was rather antisocial. I felt like a person who had been living on another planet, and who did not quite get how human beings connected in a social setting.
    Johnny would come bounding over to my apartment and say, “Wash the blackface off, kiddo. We’re invited to a dinner party.”
    â€œYou go,” I would invariably reply. “Tell them I have a disease.”
    â€œCome, come, my good woman,” said Johnny. “We can’t have this.”
    â€œPlease, Johnny. I’m not good out.”
    In social situations I was hostile, defensive and shy, not a winning combination. If I was asked what I did, I would morosely answer that I was an ethno-musicologist. Or Johnny would say, “Geraldine used to dance with Vernon and Ruby Shakely.”
    â€œHow neat! Are they classical or modern?” some nice host or hostess would politely ask.
    â€œThey used to be modern but now they’re classical,” I would respond.
    Out on the street Johnny always pleaded, “Can’t you make a little effort? These are nice people.”
    â€œI just don’t get them.”
    â€œYou don’t have to get them. Just be nice to them.”
    Every invitation, of which there seemed to be hundreds, felt like a death threat. I looked at Johnny with envy. He was like a jigsaw piece that had found its happy little place and fit right in. His colleagues adored him. The senior partners adored him. Their wives doted on him. So why couldn’t I sit by his side thinking my own thoughts and ruminating on my dinner like a cow?
    These people were sharp . They knew their way around, and they all knew each other. Their fathers were partners or their mothers were cousins or had gone to school together, or were intermarried with people who had