Color of Love by Sandra Kitt

she now lay awake with a score of characters and events appearing from the recesses of her life. Being with him tonight had begun the dredging, because a comparison was forming, despite her best efforts. There had only been a select few males that Leah had ever truly been interested in. Relationships that had all the earmarks and potential for being more than friendship. She had made emotional investments in each one with good, bad, and unexpected results.
    When she had been fifteen years old, she fell madly in love with a boy in her ninth-grade class. His name was Billy. He’d never taken her out, never had lunch with her, and had only waited once for her after school. She’d fantasized that one day Billy would marry her. Leah finally got over Billy at nineteen when he got married to a girl he’d met in church.
    She lost her virginity her first year in college. Ron had been twenty-five and a graduate student working on a master’s in political science. He was mature, worldly, handsome, and smart. He was also one very angry black man. Ron was verbose and eloquent about the historical injustices done to blacks in America, and spent a lot of time feeling cheated and vengeful. It had been exciting to listen to him speak at first, as he grabbed the attention of a group of coeds and fired them up with his rhetoric and ideas. But Ron ultimately had only one thought, and to Leah it had been singularly depressing. Things certainly weren’t all that good for a lot of blacks in America, but to her mind it was by no means a hopeless situation requiring revolution and a call to arms.
    In the final analysis Leah’s relationship with Ron was mostly physical. She had enjoyed his lovemaking, had felt breathless with his inventiveness and willingness to teach her the pleasures of her body and his. But sex, too, was sometimes as quick and angry as Ron himself. They finally broke up when Ron decided that being nonviolent was not going to get him where he wanted to be. He also decided after a year and a half with her that she was bourgeois and an elitist, unaware and uninvolved. His accusations had stung deep. Questioning her loyalties, her priorities, her identity. Leah had spent the next two years marching and protesting on one advocacy issue after another to prove him wrong.
    During the summer session in her junior year, Leah had met Philip. He was thin, wore glasses, was serious … and he was white. He’d sat next to her in Spanish class. She’d never even noticed him until halfway through the five-week session he’d leaned over her desk and asked for the translation of a joke the instructor had just recited. Leah had been the only one in class to laugh, being the only one who understood. That night Philip drove her to the subway, but after that, until the very end of the term, he took her all the way home to Brooklyn after each class. She’d lent him her notebooks so he could study, and still he found it hard to keep up. Leah had suggested that he switch to French.
    Philip took her out one night on a date. Leah had agreed readily enough, feeling a youthful willingness to ignore conventions. Interracial dating had not yet caught on. They’d gone to Sullivan Street to see a play called The Fantastiks. They had dinner at an Italian restaurant and ran into a cousin of Philip’s and her date outside the theater afterward. The cousin was pleasant, but Leah could see she was curious as to why Philip was out with a black woman.
    When the two couples had separated later in the evening, Philip and Leah drove through Central Park and ended up in the dark near the boat basin making out. She had the hell bitten out of her bare legs by mosquitoes, but at the time she had not cared. She thought she might be in love again. It didn’t bother her particularly that Philip was white and she was black. As a matter of fact, it was not mentioned even once between them.
    Philip said that he wanted to take her to a famous tavern in the Village to