“Let me know if I can do anything.”
I don’t say anything. He has his back to me. He does a quarter turn and picks up his phone again.
“How’s the old lady? You still . . .”
“She’s fine.”
He looks up from the phone and flips it shut. He looks down at me under the visor as though he’s my baseball coach and I’m back on the bench after taking a called third strike down the middle. He gets back in his truck, starts it up, and rolls down the window. He shoots me a salute.
“All right, professor.”
He eases off the curb and drives away.
I see the crew returning with lunch. I go back inside and drink. The water takes the edge off my hunger. Someone outside starts beeping maniacally. Now that I’m alone, I look at the west wall, the rubble foundation and the bricks stacked atop it. The brick rows are stratified and look like a fossil record—the horizontal joints and old floor lines—but one that’s been upset, the history scattered about in seemingly random sections delineated by mold and watermarks. That which was once uniform and strong is now a patchwork of stain and erosion.
A realtor once showed us a house nearby, much the same as this. The only question she’d asked me was “Are you Native American?” I didn’t respond. Claire did, with a question. “Why?” she’d asked in high defense mode, ready to become as offensive as she possibly could. “Because Native Americans built these homes. They built a good amount of the Heights and Lower Manhattan. They built these row houses to live in.” Claire hadn’t believed her but asked, “Which tribe?” to be polite. She seemed relieved somewhat that the woman, a mousy little WASP, had at least some story to support her curiosity. “Mohawk. The Mohawk Indians built these.” Claire spoke for me again, “He’s Cherokee and Apache,” taking my wrist and squeezing it, then sliding her hand into mine. “Wow,” the broker looked up at me and let me watch her watch me as though she’d suddenly understood something about me, something that allowed her to stare. When we got outside, Claire stopped, pulled my head down to her, and kissed me long and unrepentantly. “Dumb bunny—don’t mind her.” And she did it again and pressed herself against me. We didn’t know it then, but C was about the size of a kidney bean inside of her. We walked to the pizzeria, and she bought lemon ices for us. And when that didn’t seem to cheer me up, she asked, “What’s wrong with my guy?” and then not waited for an answer.
We walked back to the house and she asked, “Do you think we’ll be able to buy a place someday?” She looked up at the crooked facade, perhaps dreaming. “Sure,” I said. And she smiled. That was it. That was all it seemed to take to make her happy—my word. I’ve always felt afraid for my wife because she could never understand how empty the spoken word is, how lacking her remedial care was—that the flavored ice in the little cup did nothing for me.
She was not the girl—not the girl I’d been expecting, not the girl I’d imagined, not the one who would love me. She was white and full of the courage, confidence, and apprehension that only white girls can have—nonempirical, ignorant of the stakes. I was only a year sober when I met her. Gavin and I had just finished performing—he read some poems; I played some of my songs—and the two of us were feeling fairly invincible, so we walked into a bar—not to drink, only to be around people our age. She was sitting with her friends in a chocolate brown banquette—epiphanic. She looked back at me. Gavin whispered under his breath, “Uh-oh,” and everything in her face told me no. She was not the one. I’d thought about it quite a bit as a boy. And although I didn’t know what she looked like, I knew she wasn’t white, wasn’t soft, didn’t cry—at least, not so easily. Perhaps she drank a bit and sang. Okay, yes, like my mother, but literate, free. And when I was older and started to wonder if that girl existed, I found liquor and Gavin. Alcoholism and fraternal love seemed to suit me better, perhaps because with a best friend, when you’re drunk, you don’t have to do anything. You can just, if you like, watch it all go by.
She was not the one. I kept telling myself that after we joined her and her friends and made them laugh with PG-rated versions of our childhoods. It was really quite awful, that evening, the sober ethnics entertaining the tipsy WASPs in a dive bar. We closed the place and then lingered out on Third Avenue, trying to keep the night alive. We exchanged phone numbers. She called me a few days later from the street and said she would pick up lunch and stop by. For some reason, I allowed it. Claire’s eyes are oxidized lime green. They’re oversized, oval, and slant slightly from the outside corners to the bridge of her nose. They’re the first things anyone notices. They’re ridiculous, actually, how obvious they are. But her face is girlish, open, juxtaposed to that cool, electric green. The charge they have seems to come from a place that’s ancient and far away, but she isn’t distant. The rose hue of her cheeks, her long, crooked lips warm her—I can smell them. She is present, and that, to me, has always made her seem good. “Hello,” she said so quietly, but clearly, barely moving her mouth. She was not the one, not the one that I’d imagined, not the face of love—standing in the dim hallway of my tenement walk-up, or on the street carrying our child. I still don’t know if it was her eyes or her face that made me let her into my rooms, or made me take her by the hand, look to the wall, the twisted door and window openings, and say, “Us Indians sure make crappy homes.”
The crew comes back inside. Inca. Aztec, Mayan—who knew? We’re building someone else’s house.
“Amigo,” says Rice Tooth. “Amigo, you hungry?”
He offers me a foil dish full of rice and beans, perhaps a collection of everybody’s leftovers. And even though I can’t stand pinto beans, I salivate. But I like my food to be segregated into discrete portions, and I can’t eat around strangers.
“Gracias, no.”
He shrugs and puts it by the hose. Everyone seems to be sleepy, and they drag slowly to their stations. Roman clicks from above.
“Not good, amigos.” He walks back out muttering, “Now I have to cancel truck.”
“Hey, big man.” It’s Grimace. I don’t move quickly enough for him. He gives a shrill whistle. I turn slowly, hoping that by the time I’m facing him I won’t snatch the shovel from him and bust his head with it.
“Hey, big man.” He taps on something hard. It’s a rock, half buried. It looks like the partially excavated skull of an ancient giant.
“Can you lift?”
I shrug my shoulders. I forget my size—how others must see me. He taps at the dirt around it. The others start to gather. He points at Big Boots to pick around the stone. Together they clear enough of it to get a pry bar and spade under it. They roll it out of its hole and onto the clay. Big Boots drops the bar, bends down, and tries once to roll it with his hands. It’s almost the size of his torso. It doesn’t budge. He stands up shaking his head and backs off.
“Big man.” Grimace inhales and flexes, then mimes pressing it over his head and throwing it out into the pissweeds. “Diez dineros.” He whistles softly and cocks his head to the back. Lispy has moved beside me. He starts nodding his head, slowly at first, then with growing earnest. “Si. Si.” He sizes up the stone and looks up at me.
“Mui grande,” says Grimace, trying to bait me. I don’t know what kind of stone it is, how dense it is. It’s light gray. I bend and touch it. It’s cool and silt covered—nothing to really grab hold of. I dig my hands into the clay to get them underneath. Grimace chuckles. The rest begin the obligatory audience murmur. I get it up to my waist and stand erect. My grip is awkward, though—flat palmed. I try to wrap my forearms under it, but it doesn’t work. I start to feel the strain in my lower back. My biceps start to burn. I roll it a quarter turn and rest it against my stomach. It’s better on the back for the moment, but now, because of the silt, it threatens to slide between my arms and crush a knee or a foot. I get my hands, one at a time, back around to the outsides, bend, and press. The murmurs turn to yelps. “Over your head!” demands Grimace, and so I press—up, up—until I can lock my e
lbows. “Throw!” squeals Lispy. I start shuffling across the clay to the back. I make it to the edge of the pissweeds and push it in. The lads give a cheer—even Grimace. He walks up to me, nodding his bowed head. He straightens, reaches in his pocket, and pulls out a sweaty ten.
“You are very strong.” He flexes again and hands me the money.
“Gracias.”
He waves his hand, puckers his mouth, shakes his head, and returns to his spade. I look out to the piss weeds—the break in them caused by my missile. I wonder what the rock would’ve done to my skull if I’d dropped it, and I wonder who would’ve been able to tell my kids, my wife. “Vamanos!” bellows Roman from the stoop. He walks out again. Lispy gives him the finger. The others laugh, and then we all go back to work.
The sun has caught the east wall. I’m sure whatever it reveals is much the same as what it had shown before on the other wall. I don’t want to look. It’s time to go. Half the cellar has been excavated. They wash. I don’t.
“Okay, amigos,” says Lispy, taking the lead. I shake all their hands, even Grimace’s, and climb out. Vlad has arrived. He’s standing behind the van with the doors open, waiting for his cargo. I go to him.
“Anything for me?”
“No, amigo.”
I look at him, questioning. He shakes his head as if to strengthen his denial. Roman joins in. They both shift and shake and look as concerned and friendly as they can.
“You need to see the boss,” says Roman. “You need to see Johnny. He knows.”
“He knows?”
Now they both nod in unison, smiling—Roman with his expanding scar, Vlad with his gray gums. I shoulder my bag and leave.
I have gas pains from not eating. I have enough change for coffee and, if they give it to me, some kind of biscuit. The coffee shop’s bagels and muffins are inedible; the bagel store’s coffee is undrinkable. If I buy a bagel first and I’m not offered a coffee later . . . but if I buy a coffee first, I’ll have to bring it to the bagel store, which would be rude. I like the people who work there, and I don’t want to offend. I decide to get coffee. Then I remember the ten I just won. I should eat something. I go to the bodega behind the projects. A blonde pillhead is outside.
“Hey, papi.”
She tries to open the door for me, but she’s too shaky. It’s hard for her to grab the handle, and when she finally does, she hasn’t the strength to move it. She’s detoxing hard. I can see her skull through her translucent skin. All the blood seems to be collecting there. It’s about to burst.
I nod to her, go in, and make my way to the coolers in the back. Bud is on sale. Six bucks for a rack of talls. I grab one and go to tear a can off. The sensation of the cold metal shoots up my arm like a fix. I take my one can and back away. A voice calls from the front.
“Can you keep that closed?”
I come out of my shock and peer down the aisle to the front. Airborne dust lingers in what little light that has made it through the fogged-out storefront. The old linoleum is gritty. There isn’t much for sale here—cold beer, warm beer, soda, bottled juice from concentrate, junk food that may have reached the end of its long shelf life on which the dust has settled. I see the clerk now. Hiding behind a rack of gum and candy. I take a single and bring it quickly to the front.
He comes out of hiding. He’s only a teen—light skinned and chubby. Behind him is a Budweiser clock and a painting of the crucifixion. Jesus is white, blond. He looks more bored than pained. Next to him is an outdated promotional poster for a liqueur in which a honey-skinned, green-eyed woman in a bikini asks, “What are you doing tonight?” I take a roll of antacid and place it beside the beer.
“Three.”
I don’t do anything—a strategy to make him recalculate my tab. He senses this and cuts to the point. He points at the Rolaids. “One.” He points at the beer. “Two.” He taps the counter. “Three.” I keep staring at the crucifixion. He tries to further explain.
“It’s only on sale if you get the six-pack.”
I give him the ten. He drops seven singles on the counter.
He reaches underneath the counter and produces a small bag, which he snaps open and places the beer carefully inside.
“All right, buddy.”
I want to respond, with something highbrow and long-winded, but I think of the girl outside, if her head has exploded. For her sake I let it go.
The pillhead tries to open the door for me again. I let her believe that she has. She backs up to let me step through the small opening. I hold out my hand and show her a dollar bill and some change. She does her best to focus on the money and then looks up at me, questioning. She has a wandering eye—the left one. It looks glass until I see the moisture on it. It finally fixes on something in the sky.
I hand her the beer. The crazy eye snaps down to focus on it.
“Papi.” Her hands are shaking. She has a deep lesion on one of her forearms. I open the beer for her. The ritual freezes the both of us for an instant. I give it to her.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Someone, I don’t remember who, once said while extending his index finger, “A normal person’s soul is like this.” He bent it and said, “The soul of an alcoholic is like this. Drinking makes the alcoholic feel that his soul,” straightening his finger again, “is like this.”
Kali made me feel that way for a little while—right, unbroken—but the few sharp memories I have make me feel wrong. She had the power to make one compelled to act: begin a punishing diet and exercise regime, learn another language, or lose oneself at the bottom of the river. Once, before we were married, Claire found Kali’s picture inside a book, and was made to feel so inadequate that she was willing to give me back to her. She gasped—looking from the photo to me, while her face steadily drained of blood—wondering where this woman was and how she would figure in our lives to come.
Kali ruined me. That’s what I said to myself after I had taken a drink; the first in some time. I’d just grunted to myself, “I’m not drinking ’cause of some girl.” After I had sex for the first time, I left Kali’s room and went down to the river, hoping that the movement of the dark water would replace, in my mind, the tableau that wouldn’t leave: Kali and I standing naked, facing each other, my penis in her lightly calloused hands.
I decided after Sally that I would never be with a white girl again. Brian said he thought it was racist. Shake nodded his head in agreement and chuckled to himself. Gavin said, “That’s good, I suppose, if you see the world in that way.”
The summer after graduating high school I met a girl, a woman—Jenny—a black woman. I was working in the stockroom of one of those giant liquor stores, lost in perpetual amazement of the inventory. She was a receptionist at the travel agency next door and was a few years older. She was short, had bright caramel skin and her hair was pulled long by the hot iron. She never needed to twist it with her fingers or look away shyly. She cut my nervous rambles short by abruptly turning away, or stepping, like a boxer, to quickly cut the distance between us, press close to my chest and look up steeply to kiss me.
It was, of course, a disaster. That awful paradox of being good and prodigal: I had been born to lead my people, but also to find a hardworking black woman, like my mother, as she’d been instructing me to do most of my life. Jenny fit, but I wasn’t ready. Whenever she got close to me my anus would burn, or I’d think I was choking. I must have seemed insane to her. In a quiet moment when I was closing up, she came to the back of the store and told me that I was a repressed homosexual and that I should do something about it. After Jenny I decided that I would eliminate all race of woman and girl. When I told Gavin about it, he asked me if I might be gay. I told him I didn’t think so, I just didn’t like being so close to people. He nodded and said that it was probably for the best—“. . . heard melodies sweet, right?”
I stuck with that—it’s easier than most would think—virginal abstinence. In high school there had been
plenty of sex to avoid; in college there was more, and without my friends to hide behind. Shake had left for New York, Brian went away to the Midwest for school, and Gavin went on monthly benders. I had stopped drinking with him, partly out of some quasihonor, but mostly because his ma had screamed at me that I was helping him die. So every once in a while he’d show up, trembling, and we’d go out and consume just about every nonalcoholic beverage in Harvard Square, twitchily reminisce, and watch the students and hipsters our age prepare to fuck. Sometimes we’d be asked to join, but we’d refuse and the inviters would look perplexed. He’d sketch me and I would write a poem about the girl at the next table or the old drunk out in the street. Sometimes we’d go down to the river and I’d play him a song. Gavin always seemed to be able to listen to things deeply—more than a polite audience—he was engaged.
The Halloween night, sophomore year, after an unremarkable first two semesters of academic probation and athletic withdrawal we were on the MIT bridge, looking west up the Charles, listening to the sounds of revelry traveling downstream. We hadn’t said much all evening. He leaned forward over the rail as though he wanted to roll over it, but he only inhaled deeply, straightened, and still looking down said, “I wonder if the toasts we made were heard and granted—if this is oblivion.”
Then he had another fall and somehow went from the public detox to a mental hospital, and I didn’t see him for months. I avoided everything. I remember the strange feeling of being both conspicuous and peripheral—an outside insider—not at all prepared for claiming and maintaining a place within the loop. I was waiting—test scores and potential aside—to be revealed as a fraud. I went for long runs along the Charles. It had seemed different when I was boy—hopelessly polluted, something to be avoided—but now, traveling it’s narrow paths afforded me a quiet timelessness in which I seemed to move freely.
Then I saw Kali. Something had told me to turn. There used to be a little ice cream shop just off the main drag of the square and I watched her go inside—the big window—point at the board and then the flavor in the case like she was in a silent movie scene, but with vivid color. I could even see the faint yellow tint of her lemon sorbet—her first lick. She was a “terrible beauty” whose existence confirmed for me that there was both an immortal hand and eye. I got caught up in her symmetry and she was gone.
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