Everyday People

by Stewart O'Nan

  “How about some bubbly?” Michel asked. “And I’d kill for a shower.”

  “Go ahead, I’ll bring you a glass. I just took one.”

  “Don’t you want to join me?”

  “I’ll be waiting for you in bed.”

  “Playing hard to get, I see.”

  “Never failed me yet,” Andre said.

  He waited till Michel had the water on before taking the champagne out of the freezer. It was perfectly chilled, crisp. It gave him a deep satisfaction that Michel would never know. How petty he could be, like a child. He found the copper bucket under the sink and filled it with ice, plucked two fluted glasses off the shelf and carried everything into the bedroom. He poured a glass and took it in to Michel, the water drilling the stall. His tan was all over, no lines, and Andre wondered if there’d been any little Thai cabana boys. Michel liked to say they were pretty even if they didn’t have anything in their pants.

  “Thank you,” Michel said, taking the glass by the stem, utterly grateful, apologetic. He was always snippy after a long flight, and it was wrong to hold it against him. Andre thought it was his own fault; he was so wound up over Harold. It would be best to simply admit it, leave, tell Michel he’d be back when he knew what he was doing.

  And when would that be?

  The water cut off, and Andre retreated to the bedroom. The comforter on the futon was thrown back, the white sheets inviting. Michel would want the lights on, would think something was wrong if he turned them off. Andre didn’t want him to see how he’d let himself go, so he pulled off his top and stepped out of his jeans and slid between the chilly covers. He poured himself a glass and tossed it back, poured himself another and left it untouched on the low night table, as if it were his first.

  He could leave now, grab his keys and run for the Eclipse.

  Michel came out in a mask, a red dragon with flames licking its face. He had on a black kimono, undone so Andre could appreciate him. He stalked over to the bed, hunched like a sumo wrestler, his package dangling. If only he could keep the mask on, Andre thought, not talk.

  Michel took off the mask. “I got one for you too. Green dragon.” He turned and threw the kimono on a chair, and Andre could see the hardness of his long limbs, his sharply defined back tapering to his waist. Harold was no comparison, thick around the hips, and Andre thought it was unfair. Harold always called him beautiful, as if that was what he loved, not Andre himself, just his skin, the muscles underneath. He was equally guilty of lust, even now, when he thought he was immune to it. Wanted to be.

  Michel lifted the covers and lay down beside him, his skin warm from the shower. His hair was still damp. He threw a leg over Andre, his thigh rolling his cock on his stomach, bowing it. Michel rose up, took a sip and kissed him, his hands roaming his chest, and Andre reached around to touch his strong back, pulling Michel against him, their tongues sliding together, wet. His scent was familiar, and Andre’s body responded, filled with years of memory.

  It was wrong, he thought. He could see himself from the outside, as if he were hovering in one corner of the room, not really there at all. He would not stay the night. He would save something of himself for Harold, keep some part of their lovemaking sacred.

  Michel stopped to find a condom, tore the foil with his teeth, applied a dab of Astroglide. At least he was that considerate. He dug a hand beneath Andre and lifted his leg.

  Not this, he thought, but his other leg obeyed Michel’s touch, rose into the air until his heels were on Michel’s shoulders, his knees nearly touching his own. He was hard against the hair of Michel’s belly, and he could feel Michel prodding him. There was still time to stop, he thought. All he had to do was say something, ask about the picture on the mantel.

  But there was not time, because now Michel had found him, was heavy inside him, rocking, plunging, and involuntarily Andre opened to him. He closed his eyes and pictured Harold above him, Harold sliding into him, his kind face shining with sweat, his kisses afterward, their shared secret an extra tenderness between them. He would be at home, watching TV, thinking Andre was in his apartment. What if he called? He could see Harold listening to the phone ring, standing on the sidewalk under his window, knocking on his door.

  The frame of the futon creaked and shuddered, knocked against the wall, banishing Harold.

  It’s all right, Andre promised him calmly, it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing at all, just sex. Yes, he really was being honest, or so he’d thought, because soon, with the two of them slapping together, his eyes tight shut, Andre realized he was actually talking to himself, and even he knew it was much worse than that.

  ARE YOU MY MOTHER?

  THERE WAS NOTHING wrong with Miss Fisk except she was getting old. Every day Vanessa told herself this, as if she hadn’t heard Miss Fisk call her by her mother’s name, hadn’t seen the milk in the cupboard, the dish detergent in the frigerator.

  She was still good with Rashaan. Vanessa checked to make sure he’d eaten, and he had—there was a smear of bananas on his collar, a bowl in the sink with Yogi Bear smiling up beneath a brown crust of something. And every day he was fresh, smelling of powder, his diaper light. Most days Miss Fisk was fine, dropping his big keys and soft blocks in the plastic laundry basket in the corner, going on about how they had a nice stroll over to the park and what they read together and how Rashaan didn’t want to go down for his nap, but some days she said things that made Vanessa hesitate to bring him by the next morning, made her start giving him his pills at home.

  “I remember when your daddy first came north,” Miss Fisk said, beaming, showing her stained lower teeth. “This was right after the war, because his daddy worked for the war department down to Virginia—he was a dentist—and the work was over, at least for our people. Even then everyone knew he was something special.”

  Vanessa didn’t correct her, say she was thinking of someone else—her mother’s father, possibly (though he was from Texas and worked first in a sawmill and then a meatpacking plant, according to her mother, stunning dried-up Holsteins with a pneumatic bolt gun, coming home smelling of blood, his fingers shaking). Maybe she thought Vanessa was someone else altogether. Vanessa nodded as if she knew this history, as if they were just going over it again together, remembering for the sheer pleasure of it.

  It wasn’t that Vanessa wasn’t interested. Even though their oral history was done (she’d gotten an A), she still came over to listen to Miss Fisk, lingered on the couch, sipping bitter lemonade. It seemed she held the entire history of East Liberty inside her, from the Great Migration all the way up to the present. She took Vanessa back to a time when men were natty dressers, church was the high time of the week, and white landlords hadn’t bought up all their property for a song. She looked to the ceiling as if an angel were hovering above them, and Vanessa could see she was picturing the streets filled with fat Cadillacs, the sidewalks lined with businesses long gone bankrupt.

  “And on the corner of Highland,” she would say, squinting as if to see it better, “there was a shoe shop, a cobbler. Little Jewish fella, name of … Goldblum? Goldberg?”

  Sometimes she said things even she knew were wrong. She’d wave a hand in front of her face as if erasing them, sending away the messenger that served her memory.

  “Some days are better than others,” she admitted.

  “You tell me if he gets too much for you now,” Vanessa said.

  “Never. Not my good boy.” Miss Fisk stroked Rashaan’s smooth head.

  Vanessa said she had to get home and start supper so she could study, which wasn’t a complete lie. Her mother was making her famous haddock tonight, but she did have reading to do, and a quiz tomorrow on it.

  “We’ll see you two tomorrow then,” Miss Fisk said, and let her go.

  Walking across the front lawn and around the porch to the side door of their building, Vanessa wondered what Miss Fisk would do for the rest of the day. The thought of her alone in that big house worried her. Vanessa didn’t like t
he quiet. Even in their apartment, she was afraid of breakins, burglars holding a sharpened screwdriver to her throat. Miss Fisk didn’t have any family around here, no pets, not even cable TV. How did she spend the hours until bedtime? She’d stopped getting the Post-Gazette because her eyes were only good enough for large print. Maybe she talked on the phone, wrote letters someone in another state would try to decipher. Bean’s mother was her daughter. Vanessa couldn’t imagine what they’d say to each other. She had a hard enough time talking with Chris.

  They were supposed to be together again, a couple, just because they’d gone to the park twice. He called almost every night, and patiently she told him about her day and then Rashaan’s, her work waiting for her on the kitchen table. She wasn’t being mean, she really did want to talk to him, but the timing wasn’t right. They needed to be together for more than a week before they really started talking. And so every night they went on about nothing in particular, and when it was time to hang up, he said he loved her, just like in high school.

  “I love you,” he said, and she resented being put on the defensive, having to come back with something. It wasn’t a lie to say she loved him, because she did care for him, she’d known him since they were kids, he was important to her, the father of her baby.

  “Let’s wait a little while on that,” she’d say, “okay?”

  Or “I know.”

  Or “You don’t quit, I’ll tell you that.”

  Or just “Good night, Chris.”

  He needed her. Not me, she thought, just someone.

  Maybe he’d let it slide and not call tonight. It was a wish, and immediately she took it back. Sometimes she really feared she was heartless, that she didn’t like people in general, even herself. Sometimes she thought she was crazy. She knew it wasn’t true, it was just her life being so out of control.

  Upstairs, she locked the door behind her. The apartment was quiet and gray with the lights off. Her mother was supposed to be home.

  She’d left a message on the machine. “Sorry, baby. We’ve got someone coming in on the Lifeflight so I’m going to have to stay late. Save the fish for tomorrow, okay?”

  “Right,” Vanessa said, then stood there looking at the cupboard, thinking there was never anything good to eat. Nothing in the fridge either. Soup, there was always soup. She hated cooking for herself. She imagined Miss Fisk eating silently in her tidy kitchen, reusing her teabag from lunch, washing and drying the dishes as soon as she finished. Then what?

  She nuked Rashaan’s turkey and vegetables, opened a new jar of the plums he loved. She’d make something for herself later. Or not. All of a sudden she wasn’t hungry.

  She brought her books in and buckled Rashaan into his high chair, stirred the turkey and tested it with her pinkie. Rashaan rubbed his bib over his face. When he wouldn’t quit she had to hold it down to feed him, and still it was a mess. “So much for studying,” she said.

  Outside, the sun was going down, and she heard the chimes of Tony’s truck, the programmed, mechanical music drifting up from the street. It seemed too cold, the season over, but Tony liked to surprise them; once he even came the day of the Super Bowl, wearing a Steeler jersey and handing out free Clark bars. She’d been hearing his bells her entire life. “Candyman!” they used to shout, and run for their mothers, begging change. Now she didn’t even go to the window, just listened to him cruise down the block, the rubber-coated spoon poised for Rashaan to open his lips.

  Cleaning up, she wondered why she was so tired today. It was Miss Fisk mentioning her father again, that was all. Everything else had gone well. Work was work. Rashaan had been good. The haddock she didn’t really care about; her mother always had to work late. It was an emergency room, there were going to be emergencies.

  When Miss Fisk said he’d come from Virginia, that his father was a dentist, Vanessa almost wanted to believe it. She was ready to hear anything, everything about him. She knew so little that every scrap was precious. She stitched the smallest offhand remarks of her mother’s into a man, and still he was nothing like the Marine smiling down from the picture, young and handsome, almost dead already. Every time Miss Fisk said “your father,” Vanessa’s heart jumped as if she might hear a deep secret. Miss Fisk could have told her anything—that he drank, that he danced beautifully, that he carried her on his shoulders to church—and Vanessa would have no way of checking it, would have to add it to her stash of clues on faith, at her own risk.

  Why didn’t her mother want to talk about him? Would she be like this with Chris when Rashaan needed to know everything?

  No. She hoped not. She didn’t blame her mother for her father not being there, at least she didn’t think so. She’d always felt it was someone’s fault, and whose could it be—the government’s? His own? Her mother had nothing to do with it. You couldn’t stop a man from doing something stupid, Chris had taught her that much.

  Suddenly she was afraid that this was exactly what her mother worried about, and that she had let her worry about it, let it hurt her all these years. She had to tell her mother she understood, maybe then it would be easier to talk about him.

  She opened her notebook and wrote the date, cracked and flattened the beat-up paperback she was reading against the table. Professor Shelby was taking them way back, back to Africa and tribal life and the Door of No Return, making them remember the complex and delicate cultures American slavery told them to forget. It wasn’t all gone, he lectured them; it was too strong to rub out. Every generation had its griots, every set of young people dug deeper, exposed the hidden connections between African messenger dances and slave chants bearing coded news, the long line of signing and signifying running down through Jack Johnson and Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway and Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, into Satchel Paige and John Lee Hooker and Chester Himes and Leroi Jones and James Brown, into Charles Mingus and Muhammed Ali and Bob Marley and Nikki Giovanni and Gil Scott-Heron and Ishmael Reed, into George Clinton and Lucille Clifton and Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy and Shaquille O’Neal, and all the way up to the present. “Turn on your radio,” he said, “and you will hear the voices of Africa.”

  The quiz tomorrow was on that legacy and the ways people kept it alive, from the Middle Passage on. Professor Shelby would give them five names from their reading and they would have to say how the five fit into the tradition. Vanessa had gotten a sixty on her first quiz, so she needed a hundred, and as she read down the page, she stopped each time a new name appeared and added it to the long column in her notebook, glancing into the living room to make sure Rashaan was okay.

  She’d only finished three pages when the phone rang. Chris, she thought, and cursed herself for not leaving the machine on. She let it ring four times before picking up.

  “We’re done here,” her mother said. “I should be home in ten minutes. Did you get something?”

  “Just for Rashaan,” she admitted.

  “I’ll pick something up, how would that be?”

  “Fine.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “I’m just tired,” she lied, and then when she’d hung up, she really was exhausted. In the other room, Rashaan was slapping the glass of the TV set, and she went in and held him on the couch until she felt better.

  Did she really want Chris to call? No, she didn’t think so. It was everything—work and school and Miss Fisk. Her father. The usual stuff.

  She had reading to do, and she got up and brought the book back to the couch, then sat there with Rashaan on her lap and skimmed the pages. Countee Cullen, Jayne Cortez, Haki Madhubuti. There was only so much she could remember, so she retrieved her notebook from the table and started marking down names.

  Her mother brought home Arby’s, a Beef ’n’ Cheddar and a Big Beef. She gave Vanessa her choice.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Just choose one,” her mother said, impatient with her. “It’s not a big deal.” She sighed as if apologizing. “I got those spicy fries you
like.”

  “Thanks.” Vanessa took the Big Beef and unwrapped it at the table, squeezed on some Horsey Sauce. Her mother sat down and ate beside her, quiet.

  “Work that bad?”

  Her mother just nodded, chewing. She put her sandwich down and rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, her eyes closed. “The Lifeflight was this little girl, couldn’t have been older than Rashaan.”

  “She all right?”

  “She’ll live. There were six people in the van, and she was the only one. The rest of them …” She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s been a bad week. I keep thinking it’s going to get better.”

  “I know,” Vanessa said.

  “How about you, are you all right?”

  “I’m just worried about Miss Fisk.” She told her about the detergent in the fridge and what she’d said about her father.

  “I don’t know who she’s thinking of,” her mother said. Vanessa waited for her to go on, but she took a bite of fries and wiped her fingers with a paper napkin and looked off across the living room.

  “Where was Daddy’s father from?”

  “Youngstown, you know that. Otherwise she’s fine though? She understands what you’re saying to her?”

  “She seems to. It’s only when she starts telling stories.”

  “She’s old,” her mother said, and shrugged, as if that explained it, and again Vanessa felt the conversation straying, sensed her mother’s reluctance like an invisible fence, an unspoken disagreement between them.

  “What was Mr. Fisk like?”

  “Oh God.” Her mother laughed and had to cover her mouth with a hand. “Short! He was shorter than she is now and he always wore a blue suit, didn’t matter what time of year it was. They had a Lincoln the exact same color, he ordered it special. You’d see him riding her around Sunday, both of them dressed to meet Jesus.” She shook her head. “Must be twenty years now.”