“Because we’re going to get married?”
“Exactly! Bingo! We’re going to get married. What a nice proposal. Where’s my diamond ring?” Against the odds, she embraced him and held him, and then she turned so that her back was pressed against his chest, and his arms circled her waist.
“Your ring’s around here somewhere. And how will our marriage work out?” he asked.
“Wait and see,” she said. “I repeat: you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
—
Which is how Benny Takemitsu, a third-generation Japanese-American who spoke little or no Japanese, a citizen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a journeyman architect at the firm of Byrum and Haddam, a man who had such a weakness for women who could make him laugh that he could not help falling in love with such a woman, came to marry someone who had never kissed him but who had, at least, caressed his face. They conceived a child together and still she could not bear to kiss him, not before or after the child was born, a son whom they named Julian. Stranger things have happened, Benny would sometimes say to himself, about his wife’s particular form of chastity.
Sarah had laughed and groaned during the pains of labor to the consternation of the attending nurses, who had never witnessed such laughter before, or so much of it.
The baby’s pediatrician was Dr. Elijah Elliott Jones, who praised the boy’s health and equanimity and handsome features as if Julian were his own son.
—
Sometimes during the summer they sat together on a playground near the Mississippi River, the four of them: Benny, Sarah, Julian, and Benny’s mother, Dorothea, who usually watched the baby whenever Sarah fell into one of her periodic brown studies, which, following the birth, had increased in duration and intensity. Often they packed sandwiches for a picnic, Sarah’s favorite being curried chicken salad and deviled eggs. At such times, having finished nursing her son and having tied the loops of his sun hat, Sarah would stare off in the direction of the river’s other shore as if Sirens sang over there, and only nudges and direct address could call her back. “She’s just woolgathering,” Benny’s mother would say, quietly and affectionately, with a shrug, about her red-haired daughter-in-law. “In my generation,” Dorothea whispered to her son, “women often looked like that. We were distracted. All of us.”
Once in late summer, however, Sarah startled to life and waved her hand in front of her face to dispel the mosquitoes. She seemed to be coming up from some depth somewhere in another life. Turning one by one to Benny, Julian, and her mother-in-law, she smiled as if she approved of all of them and could bless them. Benny sat on a bench next to her, the baby sleeping in his lap, and Benny’s mother, who had strolled to the edge of the Mississippi, was examining the wildflowers along the bank. Grade-school children yelled from the play structure, and nearby a freight train rattled over the river, heading north. Overhead, an airplane left behind a thin vapor trail, and in the trees the cicadas chirred. “I never played any Bach for you,” she said, her voice a soft murmur. “And I don’t do stand-up anymore.”
“You still can.”
“I’ve never played any Bach for you,” she repeated. “I always meant to. Do you know that story about Bach? The last night of his life?” Benny shook his head. Holding Benny’s hand, Sarah continued with the story. “I read it on the back of a record album. You know Bach went blind? He had cataracts and things, probably. And to make matters worse, he was treated by this guy, this traveling English quack doctor named Taylor. Goodbye, eyesight. So anyway, on the evening before he died, Bach is granted a momentary miraculous return of his vision. His sons take him outside, one on each arm, and, guess what, Bach gazes upward to see the stars. The next day he died.” She looked straight up as if in imitation.
“I like that story.”
“Me too.” She held up her index finger to make a final pronouncement, one that Benny would always remember. “To his servant Bach, God granted a final glimpse of the heavens.”
Julian, now awake in his father’s lap, reached up to his mother’s face, whereupon she smiled.
—
She didn’t die the way Benny thought she would, after a long life. Instead, she lost control of her car in a rainstorm. Her car skidded off the freeway and rolled four times down a hill. She would have survived the accident if she had been wearing a seat belt, but for some reason she hadn’t bothered to attach it that particular day.
—
After she died, he grieved for her as he had grieved for her when she had still been alive—as a passion thriving on an absence that feeds on itself year after year. For months, out of habit, he continued to sketch possible houses in which she might have been happy, although none of these houses ever had human figures inside them.
—
Benny’s second wife, Jane, also an architect, is a tall brainy woman who loves Benny and Julian dearly, and together they have had two more children, twins. Myths and fairy tales instruct us that the arrival of the stepmother is to be feared, but she has always treated Julian as her own child, and although she has learned to discipline him when the situation requires it, her scolding lacks a certain force and confidence. One coincidence, if it could be called that, is that Jane’s red hair is so similar to the color that Sarah imported to herself that the two women might have once been mistaken for each other, and when she dresses Julian in his snowsuit—actually, he’s too old for that now, he can put on his own snowsuit—she and Julian talk together like co-conspirators who have known each other forever. Jane’s red hair bounces behind her as she walks down the sidewalk to the school bus stop, hand in hand with her stepson, while Benny watches them both from the window.
On their free nights when they’ve arranged for a babysitter, Benny and Jane go dancing, her particular hobby. He has mastered most of the ballroom steps. When they tango, he drags her passionately across the studio floor. They stare into each other’s eyes, glowering with the formalized lust that their tango instructor demands. In Jane’s arms Benny has gained a kind of manly confidence. Also, Jane loves kisses. “Mommy kisses a lot,” Julian has observed with affectionate irritability, wiping his face off boy-style after having had another Jane-kiss planted on his cheek or forehead. Her one deficit—a small one—is that she cannot make Benny laugh, and so she never tries. Besides, Julian, a boyish image of Sarah, has already grasped the essentials to being the class clown, and he has learned how to entertain his twin brothers and reduce them to giggles. Whenever Benny sees Julian laughing, his mind fogs over a bit. Julian may grow up to be a joker and a troublemaker, but Benny no longer tries to imagine his oldest son’s future, and in any case, what Julian might do in life is, as people say, another story altogether.
Charity
1.
He had fallen into bad trouble. He had worked in Ethiopia for a year—teaching in a school and lending a hand at a medical clinic. He had eaten all the local foods and been stung by the many airborne insects. When he’d returned to the States, he’d brought back an infection—the inflammation in his knees and his back and his shoulders was so bad that sometimes he could hardly stand up. Probably a viral arthritis, his doctor said. It happens. Here: have some painkillers.
Borrowing a car, he drove down from Minneapolis to the Mayo Clinic, where after two days of tests the doctors informed him that they would have no firm diagnosis for the next month or so. Back in Minneapolis, through a friend of a friend, he visited a wildcat homeopathy treatment center known for traumatic-pain-relief treatments.
The center, in a strip-mall storefront claiming to be a weight loss clinic (weight no more), gave him megadoses of meadowsweet, a compound chemically related to aspirin. After two months without health insurance or prescription coverage, he had emptied his bank account, and he gazed at the future with shy dread.
Through another friend of a friend, he managed to get his hands on a few superb prescription painkillers, the big ones, gifts from heaven. With the aid of these pills, he felt like himself again. He
blessed his own life. He cooked some decent meals; he called his boyfriend in Seattle; he went around town looking for a job; he made plans to get himself to the Pacific Northwest. When the drugs ran out and the pain returned, worse this time, like being stabbed in his knees and shoulders, along with the novelty of addiction’s chills and fevers, the friend of a friend told him that if he wanted more pills at the going street rate, he had better go see Black Bird. He could find Black Bird at the bar of a club, The Lower Depths, on Hennepin Avenue. “He’s always there,” the friend of a friend said. “He’s there now. He reads. The guy sits there studying Shakespeare. Used to be a scholar or something. Pretends to be a Native American, one of those impostor types. Very easy to spot. I’ll tell him you’re coming.”
The next Wednesday, he found Black Bird at the end of The Lower Depths bar near the broken jukebox and the sign for the men’s room. The club’s walls had been built from limestone and rust-red brick and sported no decorative motifs of any kind. If you needed decorations around you when you drank, you went somewhere else. The peculiar orange lighting was so dim that Quinn couldn’t figure out how Black Bird could read at all.
Quinn approached him gingerly. Black Bird’s hair went down to his shoulders. The gray in it looked as if it had been applied with chalk. He wore bifocals and moved his finger down the page as he read. Nearby was a half-consumed bottle of 7UP.
“Excuse me. Are you Black Bird?”
Without looking up, the man said, “Why do you ask?”
“I’m Quinn.” He held out his hand. Black Bird did not take it. “My friend Morrow told me about you.”
“Ah-huh,” Black Bird said. He glanced up with an impatient expression before returning to his book. Quinn examined the text. Black Bird was reading Othello, the third act.
“Morrow said I should come see you. There’s something I need.”
Black Bird said nothing.
“I need it pretty bad,” Quinn said, his hand trembling inside his pocket. He wasn’t used to talking to people like this. When Black Bird didn’t respond, Quinn said, “You’re reading Othello.” Quinn had acquired a liberal arts degree from a college in Iowa, where he had majored in global political solutions, and he felt that he had to assert himself. “The handkerchief. And Iago, right?”
Black Bird nodded. “This isn’t College Bowl,” he said dismissively. With his finger stopped on the page, he said, “What do you want from me?”
Quinn whispered the name of the drug that made him feel human.
“What a surprise,” said Black Bird. “Well, well. How do I know that you’re not a cop? You a cop, Mr. Quinn?”
“No.”
“Because I don’t know what you’re asking me or what you’re talking about. I’m a peaceful man sitting here reading this book and drinking this 7UP.”
“Yes,” Quinn said.
“You could always come back in four days,” Black Bird said. “You could always bring some money.” He mentioned a price for a certain number of painkillers. “I have to get the ducks in a row.”
“That’s a lot of cash,” Quinn said. Then, after thinking it over, he said, “All right.” He did not feel that he had many options these days.
Black Bird looked up at him but with an expression devoid of interest or curiosity.
“Do you read, Mr. Quinn?” he asked. “Everybody should read something. Otherwise we all fall down into the pit of ignorance. Many are down there. Some people fall in it forever. Their lives mean nothing. They should not exist.” Black Bird spoke these words in a bland monotone.
“I don’t know what to read,” Quinn told him, his legs shaking.
“Too bad,” Black Bird said. “Next time you come here, bring a book. I need proof you exist. The Minneapolis Public Library is two blocks away. But if you come back, bring the money. Otherwise, there’s no show.”
—
Quinn was living very temporarily in a friend’s basement in Northeast Minneapolis. His parents, in a traditional old-world gesture, had disowned him after he had come out, so he couldn’t call on them for support. They had uttered several unforgettable verdicts about his character, sworn they would never see him again, and that was that.
He had a sister who lived in Des Moines with a husband and two children. She did not like what she called Quinn’s “sexual preferences” and had a tendency to hang up on him. None of his friends from high school had any money he could borrow; the acquaintance in whose basement he was staying was behind on his rent; and Quinn’s boyfriend in Seattle, a field rep for a medical supply company, had a thing about people borrowing money. He might break up with Quinn if Quinn asked him for a loan. He could be prickly, the boyfriend, and the two of them were still on a trial basis anyway. They had met in Africa and had fallen in love over there. The love might not travel if Quinn brought up the subject of debts or his viral arthritis and inflammation or the drug habit he had recently acquired.
Now that the painkillers had run out, a kind of groggy unfocused physical discomfort had become Quinn’s companion day and night. He lived in the house that the pain had designed for him. The Mayo Clinic had not called him back, and the meadowsweet’s effect was like a cup of water dropped on a house fire. Sometimes the pain started in Quinn’s knees and circled around Quinn’s back until it located itself in his shoulders, like exploratory surgery performed using a Swiss Army knife. He had acquired the jitters and a runny nose and a swollen tongue and cramps. He couldn’t sleep and had diarrhea. He was a mess, and the knowledge of the mess he had become made the mess worse. The necessity of opiates became a supreme idea that forced out all the other ideas until only one thought occupied Quinn’s mind: Get those painkillers. He didn’t think he was a goner yet, though.
He could no longer tell his dreams from his waking life. The things around him began to take on the appearance of stage props made from cardboard. Other people—pedestrians—looked like shadow creatures giving off a stinky perfume.
In the basement room where he slept, there was, leaning against the wall, a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger, and one night after dark, in a dreamlike hallucinatory fever, he took it across the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to a park along the Mississippi, where he hid hotly shivering behind a tree until the right sort of prosperous person walked by. Quinn felt as if he were under orders to do what he was about to do. The man he chose wore a T-shirt and jeans and seemed fit but not so strong as to be dangerous, and, after rushing out from the shadows, Quinn hit him with the baseball bat in the back of his legs. He had aimed for the back of the legs so he wouldn’t shatter the guy’s kneecaps. When Quinn’s victim fell down, Quinn reached into the man’s trouser pocket and pulled out his wallet and ran away with it, dropping the Slugger into the river as he crossed the bridge.
Back in his friend’s basement, Quinn examined the wallet’s contents. His hands were trembling again, and he couldn’t see properly, and he wasn’t sure he was awake, but he could make out that the name on the driver’s license was Benjamin Takemitsu. The man didn’t look Japanese in the driver’s license photo, but Quinn didn’t think much about it until he’d finished counting the cash, which amounted to $321, an adequate sum for a few days’ relief. At that point he gazed more closely at the photo and saw that Takemitsu appeared to be intelligently thoughtful. What had he done to this man? Familiar pain flared behind Quinn’s knees and in his neck, punishment he recognized that he deserved, and the pain pushed out everything else.
He called his boyfriend in Seattle. In a panic he told him that he had robbed someone named Benjamin Takemitsu, that he had used a baseball bat. The boyfriend said, “You’ve had a bad dream, Matty. That didn’t happen. You would never do such a thing. Go back to sleep, sweetheart, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”
After that he lay awake wondering what had become of the person he had once been, the one who had gone to Africa. To the ceiling, he said, “I am no longer myself.” He did not know who this new person was, the man whom he had become, but when he finally fel
l asleep, he saw in his dream one of those shabby castoffs with whom you wouldn’t want to have any encounters, any business at all, someone who belonged on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign that read HELP ME. The man was crouched behind a tree in the dark, peering out with feverish eyes. His own face was the face of the castoff.
Somehow he would have to make it up to Benjamin Takemitsu.
—
In The Lower Depths, when Quinn entered, Black Bird did not look up. He was seated in his usual place, and once again his finger was traveling down the page. Cymbeline this time, a play that Quinn had never read.
“It’s you,” Black Bird said.
“Yes,” Quinn said.
“Did you bring a book of your own?”
“No.”
“All right,” Black Bird said. “I can’t say I’m surprised.” He then issued elaborate instructions to Quinn about where in the men’s room to put the money and when he, Black Bird, would retrieve it. The entire exchange took over half an hour, though the procedure hardly seemed secret or designed to fool anyone. When Quinn finally returned to his basement room, he had already gulped down two of the pills, and his relief soon grew to a great size. He felt his humanity restored until his mottled face appeared before him in the bathroom mirror, and then he realized belatedly what terrible trouble he was in.
Two days later he disappeared.
2.
That was as far as I got whenever I tried to compose an account of what happened to Matty Quinn—my boyfriend, my soul mate, my future life—the man who mistakenly thought I was a tightwad. I was very thrifty in Ethiopia, convinced that Americans should not spend large sums in front of people who owned next to nothing. But to Matty I would have given anything. Upon his return to Minneapolis he had called me up and texted and e-mailed me with these small clues about the medical ordeal he was going through, and I had not understood; then he had called to say that he had robbed this Takemitsu, and I had not believed him. Then he disappeared from the world, from his existence and mine.
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