Freedomland

by Richard Price

  Lorenzo glanced at the mirror, which held them in profile, and wondered who and how many were behind it. “Brenda. I’d kind of like to start out with what happened three nights ago.”

  “No,” she said, holding up a hand. “You have to let me… I’ve been thinking,” Brenda took a deep breath, then a shallow breath. “Ever since I met you, I’ve been thinking about how to, like, really, really tell you about everything. And now you just have to let me do it.”

  Lorenzo nodded, gestured for her to proceed, clasped his hands over his gut. It was two-ten, the clock a time bomb.

  “With my family—my mother, my brother—school, cops, it was always, like, everybody, everybody please, just, go away. Leave me be. But with a child, when you have a child, it’s safe. It’s yours. It’s finally safe. I mean, even that goddamn therapy group I was in, I mean everybody was working so hard on their relationships, on their peer relationships; it was so formal, so, like, earnest, everybody walking around with these gigantic date books, making dates for everything, like two, three months in advance—dinner dates, sleep-over dates, study dates, fuck dates, play dates, music dates, sports dates, dog-walking dates. It was like, it was like hiding in plain sight, do you know what I’m saying?”

  He didn’t really, but he felt it in some way, the urge to lie low, mostly from his drinking days. Lorenzo was jumping ahead of himself, half listening, wondering if there was a way he could call people—the Reverend Longway, other clergymen, some council-men, a few street stars—give them a heads up on the possible post-announcement fallout, without leaking the news.

  “Even now, with the Study Clubs, you know, in Jefferson or in Armstrong or wherever, these kids that I’m—” she caught herself—“I was, you know, involved with? Even, like, with Felicia and everybody? They’re the other, they’re… It’s safe to care for them, it’s safe to put out for them because, because they’re not quite real to me. And if I had to guess? I’d say I’m not quite real to them either.”

  “I don’t follow,” Lorenzo said, but he did.

  “I’m white, they’re black. They’re black, I’m white. We’re the other to each other. We’re not quite real.” She looked at him directly now. “Do you know what I’m saying?” She was almost begging him to agree.

  “I hear you,” he said mildly, but the observation scorched him, left him feeling betrayed in some vague way, and she knew it, her face taking on a stuck, stricken aspect.

  “I know you know what I’m saying…”

  “I’m right with you,” he said, to get her going again.

  “And, when I got pregnant? First I’m thinking, Get an abortion, who are you kidding… You know, I’m thinking, Hey I’m my own baby. I mean, it never even occurred to me to have a child. Me. But all of a sudden, somehow I had a vision, long-range, of what it could be like—the, the companionship, the secret companionship. It was like, I saw a feeling. I saw, like, an emotional state that could be mine. You know what I’m—but then I remembered. This child has a father, too, and, I know this sounds sick but, like, in order to duck having to be with this guy? Ulysses? Like, as a family? I figured, have the abortion, then just adopt a kid with no strings attached. It wouldn’t be mine, but it would be mine. And I liked Ulysses, too, but when he told me he was going back to Puerto Rico? I just busted out crying, and I’m sure he was thinking, you know, that I was crying, like, ‘What Now, My Love?’ or something, because he had kind of, you know, that smile, like, ‘Look, she can’t live without me.’ But I swear to you, those tears? My tears? They were tears of joy I mean it was too goddamn good to be true.” She drifted off, staring past Lorenzo’s shoulder. “Ulysses. If you think about it? Going back to Puerto Rico? He just, he just saved that baby’s life.” Her eyes strayed down to her hands, and she remained in that wilted, contemplative pose until Lorenzo felt the need to goose it along.

  “Can I get you something?” He heard the coolness in his voice, knew it to be a reaction to her having assigned him to “other” status. He didn’t have the luxury of reacting personally to that statement; all he could do here was withdraw emotionally, and so his pity began to drift.

  “Four years,” she muttered. “For four years, me and him, Cody, for four years I knew who I was. I was that boy’s mother. What was that saying, that song? ‘You Can’t Touch This.’ Remember that? For four years that was like my theme song, it was like my life was finally, you know, good.”

  Lorenzo became aware of a muffled shuffling sound from the wall opposite the one-way mirror, from the wall shared with the men’s room. They were surrounded.

  “But it wasn’t enough, you see, just being with my son. It wasn’t—you can’t live on just that. You can try, but…” She began to withdraw again.

  “Brenda.” He spoke her name to bring her back.

  “So Billy.” She sighed, as if contemplating a steep flight of stairs. “Billy. I first met him—I had this thing at the Study Club where I would invite, like, adult role models for the kids. You know, show them people who got up and out, like in advertising, civil service, business, whatever. Anybody who the kids could eyeball and see it was possible to grow up and, you know, because you can’t become something if you can’t even visualize it. Like, you say, ‘Chantal, you can become a lawyer,’ and it’s like, ‘Become a what? Like who. I don’t know no lawyers that look like me.’”

  “Brenda,” Lorenzo cut in, all her fervent compassion and empathy finally beginning to wear thin on him. “Brenda, Billy…”

  “I know where I’m going.”

  “I just need you to get to Billy,” he said, his voice warming up again despite himself. “Please.”

  “Billy. He came in because Felicia said to me, ‘Yeah, I got someone for your role model show. I’ll bring in my boyfriend. He was on Wall Street,’ then something like, ‘Get his ass out of the house.’ So Billy comes in to talk to the kids, and he comes in in, like, a three-piece suit, wing-tip shoes, white shirt, tie, and I knew he was unemployed, and it was kind of sad, and, but he talked to the kids so, so earnestly about the stock market. He took this visit to the Study Club so seriously. And like, he’s talking about stocks, bonds, hog bellies, pork bellies, buying on margin. I mean it was like, way over the kids’ heads. I mean I didn’t understand half the shit he said, but he was trying, he was so sweet, and he brought the New York Times and showed them how to read the, the stock listings. But you know, you could tell why he would have a hard time in life. I mean none of this was, I mean the kids were like, ‘Huh?’ and he wasn’t picking up on it, but they liked him, liked his reaching out like that. And all the time he’s talking, I look over at Felicia and she’s rolling her eyes; it was like she had had it with him, this loser. I mean you could tell she had nothing left for him but contempt, and he had this look on his face when any of the kids were asking him something? His eyes would go all wide and his mouth would make like this O, like he didn’t want to miss a word of what was being asked him, and I was just sitting there watching him in his unemployed Wall Street suit with that look on his face, and he had this little natty moustache and I just wanted to—that moustache was just making everything worse, and I felt like I just wanted to peel it off his face, I just wanted to reach out…”

  She went off again for a moment and so did Lorenzo, wondering when his pager would beep, needing that coded signal from the exhumation team coming up on his hip before he could charge her—charge her, tape her statement, then dump her, start making those calls.

  “It was like, I could feel his weakness—like a flu, you know? And I just wanted to lie down with him, like, be sick with him, get better with him. I just understood him so well, so quickly. It was like—looking at him was like—he was me.

  Lorenzo glanced at the clock again: two-thirty.

  “Brenda. Billy, did he have anything to do with Cody’s accident, other than—”

  “He never even met Cody.”

  Lorenzo nodded, thinking, Pick him up, scare him with a conspiracy charge, see what comes
out of his mouth.

  “And so, like, at the end of his talk? The kids are all milling around, it’s loud, it’s crazy. I just went up to him and kind of took his hand for a second and he, like, jumped. He looked at me kind of startled, and, it was on. The whole thing took maybe ten seconds, and it was on.”

  Lorenzo nodded again, cast a glance at his blank pad.

  “He just showed up at my apartment like two hours later. Cody was at some other kid’s house to play, and Billy, he came in and he looked like, distracted, kind of worried, but you know, hungry. And we spent like an hour together, you know, sex, and, at the end of the hour I knew I was in big trouble, because I knew what was in store for me. I knew Billy would never lose that distracted, kind of worried vibration around me, and I knew, I knew that I would lose him. I mean, how you can lose something, or someone, you never had possession of to begin with, I don’t know but it was like instant pain for me. Like a reminder of why I had structured my life around my son, focused my love on my son. But it was too late. I was, I had laid down with someone not a child; I had held someone not a child after all those years, and it was too late to go back. I had overabstained, and now I was in trouble.”

  Lorenzo heard someone coughing from behind the mirror, a ropy growl that just wouldn’t quit.

  “OK, so the day, that day? My son came home an hour after Billy had left, and I look at my boy and for the first time in my life, in his life, he seemed, like, unlovely to me… And I knew I was in trouble.

  “I don’t, it wasn’t the sex. It, that, I mean, it was OK. I mean, that’s what you do, so you do it. But with me, with sex, if the guy is happy, I’m happy. If the guy feels good after, then OK, great, I feel good too. And Billy, he was no—he didn’t—we didn’t even, you know, every time. But I just couldn’t wait to lay down with him again… For me, it was the arms, the holding.”

  She nodded, looking glassy, and Lorenzo began to feel for her again, lost some of his anger. He also knew he would never come back all the way with her.

  “Do you want to know what I like in bed?” She asked him directly, eye to eye. “I like someone’s hand right here…” She splayed a palm on the flat plane above her breasts, Lorenzo smiling, looking down at the table. “Right there, someone to press their hand right there. And I like a hand here.” She pressed that same palm against her forehead as if she were checking for fever. “I like to lay on my back and close my eyes and feel someone’s hand, not moving, just the pressure of it right here. It makes me feel safe, it makes me feel loved, physically loved… and I just float, float away.”

  “OK,” Lorenzo said, trying to move her on.

  “See, Billy didn’t love me. I mean, so what, but—and I guess I didn’t love him either, really, although I had that terror of loss that makes you feel like you love the person you’re afraid of losing? But for Billy, I think he just liked being with someone who made him feel good about himself, and that was me. But there wasn’t that much coming back from him. Billy’s heart belonged to Mommy—you know, Felicia—and I guess I knew that from the gitty-up, but like I said, I went crazy and I was, like, in instant terror of losing him, which of course becomes—you know, what happens.

  “We would get, we would see each other on the fly. He’d come up during the day if Cody was out at a friend’s, or he’d come over late at night in Felicia’s car and wait in the parking lot until Cody was asleep, and then I’d come down and we’d do stuff in the car or just talk, or sometimes I’d go over to his mother’s house. He was house-sitting for his mother—she’s in the hospital—so I’d drive out to Plainfield. But I guess most of the time I’d go down to Felicia’s car at night, in front of my apartment. I wouldn’t let him upstairs with Cody, in case he woke up. It was like I was cheating on Cody, or like I was sneaking out on one of my parents. Cody became like this, this…

  “And for the first few weeks I could sort of control the panic, you know, of losing him, Billy, and kind of fake being a normal person having a normal sneaky, like, affair or whatever, but the dam, it just broke one night and, it was just pain, unbearable pain, being with Billy, being away from Billy, just second-by-second pain.

  “It’s like I got into this head where I had to interpret every gesture of his, every facial change, vocal change. If I came down into the parking lot and the car was clean, he loved me. If it had Felicia’s shit all over? He was telling me something, sending me a message. And I couldn’t sleep with him—I mean, fall asleep with him—because I was too busy analyzing how he was breathing, how he was lying. Was he curled away from me; was he going asleep to tune me out; why did he just turn on his side; is he faking being asleep; is his dream head telling him to get away from me…

  “And sex? By the end, was unbearable because there was just too much stuff to decode, too many signals, too many… I’d just about have a nervous breakdown faking everything. And all the time I’m thinking, analyzing the talk, the touch, the time between talk and touch. And for Billy? I know that me being this way is, was bringing him down, making him unhappy with me; it’s not, it wasn’t, attractive. It wasn’t, flattering. But I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help it… And when I tried to, to mask it? The effort to hide it became just another…

  “He couldn’t put his finger on it, this hovering thing I’m laying on him, but he could smell it, you know? And, not now, but when I—in the beginning? He liked my sense of humor. I had this kind of low-key, mutter thing going that he liked, but I was aware he liked it and I was aware, like, for the first time how I did it, I was aware that I did it. So I would desperately try to get up this lay-back dryness for him, but you try desperately to, to fake… So that was shot. It was like everything, everything…”

  Lorenzo physically readjusted himself, shifted his weight in the chair, attempting to get her moving faster toward the deed itself, but Brenda was oblivious to the signals.

  “Billy, Billy was junk sickness, and, and the cure was the poison. And before Billy, it was all Cody for me. It was like, life was this cliff but I had kind of carved out this ledge for me and him, and I was happy, more than happy, but all of a sudden there was this gap…”

  “Brenda,” Lorenzo said.

  “Like with my son, before Billy,” she plowed on, the reintroduction of the boy settling him down again. “Before Billy, me and Cody—I would love watching videos with him or just like, lying down with him until he was asleep. But all of a sudden, I’m… It was terrible. I would look at my son’s face in the, the TV light? And all of a sudden he’s unprecious to me. And it was like, videos? I’m wasting critical minutes here like this. Billy’s parked downstairs; I got to get this kid down. I got to before Billy loses patience and goes home. He did that once. But Cody, he takes—” She stopped, swallowed. “He takes,” she continued, keeping it in the present tense, “twenty, thirty minutes, an hour sometimes to fall asleep, and I have to get the hell out of there before…

  “And Cody, he can feel my tension and it keeps him awake, which makes me more crazy and that makes him more awake, but all I can think about is getting out that door, and sometimes I’d think he was asleep and I’d just make it to the hallway, you know, tippytoe, and it would be, like, at the last second, ‘Mah-mee, Mah-mee…’” She used a braying singsong. “And I’d be, like, “Get to sleep!” Brenda shouted it, eyes wide and gelid.

  Lorenzo shifted in his seat again and glanced at the time bomb on the wall: two forty-five.

  “And how fast would you fall asleep, you have this, this giant hanging over you, this half-insane giant who didn’t love you anymore, didn’t want you anymore; this person who used to treat you like the sun the moon and the stars, but no more, no more…”

  She began to glaze and drift, the room becoming heavy with silence, a silence that Lorenzo knew to let be.

  “So I started giving him Benadryl to put him out,” she began again, her voice turgid with pain. “I started doping him, Cody, just to get him down, nothing more than you’d give a kid for a stuffed head… I was on
a bus once, and I heard some woman talking to a friend about how she used it to get her kid to sleep every once in a while, so I tried it one night and it worked. It worked. I told him it was night vitamins, and it became a part of our bedtime routine.

  “And the hell of it is, is that I knew about the gap between what I should feel and what I do, did feel. It’s not like, well, you’ve been replaced by Billy and that’s the way it is. It killed me not to be moved by my son anymore.”

  Lorenzo coughed, resisting the impulse to check the time again, looking down at his blank book instead.

  “But even at my worst, even at my worst there was a part of me that had the big picture still; there was a part of me that wanted to say to my son, Just let me get over this Billy guy, sweetheart, and I’ll be right back. Just let me play this out to its miserable end, and we’ll go back to watching the movies and having our talks… See, I knew about this, this, seizure by Billy. I recognized it, I could break it down, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I was so… I am not a stupid person, but it was like, my intelligence—my experience with people—my intelligence was just standing on the shore…” She floated out a languid hand, signifying a river, he guessed.

  “Let me—” He leaned forward, gearing up to intrude, to speed her along.

  “See, Billy, with all his, his weakness, and, craziness, he was human—I mean, more human than me, because he had like a number of preoccupations. Love life, job hunt, whatever. But me, for me, it was all Billy, all Billy. And the thing is, right now talking to you? I can’t even conjure up a picture of Billy’s face.”