Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  Putting John and May to bed left Elizabeth depleted, so meals were a chance to catch up before she got too beat. Work was picking up, which suited her fine. Idle hours killed her. Sitting around the office with nothing to do but stick your face in the fan. With the summer travel season winding down, Black Star was in the midst of fall and winter travel, booking a lot of conventions. American Association of Negro Funeral Directors, National Association of Negro Dentists. Puerto Rico was big this year, thanks to the new brochures, followed by Miami. Some of the groups they’d handled last year, the Negro Lawyers, the Negro Accountants, had told their friends. They were getting a lot of word of mouth.

  “We should go this year,” Elizabeth said, referring to Miami, which she had been lobbying for. “There are some new hotels going after the Negro market.”

  “We’ll see. I’d like to,” Carney said. Christmas was busy, with people spending end-of-year money on practical items they’d put off. He was trying out I’d like to as a response to put her off, as opposed to the customary I wish we could.

  Elizabeth took it as a yes and said she’d find the perfect place. “I had to give my father an earful today,” she told him.

  Leland had been visiting a client near the Black Star office on Broadway and stopped in to say hello. He mentioned, among other things, that he was investing in Liberty National, and compared it to getting a tip on a winning horse. As if he’d do something as common as bet on a horse race. She hadn’t brought up the Dumas Club thing with him but he provoked her. “I asked him why he’d give money to the man who had humiliated his son-in-law—”

  “I wouldn’t say—”

  “Treat his family so shabby. And you know what he said? ‘The Dumas Club has a reputation.’ So I let him have it.”

  “Okay.”

  “I kicked him out of the office I was so mad. Mommy called me to smooth it over but I was mad all day.”

  Carney told his wife it was nice of her to go to bat for him, but he didn’t need it. He changed the subject: “It tastes better the next day.” He’d allowed that Leland had taken a small delight on hearing of his rug-peddler son-in-law’s rejection, but he had refused to admit the obvious—that his wife’s father had actively undermined him. To permit that thought was to accept that Leland would never be his father-in-law in any other sense than a legal one.

  Elizabeth cleared the table, a signal that she was going to get the kids ready for bed. He told them to hold on a minute: It was time to finally try out the Polaroid.

  He’d snuck a peek inside the box a few times and retreated; the instructions were daunting. But he’d put off talking to Munson and that had gone as well as it could, so why not go for a streak? John reached for the Polaroid when Carney set it on the coffee table and he told the boy to stop in a voice so sharp it made them both flinch. It wasn’t cheap, the camera.

  He opened the back of the Polaroid and slid in the roll of film while his family arranged themselves on the Argent sofa. The upholstery was the color of faded mint, a fine setting for their brown skin, but the camera only took black-and-white photos. John on Elizabeth’s lap, May beside them. May didn’t know how to smile yet—all instructions to do so summoned an unsettling, gum-heavy display that would not have been out of place on a Bowery bum sleeping it off in a vestibule. “Sit still,” Elizabeth said.

  “I can ask Rusty to take one of all four of us,” Carney said. On 125th Street, with the store behind them, classy. He also wanted one of the store. Get a nice frame for it and put it on the wall of his office. They looked good, the three of them sitting there. A wave of worthlessness sent him sagging. It was good he wasn’t going to be in the picture because he didn’t deserve them. Aunt Millie had a few of the pictures of his mother, he remembered. Carney didn’t have a single one—his father had taken them, who knew where they’d ended up when he died—and lately his mother’s face withdrew into shadow in his memory. Next time he was at his aunt’s, he’d ask if she could spare one.

  What kind of a man didn’t have pictures of his family?

  The shutter mechanism and lens moved back and forth fluidly on the wheel. It wasn’t as fragile as it appeared. “Ready?”

  “Before they start fussing,” Elizabeth said.

  He botched it. There was a red button on the back to start the developing process and according to the instructions you were supposed to wait sixty seconds. He didn’t. Next time he’d get it right, but they were done for tonight once John started howling again. Christ, if Carney’d cried like that, his father would have smacked him across the face—and at that thought he felt the blow, reverberating through the years. Ringing in his ears, his cheek pulsing with heat. He shook it off.

  Carney tore away the backing and the four of them crowded around the rind of wet film. They waited, but nothing doing. The photograph remained a light brown square with three thin silhouettes where his family should have been. They looked like ghosts.

  FIVE

  The woman who lived in the third-floor apartment of 288 Convent was not on the lease. The tenant of record was one Thomas Andrew Bruce, known in grubby corners and underlit byways of the city as Cheap Brucie. When the landlord found out what he did for a living and made a fuss, Cheap Brucie threw him an extra fifty bucks a month. That shut him up.

  Miss Laura had lived there for three years and considered one-third of the apartment hers fair and square. The front room was for business, as well as the kitchen. The icebox was a desolate hum but the kitchen had a little bar, if you wanted to wet your whistle before you got to it. The small room in the back overlooking the garden was her domain. No one was allowed past its threshold. She slept there, never easily, and dreamed there, and beneath her bed kept a white leather box for tokens of her life before. Over the decades the street side of the apartment had settled in a slant, but her room was level.

  Each time Carney came knocking, he hesitated before he stepped into the front room, as if someone crouched behind the door to spook him—the vice squad, or his wife. By then Miss Laura was accustomed to his skittishness. His intent was bent but he was mostly straight, deep down, she could tell. The man was in sales, so he said. Miss Laura was in sales, too, and knew a mark when she saw one. Let him act this way or that, talk out the side of his mouth, but she knew who he was, what he was worth, the avenues of approach.

  * * *

  * * *

  She was a hard case. He didn’t know how to read her that first day and hadn’t worked it out since.

  The afternoon he approached her, the lunch rush was over but it was before quitting time, the in-between zone. The only other patron at the Big Apple Diner was an old white man in a yellow windbreaker, dozing with his head on the Formica counter. Carney sat at the window again and looked up at 288 Convent. She lived on the third floor. The pink drapes in the front room allowed the July sun in.

  The waitress that day was a tinier version of the usual miserable waitress, in eerie proportion and likeness, as if he were served by Russian dolls—take the top half off one and there’s another inside. Carney had one crook who kept coming to his office with tacky shit like those dolls, rhinestone-covered knickknacks, and whatnot. Finally he had to tell the dum-dum to beat it and not come around anymore. It was one thing for his father-in-law to disparage him as a rug peddler, but for a common hood to think he trafficked in such crap was a true insult. The waitress grimaced at him when he asked for milk for his coffee. What factory made such living monstrosities as her and her doubles? Some place in Jersey.

  The waitress and the cook started fighting and their epithets for each other were so ugly and precise that Carney had no choice but to finally cross the street.

  She buzzed him up and was unsurprised to see him round the stairs to the landing. Had the door wide open, unafraid of a stranger in the stairwell. He said he was a friend of Wilfred Duke. She let him in.

  Miss Laura was prettied up that d
ay, in a red-and-white cocktail dress, small hoop earrings dangling beneath her curly bob. In uniform, on the clock. She said, “Hello.” At first glance he took her for a teenager—she was petite and lean—but the impatience in her every syllable sounded ancient enough to predate civilization.

  A Burlington Hall four-poster bed with tasseled mauve curtains dominated the living room, centered on a Heriz rug of lush crimson. Whoever had furnished the joint had hit a white store downtown—there wasn’t a Burlington Hall dealer north of Seventy-Second Street. The lacquered armoire, side chairs, and love seat with the chenille upholstery all came from their 1958 catalog—1958 or 1959. In the three portraits on the walls, plump, nude white women reclined on divans while being bathed or adjusted or otherwise attended to by black-skinned servants. “Atmosphere.”

  Miss Laura offered him a drink and he accepted a can of Rheingold. She opened one for herself and sat on the love seat. “You want some music?” she asked. Next to the armoire was a 1958 Zenith RecordMaster hi-fi console, with a recess and metal dividers for LPs at the bottom.

  He shook his head. Time to make his pitch.

  He’d considered various approaches in his midnight stretches of industry, between sleeps, in that new time he’d rediscovered. Bring up the money: “How much would it cost for you to…?” She had a price for her customers; perhaps she had a variety of prices. Or make an appeal to her sense of justice: “You might not know it, but Duke is a bad man.” On the man’s say-so, his bank kicked widows and families out into the street. This one lives and that one dies, like God. Carney had an anecdote in his pocket about a spastic kid who needed an operation, and the poor boy’s eviction in the thick of it. Notorious. Verifiable. The Harlem Gazette ran two pieces about it. Certainly the offense against Carney didn’t rank compared to that, but there was no need to be specific about his own complaint.

  If she said no, she didn’t know Carney’s identity. She could find out, but that would take time, and there were other ways to get at the banker. Carney had a notebook full of stratagems. The first two schemes had not panned out. So this was the next contender.

  Sitting in her apartment, searching her narrow brown eyes, he couldn’t read her.

  In the end, he didn’t have to go into a big pitch at all. What you want in his trade, that most perfect thing, is a product that sells itself, an item of such craft and novelty that it renders the salesman superfluous. He had barely begun his spiel when it was clear that Fucking Over Duke, it turned out, sold itself.

  “Lay it out like that, all cool,” she’d said. “Like you’re selling me a couch.”

  “You in the market for a couch?”

  “What’s my end?”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  The number impressed. “Who are you?” she asked.

  He didn’t say.

  “Right. Men come up here,” Miss Laura said, “I’ll take any name they want to give. Take their money, too.” She sipped her beer. “But this is real business, and I need to know the name of my partner. Like how a bank needs to know.”

  It was like Freddie and the Theresa job—there’s being outside in the car, and being in the thick of it. “Raymond Carney. I own that furniture store on 125th—Carney’s Furniture?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  In many negotiations, a pause opens up, a silent interval in which both parties consider the next move and its implications. Like the pause before a kiss or before a hand reaches into a wallet.

  She said, “I knew you wasn’t no friend of Willie’s. Know how?”

  “How?”

  “Willie doesn’t like to share.”

  She smiled at him for the first and last time, to say she saw through him and delighted in her superiority. Her lips curved then, her eyes containing a mean brand of delight, and they did a deal for the Duke job.

  * * *

  * * *

  The first sleep was a subway train that dropped him off in different neighborhoods of crooked behavior and the second sleep returned him to normal life with a rumble. The Dorvay Express? That was too fancy, galloping and gleaming in the moonlight. Here was a local: rattling, grimy, and it didn’t take you anywhere you hadn’t been before.

  Carney woke to the first summer night that was more fall than summer, with a breeze that sent you to shut the windows and snap open a musty blanket. Elizabeth didn’t stir when he dressed. The children were spread-eagled, with their faces nestled into the crooks of their arms. All the Carneys slept like that, as if still shrinking from some primeval ugliness.

  He didn’t know Convent at night so he took Amsterdam, in and out of stretches of liveliness and desolation—men drinking beer on aluminum folding chairs, clacking dominoes, and then blocks of cratered emptiness, rowdy night spots next to tenements torched for insurance money—until he got to 141st.

  His first encounter with Miss Laura took place in July, and they had met a few times since then. Now it was almost a month later, and she had summoned him. He had an inkling why, and it was nothing good. She buzzed him in quickly. Carney had suggested the diner more than once but she wouldn’t meet him during the day. It was near midnight.

  Her irritated nod served as a welcome. Miss Laura wore a thin blue robe and her hair was tucked with bobby pins. She was slender, and the robe made her look slighter still, exposing the line of her collarbone and a splash of freckles below her throat.

  Out of the Zenith hi-fi shook crazy saxophone stuff from the Village. Freddie could have identified who was playing, and on what basement bebop nights he’d seen them, but whenever Carney heard those sounds he felt trapped in a room of lunatics. Down the hall, the bathtub was running and his host told him to hold on. She disappeared into the back.

  Carney’s nose wrinkled at the unctuous aroma that underlay the cigarette smoke. He determined that it came from the purple flowers in the vase on the fireplace. Miss Laura returned and caught him taking a whiff. “My mother kept a garden full of them,” Miss Laura said. “Back in Wilmington. The flower place on Amsterdam has them this time of year.”

  “That’s where you’re from?”

  She rubbed her fingertips together.

  After that first meeting, she made him pay for their conversations, even though it was just talk. Business. Sometimes ten bucks, sometimes thirty, he never knew. Carney asked her to explain the variance and she told him that not everything costs the same. Tonight he handed her a twenty, guessing.

  The amount was satisfactory. “Wilmington is where I came from,” she said. He joined her on the love seat. He usually chose one of the Burlington Hall chairs across the room and immediately regretted tonight’s choice. The love seat was a two-seater, made to squeeze a couple close, and here he was a married man in the room of a “working lady,” as his father used to say.

  “I got out of there,” Miss Laura continued. “Figured New York was more my size. My aunt Hazel packed her bags and beat it up here when I was little, and whenever she came back, she had the nicest dresses and hats and all these stories of the Big City. It was the first place that popped into my head—New York City.”

  Observing his discomfort, she sat up and crossed her legs so the frayed edge of her robe relinquished an inch of thigh.

  “It’s good to have family,” Carney said, “when you come to a new place.”

  “Good’s a word. She didn’t know me from Adam when I knocked on her door. Still up from last night, to look at her. But she said I could sleep on her couch for a few days until I found a place. I was there six months.” However disheveled Aunt Hazel was in the morning, Miss Laura said, she was the picture of glamour whenever she walked out the door. “You have to have an inside you, she used to say, and an outside you. Ain’t nobody’s business who you are really, so it’s up to you what you gave them.”

  “She still living here?” Carney asked. Miss Laura had arranged this meeting a
nd he wondered when she’d get to the reason. It occurred to him that Laura was not her real name.

  “She was,” Miss Laura said. “Now she ain’t. She’s the one got me working at Mam Lacey’s—you know it?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  He squinted, and she said, “I didn’t work downstairs.” In the bar, she meant.

  “Right.”

  He and Freddie had often joked about going upstairs, but they didn’t mess with hookers. Well, Freddie was up to all sorts of stuff. They knew plenty of guys who used to go upstairs, or who frequented the other whorehouses people knew about. On Carney’s fourteenth birthday, his father had offered to take him to “a place I know,” and Carney said no, and it was years before it clicked what Big Mike had been talking about. Had Freddie joked about this or that woman getting off the bus or walking into the drugstore working for Mam Lacey? Big ass, too much makeup, some kind of look in her eye. Sure. It was in the realm of his humor, and Carney had doubtless laughed. You get older and the old jokes grow less funny.

  Miss Laura said, “I used to lie up there and listen to the music. Everybody having a high old time down there. That music…If I got bored, or if I had a rough one, I’d picture me in one of those girl groups. Long dress. Gloves up to here.” She stuck another cigarette into her mouth. “Downstairs was one good time, and upstairs was a different kind of time.”

  “Been closed a while,” Carney said.