by Paul Hond
Soon the plane was dipping into the clouds, and when land came within sight—white houses with red rooftops, gray rain-soaked fields—Mickey knew he had arrived in a place of consequence.
The old excitement returned. It was the same excitement he’d felt when, standing by the basement door, listening to Emi play, he would place his hand on the knob, poised to intrude. This sensation was personal, his own; it had nothing to do with the more universal thrill of arrival. For an entirely different reason, he once again felt distinct from the crowd.
He gripped the back of the seat in front of him as the wheels touched the ground.
There was applause. It was morning. Mickey looked around for his stewardess, to thank her, but she was nowhere to be seen, and as he filed out of the plane with everyone else, he could feel, like a heavy hand on his shoulder, the return of his anonymity.
The airport was much bigger than he’d expected. Words on signs were different—Mickey understood nothing. Announcements in French issued from the loudspeakers. People spoke to one another with no regard for his understanding.
The strange language added to his sense of persecution; it was like an attack on his sanity. He was alone, completely alone, glimpsing the life that he’d always feared was in store for him: the solitary man, old and bewildered, and the world around him menacing, inscrutable, leaving him further and further behind.
He followed the other passengers through a series of document checks (security was tight on account of some recent problems with Arabs, you couldn’t spit without hitting a cop or a soldier) and then to the baggage area, where he waited and waited in a dwindling crowd, fearing his bag would never emerge from the tunnel, so that when it finally did he felt a shock of recognition, and reached out for it as though it were a person.
He went to a window marked CHANGE and handed over three hundred dollars in traveler’s checks. He’d brought a few thousands’ worth, and carried three credit cards. The transaction went smoothly. Mickey took a small pleasure in each successive triumph over the language barrier, embracing the challenges like an athlete and finding that all the worries he’d rehearsed so intently on the plane had fled to the edges of his thoughts, leaving nothing but the moment at hand. He was convinced that there was something here for him to discover, something about his wife; indeed, it was as though she were leading him through all of this, and as he entered a waiting taxi, which seemed planted there by the curb, waiting in the rain just for him, he pulled from his wallet a scrap of paper on which Emi had written the name and address of a Paris hotel, along with the name of the place where she and David Shaw were to perform. He handed it over to the driver, who glanced at it and nodded.
“L’Hôtel Dakar?”
“Yes,” said Mickey. “Oui. Merci.” He hoped the place wasn’t too expensive.
He gazed out at the scenery along the rain-slicked highway: gray loomings of modern office buildings, high-rise hotels of black glass, housing developments that looked as though they were thrown up in a hasty response to a refugee problem; hardly the hills and forests and rolling manors and country houses that Mickey had always imagined surrounded the great city in lush, green, ever-widening concentric circles. As things on the outskirts of town grew bleaker and denser with drab apartment buildings, Mickey began to worry. Was this Paris?
When the taxi entered the city, Mickey was shocked: he’d never seen such filthy streets. And the people! Nothing but blacks and other dark-skinned types. Arabs? Turks? Soon the driver slowed and pointed to a white building on a corner. Attached to it was a lit sign with the words HôTEL DAKAR burning red through the drizzle.
The place looked like a dump. And the area! Blacks everywhere (blacks, here in Paris!), half of them dressed in brightly colored African robes, absurdly out of place among the white buildings, the flashing lights, the cars whizzing along rain-glazed boulevards. The sidewalks, meanwhile, had been taken over by foreign street vendors, who were busy arranging their wares (clothes, shoes, books, dishes, tools, batteries, you name it) upon thick blankets, and the trash cans—sealed, Mickey figured, to prevent terrorist bomb attacks—overflowed with the garbage placed atop them by careless passersby. Mickey turned his gaze to the elevated tracks splitting the dirty street in an infernal eruption of steel, thinking how easy it was to forget that he was in one of the great capitals of Western civilization.
He paid the cabbie and got out, unsure what to think about Emi’s choice of lodgings.
Or maybe this wasn’t her hotel at all, but someone else’s; someone she had meant to call on, meet. And what about Shaw, he wondered; where was David Shaw staying? Certainly not here. Not Shaw.
Mickey pushed open the door and entered what he supposed had to be called the lobby. There was a wooden desk, two chairs, a small wooden table and a pay telephone.
“Bonjour,” said the man behind the desk. His skin was as black as Mickey had ever seen on a man; his European sweater and jacket seemed wrong on him, a corruption of his nature. “Puis-je vous aider?”
“No French,” said Mickey. “English.”
The man smiled, showing an octave of white teeth. “How may I help you?”
“How much for a room?” said Mickey.
The man seemed to respect Mickey’s no-nonsense approach, and the figure he quoted was satisfactory. It took Mickey some time to figure out the money, and he could feel the man’s patience bearing down on him as the coins and bills jingled and crinkled in his white hands. He placed the money on the desk, along with his passport.
“Thank you very much,” said the man, placing a key beside the money. The exchange seemed to have put a distance between them. When the man looked up and smiled, there was something false in it. “Please sign,” he said, producing a pad and pen. Mickey took the pen, hesitated; the handing over of the key had thrown him off, had reminded him for some reason of Donna. It was an unexpected and unwelcome thought—he was here to concentrate on Emi, after all—but the guilt over his treatment of Donna, coupled with his desire to make amends, exceeded for the moment all other feelings, spurring in him an odd resentment of his wife: he found himself wanting to find fault with her, that he might ease the burden on his conscience with regard to Donna Childs—Donna, who was alive, and who was perhaps feeling, even at this very moment, the sting of his disappearance.
Mickey signed the register with a steady hand. The man looked at the passport and said, “Thank you, Monsieur Lerner, and have a pleasant visit.”
Mickey blushed at the sound of his name, and felt intimidated by the man’s obvious command of English. “Thank you,” he said, thinking too that if Emi had come here before, this man would surely recognize her. Mickey pulled out a photograph of his wife from his wallet—an old photo, true, but then she hadn’t changed all that much, and how many white women came into this place anyway—and offered it to the man, watching him carefully. “Do you recognize this woman?” he said. “Has she ever been here?”
The man studied the photograph, then looked at Mickey. “I think she has been here,” he said, “but I cannot be positive. What is her name?”
“Emilie Lutter,” said Mickey. He spelled it.
“I can look in my records,” said the man. “But with all respect, why do you ask?”
“I’m her husband,” said Mickey.
“Yes,” said the man, and nodded gravely. “Of course.”
Mickey was dumbstruck; he hadn’t meant to convey any such meaning, but the man had understood him instantly, and though this understanding seemed to point to exactly what Mickey had thought he needed in order to justify his feelings toward Donna—that Emi had, indeed, been unfaithful—the imminence of so enormous a confirmation sent him reeling, which told him that he hadn’t believed in it after all, and was thus wholly unprepared to take it on.
“I will check for you,” said the man, who seemed pleased to find himself the pivot of an international intrigue, though Mickey could see, beyond this new sense of duty, a glimmer of contempt for his new guest,
whose circumstances were less than dignified.
“Thank you,” Mickey said, his voice straining against his anger. Room key in his fist, he climbed the winding, uneven staircase, feeling certain that he was being mocked.
On the third-floor landing he observed a dark-skinned man enter a room ahead of an older white woman dressed in a long coat with what looked to be a black teddy underneath. Mickey couldn’t believe it. This place was worse than he’d thought. Mickey knew that his wife had had something of a fascination with the underclass, but to stay in a flophouse? On the other hand, it was too seedy a place in which to conduct a love affair, though Mickey could see as how some people might derive a certain thrill from it. But he could not in a million years imagine Donna Childs conducting an illicit affair here or anywhere else; she was a woman of strong moral fiber, Mickey felt. He really ought to call her and apologize, explain, but he didn’t want to compound his offense by lying to her, which is what he would end up doing, what he would have to do, seeing as how he had no clear idea why he’d stood her up, fled, save maybe that he felt he was in some danger from her, and how could he possibly tell her that?
Mickey entered his room, which was not much bigger than a boxing ring. Bed, night table, dresser, toilet, shower. On the wall above the bed hung a framed aerial photograph of an outdoor arena filled with tens of thousands of people dressed in white. Tall light towers illumined the scene, their bulbs so bright under the dusky sky that even in a photograph they hurt the eyes. It was entitled Mecca. Mickey could not look at it without feeling a dizzying sense of dislocation.
He lay on the bed. How could Emi stand it? How could she stand to travel so far from home, to be so deeply alone in a foreign room? Had she felt as he felt now—like a child lost, a child forgotten?
He could hear sounds coming from the next room; thumps and grunts, one and then the other. Occasionally there was a female whimper.
These seemed to Mickey the loneliest sounds he had ever heard.
He brought his knees to his chest. What did they know, what did anyone know about fucking? He alone knew what it was to please a woman, and all attempts by men in bedrooms and hotel rooms could only fall short of the standard he’d set in those early years with Emi. He saw her now, youthful and girlish in just a T-shirt that came to midthigh, her hair wet from her bath and smelling of cherries as she combed it in the bedroom mirror. How graceful she was when she didn’t know he was watching her! The small eager breasts, the white legs; how he liked to walk up behind her and lift the shirt and peek at the small, goose-pimply buttocks, press his groin against them as she tilted back her head and opened a mouth full of crooked European teeth. And who better than he knew how to grip her by the shoulders and gently drive her to the bed? Whose prick? Whose tongue? Yes, he knew what it took to keep her coming home, and when she bounced so slick and warm astride him and ground her bone into his and cried out into his mouth as his fingers pressed each knob of her spine right down to the dangerous dark button of her backside, his mastery was clear to him—for who else could make her see such colors, who better than he could play this wild clarinet?
Strange: he had not, in those days, ever supposed it might be he who’d become restless and get wandering eyes. But it was only recently, when she became so distant, that he had started to think—really think (of course he’d always had casual thoughts)—about pursuing other women. Yes: she’d driven him to it; and as he listened to the sickening creak of bedsprings through the wall, he dared to seek comfort in the idea of Donna Childs, thinking too that in having very nearly elicited from the man downstairs testimony of Emi’s infidelity (he’d all but laughed in my face, Mickey thought), he had earned the right to indulge this secret preference. For Donna existed; she lived and breathed. That she was attractive and warm and intelligent and had a wonderful laugh, well, that was secondary, it was icing on the cake; nor did it hurt, in terms of her appeal, that she was wrapped in the forbidden—so much so, in fact, that Mickey was all but resigned to the knowledge that he might only ever be with her in this sad little way: alone in a darkened room, the blankets pulled over his head.
But as he tried to summon her to his imagination, the sounds from the next room grew louder: thumps, grunts, gasps for air, noises that sounded less like a session of love in a cheap hotel room in Paris than an exchange of blows in a West Baltimore gym. It was as if Tommy Childs himself were in training on the other side of that wall preparing for a rematch, rising from the dead to defend the honor of his daughter; and as Mickey placed his hands over his ears, the noise grew louder, beating him further against his pillow, pummeling him at last into the depths of memory.
14
Lou Glazer was all over him the minute he walked in the door. “Where the hell’ve you been?” Glazer demanded, in that high, loud, deaf man’s voice, which, along with his lazy right eye and the thick tufts of hair that stuck up like wings at the back of his neck, had probably given him plenty of reason to become a fighter—as if having grown up among cutthroat Greeks and Poles and Italians in East Baltimore weren’t reason enough. He followed Mickey to the locker room, which smelled strongly of crotches, buttocks, armpits, feet, powders, hair oil. Two young, thin Negroes whom Mickey didn’t know were getting dressed there.
“Hey, smart guy,” Glazer pursued. “You got a fight tomorrow. Or did you forget?”
“I didn’t forget,” Mickey said, turning the combination lock. His hand was shaking, in grief and in anger: he’d just finished bawling his eyes out at the bakery, and that hadn’t been in his fight plan.
“Two days you’ve been gone.”
“My father died.” The locker popped open.
“Your father died.” Glazer nodded, folded his arms, rocked on his toes. He’d heard it all before. “So,” he said. “How many times did you screw her? Huh, Lerner? How many times?”
Mickey was embarrassed by this sort of talk, but he liked what it assumed about his experience, liked that the Negroes might think more of him. He said, “He had a heart attack.”
Glazer clucked his tongue.
The Negroes snickered.
Mickey turned his body away from Glazer to change into his leather protector and trunks. “Check the obituaries if you don’t believe me,” he said.
Glazer wasn’t buying. “Think I wasn’t eighteen once?” he said.
Mickey looked at his trainer: skinny legs, bulky middle, that clean white tunic; no, he could never have been eighteen. He looked like the eternal Italian barber.
“Call my house you don’t believe me,” Mickey said. “There’s a whole crowd there. I told them I had to go to the store for some aspirin. They think I’m at the store. The funeral was this morning.” There must have been something in his voice, because Glazer shifted his weight.
“Well then,” Glazer said. “If that’s the case, maybe you shouldn’t be here.” He clasped his hands together. “I mean that really is a terrible thing.” His voice could not find the right note for sympathy; like his eye, it seemed to have been knocked out of alignment from too many punches. He said, “You want to cancel?”
Mickey shrugged.
“What?” said Glazer.
“No.”
Glazer nodded, then took from his pocket a pair of used, smelly wraps, which caused Mickey to turn and hold out his hands. Getting wrapped always reminded him of that day, several years before, when Noah Brown, the bakery’s kosher supervisor, had beckoned him to the back of the store while the elder Lerner was busy with a customer. Noah pulled from a silken bag a small black box that was connected to a long leather thong, and Mickey, feeling small in the face of such a mysterious and presumably powerful object, allowed Noah to place the box on his arm. He repeated, at Noah’s command, some foreign syllables that rumbled the back of the throat, then watched again as the old man wrapped the thong around his forearm and middle finger and uttered another blessing.
It happened just once, and was never mentioned again: it might have been an illicit act. But whenever
Glazer wrapped his hands, Mickey became aware of a similar sanctity; and Glazer was always solemn, winding the bandages round and round with great care.
“Okay,” Glazer said. “Lerner?”
Mickey had been drifting; he hadn’t wanted the wrapping to end, and now Glazer was holding his finished hands, waiting for Mickey to pull them away. When Mickey didn’t, Glazer dropped them.
Mickey stared at the hands. They were now calibrated weapons, weighted, packed. He said, “You gonna at least tell me who I’m fighting?”
Glazer looked askance. “Kid named Thomas Childs. I told you, don’t worry about it. Just do what I tell you, you’ll be okay.” Then he was gone, quick as a fly: he raged into the gym and went after a wheezing, bloated Clayton Grimes, who was sluggishly shadowboxing in the mirror, appearing somewhat less fierce than he did in the promotional posters that covered the peeling white walls of Glazer’s office.
In the main area there hung four big bags, which, amid carnal smells, resembled things hanging in a slaughterhouse; on one of them a light-heavy named Warren Hurt was taking out serious frustrations, grunting, occasionally butting the bag with his head or shoulders as it swung back toward him. Like most of the fighters here, Hurt was essentially a violent man, in whom the gym prompted a grudging discipline; so that by the time he returned to the street he was, far from tranquilized or ennobled, often ready to kill a person.
