No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  “No, no,” Wyndell said, getting up and feeling the effects of the whiskey. “I didn’t mean to hit you. I promised that first time, and I just lost it …”

  “You didn’t hit me,” she said. “I was off balance and almost fell.”

  And then she was overcome by all the emotion and she was crying and curling up on the leather chair by the window. Wyndell let her cry and then came over and picked her up in his arms and brought her over to the couch.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, kissing her forehead. “I really am. I missed you so much.”

  “I never wanted to see you again. All week long while you were gone I kept thinking about us and I couldn’t figure anything out. It was this big lump of hurt inside of me. And then I started thinking, and maybe I figured it out. I was thinking about you and Daddy,” she said.

  “About the gig?” Wyn said. “No matter what happens, we’re going to do it. I can’t wait to get back to rehearsing. I called everyone.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Vidamía said, breaking away from him so she could face him. “It’s like every time you start with this race stuff, it’s like you’re asking me to choose between the two of you. I could never do that. I love you both so much. Can’t you understand that?”

  “I understand,” he said. “I was just pissed.”

  “About what?”

  “You and me. I mean, you’re a white chick. It cracks people up when I tell them you have African blood. I get so much fucking heat from people. Especially sisters. I tell them you’re Puerto Rican and they just laugh in my face. They act all nice in front of you, but deep inside they can’t take me and you feeling the way we do about each other. I was never into this black and white thing until I came to New York.”

  “Bitches!” Vidamía said. “Which ones?”

  “I’m not gonna tell you. I’m sure you’d kill at least two of them. No jail for you.”

  Vidamía laughed, looked at her watch, jumped up from the couch, and ran into the bathroom to wash the redness out of her eyes. When she came back out she kissed Wyndell quickly and said she had to be at the store. He asked her if everything was going to be all right. She nodded happily and reminded him that he had rehearsal at the loft that evening.

  “I know,” he said. “You want to get together afterward? Let’s have dinner late and just walk like we used to.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I love you.”

  “And I love you,” he said.

  Wyndell closed his eyes and knew something was happening in his life that had never happened before. He didn’t feel cynical now and couldn’t understand why he had behaved as he did. The black and white issue was confusing and he couldn’t really say that he felt totally convinced that Garlande or Carl or Vidamía was right. He thought of all the white friends he’d had over the years, people who respected him and even loved him. And he thought of the black people who ridiculed him and disliked him immensely.

  Maybe they were right. Maybe he had to begin forgetting about skin color and concentrate on the way he’d been raised. And then he recalled sitting on the floor of his mother’s gallery as she placed small plastic plaques next to the paintings for an upcoming exhibition. He couldn’t have been any more than seven or eight years old. Amanda Creighton Ross, who had studied art history in Rome and Paris, was beautiful, and she was his mother. She had never once told him any horror stories about Europe.

  One summer he had traveled with the family to Paris and they’d gone through Germany and up into Denmark, crossing the sea on a big ferry that the railroad cars traveled on. They went by train through the Danish countryside, the fields yellow with mustard flowers, and in Copenhagen they took another big ferry to Sweden.

  Everyone they met was pleasant and relaxed. His father’s friend Gerald Grayson, who was black and an architect, was married to a blond woman who was a violinist. They had two children, and their family lived in a beautiful house near a lake with hardly any other homes near. Wyn and his family returned to Paris and spent time with friends and he got to stay up late and they let him drink a little wine. He always watched his mother to learn what he must do. There was nothing that made him prouder than his mother. He recalled watching her figure, the legs long and shapely, the high heels accentuating the muscles, the hem of her dress just above the knees, and then her shape, which was round at the hips, narrow at her waist, and then widening out again to full breasts. Her neck was long and elegant, her face sculpted—high cheekbones, her nose narrow at the bridge and wide at the base, like the sculptured masks in Garlande’s house.

  They were the same color, he and his mother. His father and his sisters were lighter, but his mother’s skin was dark and smooth, the color of the mahogany furniture in his parents’ bedroom. Perhaps his father and mother had fashioned him from parts of the furniture, he thought one day when he was six years old. He laughed to himself and thought of Pinocchio, another wooden boy. But he wasn’t a wooden boy. And then, as he sat on the floor of the gallery, alternately drawing geometric patterns on his Etch-a-Sketch and watching his mother work, the aromas of her womanhood and perfume wafting to him, he thought of what the man in the car had shouted to him when he was walking home from school the previous week.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, darling,” she’d said, her back to him.

  “Am I a nigger?”

  “No, you’re Wyndell Ross,” she’d said, turning and smiling at him from above. Her face was radiant with love for him. “Wyndell Ross, an American boy who lives in Denver, Colorado. That’s who you are. Could you please get me the rest of the plaques from my desk?”

  “Yes, Mama,” he’d said.

  He’d gone for the little plastic signs with the data identifying each painting—artist’s name, title, materials. As he walked back he kept thinking of his own name and who he was. He had not yet begun playing music, but his father and mother were always talking about people in jazz. Wyndell Ross. The name sounded like Charlie Parker. Like Miles Davis. Like Thelonious Monk. Like Dexter Gordon. Wyndell Ross. An American boy living in Denver, Colorado. Wyndell Ross. An American man trying to make sense of things. And Vidamía had the same right as anybody, he thought. Vidamía Farrell. An American girl living in New York City. He shook his head and promised himself that he’d listen more carefully to his heart. God, she was beautiful, and bright, and he loved her and didn’t care what color she was, and that was the truth.

  60. Sermon

  The week beginning with Sunday the twelfth of August, 1990, was like three weeks crammed into one for Vidamía. On Monday she took Wyndell to Alan Flusser’s to pick out his suit. Flusser himself took care of them. He was dressed impeccably and reminded them of David Niven without the mustache, so suave was he. Vidamía offered to take Cliff as well, but Cliff said he knew what he wanted to wear and his girlfriend Phillipa was working on something. Billy went up to see Pop Butterworth and returned to say that the old man wasn’t doing too well.

  Billy sat in his rocker, staring straight ahead, as he used to do for hours at a time before he started playing the piano again. Caitlin had turned on the television and had paused on CNN for a moment. There was another report on the military activity in the Persian Gulf. The report said something about Marines, and Billy jumped up and told Caitlin not to change the channel. It was too late, the screen jumped to MTV and Billy slammed his fist on the table.

  “Caitlin, dammit,” he said. “I told you not to change it.”

  He got up and went over and took the remote from her and sat down to watch the report on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Caitlin said, suddenly frightened.

  She walked slowly to Lurleen and buried herself against her. Lurleen soothed her and everyone went about their business. Billy sat glued to the television set for the next hour, changing back and forth from CNN to the regular news. When the news was over, he went to the back of the loft. He opened the combination lock on his old footlocker, lifted the lid, reached insid
e and brought out a smaller wooden chest, about the size of a makeup case with a small padlock on it. He took the case up the stairs to the roof and turned on the light. Opening the case, he unwrapped the oily rag to reveal the .45-caliber pistol he had purchased as soon as news about Iraq’s march into Kuwait began. From the bottom of the chest he removed the three full clips and laid them on the picnic table. He checked the action on the pistol, stripped it, and put it back together. Then he loaded a clip into the pistol and sat up on the roof as if he were on guard. He knew it was nuts, but something could happen any minute. The world was getting crazier and crazier. If Iraq kept it up there was going to be war, and then he’d have to go, just like before. Maybe he should just go down and volunteer. But they wouldn’t take him because of his disability. He’d convince them that he could be helpful in some way. Then again, maybe he ought to stay close to home in case something broke out here.

  Around one o’clock in the morning Lurleen came up to get him. When she saw the pistol she stood still, waiting for him to look up, recalling those times when she’d watched him consider ending his life. She finally lost her patience.

  “You went back on your word about having guns around the kids,” she said, walking to him.

  “No, it’s not like that, Lynn,” he said. “Let me explain.”

  Billy began talking real fast about Iraq and Saddam Hussein and how everybody had to be real careful and watchful because something could go down at any moment. Lurleen finally calmed him down enough to convince him to come downstairs and put the pistol away. He reassured her that he was okay, that he wasn’t thinking about suicide. Lurleen said she knew, but wasn’t sure how much she could believe him. Billy explained that he was just anxious about the gig. He said that the other thing eating him up was that he didn’t think Butterworth was going to make it.

  “He’s so sick, Lynn,” he said. “Man, I just feel helpless. I’m taking him to the hospital tomorrow to check him in.”

  She held his arm firmly, her own hooked into his, as if at any moment he’d fly away from her. Carefully, concentrating with all her might, she guided him through every step of putting the pistol away and made him lock it up again. She brought him to bed and made love to him slowly until he was aroused, and as always he was all over her, forgetting himself in her embrace. In the middle of the night he woke up in a sweat and was back in Vietnam, in the middle of a firefight, whispering that the machine gun was jammed and shaking Lurleen. She woke up and held him until he again was relaxed enough to fall asleep.

  The following day, Billy went up to Harlem and took Butterworth to the hospital to sign him in. Each day he stayed with Butterworth from mid-morning until late afternoon, when he came back home for the evening rehearsal. He watched the situation worsen in what was now called the Gulf War, each report making him more concerned about the Marines in Kuwait.

  On Friday the seventeenth, Vidamía went with Wyndell to bring Pop Butterworth magazines and the papers, and Butterworth looked at them together and, in a raspy voice, said, “Damn, you two are the best-looking people I’ve ever seen.”

  And then he got very serious and spoke what Wyndell later termed “some strange shit.” “Watch yourselves, chillun,” Butterworth said, “cause the shadow man’s gonna get you sure as God made split-pea soup.”

  Wyndell had laughed and said, “Man, you still talking stuff? Whyntcha get yourself outta that bed and let’s play us some music so I can run your old behind into the ground.”

  Butterworth smiled weakly and said, the voice raspier than ever, and the effort making his eyes water, “I wish I could, son, but I can’t. I’d like a favor if you could do one for me.”

  “No problem at all,” Wyndell said, all serious so that it frightened Vidamía. “Just tell me what I got to do.”

  Butterworth motioned him closer to the bed and from around his withered, scrawny neck, the dark coffee-colored skin dry and ashy, he undid a key from a chain and pressed it into Wyndell’s hand.

  “That there’s the key to my papers,” he said. “They’re in a bureau up at Mae Wilkerson’s house in the Bronx. Third floor in the back. She knows where. There’s a letter addressed to Mae explaining the whole thing. Whatever’s in there is yours. Do what you want with it. If you can use the stuff, go on ahead and use it. If you can’t, burn the whole damn thing.”

  “What is it, Pop?” Wyndell had said.

  “My papers,” Butterworth had replied. “A few tunes I wrote, that’s all. There’s no arrangements or nothing. Just the basic tunes, top and bottom. Get Billy to play them for you to see if you like them.”

  “Tunes?” Wyndell said. “That’s great, Pop.” And, turning to Vidamía, he pointed to Butterworth. “Can you believe this, the man is a composer!” Then back to Butterworth. “Man, you best get yourself well and get outta that bed so we can play some music, you understand what I’m saying to you? The gig at the Gate is in two weeks and you gotta be ready. Don’t you wanna sit in with us? Billy’s expecting it.”

  Butterworth smiled again, his long yellow teeth already showing death, and then shook his head and said he didn’t think he could comply with the request at this time. And he was right, because as the illness, which the doctors had categorized as terminal, progressed, it began to incapacitate him further until the slightest movement caused him increasing pain.

  Ultimately, as if paint remover had been applied, the illness, which had begun in the throat, stripped the many-layered coat of negrification that had been the source of the inhibitions of Alfred Butterworth and he’d drift in and out between civility and angry, foul language. At first he would be discussing something calmly and suddenly he’d say things like “motherfuckin’ apostles” or “Sure the bitch was sucking Jesus’ dick. Why you think they crucified his ass?” Precipitously, without warning, words tumbled from his mouth as if a large faucet had been turned and turned, and turned some more, allowing a dam to release its captive waters.

  When Vidamía, her extreme curiosity hungering to decipher the mystery of Butterworth’s now aberrant mind, received nothing but psychological mumbo jumbo from her mother in a waste-of-time telephone conversation, she went and looked into the big Spanish—English dictionary at the library across the street from Tompkins Square Park. Hoping somehow to get at the Latin roots of the word “repressed,” she ran across the word represa, which in Spanish means dam. The irony of the bilingual coincidence made Vidamía initially laugh, but then the more she thought about it the angrier she grew, thinking of poor Mr. Butterworth, so quiet in the past, his body becoming skeletal, and yet as bony and skinny as he was becoming, his voice, up to now raspy, now acquiring a different timbre and an almost crystal-like resonance, the words coming out clearly, everything up to that time withheld rushing out of him, indicting everyone and everything that had ever wronged him or in his opinion had hindered his vision.

  Vidamía tried holding Butterworth’s hand, but to her consternation, other than the occasional curse word, the old man simply smiled at her and invariably fell asleep, snoring lightly, his face placid in repose. But when her father came to see him, which he did every day, sitting in the room for hours, something quite different happened. His good friend and the person for whom he felt the same filial devotion he’d had for his father, behaved quite differently when Billy held his hand. The old man would immediately start discoursing, or, as Mae Wilkerson said on one of her visits to the hospital, sermonizing. Once, to ascertain whether her observation was accurate, Vidamía called her father out of the room. As if an electrical circuit had been disconnected, Butterworth turned off in mid-sentence. But as long as Billy held Alfred Butterworth’s hand, the old man discoursed, so that all Vidamía could think about was Wyndell’s tenor saxophone in full flight reciting eloquently chorus after chorus of musical ideas, each one more complex and beautiful than the previous one and everything up-tempo, evoking all his musical heroes. When Butterworth spoke he did so clearly, his voice no longer ravaged by age and the cancerous polyps in
his throat.

  One day he began at two in the afternoon, and at six, when they brought him his evening meal, he was still going—

  What you think you are, you silly-ass mothafucka? You made the heavens and the earth? So mothafuckin’ what! And you’re the Almighty what? Don’t talk shit, okay, man? You understand what I’m saying to you? Do you, you pasty-faced son of a bitch? You sitting up there in mothafuckin’ white Heaven, dictating to niggers how they should be. Suck my dick. Suck my limp, useless mothafuckin’ dick, you faggoty-ass punk mothafucka. You did what?

  And, turning to Billy, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing back, he said, Check this mothafucka out, Solomon.

  Nobody ever figured out who Solomon was, but that’s what Butterworth said when he looked at Billy Farrell holding his hand. Mae Wilkerson said maybe Pop Butterworth was appealing to the wisdom of Solomon, implying, one could imagine, a sort of a biblical legal brief, that is, arguing the case. Did you ever hear such shit? What am I gonna tell him? I got no choice, do I, Solomon? And Billy’d nod his head, as if he was agreeing with Butterworth, the sadness spilling out of his eyes in big, thick silent tears. I gotta tell him, don’t I? And, turning away, he’d start talking at the ceiling, removing another layer of his repressed negritude.

  You fulla shit, you know that? Where in the fuck did you get your ideas, you stupid-ass mothafucka? Yeah, right. Can’t make up your mothafuckin’ mind, can you? You feeling creative one morning after you make the world, so you figure you gonna make people. Outta clay so the shit gotta be coming out their asshole all the time. And you make a man and you wanna call him Ken or some stupid-ass white name like that cause you know your clay man Ken can maybe do stuff and carry your word forth into the mothafuckin’ desert some fuckin’ where. And looking at this puny mothafucka standing all naked and pale as a mothafuckin’ ghost you say: Sheet, his name should be Kent cause he look like he ain’t gonna be able to do diddly-squat. So you’re madder’n a wet hen and pissed off to boot and you say, Agh Damn! And that’s what you name the nigger. Aghdamn.