It was late and I was starving. “I’m buying,” I told Andre. “What do you suggest?”
“You shouldn’t treat,” he said. “You’ve been buying all day.”
“It’s okay. I’ll write it off on my taxes under Educational Expenses.”
“You know, there is a place I want to try.”
“Name it.”
“Bricktop’s. It’s in the ninth.”
He was putting me on. “Oh sure,” I said, laughing. “Maybe we’ll run into Mabel Mercer and her friend Cole Porter. Scott and Zelda, too.” Bricktop, the oh-so-sophisticated cabaret singer, and the club bearing her name were roaring twenties legends, I knew. He had to be putting me on.
“No, no. It’s there. Really.”
I looked at him then, truly worried. “Jesus. You’re really over the edge. I mean, you think we’ve been transported back to 1928, don’t you? I understood that Bricktop’s closed about sixty years ago.”
He grinned mischievously at me. “Yes, you’re right. It did. But there’s a place with the same name now. I’d like to see what it’s like.”
“That’s better,” I said. “I guess we won’t have to get the net for you after all. Are we dressed for it?”
“I think we’re cool. It’s just a place with down-home food and a piano player.”
Back to funky Pigalle. I had crisscrossed most of these streets before, in my scattershot search for Vivian. Well, this time I wasn’t sitting around in the lobbies of grunge hotels, searching for down-and-out bars or the Parisian equivalent to a soup kitchen. I was being escorted around the hallowed grounds of our ancestors, so to speak. The hotel where Bud Powell lived. The cabaret (at least the address where once there had been a cabaret) where one celebrated musician reportedly shot another to death. And, of course, the site of the original Bricktop’s on the rue Fontaine.
I felt a flash of guilt about having taken the day off like this. That would be old Ernestine trying to shame me: Vivian’s suffering! she was reminding me. Vivian’s lost—broke—Vivian’s dying! And here you are, drinking the day away with some man, chasing after some phantom of the glamorous black past.
Yes, ma’am, I answered meekly. I am having too much fun and he is too good-looking. Tomorrow I widen the search for Aunt Viv. I swear.
Cole Porter and Mabel Mercer were definitely not in residence. No ladies in bare-back evening gowns and diamonds. Not a tuxedo in sight. The new Bricktop’s was African-American kitsch. Autographed photos of the namesake lady herself, of Louis Armstrong and Lady Day, Alberta Hunter and you name them. Stuffed piccaninny dolls. Posters for Oscar Micheaux movies. Laminated Bessie Smith records. Items on the menu named after this or that famous personage. The food wasn’t half bad, though. We devoured hot cornbread and smothered chicken and collards while we goofed on the place. The generic old black gentleman at the baby grand played terrific stride.
They were doing a fairly brisk business in the place, too. Mostly older black people occupied the tables, but quite a few younger couples—black, white, black and white—were chowing down as well. Some musician types were drinking and bullshitting with the bartender up front.
A loquacious elderly gentleman we took to be the owner, because of the deference being paid him by what appeared to be the regulars, was holding court at a large round table near the back. The drinks were flowing back there and spirits were high. One woman at his table we recognized as an up-and-coming diva from the States—you know, in one meteoric arc she goes from the church choir in Stomach Ache, Mississippi, to rave reviews at the Met. When Andre kept glancing over there, I assumed it was Miss Thing that he was staring at.
But no, he said, he was looking at the old man. There was something about him—something vaguely familiar—that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“He was probably Eubie Blake’s butler or something—somebody only you would know,” I said mockingly.
He blushed. At least he had enough perspective to be embarrassed.
I called for the check.
What a day it had been. We began the long walk back to the 5th, still talking, confiding in each other the way you do in the early stages of a friendship. Occasionally I’d point out a café or a restaurant or a street corner where I’d dined with friends, met a lover, made a discovery of one sort or another.
Back at last at the hotel, we were reluctant to say good night. I invited Andre up for a glass of the brandy I’d been smart enough to purchase and lay away in the armoire.
We set our chairs in front of the open window and went on talking. It wasn’t long before a weird kind of chill went up my back. I knew it wasn’t from the night air. It was a bizarre sensation and I managed to push it away quickly enough, but I had become somewhat distracted.
“I think I got it!” Andre exclaimed, seemingly out of the blue.
It was as if his voice were coming at me from the bottom of a well. “What? What did you say?”
I had been staring, transfixed, over at the top of the bureau.
“You know that old man—the one who owns Bricktop’s?”
“Yeah. What about him?”
“Didn’t someone call him Mr. Melson—or Melons?”
“I may have heard somebody call him something like that. Why?”
“I think I know who he is.”
“Who?”
“Morris Melon. That’s it. He was a teacher. Anthropology, wasn’t it? Or sociology. Yes, right. He wrote a book—one of those pioneering studies about the black community in Chicago. Or am I thinking of Black Metropolis? It was something like that, anyway. Damn, what was the name of that book? Or was it the study of the Gullah Islands? I should interview him sometime. Find out his story.”
He went on chattering. I was only half listening. I got up and began to walk around the room slowly, a sense of fear rising steadily inside me.
Andre had pulled himself out of his compulsive trip down memory lane. “What’s the matter, Nan? What are you doing?”
I began to open the bureau drawers then, checking, I’m not sure what for. I looked inside my sax case and all seemed well there. I could find nothing missing. But I knew that someone had been looking through my things. I just knew it: earrings placed at the right-hand corner of the bureau instead of the left; a tube of hand lotion set on its side rather than on end; pantyhose rolled up with the toes outside rather than in. But things disturbed so minutely that it was possible I was imagining the changes. I told Andre what I was thinking. Moreover, I said, I think it might have something to do with my aunt.
“What do you mean? It was probably just the maid.”
I shook my head. “No. No, something’s…”
“What? What were you going to say?”
“Something’s happening.”
“Like what? What’s happening?”
I had to shrug my shoulders. I had no idea what I meant.
He smiled at me and got me settled down again, almost convinced me that it was my imagination. I sat back at the window with him and finished my drink, but that weird feeling never went completely away.
“I’d better go,” Andre said a while later, his voice low. “You need to get to bed.”
I nodded. “So do you, friend.”
He nodded, too.
A darkness moved across his face then. I didn’t understand it. We stood for a minute in the doorway, saying a final good night, and then he left.
Seconds later, there was a knock at the door. He had come back.
“Forget something?” I asked.
“No. Look—uh…”
I waited in silence. The darkening in his face was full-blown midnight by now. Something was very wrong.
He dropped the bomb then:
“You think I’m a fag, don’t you?”
“Of course not.” Oh yes, I did.
I hadn’t known it before, but of course I did. What else could it mean for a handsome young man to be staying chez “one of my profs.”
“I’m not,” he said,
threatening. He reached for my wrist but at the last moment pulled back. “I’m not gay.”
I caught my breath. I didn’t speak. He was looking at me so intently that I lowered my gaze from his.
“I’ll come over to have breakfast with you tomorrow—if that’s okay,” he said finally. “We have to do something about your aunt.”
We have to do something?
I nodded. “See you in the morning.”
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t a closet case. But surely there was more to his life story than brilliantly gifted mixed-race kid fights his way out of the ghetto and becomes the toast of Gay Paree. It wasn’t that I suspected what he had told me was untrue; there simply had to be some juicy bits that he’d left out.
We.
When he was gone I locked the door and placed my grip in front of it.
Buy Coq au Vin Now!
About the Author
Charlotte Carter is the author of crime novels including the Nanette Hayes Mysteries—Rhode Island Red, Coq au Vin, and Drumsticks—featuring a saxophone-playing street musician and crime solver. Though Nanette is from a solidly middle-class black family, her salty language, boho ways, and irreverent humor undercut her bourgeois upbringing—and often land her in the middle of a murder case. The books have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch.
A recipient of the Chester Himes Black Mystery Award, Carter has worked as an editor and teacher. A longtime resident of downtown New York City, she has also lived in France and North Africa, where she took writing workshops with Paul Bowles.
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All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author᾿s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1977 by Charlotte Carter
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9182-7
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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