As Lie Is to Grin

by Simeon Marsalis

  “Stolen,” she kept repeating, “stolen.” I looked down at the black circles that surrounded the obelisk from Heliopolis, Egypt, that was behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I told her I had wanted to go to a downtown museum, she said that the only art worth the admission was Egyptian. At first, I found this connection to my mother and her interests as some sign to leave Melody, but as we walked through the jewelry of Sithathoryunet (ca. 19th Century b.c.e.) and the Temple of Dendur (1st Century b.c.e.) she kept repeating “stolen,” loudly enough to disturb other patrons, as if she were a part of the exhibit, I knew that she and my mother did not share the same understanding of history. As I began telling Melody about the discrepancy between the naming of Cleopatra’s Needle and the history of Ramses II, she became annoyed. “They had no right to name it in the first place.”

  “Who is they?”

  “The English.”

  “Maybe we should go to a different exhibit, then.”

  “Wasn’t that enough?”

  “Let’s expand.”

  “Oh, expansion, that’s nice—”

  “The American section?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Just for a second.” She made her eyes narrow, suspecting that I knew about her father’s painting, but could not object without admitting to its existence. We walked up the museum steps, past the packs of bumbling tourists, toward the second floor. A security guard started to say something in our general direction, so I pulled out of my pocket the small pin that proved I had paid the suggested donation. Once above the grand staircase, we turned left and right, searching for the hallway devoted to our national artwork—past the eighteenth-century canvases, the fifth-century Byzantine stained glass, and many other marvels of the Christian world I did not fully register, because my eyes were focused on Melody’s back. The yellow bag bobbed away, rubbing against her washed blue jeans, and the gray jacket hung around her waist. She glided in front of a painting entitled Prescience, and put her hair in a bun. A European man tried to stop his young daughter and son from fighting while a woman rolled her mother through the exhibit in a wheelchair. The older woman stared, eyes filled with nostalgia, as the younger one checked something on her cell phone. As we walked by The City’s Forgotten by Richard Gilbert, she hurried to point out the next canvas, a painting called Black Iris.

  I was captivated by the strokes at the top of the canvas. It was neither colorful nor big. White petals, on top of black petals—it was pink inside, with red lips.

  “See something you like?”

  “It’s intense,” I said.

  “O’Keeffe.”

  “It has a certain depth—”

  “It’s just a pussy.” She laughed. “You’ll probably like this one too, then.”

  The white pearl balanced on a curve that started at the top right of the canvas and stopped at the bottom left. The pearl pulsated. Its gray rings rippled across the blackness. I began to sense what would come next. It would be raining on that late afternoon; drizzle would spot us as we got out of a cab that she would pay for, the droplets reminding me of the painting Black Abstraction by Georgia O’Keeffe. Her father would not be home, again. She would lie on the bed, perpendicular to its length, and I would put the condom on the wrong way twice, before the tip filled with air. I found it beautiful. As she spread her legs, I shut everything out—how I got here, whether my desire for Melody was true—and focused on the physical act. It was dramatic and quick; she sat against the wall, and I laid my head in her lap. I began to hum. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Humming, Melody.” We laughed together. We tried again, I licked again, and the short sounds she emitted made me aroused again. I balanced between sleep and wakefulness, on the other side of my virginity, until dawn crept through the single window in Melody’s room. And in the morning, she awoke slowly. Her hair was pressed against my shoulder. She began to tell me a story. “My mother grew up in Sonora, Mexico, and was discovered at fifteen.” There was a picture of Magdalena from Vogue on Melody’s dresser. “She passed away because her heart was too big. They did cocaine, Rick and she. Her heart was too big.” I tried to affect surprise, though I’d read on the Internet of her mother’s untimely death. In the end, Melody’s eyes were sad, and I tried to console her.

  Chapter 4

  I had to cross Route 114 to get to my house from school. There were two blind curves—Doris always said, “Look both ways twice before you pass.” I looked twice both ways, and a red pickup truck did not slow down at the curve. Two more cars had passed before I made it to Hempstead Street. I turned onto Richards Drive. The sky was so gray it seemed to be one sheet of cloud. Three crows had perched on the highest wire of the telephone pole that bisected Doris’s house. They did not call. I walked to the door and slid the key inside. I went to the refrigerator, made a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and thought about turning the TV on, but I did not want to wake my aunt. I put the dishes in the sink, then tiptoed to my bedroom. I went to the window and looked at the crows, which turned from time to time to stare at me. Even they were silent for Doris.

  Now I lay me down to sleep.

  I pray the Lord, my soul to keep.

  She was not home. I picked the lock with a butter knife and entered her room. The teal bedspread could have been from any decade after 1950. There were tan and white stripes on the wallpaper. Everything in the room was neat except the paintings she had hung. They were turned upside down seemingly at random. There were the idols: Sophia, Erzuli, and Isis. All three of them had been painted by the same artist. The room had three closets, one to the right of the door, which held her jackets and robes, another to the left, next to the television, which was stuffed with papers and boxes. In the third closet was an armoire that had been crafted into a bookshelf. It held books in languages I could not comprehend. There were two volumes called The Book of the Dead, one from Tibet and one from Egypt, that came with translations.

  Once I asked Doris, “Who else speaks Hieroglyph?”

  “People don’t speak Hieroglyph. They wrote in hieroglyphs.”

  “What do they speak? Hieroglyphan?”

  “No. The language that goes with the words doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “That’s confusing, Aunt Doris.”

  “I know it is.”

  “Why do you read it if no one speaks it?”

  “Because there are important things you can only understand in their original forms, even if no one speaks the language anymore—but you have to be careful. Some of these books are powerful, and if you read them too young, they will destroy your brain forever.”

  “That isn’t possible, Aunty.”

  She stepped back—“Yes, it is”—and looked at my face for confirmation.

  “Behold Osiris!

  Ani the scribe—who recordeth the holy offerings of all the gods—who saith,

  homage to thee who hast come as Khepera.”

  One night I awakened to the sound of a truck’s motor. Doris was out front, speaking to the florist. He wore a camouflage baseball cap and was smiling, as she motioned for him to enter the driveway. The truck bed was filled with sodden earth. Doris opened the garage. Together, they began shoveling the dirt inside.

  When he left and she came up to her room, she shouted, “Where are my books?”

  “What—”

  “Don’t play with me.”

  I went to get the books from underneath my bed, but they had disappeared.

  “Now apologize for lying.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “What did I tell you?”

  “I can’t understand them.”

  “Good, stop being so curious about things you are too young for.” I nodded and turned to leave. “Put on a clean shirt, we have people coming over.”

  “Why do I always have to do what you want me to do?”

  “Go to your r
oom and change your T-shirt.” I looked into her eyes. “Are you hard of hearing?” I stood still. “Listen, little nigger, I’m not arguing with you now, go change!” I went to my room. Since there was no lock on the door, I pushed my dresser in front of it. At 7:45, she came to get me. First, she knocked, then used force. I pressed my weight against the dresser. She kept managing to crack the door open, whispering threats into the wood. The doorbell tolled. She whispered, “I’ll let you look at the books, just come out tonight.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she hissed. I opened the bedroom door. She motioned downstairs, toward the knock at the front, and reminded me to “say it right this time,” her voice still in a whisper. I walked down the hallway, turned the locks, and said, “Welcome, Doris will be with you in a moment, she just saw a vision of the new millennium.”

  “And who are you?”

  I responded, “Her nephew,” then moved aside as the two white strangers stepped over the threshold, into the house.

  We all sat in different places around the living room. Doris said, “My nephew is here to help you deal with your shame.” I nodded at them.

  The husband said, “I don’t know.”

  Doris responded, “We should begin there. Why did you hesitate?”

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  “Good,” she said. “Let us start with not knowing. A particular type of depression.” The couple looked at each other, confused. Doris let the tension rise. Finally, she said, “Depression, the kind that can get you prescribed light dosages of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, is a code word for American guilt.”

  To which the wife said, “How did you know I was on antidepressants?”

  Doris smiled and went to the closet to get two blankets. “We know these things.” She motioned for both of her patients to lie down. They closed their eyes.

  “You are sitting in your bedroom, holding hands, looking out to sea. You hear the wind from outside, and all of your concerns are so far away. Imagine yourself on the roof of your house, still looking out to the beach. You can smell the sea now.” She waved to me, as the strangers had their eyes closed, so I would sit across from her and caress the bottoms of their feet. “Now you are focusing because we have to build this journey together. You are in a boat, just the two of you. It is small, and the sea is vast. You look down to the right. Karen, what do you see?”

  And if I die before I wake?

  I pray the Lord, my soul to take.

  I am seated in front of a building with ten identical Grecian pillars. I cannot remember what it is that I am thinking about. There is a piercing cry to my right and I begin to sprint in the other direction. My feet stop, I blink, and all around me is blackness. A force pushes me back, sends me sliding toward the bottom of a curve until the tip of a giant talon punctures my sternum. As the life fades from my eyes, I look toward the horizon, which is opening to reveal a golden orb. All around, I feel a rumbling, and from the waters, the outlines of two cones rise like glaciers. I woke up to the reality that I was screaming. Doris had to push through the bookshelf I had put in front of the door again. The patients had left at some point in the night. It was the first time that she had given them flowers.

  October 10, 2009

  Melody opened the door for me with bright red lipstick on. She said she was having a party for her friends from school. We drank some whiskey together and went to the back room. People started to arrive. I grazed around in circles, popping in and out of different cycles of conversation, thinking back to the dream I had that was woven into Chapter Four. Melody’s father’s kitchen was tiled with white squares; the mortar was black. Beneath the cabinets, there was a fresco of a green man tumbling over himself again and again. Kids trickled out of the powder room, and I paced around the TV with the ones smoking joints and playing video games. “Kick in the Door” by Biggie Smalls was playing. Girls swayed in groups of three; boys huddled in circles. The white bodies moved in concentric shapes, avoiding the same word in all of their favorite songs. Then I was in Melody’s room, smoking with others. Her friend Grace asked, “So how did you two meet?”

  “I was going to visit my father’s friend in the Hamptons . . .” And so for the first time I saw myself as part of her life. I had never considered what she had thought of me, if she had at all, in the time between August 2007, when we met at the carnival, and May 2009, when I brought the letter to her school. I had planned what she had seen as providence, yet had not considered what narrative she was writing about me, and did not want to. I excused myself from her room, found myself drinking in front of the mirror in the bathroom, and stayed for a while before returning to the party.

  It was early. Then it was late. Melody kept staring at me from across the room, as if upset. I went to the bathroom for longer intervals of time, avoiding her closest friends. The classmates trickled out. I went to her room and we began to hold each other. She kissed me with a cloud of smoke in her mouth. The little white fan was on by the window. The room smelled like marijuana and tobacco when we lay down together.

  “Did I embarrass you?”

  “Embarrass?”

  “With the story about how we met.”

  “No.”

  “Just no?”

  “What else is there to say?” She shifted under the covers, turning to look at me. “Who are you?”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Where were you born?”

  “St. Luke’s Roosevelt, four blocks from here.”

  “Parents? We have to talk through this at some point.”

  I inched closer, and she rubbed my chin off her shoulder. “I’ve never met my father. It doesn’t make me angry or anything . . .”

  “What does your mom say about him?”

  “Not much.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “She’s black.”

  “I figured that, but what is her face like?”

  “Pointy, doughy in the cheeks. Her eyes are brown.”

  “Does she have freckles like me?”

  I kissed her near the nose, attempting to calm my nerves. “I guess she does.”

  We kissed each other on the mouth, and I tried to slide my tongue between her lips. She spat it out.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Doris.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “She is an addict.”

  “So is Rick.”

  I tried to sound more convincing. “You don’t understand. Sometimes I don’t see her for days at a time.”

  “What does the doctor say?”

  “I would prefer not to talk about it.”

  “Oh.” Melody was silent for a while. “You aren’t at health risk or anything?” I pointed at myself, and pretended to be offended by her insinuation. “I’m sorry.” She picked up my right shoulder, nuzzled into my neck, and kissed the place where my throat met my collarbone; I descended to her chest.

  “Stop.”

  “Why?” She opened her eyes. “Are my questions turning you on?”

  “It’s just spontaneity,” I said and then inched closer; she pulled away. Though I was compelled to tell her the truth, Melody seemed to enjoy my anonymity, and even now, as she questioned me, she may have hoped for my life to remain a mystery. Though I had executed my plan to gain Melody’s trust, I had not seen a future with her—I still could not see one. She inched closer.

  “Will you meet my father?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t want to meet him?”

  “If you want me to, I will.”

  “He gets back in two weeks.” She opened her mouth and then closed it, looked down at her hands.

  october 11, 2009

  I was staring up at
the neo-Gothic cathedral on St. Nicholas Terrace where my mother said she attended college in 1980 and 1989. I descended across St. Nicholas Park at 135th Street, weaving through the people coming from the mouth of the subway. I walked up Edgecombe Avenue to 137th Street and turned east, where I crossed two men walking south on Frederick Douglass, and continued toward Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. I looked to my right and studied the apartment buildings with tiled walkways, brownstones with Romanesque windows. I looked at the façades, which were built neither like the old brownstones nor the new apartment buildings. Across the street, the houses were nearly identical, but the bricks ranged in color from maroon to orange instead of tan. They extended down the entire avenue, on both sides, in the same fashion. I approached a gate just like the others, with spiraling metalwork, and thought the designs were adinkra symbols, whose cultural origin was Akan.