As Lie Is to Grin

by Simeon Marsalis

  “I didn’t ask you for help.”

  “But those who need it the most often don’t ask. Listen, listen, listen. I don’t want to argue with you, I do that enough with my daughter. Do you want to stay here tonight?”

  “No.”

  We left the basement entrance, and the red headphones hung around his white jacket. Rick stood out against the night. I watched him, the way his body swayed to catch his weight, the predetermined strut, practiced and meditated upon.

  For the duration of our train ride—catching glimpses of him checking for my eyes in the window across from us—I felt as though Rick had been waiting for me to appear in his life. He stared at me not as a human, but as a symbol for a larger group of people who were suffering. It was offensive, yet still, I tapped his shoulder near Thirty-fourth Street; he removed his headphones, and I made sure to express my gratitude for the safe house. I stayed on the express train to 125th Street after he got off at Columbus Circle, walked up the stairs, then descended to the downtown platform.

  november 15, 2009

  An iPhone sat on the counter charging in the safe house. It was wiped clean and had no password. I was sure Rick had left it for me, knowing I would not have accepted it if he had offered. I turned off the frying pan and put the eggs on a plate next to strips of bacon. The Law & Order television marathon would run until late in the afternoon. My notebook was sitting in the corner of the living room. The scenes I had written since I stopped going to the libraries in Harlem were stale. I had not been to class in two weeks and had lost control of the narrative. Though I could see how the story would end, I did not want to write the final scene because, when it was finished, I would be left to write the small, ugly details in the middle chapters. I wanted to put the energy wasted on fiction back into my life, so I thought of ways to make the safe house more my own. The Internet told me there was a flea market just four stops away, so I put on my coat, gloves, and hat, before heading to the subway at Clinton-Washington. I looked at the Fort Greene brownstones on my way to the train, distinct from those in West Harlem, and saw again the symbol that resembled a cursive heart in the design of the gates. I typed “adinkra,” “Akan,” “symbols” into the cellular phone, and clicked on the “Images” tab. There I found a page with aphorisms represented by symbols. I recognized the one I had seen as “sankofa,” and the phone said the symbol originated in the Twi language. It meant to bring what is good from the past into the present. I looked up at St. James and Atlantic and did not recognize the neighborhood, so I went to the phone’s map application and found my way back to the train.

  The flea market block was quiet. There was a coffee shop with a squeaky door, a children’s apparel store, and a soul food restaurant. Some young men roamed in groups of three or four—women pushed shopping carts, and white men tried hard not to look into my eyes. I didn’t like standing long at lights, because the block made me feel uneasy. This uneasiness made me think of Melody, so I tried to remember what I had liked about her after our first date to calm my mind. I began repeating, “curiosity, openness, honesty,” things I did respect, in a way, but did not entirely practice. I looked to my right. The flea market seemed to be closed. A man came out and pulled on the gate, a brown newsboy cap sitting low on his head. I crossed the street so as to avoid the men in the neighborhood, and noticed two cops standing on the corner, so I stopped, crossed back, and raised the police’s suspicions. I tried not to turn to face them, but I did, twice. They were walking in my direction. I gathered speed, passing the train station at Utica that I had exited; they did as well. We crossed St. Johns Park then Park Place before they were right beside me, and as my breath became short they passed me by without saying a word. I was not sure how far I had walked. The street names—Malcolm X then Park Place—were the same as in Manhattan. I pulled up the map on my phone again, and found myself on Eastern Parkway, looking up to see a man selling incense, and a line of young oak trees. I sent Melody a message—

  Me: I miss you. 4:12 p.m.

  It was not true. Her impending return cast a spell over me: doom. I looked up from the phone to see the green banisters of the 2 train. I transferred to the 1 train at Chambers Street, and took it to Houston. I arrived at the writers’ workshop without the ten thousand words Jim had asked us to prepare for class.

  Melody: I miss you too. 5:16 p.m.

  november 20, 2009

  Melody asked me over when she got back from her trip. It lasted three days longer than she had expected. I wanted to talk to her about the safe house, but somehow I knew she knew, and she knew I knew, we were not supposed to talk about it. Melody had put sheets on the floor in the living room, and put whiskey and popcorn on top of the sheets. It was an indoor picnic, she said. I began to drink.

  “So what’s it like in Harlem?” she asked. I spoke about St. Nicholas and the Countee Cullen library but avoided mentioning Jean Toomer, afraid I would become too passionate about his decision not to identify as a Negro, and offend her. It seemed as if Melody was expecting me to say more. “Do you have friends?” I told her that Meat lived in the building, and as I was conceiving more lies, the doorbell rang. I jumped. I ate too much food. She wanted to talk and drink more. We took our clothes off dutifully and lay in bed. I was overcome with the feeling that we should not know each other at all.

  november 21, 2009

  I woke upset. It was drizzling. Melody wanted to take a walk, so she gave me one of Rick’s raincoats and we left the apartment. There wasn’t much talking. Outside, Christopher Columbus was hunched over atop his statue on Fifty-ninth Street. To his right was a monument built for the battleship Maine, an American boat that blew up in the harbor of Havana in 1898. The statue featured Columbia, American goddess of liberty. I remembered the last two lines of a Phyllis Wheatley poem that my mother had made me memorize as a child. “Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales / for in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.” The statue seemed to have nothing to do with the battleship it was commemorating. We walked north and stopped at a small brown bench near Seventy-ninth Street to share a cigarette. I saw Melody in pieces. Her expensive jacket, her brooding silence, her hungover eyes, the way she inhaled the smoke all seemed ridiculous, so I looked away. Tourists crowded around hot dog carts next to the Museum of Natural History just two blocks north. Human life felt alien to me.

  “This is certainly the end,” I thought to myself, though I did not want it to be. I held Melody’s hand tight, as if that could bring us closer. Our green and yellow raincoats stood out against the stone wall Vaux and Olmsted had designed to encircle Central Park. I looked back and could see what this island had been before—trees and hills. The entrance to Seneca Village had been six blocks farther north. It had been named after a Native American tribe or a Roman poet or a corruption of “Senegal.” No landmark exists; now it is an area for recreation.

  The rain began to pick up. Melody grabbed my hand and we walked to the front of the museum, where she pointed at a statue. Theodore Roosevelt sat on an unnamed horse, next to an unnamed black man in shackles and an unnamed Native American in tribal dress. They were cast in solid bronze, facing the park. She could see that I didn’t like the statue, and of course she didn’t like it either, but she seemed to like staring at it, in a way I found base.

  “At least it tells the truth,” she said. I felt hate for her and the instincts she gave words to, as if these words were profound. “What are you thinking about?” Although his father’s passing for white had left Rick emotionally crippled, it seemed on the surface to have had no lasting effect on Melody.

  “Do you know anything about Native American history, slavery?”

  “I have learned about slavery, David.”

  “I’m not asking if you were assigned Howard Zinn; I’m asking if you feel part of it.”

  “That is what you were thinking about?”

  “I just want to know why you find this statue
entertaining.”

  “I don’t find it entertaining. It’s just here.” Her words diminishing history, human suffering. “Why are you looking at me like that?” I thought about who I was, who I was becoming. “At least they aren’t buried.”

  “Have you ever tried to say the word nigger before?”

  She frowned at me. “Why are you so angry?”

  “Say it.”

  She pulled the hood of her coat back on and went downtown.

  Me: I’m sorry. It’s an ugly statue. 8:05 p.m.

  Melody: Come get drunk, stupid. 8:22 p.m.

  Melody and I finished the fifth of whiskey Rick had stored in the freezer. She left Law & Order on the TV in her living room, and as we continued past our fifth shots, we pretended to be officers Tutuola and Benson. I watched her breasts bounce, milk white in the wintertime, carefree and childish, in a way that made me uncomfortable. She stopped playacting and said, “I knew you would behave differently. I should have never told you about my grandfather.”

  “I am the same as always.” Her frown turned into a smile, and what I had seen in her before, awareness and intelligence, had been her self-conscious prodding, searching for approval from me that she did not find in herself. She whispered: “Can I show you something?” I nodded my head. She grabbed my forearm and pulled me into Rick’s bedroom. It was a mess of clothing, and the TV hadn’t been turned off after he left. A desk and easel were set up in the corner, like in her room, though his easel was covered in paint and his desk had small ideas collected on it in figures made of copper wire and nails. She excused her father’s room. “It’s messy, I know.” We stopped by the bedside table, and for a moment I was sure she would pull out some drug that she had found, but at the bottom of this red drawer there was a black box. “You can’t judge me. It’s just . . . well, Rick showed it to me, and I feel like there is this dirty secret I have to share with someone.”

  The picture inside was a college scene; there was a frat house with Ionic columns, the number 282 above the doorway. It was sunny out, and there were seven white men crowded around a trophy. Two of them were holding it up. The other five, posed in various ways, slightly behind the first two, were arranged in a semicircle. You could just make out the date, 1954, on the bottom of the trophy.

  “My grandfather is second on the left. The best man at his wedding is holding the trophy on the right side. I have never shown anyone this. I’m sure you can guess why.” Richard Sr. was looking at the camera; he was wearing a red cap and a football jersey. Although he was not scowling, compared with the jovial nature of the rest of the scene he appeared to be upset. The two men in the middle, both in long white stockings with bow ties on, had used burnt cork to coat their faces black. “It was a ceremony that happened every year. It was called the Kake Walk. Thousands of people came from all over Vermont for one weekend, just to see this. They had skits, and singing, and parades. It was like prom but it was in February. He was a runner-up for the Kake Walk King that year. A good-looking man in a horrible kind of way.”

  Melody looked into my eyes for a reaction. I forced myself to grin, which she liked, puckering her lips as she backed away from me to the mass of clothes on Rick’s bed. Her legs opened a fraction. I still had the photograph in my hand. I placed it back in the box, being gentle, and got into the bed. I lay behind her and put my penis between her legs, staring at the mullions in the window with my eyes squinted so that I could just make out a cross at the center. The light from the TV reflected on the side of her face in blue flashes that lasted four or five seconds at a time. Her feet were in my hands. I lifted my head and came inside her without wearing a condom. We lay naked after we had finished.

  I wake up. All of the furniture in my room is next to the bed. The bookshelf, desk, and dresser are all draped in Melody’s clothes. Everything is covered in orange goo. I wipe the crust from my eyes and begin to walk down the hallway toward the bathroom. The walls are light blue. A door opens. I enter. On the sink, outlined in seashells, there lies a toothbrush, a comb, and a tin of shoeshine. In the mirror, I see the back of the bathroom door. A red cape hangs with the words “Mister Interlocutor” on it. I wash the shoeshine into the sink, picking up the cloak. There is a calendar on the wall where it had hung. Melody had left me in her father’s room. I covered myself and walked along the hallway to her room. As I stood in the doorway and watched her rest peacefully, I understood again that this life I was living with her was wrong. I walked to the backpack, removed the notebook, slipped into the bathroom, and began to write over the sink.

  november 22, 2009

  I jumped from my sleep. Melody was smoking a cigarette out the window. It was 11:00 a.m. I could not separate my dream from the events that had transpired the previous night. To give the occurrences more definition in my mind, I picked up the phone by my pants and searched for “Kake Walk Vermont.” I then watched a video of two young white men in blackface parading around a gym. I typed in “Harlem Renaissance, blackface, Kake Walk.”

  “When am I going to meet your mother?” She had put the cigarette out and was standing in the bathroom. Her nipples were raised because she turned off the heat at night before she went to sleep. The question seemed to come from nowhere, but as I looked into the mirror at her back, I could see my notebook sitting on the sink next to the toothpaste.

  “I didn’t say you could read that.”

  “When am I going to meet your mother?”

  “You can’t.”

  “What do you mean I can’t?”

  “I mean you can’t.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Harlem.”

  “Where?”

  “At 362 West 127th Street.”

  “Does she know about me?”

  “In her own way.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she wouldn’t approve of our relationship. I don’t like to talk about it.” I spoke precisely in order to move past the conversation. “Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Why are you changing the subject?”

  “What subject?”

  “Your mother. She doesn’t know about me?”

  “This is what you want to pick a fight about?”

  “I’m not picking a fight. I just want to know why I can’t meet your mother.”

  “I’m sure you will eventually.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “She is relapsing again.”

  Melody’s expression changed.

  I went to the bathroom door and saw myself in the mirror. My jaw was clenched and my fists were balled. I unfurled them and went to hug Melody.

  “I know it’s hard to understand.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” I rested my chin on her shoulder and tightened my right arm before grabbing the notebook with my left and slipping it behind my back.

  Final Chapter

  You walked to the gate and pressed the bell next to the red door of the safe house before knocking. Nothing. You grabbed the brick and looked for the key, but it was not there. You banged on the door again. A rumbling. I saw your eyes through the curtains in the front window. “I figured you would just show up at some point.” You kept your hair in a bun. It made you look narrow. I opened the door.

  There were papers all over the living room, and a sandwich from last week sat on the chair beneath the desk. I invited you into the kitchen for a pot of tea. We sat at the teal table with wicker chairs, just below a poster of your father’s work The City’s Forgotten, which I had bought from the visitors’ center in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Next to this poster was a group of stick figures that resembled crows. Each of them was scratched into the wall with a knife. You shifted in your seat. Just beneath your shorts, I could see the black marks of a tattoo. I wrote something
on the piece of paper in front of me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve been writing as the mood hits me.” You turned your head sideways, but said nothing else, so I started to write again, pressing the pen harder into the sheet of paper.

  “My father doesn’t want you in here anymore.”

  “OK.” It was not how I thought our first conversation after so many months apart would go. You stood up from the table and went to the refrigerator for water. There were crumbs and three sets of silverware (spoon knife, spoon knife, fork knife) on the table next to keys on a copper ring. The ring was attached to a pendant in the shape of the old World Trade Center.

  “Rick told me you were living here, but how could I believe that?”

  “I haven’t been living here the whole time.”

  “Stop lying, David.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  “It’s like you were fucking me for this apartment.” You came back to the table and sat down. I saw the yellow in your gray irises, wrote it down, and as I diverted my attention you slapped the table, raised your fingers to my face. “He spoke to your mother, did you know that? Doris Wesley.” You cut your head sideways and looked at me with those demeaning eyes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I want you to seek help. I don’t want you in my life in any way.”

  “Just stop and think.”

  “I don’t need to—”

  “Forgive me and I can leave—”

  “You will leave either way.”

  “Just shut your mouth. Stop talking and forgive.”

  You backed up. “You still just don’t get it. The thought of you coming near me, the thought of us laughing togethe—” KNIFE WAS DRIVEN DOWN, fracturing and splintering the wood, down and down and down, into the table in the same place. Beige, brown, and copper flakes flew in patterns. You shook, and shadows came into the house from the backyard.

  “Out.”

  “I have things here.”

  “Out!”