by Zadie Smith
Levi glossed over this accusation of stoicism: ‘Eyeano. It’s all right, man. I’m out a lot. You know.’
‘The stupid thing is,’ continued Jerome, fiddling with a ring on his pinkie finger, ‘Kiki still loves him. It’s so obvious. I just don’t get that – how you can love someone who says no to the world like that – I mean, so consistently? It’s only when I’m away from home and I’m talking to non-family people that I can see how psychotic he is. The only music in the house now is, like, Japanese electro. Soon we’ll just have to tap on pieces of wood. This is a guy who wooed his wife by singing half of The Magic Flute outside her apartment. Now he won’t even let her have a painting she likes in the house. Because of some deranged theory in his head, everybody else has to suffer. It’s such a denial of joy – I don’t even know how you can stand living there.’
Through a straw, Levi blew bubbles in his Americano. He swivelled on his stool and, for the third time in fifteen minutes, checked the clock on the back wall.
‘Like I say, I’m out a lot. I don’t see how it goes down.’
‘What I’ve really realized is Howard has a problem with gratitude,’ pressed Jerome, more to himself than to his brother. ‘It’s like he knows he’s blessed, but he doesn’t know where to put his gratitude because that makes him uncomfortable, because that would be dealing in transcendence – and we all know how he hates to do that. So by denying there are any gifts in the world, any essentially valuable things – that’s how he shortcircuits the gratitude question. If there are no gifts, then he doesn’t have to think about a God who might have given them. But that’s where joy is. I’m on my knees to God every day. And it’s amazing, Lee,’ he asserted, turning on his stool to look at Levi’s impassive profile, ‘it really is.’
‘Cool,’ said Levi, with total equanimity, God being as welcome within the borders of Levi’s conversation as any other subject. ‘Everybody got they own way of getting through the day,’ he added truthfully and commenced picking the blueberries out of his second blueberry muffin.
‘Why do you do that?’ asked Zora, reclaiming her seat between her brothers.
‘I like blueberry flavour,’ explained Levi, betraying a slight impatience; ‘I’m just not that into blueberries.’
Now Zora swivelled in her seat so that her back was to her younger brother and she might speak more privately with the elder. ‘S’funny you mention that concert . . . So you remember that guy?’ said Zora, tapping her fingers on the glass in a vague way meant to suggest that what she was about to say had only just occurred to her. ‘The concert guy – who thought I stole his thing – remember?’
‘Sure,’ said Jerome.
‘So he’s in my class now. Claire’s class.’
‘Claire’s class? The guy from the park?’
‘He’s an amazing lyricist – as it turns out. We heard him at the Bus Stop – all of the class, we went to see him, and then Claire invited him to sit in. He’s been to two sessions.’
Jerome looked into his coffee mug. ‘Claire’s waifs and strays . . . she should try taking care of her own life.’
‘And so, yeah, so it turns out that he’s pretty amazing,’ said Zora, talking over Jerome, ‘and I think you’d be really interested in his stuff, you know . . . narrative poetry . . . I was saying to him, you should probably . . . because he’s so talented, you know, you could, like, invite him round or –’
‘He ain’t all that,’ interjected Levi.
Zora spun round. ‘You need to deal with your envy?’ She turned back to Jerome and filled him in: ‘Levi and – who were those guys? – like, some guys he just met in the harbour, right off the boat – anyway, they got destroyed by Carl at the Bus Stop. De-stroyed. Poor baby. He’s smarting.’
‘That ain’t got nothing to do with it,’ said Levi very calmly, without raising his voice. ‘I’m just saying he’s all right, ’cos that’s all he is.’
‘Right. Whatever.’
‘He’s just the kind of rapper white folk get excited about.’
‘Oh, shut up. That’s so pathetic.’
Levi shrugged. ‘It’s true. He don’t do no wilding out, he got no crunk, no hyphy, no East Coast vibe to test what be happening on the West Coast,’ he said, thus happily rendering himself incomprehensible both to his siblings and 99.9 per cent of the world’s population. ‘That’s my boys, they got the suffering people behind them – that dude just got a dictionary, man.’
‘Sorry –’ began Jerome, shaking his head to clear it. ‘Why would I want to invite this guy – Carl – round?’
Zora looked startled. ‘No reason. I just . . . you’re back in town. I thought it might be good for you to make a few friends and maybe – ’
‘I can make my own friends, thanks.’
‘OK, fine.’
‘Good.’
‘Fine.’
Zora’s silent sulks were always oppressive, and as belligerent as if she were screaming at you from the top of her lungs. They ended only with your apology or with Zora’s delivery of something a little poisonous, wrapped up in pretty paper.
‘Anyway, a good thing is . . . well, that Mom’s been getting out a lot more,’ she said, taking a spoonful of froth from off the top of her Mocha. ‘It’s been liberating for her, in that way, I think. She sees people and stuff.’
‘That’s good – I hoped she would.’
‘Yeah . . .’ Zora slurped the cream into her mouth. ‘She’s seeing a lot of Carlene Kipps. If you can believe that.’ Thus was the present delivered.
Jerome brought his coffee up to his lips and took a leisurely sip before replying. ‘I know. She told me.’
‘Oh, she did. Yeah . . . Looks like they’ve totally come to roost. I mean, the Kippses. Except the son – but he’s coming over to get married here, apparently. And Monty’s lectures begin after Christmas.’
‘Michael?’ said Jerome, with what appeared to be genuine fondness. ‘No way. Who’s he marrying?’
Zora shook her head impatiently. This was not her main business. ‘I don’t know. Some Christian.’
Jerome brought his cup back down to the table, hard and quick. Zora checked for, and found, that worrying accessory that used to come and go with Jerome, but now seemed to be here to stay: a little gold cross around his neck.
‘Dad’s going to try to block them, the lectures,’ she said rapidly. ‘I mean, under the hate crime law. He wants to see the text of the lectures before they happen – he thinks he might get him on homophobic material. I don’t think he has a chance. I wish he did – but it’s going to be tough. So far all we’ve been given is the title. It’s wild. It’s too perfect.’
Jerome was silent. He continued to examine the windblown surface of the small lake in the park opposite. It swelled and surged like a bath two fat men were getting into over and over, one at each end.
“ ‘The Ethics of the University – colon – Taking the ‘Liberal’ out of ‘Liberal Arts” ’. How perfect is that?’
Jerome pulled each of the cuffs of his long black trench coat down over his wrists. First one and then the other. He gripped the tips of the fabric with his forefingers and then put each of these bunched fists against his cheeks and rested upon them.
‘And Victoria?’ he said.
‘Hmm? How d’you mean?’ inquired Zora innocently, although it was too late for this. A faint growl came into Jerome’s mild voice. ‘Well, you told me about the rest of them with such glee – aren’t you going to tell me about her?’
Zora denied the glee adamantly; Jerome insisted on the glee; a typical sibling argument began, concerning subtleties of tone and phrasing that could neither be objectively proved nor rationally questioned.
‘Believe me,’ said Zora stridently, to finish the thing, ‘I don’t feel any glee in relation to Victoria Kipps. None whatsoever. She’s auditing my class. Dad’s class. There’re a million freshman classes she could sit in on – she chooses a sophomore seminar. What’s her problem?’
Jerom
e smiled.
‘It’s not funny. I don’t even know why she turns up. She’s purely decorative.’
Jerome gave his sister a look heavy with the implication that he expected more from her. He’d been laying this look on her since they were children, and now Zora defended herself as she always did, by attacking.
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t like her. I can’t pretend I like her when I don’t. I do not like her. She’s just a typical pretty-girl, power-game playing, deeply shallow human being. She tries to hide it by reading one book by Barthes or whatever – all she does is quote Barthes; it’s so tedious – but then the bottom line is, whenever things get sticky for her she just works her charms to her advantage. It’s disgusting. Oh, my God, and she has this coterie of boys just following her everywhere, which is fine – obviously it’s pathetic, but whatever you need to make it through the day . . . but don’t fuck up the dynamic of the class with stupid questions that go nowhere. You know? And she’s vain. Wow, is she vain. You’re lucky to be out of that situation.’
Jerome looked pained. He hated hearing anybody bad-mouthed; anyone except Howard, maybe, and even then he preferred to do his own dirty work. Now he folded his muffin wrapper in half and passed it idly between his fingers like a playing card.
‘You don’t know her at all. She’s not really that vain. She just hasn’t settled into her looks. She’s still young. She hasn’t decided what to do with it yet. It’s a powerful thing, you know, to look like that.’
Zora guffawed. ‘Oh, she’s decided. She’s using it as a force of evil.’
Jerome threw his eyes back in his head but laughed along.
‘You think I’m joking. She’s poisonous. She needs to be stopped. Before she destroys somebody else. I’m serious.’
This went too far. Zora sank into her stool a little, realizing.
‘You don’t have to say any of that – not for me, anyway,’ said Jerome crossly, confusing Zora, who had been expressing nothing but her own feelings. ‘Because . . . I don’t . . . I don’t love her any more.’ With this simplest of sentences all the air seemed to rush from him. ‘That’s what I found out this semester. It was hard – I willed myself. I actually thought I’d never get her face out of my system.’ Jerome looked down at the table top and then up and directly into his sister’s eyes. ‘But I did. I don’t love her any more.’ This was said with such solemnity and earnestness that Zora wanted to laugh, as they had always laughed in the past at moments like these. But nobody laughed.
‘I’m out,’ said Levi and bounced off his stool.
Levi’s family turned to him in surprise.
‘I gotta go,’ he reiterated.
‘Back to school?’ asked Jerome, looking at his own watch.
‘Uh-huh,’ said Levi because there was no point in worrying people unnecessarily. He made his farewells, pulling on his Michelin Man coat, thumping first sister and then brother hard between their shoulder blades. He pressed play on his iPod (the earphones of these had never left his ears). He got lucky. It was a beautiful song by the fattest man in rap: a 400-pound, Bronx-born, Hispanic genius. Only twenty-five years old when he died of a coronary, but still very much alive to Levi and millions of kids like Levi. Out of the coffee shop and down the street Levi bounced to the fat man’s ingenious boasts, similar in their formality (as Erskine had once tried to explain) to those epic boasts one finds in Milton, say, or in the Iliad. These comparisons meant nothing at all to Levi. His body simply loved this song; he made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was dancing down the street, the wind at his back making him as fleet of foot as Gene Kelly. Soon he could see the church steeple and then, as he got a block closer, a flash of the wash-white bed-sheets, knotted to black railings. He wasn’t so late. A few of the guys were still unpacking. Felix – who was the ‘leader’, or at least the guy who held the purse strings – waved. Levi jogged up to meet him. They knocked fists, clasped hands. Some people’s hands are sweaty, most are moist, and then there are a few rare souls like Felix whose hands are as dry and cool as stone. Levi wondered whether it was something to do with his blackness. Felix was blacker than any black man Levi ever met in his life. His skin was like slate. Levi had this idea that he would never say out loud and that he knew didn’t make sense, but anyway he had this idea that Felix was like the essence of blackness in some way. You looked at Felix and thought: This is what it’s all about, being this different; this is what white people fear and adore and want and dread. He was as purely black as – on the other side of things – those weird Swedish guys with translucent eyelashes are purely white. It was like, if you looked up black in a dictionary . . . It was awesome. And, as if to emphasize his singularity, Felix didn’t goof off like the other guys, he didn’t joke. He was all business. The only time Levi had seen him laugh was when Levi asked Felix that first Saturday whether he had a job going. It was an African laugh, with the deep, resonant timbre of a gong. Felix was from Angola. The rest were Haitian and Dominican. And there was a Cuban too. And now there was a mixed-race American citizen, much to Felix’s surprise and much to Levi’s. It had taken a week of persistence to convince Felix he was serious about working with them. But now, looking at the way Felix held Levi’s hand and kneaded his back, Levi could tell Felix liked him. People tended to like Levi, and he was thankful for this fact without really knowing whom to be thankful to. With Felix and the guys, the clincher had definitely been that night at the Bus Stop. They just didn’t think he’d turn up. No way did they think he was going to show. They thought he was fly-by. But he did turn up, and they’d respected him for it. He’d done more than turn up – he had demonstrated how helpful he could be. It was his own articulate English – comparatively speaking – that had got their tape played and convinced the MC to let ten guys on stage at the same time and made sure they were given the crate of beer each act is promised. He was in. Being in was a weird feeling. These past few days, coming to meet the guys after school, hanging with them, had been an eye-opener for Levi. Try walking down the street with fifteen Haitians if you want to see people get uncomfortable. He felt a little like Jesus taking a stroll with the lepers.
‘You come back again,’ said Felix, nodding. ‘OK’.
‘OK,’ said Levi.
‘Saturdays and Sundays you will come. Regular. And Thursdays?’
‘No, man – Saturday and Sunday, yes. But not Thursdays. Just this Thursday. I got a free day today – if it’s cool.’
Felix nodded again, took a little notepad and a pen out of his pocket and wrote something down.
‘It’s cool if you work. It’s fucking cool if you work,’ he considered, putting his syllabic emphasis in various unnatural places.
‘I’m all about work, Fe.’
‘All about work,’ repeated Felix appreciatively. ‘Very good. You’ll work other side,’ he said, pointing to the opposite corner of the street. ‘We have a new guy. You work with him. Fifteen per cent. Keep your eye to the city. Fucking cops all over. Keep your eye. The stuff is here.’
Levi obediently picked up two bed-sheet sacks and stepped off the sidewalk, but Felix called him back.
‘Take him. Chouchou.’
Felix pushed a young man forward. He was skinny, with shoulders no broader than a girl’s; you could rest an egg between each knob of his spine. He had a big natural afro, a small, feathery moustache, and an Adam’s apple bigger than his nose. Levi imagined him to be in his mid twenties, maybe as old as twenty-eight. He wore a cheap orange acrylic sweater rolled up to his elbows, despite the chill, and down his right arm there was this knockout scar, rose-pink against his black skin, beginning in a point and then spreading out down his forearm like the wake of a ship.
‘That’s your name?’ asked Levi, as they crossed the street. ‘Like a train?’
‘What does this mean?’
‘You know, like a train, like, choo choo! Train coming through! Like a train.’
‘It’s Haitian. C-H-O-U-C –’
‘Yeah
, yeah – I see . . .’ Levi considered the problem. ‘Well, I can’t call you that, man. How about just Choo – that works, actually. It works. Levi and Choo.’
‘It’s not my name.’
‘No, I get that, man – but it just runs better to my ear – Choo. Levi and Choo. You hear that?’
No answer came.
‘Yeah, it’s street. Choo . . . The Choo. That’s cool. Put it there – no, not there – like this. That’s the way.’
‘Let’s get on with it, shall we?’ said Choo, freeing his hand from Levi’s and looking both ways down the street. ‘We need to weigh everything down in this wind. I have some stones from the churchyard.’
Such an extended piece of grammatically correct English was not what Levi had been expecting. In silent surprise he helped Choo untie his bundle, releasing a pile of colourful handbags on to the sidewalk. He stood on the sheet to fight the wind, while Choo placed stones on the handles of the bags. Then Levi began to clip his own DVDs to a similarly weighted bed-sheet with clothes-pegs. He tried to make conversation.
‘Bottom line is, Choo, the only thing you got to worry about really is keeping an eye out for the cops and just giving me the holler when you see them. A holler and a hoot. And you got to see them before they even there – you got to get that street sense so you can smell a cop eight blocks away. That takes time, that’s an art. But you got to acquire it. That’s street.’
‘I see.’
‘I lived on these streets all my life, so it’s like second nature to me.’
‘Second nature.’
‘But don’t worry – you’ll pick all this shit up in time.’
‘I’m sure I will. How old are you, Levi?’
‘Nineteen,’ said Levi, sensing the older the better. But it didn’t seem better. Choo closed his eyes and shook his head, slightly but perceptibly.
Levi laughed nervously. ‘Now, Choo . . . don’t look too excited, you know, all at once, now.’
Choo looked Levi straight in his eyes, hoping for fellow feeling. ‘I really fucking hate to sell things, you know?’ he said, pretty sorrowfully, Levi thought.
