She tried to define him in the meantime from the little that she knew.
He was Jamaican, obviously. Educated and middle class from his accent. And had spent some time abroad—at college perhaps—most likely in the States.
Age-wise he was thirty, thirty-two … and lived where now? Well, that would depend on what he did. He was involved in the arts somewhat—but not to the point where it paid his bills. If it did she would have heard of him. The black art world was too small. Too inbred. Too incestuous for her to not have known him. Especially in New York.
But which art?
There was a thing about him—a sense that dirt didn’t disturb him—that made her think “sculptor” or “painter.” He wasn’t a dancer, for sure. His posture didn’t say that.
Graphic designer was a maybe … Web sites and that kind of thing. Those guys often dressed like that. She was sure he always dressed that way. There was nothing contrived about it, like a diving watch or an ostrich belt, that would have marked him as a poseur.
She considered “writer” briefly, then chucked it away. If he were a writer, she reasoned, he would’ve had a say about Brazil. Even if he hadn’t read it. Writers were like that. At least the ones that she knew. Arrogant and opinionated.
Then she remembered.
He was a musician … or did something related to music. The conversation was like ashes now, finely ground, with glowing shards. He was connected to The Wailers somehow. How, she couldn’t remember. But there was a connection. She thought about his hair … and it made more sense. But then again it didn’t. What did he play? Then she remembered: his uncle used to play with The Wailers.
She was back where she’d begun.
Why did he affect her so? The not knowing made her queasy. Made her anxious to clear her mind.
She tried to distract herself with cleaning. It was a roomy apartment, a one-bedroom with cream walls, and a kitchen divided by a breakfast counter from a front room with bay windows.
And yet the place had a feeling of transience. An indifference to design that suggested eclectic taste—a chintz-covered couch paired with steel end tables. Generally, her tastes were eclectic, though for her own space she preferred English country. She didn’t consider this her own space. It was just an apartment. She would have English country when she bought her house. She’d been living in the apartment for five years now, three years longer than she’d planned, but this didn’t discourage her. She was used to setbacks. So many things had happened in her life.
She’d been born in Jamaica but had no memory of the place except that she’d lived in a house near water. It was a wooden house, in a yard with three other houses that, when she was younger, she’d remembered as outhouses or something—a kitchen and a bathroom perhaps. There was a time when she thought the house was big, with concrete walls and a wide lawn. But she knew now that the house had seemed big only because she was small, and that her recollections of concrete walls came from her stay in the sanatorium where she’d been quarantined from four to eight with TB.
She didn’t remember very much of her childhood. According to Syd, who raised her for a while, her father was a butcher and her mother was a go-go dancer, the black sheep of a rich Syrian family who ran away to shack up because “she was the lowest dog around.”
She could only remember a year with her parents, the year she returned home, when the sounds and smells of the hospital—coughing and Dettol—were replaced by those of animals. The sourness of shit and sweat. Hair being singed from skins to make drumheads. The arcing whoosh of the butcher’s knife. The gush of blood and the squeal of death.
Of her parents there were few recollections. Her mother was the color of almond paste and had curly hair down her back. Her father was antenna-thin and hacked and spat a lot. That was it and no more. She still had no idea who they were. What did they believe, she wondered. What had made them laugh? What had been their hopes for her, their only child? Why had they visited her only once a year when she struggled to breathe each day?
Sometimes, less now than during high school, she would wonder how much she was like them, ask which of their traits were hers. Was it her need for order? Her love of the arts? Her aversion to risk? Her strength in academics? There was no way to know. Her father murdered her mother in a jealous rage when she was nine years old. Chopped her up, buried some parts, and minced the rest for dog food.
A week before he closed the case by making a confession, Mr. Lucas sent Sylvia to the last known address of his estranged brother, Syd, a decommissioned sailor who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. His face a shallow engraving of Billy Eckstine—whom he claimed was a distant cousin—Syd lived alone in a rooming house in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was an alcoholic and had no children—at least none for whom he felt responsible—and didn’t know how to raise a child, least of all a girl. He would send her to school with her hair uncombed, and dress her in clothes that were sizes too big, and he never checked her homework, because, he claimed, his eyes got dim in evening light—but really because he was illiterate.
In spite of this she quickly grew to love him. He was different from any adult she’d ever known. In many ways he was a child—he had few rules for himself, and even fewer for her. That and their natural curiosity made them great friends.
That’s what he was, her friend, which is why she never called him “Uncle.” He would allow her to smoke at jazz clubs if she stayed with him for the second set. And they would go to museums on Sundays, sometimes walking over the Brooklyn Bridge hand in hand, counting cars and reciting whole scenes from westerns.
She would write to her father, but he never replied. When she got older, she began to wonder if he could read or write. Maybe he wanted to reply but couldn’t. But by then it didn’t matter. She had never really known him, so there was little for her to miss. Her mother, Syd told her, had died in her sleep. She didn’t know the truth till she was grown.
Every Friday before he went drinking, Syd would bring her a book and take her for a banana split or cheesecake at Junior’s. They would sit in their special booth and talk about whatever was on her mind, which was usually something about the girls who picked on her because she was different. They’re just jealous, he would say to her, because they don’t have good hair like you. Which would make her happy because she did have the longest hair in school, even if she didn’t know how to manage it.
On the way home, as they walked along Fulton, they would listen to his pocket radio and sing along with the hit parade. That’s the best way to lose an accent, he used to say. Good singers have good diction—my cousin Billy told me that.
As soon as they got in he would make her take a bath, wait until she settled herself, then ask her to read to him from the latest book he’d bought her. At first he would squat on the floor beside her, with his chin on the edge of the bed, then gradually, while smiling and praising her, he would lie down beside her and stroke her face and tell her how nice she looked. He knew, he would say—he could tell these things, he added—that she would grow up to be a TV star like the colored girl on Star Trek.
He would call her beautiful. And when she said that she was ugly, that she was too skinny to be pretty, he would run his hand under her nightie and say, “But right here fat … and right there fat … and behind here fat … and in the middle here … lemme check it again … is so fat. Can I kiss it?”
If she said no he would make funny faces and she would indulge him. Not just because it thrilled her—it felt dangerously good, like jiggling a shaky tooth—but because in the hospital no one had wanted to touch her. In school no one wanted to be her friend—she spoke funny and dressed funny and her hair was frizzy, and she couldn’t play sports because she was always out of breath.
But Syd said she was beautiful. Why not let him kiss her where she peed? He wasn’t hurting anyone.
He would always leave her money when he left for the bar. Five bucks on the pillow beside her face, which like the rest of her would be able to sense a
touch before it landed. So sensitive it had become. So connected to itself and the air around it.
Something about the money didn’t feel right, and she would ask about it. He would wink and say that it was for emergencies.
Like what?
Like anything, he would tell her as he buttoned his shirt. We all have to pay our way in life.
With menstruation came an awareness, an intuition, that neither she nor Syd was a child—that what they were doing was not a game, but something serious. One evening as he buzzed her blossom she thought about the things that adults had placed inside her—thermometers in her ass, depressors in her throat, air tubes in her nostrils, syringes in her ears. On reflection she concluded that none of them had been pleasant, and that all of them had made her nervous. Why should this thing—she knew the name but was afraid to conjure it—that Syd had begun to coax inside her fairly often now, be any different … any more benign … any less reason for concern?
Why?
There was no one to ask. No one to speak to. She had no friends or family but Syd. One Thursday afternoon, she edged up to a girl she barely knew and asked if they could talk. As they sat facing each other in the cafeteria, she leaned forward and framed the situation hypothetically, speaking in a whisper. “I have this friend …”
When she was through the girl said take the money. They were all getting fucked, she said, pointing around the room. She, she, she, she, she … they all be getting fucked. They wish they was getting paid.
Fucked. The word braced her. Placed everything in perspective. Getting fucked. She didn’t like the sound of it. If she had once thought of Syd as fulfilling her, or of them as fulfilling each other, she felt different now. Used.
They all be getting fucked.
She looked at each in turn. They were all girls she didn’t like.
Now that she spoke American and chose her own clothes and knew how to style her hair she resented them. Not for how they’d treated her, but for how easy it was to be them—how easy it was to surpass them. She was the only one who took the exam for Brooklyn Tech. The only one who wanted a career. These girls—the girls getting fucked—didn’t want careers. They wanted jobs. No. She would not be like them. She wouldn’t get fucked anymore. Syd would have to stop.
The next evening she hid a knife beneath the sheet. When Syd began to touch her she told him to stop, but he didn’t listen. She ended up in juvenile court and a group home in Harlem. That’s where she met Diego Peña, a foul-mouthed boy with a bullet head and bushy brows who would study with her at Columbia and grow up to be a filmmaker.
She took a break from straightening up the apartment and checked her watch. It was time to go to his barbecue.
“So what are you working on these days?” Diego asked, his Buddha belly draped in purple. “Which sistah-mama superstar is gonna be your cover girl?”
“Oh shuddup,” she said, tugging one of his chins. “We’re doing a twelve-page spread on black New Orleans. That’s going pretty well.”
He chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Black New Orleans. Isn’t that like Latino San Juan?” She punched him playfully. “Umbra kills me, mamí.”
They snuggled and laughed in the filtered light of the stained glass windows, artifacts that he’d bought on a trip to Cochabamba and installed in his West Street loft. Decorated in what he called “homodecorous,” the space was sponge-painted a soft tangerine and divided into rooms by Burmese screens and fabric tents that draped from rings in the ceiling.
Almost a year had passed since he’d seen her. In demand since winning a jury prize at Sundance, he’d been filming a courtroom drama in Australia for the last ten months, and had been back at home for only a week now.
Twice when he’d traveled to New York during the shooting he’d arranged to have dinner with her, and she’d canceled each time because of work commitments. Or so she said. He wasn’t completely convinced. He suspected that she was bearing a grudge from the argument they’d had the week before he left for Sydney, when she’d asked him to critique her novel.
Be frank, she’d said. Be cruel. Let me really know how you feel.
And when he told her the story was ridiculous, she said that fame had turned him into an asshole, to which he replied, “But you were one from birth.”
The fight notwithstanding, it was good to see her. Sylvia was like his sister. Sometimes his mother. But he sensed her need to be his daughter now, and this made him feel important. He seemed to matter less in her life since she’d started dating Lewis. Maybe he was projecting. But still … it seemed that way.
So while the other guests mingled on the roof, he stole her away for a lie-down in his bedroom, a teepee of translucent silk.
At first they talked easily but carefully, their words assuming the cadence of footsteps falling on narrow stairs. Then slowly, as they each became aware of the sameness of the other, their words began to run and skip and race like children scampering over an open field. And they began to open up to each other, he about whether he deserved success, and she about knowing she’d outgrown her job.
“I hate it,” she confessed. “It’s so boring. It doesn’t challenge me. I mean, it’s not just Umbra, it’s the magazine business—you cover the same things over and over again … y’know … sports and media stars … fashion … tropical vacations … gadgets for an easy life. Diego, there are so many mornings when I lie in bed asking God to make me sick so I won’t have to go to work.”
She rolled her head from side to side, breaking loose the tension that was cocooned in the base of her neck.
“Well, you know what I’ve always said,” Diego replied. “Leave.”
“Sure … and do what? What else is there? Corporate communications? Teaching? Advertising? P.R.? I’d hate that too. They’re all the same. Long hours and people who suck your energy and drown your imagination. Come on, what would I do if I left?”
He reached toward the nightstand for a glass of water, considering what to say and how to say it. There is only one thing to do, he thought, taking a preemptive aspirin.
“You could finish your novel and sell it. Forget what I had to say about it. If you left Umbra you could really spend time with it … and finesse it … and really make it work.”
She asked for an aspirin, sat on the edge of the bed, and lowered her head between her knees to stretch her spine, where tension was crawling like a worm along the stem of a leaf.
Absently, she took the pill without water, and was forced to endure its scrawl along her throat, a chalky bitterness as galling as graffiti. Wincing, she drained the glass, then leaned against Diego’s belly and stared up at the teepee, whose silken folds faded as her gaze burned through to the past.
“There is one side of me, Diego, that loves to write … I mean … you know that. But I’ve given up on getting that novel published. I don’t even call my agent anymore. I haven’t spoken to her in months. The rejection letters just became too much …”
The words trailed off into a hum, which was her way of fighting tears. Hums were better than sighs. One could always pretend they were songs.
They lay together quietly for a while, listening to each other breathe as music and laughter dripped through the ceiling, balming them like sea spray.
I wish I could just lie here, she thought … and fall asleep.
But she was animated by a new thought: “The politeness is the part that’s damaging, y’know. They never tell you the truth. They never say, ‘Give it up because your work is shit,’ or ‘Join the right clique and you’ll be okay.’ So instead of packing it in, you keep hanging on, waiting for your luck to turn, like those guys with their eyes glazed over at the OTB. But it never comes, man. Not for most people at least. And I don’t have time anymore. I’ll soon be thirty-five, Diego, and I have to get on with my life.”
She sat up again and looked around this space that Diego owned, saw all the things he had—the chairs from Java, the Turkish rugs—and th
inking of their similar backgrounds asked herself, How is it that we’re so different? Why can’t I be like him? Why can’t I just be?
She was thinking now of the day he quit college to work as a gofer at a production house. There she was on the steps of Low Library, begging him to stay. There he was, striding across the quadrangle … driven to madness … drawn to his calling, he said, after seeing Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict.
“You can’t just go like that,” she’d screamed. “How many Dominicans ever make it to Columbia? This is not just about you, Diego. This is about a nation of people.”
“I can’t live for others,” he told her. “I have to live for me. Success or failure will come on my terms.”
“But what if you fail?”
“If I think about that,” he said, “I’ll never try.”
That was ten years ago. Ten years and three features, the most recent one with a forty-million-dollar budget.
Angry with herself for being weak, she went over to a window and watched the boats on the Hudson, fiddling as she stood there with the knot in her sheer white blouse, as the pain seeped back into her navel, which she’d funkified with a clip-on hoop.
“I’m not like you, Diego,” she said, misting the glass with her breath. “In a lot of ways, I wish I could be. I’ve rewritten my novel so many times. It’s gone from serious fiction to mystery, then back to serious fiction, then somehow it became a thriller at one time … and now I think it’s a contemporary romance. You know what? I really don’t know what the fuck it’s about. I don’t even know what I’m about.”
He tried to gather his face in a look that matched his feelings. But it was hard to know which particular combination of his pointy mouth and beady eyes would best convey this thought: We both know what you have to do, so cut the shit and do it. You don’t really want to write, Sylvia. You want to be a success, and you’ll take it however it comes.
But he didn’t say this. Instead, he tried to lighten the mood. He walked over to her with his stomach sucked in, and asked, in a Mae West–meets–Eartha Kitt voice, “How’s Lewis? Tell that hunk of a man that a certain gay filmmaker would like to invite him for dinner and show him the benefits of the Fat for Life diet.”
Waiting in Vain Page 5
