Apex Hides the Hurt

by Colson Whitehead

  He resolved to wait her out. She appeared to sense this, employing a primitive, animal awareness, growing quiet save for her quick, shallow breathing. “I will return!” she said after a time.

  An hour later he was in the lobby, on the lookout for his ride. The desk clerk had called up to inform him that Mr. Winthrop would pick him up at noon. Actually, the clerk had used the word fetch. He saw the scenario plainly. The white-haired scion, heir to a barbed-wire empire, dispatches the limo and receives him in a smoky drawing room. That Winthrop gaze lasers in on him when he enters, but what the man is thinking exactly cannot be determined. They pose in the burgundy club chairs. Over the man’s shoulder, beyond the window: the rolling estate, sprawling, undulating, alive with force. Winthrop complains about gophers, proposes solutions, and such are the tribulations of his world, eradicable by pesticide bombs. Over brandy fresh from decanters, the old dog makes his case for the Winthrop name, for tradition, for the old ways which are the best ways. His guest wears out the knees on his pants from spontaneous fits of genuflection.

  So went the narrative he concocted in the lobby of the Hotel Winthrop. The job still had its paws on him. Dipping a cup into reservoirs and tasting the waters was part of the gig. If he could swallow it, the rest of the world would, too. Nomenclature consultants were supposed to have universal stomachs.

  He closed his eyes, and realized the extent of his trepidation. Meeting Winthrop was no problem. He knew the type. But he was back on the job after so long, and his fingers trembled. He made them into fists in his pockets.

  The desk clerk said, “Sir.”

  He limped out. The black Bentley crouched at the curb like a big lazy bull. A white head with little white hairs steaming off it emerged from the driver’s side. “Hey, nice to meet you,” the driver said. “I’m Albie.” Albie wore a faded red jogging suit. Sweatbands sopped heartily at his wrists and forehead. He got the impression that Albie had just finished a few laps or had been chased by a creature. Albie said, “Hop on in.”

  The backseat was filled with grocery bags. A laundry-detergent spout poked out, the frilly plastic end of a bag of bread, celery stalks. “Why don’t you hop up front,” Albie offered, “and move a few of these things.” Albie knocked a cut-up supermarket flyer off the seat, and last week’s paper, and an ice scraper.

  He climbed in, good leg first, and tried not to get his wet feet on the flotsam below the seat. “You can just shove that stuff under the seat,” Albie said.

  He shoved and settled.

  “Bum leg?” Albie asked.

  “Bum leg.”

  Albie nodded. “Been raining like this since you got here, huh? You must be bad luck or something.” The man smiled. “Albie Winthrop,” he said.

  He shook the man’s hand. Moist was the word.

  They pulled out and a little dribble of coffee sloshed out of the Grande Admiral in the cup holder. Cheap plastic cup holders were not standard issue on Bentleys, he gathered, inspecting the weird little monstrosity gaffer-taped to the dashboard. Where the consumer comfort industry failed, Albie stepped in, and some time before, apparently. There were a bunch of old brown stains on the carpet. He resisted the urge to lean over and check how many miles were on the car.

  Albie smiled. “Got back into town this morning,” he said, “or else I’d’a come by before to meet you.”

  “Lucky told me you were off racing your boat somewhere?”

  Albie’s head bobbed. “Not my boat, no, aw,” he cackled. “Haven’t had a sailboat in a long while. My old buddy Percy’s boat. I’m first mate whenever he goes out. ‘First mate Albie reporting for duty, capt’n!’ ”

  “Oh,” he said.

  They drove a ways. The few people out on the street shuffled under slickers and umbrellas but Albie recognized them nonetheless, waving out the window excitedly and shrieking, not caring if the rain got inside. The people made their greeting motions, shook umbrellas in their direction, and trudged on. Whenever Albie passed a car, he clapped twice on the horn at the other driver and bobbed his head. “Everybody knows me,” Albie explained. “I’m everybody’s uncle.”

  The people honked back or ignored him. There’s that crazy bastard again, is how he decoded these brief exchanges.

  “That’s old Frank’s son,” Albie said as a red SUV zipped toward them. Albie honked and Frank’s son swerved, startled. “Frank was our foreman for many years,” Albie explained. “He came up from the floor. Started on the floor with the Bessemer and moved up.”

  “That right?”

  “Shoot. Never worked anywhere else. That’s his house over there. Went there for a barbecue once. Guess you don’t barbecue that much in the city, huh?”

  “Hadn’t noticed.”

  “Don’t barbecue much at all, I guess.” Albie honked at a station wagon. “Hey! Mason! Hey!” And there was almost an accident.

  He deliberated and then decided, yes, the Winthrop family spread qualified for estate-hood, and with a few wings to spare. They drove through an iron gate that took them past a low stone wall and wound their way up the driveway. Feral hedges clawed the car. As they approached the house he was reminded of good-for-you public television shows where there were always a lot of goings-on in the servants’ quarters. But there were no more servants. No signs of life besides them in fact, until they got around back, and something crunched as the car slowed. They inspected the damage. The Mighty Wheels was now yesterday’s toy, mashed to yellow-and-red bits beneath the front tire. “Aw, will you get a load of that,” Albie groaned. “The tenants in the guesthouse, the kids leave all their stuff around.” He shook his head.

  It was always a perplexing event, he found, to help people put away their groceries. You never know where the other person’s system of grocery placement connects and diverges from your own. The cabinets and drawers are avenues in a maze. One man’s sponge nook is another man’s soup hutch. So he leaned against the refrigerator and watched Albie unpack the week’s shopping, limiting his contribution to two bag-carrying trips from the Bentley to the kitchen. He had calculated that it would require five trips to unload the car, so he exaggerated his limp to keep his trips down to a pat and optimum two.

  “Have you eaten?” Albie asked, folding the last paper bag flat. “I’m going to make some hot dogs.”

  “Sure.”

  “I usually boil them, but if you want I can put them in the toaster. Put it on broil.”

  Albie interpreted his silence and prepared their repast, such as it was, placing a tiny pot of water on what had to be one of the biggest ovens he had ever seen. Albie grabbed a pair of pliers to light the burner. There were no knobs on the stove. His host offered no explanation.

  “I really appreciate you coming out here all this way to help straighten out this thing,” Albie said.

  “It’s my job.”

  “At first I didn’t know if I could trust them to bring in someone who would give me a fair shake, you know what I mean? After what happened at the council meeting. And then you working for the company Lucky hired to think up that new name of his. How much you get paid for one of those things?”

  “It varies from case to case, really. I didn’t handle that account. I’ve been on a sabbatical.”

  Albie looked him over. “Heard about that,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to trust you. But then Lucky told me you were a Quincy man, and I knew I would get a fair shake. A Quincy man is a man of his word.”

  Albie asked him about that old groundskeeper, the one who always had a cigar plug jutting off his lips. There had been this geezer who used to trim the shrubbery and leer at the freshman girls, and he decided this must be the codger in question, so he said yes. What the hell did he know about beloved campus characters? He was not the kind who went around befriending beloved campus characters.

  School days. Albie asked him what dorm he’d lived in, what year did he graduate. He didn’t need to tell Albie that he’d lived next to the Winthrop Library. There was no need; A
lbie knew the layout of the quad and had his answer on hearing the name of the dorm. When he’d arrived at the hotel, he’d thought it was just coincidence. There were a lot of rich white people named Winthrop. But of course he of all people should have known that with names there is no coincidence. Only design, design above all. There were a lot of rich white people named Winthrop and they were all related, if not by blood then by philosophy. Old Albie’s great-granddad or what have you had been a big booster of his alma mater. Their alma mater. And now that name was supposed to bind them together. Like it always did.

  . . . . . . . .

  Some names are keys and open doors. Quincy was one.

  It was the third oldest university in the country, founded on a Puritan ethic, structured on the classic British model, whatever that meant. It was prestigious. Quincy men formed the steel core of many a powerful elite, in politics, business, wherever there were dark back rooms. The sons and daughters of the famous attended Quincy and were anointed anew, for now they had two royal titles, one from the circumstance of their birth and the second from the four-year galvanizing process that occurred behind those ivy walls. The sons and daughters of the working class attended and became prows to pulverize the swells of new middle-class oceans. The presidents of foreign countries sent their sons to be educated at Quincy and they returned double agents, articulating American and Quincian directives in their native tongues. The great-grandsons of presidents would sit next to him in Modern European History and exude. Those who wanted to be president one day would leave the room when someone lit a joint. Superfamous academics and former cabinet members and Nobel laureates joined the faculty to be tenured and formaldehyded.

  For the right amount of money, it was possible to get your name on a Quincy edifice. The university had a complicated pricing plan based on square footage versus prestige of placement, from the new pool to the new dining hall to the new astronomy building. Their names would live long, tattooed on the granite skin of an eternal university. Their kids would get in, too, no hassle. On Parents Weekend, the proud relatives swarmed the square and snatched up sweatshirts and mugs with the bright green Q so that everyone would know they were a satellite of the pulsing Q star and somewhere in the Heavens, too. It was a strong brand name, as they said in his business.

  They reached out to him in his last year of high school. He had filled out a form the previous summer at the African American Leaders of Tomorrow conference, a weeklong program held in the nation’s capital where teenagers debated U.S. policy and tried to break curfew. The pamphlet that came in the mail was his introduction to the world of mailing lists, target marketing. Quincy believed in diversity. He applied. He got in, and ended up there the next fall. What clinched it for him was the Pre-Fresh Weekend, where they pulled out the stops to convince him to come. And come he did. He got laid for the first time at a party his freshman host had taken him to, and the Quincy name now meant manhood, or at least the end of expectant masturbation and the start of default masturbation.

  He never bought into the Quincy mystique. He did not learn the words of the drinking songs. He did not demonize the other colleges in their academic stratosphere. He did not come to appreciate the peculiar magnetism of the Quincy name until he graduated, when its invisible waves sorted the world into categories, repelling the lesser alloys, attracting those of kindred ore at job interviews, parties, in bedrooms. There was no secret handshake. The two syllables sufficed. Quincy was a name that was a key, and it opened doors.

  . . . . . . . .

  “My wife took it all,” Albie moaned again. They toured the empty rooms. “Took my name and then took everything else.”

  He was breaking a rule, one that he didn’t even know he had until he got inside Albie’s place: no house calls. It was depressing. Most of the light fixtures didn’t have working bulbs, so they maundered from room to room in a sullen march, their path illuminated only by the gray light from outside. Sometimes the two men were mere silhouettes, sometimes barely ghosts, and Albie’s words in the air were rattling chains, it seemed to him. He grabbed items from the Hotel Winthrop and placed them on the floors and along the walls to visualize what the place had looked like a generation ago, and fire shimmied in the fireplace, and great tones erupted from the grand piano. These dim visions.

  Every new door opened on emptiness, on hollowed-out history. Albie preferred the past tense. It was his new roommate, eating the last doughnut and leaving flecks of toothpaste on the bathroom mirror. “This was the game room,” Albie said, as they sent dust scurrying from their steps. “This was Grandmother’s room,” Albie said, as a tiny square of light squeaked through an attic window.

  What was there to say, he wondered, standing in the gloom, holding a paper plate. He said, “Thanks for the hot dogs.”

  Albie brightened instantly. “My specialty!”

  They started back down the stairs. “You should rent out some rooms,” he offered. Sympathy did not come easily to him, but he knew a fellow patient when he saw one. He had his misfortune, and Albie had his.

  “That’s what the hotel is for,” Albie said. “At least I still have that.” He grimaced. “We’re all booked this weekend, every room. For him. Even when I’m making money off him for a change, he’s making ten times more offa me, what Lucky’ll get out of this conference in the long run.”

  Only the living room contained more than one piece of furniture, and they sat on the bumpy couch after Albie cleared away magazines and shooed crumbs. Mounted heads stared from one wall, the stuffed remains of the antlered and the slow-moving. Albie saw him looking at them and told him again that yes, his wife had taken everything in the divorce, everything, but he had held firm when it came to the trophies. “A man has to draw a line somewhere.”

  “With barbed wire,” he said. He pointed above the fireplace, where a thick braid of metal was mounted on dark wood. Not a trophy but a monument.

  “Barbed wire! Drawing a line, exactly! I knew I could talk to you,” Albie exclaimed gleefully. He skipped over to the mantel and ran a finger along the metal. “This was our barb,” he cooed, tracing the butterfly-shaped loop. “Mark of distinction. Every wire manufacturer had their own barb, so you knew what you were buying. People go to buy a new bundle, they’d look at this W right here and know they were buying quality.”

  “Your brand.”

  “All over the plains, they buy Winthrop Wire, they buy quality. They knew this. Nobody knows about this stuff anymore except people here. And soon . . .” His hand fell.

  Albie returned to the couch, frowned, and recounted the whole sad story of The Day of the Doublecross. He didn’t know why it had happened, but Regina and Lucky had “bushwacked” him. For the life of him, he didn’t understand. Lucky Aberdeen—why, Albie had embraced the man like a brother, despite all that had gone on between them real estate–wise. And Regina, they were practically blood relations—their families went so far back it was practically historical.

  The day of the vote, Albie had just finished visiting old Marcia Newton, who had broken her hip and was bedridden. (He recalled the days after his misfortune, when he was bedridden and unable to escape. It was people like Albie who had made him barricade himself in his apartment during his convalescence.) Albie was in fine spirits when he walked into the meeting, full of his good deed, and ready to discuss the new SLOW CHILDREN signs. The controversy over whether to put up two or four signs had been simmering for weeks, and that day the city council would settle the matter once and for all. Just the three of them at the table, the way it had always been for generations. The city council, the old, benevolent tribunal. Majority rules.

  And then Lucky said that they had another matter to settle before they could proceed to the matter of Slow Children: the name of the town. There’s been a lot of talk in town, Lucky told him, about whether or not Winthrop as a name reflects new market realities, the changing face of the community. (As Albie’s mouth formed the words market realities, his lips arched toward his nostril
s and his eyes slitted, so sour were the syllables.) Talk, what talk, Albie asked, he hadn’t heard any talk and he was practically the heart of the town. Lucky appeared not to hear him. Lucky kept on with his nonsense. “In that idiotic vest.” Lucky said: It’s been proposed that maybe we should look back to the town charter of Winthrop and invoke the laws that define this town. That maybe we, the city council, should run the numbers and take a vote on whether to change the name of Winthrop to something more appropriate.

  “You can imagine what I was feeling,” Albie complained, putting two fingers to his lips and belching. “I tried to get them to talk to me, but they were like stone. I said, ’How could you do this to me, I’m your good old pal.’ Bringing up that old law. It hadn’t been used since they changed the name to Winthrop in the first place. Was it still on the books, I wanted to know, but they weren’t having it. Wouldn’t listen to me. And I tell you, I thought it was a done deal once they won the vote, two to one. I was thinking, how long have they been planning this? Voting to change the name. Digging up some old law no one ever thought to take off the books. Putting one over on Uncle Albie. ‘You don’t do that to your uncle,’ I said. ‘I’m everybody’s uncle!’ I turned to Regina and told her, ‘Regina, look me in the eyes.’ But she wouldn’t look at me. And Lucky went, ‘Now that that’s decided, let’s move on to the matter of the new name itself.’ He brought out that stupid suggestion of his—New Prospera—and went, ‘All in favor, say aye.’ But then Regina double-crossed him, and boy, oh boy, was he surprised! You should have seen his face,” Albie said, his voice cracking. “We sat there deadlocked. Every name—mine, Lucky’s, Regina’s—had one vote, and no one would budge. It was the three of us, and no one would budge.”

  Albie looked exhausted.

  “This law was put on the books to change the name of the town to Winthrop.”

  “It was only a settlement really,” Albie said, “where Regina’s family decided to stop one day. There wasn’t any thought to it. They just dropped their bags here.”