Boulevard

by Jim Grimsley

“Who? Your new boyfriend?”

  “Who else? Oh, I can’t believe I didn’t see him leave or give him my number or anything.” Lawrence shut the cash drawer emphatically.

  Henry said to Newell, “You going out after work?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You want to have a drink at the Corral?”

  “I might walk down there,” Newell shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m going to feel like.”

  “Well, at least walk through the Corral on your way home, so I don’t sit there all night.”

  Lawrence walked away from that tiny drama, wanted to snap his fingers in the air. Go on, fat man, go back to the booth you came from. You are too homely to hang around the counter as much as you do. But, as he reflected, everybody has a fat friend; his own friend, James, for instance, love handles the size of a life preserver. Lawrence ducked behind Newell, called back, “I need to potty, sweetie,” and hurried to the back.

  He stepped into the courtyard, lit a cigarette, and took a long drag on it. The courtyard was empty except for that black man who had been introduced to Lawrence as a security guard, with a friend of his. He was sitting at a table in the middle of the courtyard, looking up at the galleries of the house as if he were keeping watch. Lawrence was beginning to suspect that something was going on upstairs, that maybe this was a massage parlor. He stepped inside before the security guy could get suspicious. That handsome man was nowhere to be seen but Lawrence was sure he had left this way.

  A man like that could make you wet for days. In the bathroom Lawrence ran fingers through his hair that some accident of the peroxide had turned a pale orange-sherbet color. That motherfucker Chris, his barber, could fuck up a hairdo in a heartbeat. Short and close-cropped, as was becoming the fashion, admittedly a good cut. But that color. Still, it was getting attention, like now, when Lawrence stepped into the bookstore again, the disco music enfolding him.

  Wishing he would see that man waiting at the cash register, but never mind, Lawrence saw Henry was still pouting, watching Newell, who smiled at Lawrence as he passed. “That was a little too long for a bathroom break, Lawrence.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t get fifteen minutes to go to the bathroom. Unless you want that to be your break.”

  “What are you talking about? That wasn’t any break.”

  Newell spoke coolly. “I’m just making a point, Lawrence. You don’t get fifteen minutes to pee.”

  “Oh, kiss my ass, Newell. There’s not even anybody in line.” Though of course there was, by the time he got the words out of his mouth. What really pissed him off, though, was how much Newell appeared to be enjoying this confrontation. Newell sauntered away to Mac’s office, hovering in the doorway there, while Lawrence glared at him.

  Lawrence was thinking he should have taken the third-shift job at the doughnut place, making cream-filled and jelly-glazed doughnuts for the morning rush hour crowd, but here was another man in line, looking too cute to ignore, and Lawrence forgot about Newell, leaned forward over the counter and asked, “Now, how can I help you?”

  Newell had gone to look at his face in the mirror. Touching fingertips to his skin, soft and supple, not so much silky as downy, a texture that wanted to be touched. He combed his black hair again and afterward roughed it with his fingers to make it appear less arranged. He had developed a habit, lately, of standing in front of the mirror and looking himself in the eyes, admiring the moist lips, the graceful shape of face and neck and shoulders, the muscles that were thickening on him through no apparent effort. When he had taken stock of himself in that way, he took a deep breath.

  Outside, Lawrence was still hanging over the cash register with something to say to every customer, and Newell wondered if people coming into a dirty bookstore to sneak into a booth and have furtive sex in front of flickering movies really wanted to be chatted up like that. Newell’s thoughts were confirmed when he stopped at Mac’s door and Mac said to him, frowning, “That little cocksucking queen out there never shuts up, like a goddamn magpie.”

  “I’ve been listening.”

  “You better set him straight. People come here to look at some pussy in peace, they don’t need all that jabber.”

  “Some of it is all right.”

  “When I have to hear it all night long it’s not.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Tell him to shut his mouth and make change.”

  “Yes, Mac.”

  “That is all the fuck I want him to do. What the fuck does he think this is, a goddamn church social?”

  He could picture the scene that was coming, of course, when he pulled Lawrence away from the register to tell him to stop the chatter with the customers, to turn down the flame a notch or two, or else next time he could hear it from Mac. Weighty words from the night shift supervisor, which Newell had begun to turn over in his head as what he was, in fact, though without anyone saying so. For a moment he had a sense of satisfaction, and figured he would picture Lawrence as Curtis, the restaurant manager who had fired him, and say the hard words to Curtis instead of Lawrence. He liked having the power and being the one to cause the pain. It would be a good feeling, to be the person who could say, you’re fired. Newell would have to say it to Mac, of course, and Mac would do the firing, but that, too, was fine with Newell, and it would all amount to the same thing. Watching Lawrence across the store twisting his tail this way and that like it was something to see, and him skinny as a chick, with that awful color to his hair, like an orange soda. He was lucky Newell wasn’t like Curtis, in fact, that Newell wasn’t trying to get into his pants; though, on second thought, Lawrence might not have minded.

  He wanted to ask Mac what happened upstairs, with Jack. He knew it was Jack he had seen, he knew Jack was a customer of the upstairs business. But looking at Mac, Newell knew better. Since he wasn’t supposed to know about the room or the business Mac did there. But it was Jack; Newell wanted to know about him. Newell’s appetite was roused. Was it only vanity to think Jack had something in mind? That his appearance tonight was not precisely accidental?

  Trying to put that out of his mind: Jack watching him from the back door, stepping into the store and standing there, watching so coolly, Jack, who might as well have been Rod the Rock stepping right off the cover of the magazine, down to the burning looks, the way he held his lips tense at the edges, like a predator tasting the air, letting nothing escape his senses.

  Lawrence thought Jack was interested in him! But it wasn’t true.

  Newell said to Mac, “All right. You want to handle the cash register while I take Lawrence out to the courtyard and talk to him?”

  Mac lurched forward, already reaching for a cigarette.

  Mr. Mac suddenly appeared out of nowhere at the cash register, thought Miss Sophia, who was dusting the new display of French tickler condoms in seven edible flavors, and at the same time Newell took that sassy new boy to the back, that Miss Priss with the flapping mouth. Here Miss Sophia was dusting the showcases in the main room, but just at that moment she needed a clean dust cloth from the back—the one in her kit would not serve another minute—and so she marched to the cleaning supply closet, which was next to the toilet. There, with a clear view of the courtyard at the open window, she heard the spat that followed. Tussling outside like two cats, that sassy one hissing and spitting, Newell with his arms folded, standing perfectly calm, but in Miss Sophia’s mind’s eye his tail was slowly lashing.

  “I don’t talk any more than you do,” Miss Priss was saying.

  “You keep the line too long. Mac wants you to keep the line moving.”

  “Then why doesn’t he tell me so himself?”

  “You don’t want Mac to tell you,” Newell said. “He is nobody to fuck with, and he would probably end up firing you. So just listen to me, please, and tone it down some.”

  “You put him up to this, I know you did.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You want to get rid of me.”<
br />
  “Oh, right. And work by myself again. Grow up, Lawrence. Some of these people don’t want to be talked to, they just want their magazine put in a bag and their quarters handed to them all counted out right.”

  “I’m just trying to be friendly.”

  “If you want to be friendly, go to work in a bar. This is a dirty bookstore.”

  “Oh, fuck you.” Lawrence waved his cigarette and sashayed into the store again. He had cultivated a liquid, curvaceous walk of the type Miss Sophia had once employed, and had herself been quite proud of, though she was certain she walked with more flair in her prime, even on the occasions when she was a man.

  Newell stood in the courtyard for a while. When he had been alone a moment, somebody slid toward him out of the courtyard, from behind the big hydrangea bush, and stood in front of him and started to talk. A big, dark figure, Miss Sophia could not make out the shape, whether it was Lafayette or somebody else, but it was definitely a large man, taller than Newell, and they stood together for a while.

  Something happened between their bodies, some moment of tension, a change in posture, and then Newell was turning, heading back to the store. One moment the two shadows merged, as if Newell were pressing against the other man, but she had seen no movement, she had only felt the charge. The man stood there for a long time and Miss Sophia waited, too. When he moved she thought he was a black man, but when he passed by the window she thought he was a white man. He climbed the stairs, and she wondered if it could have been Lafayette, and decided the footfalls were not his, the weight of the step not the same. A moment later, there was no more sound, and she could no longer be certain of anything.

  She hurried to the store and resumed her dusting, but Newell was nowhere to be seen, most apt to be in the bathroom, collecting himself. Once she had opened the door on him when he forgot to lock it and there he was, standing in front of the mirror, arms spread around it, looking at his face. Cool contemplation, as if he were counting a stack of money. Blushing, he ran water and washed his hands when Miss Sophia apologized and closed the door again; and he had never forgotten to lock the door since. She could picture him now, watching himself in the mirror, as she was watching herself in the surface of the glass counter, her lovely red wig styled in the Carol Channing manner, and her lips a thick swath of red, her hands veined and spotted and her nails yellow. Dusting this, dusting that, wandering through the booths on occasion, to listen to the sounds.

  She felt herself sliding at moments, into the floor or the glass counter, sliding down, almost falling over, and yet she would come to her senses and realize she had not moved at all.

  So she focused on objects, moving ones, like Miss Priss at the cash register, lips curled tight, making change and counting it out with stiff, stricken movements. Newell stood nearby checking a stock invoice, eyeing Lawrence the way a cat eyes something it has caught, something that offers new possibilities of what seems like play, to the cat.

  That friend was with him, still hanging around, the one that looked like living lard. She dare not notice what he was wearing, his outfits were shamelessly uninteresting. She had long ago come to the conclusion the friend, Henry Carlton, had never developed a sense of self, not even of one self, let alone more than one, as some people were forced to cope with. But tonight the sight of him still here in the store made her angry, so she ran the mop bucket over the toe of his shoe. She had mopped the bathroom and needed to walk the bucket to the booths and the other cleaning closet, which meant she had to pass right by the counter where he was leaning with his tasseled loafers sticking out like duck feet, and Miss Sophia hardly saw it coming herself but walked right over to the bucket, grabbed the mop handle and steered the same as she always did. She could have run a slalom course with that thing, she was so accustomed to the physics of it, but a woman of her size never has a problem appearing clumsy in heels and so, when she rolled the bucket over Henry Carlton’s toe, oh, she knew his name all right, when she ran the bucket over him, he let out a yelp and jerked his foot and the bucket sloshed on his pants a good lick, Miss Sophia having the sense to dodge her part of the splash, and Miss Sophia waddled away looking down at the carpet and performing one of her favorites, mumbling to herself, making sounds that might have been words, deep in her throat, a ploy that always frightened people. She steered the mop bucket into the booths, into the cleaning space, and stood there for a while, in the paradise in which she worked, the hunks walking past her on all sides and the studs in the shadows watching the hunks, sizing them up for later, all this beauty in one place.

  Miss Sophia had a theory about the space inside her head, growing on her recently, added to all that she had understood about herself and Clarence Dodd. One person could not be in two places at the same time, but two people could be in the same space, namely, the one inside her skull, and even more could fit in there, though she had only noticed the two; and this led her to wonder about the head space of others. Was it sufficient to hold more than one personality, more than one soul? She felt that the answer was yes, that many people, in fact, already had such compartments of themselves as she had developed.

  For instance, Mr. Mac, she felt, might possibly have room for five or six different personalities inside his head, for his skull appeared mighty roomy to her. Whereas Newell, she felt, most likely had only the one person in his skull, not for lack of room but because in his case he was possessed of a larger personality than usual. A singular personality, which would not accommodate the kind of mental company that Miss Sophia, for instance, was forced to endure.

  She found Newell at the door to the bathroom, about to enter, she guessed, but he stopped when he saw her. “Do you need in here?”

  She shook her head. He was still standing there, though. “Lord, Miss Sophia, it has been one night.”

  “That new boy is nothing but sass and ass,” Miss Sophia answered.

  Newell burst out laughing, hung onto the door jamb. Nodding his head, “Yes ma’am, you got that right.”

  “You’ll learn him how to act.”

  “I’m not worried about that. But I was thinking, just now, what if my grandma saw me in this place? And all that stuff in the counters. What if she found out I worked in a dirty bookstore?”

  Miss Sophia shrugged.

  “It’s no harm in any of this stuff,” Newell said, looking through the door at the end of the short hallway where the customers were still milling through the store, “I guess that’s the truth.”

  She felt he was not telling her the truth, quite, that he had something else on his mind, but that this subject was somehow related to that other one. She went on standing lumpishly, aware of herself as impenetrable, having decided long ago that her best course in most cases was to pretend she understood nothing. Newell was listening, waiting, and asked, after a point, “Did you ever do anything dangerous, Miss Sophia?”

  She looked him in the eye.

  He went on, “Did anybody ever ask you to do something dangerous, and you really wanted to say yes?”

  She went on waiting. Trying to let him know that he had the attention of at least half of her head space.

  “Something like you see in these movies.” His voice trailed off. Shaking his head. “I ought to know better. But I don’t.”

  Miss Sophia drew herself up, time to go, enough. “Time was, I would do most anything,” she said, sliding past him, speaking, that time, and for the first time in the store that she could remember, in the voice of Clarence Dodd, as if he had been listening, too, inside her. As if he were answering, too.

  Newell slipped into the bathroom, closing the door.

  When he called Flora, later, from Mac’s office, she was hardly surprised. She had been thinking about Sweet Thing all afternoon and that was usually a sign he would call or she would hear something from him. When the phone rang, in fact, she looked across the dinette to Jesse and said, “See what I told you?”

  “You ain’t never wrong, I know,” Jesse dragging a long hit on his
cigarillo in the fancy plastic holder.

  “Hello, honey,” she said into the receiver, and Newell said, “I just got lonesome for you, Gramma, that’s all. I’m still at work.”

  “You miss your Gramma. Ain’t that sweet.”

  “You know I do.”

  “You still working at that bookstore? Seems like you would get a vacation by now, and come on home to see me.”

  “I’m still at the bookstore,” he said, and from the echo on the line she thought maybe he was listening to somebody else, too.

  “You still like it?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “They treating you good?”

  “I’m the night supervisor, now. Our business is so good, lately.”

  “What kind of books you sell?”

  “Picture books, mostly.”

  “I never even been in a bookstore,” Flora said. “Well, honey, you sound all right.”

  “Oh, I’m fine. I’m just a little lonesome.”

  “Well, I tell you what. All you got to do is come home.”

  “I thought you and Jesse were coming to see me here one of these days.”

  “You know Jesse don’t go nowhere. He’s setting here right now in the kitchen chair happy as a dog with a bone. Long as he’s got a beer and something another to smoke, he’s fine.”

  “Tell him hey,” Jesse said, waving the brown smoking cylinder looking like some kind of Hollywood fruit with that plastic holder.

  “Jesse says hey, honey. I told you he was setting here. He’s took up smoking cigarillos. He looks some kind of sissy, let me tell you.”

  “Leave Jesse alone, Gramma.”

  “I ain’t bothering him.”

  “Well, listen, I better go,” Newell said, and Flora had the feeling he was listening to somebody again. “I just wanted to hear your voice a little bit.”

  “You come on home to see your grandma, now, if you’re so lonesome. I promise I’ll let you go back.”

  Newell’s easy laughter always made Flora happy. “I tell you what, I might do that,” he said, and added a good-bye, and there she was, alone in the glare of the kitchen light with Jesse again.