Three-Martini Lunch

by Suzanne Rindell

  • • •

  But of course my mother did mind. She let Clarence stay, but late at night I heard my parents arguing in hushed voices. My parents rarely argued, and the sound of it put me on edge. I couldn’t sleep, and decided to creep quietly into the kitchen for a glass of milk.

  It turned out, creeping quietly was unnecessary; our houseguest was awake. The light was on in the kitchen. I found Clarence rummaging through the ice-box. He spun around when he heard me come in.

  “A’most gave me a case o’ palpitations, boy!” he scolded. He straightened up and looked me over from head to toe. “Say, you oughta be able to tell me: Whatchu got in here worth eatin’, son?”

  I shrugged. “You could fry up some eggs.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t wanna wake up the house with all that sizzlin’ grease and cookin’ smells,” he said. When he talked, I could see his teeth and tongue were slightly purplish, as though stained by wine. I wondered where he’d gotten it. He’d told my father he was down on his luck and flat broke.

  “Ma made some ham-and-potato casserole,” I said.

  “That’ll do.”

  I skirted around him to retrieve a glass of milk, my stomach turning at the rancid smell of cheap, sugary wine sweating through his pores. My mother didn’t allow food or drink in any room but the kitchen, so I sat down dutifully at the table, trying to finish the glass I’d poured as quickly as possible. Clarence scooped a mound of cold potato casserole onto a plate, helped himself to a fork, and sat down across from me.

  I watched him eat, bits of slobbery cheese sticking to his unkempt beard. He caught me watching him—very likely a disgusted expression on my face—and looked up. A hostile, wicked smile slowly stretched over his features.

  “Yo’ daddy ever tell you ’bout his Army days?” he asked.

  “I suppose,” I said, shrugging.

  “I bet he din’ tell you ever’thin’.”

  I finished my milk and moved to wash the glass and go to bed.

  “Now, hang on a minute there, son,” said Clarence. He refreshed his plate with a second helping. “Don’ rush off. Chew the fat with me a bit.”

  I didn’t want to, but I sat down, feeling arrested by Clarence’s demand.

  “Tell me about you. You gotta girl yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Guess you still too young to be much interested in that yet. What’s yo’ best subject in school?”

  “Latin,” I replied. This was true; I had worked so hard to catch up to my private school peers, I had surpassed them.

  “Latin!” Clarence hooted. “What’s a nigger boy like you doin’, fooling around with Latin?”

  I stiffened at the slur and didn’t answer.

  “When they start teaching Latin at ol’ P.S. 24?” he asked, still laughing at my expense.

  “They don’t,” I said. “I go to Warner Academy.”

  At this, Clarence stopped laughing and narrowed his eyes at me. “What’s that?”

  “Private school,” I said. He proceeded to ask me questions about my schooling, and I haughtily explained the circumstances.

  “Huh,” he grunted when I’d finished my explanation. “Sounds to me like you think yo’ better than us, boy.” I widened my eyes at the accusation. “Yeah,” he continued. “I see the way you been lookin’ at me, actin’ like I’m gonna give you a case of them head-bugs or somethin’ . . . You think yo’ shit don’t stink.”

  By this point, his eyes had turned eerily black and the expression on his face had grown hard and bitter.

  “But I’ll tell ya something, boy . . . you may think yo’ something special, but you just a chip off the ol’ block. Your mama tell you your old man a war hero. Sure—he march up Fifth Avenue in that fool parade with the rest o’ us, but that about it. He ain’t seen no action in the Pacific. Ever’body know yo’ father discharged for bein’ a coward and a thief.”

  “He saw action in France in the first war,” I said, “and he was discharged for his health.”

  “Hah! That disability an act of mercy; they couldn’t charge him with nothin’ else.” Clarence leaned forward on his elbows and licked his lips. The lamp over the kitchen table threw long, ugly shadows down his face, and I realized he was winding up for some kind of final blow. “He such a coward, he murdered a man just so’s they wouldn’t have no proof o’ his thievery,” Clarence growled in a low, confiding voice.

  I got up from the table, trembling, and stormed out of the room. I lay in bed for the rest of the night, hurt and confused. I didn’t believe Clarence’s story; he was a drunk and a bully. Nonetheless, he had struck some kind of chord. There was something funny about my father’s discharge. A disability discharge made sense on the surface of things: My father was old by active duty standards, and there was no question his respiratory ailment was real. And yet, there had always been something slightly discomfiting, an unanswered question that hovered like a dark cloud. I couldn’t shake the image of my father in the living room, his eyes snapping instantly to my face as he rushed to say, “We don’t need to discuss that, Clarence.”

  Staring up at the ceiling of my bedroom, only a ten-year-old boy, I was suddenly afraid to learn the truth, and this fear remained with me into adulthood, long after my father passed away.

  • • •

  Clarence stayed with us for a full month, well past the point of his welcome, as far as my mother was concerned. Late at night, I could hear her complaining about him, leveling some kind of accusation I could never make out, not even with a water glass pressed against my bedroom wall.

  As my mother’s resentment mounted, eventually my father had a falling-out with Clarence, and I assumed it had to do with her objections. I could never be certain what the straw was that broke the camel’s back. I caught a few fragmented lines of the final fight between my father and Clarence, but they were cryptic, my father demanding over and over again, “Explain to me what these bars doin’ in yo’ things!” Clarence, for his part, adopted a stance of indignation over the violation of his privacy, until finally he gathered his belongings and I heard the front door slam.

  I never knew what my father meant by bars. It didn’t make sense. As far as I could tell, Clarence hadn’t stolen anything from my parents, apart from copious amounts of food and beer.

  Either way, Clarence must have left the neighborhood not long after leaving our apartment, because although I expected to cross paths with him at some point, I never saw him again.

  • • •

  After the incident with Clarence, I avoided the subject of my father’s discharge at all costs. I never asked my father anything about his years of service; I never asked my mother, either. I pushed Clarence’s words to the back of my mind, where they remained for years, until my mother turned to me that hot afternoon in June and handed me a key.

  “Aren’t you afraid to go all the way across the country to California?” Janet asked me as we sat at a drugstore counter on 125th Street once I had announced my plan.

  Her brooding eyes bored holes into my own. Yes was the true answer: I was afraid to go. I was also afraid not to go.

  “I know this will upset our plans a bit . . . It will take us a little longer to save up for a place of our own, but it’s something I have to do.”

  She closed her eyelids as though they were suddenly very heavy, and briefly lifted a hand to her temple. Then she dropped the hand and opened her eyes again. “All right,” she said in a meek voice, shrugging and shaking her head. “If it’s something you have to do.”

  “I think this will help us in the long run,” I said, reaching across the table to touch her hand where it had fallen. “I think once I’ve done this, I’ll be ready . . . for the next steps to come.” I did not say marriage, but of course marriage was what I meant, and Janet knew it, too. She looked up, and smiled meekly.

  “
Then I guess I ought to wish you good luck.”

  I squeezed her hand and leaned across the table to give her a grateful peck of a kiss. This move was only moderately successful. Her lips were cold and waxy, and smelled a bit like the peculiar clay used in ladies’ lipstick. She smiled, though, and I smiled back, already feeling guilty for the slight shimmer of relief I felt upon having resolved to go to California after all.

  11

  The money my mother had given me was a start, but if I was going to make it all the way out to California, I’d have to scrimp as best I could. Summer loomed closer, and I graduated from Columbia. My mother attended the ceremony with a mixture of pride and dread on her face as she fanned herself in the humid sun, for graduation also meant the end of my life in the dormitory, and that meant I was coming home to stay under the same roof as Wendell.

  For income, I had my part-time job as a bicycle messenger. The pay was modest, but I was having little luck finding much else—college degree be damned—so I asked the messenger service to increase my hours to as many as they would allow. I was paid weekly, and every Friday I added to the roll of bills I kept hidden in an old boot in the corner of my closet, but the saving was slow going.

  One morning, however, the heavyset dispatcher sent me on a delivery that changed my fortune in a rather unexpected manner. It was—I realize looking back on it now—the second time within the space of a month that someone handed me a key and altered my prospects.

  “Be careful with this one,” the dispatcher advised me, chewing on a toothpick and handing me a slip with an address scribbled on it. “Character named Augustus Minton, but likes for his help to call him ‘Mister Gus.’ He’s a grumpy sonofabitch, but he’s richer than God. He writes a whole heap of them dime-store books under some other name—for kicks, I suppose—but he comes from important family, so we’re under orders not to rattle his cage. The old fart doesn’t get around too good, so if he doesn’t hear you buzzing, you’re to go around to the side entrance and use this key to let yourself in.”

  He handed me a house key and an envelope, eyeing me over from head to toe. “Hmph. I know you’re one of those book-smart Negroes and all, but I don’t expect you’ve ever been anywhere that compares to his house. Try to behave yourself. With any luck, you can leave the package downstairs and you won’t have to talk to him face-to-face.” He paused and rubbed his chin. “Now that I think about it . . . maybe I’ll phone over and warn him. Wouldn’t want the codger to be surprised by seeing a Negro in his house and have himself a heart attack.”

  The dispatcher shuffled away. The top flap of the envelope was open, and a quick peek inside revealed the package contained a slender manuscript written under a curiously quaint nom de plume, “François Reynard.” I had seen this name before, on bookshop shelves and even, sometimes, at the drugstore. He was the author of short, noir-style mysteries, the type of fare popular in the 1930s and more often than not snatched up by Hollywood and turned into movies.

  I memorized the address; it was on the Upper East Side. I tucked the key into my vest pocket and pedalled off on my bicycle. Messenger-boys were indispensable to publishing houses in those days. It seemed an endless stream of copies wanted dispatching all over the island of Manhattan and occasionally across the Brooklyn Bridge. Memos, typed carbons, and signed contracts whizzed between skyscrapers, brownstones, and mansions alike. A great many authors lived in New York at that time and quite often correspondences between writers and editors were ferried directly back and forth by messenger.

  I rode uptown and found the townhouse more or less as I had imagined it: a rather large, stately brownstone on East Seventy-eighth Street near the park. It was a corner building, the kind with a servants’ entrance around the side. After two attempts at the bell, I went to the side entry and tried the key. Once inside, I found myself in a narrow hallway. I followed it blindly into a foyer where my shoes echoed loudly on the pure white marble floor. A package wrapped in brown parchment was laid out on a small console table. I assumed it was intended for me, or rather for the publishing house that employed me, and I moved to collect it.

  “Who’s that? Who’s there?” came a voice. I froze.

  “My name is Miles Tillman, sir,” I called back. “I’m a messenger. Torchon and Lyle sent me.”

  “You’re not the regular boy,” the voice said. The timbre of it sounded tight, full of tension, as though he were holding back a wheezing cough. I was sure he was lying down and had been napping. I could hear him catching his breath from some remote back bedroom and I understood I had clearly woken him by ringing the bell and upset his regular routine. “Well?” the voice demanded. “Come on up here.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re here in my house, I need to get a look at you!” he snapped. “Don’t dawdle. I’m not getting any younger.”

  I set the package down, put a hand on the cold marble banister, and looked upwards in the direction of the voice. There was nothing to do but go. I reached the top of the stairs and was met with a hallway that extended in both directions. I hesitated, considering which way to turn.

  “Faster, boy!” he snapped. “You lack confidence. I can hear your mincing little step on the rug.”

  I moved in the direction of the voice, and found my way to the most cavernous, sumptuous, bizarre-looking bedroom I have ever seen. It was a veritable sultan’s palace. Every inch of the place was covered in velvets and silks. Cushions were piled in heaps amid animal skins stretched out all around the floor. I looked up and noticed there was no visible ceiling, just billowing swags of ruby-colored silk ascending, tentlike, to an apex from which dangled a strange-looking glass chandelier. Aesthetically speaking, the room charged headlong towards a state of gaudiness and then veered away at the last second. Until that day, I had never realized there existed people wealthy enough to bring the entire museum home with them.

  Sure enough, as I looked around, I saw several objects that very likely had, on some occasion, once been exhibited in an actual museum. Marble sculptures perched on ionic pedestals. Baroque figurines were arranged in clusters here and there on a fireplace mantel. Dark, jewel-toned Renaissance paintings hung on the walls, the ripples of muscular human and animal flesh so real and vivid, they threatened to topple right out of their gilded frames.

  “They’re copies,” Mister Gus said, catching me gazing at the paintings. “But quite accurate, I assure you. That’s a Titian.” I nodded absent-mindedly. “Don’t nod as if you know who that is,” he snapped in a petulant voice. “You don’t know who that is.” My eyes sought out the source of the voice. The room was big, dim, and ornate, and it took me some seconds before my gaze landed on a small face frowning at me over a mound of bedcovers.

  His brittle visage hovered over the bed, and I was struck by how it was possible he could appear paler than the white bedsheets. He was very much how I expected him to look, only smaller. He had sunken-in, skull-like features, the kind wherein the cheekbones and jawbones encircle each side of one’s face like two angular, upside-down trapezoids. His chin was very pointy, his eyes were a faded blue, his skin bore a mottled map of age spots. His lips had thinned to the point of becoming a taut line. You could see, though, from the dark pepper still present in his wiry eyebrows and in the dark fringe of his lower lashes, that once upon a time he had perhaps reminded people of Errol Flynn and had been something approaching handsome. Now he glared at me, waiting for me to speak.

  “That’s a Caravaggio,” I said, pointing to another painting in a far corner. This was a lucky observation. Once, when I was fifteen, I found a large book that had been abandoned under a bench in Central Park. Inside the book was a series of translucent envelopes filled with glossy black-and-white photographs of the great paintings of Western Civilization. I took the book home, extracted the photographs, and pasted them up all over my bedroom walls with Scotch tape. They gave me great pleasure to look at, and they hung there until two years
later, when my stepfather ripped them down in a routine fit of drunken irritation with me. The Caravaggio had been one of my favorites; I had taped it to the ceiling over my bed and memorized its shapes and lines, but I had never seen it in color and hadn’t understood all that I was missing. I stared at it with fascination now. It was like seeing a friend you thought you knew and realizing there were still a great many secrets you had yet to discover about each other.

  “Hmph,” he said. “When they telephoned to warn me you were coming, they said you were an educated Negro. I didn’t know how to picture that until just now.” He pointed to another painting over his shoulder, on the wall to the right of his bed. “Do you know that one?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” I admitted. He smiled instantly, a smug, gratified smile.

  “Then I guess there’s still some difference between us after all,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t agree with that, boy!” he snapped. “I just insulted you. Never agree with a man who insults you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He huffed and rolled his eyes. “Oh, I can see you are going to be trouble already,” he scolded. “Don’t you know enough not to abide a man who insults you?”

  “With all due respect, sir,” I said, “insults are relative. They depend on what a man aspires—or doesn’t aspire—to be.” Mister Gus looked at me a long time, his left eye squinting a tiny bit more than his right.

  “I believe,” he said finally, “that you just insulted me.” Only as he said this did I realize how brazen I had been. I thought about my job and swallowed, waiting for him to speak again, my pulse thundering in my ears. It would not take much for him to telephone the publishing company and have me fired. “Hmph,” he said. “Well. At least I can see you’re not going to be boring. Come here; let me get a look at you.”

  I drew closer to the bed. He must’ve been one of those old people who is perpetually cold; the blankets were tucked up to his chin. All of his body remained concealed beneath and only his long, spindly fingers curled over the folded edges of the cool white sheet. His eyes studied me, and I got the impression he was calculating a long and complicated math equation.