Ecstatic

by Victor La Valle

  – Is that why we’re here?

  – Well.

  – You keep that. Getting involved can change your entire life. Make you a better person.

  She pointed to the pamphlet and wouldn’t relent until I’d put the ten-page document in my jacket pocket. I was on the bed and so was she, but we faced dissimilar walls.

  Two hours past midnight Lorraine said, – You’ve been quiet.

  – I’ve been looking at you.

  She had a faint mustache over her upper lip. It didn’t make her ugly or masculine. Right then it was the most beautifully feminine thing that I could stand.

  I crept toward her. Dim light was the best special effect; it made me appear graceful. My knees were in some of her papers; my palms ground down on the books. She put one hand out to push me back, but I was fawning over her and she liked that as much as everyone does.

  She got into bed under the comforter. I dug in there to find one of her feet.

  Lorraine squirmed, but I pulled her down toward me. I touched the back of my hand against the top of her wide foot.

  I took her clothes off without getting to see her naked. Pulling the socks, jeans, shirt, panties even, while the covers stayed up to her neck. It was nice. Like she was stripping, but I only got to see the layers once they were removed. Her body, under there, became more real the harder I imagined.

  In the bathroom I ran a washcloth under hot water and motel soap then sat near her again and pulled the covers away from her thighs. I massaged the cloth into her leg until one was slick with bubbles. Under the knees. On her shins. Until the cloth was dry.

  Wet the hand towel again. Soap again.

  Lifted her other short thick leg onto my shoulder, pressed the red cloth against the back of her thigh. Wrapped the cloth over my pointed finger and touched it to where leg greets pelvis, where her skin shifted from one shade to one darker.

  Did this steadily until her hips matched the rhythm of the wet cloth and my hand. As she pushed against me lather wept down her leg.

  I squeezed the little towel until the soapy water uttered into a puddle in my hand then I rested my palm against her pussy. When she rubbed against me the slight tickle of her hair played up my forearm into my elbow. Moved my hand until the foam spread across us then I touched my hand to my own neck, to my mouth.

  The look on Lorraine’s face might have been mine. With her eyes shut she seemed far away. I wondered where. I doubt she was even focusing on Ahmed Abdel or that guy she lived with. She had reclined into that calm state people only find when alone.

  I rubbed the top of my head on the lips of her pussy just to spread her scent on me.

  I thumped her knees lightly with my fingertips.

  What sounds? If the curtain hadn’t been so thin there would have been that kind of total quiet when there’s no light. We had a sackcloth warmth in the room.

  I wanted to ask her everything.

  If she genuinely cared about Ahmed Abdel’s cause. Why she had started college late. If she had children. If she’d ever been out of the country. If she was in love with me.

  – Why won’t you give me your phone number?

  She answered sluggishly. – A woman keeps power however she can.

  – Why does that prisoner mean so much to you?

  – Because his mind is such a powerful tool.

  – Could you imagine feeling that way about me?

  I asked, but she didn’t answer. Only breathed.

  – What are you that I don’t know you are?

  Without hesitation Lorraine replied, –The hero.

  Two hours later Lorraine could sleep, but not me. I was pretty naked except for my T-shirt and boxers that I wore the whole evening because even in the dark I was self-conscious. I took them off since she was tuned out, then ran naked around the motel, three times.

  Okay I felt like doing that, but if I really had it would have been an act of joy, not madness, though it might have appeared otherwise to the average person.

  I did have trouble sleeping though, so I spent time in the bathroom wishing there was a television above the tub. I hadn’t even brought a book because I’d had this fantasy of Lorraine and I sexing each other for eleven hours, which is the kind of thing one comes to believe in when years pass between layovers. I forgot that people and parts get exhausted.

  Eventually I was so bored that I tried to wake Lorraine again, but her eyes were soldered shut. This led me to that paper she wrote. Just to do something. The one on the nightstand, the one that I took. I shut myself inside the bathroom and corrected the work.

  I didn’t mean to be snotty when I wrote questions in the margins like, Are you sure Ford was a ‘toad of a man’? and, Should you really describe Lee Iacocca as having ‘the business sense of a god’? and, Do gods really have business sense? Which one? Mammon? Ayizan?

  My suggestions left a terrible smell. Instead of running off tonight I wanted to have sex with her in the morning. I wanted to wake her by gliding my tongue up the crack of her ass. I wanted to do that many times in the coming weeks, but that wouldn’t happen if she found this cutjob. So I rewrote the paper, making the corrections I could, but without rearranging her ideas entirely. It was so much fun. I would have made a good English teacher, except that I hate kids.

  After I was done I wrote a note on another sheet of paper apologizing for having spilled water on her notebook, so that was why I had to do it over by hand. Then I tore her version, the one with my critiques, and flushed the scraps away.

  Fingers of my left hand were cramped from writing awkwardly; sitting on the toilet using my crossed leg as a desktop. After I put the notebook back on the nightstand I ran warm water over my hand, but I heard Lorraine mutter around so I thought she was waking up and I turned off the light in the bathroom. This was the first moment in an hour when I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I wanted to feel good alone.

  I shut the bathroom door then locked it. The water was running into the sink, but the faucet made another sound, too. Like a gas oven burner when the dial’s been turned halfway, but the flame hasn’t yet been lit. A –hisss– that was soothing not sinister. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror, only the outline of me since the light came faint through a small window near the ceiling. I couldn’t go outside and do it, but in here I took off my clothes to prance around the little room; I shook my naked ass celebrating an end to one long dry season.

  4

  Lorraine and I parted the next morning. Sunday, October 22nd. I never saw her again. She stopped calling. Her number had come up as ‘Unavailable’ on the caller i.d. box every time.

  But I wasn’t sad then. We didn’t talk about getting together again, but yes I’d expected it. Now it’s like there are two versions of me. The one who knows that she left and the one who doesn’t. My longing clouds the portrait of him, but his delight remains with me.

  I was overjoyed that day. So much I skipped in the parking lot then down the block to the bus stop. I just about popped.

  If I’d wanted I could have taken an express train rush through the Bronx and upper Manhattan, but back in Rosedale, this being Sunday, my sister was undoubtedly strapping on her church shoes.

  Nabisase’d been so angry two Sundays earlier when I first ran off and met Lorraine on the 6 that she made me promise to come the next weekend, but that was the first time the movers had work for me, overtime pay, so I swore to go this weekend, but then Lorraine again.

  I made the two-hour commute home last three. Passed four magazine stalls on various subway platforms; bought a Watchamacallit at each one. When I opened the kitchen door Grandma nearly pounced on my shoulders. – Where were you! she demanded. He’s here, she called.

  – Where did you go, Mom asked, coming up from the basement. Where did you get to?

  – I met a friend.

  – You must call, Grandma told me. She was using a bucket and mop on the kitchen floor. Though she was ninety-three, Grandma still sewed, did the laundry, walked to the superma
rket and carried groceries on her own.

  – Or else we wonder, Mom said. Tell us you won’t do this again.

  – An oath, Grandma whispered.

  – I promise, I swear, I pledge and I vow. Am I going to have to go to church, too?

  – You missed Nabisase, Grandma said.

  Am I crazy then, for expecting I’d avoided lecturing, hectoring? Mom even agreed.

  – You don’t need church, she said from the kitchen table where she was preparing a breakfast of asparagus spears and weak tea.

  Mom took my hand. – I know what can help you.

  I said, – Great.

  Every realm has its capitol and for Southern Queens that’s Jamaica. Sanctuary of discount shoppers. 99¢ stores and used cars sold along Hillside Avenue.

  Mom drove up Merrick Boulevard. It wasn’t congested at noon, but by one o’clock all the churches freed the faithful. You wouldn’t imagine how many believers there are until you see them filling the roads.

  I kept the car window down because I had the smell from between Lorraine’s legs still drying on my chin; no mother wants to smell pussy on her son’s face.

  – You’re right about that! Mom laughed and slapped the dashboard.

  I was embarrassed for what she might have heard. I put my hands around my forehead.

  – Did I say something?

  – Never mind that. You’re a grown man I guess.

  An admission I’d appreciate on any other afternoon, but this time it made me feel oily.

  – Reach in that dash, she said.

  Gladly. I went into the glove compartment elbow deep pulling out every item asking Mom if that’s what she wanted. What about this? In one movie I liked, Little Tricks, a man hides his monstrous, deformed brother under the car’s dashboard; the creature eats unsuspecting prostitutes one digit at a time.

  – One of the music tapes! Stop playing, Mom said. It has your name on it.

  The tape with my name on it was so old that the plastic outer shells were held together with Krazy Glue that had gone gummy brown in the cracks. While the tape began reeling I took off my shoes. I wanted to sleep. I would have, but then my mother asked me a question.

  – How old are you today?

  Her voice sounded strange because it was playing through our two car speakers. Then my answer was funny, because I squeaked. – I’m ten years old.

  – You keep these in the car? I asked over the recorded conversation.

  – Not always. Just recently.

  If I was ten on the tape then it was from 1982. She’d been taking photos, home movies and even these cassette tracks since I was five. Whenever she was institutionalized I sent her the tapes of Nabisase and I to comfort her.

  – How do you like your new little sister? My mother asked a ten-year-old Anthony.

  – She’s fine, he answered.

  – Is that all you can say about her?

  – My sister is always making BM’s!

  That’s how the dialogue went; I was underwhelmed, but my mother was marooned. She was back there now, in 1982, without need of rescue.

  She said, – Do you remember when you were that little boy?

  – You taped us a thousand times.

  The rest of the way she and I were quiet while Mom and Anthony spoke. They were funny, sometimes bland, but I enjoyed the time capsule, too.

  We parked on Linden Boulevard then walked around the corner onto Merrick. Two of the four corners at the intersection were occupied by gas stations, the third was a hair salon and fourth the Hillman Christian School.

  Hillman A.M.E. was the grandest landowner in Southern Queens; its elders ran the school and other businesses. The church itself, two blocks from this intersection, was one hundred thousand square feet. It looked like a massive clam, a wooden quahog, surrounded by flood lights. A house of worship constantly lit for a Hollywood premiere.

  This Hillman church consortium ran for-profit businesses like the Christian School along Merrick Boulevard. Hillman Neighborhood Care Team, Hillman Christian School Early Childhood Learning & Development Center, Hillman Home Improvement Association. Hillman Federal Credit Union.

  They placed caregivers with the homebound elderly.

  Ran small-business seminars.

  They were even buying back homes from the Arabs and Jews who’d been overcharging the largely working-class black renters for two decades. There was much applause for this in local black papers because it was still two years until Hillman A.M.E. raised the rents to prices neither type of Semite would have ever dared.

  – How many more of those tapes do you have? I asked her.

  – Plenty. Of you. You and your sister. Your sister and I. A couple of Grandma. Isaac.

  – We’re all saved, I said.

  The long corridor that is Merrick Boulevard pushed sounds up into the ceiling so that car horns and bus horns and truck horns, the music of Queens, floated away. And underneath them I heard the cheerful wind of birds flirting.

  I was constantly surprised by how many trees there were on every block out here. Is that a stupid thing to say? When I was at Cornell, Ithaca’s ponds, the foliage, made me forget what my city was really like. When friends who weren’t from New York would call it mechanical and unnatural I agreed. Pretty soon I was describing the piss in building staircases or heaps of trash ten feet high because I thought it made me tougher to come from a hard place. But I didn’t tell enough about Flushing Meadow Park’s scarlet maples. The white-rumped sandpipers of Jamaica Bay.

  – I want you to drive with us to a pageant in November. You know I can’t stay awake more than two hours in a car.

  I didn’t believe her. Not about the contest, but why she wanted my participation. – You just don’t want to leave me alone in the house for a weekend.

  One of the stores on this Hillman-owned block was our destination. – Anyway, she said, here we go. Mom held the door.

  I looked up to read the silver letters above the entrance. Hillman Halfway House, it read.

  – I’m not going in there.

  Mom pulled my arm forcefully. – What’s the problem?

  – A halfway house? You want to put me in a hospital, just take me there.

  She read the sign out loud then laughed. – I’m not thinking that way. You’ve got the wrong idea.

  – How do you mistake the words Halfway and House?

  – It’s a saying of ours. ‘Once you step inside you’re halfway to your goal.’

  – And what’s my goal?

  –To be healthy.

  – Healthy?

  –To be lean.

  –This is a weight-loss clinic?

  – It’s a Diet Center.

  My mother had to follow me back around the corner to Linden Boulevard, because I walked away.

  – What are you doing, Mom? This isn’t going to make things better.

  – It’s not? When did you become a doctor?

  – Oatmeal in the morning won’t fix me!

  She put a few of her nails into my hand. – Worked for me.

  I couldn’t deny that she looked force majeure, but this solution was as idealistic as Grandma’s. Labor was not a balm. At a job in the Bronx I’d tried to pick up a couch by myself a day ago and strained my shoulders.

  – Maybe you should just get me some of your Haldol. I’ll take it if that means you’ll all stop trying to save my life.

  – I’m telling you that’s wrong, Mom said. I stopped taking it a year ago. And look at me.

  Reflected in the glass panels of the hair salon on the corner Mom and I looked like a married couple. I was wearing a cheap suit plus my fat added twenty years. I looked forty-three. And Mom, fetching, sinewy, wearing a red rabbit fur scarf, seemed thirty-five at best.

  – So what do you use for . . . I tapped my right temple twice.

  – I used to have faith in doctoring. But the doctor’s had no faith in me. They don’t want you well just wasted.

  The stinging odor of hair dye made it
out to the street. Along with it came the vinegar odor of straightening treatments, the cloying dreadlock butter. We walked back.

  – Why is a church running a fat camp? How do they make a profit on it?

  – It’s in Hillman’s honor.

  – Hillman A.M.E., that’s a real guy?

  – Bartholomew Hillman was a slave in New York in 1787. He had a weight problem.

  –The church is named for a fat slave?

  – I wouldn’t say it that way.

  We reached the Halfway House again.

  – How could someone be a fat slave? Did he work in the master’s house?

  – No, she said. He worked in the field. They think it was a glandular problem.

  Inside, the reception area was a mix of purple and cream. The carpet, the chairs, the walls were these two swirled hues. It was like standing inside a bruised sky. Heaven as a lounge.

  At the back of the room there was a narrow door and a wide one. A lacquered wood desk with a receptionist behind it; the receptionist was the lady who walked over to greet my mother with a robust hug.

  – And this is my son.

  – You’re halfway there, the receptionist said to me in a quiet voice, cleared her throat then said louder, You’re halfway there.

  I don’t know how my mother found the clothes hooks on the wall. They were part of the misted background, indiscernible as each water particle in a cloud. Mom’s long brown coat floated nearby as she offered to take mine.

  – I’ll wear it a little longer.

  Mom didn’t fight me. She wore a thin white sweater with silver sparkles on the shoulders as epaulets. Her boots must have been part of the outfit sale at Rainbow Shop because they had sparkles too, on the three-inch heels. My mother was beautiful despite her general tackiness.

  There was a buzzing noise because the receptionist was pressing a button, though I couldn’t see where it would be on her desk. My mother walked to the narrow door and pointed to the other one. I didn’t want to go, but it was the only one I’d fit through. The big door was four feet wide, of gray steel, heavier than terror.

  – You go right in there, said the woman at the desk.

  – You’ll be happy. Mom cried.