by H. M. Naqvi
Maybe we weren’t such good hosts, or were bad guests, or perhaps our novelty had worn thin, because we had been invited less and less to the Ducks in the preceding few months. It had to do, in part, with Jimbo—every relationship has its natural ups and downs—but we liked to believe that we had an independent relationship with her. AC even said, “The best thing about you, Jimbo, is your girlfriend. If you two ever break up, I’m not only, ah, taking her side but taking her, period.” Although he didn’t mean it—or I didn’t think he did—he said it often enough. Of course AC never admitted that he might have contributed to the fraying of our relationship. At a midsummer soirée, he had mounted the Duck’s best friend in the bathroom, and the best friend’s fiancé—the fey, tan, mole-faced rockstar whom we all know—held the Duck unfairly responsible for the tryst.
Nevertheless we still harbored great plans with the Duck, plans we had discussed several times when everybody else had left and we had her to ourselves. We talked about a road trip out West, across America, a pilgrimage, really, to Las Vegas. “Wouldn’t that be something, boys?” she’d said. Sitting on a bergère chair, sipping ice wine for breakfast, I imagined the journey: there would be Main Streets and motels and postcard vistas on the way, the singing of show tunes, chatty nights in small-town Comfort Inns, and finally the dazzling city of glass rising in the desert like a mirage. It might have all been fanciful conversation, but it didn’t really matter anymore. Who then could have anticipated that it would soon not be possible for three brown men to drive across America in a rented car, even with a blond in tow?
“What the hell are you waiting for, chum?” AC yelled. “I swear to God that blow has knocked a screw loose in your head.”
“Aren’t we, um, going to say hello to the Duck?”
AC swept his broad forehead with his free hand as if to sweep an errant thought. “No. We’re here to summon Jimbo. This is not a social call. This is an exercise in touch and go. You follow?”
Nodding toward my VP, I said, “Okay, okay, but what do we do with this guy?” As he lay prone across the backseat, a silver glob of drool dribbled down his cheek. “We can’t just leave him.”
AC sighed. “You want to say hello to the Duck? Then go say hello. But don’t exchange kisses and formal pleasantries and notes on the inclement weather. I’m warning you: if you’re not back in six minutes flat, I will shanghai this cab and dump your VP in the Hudson.”
“Okay, yaar, okay. I get it. I get it.”
When I opened the car door, AC grabbed me by the shoulder. “One more thing,” he said. “Convey my, ah, love to the Duck.”
Jumping out bearing AC’s affection, I sprinted inside the gray building, which I had once overheard being described by a tenant as neo-Bauhaus. The lobby was deserted but was usually populated by a marvelous set whose vocation involved a strict regime of walking their dogs and dining at Cipriani’s. At the reception, I introduced myself to the doorman, a portly Bulgar defined by mutton chops and a lazy eye. Picking up the receiver, he looked me up and down with his good eye as he dialed, glancing at his watch as if to suggest that this is no time for men like you to visit here. “Another one down here,” he announced with Eastern European bluntness. “Yes, miss, yes, miss, that the one, miss.” Turning to me, he instructed, “You get your friend.”
As I rode the elevator up to the penthouse, my ears, as usual, popped. Consequently, when the doors slid open, I heard strident voices in the distance but missed the back-and-forth, save the following emphatic pronouncement: “You’re drunk, Jimbo! You’re always drunk!” Turning the corner, I found Jimbo, wobbly and watery-eyed, like a Cyclops with a spear through the eye. As if expecting me to be there, he wordlessly tumbled into my arms. “Easy on, Jimbo,” I grunted, falling against the wall with a thud. Somehow I managed to guide him into the elevator and prop him against one side, cheek against the wall. He began mumbling some mumbo jumbo that I could not readily decipher, though the gist was obvious. “I’ll make things right, yaar,” I whispered. Assisting him the best I could, I walked him through the lobby to the cab.
When AC jumped out to help, I told him, “Give me a minute,” and was already jogging back in when he yelled after me. The doorman stumbled off his stool, waving me down, crying “HAI YOU! HAI YOU!” but he was also too slow. Jamming the elevator on the fifth floor with a horizontally placed pack of cigarettes, I strode determinedly to the Ducks, though I was not sure what impelled me or what I was going to say or do. I just needed to see her.
The Duck stood in the doorway, wrist on hip, arm on frame, in plush cherry red slippers and a knee-length lavender nightgown. She wore a tired smile and, save a cursory application of Chapstick, no makeup; and though she would typically have her gold locks in a bagel-shaped bun, that night her hair was wet and loose like she had just stepped out of the shower. “Hiya, Chuck.”
“Hiya, Dora!” I said, kissing her on either cheek, taking in the wheat-germ freshness of her shampoo.
“Why on earth are you wearing shades?” she asked, then exclaimed, “Oh my God!” when I took them off to reveal my shiner. Brushing my bruise with creamy fingertips, as if to make sure it was real, she asked, “What happened?”
“It’s nothing, really.” I figured that I could not or maybe did not have to lie, but later I thought maybe I should have. “We got into a scuffle. It was a misunderstanding, I don’t know. These guys, they thought we were talking about blowing up something, or something …”
Crinkling her pug nose, the Duck asked, “Why would they think that?”
“I don’t quite know.”
We stood in the cold corridor. Not knowing where to look, we smiled vaguely at each other’s feet. The Duck slipped one foot out of her slipper, scratched her ankle, and said, “Well, it’s wonderful to see you, Chuck, but what’re you doing here?”
“Just thought I’d say hello?”
“Oh,” she said with a tender laugh. “You’re darling.”
As she shifted, I could glimpse into her apartment. Save for a big blank trademark Rothko on the facing wall (which I had attempted to make sense of for several years), everything inside—the furniture, drapes, carpeting, ceiling—was in earth tones. It was a warm, inviting scene. Lyman, a permanent fixture, was nowhere in sight, but at that instant I felt the urge to pat him, have him lick my hand. I found myself saying, “Isn’t it too late for goodbyes?”
“What does that mean?” the Duck asked, cradling her elbows in her hands. I shrugged. Then she said, “The last few weeks have been rough for all of us—”
“I just kind of wanted to know what happened here tonight.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Because we’re friends?”
“Well, okay, Chuck, if you really want to know: your friend barged in drunk as a sailor, and I baby-sat him for a while, but it’s late, and I’m tired, and I shouldn’t be explaining myself to him again and again and again. It’s time he explain himself to me, but instead he babbles. Do you know he’s been calling at four in the morning? I listen for a while but then put the receiver on the pillow. I mean, I love Jimbo to death—you know that—but this can’t go on. You’re his friend. Get him on the wagon or something—”
“This isn’t about Jimbo’s drinking.”
“Look,” she said, the skin tightening across her face, “you’re a good guy, you really are, but what’s happening between us is none of your business!”
“Just give him some time—”
“I’m not doing this right now—”
“You’re his world!”
“Then he needs to stand up for me!”
Just then the Bulgar rolled down the hall, huffing and puffing and red in the face. “I run, miss,” he panted, resting his hands on his thighs, “but he run faster.” The Duck glanced at me, then at him, and for a moment I thought, That’s it, it’s over, I would be escorted unceremoniously out of the building by the irascible Bulgar. That would have been that. Except the Duck said, “
It’s okay, Georgi. There’s been a misunderstanding.”
Georgi did not care for the disclosure. Before turning to leave, he solemnly shook his head as if he had been insulted, had been told, All Bulgars are bastards, Georgi. When he was out of earshot, the Duck, smiling, said, “You’ve caused a stir. You boys always do.”
“I’m sorry, Dora, I’m sorry. I’m out of line—”
“No, I’m sorry, dear—”
“I should get going.”
“Well, it is getting late,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll see you around. Kiss, kiss. Ciao bella.”
“Ciao, ciao,” I said, but as I turned away, I thought I heard the Duck mumble, “I don’t get you guys …”
There was something in the tenor of the phrase, in the way she said you guys, that got me hot and bothered. It might have been the offhand suggestion that we eluded her despite all the time we had spent together or that we had somehow mutated overnight. Although I felt no different, I had this feeling that the Duck wasn’t the same. When I thought about it later, the few times we had happened to run into her, it was as if she had became more normal, more like us, like everybody else, contending with her own neuroses and anxieties, searching for something meaningful, something real. Someday soon she would find love again and find herself, take salsa classes, go bungee-jumping, move to Europe. And someday we might cross paths again, wave across a room, perhaps even exchange kisses and pleasantries.
Turning around, I asked, “What don’t you get?”
“Huh?” came the reply through the crack in the door.
“I said, what don’t you get?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes, I do.”
Pulling the door open with a purposeful tug, she persisted, “Right now?”
I nodded again. “Yes,” I said, “I do.”
“Okay, Chuck. Here goes. I don’t get how you guys are always boozing it up and everything but, like, aren’t supposed to. Jimbo’s father doesn’t know his son drinks. He certainly doesn’t know that we’ve been dating for years. That’s crazy to me, just crazy. I mean, you guys are like one way here, like hardcore, homeboys, whatever, but when you guys go home, you become different, all proper and conservative. You have to decide what you’re about—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Easy on, Dora!” My mouth was dry, and I felt sweaty and dizzy. “You’re what, like thirty-one? Have you decided what you’re all about yet? Why is it so strange that our behavior is, um, defined by certain contexts? Do you snort coke in front of your parents? I mean, what’s this really all about?”
“I’m not going to listen to your childish speech!”
“Fine,” I said, putting my shades on and turning my back. “Don’t.”
“Wait!” she cried, “don’t walk away,” but I kept walking, and then the elevator doors closed on us.
We could have turned back. We should have turned back. We had had an inauspicious start and were no closer to Connecticut than when we left four hours earlier. After the events of the night, I had a bad feeling about the expedition, a kind of numinous unease. Most people are unaware that cabbies belong to a particularly superstitious demographic; every cabbie believes that he (and the odd she) is protected from the whimsical vicissitudes of city streets by God or gods, by some system or talisman—a rabbit’s foot, a cross, a pair of hairy red dice. The perceptive passenger might even notice a heavy Haitian amulet swinging from the rearview mirror to ward off the evil eye, or the hand of Fatima, a statuette of the Virgin fixed on the dashboard or the Grim Reaper of Santa Muerte, stickers of the Sikh prophet Guru Nanak or the Hindu monkey god Hanuman on the inside of a door. After 9/11, Muslim cabbies bore American flags. Although I did not subscribe to portents or voodoo and had not been committed to the directives of Allah in any meaningful way, I wished I had something, anything to hold on to then.
Pressing on, we rattled by parked cars, shuttered shops, green orbs refracted through wisps of steam rising from open manholes. Just before the rain began coming down in sheets, a crisp gust scattered newspapers and plastic bags. Outside the meatpacking district, a lone prostitute holding down a precariously perched orange wig blew me a kiss. When I nodded in gentlemanly acknowledgment, AC said, “You’re not having much luck with women tonight.”
“Why would you say that?”
“That was a tranny chum.”
“You would know.”
If Lady Luck had not been smiling at me, she had bitch-slapped Jimbo. Tipped over, he rested his large head in AC’s lap as AC ran his fingers through his dreadlocks, consoling him with a variation of the platypus and dodo parable. It did not seem to make any discernible impression on him because he continued to murmur inaudibly like a toddler too exhausted to bawl. Watching him in the rearview, I felt horrid, like I had let him down. I couldn’t make things right. I wasn’t sure why I even tried. Changing tack, AC started singing raucous bhangra numbers for our heartsick friend’s benefit—Saday naal ravo gay to aish karo gay / Zindagi kay saray mazay cash karo gay—when he suddenly yelled, “Five-O at twelve o’ clock!”
As advertised, there was a roadblock up ahead: two patrol cars facing each other at a slight angle, a couple of cops in raincoats waving us down. As a cabbie, I derived comfort from police presence, especially at night, because the crazies came out at night. That night, however, we were the crazies: we had a hostage situation in the backseat. Curled up against the door, my VP remained cuffed and blindfolded, and though he hadn’t stirred again, he whimpered as if to remind us of his presence. The last thing we needed that night was a brush with the law. “Quick, yaar!” I yelled, slowing down. “Untie that guy!” Reaching over, AC unraveled the tie and hung it around his neck like a scarf, but when he whisked the handkerchief off, my VP awakened with a start, rubbing his eyes and wiping his mouth with the retail $225 Hermès. Turning to AC, he asked, “Who the fuck are you?”
“The bouncer from Flash Dancers, numnuts,” AC replied. “We caught you groping Belinda.”
“Belinda?”
“In the VIP room. Remember?”
The VP’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Let me put it in, ah, vernacular: you’re in deep shit, chum.”
Pointing timidly at Jimbo (who, in turn, studied him with one open eye), he asked, “And who’s he?”
“You groped him as well! Now shut up! And sit tight! One peep out of you, and I swear I’ll hand you over to New York’s finest, and you know they don’t take kindly to sex offenders.”
When I stopped, a beefy middle-aged cop swaggered toward the cab, flashlight in hand. He had the mien of an ex-Marine, and his name tag read BROPHY. Leaning out, I asked, “Is there a problem, officer?”
“Yeah,” he drawled. “For starters, why’re you wearing shades, friend?” Cops always busted balls. That was their job. It would be weird if they were like, Isn’t it a nice night, sir? The moon’s out, and you can see the North Star, and oh, there’s Orion’s belt.
“What? Oh. These? They’re, um, prescription. I broke my last pair.”
“Why isn’t your meter running?”
“What?”
“Your ‘off duty’ sign’s on.”
“Oh.”
“You speak English, right?”
“Yes, sir, officer.”
“We took a wrong turn back there,” AC yelled from inside the cab. “And our cabbie—being fair and morally upright, a, ah, man of genuine character—switched the meter off so as not to overcharge us. Rest assured, officer, we’ll tip him accordingly.”
Officer Brophy regarded the scene in the back and lingered for a few moments. In the rearview mirror, I could see Jimbo propped up, head tilted back as if he were nursing a nosebleed, one eye half-open, and AC smiling widely, appearing somewhat derelict if not quite sinister. As the muscles on Brophy’s face tightened, he muttered something into his radio. “Step out of the vehicle,” he instructed.
I had no idea what triggered his concern—and frankly, I never may—but at the
time the following thought hit me: We’re a bunch of brown men in a car, the night of heightened security in the city. We looked appropriately unshaven, unkempt, possibly unwholesome. I could have been silly or paranoid, but it was the first time I had felt this way: uneasy, guilty, criminal. I hesitated for an instant, trying to think of something to say, something conciliatory or funny, but I couldn’t—perhaps because I figured that I was developing a talent for putting my foot in my mouth. So I simply, silently opened the door.
“Let me see your license.”
When I produced the relevant document, Brophy examined it closely, comparing my laminated passport-sized photo to my face. I smiled and squinted, shielding my eyes from the rain.
“Where’re you headed?”
“Um, Greenwich Street.”
By now, another cop had appeared by the other side of the cab, a Hispanic sporting a crew cut and straight mustache. Again AC intervened: “I’ve got a couple of bankers in the back. We were out celebrating a two-hundred-million Euro bond offering at a strip club. You can’t blame us. There’s so little to celebrate these days.”
Brophy processed the information slowly, as if AC had just gushed a verse of Urdu poetry. Removing his hand from the hilt, he sighed. “You know you shouldn’t be driving around at night with shades.”
“Yes sir, officer. I’m sorry.”
Swatting the license in my open hand, Brophy and the other cop turned to walk back, but just as I sat back down, drenched and relieved, my VP cried, “Hey! Wait! I don’t know these guys!” The cops stopped in their tracks, looked at each other, and then turned to look back at us. As they wearily plodded back in the downpour, I heard a resounding thwack, followed by an oomph in the back. From the corner of my eye, I caught my VP hunched, handling what I imagined were his bruised family jewels. Slapping him on the back, AC whispered, “You try that again, chum, and you won’t be able to produce progeny.” My VP grunted weakly.