“I want to come when you go see that man.”
“Maybe. Keep one of your dictionary pages open to patience.”
Kurt was still bouncing the ball on his racquet, but the racquet had switched hands.
“Nimble.”
“What?”
“You’re nimble. That’s my word for you today.”
“Procrastinator. As in a boy delaying getting his ass kicked in tennis by his old man. Get back over there and let’s hit.”
I smiled and ran to the baseline, my legs stiff from standing so long at the net. Kurt’s balls came quick, precise, smudging the white lines, every one in but every one so close to being out. Kurt said the key to the game was taking space away from the opponent, gradually shrinking where the opponent could go, and then, just at the right moment, putting the opponent on the run. He said “opponent” when he played tennis. He didn’t say guy or man. I was his opponent on the court, not his son. I was somebody to be beaten. I liked that. I liked that he thought enough of me to give me his best. That’s what a boy wants most from his father. The respect of being counted as an equal, of losing, maybe, but keeping that respect until the day he wins, which I was sure must feel like it felt when I traced Alice in the darkness.
Kurt beat me 6–0. We played a second set and I lost 6–0 again, but I hit better and found angles that surprised Kurt a few times. I even slid an ace by him. An old couple played on the court next to us. Their skin was the color of pancake batter; webs of purplish veins ran through their legs. They wore long visors and big black sunglasses. They seemed uncommonly pale. I had to squint to look at them. They were consistent but what little power they had was all above the waist. Theirs was a languid game, the ball a burned-out planet, arching and landing with no spin, but staying in play as if you took the game that was in them long ago and set it to slow motion. Kurt and I studied them from the fence shade.
“The legs go first on an athlete,” said Kurt. “Look at the guy. He shuffles and his swing is stiff. What’s that word, Jim? He’s lost his, ah … fluidity. That’s it. He’s lost his fluidity. He’s doing okay for an old guy, but you hate to see it happen, don’t you? I bet he can remember those days when his legs worked just fine. I bet he can see his game like his memory sees it.”
“It’s good that they’re hitting at their age, though.”
“No doubt. That’s how I’ll be one day. An old man with a can of balls, roaming tennis courts looking for games. Everything slower. Knees stiff. Ankles brittle. Shoulders cramped. Aging is like going into battle day after day. That’s what it seems like to me. Just so long as I keep my mind, remember what I know now about chasing balls and hitting angles. If I keep up my leg squats maybe it’ll be a long time before I slow down. It’s all about strong muscles.”
Kurt built his muscles in the basement of our Philly home. Like the back stoop he sipped his beer on after work, the basement, an unfinished, unpainted cave at the bottom of twelve narrow steps, was his place, except for the washer and dryer Mom had under a lint-shrouded window that let in strangled strands of light. When I went down, which wasn’t often, to hunt for a shirt or a pair of socks in a pile of laundry, it was an underworld of brass and copper pipes, slanted beams, half-driven nails, wires, circuit breakers, and gray metal boxes, the bones and veins of a house, absorbing and bending with footsteps that creaked like ghosts just beyond the square of light in the kitchen above.
Kurt kept his weights and barbells on a ripped rug near the drain in the center of the cement floor. A punching bag, suspended on silver chains, hung near the water heater whose blue flame glowed in the corner and seemed, to a kid’s imagination, an uncharted galaxy. Kurt had wanted to be a boxer when he graduated high school. He was a Golden Gloves prospect and the guys in the neighborhood and a few lines in the Inquirer had summed him up not as a natural but “a tough brawler who could take a punch.” Philly didn’t care much about prettiness; it was a city of looping fists and spat blood, a black-eyed and bruised small-town metropolis, much different from New York to the north, which seemed to me, on my one visit there on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History, to be splendor built on artifice (one of my first dictionary words). Being labeled “tough” in Philly was like having a seat at the Round Table.
One night after hurrying to a bout through a rainstorm, Kurt broke his right hand on the jaw of a counterpuncher from Asbury Park in round three of his tenth fight. He wore a cast for a month, which meant he couldn’t play tennis, a love he had kept a secret from the guys at the Kensington gym. Not having a racquet in his hand for so long seemed unnatural to Kurt. He quit boxing. He wasn’t going to be a great fighter; he’d have been a pugilist who’d have hustled with his gloves, rubbing alcohol, shoes, and workout bag from Atlantic City to Hoboken but never to the Spectrum or the Garden. Kurt saw through his dream early, saw in his mind, I suppose, what his body and luck could not achieve, not like a lot of Philly guys with crooked noses and scars under their eyes and stories of winter nights and icy rings in armories scattered through the Pinelands.
Kurt wasn’t ever going to touch the grass in Wimbledon, either, but tennis was the image of himself he wanted. It was what he trusted. Every autumn, when the rains came and the court nets were dropped and folded away, Kurt would tape his knuckles and hit the punching bag, light jabs at first and then, as the sweat came, harder body shots, making the bag shimmy and jump on its chains so it seemed Kurt and the bag were dancing in our basement. The kitchen floor shook, the living room floor shook. It could happen at any time. Kurt kept no set workout schedule, and sometimes Mom and I would be awakened at three or four in the morning by the slap-sound of the bag and the grunts and the rolling-metal clatter of barbells and weights dropping and gyrating on the basement floor like big nickels warbling on a countertop.
One time, maybe about three months before Mom died, I snuck downstairs in the hours before dawn and saw Kurt leaning back on a kitchen chair drinking a beer, knuckle tape dangling in strands, sweat pouring off him; he sat there until first light came through the window over the sink. It is the most amazing time when dawn strikes night. Kurt stood up that morning and scrambled eggs in a black skillet, whistling, his back slick. He didn’t see me. I slinked back upstairs and a few minutes later, I heard Kurt (he was Dad back then) open his bedroom door and I heard covers rustle and Mom laugh and the door shut, not with a slam but with the hushed click of a secret.
I eased back on the fence and watched the old couple. They leaned their racquets on the net and shared a water bottle from a cooler. They talked and pointed, reliving strokes and rallies the way you might reminisce over scrapbook pictures. I nudged Kurt. He rolled his eyes. I nudged him again and pulled up my sleeve and flexed.
“I’ve been working on my muscles, too.”
Kurt cracked up.
“Jesus, Jim, you’re gonna hurt yourself. Where is that little bump hiding anyway?”
I cracked up, too.
“You can use my weights when we get back to Philly.”
“When are we going?”
Kurt rested his head on the fence and closed his eyes. His smile died. He was silent for a while before he spoke.
“I’m worried about Vera. She’s not right. She can still be magical in that way she is. But she’s losing her grasp.”
“The other night I peeked into your room and she was staring at the gun on the nightstand.”
“She’s convinced that man is out there. But there’s no man. If there was, if he is like she says, he would have come long ago. We just can’t leave her. We’ve got to get her help. I feel bad about it. But I don’t regret taking this trip. As a father it maybe was not the best idea, but I never felt in danger, even from the beginning. I just figured we were living out one of Vera’s stories. I can’t explain it. She’s so different from me, but I think I wanted to hide in Vera’s stories. All those places out there she brought to us.”
“Do you think she was ever in the deserts and the Maghreb?”
“It’s hard to tell what’s real and not anymore.”
“What do you think?”
“Sometimes I think I see a shadow or feel a presence, as if someone is there watching us. When I turn there’s nothing.”
“The mind plays tricks. She’s got us half believing …”
We packed our racquets and walked past the old couple who had returned to the patter of their strokes. Kurt took off his wet shirt and grabbed a dry one from the Impala’s trunk, which had started to look like the closet of a traveling salesman: tools, jack, and spare tire covered in a jumbled tide of clothes, cups, blankets, paper bags, magazines, Vera’s underwear, straw hats, and the stuff that accumulates on a trip with no specific destination. The top was down and the sun seeped into the leather seats, and even though I was hot from playing tennis, the warmth of the car felt good. I leaned back and closed my eyes. Kurt slipped us into traffic and after a few minutes, amid a scratchy Walter Jackson ballad and the rattle of Sunday churchgoers, I smelled the sea air and thought of what it would be like to gallop on a horse across a North African beach, splashing in the surf beneath cliffs and racing through whitewashed villages with blue and green shutters, and into the great souk, dipping my hands into sacks of cumin and saffron, and sitting in a café sipping tea, an overhead fan stirring the musty, ancient air around me. What’s wrong to think like that? To be in a place so strange? Maybe Vera wasn’t there, or maybe she was. How can you tell stories so precise if they are not real? How can you conjure worlds so intimate if they’re false? Threads of gasoline coiled through the sea breeze. I heard snatches of passing radios and felt the Impala turn a corner. The air turned hot, sugary, and butter-smeared. I opened my eyes. Kurt parked in front of a Krispy Kreme.
“I’ve heard these are the best donuts. They don’t make ’em up north.”
Kurt went in and I could see him through the big spotless window, standing in line at the counter, among people sitting in red swivel seats, reading newspapers and smoking. It was bustling and bright, the opposite of the diner Edward Hopper painted, the postcard Vera kept in her macramé purse. Hopper painted with an “interior vastness,” the postcard said, that made his diner the loneliest place on earth. His characters looked as if they had lost something but were too tired to go look for it. Vera believed they had stopped looking for intervention, divine or otherwise. What I thought about most, though, was what was beyond the frame: The characters stared past the borders of Hopper’s brush to vistas only they could see. He created them but they had needs he could not fill. Vera said the genius of Hopper was making you wonder about what wasn’t shown. I knew what she meant. It was better not to know everything, to keep a space the imagination could fill in, like the slivers of white on the page between letters and words.
Krispy Kreme evoked no such allusion. It was pale green, white, and dazzling. Its red letters stood in the sun like calligraphy copied from a book written by a monk.
Kurt came out with a dozen donuts, a cup of coffee, and an orange juice. He set the box on my lap, opened it, and lifted a chocolate-covered donut sprinkled with coconut. I chose a glazed. It was warm and sticky and light as spun cotton, and melted on my tongue quicker than communion. Kurt ate two more, one covered in crushed peanuts, the other a custard that drooled down his chin and onto his shirt. He laughed at the mess. He gunned the Impala and we screeched out of the parking lot with Krispy Kreme napkins whirling out of the backseat as if we were in a parade or had just won the World Series. The ocean was dead ahead. The waves lunged white and heavy on the shore and the spray kicked up rainbows in the sun. Kurt parked and sat on top of his seat and looked over the windshield to the water.
“The great beyond. Ships I’ve painted are out there making port-o-calls and emptying their bilge. My work sails around the world. I like knowing that. And after years they come back to be scraped of their barnacles and painted again. It’s amazing, Jim, what the sea can do to something as hard and heavy as a ship.”
Kurt opened his door. He took off his shoes and his custard-stained shirt, jogged across the blacktop, over the boardwalk, and across the sand, into the waves. I ate another donut and sat on the top of my seat, watching him. I felt like a king or a prince, lording over the world in a convertible, looking out at people on their blankets, all those lives and stories, the sounds of living tangled in the wind and blowing away like a ball of sound too knotted and intricate to decipher. I left Kurt to his waves and went up to Room 503. The bed was made, the Almond Joy wrapper and the roach of a joint were gone; the scents of the night before, gone; the carpet vacuumed, two white towels folded on the bathroom rack near a basket of soap, shampoo, and a rolled-up washcloth made to look like a bird. It was my room, but it was a new room, and tomorrow when I was gone, if we were still leaving tomorrow, the room would look the same for a new guest who wouldn’t know that a boy from Philly touched for the first time a girl’s breasts in this very place.
I went to 501 and knocked. Vera opened the door and pointed to a lipstick map on the mirror. The gun was on the bed, her purse was in shambles, and Vera was wrapped in a towel and wet from the shower, mascara dripping around her eyes like Alice Cooper.
“How was tennis, Jim? Did you beat that old man of yours? Where is he now? In the ocean I bet, washing off his sin. It’s Sunday. A day for baptism. I got his note. I didn’t worry, but I had to stay in the room. I sense the man is in this hotel or very close. I thought we were out of danger, but as I told you …”
She pointed to the lipstick map.
“It’s pretty, don’t you think? Quite specific, too. Streets in tangerine, escape routes in red. You, me, and Kurt will go over it later. We need to coordinate.”
She sat on the bed so much smaller than when she’d told the tales of her past. Her shoulders were beaded with water, her hair flat and damp, lusterless. I thought of when we met in the diner, when Vera spun into Philly drinking frozen lemonade vodkas and playing tennis with Kurt in the alley. I wished I could have kept that image of her, the way one cuts a picture to fit into a locket. But people won’t let you do that to them.
Late the night before we left Philly, I came down to the kitchen and saw through the back door Vera sitting on Kurt’s stoop. Her legs were pretzel-folded, her back straight; a candle shone before her in a glass beside two sticks of incense. She hummed, gathering light and smoke with her palms and washing them over her face. I wondered then what our neighbors would have thought looking out of their row-house windows and seeing Vera chanting and collecting candlelight as the Inquirer’s delivery trucks thunked bundles of papers on sidewalks and paperboys walked into the dawn with the world’s news.
“Tell me a story, Vera. Something from far away.”
“So many. Where to begin? I am a vagabond, Jim. I should have put all my experiences into songs and hymns. That’s the best way to tell them. I’ll think of a good story for later. Right now I’ve got to get out of this room.”
She went into the bathroom and through the crack in the door I saw her towel drop on the floor and in the mirror I saw Vera’s bare back. I turned away and sat on the bed by the gun. She came out of the bathroom wearing a long, gauzy white shirt over her black bikini, those big black sunglasses and that straw hat, looking like a movie star in hiding, an alabaster girl summoning courage to face the sun. I followed her into the elevator.
“Why is that radio downstairs always playing the Beach Boys? Jesus. They gotta change stations.”
“Yup.”
“Something classical, maybe.”
The doors opened and we walked across the lobby — I didn’t see Alice or Slim at the front desk — and out the door to the boardwalk. It was starting to feel like home. Vera scanned the beach and spotted Kurt, tumbling through a wave, then rising and bending to catch his breath. Vera looked up and down the boardwalk, then behind her. She switched shoulders with her macramé purse and descended the stairs to the sand, hurrying toward Kur
t, her straw hat blowing off, which I caught, and her white shirt tugged by the wind. She got to Kurt and hugged him, held on to him until he lifted her and spun her above the surf and she started laughing and crying and she whispered things into his ear and slid down his wet body so she could stand. She threw me her shirt and purse, but kept her sunglasses on as she and Kurt swam out over the surf to flat water. Kurt waved to me from out there, and I pretended it was a call for help, a plea from a distressed sailor who had tumbled off his ship. Vera looked like a bug in those big black glasses, chin skimming the water and her hair falling in straggles into the sea. I sat on the beach like a dog waiting to be walked. The sun was not too hot and every now and then a chalky cloud, tall and fat as a building, lumbered across the sky, throwing a shadow over the beach and chilling the air. I closed my eyes and listened, and I guess I must have fallen asleep; the next thing I saw was Kurt standing over me, dripping water on my face.
“Get up, boy,” he said, laughing. “You think this is a vacation or something?”
Vera was still out beyond the waves. Kurt plunked in the sand.
“She okay?”
“Right now, yeah.”
“She drew an escape map on the mirror. In lipstick.”
Kurt half smiled. He sat like a breathing statue.
“There used to be slave ships out there, Jim. Not that long ago, either, in historical terms anyway. Could you imagine being a boy or a man chained for weeks, maybe months, in the bottom of a wooden ship? Chained to hundreds of others. What did they think at night, listening to the creaking of that big boat, wondering where in the hell they were going? Death and stink all around them.”
Kurt let it stop there. He stared at the horizon. I imagined sea and shoal and forest and mountain rising in the blue-green of the New World. Not for those on the boat; theirs was a land of whips and ropes looped over trees, fields of cotton and tobacco and big pillared houses. It was hard for a white person to feel close to a black one. Even the black families on this beach, scattered dark splotches in the sand drinking out of coolers and building castles just like the white families next to them, seemed exotic, living in my world, but not exactly in it, as if there was another dimension, existing alongside mine but separated by a sheet of glass as clear and as impenetrable as a Krispy Kreme window. Everyone pretended, but sometimes make-believe was not enough, and that’s when you felt bad about your white skin, how much it gave you, how much it took from others.
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