Claudius stared brazenly at them. “She does,” he said. “She really does.”
He had come to New York from West Oakland with certain notions regarding life out here, that the city’s summer heat and dust, and its soot-encrusted winter ice, were those of the cultural comet, which he ached to witness if not ride. Because of these notions, he manipulated gestures and disguises, pushed the very core of himself outward so that you could see in his face and in the flare of his broad nostrils the hard radiance of the soul-stuff that some people chatter on about. Though the features of his face didn’t quite agree, he could convince you he was handsome. For this trickery his implements included a collection of Eastern-style conical hats and retro four-finger rings. His choice for tonight: a fez, tilted forward on his head so that we, both of us, felt emboldened by the obscene probing swing of the tassel.
Claudius and I knew what we were toasting: the next phase of life. At parties like this the crowd was older, college seniors who already had New York apartments, graduates who were starting to make their way, and folks who were already far enough into their youth to start questioning it. The booze was better and the weed was sticky good. The girls were incredible, of course, especially here. You could taste a prevalent Caribbean flavor in the air, as if the parade through Brooklyn’s thoroughfares on Labor Day had never stopped and this had been its destination all along. If not Caribbean like Sybil, the girls were African like Naomie or something else distinct and of the globe. Each girl had her own atmosphere. We were convinced they wore better, tinier underwear than the girls we knew, convinced they were mad geniuses of their bodies.
“So where’d you two escape from?” Naomie asked, though her gaze drifted out to the backyard again.
“Uptown,” Claudius said. “Columbia.”
“Roar, Lion, Roar,” Sybil said.
“We graduated in May,” I lied.
“Mazel tov,” Naomie said.
Sybil shook her head and laughed.
Naomie’s attention snapped all the way back now. “What? I can totally say that.”
Sybil made a popping sound with her mouth.
“Fuck you,” Naomie said. She sounded angry but smiled in a pretty way. “Hello? The original Semites? They were African. My people basically.”
Sybil made her mouth pop again.
“Beta Israel, bitch,” Naomie said, and the two of them laughed.
Claudius and I laughed too, though neither of us really knew what was funny. Before we could pick up the thread of the conversation, the girls left without saying a word.
We slid up the stairs after them and wound past the partygoers perched there gossiping or flirting or losing themselves in mazelike privacies of thought. On the second floor, a group of people stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway of one room, as though to block something illicit from view. Claudius and I pushed past them and found ourselves in an immense bathroom, where voices echoed off the tiles. Two girls stood fully clothed in a tacky, powder blue Jacuzzi, their heads framed by a backlit square of stained glass over the tub, but they weren’t our girls. We returned to the hallway and caught Naomie and Sybil coming out of a bedroom, trailed by the skunky-sweet odor of marijuana. We pursued them downstairs and out into the backyard.
Claudius jumped into their line of vision and said, “So let’s play a game.”
For a moment the girls acted as though they had never seen us before, then Sybil’s eyes widened. “Wow,” she said.
Claudius announced that we should all trade confessions. “Shameful stories,” he said. “Secrets. The worse they are, the better.” This idea seemed to have been inspired by the refrain of “Brooklyn Zoo”—Shame on you! Shame on you! The girls seemed amused but unconvinced by his suggestion; Claudius went on anyway. “Who wants to go first?” he said, and waited. But this waiting was just a sham. Of course he would be the one to begin.
What we aimed to achieve in these moments required patience and a strategic silence. Then, when we did speak, there was a distinct lowering of our voices—even in loud places, so that we’d have to lean in close. We made eye contact that was both firm and soft, not quite a stare, and we broke it occasionally to let our gazes trickle down the full lengths of their bodies. This had to be less wolfish than a leer, more a sly undressing. The total effect would be a kind of hypnosis, inducing a gradual surrender of the self. As we’d developed it, this method had worked plenty of times with the girls on campus, but we knew that this was nothing to be proud of. College is nothing if not four years of people throwing themselves recklessly at one other.
In his affected murmur, Claudius told us a story I had heard before. The story may or may not have been true, but it shocked people, or aroused them, or made them feel vulnerable and sad. Claudius wasn’t what you would call a patient guy. He needed to know as soon as possible where people stood, especially girls. Here is the story: When he was in high school, he discovered that the old lady who lived alone next door was watching him from her window. Every morning and evening, with the door locked against his alcoholic mother, he would exercise in his room wearing only his briefs. Furiously blinking, Claudius told them: “Calf-raises, push-ups, chin-ups, and crunches till I dropped. And there she was, this old biddy, looking dead at me with her old biddy glasses on like it was the most natural thing in the world, like I was putting on a show. So that’s just what I did. At first I stood at the window and stared right back at her, rubbing my chest and abs. Then, after a week or so of this, I started rubbing baby oil on myself. Took it up a notch by walking around butt-ass naked, and when that didn’t faze her, I tried to get my girlfriend to help me put on a sex show. Well, she wasn’t having it. Too innocent, I guess, so get this: I masturbated instead, stroking it right in front of the window. The old biddy watched this too, but the next night she wasn’t there. Poof, gone. Wasn’t there the next night either. That was the last night she watched me. I guess she got to see what she’d been waiting for all along.”
In unison the girls let out a shriek, which spilled into rapid chatter that was like another language. Even in the dim party lights, their darting eyes stood out, fine russet and amber stones. Their bodies shook with laughter as they slapped their thighs and rocked their heads back. The flurry of motion seemed to release scent from them: ripe sweat and vanilla oil with traces of almond. Naomie’s perfect afro eclipsed broad sections of the room in its orbit. Other girls had been either repulsed or aroused by the story, unambiguously so. None had ever reacted like this. And something else was off. Naomie’s wild mouth and eyes appeared to move independently of the rest of her face. She looked like a defective plastic doll.
“What the fuck?” Sybil said finally. In her accent, the word fuck became for us a powerful sexual clue. “This one thinks he’s a freak,” she said and then sent Claudius’s tassel spinning with a flick of her finger.
“Shame is the name of the game,” he replied, with a flare of his nostrils. “It was the nonsense of that age.” He was speaking a little too grandly now, even for him. “Let’s get on with the nonsense of this age.”
The girls whispered to each other, blew soft gibberish onto each other’s necks.
“Well,” Claudius said, “who’s next?”
“Him,” Naomie said. We had their attention now. “What’s he got to say?”
All three of them stared at me, waiting. There were a million ways I could go, but every corridor of my mind led to the same place.
“My dad,” I began, saying the first and only words that came to me. I explained that he was a white man, born and raised in Italy. He would always call my mother his cioccolata. Whenever she was angry with him, yelling for one reason or another, he would laugh and pet her cheek. In those moments he would tell her she was agrodulce, always retaining some of her sweetness.
Claudius smiled when I said this. He liked when I used my Italian on girls.
I told them how much my father loved my mother and her family. He especially liked when her younger sisters would visit us. This was
when I was a boy. Before they arrived I would sit on the rim of the tub and run my finger along the edge of the shower curtain, watching as he beautified himself. He’d put on cologne and decide whether to leave one or two buttons open at the neck of his finest shirts. He’d make sure his cheeks were perfectly stubbled. During the visits he charmed as he mixed drinks, kissed the backs of hands, and admired new hairstyles. He ladled praise over my pretty aunts in easy pours. I had always adored him.
Claudius had stopped smiling. I wasn’t telling a shameful story. My story wasn’t helping our cause at all. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I kept on.
Things like this would frustrate my mother, I told them; she accused him of flirting and loudly complained about his lack of respect for her. One day, when I was twelve, something else really brought out her fury. She came home from work hours before I was expecting her, and found me at the kitchen table looking through my father’s collection of dirty magazines. I had seen his nudies before, and had previously avoided detection by taking only quick peeks, but this time I discovered, or could no longer ignore, the fact that my father had specific preferences. I was riveted by the curves of the women’s buttocks, their dark nipples, and the dense blackness displayed between their thighs. My mother picked through the pile—I hadn’t realized until then how many there were—and from time to time, between glances at me, she would touch a finger to the mute faces of the women in the pictures, strained into expressions of pleasure. Her deeply brown skin pressed against the images of theirs. My mother’s silence unnerved me. I desperately wanted her to say something, anything at all, but she didn’t. She simply took the entire stack from the table and gestured for me to go to my room.
When my father got home, he and my mother argued in the living room. I crept out and watched from the hallway.
“He’s twelve,” she kept saying to him. It was as if my father had sat me down to show me the magazines himself, or, worse, as if he had taken me to a whorehouse. Why would she blame him for what I did? I couldn’t understand.
“Benito’s curious, Doreen, almost a grown boy,” my father replied. He thought it was no big deal, nothing to fuss about, and I agreed. “And isn’t it good that he learns such women are beautiful? That his mamma is beautiful?”
“That’s not what he’s learning!” my mother screamed, and in that moment she looked hideous to me. “Don’t you realize what you’re teaching him? Don’t you see what you’re doing?”
At this, he took her into his arms and kissed her on the neck, a generous response to her wild nagging. She struggled against him for a little while, infuriated more by his actions than his words. But he kept kissing her neck, and biting it. He snuffed out her anger with his embrace, and between laughs he murmured his pet names for her: cioccolata, agrodulce. I raised myself a little, still observing them from the hallway, filled with a distinct feeling of pride.
I stopped the story there, unable to go on, unsure how to continue. For a while no one said anything. Naomie took a sip of her Jack. Sybil looked around, as though she’d left something in another room. The music blared on. Finally Claudius grabbed the back of my head and laughed.
“This dude’s a psychopathic thinker,” he said. “A sensitive soul, a killjoy. He wears his heart and his mind on his sleeve.”
The girls remained unconvinced.
“Okay, ladies,” Claudius said. “Your turn now.”
“Oh, we haven’t had nearly enough to drink for all that, boys,” Naomie said. “Not really feeling your game.”
Sybil nodded. “Plus, you know what they say. Women and their secrets.”
“And bubbles,” Naomie added with a wink.
Then they turned away, and just like that sealed us off from them. I marveled for a moment at this female power. Claudius stared at Sybil’s ass, continuing to make a claim on her, the only one he could still make in this moment of rejection. “That’s a goddamn bubble,” he whispered to me. It was held up for scrutiny by the tightness of her jeans and the heels of her boots. Her sticker was beginning to peel off. Claudius glanced at me and began to ramble on about the miracle of tight jeans—he recognized these as Brazilian, he said, nodding slowly as he uttered the word with reverence. Then he fell silent. Looking again at Sybil, the long and deep curve of her that communicated with something primal in him, he moved his lips as if trying to remember a forgotten language. But she and Naomie were lost to us, for good this time, it seemed. Though Claudius didn’t say anything about it, I couldn’t help weighing our two stories in my mind. I was clearly the one to blame.
He and I spent the next two hours or so chatting, smoking, and drinking out in the backyard, where the torches flattened everyone’s faces and made them gleam. Eventually we returned to the house. In the kitchen, I munched on cookies and a sopping leftover square of rum cake. I was intent on some sweetness, despite my own troublesome teeth, as we approached the end of the night. Claudius, having gathered himself again, began to scramble around the emptying party, in search of other girls worth our attention.
Not long after the incident with the magazine, my mother left us, and later she divorced my father. She claimed he loved her with his eyes but no longer with his heart. She said a woman couldn’t spend her whole life with a man like that. But she was wrong about my father’s feelings. Sure of this, arrogant in my knowledge, I ranted it to myself. My father worshipped my mother, every fact and feature of her. All he’d ever done was lavish her with affection. After she left, he became bitter. One day he complained to me that she wasn’t really gone at all, that she was much too wicked for such a mercy. She was still there, he said, stuck in him: a froth in the veins, a disease of the blood. That’s how I began to think of her, as a sickness, a betrayal on the cellular level. My decision to stay with him became a badge of loyalty, and I brandished it in her face as often as I could, until she stopped trying to talk sense to me. She did write on my seventeenth birthday though, asking me to come to Newark to see her, to meet her new man and his kids. She also called my dorm room at the end of freshman year, right before final exams, to tell me about her engagement and to let me know how much it would mean to her to have me attend the wedding.
“What makes you think I would ever do that?” I asked.
She was quiet for a moment, and even this interval of thought enraged me, primed me to pounce on anything she said. I stared at the shadeless lamp on my desk and forced my gaze into the bulb’s hot center.
“What makes you think you wouldn’t?” she said. “At some point, son, you’ll have to give up whatever idea you went and got fixed in your head.”
I cursed and hung up the phone, shaking, purblind with anger, completely closed to her. She was a coward, unable to withstand the force of my father’s affection, as if there were such a thing as too much love.
My father. The old version of him would have enjoyed this party. I walked into the living room smiling at this thought. There was a time when he would have hosted such an event, casting invitations far and wide to young, magnificent, colorful people, people he referred to as “the essence of the earth.” For these parties, he’d let me stay up, all night if I could manage it. So I could imagine him kissing the cheeks of the four girls who were now heading toward the door, whose brown feet were tantalizing in their heels and sandals, wearing jeans smoothed on like blue oil, and summer dresses like saintly robes. My father would hold their hands and beg them not to go yet. He’d tell them about a special bottle, some vintage he’d been saving for the right moment, and offer the promise of a home-cooked breakfast at the first hint of sunrise. He’d say almost anything he could think of to get a smile to flash across one of their faces, to make them stay, to keep the party going as close as possible to forever.
But my father was wasting away in Philly, not here, the man he used to be long gone, and so the four girls were allowed to pass out of the house without ceremony. Noticeably more guys than girls were left now, and most of them had these hangdog looks made more pathetic b
y the dreary music the deejay played at a lowered volume.
Naomie and Sybil were standing by a makeshift bookcase, giving these three lames the same treatment they had given me and Claudius. Now, drunk or high, maybe both, they lifted their feet and flailed their arms, swimming in a thick sea of hilarity. Then one of the lames clung to Sybil’s arm as he begged her to stay, to give him her phone number, to go home with him. The guy looked older—old, frankly—and he and his buddies had probably crashed the party too, though not the way we had. They seemed to have come from someplace else entirely, another time, another dimension, and the stink of it emanated from them. That was it: something I couldn’t name festered in their horniness, and it made their solicitations coarse, mean, and frightening. I could have interfered, played the gallant hero as my father would have, but Naomie was able to pull her friend away from the lames and out of the house.
Claudius came into the room holding his fez upside down like a bucket without a handle. His hair was matted and kinked, and he resembled certain homeless folks you’d see begging on the subway, crackling with foul energy, offended and beseeching. He stormed ahead and almost walked through me.
“No luck?”
“Fucking sausage fest,” he called back.
I followed him outside. He put the fez back on and its tassel flapped in the breeze. I had seen him this way before, in this state of extreme agitation. He was terrible at idleness, much worse than I was, and could quickly lose his way. Without an exact destination, the map of his life had no significance or shape. We stood together at the gate of the house, surrounded by the high-pitched barking of a neighbor’s dog, the buzz of a faulty streetlight, a faint clinking of metal. I clapped him on the shoulder and said we should head back up to campus. He took out his pager. The greenish glow of its display told us it was nearly four in the morning. Subway service would be awful.
Just then, on the sidewalk, Naomie and Sybil teetered by on bicycles, their front wheels doing a spastic dance. They rode a little past us before Sybil swerved and crashed into the side of Naomie’s bike. She caught herself, but Naomie fell. We rushed through the gate, over to them, and I helped Naomie up. There were tears in her eyes, but she was making a noise that eventually revealed itself as a laugh. Sybil was laughing too.
A Lucky Man Page 2