“I know, I know. You loved him like a brother.”
“No,” Curtis said. “That’s what people keep on saying but it was more than that, a lot more.” He was startled by the sound of his own voice, the force of it. He gazed down at his hands, unable to bear the gentle, curious way Andre was looking at him. He couldn’t find the words to explain the affection he felt, still, for the boy’s father, and in this moment he didn’t want to be misunderstood. Another jogger went past but neither of them paid her any mind.
“What happened the night that lady got killed?” Andre said.
Curtis had a sour taste in his mouth. “I was drunk,” he said. “They said she had some drink in her too. She got in my way. That’s all.” He rubbed his palms against the knees of his pants. “I did something I shouldn’t have done.”
Since no one would hire Curtis for steady work, he had lots of time to spend with Andre, when the boy allowed him to. Lena supported them all, sometimes working extra shifts at the restaurant. She stood aside and let Curtis try to deepen his relationship with her son. She put a smile on her face when Curtis, and sometimes Andre too, made fun of her Sunday bacon, picking it up by one end and wriggling it in the air. She must have noticed the way they both looked at her when she reached for her cigarettes. Soon enough she stopped reaching for them, and then Curtis no longer saw them in the apartment at all. She hardly ever took a drink, and in this way, he followed her example. She didn’t buy tickets for movies on Fridays, unless she was going to the theater by herself. When the woman Curtis had struck with his car kept entering his dreams, Lena didn’t put her hand on his shoulder. If she ever cried at night, she refused to be comforted by him. She still signaled him with her cold feet, however. She still made her little demands for intimacy, and sometimes he did too.
Before they slept, she lay beside him in bed and listened as he talked about Andre, unable to stop himself. “He seems happier, doesn’t he?” Curtis asked one evening, and she agreed, as though he truly understood her son. It was true, Lena told him, and she called them her “men,” her “two men,” which she was in the habit of doing, as if they were all she had ever wanted.
“I think Marvin would be glad,” he said, but wondered. Lena agreed again though, and appeared pleased at the thought of all her contented men. Curtis forced a smile onto his face too. He kissed her cheek, lightly, his lips barely making contact with her freshened skin. He and Lena wouldn’t love each other, but there was love they openly shared, and that would be enough, for now, to make a kind of family.
A Lucky Man
Lincoln Murray sucked in his stomach on the crowded morning subway. He struggled to keep it from touching the young woman in front of him, whose throat was alive with perfume. Now in his mid-fifties, Lincoln withheld himself by habit. Only in the privacy of home did he allow his stomach to settle into its full hanging bulge. Until recently, his wife, Alexis, would tease him while reaching out in the same moment to soothe his paunch and his pride. Like his wife’s scent, the young woman’s perfume reminded him of bright citrus. A finger drawn lightly across her neck, an accident of that kind, and he’d have some trace of her to keep for a while.
The young woman’s face was smooth, dark, and glowing. She looked maybe a few years older than his daughter, Tameka. The white plastic buds in her ears emitted a loud, constant hum, and the wires connecting them to her phone were caught in two tangles. The young woman had eaten a healthy cereal with almond milk for breakfast, he guessed, or maybe she’d taken the time to pack spinach and cucumber and apple into a machine for fresh juice. And she drank it wearing whatever she had slept in, something pale yellow or some other color good for springtime, something that floated around her thighs. Maybe she had a lover and had stood this morning drinking the juice in one of his shirts.
As the train rocked, Lincoln leaned forward to figure out what the woman was listening to. His job at the Tilden School, even more than his relationship with his daughter, meant that he knew the music of young people. All he could tell was that the voice was female. He imagined one of those new soul singers with respectable clothing and a bloom of natural hair. Alexis watched them with pleasure on television. This thought prompted him to smile at the young woman, but she kept her lids narrowed, eyes dull crescents, and her attention lingered somewhere beyond him. The faulty cooling system in the car wheezed as it pumped in warm air. Sweat pearled a little on the woman’s nose and darkened her T-shirt at the chest.
They rode in the last car, which would let Lincoln out at the stairs closest to Ninety-third Street and Broadway, five blocks away from the school. The way the subway operator drove made the last car feel only loosely connected, as though dislodged from the rails. As it approached Penn Station, the train took turns he hadn’t felt on other mornings, turns that seemed to belong to another route, and which knocked the commuters in the last car against each other. Through it all, they avoided making eye contact, as people in the city tend to do.
When the doors opened, the crowd thinned out a little and the young woman took one of several seats that had opened nearby. Lincoln stood over her. He held on to a pole and took his phone from his left pocket. It was a gift from Alexis, who had said when she gave it to him that it wasn’t fun anymore to ridicule his old, dented flip phone. Lincoln was slow to follow technology. He held the phone close to his face—Alexis mocked him for this—and read the message from his daughter again, even though there wasn’t much to it. He’d read it several times since it had been sent the previous night. My bus gets to Port Auth at 4 tomorrow, daddy, the message read. Meet me? Can’t wait to see you. That was all. It was the end of Tameka’s first year of college. She had a job on campus for the summer, but was coming home to visit for a couple of weeks.
He hadn’t expected the sweetness of the message. The safe bet was that Alexis would have turned their daughter against him. In his mind, those two were always together. Even when their daughter misbehaved as a child, Lincoln was often alone. In the middle of a scolding, something would overwhelm his wife’s anger—some deep pleasure, he sensed—and she would be drawn toward the defiance in Tameka’s face. When he and Alexis talked in the bedroom before falling sleep, she said the quality was a kind of strength and argued that they shouldn’t be so quick to discourage it in a little girl. But even before she said anything, he had felt her softening and drifting to the other side. He knew. She and their daughter were the same way.
The young woman on the train was the same way too. She could use her face like that, he thought. If she had a lover, she showed him that face. Something like a scowl, the expression seemed different on women of a certain beauty, like they never had to justify their use of it—they just assumed they had the right. Like some wealthy children, many of the ones at Tilden, who grow up making little effort in life, but demanding their share of it, or more. Lincoln could see the young woman fussing about any little thing or wearing an outfit too revealing when she went out to dance with her friends. He could see her being casually cruel to her lover, or doing worse things. The lover would forgive her soon, if not at once. But why? The secret had to be in that face, the way it ripped at its own symmetries, contorted its relied-upon beauty. It was a kind of threat and he, like the woman’s lover, felt weak against it.
The train pulled away from the Times Square station, and more seats became available, but Lincoln saw no point in sitting for two stops. The train took an abrupt turn, and he fumbled his phone a bit. Pleased about not dropping it, he held it even higher than usual and smiled, showing off for the young woman. He noticed they had the same hard blue casing on their phones, so he said, “Would you look at that?” The young woman didn’t reply. Still listening to her loud music, she exhaled heavily and turned her head toward the empty space on her left, as if to share a bug-eyed glance with a friend. As she turned, one of her earrings, a long and loose silver strand, made a brief spiral around one of the white wires and unwound itself. Lincoln then forced his attention back to his phone, touch
ing the screen. The young woman looked up at him and there it was. He touched the part of the screen that activated the camera function and took a picture, without noise or the flash of light. He took another picture before thumbing the button that made the screen go dark. He slipped the phone into his pocket. Holding it there, as if it would leap out otherwise, he affected a serious study of the poem above him, where an advertisement would normally be. “Those Winter Sundays,” he read, but couldn’t get beyond the title. He felt the eyes of the young woman questioning him. After the Seventy-Second Street station, Lincoln moved away from her, stood for a moment facing the nearest doors, and then walked to the ones farthest away. In the tunnel, until his stop, he swayed with the movements of the train and shivered in front of the scratched glass, rapt in the darkness, oblivious to the passing streaks of light.
A feverish energy coursed through the avenues of the city that morning. After weeks of disappointing weather, it was finally spring. Rainclouds had been wrung away, leaving a clarity of unbroken sky and a sheen on everyone’s limbs. Lincoln unbuttoned his cuffs and folded them back a little, exposing his wrists to the mild breeze. He walked toward the school while holding the phone in his pocket. As he passed the Goldfinch Academy, the all-girls school that obsessed the older boys from Tilden, Lincoln knocked on the loose pane of a window and waved. Sidney had been a security guard there longer than Lincoln’s sixteen years at Tilden, and his hair was more fully gray. Over beers, he liked to use the authority of his tenure and his grayness to proclaim, in a heavy Bajan accent, that Tilden boys had always preferred the girls at Goldfinch to their own. For some reason he felt proud of this. His girls were prettier, he said. Smarter too. One day, after more beer than usual, he added that the Goldfinch girls were more likely to participate in those rainbow parties. Lincoln had heard about the parties. He heard lots of things from students, but he’d also heard about them from Alexis. Tameka had told her mother after transferring from Goldfinch to Tilden. She had called the parties “nasty,” said that they were things mostly white girls went to. She declared that she would never go. Despite this, Lincoln wondered what Tameka did when she was allowed to have late nights and sleepovers in the city. He hardly admitted these thoughts to his wife.
The Tilden School was the second oldest private school in the entire country. Lincoln liked to walk past the doors of the upper school and place his palm on the dated cornerstone, still cool in the early morning, before he went inside. The kids addressed him by his first name, and he was almost popular among them. Three freshmen gave him high fives outside the student lounge area, already raucous with shrill laughter, deodorant, and young sweat. Boys hooted and girls lifted their faces to the fluorescent lights.
At the security desk, adjacent to the lounge area, James wasted no time starting to chatter, seemingly in the middle of a sentence. A younger man, still a bachelor, James kept his shirtsleeves rolled far past his ashen elbows, showing his hard forearms and the slopes of his biceps. He flapped his blue necktie as he talked, about sports or in barely coded language about his latest sexual triumph. In Lincoln’s opinion, James wasn’t bragging just for fun; he really thought about women that way. The younger man talked on, and Lincoln held the phone in his pocket as he halfheartedly listened. Whenever he took his hand out he rubbed the moisture from it on the thigh of his uniform’s pants.
Before long he took a break from James’s coarse jokes, and from chats with students who held him captive during their free periods. He went into a stall of the nearest boys’ restroom and lingered there, sitting fully clothed on the toilet seat. He slid his thumb across the screen of his phone and studied the pictures of the young woman on the subway. The first image came out blurry, but the second one was clear: her rigid mouth—the scowl there—and tensed nostrils. Her earrings had managed to seize the light, and they formed two slivers of visible heat on either side of her jaw. But what disconcerted Lincoln was a kind of raw serendipity. He had caught her gaze at a moment when it shot into and almost through the frame. She stared from the phone directly at him. None of the other pictures on his phone looked like this. He’d taken about seventy now—mostly of women who appeared to be in their twenties or thirties, a few in their middle years—and in every one but this, the agitated faces had oblique and unaware expressions.
Two students burst into the restroom and Lincoln hastily put the phone away, as if the door to his stall weren’t closed and locked. While the boys talked idly at the urinals, he stayed completely still. Alexis had been upset when she discovered the pictures, but why? They were all pictures of faces, not that other kind. He knew how easy those would be to take, trailing a college student, her long hair swaying in a braid as she walked in form-fitting workout clothes on sun-warmed streets, or behind a young wife coming up from the subway in her ladylike way, slim fingers pressing the billowing edge of her skirt against the backs of her thighs. Tameka said boys took these sorts of pictures all the time and sent them to each other. What he had done, or was doing, wasn’t nearly as bad. Not even close.
After the two boys left the restroom, without washing their hands, Lincoln felt uncomfortable staying there. He took one last look at the most recent picture and tried to commit its details to memory. This might be the one. As he received visitors and checked IDs back at the security desk, the image would be there, fixed in his mind, and at some moment he might understand it: the power held by such a face.
It didn’t take long for James to ask about Alexis. He made no secret of his fondness for Lincoln’s wife, and she inspired many of his jokes. He said her first name in a familiar way, almost lewdly. Though she was forty-six, ten years older than James, she could have passed for his age or younger. Unlike Lincoln, she had kept her looks. She exercised to tone her arms and flatten her stomach. The years had only improved the shape and breadth of her hips. Her face remained smooth, marked by a few tiny lines around her eyes only when she lost herself in laughter. She liked to say, “Black don’t crack.” When James joked, she was the inspiration and Lincoln was the target.
“Lexi hasn’t been by here in a while,” James said. Lincoln had warned him before about calling her that. He thought it was a pornographic name, a stripper’s name.
“She’s off visiting her people down by Richmond,” Lincoln replied, telling all he was willing to admit. He wasn’t ready to say that Alexis might have left him.
“Man,” James said, “I miss when she brings in those cakes.”
Lincoln crossed his legs at the ankles and began tapping the blunt end of a pen on his clipboard.
“Chocolate frosting,” James said, flapping his tie. “Or lemon frosting … Lemon’s good too, better than vanilla, but you know brothers like that chocolate the best.”
Alexis worked as one of two manuscript curators at the Schomburg Center in Harlem. Sometimes, on Mondays, she’d take the short taxi ride down to Tilden during her lunch break and bring in desserts from her favorite bakery. She liked to show her appreciation of the security and maintenance staffs, “the invisible folks,” she called them. They seemed to be the only black and brown people in the school. Her notion wasn’t far from the truth. After Tameka transferred in for high school, Alexis become known among some administrators as a rabble-rouser for initiatives related to diversity. Her Monday visits always caused a stir—not only among the men—but she hadn’t been by in a month. It had been that long since Lincoln had seen her, that long since they’d last spoken. Before taking vacation days for her trip to Virginia, she had spent some time away, in Jersey City with her girlfriend Donna.
“You keeping her under lock and key, I bet,” James said. “Can’t blame a man for wanting those cakes all to himself.”
Lincoln smiled and tried to be a good sport, but he was gripped for a moment by a reckless idea. He tried to think instead about the face of the young woman on the subway, to see it clearly enough to contemplate it.
“Hope to God you bring her to the end-of-year party though. She looked like a queen
at Christmas. Finer than frog hair, as my cousins and them down home like to say. Jet Beauty of the Week status, you know what I mean. Tell her I said hello, all right?”
Lincoln gave an imperceptible nod and tapped his pen more rapidly. The woman’s face was vague in his mind, then gone.
“Hey, tell sexy Lexi I said hello, okay?” James said.
Face burning, Lincoln threw his pen at James, a blind, broken gesture. The pen bounced feebly off the younger man’s chest.
“What the hell, man?” James said, rising. “What the hell?”
A group of students nearby fell silent and stared at them.
“You could’ve put out my damn eye,” James continued. This wasn’t true, but his brow and the activity of his arms said he was ready for a fight.
Lincoln picked up the pen and held it in the space between his knees, rolling it with his fingers as he spoke. “Don’t talk about my wife that way,” he said quietly.
James’s face softened to puzzlement and then consideration. He noticed the students and told them to go on about their business. He sat back down as the students turned or walked away. “Come on, man,” he said to Lincoln, tapping him on the shoulder. He leaned closer and let his voice fall to a whisper. “You know I’m just messing with you, chief.”
Lincoln acknowledged this with a nod, his head still heavy and hanging low. All that he held at bay from even the surface of his thinking sank to an unavoidable depth.
“I’m just jealous is all, chief; you know that. You’re a lucky man. I wish I could get me a high-quality woman like that. A good woman.”
“A good woman,” Lincoln repeated, “but … but she’s gone.”
James sucked his teeth and shook his head slowly, commiserating as if Lincoln had already explained everything, or as if he didn’t have to. Men were men and women were women, his gestures said. And that was that. He rose again and the students stared again. “I know how it is, man,” he grumbled. Then he leaned over and wrapped Lincoln’s slumping body in his powerful arms. Lincoln felt like he was held for a long time.
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