A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  After that, James left him alone or, in a brotherly way, uttered vague expressions of support. “It’s gonna be all right,” he’d say, or “Don’t even worry about it.” He insisted on doing everything. He jumped to answer phone calls, hand out visitor passes, sign when the UPS man showed up with deliveries. He made sure the kids hanging out in the lounge area stayed under control. But if he thought he was doing Lincoln a favor, he was mistaken. Left with nothing at all to do, the older man had no choice but to confront his wife’s face, which loomed at him now in a spectral way. Lincoln tried to read the New York Times, an article about a Cleveland man charged for his crimes against several girls, but he kept thinking about his wife and her face.

  When Lincoln met Alexis, twenty-two years earlier, they were equals. He was as handsome as she was beautiful and bright, and despite their age difference he had as much to expect from the coming years as she did. Lincoln courted her in Richmond with a passion rooted in his certainty about himself. He’d been a good student, and had excelled at boxing and football; his life had been full of prizes, trophies, and scholarships. He’d had more than his share of attention from women and had enjoyed the warmth and cheer of many men. He thought often about the question of what lay ahead in his life, but when he tried to see its exact outlines, he couldn’t—it was indistinct with light. It had been this way with her too. With other girls, there was no limit to how long his eyes could feast on the shape of legs glistening in stockings, on the coy retreat of a trembling hand, or on the flash of tongue in their laughing mouths. But looking at Alexis Campbell was like gazing into the sun. After just a few moments, he had to turn away. At Garfield’s Bar he would tell his buddies how it hurt to look at her, and they would agree, mistaking his words for their usual hyperbole about women. On one of those nights at Garfield’s, it occurred to him briefly that love was pain.

  His father, who dispensed wisdom while rubbing his knees or soaking his feet, had always told him, You better don’t. Better don’t be fooled by the slenderness of a girl’s waist or the roundness of her behind. Not if you’re thinking about marrying her. If your heart and mind were inclined in that direction, he’d say, what you’d better do is have a look at her mother, because that’s what she would become. It was lore—heard as often as Stand by your man—so Lincoln took it seriously. He would succeed where his father, for many years a lonely man, had failed.

  He worried during the drive down to meet Mrs. Campbell. Despite the lovely and brilliant girl sitting beside him, he didn’t expect much from a widow in a little unincorporated town called Hobson. “What’s the name of the creek again?” he’d ask in the car. “Chuckatuck,” she’d reply with a laugh. “And the river on the other side is Nansemond,” she told him. “Named after some Indians. Then there’s Nix Cove. Good fishing.” All Lincoln could do was shake his head. When they got to Hobson, there were several men on Mrs. Campbell’s porch, none inside. During the visit, he’d had to leave from time to time to sit out there with them. Men of a kind can bear only so much light. It might not have been true that Mrs. Campbell was even prettier than her daughter, but Lincoln couldn’t tell because his eyes wouldn’t follow her. Sitting out with the men, blowing steam from his cup of coffee as they blew it from theirs, he knew he had something in common with them—a small part of him had fallen for the widow too. He and the men shared this affliction but they wouldn’t talk about it; as far as he could recall, none of them said a word. Better not to speak than tell a lie. On the drive back, Lincoln decided before they even got to Newport News that he had to marry Mrs. Campbell’s daughter.

  James kept busy at the security desk now, doing the work of both men while Lincoln sat there with his stomach on his lap. He felt a sort of bond with James now, a familiar gratitude. But one gets sick and tired of saying thank you. When he was engaged to Alexis, and during their first years of marriage, his friends would also tell him how lucky he was, but this was said as a joke. Lincoln would say thank you and agree, would tell them how grateful he was for her, but this wasn’t true. He deserved her—this was what he believed, and he knew this was what his friends believed in. A man of a kind should get what he deserves, and if a man like him couldn’t get a woman like her, then something was terribly wrong with the world.

  James snipped withered leaves from the spider plants, a thing he’d never done before. Do her friends tell her she’s lucky? Lincoln wondered. Has Donna said that to her? Has her mother told her to give thanks for her man? She might be saying it now as they picked out plums and nectarines at the fruit market, or sat out on the porch shelling peas. Surely this was foolish thinking, just as foolish as thinking Tameka would spend these years breaking the hearts of any eager Georgetown boy who wasn’t like her father. Lincoln came to understand that this had always been part of his vision for himself, to have children who adored him—a son who resembled and worshipped him, a daughter for whom no other man would ever measure up. This was part of what he couldn’t see before he married. But there was no son, and the years of Tameka’s life had marked his decline.

  She had grown up watching it. His professional gambles with the boxing gyms, and the attempts at training and managing, had failed. His charm and stature no longer earned him opportunities, and in New York he had no reputation. He was lucky, he knew, to have his job at Tilden, steady and respectable work, but years ago he and his wife had deserved each other. Time had not treated them equally. Why did he expect otherwise though? With any two people one would get the brunt of it, and time had hit him worse than any beating he’d ever seen in the ring. He felt it had brutalized him. What did his wife think? Alexis had always been kind and supportive, but in her privacy she had to keep thoughts. A long marriage forced you to witness or suffer such brutality. Lincoln wondered, not for the first time, if this was exactly what marriage meant.

  Across from the front desk, James pulled the director of security aside. Lincoln couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the discussion had the look of seriousness. He approached, but the director stopped him short with a flat stony hand, which he closed into a fist before lowering it. Lincoln went back to his chair.

  One day his wife’s looks would go. Creases would line her face, the skin there would loosen and thin, pouches would form under her eyes, maybe little dewlaps like his under the jaw. And her mind, it would start to slip and show weakness too. Everything cracks eventually. But when? How long would it be his good fortune to have her? How long until he could just plain have her again? Her smooth face. Even after all these years he longed for it, to rub his cheek against hers and breathe hot words into her hair—there’d been no diminishment of that feeling. He still had those appetites, and she did too. Yet he also felt the urge to press the sharps of his teeth against her face, to bite down and place the first deep crack in it. When pulled by contrary desires, you often don’t do anything at all. So on evenings and weekends he’d sit at home like a chastened boy, captive to her every small gesture. He didn’t want to lose her.

  But Lincoln was a man with luck—yes, he still had it, James had said so and he was right. Good fortune can change in an instant, however, or it might never, but whatever it does has nothing to do with you. For years it had persisted in following him. It went home from work with him, lived with his family, claimed a space between him and his wife in their bed. She still had her light, but his was his luck. If it left him, she would too. No one would blame her. Neither Donna nor her other girlfriends, nor her mother, nor their daughter. Nor James. Maybe James had been wrong earlier. Maybe Lincoln’s luck had already abandoned him—his wife was gone for now, after all. Or maybe Lincoln was the one with wrong notions—maybe, slumped in his chair at the desk, unable to muster the little strength it took to hold in his belly, it was his luck that he was alone with.

  The director of security came over with James smiling at his side. “Listen,” he said, “why don’t you take off early?”

  “But I’m okay,” Lincoln said. “I’m good.”

 
“Cut the crap. You’ve looked like shit for days now.” A few of the students nearby laughed. “People on this team take care of one another.” He nodded to James and then fixed his light gray eyes back on Lincoln.

  The director was a big man, a former marine and police officer. He had a hard, pasty face that splotched red in winter. When he’d started working as the director, Lincoln had had the impression that he was still learning how to be gentle again. The cushion on his voice had worn thin, and he didn’t like it when his kindness was declined. Not knowing what else to say, Lincoln ended up thanking him, but the director dismissed this.

  “Take tomorrow off too,” he said. “A couple of days, if need be. Don’t worry. The team will pick up the slack. We’ll be fine without you.”

  Lincoln spent a long time eyeing the labels on the packages and randomly moving things around on the desk. With the director in a meeting, he lingered until dismissal time so he could be swept by the onrush of students out of the building. Outside, he kept looking back through the glass doors at James, who waved and then shooed him away. All three divisions of the school flooded the sidewalk, and SUVs had started to line up at the curb. As he approached Columbus Avenue, passing Tilden’s more modern middle- and lower-school buildings, Lincoln had to take special care to avoid bumping into the youngest students. The next few blocks would be like this, as many kids from Tilden, Goldfinch, and two other neighborhood schools liked to intermingle.

  He thought about tapping on the window at Goldfinch, but his leaving early wasn’t something he could even pretend to gloat about. Sidney looked busy anyway, dealing with the girls and their mothers and caregivers. Lincoln made slow progress on the sidewalk between the avenues, but he didn’t want to cross the street or change his usual route to the subway station. The girls’ voices rose into a kind of keening and comforted him. He used to walk over here from Tilden to get Tameka at dismissal time, before she was old enough to cross streets by herself. She never liked it when he held her hand, and would snatch it away as soon as she set foot on the sidewalk.

  The uniform the youngest girls wore hadn’t changed much over the years. The jumpers were a darker shade of blue, and the shirts now had rounded collars; otherwise they were the same. A few familiar brown faces remained among the caregivers, though they were older now. Lincoln exchanged nods or smiles with even those he didn’t recognize. Grinning high-school boys, some from Tilden, weaved their way through the crowd. One boy shouted to a tall Asian girl about the upcoming weekend. To Lincoln the weekend felt very far away. This moment appealed to him, and he didn’t want it to end. As he stood there, he felt a stirring on his body, but it was just the vibration of his phone in his pocket. A couple of lower-school girls jostled by him, then he moved over to an open space near the curb and brought the phone high up, close to his eyes. The screen showed a message from Tameka: her bus would get in about half an hour early. He took a few idle steps as he typed his reply, then stopped because he kept hitting the wrong letters. He walked a few more feet and stopped a second time to correct another error. “Lord have mercy,” he muttered. All that trouble for a simple response—Okay, ill. See you soon. He stopped walking a third time, turned to apologize to whoever had bumped into him from behind, and scanned for the button that would delete.

  “What are you doing?” someone said.

  Lincoln took a few more steps and then stopped.

  “I said, what are you doing?” It was the yelling voice of a woman.

  Lincoln gave up and was about to send the message without correcting it.

  “Are you taking pictures?”

  From the right a young white woman, no older than thirty, entered his field of vision. Her lipless mouth was pressed tight, a hard little line stabbed into her face. She grabbed a loose section of her hair and tucked it violently behind her ear.

  “Are you taking pictures of the girls?” She was talking to him.

  Lincoln panicked. “What girls? No.”

  “But I saw you. I saw you doing it,” the woman said, her voice louder now. She meant the girls around them, the Goldfinch girls. He stared at the shock of prematurely silver hair at her temple to avoid looking in her eyes.

  “Me?”

  “I was watching you the whole time!”

  “You think I was taking pictures?”

  “Of the girls!”

  The eyes of other women, white mothers gathered in a group as well as caretakers, fixed on them. A pigeon glided by, cutting a fine arc just above their heads. The keening of the girls hadn’t stopped but it was quieter now; some of them watched the altercation as well.

  Lincoln found himself blurting out, “Miss, my daughter was a student here. I work here.”

  “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “I mean, I work at the school down the street.”

  “Which school?”

  “Tilden.”

  “Why were you taking pictures of the girls?” the woman insisted.

  “But I wasn’t—”

  “Show me your phone.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You heard what I said. Give it to me!”

  Lincoln found himself shouting then. “Who the hell do you think you are? What gives you the damn right to—?”

  “I’m protecting little girls from creeps like you.”

  “You don’t know a thing about me.”

  “I don’t want to know you,” she said, and he took a few steps away from her. “Pervert!”

  When she took out her own phone, Lincoln walked away more quickly, bumping into several people before turning the corner onto Broadway.

  For almost a mile he kept looking behind him. Though he knew after a block or two that the white woman could no longer see him at all, if she had ever seen him, the distance between the two of them seemed no greater. Her voice still rang in his ears. It wasn’t that she was right about him. What she had said about him was completely wrong, the accusation wild and coarse, her words just hacking away. But he also knew that he carried guilt in him that was large, for something impossible to defend.

  Lincoln walked without purpose. He took random turns but generally made his way south along the city’s grid. A creep, the white woman had called him. A pervert. Under the awnings of storefronts, on the steps of churches, against the papered-up windows of failed restaurants, he would stop and delete a picture from his phone. He was willing to do now what had been unthinkable just earlier today, though doing it wasn’t really about his will.

  When Alexis had discovered the pictures, there’d been about thirty of them. It wasn’t clear how long she had known, but judging from the change in her demeanor it had been at least a few days. She would get home about an hour and a half after he did, as usual, look at him and not say a word. She’d bring takeout Chinese or Thai food for dinner and leave some for him in the kitchen, eating her portion in the bedroom with the door closed, alone. During those evenings, she would run long baths even though she showered every morning. After a few anxious days of this, he came home to find a letter from her on Schomburg stationery. Even with what poured out in the letter, her handwriting had the constancy of a font—the upward flourishes at the end of each word, the fullness of the counters. She told him she would be staying at Donna’s, but the letter never explicitly mentioned his pictures. If you ever want to talk to me, to try to explain yourself, I might be willing to listen. Each time he stopped on the street to delete an image from his phone, Lincoln took a long look at it, as if the thing that would fortify him for the talk with his wife might be there, as if he would discover what, until now, he had overlooked.

  The news about her trip to Virginia came in a phone call. Lincoln noticed when she called that day, both times, but was afraid to answer. Finally, in the evening, Donna left a message that Alexis was going to stay with her mother, and that Tameka knew she was going but not why. “She’s already gone but you know how to reach her,” Donna said, and hung up without saying good-bye. Lincoln lay in bed that night
staring into the glow of his phone, the pictures up to about sixty by then. In the dark he practiced explaining himself to several of the women’s faces before giving up. He didn’t feel lonely, not yet. Alexis hadn’t completely given up on him, so he knew he still had time.

  Somewhere west of the theater district, Lincoln spoke to the screen of his phone. “I just want to say …,” he murmured, and then deleted a more recent image. The light from the cloudless sky felt harsh on his cheeks and prickled his skin under his sleeves. He pulled his shirttails out of his pants and, making careful folds, exposed his arms past the elbows like a working man. He walked south through Chelsea and Greenwich Village, then into SoHo and along Canal Street, where he eventually faced the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. Only two of the pictures remained on his phone now, the two from this morning. He deleted the one that had come out blurry. All that was left was the final one: the precision of the young woman’s glare, her disappointed mouth, the bolts of heat bright along her face. Her eyes were worse than those of the white woman in front of the school. Eyes worse still, ones he only imagined for now, would remain with him.

  Lincoln was sweaty and tired. The steel of the bridge’s towers appeared ugly to him in the late afternoon light. He could have taken a cool subway the rest of the way, but he decided to go ahead and walk across to Brooklyn in the hot sun.

  He stopped once, high over the water, to delete the young woman from his phone. After it was gone, he realized with some surprise that he hadn’t taken any other pictures, not even a single one of his wife. He shut off the phone and stared at its dark screen until he felt it was time to go home.

  It took a while, so Tameka was already there when he arrived. He hadn’t seen her since the winter holiday. Her hair was different, twisted and dyed brown at the edges. She reminded him even more of her mother. She gave him a hug, pressing herself tightly against him. “Where were you?” she asked. She had waited for him at Port Authority, and had called him more than once. When he didn’t answer her question, she stood apart from him and said, “Daddy? Look at me. What’s the matter?”