At first Lincoln said it was nothing, nothing at all, but she continued to ask. She kept demanding to know what was wrong. Finally, he met his daughter’s gaze and told her. He described every humiliating detail of what had happened to him in front of her old school. He told her what he could. He told her a lie.
Infinite Happiness
The new waitress came by that morning to refresh my coffee and give Micah more hot water for tea. She had light brown skin and twists of lovely russet hair. When she wasn’t biting her lip, her nervous smiling mouth reminded me of a cut strawberry’s inner flesh. Micah watched her walk back toward the bar, mumbling to himself as though casting a spell. Whether the spell was on himself or on her retreating hips I couldn’t tell.
“It’s time,” he declared, as he forked and held aloft a flap of potato pancake. “It’s time for me to put the booty-goggles back into storage.”
I laughed, but only with my mouth.
“Besides, she likes you, blood. You see the way she was looking at you?”
Micah steeped the tea, his own pungent blend of crushed black and green leaves, which he carried around in a pouch. He guffawed, as though late at getting his own joke, and his body shook within his loose colorful dashiki. The crow’s-feet etched at the corners of his eyes were the only visible clues that he was on the cusp of middle age. He kept his face and head cleanly shaven, so you never saw a speck of gray on him. An excess of joy seemed to be Micah’s burden in life. You could see the effort of laughter taxing him like labored breath.
His girlfriend, Cody—A Black Girl Named Cody he sometimes called her, as if she were a myth, an impossibility—was returning sometime that evening from her family’s annual trip to see the old maternal relatives in Ghana. Usually she would have been there at Saturday brunch with us. I often tagged along on their outings. Cody didn’t mind, so whenever Micah invited me, I’d be there. For a long time, I’d been the camera verifying their love.
According to my watch, which I kept a few minutes fast, it was almost noon. I asked when Cody was getting in. She hadn’t responded to any of the emails I’d sent in the past few weeks. Micah took a sip of his tea, smiled, and said her flight arrived around seven thirty. He knew this and I didn’t. This may seem like an obvious thing to say, a stupid declaration, but sometimes the most mundane facts get imbued with deep feeling. The tiniest splinters of information can strike with hard weight when they’re finally given to you.
With Cody gone those four weeks, Micah had been a creature uncaged in Brooklyn’s simmering streets, chasing women as though their shorts and skirts were those little flags pulled from body to air during field games. Before brunch that day, while we walked to the restaurant, Micah stopped and asked me to smell his face. He closed his eyes and pouted a little. Somehow, these unsettling gestures softened the crassness of his request. I could do anything at all to him—spit on his chin, strike his brow with my palm—but all I did, stupidly, was stick with the script. I sniffed at his cheek and then told him he’d forgotten to wash.
“I didn’t forget,” he said, and grinned.
Ever since I was a boy, men like Micah have captivated me. They dress in ways that should be funny—hats wide or tall, shirts with collars like condor wings, fingers winking with jewelry, pants and shoes in outrageous colors—but no one ridicules them, because they are also always enmeshed in the rogue limbs of women. Some part of me wanted to be like those men we called, casually, “pimps.” Despite whatever else I may have felt about them, I’d declared to my uncle that I wanted to be a pimp, as we walked with ice cream one afternoon on Eastern Parkway. Uncle Max made a face I couldn’t read and told me, not for the first time, that black men used to be kings. Then he shifted his Good Humor bar to his left hand, and slapped me. Sometimes the pop of his ring still burns on my mouth.
Back at the apartment that day, Aunt Leigh asked my uncle what had happened to my face. He said he’d be back later, after a few rounds with the fellas, and slammed the door on his way out. When she asked me, I said I had fallen and left it at that. I didn’t want to tell her anything. Her concern for me, for us, always came too late; reacting was all she seemed capable of doing. In that way, she resembled my mother—her sister-in-law. I felt sorry for her, that she was so feeble, just as I felt sorry for my mother, who had been dying long before doctors informed her she was. My father was, as they say, a rolling stone, and he had rolled right over her before he skipped town. That collision may have started her dying—I don’t know. All I can say is that he left and she died, and so I ended up living with my aunt and uncle in Brooklyn. They had no children of their own.
Micah’s studio apartment was two blocks from the restaurant. It still smelled of sex. I sat on his small couch as he pulled sheets from the bed, shut off the air conditioner he’d kept running, opened the windows. Cody’s old copy of Love in the Time of Cholera sat on an arm of the couch, its torn cover and a few ragged pages fluttering in the rush of warm air. Micah’s cat, Pawtrice Lumumba, watched the book for a while before leaping onto the nearest windowsill. He rubbed his face against the screen as a tumble of street noise spilled from Flatbush Avenue into the apartment. Micah dropped the sheets in a pile by the front door, then lit several sticks of a kind of incense I despised, which purpled the air with its thick, stony smoke. He stuck the wooden ends of the incense into various holes in the walls of the apartment. Though Micah hardly ever brought other women home since he’d started seeing Cody, there was something cool and mechanical about the way he moved around now. The last few weeks had been enough time for him to remember his old routine.
He cleaned in denim shorts and a pair of flip-flops, now shirtless, but he still wore his large yellow fedora tilted sideways on his head. The hat gleamed softly against his dark skin. For a moment he looked sad and oblivious—as if there were something he had forgotten or didn’t know. His appearance dropped the cold, heavy glass clutched at my chest right into my gut. In his brief wistfulness and ignorance, he looked like a boy who had just been crowned.
He suggested we listen to some roots music, his cure-all, and played his favorite mix of Bunny Wailer, Burning Spear, and the Abyssinians. Everyone in Brooklyn had probably heard this mix. Reggae was a big part of the way Micah announced the syncopated cluck of his heart to the world. All of the lyrics were about Emperor Haile Selassie, spirituality, and a life of resistance to racism and government oppression. I listened for different songs, ones about betrayal and faithlessness. Life’s smaller, inglorious oppressions.
“So what’s up, stranger?” he said. “How’s the writing going?” We hadn’t seen each other much during Cody’s trip.
“It’s not.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Just can’t find the words,” I said.
“Brutal. You need inspiration, that’s all. Yo, why didn’t you go to the party last night?”
I almost snapped back and asked why he did go, but I just shrugged. I knew why. He went because he could and because he always had a good time, even though most people who went were probably my age, a decade younger than he was, if not more. The party was one of a series of fundraising events for a political prisoner. Flyers for such parties were always all over the place, on the internet, and in the windows of local stores and restaurants. FREE CHAKRA GIBBONS. This particular event was where Micah had met last night’s girl. He had told me about her as we ate, in the usual way he had of talking about his women, first emphasizing the raw physicality of the initial encounter—how her body in that dress nearly snapped his neck, how her hips loosely swayed as she walked, how fragrant and soft she was as they danced. For him there was obvious purpose, a clarity of desire, in her every gesture. No smile was ever a curtain politely drawn. No laugh fretted with irony, no glance clouded with ambiguity. But then the story itself became cloudy as matters escalated and he got her to go home with him. The pace of his telling picked up, the language became more ornate. He and the woman were no longer attractive physical beings. They
were something greater, deities of a kind, anointing and sanctifying each other behind a curtain he closed even to me, his audience.
And now all that was left of her, so soon, was a thinning perfume smothered by incense and soiled sheets heaped on the floor. In his fingers, a woman’s panties were the strings of a rosary, but only for the few slow seconds that he creeped them from her waist and hips, from her sloped thighs, her ankles and tensed toes. Thereafter, flung on the floor, drained of the mysteries of his attention, they were nothing but strips of rag, the leavings of an act. Quickly the woman from the party, so fleshy and sensual in her dress, would also become the leavings of an act, among the stuff to be covered up or swept away.
I knew the ceremony of his bedrooms, or imagined I did, because he talked and talked to me. I hung on every one of his inflated words, felt for their edges, peered around them in search of patterns, clues: what it meant when he disclosed a bit more, used this or that adjective; what it meant when he withheld. He never said a word about his sex life with Cody though, even during the early stages when they were casually dating. That curtain stayed closed, completely.
Micah stopped cleaning and turned up the dial on the good cheer. I must have been looking glum. He told me the words Free Chakra Gibbons never failed him in the booty department. Micah had a high number of tactics that supposedly never failed, and he’d offer these to me as if they had the power of currency.
“I approach women in the street,” he said, laugh lines deepening, “honeys I’ve never even seen before, and say, ‘Peace, sister, didn’t I meet you at the Free Chakra Gibbons party last month?’ Meet, see. It doesn’t matter. Last month, last night, last year. Doesn’t matter. Works every time.”
“You must say it real sweet,” I said. “Agave nectar pouring out of your mouth and everything.”
“It’s the ancient science, blood. Check it. If she knows who Chakra Gibbons is, you’re golden, as the conscious brother. If not, it’s the science. The words, the secret signs.”
“Initiate me.”
“Free is the American word. Free sample. Free consultation. Free shipping. Free your mind. Free the slaves. We love that shit. From the best to the worst, all of us. But then there’s Chakra. Tantra. Yoga, you feel me? And Shaka Zulu. Freaky revolutionary vibisms, man. And then Gibbons. With that they hear give, give. Give thyself wholly to him. It’s like speaking the ancestral tongue, on the lower frequencies, on some ill subliminalisms. Free Chakra Gibbons never fails to get the digits. And if you work it right: the honeypot.”
“But what if they left their secret decoder rings at home that day?”
Micah laughed like the supervillain in a movie. “You underestimate your power, A.J.,” he said. “You block your blessings.” He plucked Pawtrice Lumumba from the sill and cradled him like an infant, rubbed the soft of his belly until he purred. “When’s the last time you got blessed, yo? Weeks? Months? A year? Don’t say a year.”
“About a month,” I said, a possible start to my truth-telling about Cody. But the woman I went on to describe wasn’t her, and the encounter I sketched belonged to another month of another year, an entirely different lifetime. On top of that basic act of lying, of hauling in an alternative and irrelevant truth, came embellished details about that long-ago night of desperate, fumbled lovemaking. Micah placed his cat back on the sill and stood over me, beaming. He drilled the knuckle of his middle finger into my shoulder as he enjoyed my story. “She couldn’t get enough of me,” I found myself saying. “Kept calling and texting after that, you know. It was too much. I had to cut her off.”
“Damn, blood, you gotta be careful. Can’t go activating the pathways with every honey you bring home.” To illustrate the pathways he traced parallel lines from his groin to his heart. “They’re always looking for a reason to fall in love.”
Micah used words like blood and brethren and phrases like peace and love and don’t block your blessings, language so earnest and sappy the poet in me found it embarrassing. He had volleyed an entire glossary of it at me when we first met, three years earlier. It was the morning after he’d first slept with Cody, who was then my roommate. She and I had lived in a walk-through two-bedroom apartment on the edge of Clinton Hill. A friend of Cody’s whom I knew from graduate school had vouched for me, saying I was a good guy, safe, reasonably clean, responsible. Boring, in other words, but a suitable replacement for the girl who was moving out. The apartment was affordable because one of the rooms, mine, was just a glorified closet. It was at the extreme end of the place and opened directly into hers. So it was like this: I’d have to knock on my door before coming out—to watch TV, to grab a bowl of cereal, even to take a damn leak—to make sure she was, as they say, decent. What does it say about me, about my situation of mind and nerve, that I never failed, not even once, to give those precautionary knocks?
The afternoon I first went over to meet Cody, it took a long time for her to open the apartment door. There were three locks, one of which she had had installed, and a security chain to undo. This struck me as odd. The neighborhood wasn’t dangerous and the door itself was weightless, made of the flimsiest wood. The feeble thing swung open and Cody stood on the other side of the doorway, in a tank top and no bra. She was anything but decent. She touched the head of a foot-tall porcelain unicorn that stood on a little table, its crooked horn pointed at me.
After a quick tour of the apartment, which had lots of art in thick frames on the walls, we grabbed a couple of beers and chatted in the living room. She was a few years out of college, she explained, and now worked as a publicist for a fashion company. As she spoke I decided, perhaps because I thought I had to, that she wasn’t my type. During the tour, I’d sized her up: kind of lank, with only a dollop of ass, and her legs rose to meet her hips farther out than you’d expect. I would discover in time that she herself made fun of these features, as well as of her light skin, blaming her white Englishman father and his side of the family. But Cody didn’t lack confidence. She knew she was attractive. She had full, distracting breasts and large, dark areolae that I could see through her tank top. I worked so hard not to look that I lost track of our conversation. She was giving me an expectant look, her lashes and lips both floating from her face in the same way, following the same gentle circuits.
“I love the place,” I said. “It’s really a great place.” I complimented everything there, everything but her. I even complimented her porcelain unicorn.
“Oh, it’s not a unicorn,” she said, looking at it. “It’s an abada. Congolese.” Striations, which gave the statue the appearance of whitened wood, indicated the hair of its mane and the lines of its muscles. Cody told me the creature was supposed to have two horns, which could cure the effects of poison, but one of them had broken off and was lost.
When I moved in, I was a graduate student, mastering poetry by degrees. I lived on a stipend and loans. Despite my best efforts, I started to look at her, and look at her. At those eyes and lips. At her hair, incredible no matter what she did with it: close-cropped, faux hawk, grown long, poofed out with whorls wide enough to put your hand through. It all took me for a ride. I started to notice other things, like her devotion to small collections of books and albums. She constantly reread books from her high school English classes, and invited folks over to listen to the same old Miles and Billie records. These made up the entire soundtrack of her existence. I always recommended volumes of poetry and novels, offering to let her borrow my own copies, but she always refused. “I’m fine with these,” she said once, pointing down at her modest bookcase. “Just these. I’m happy getting to know them better.” She told me libraries made her nervous in college. “Huge buildings with all those books, all those writers and their opinions and worlds. I used to think I’d be wasting my opportunity if I didn’t try to read as many of those books as I could, but it’s too much, too hard to wrap your heart around. They look so graceful lined up on the shelves, not messing with each other, so neat. It’s nicer that way.”
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br /> Cody and I lived together for two years and it wasn’t long before I began to think that somehow, in a moment of weakness or realization, we would share her bed. Hers, not mine. Her bed was larger, better for the things I wanted to do to her and the things I imagined she would do to me. When tipsy with wine, feeling a little flirtatious, she had hinted at such things, at what she would do if only the world were a different place. Who knew what she meant by this? It was probably easier than saying If only you were a different man.
Given the terrible layout of our place, Cody had been kind enough not to bring any of her smutties around. After about a year of rooming together, though, Micah became the first and only exception.
I can’t blame her. When she brought Micah over, she didn’t know I was home. On hot nights I sometimes stayed with Aunt Leigh, now living alone in an air-conditioned place south of Prospect Park, but that night I had fallen into a heavy torpor. I was naked in my room with the lights out, completely still on my futon mattress, surrounded by books. Under these, the corners of printouts of poems by Auden and Lowell flapped in the air blowing from my box fan. I’d been trying to compose a long poem, an elegy for Uncle Max, but the writing wasn’t going well. It was summer, the season of my anguished vanishing, my annual retreat indoors, and it felt as though the capacity for true language was being burned out of me. I never wrote that poem. I never could find the words.
When it gets hot, especially in New York, most people happily remove their clothing, favoring the merest layers between their vivid selves and the sticky flesh of the city. I’m different. I feel most like myself in dark jeans and heavy shoes, long sleeves, sweaters, and thick jackets. In shorts and T-shirts I’m just the ghost haunting them, billowing the fabrics and rattling my awkward lengths of bone. I can’t hide how scrawny I am—the thinness of my wrists and ankles, my shins like blades—and I experience it acutely, my lack of substance. Even when I’m alone, nudity sometimes embarrasses me, and in my waking dreams I see myself being blasted away by a strong wind.
A Lucky Man Page 17