A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  I was still awake when they came in laughing, well before midnight. I found myself taking more shallow breaths as Cody called my name to see if I was home. She sounded drunk. She called a few more times, but I said nothing, didn’t move. After a few moments, I was hardly breathing at all. I moved in weightless slow motion, pulled on underwear, turned off the fan, pretended to sleep in case she came in, pretended to disappear. As I lay in that hot airless room, my body seemed unbearably loud—my stomach, the sound of my blinking. When I had to pee, I held it as long as I could. Finally, moving with agonizing slowness, I sat up and relieved myself into an empty beer bottle.

  I listened all night, and deepened the vividness of my imaginings until they became grotesque. They had sex twice and once again in the morning, each time prefaced by his teasing and her joking protestations. It was as though, beneath him (on top of him? gathered like a leggy insect before him?), she herself melted from one rhythm and shape in order to be remolded by his flung hands and organ into another.

  It was close to noon before I heard them leave. I came out of my room to slip away from the apartment, but Micah was there. He sat on our shabby living room couch, looking like the black Hatter. He beamed at me, showing the creases in his face, not concerned in the least about my sudden appearance.

  He told me Cody had gone around the corner to grab pastries and soy chai lattes. After a moment, he added, “You must be Anthony.” Cody called me Anthony even though I went by A.J.

  He nodded cheerfully when I corrected him. Then came the Micah words and the Micah phrases. I felt grateful, in a way, despite his refusal to give much of a damn about the fact of my presence, as if it didn’t matter one bit that I’d been there the entire time. He gave me his full attention now though. He seemed genuinely curious about me. Meanwhile I kept thinking, This guy? From certain angles he looked almost old enough to be her father. But he allied himself with me when Cody came back. He played along, nodding and grinning as I lied to her about having just gotten home from a wild night.

  After that, through his oddly persistent efforts, we became tight. He showed me how to work a camera and operate a boom. I worked on the crew for some of his local film projects, mostly shorts, and when I was strapped for cash he hooked me up with work on other people’s productions. He was always dragging me out, so I began to meet people around the city. These were people whose lives seemed beyond my reach, who showed up en masse during summer’s cultural fairs and bazaars, filling the streets with color and music and rare sensuality before vanishing for the rest of the year. I could hardly believe they lived in the same city I did, but Micah knew where they went when it wasn’t summer and he brought me to those places too. He was good to me. He was kinder to me than any man I’ve known.

  As his favorite music played and summoned our racial glory, Micah and I drove through Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy, the parts that hadn’t yet been touched by gentrification. I’d been avoiding him for the past few weeks but agreed to tag along on a few errands he wanted to run before picking Cody up at the airport. I intended to tell him what had happened between me and her. Again and again, I’d gone over the possibilities of how it could play out. On what ground could his anger stand? How could he, of all people, accuse me? I would tell him the truth, that I’d slept with her, and then the harder truth, that I was in love with her. This is a good time, I kept thinking, right now, just lower the music and face the man and speak. Instead I stared at the passenger-side window as he sang stray, discordant phrases of song. We dropped off his laundry first, then, from Nostrand Avenue, with its roti shops and gated supermarkets, we made our way to Fulton Street, where people poured out of the subway station on the corner and a man hawked DVDs in front of a chicken joint.

  I noticed Micah had been silent for a while, and I could feel his eyes on me.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  We drove alongside a park I didn’t recognize. Medallions of light twinkled through the gaps in the trees onto a stretch of patchy browned grass, and beyond the chain-link fence the backs of boys playing basketball gleamed like dark, wet stones. Above them a slim crescent moon persisted in the afternoon sky.

  “You seem deep in it,” he said. “Inner visions.”

  In response, I pointed up at the moon.

  “Irie,” he said. He was so excited that his voice rose again in song. When he parked the car, I turned to him with the first words I’d settled upon ready at my lips, but found his face close to mine as he leaned to look at the moon. There was something sweet and childlike about the gesture, his unembarrassed physical closeness.

  The sky, he said, held a good omen. “The constancy of the moon on the day my moon returns.” Sometimes he called Cody his “moon,” sometimes his “earth.” He, however, was always the shining sun. A smile played at the corner of his mouth while he looked up into the sky and absorbed all that the universe was confirming for him. “Synchronicity!” he exclaimed, and bounded out of the car.

  We entered a bookstore without a sign out front. I had never even known the place existed, and had I known, I wouldn’t have gone in anyway. The selection was limited, the shelves dusted with the sadness of another time. It immediately revealed itself to be a temple devoted to black hero worship and the erotic mysteries of the East. A few symbols and images predominated on the walls. Bared skin of the plummiest, oiliest darkness. Cowries. Ankhs. On a calendar, various figures—impossibly voluptuous women, muscled babies, regal-headed men—were fitted into the precise shape of the Motherland. Here one was as likely to invoke the name of Imhotep as I was to call upon Whitman or Stevens. My body stiffened in response to the place. I felt exposed as some kind of a sellout, scrutinized by the very walls.

  The woman minding the store was almost as tall as Micah, and her hair was wrapped in a bright blue cloth. She came out from behind the register to give him a hug. She wore leggings that showed everything, smoothed everything, nudged all that flesh skyward just the right bit. Her body bruised my lonely, lusting heart. With its high arrogant jut, her ass seemed like its own organism, separate from the rest of her. She looked older, probably around Micah’s age, but she was very attractive. I couldn’t stand his easy way with her.

  “Look at you, queen!” He liked to call black women “queens.” I obsessed over this and constantly shouted complaints in my mind. In our attempts to love them, why did our women have to be queens? If we were kings and queens, then who were our subjects? It was impossible for every one of us to be royalty.

  But the woman in the store clearly liked being a queen. With arms raised, she spun herself before Micah like a loosened feather. I considered bowing my head or genuflecting to claim a place in the ritual, if only to justify my presence.

  “Gotta drink all your meals, baby,” she said. “Health is wealth.”

  “A blessing!” Micah exclaimed.

  “Hey now, so where you been?” the woman said. “You could call a sister. You could come around more than once a year.”

  She wasn’t kidding. Micah’s absence had really made her upset. In that moment, he nodded in my direction and introduced me. That timing of his. She glanced over with dulled eyes and then fixed on me, suddenly intrigued.

  “This is what you do, Micah? I gave you that shirt.”

  The T-shirt I was wearing had the words MORE JUJU across the chest, declaring on behalf of its wearer powers that were African, magical, and sexual. Below this, two huge reddish spark plugs glowed. I was wearing it only because I needed to wash my clothes, but now I felt as though I’d been walking around all day making fraudulent claims.

  “I can’t believe this. That was a gift, for you. It’s my design.” She spoke as though the cloth were pulled from the fibers of her womb. But it was hard to tell if she was more upset with him or me.

  “You know I don’t rock no tight-ass smedium shirts. Too small. Only mess with them kingly robes.”

  He spoke in the Jamaican accent he sometimes affected. The rhyme or reason of its use was impos
sible to figure out, but somehow the accent and the words it bent earned him her instant forgiveness. She said she would get him another shirt, one in the right size. I imagined a version of my shirt that came down to Micah’s ankles. They made up with another long hug, murmuring to each other, two liars locked in an embrace. I figured he was promising her two visits in the next year, two Nubian orgasms perhaps, twice as many reverent anointings of her ass, speaking the whole time in his half-baked accent. I wanted to remind him that he was from Cleveland, but they both seemed far away from me.

  The woman held his face in her hands, but the look she gave him was maternal, not sexual. She left a kiss on the top of his head after he removed his hat and bent to receive it. Then she came over and pulled me into a hug too. She stood apart and studied me for a moment. With a honed sincerity she said how good it was to meet me. “You’re always welcome here, son,” she said. “Hope to see you again soon.” The warmth of her skin, the sweetness of her breath, and the steady lights of her eyes extinguished the bitterness in me. It seemed suddenly and powerfully true: I really was welcome; she really did hope to see me again, even though I had done nothing at all to deserve her kindness. As I stood there, the business of this errand was finally conducted. Micah paid for a book he’d ordered through the store. He avoided the big chain bookstores and online retailers. According to him they were part of Babylon, against what was righteous and true.

  The book was called The Manual of Taoist Sexology: Infinite Wisdom and Methods. In the car he told me to take a look. It was a thick volume, over three hundred pages. Clearly its wisdom and methods were for Cody, starting tonight. The introduction included this passage: “Correct sex circulates happiness among individuals and societies. Happiness is a form of healing, and correct sex conjures forth healing and infinite happiness. Incorrect sex—sex used as a weapon to be inflicted upon others—conjures forth decay and infinite pain.” The book was more for him than for her. Or if it was for her, a genuine gift, then there was nothing of an apology in it. His intention in giving it wasn’t at all to make amends for what he had done. His notion of correction wasn’t concerned with morality; it was simultaneously physical, metaphysical, and cosmic. It struck me that telling Micah about what had happened, about my incorrect sex with Cody, wasn’t about apology either. I hadn’t been thinking of it that way at all. I wanted to shift Cody’s position between us, and to shift his position too. My desire, like his, was to reorder the universe so it revolved around me.

  Sometimes, because of the way he looked at me—the way he glanced and grinned now as I held the book—it seemed he already may have known my secret, that he suspected it or that Cody had already confessed. It would have been exactly like him to suspect or even know and, out of confidence or even arrogance, perhaps some mythic notion of ancient brotherhood, not to care very much. His concern, if he had one, wasn’t me; it was the Ghanaians across the Atlantic, men of mind and flesh and throbbing blood who weren’t mythical or ancient, men who were very much alive. But his logic of correspondences interpreted the daytime moon as a confirmation of her fidelity while abroad, and he saw no reason to worry about what she might have done here. As soon as I thought this, however, I told myself it couldn’t be true. Micah had told me his relationship with Cody was the longest he’d ever had with a woman. He would care what she did, even if it was with me. He cheated on her constantly, yes, but he did love her. Both these things must have warred within him, but his body could—with apparent ease—contain such conflicts.

  While waiting for a traffic light to turn green, Micah turned to me with a funny look on his face. I couldn’t pinpoint the meaning of his expression.

  “So, homegirl at the store,” I said, just to say something. “She’s a real trip.”

  “A queen,” he said.

  “One of your old pieces?”

  Micah looked at me like I was deranged. “What? She’s an elder, blood. She’s got kids my age. Keeps herself looking right, but that woman’s gotta be sixty years old.”

  Even her body lies, I thought. But it didn’t feel like a lie, or not merely that, and this new feeling colored the way I had seen them hugging earlier. To so wholly throw yourself into fabrication, into falseness, stretching yourself into a different shape. People like that must have a constant need to be held.

  We spent a good deal of time tracking down the herbalist Micah liked, so he could buy some bundles of dried sage. A few hours remained before Cody got in. Micah said our next task, which for some reason he also referred to as an “errand,” was to participate in the weekly meditation for people of color. It took place, when the weather was nice, in Fort Greene Park. I’ve never been one to meditate. And people of color was to me an unsatisfying, even problematic phrase. It called to mind crayons or Magic Markers. But Micah promised that honeys would be there, explained on the way that these particular honeys would appreciate my “cerebral vibisms.” He liked to add ism to certain words. He was a chief constructor of arcane theories and doctrines that only he, if anyone, understood. When you boiled it down, his language had just a handful of words, and few of them made any sense. They evaporated as soon as they left his mouth. He was so confident when he said them, even though his entire store of knowledge and wisdom was suspect. It didn’t matter in the end, because of the way he made you feel. So few words, as if he had pared them down to get closer to the crucial beginnings of language itself, to notions so large and surprisingly simple they had to be shared.

  Micah dangled the promise of women so I would go to the meditation with him. It was hard to understand—maybe I was only his foil—but he really seemed to want my companionship. There was no way he knew what had happened, I realized. No man with the barest degree of sanity would cling this way to another man, a friend, who had slept with his woman. So the burden of telling was still mine.

  We walked through the park and passed children at play. The air was hot but not humid. We made our way past scattered oaks and elms, and then up the hillock in the middle of the park, emerging finally from a dappled tunnel made by a cluster of ginkgos. The sky, a huge blue sparkle, framed the thin, yellowed smile of the persisting moon. The group, made up mostly of women, had started to gather near the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument. At least three different languages drifted from them into the breeze. The monument’s thick Doric column rose above the group like a phallic idol. Micah was right; many of the women were extremely attractive, but Cody was the person I wanted. The effect of the array was striking, however—one gorgeous collective personality—and no one looked at me as though I didn’t belong. For a few solid moments—the first I’d had in a long time—the phrase people of color made complete and unassailable sense.

  Micah wanted to introduce me to some women right away, but I resisted.

  “Come on,” he urged. “Blood, this is it. It doesn’t get better. Open thy hand wide,” he said, exposing the skin of his palms.

  “Maybe after.”

  He smiled, but disappointment creased his face. “Don’t make me do everything,” he said, pointing a finger at my nose. “Because I will, damn you.” We clapped hands and he pulled me into his chest, holding me there for a while. He really wasn’t afraid to show affection for anyone, man or woman. “We’ll find you your queen yet,” he said.

  Black love was one of his crucial notions, a heterosexual paradise in which a desirable woman existed for every desiring man, a queen for every king. When he called me “king,” he believed it—more than Uncle Max had. Micah believed more fully in me. He seemed genuinely baffled, even concerned, that I didn’t have someone.

  Micah moved fluidly through the crowd. As always, he made each interaction tactile, kissing each woman on both cheeks, grasping their hands, touching their naked shoulders. He flirted and laughed easily, his eyes wide and receptive, and it became difficult to tell which people he already knew and which he was meeting for the first time. I walked a few feet across the coarse grass and sat at the base of the monument. Even through jeans
the granite warmed the backs of my thighs. Warmth spread all over my body, making me feel vaguely feverish. Uncle Max used to take me to this monument when I was a boy. He used to tell me the monument was for our people, black people, built to commemorate those who had died on slave ships, those floating prisons. He didn’t always narrate the monument that way, but I didn’t mind. Sometimes he would tell me it honored blacks who had fought in the Revolutionary War, people who thought of liberty not as an abstraction but as a felt thing. Once, he gripped my shoulder and asked if I could imagine the ease of limbs freed from shackles, the beauty.

  My uncle was a handsome man, with a serious face that could become severe. He worked as a copy editor for a tabloid newspaper and kept a photograph of Kwame Ture on his desk. His thumbs were often smudged with ink. Uncle Max wanted to write articles himself, but all his attempts failed. As he got more and more frustrated, he began to spend more time away from home, and when he wasn’t fleeing from our apartment, he stretched its air taut with his bile. The quality of his writing was unknown to me, but he was a gifted storyteller, which is why I accepted his contradictory tales. He had a particular talent for conjuring motive, character, and blame right on the spot. In the story he made of his life, he blamed everyone—his bosses for being racist, my aunt for not loving and supporting him enough. He blamed my father for being, in his words, a “bum,” and blamed his dead sister for loving a man who was no damn good. He blamed me simply for being my mother and father’s child. For a long time, Aunt Leigh and I were both pricked by the edges of his well-honed fantasies, even after he became nothing more than a jagged rock in the world, even after he died. Only in his lowest moods, in the middle of the night during those last years, would he admit to himself that some of his failings might be his own; he thought these moments of slurred confession at the kitchen table were private, but sometimes I’d sneak into the living room, where I could hear him. His words terrified me. They let in everything a man’s sense of self-preservation should keep at bay, and he was alone, I realized, so alone. I listened because I couldn’t stop myself, but my listening did him no good.