A Lucky Man

by Jamel Brinkley

  As a high-school senior I felt exposed to my uncle’s distinctive pierce again while walking through Fort Greene Park. It was five years to the day since his passing, and I hadn’t been there since he was alive. After a while I came across an informational plaque and read about the monument’s history, its true history. And there was my uncle, near me again, a kind of threat, as if his bones lay among those hardening in the crypt below.

  The sound of Micah’s laughter carried across our brief expanse of open sky. A woman with a nimbus of dark glistening hair approached the group he was standing in. On her brown arm she carried a basket that was beautifully woven, with triangular patterns of pale red, orange, and lilac. When the woman joined the group she reached into the basket and pulled out two spheres of bright yellow fruit. Micah and the others peeked into the basket, dipped their hands in, but didn’t take anything, and the woman set the basket down in the grass. Other women, and two or three men, joined the circle, and Micah stood at the center of it.

  For most people there is a gap, for some a chasm, between the way they dream themselves and the way they are seen by others. That gap might be the truest measure of one’s loneliness. But seeing Micah as I often did, from across that gap, I was the one made to feel lonely. Everyone else seemed to be with him on the other side, always. At times, I couldn’t understand this. He had hurt people, deceived people, among them perhaps some of the women he was now surrounded by. He had deceived Cody. Yet, knowing his reputation, or sensing it, people still clung to him. I had clung to him, as if this proximity could make me more like him. The thing was this: he seemed to be one of the few for whom there isn’t a gap at all.

  Disgusted, I had the urge to stand on the base of the monument and shout my secret at Micah, to make my confession to him into public testimony. It would hurt more, but which of us would suffer the deeper wound? Amid that crowd of beautiful, happy people, my testimony would get lost in the collective song of their laughter. Or so I told myself. The truth was I was afraid. It felt impossible to predict what the words would do. They caught in my throat and I could taste them on the back of my tongue.

  How many of them, the meditative, the seekers, knew the simple fact that there were ruins of prisoners lying beneath us? I wasn’t meditating, only pretending, looking around through squinted eyes. My jeans pulled against my knees as I struggled to sit cross-legged. Spears of grass pricked my feet. The squeals of children leapt from the distance. Above us, a passing flock loosed its bird-chatter. The air smelled of skin creams and hair oils. It was almost five-thirty; Cody would arrive in two hours. No matter what I did, my mind refused to be still. The woman in front of me was the one who had brought the basket. I lost myself in her flawless storm cloud of hair.

  I closed my eyes and took a few meditative breaths, but what was the point of this pursuit? My eyes spotted with envy even when they were shut, even when I deeply inhaled what Micah called the “miracle of oxygen.” I tried to clear my mind, to embrace a vision of nothingness, but instead came that miserable little room in the apartment I’d shared with Cody, Cody’s lips pursed to sip wine or to kiss him, Cody’s face in distress, Cody’s face.

  The day before she left for Ghana, I invited her out for a drink. Micah was away in New Orleans helping a friend on a film shoot. Micah did much of his dirt when he was away. Cody was sad he wouldn’t be around to see her off, so I had an opportunity to comfort her. When I arrived, she was already at the bar with a glass of red wine. Cody was always early. She didn’t have on anything special, just a white tank top and jeans, but she looked incredible. I searched for the lean of a stray bra strap toward the curve of her shoulder, but there was no bra. I tried not to stare as I approached. During our friendly embrace, her cheek shocked the heavy heat of the evening from my lips.

  As always, she asked about the babies, by which she meant the seven- and eight-year-olds I worked with as a part-time teaching artist. I recited some funny lines from the kids’ poems, and her insane laughter disturbed the other patrons. After a few glasses of wine, Cody allowed her hand to linger on my knee. She kept asking me if I was okay, which was strange. I was so happy.

  After a couple more glasses she brought up Micah. She asked if it was true what they said—her girlfriends and her rivals. All of Brooklyn, it seemed. But I knew she was asking because she felt it in her gut. “Is he a player?” she said, almost whispering. “Is Micah fucking around on me?”

  The way she looked as she let the question slip through her teeth suggested that she wanted some kind of false reassurance. Maybe not an outright lie, maybe just an evasion, a drunken sidestep that would leave the matter with her, with the two of them. But she knew I knew the truth—why else would she ask? I was happy she’d asked. Her hand wasn’t on my knee anymore, and I longed for it to be there again. So I did what felt right to me. I told her the truth. She turned and faced the lines of bottles behind the bar. I considered saying sorry, but for what? I wasn’t sorry at all. I ordered one more round and we drank in silence. She didn’t cry or ask questions or rail against Micah, and for this I felt grateful. I didn’t want to defend him, or condemn him any more than I already had.

  As I walked her home, my mind raced. What was next? When should I tell her the rest of what I had to say, the way I felt about her? Would she accept this confession now? Why didn’t I just say it? I had to take long strides to keep up with her brisk pace. Her shoes ticked against the pavement and her hair changed color as we moved in and out of blue and gray shadows. She unlocked the door to her building and held it open, then unlocked her apartment door and invited me in. I’d been there before, several times since we had roomed together, but the place felt strange to me now. Traces of the Egyptian Musk body oil Micah liked to wear lingered. Two suitcases stood by the door. What if he had come back early to surprise her? Throughout the night I would keep seeing him.

  Cody went into her kitchen, flipped on the meager light, and stood at the sink. She ran water from the tap into a marbling glass. I stood behind her, and then against her. I slid my palms down her arms and my thumbs skimmed circles around the fine knobs of her wrists. Holding the glass, Cody’s hands shook as much as mine did under the running faucet. She set her water down and twisted around to face me. Her wet fingers, on my neck, pulled my face down to hers. The kiss she gave me, ungentle, pulled air from my mouth, and her hands dampened my shirt at the shoulders and chest. With a quick lift of her arms, her shirt was gone, and I stood back so that her deep navel and her breasts and sinewy shoulders were finally exposed to me. She had to know how the dim kitchen light brassed her skin, and so, I felt, she must have been presenting herself to me in this way as a reward for my patience, for all the time I’d spent helplessly imagining her precise nudity. I understand now though, all these years later, that her actions weren’t about me or my desperate longing at all.

  Some of what happened after that eludes me, despite my attempts to retain every second in memory. I wanted to reach out and hold the weight of those breasts long in my hands. I wanted, despite our drunkenness, to say serious things to her that she would comprehend and happily accept. In those next moments, though, I touched her but hardly held her. We fumbled at each other and stripped each other. I tried to draw her into my arms and kiss her, but something fought within our embrace. It seemed like she was shoving me toward her bedroom.

  Once there, she kissed me briefly, urged me onto the bed, and began rummaging through her nightstand and then her closet. She seemed frustrated. She was looking for condoms, I realized, and didn’t know where they were. She and Micah probably didn’t even use them anymore.

  She found one on the floor of her closet and came back to the bed. With her eyes squeezed closed, she kissed me, again without tenderness, and slipped the condom into my hand. It was wrapped in paper instead of plastic or foil, and the paper felt worn, soft, the corners bent and dulled. Cody maintained control of the act throughout, and when I attempted to take hold as she moved on top of me, her writhing kept he
r from my grasp. There was no way it happened like this with him.

  The sex ended quickly, too quickly. I started to apologize but was scared I wouldn’t be able to control the words. They might spill out into a larger acknowledgment of everything that was wrong. Instead, finally, I held her. We both lay on our sides, my arm around her waist, claiming her, her cool buttocks tucked into my groin. I saw, as if through other eyes, a vision that made me smile, but I still couldn’t tell her how I felt. Nothing I considered saying seemed right, so I stayed quiet. After a while I started to drowse against her, but then I felt her shaking. She twisted herself away from me, out of the warm pocket I had made for her with my body. I realized she was crying.

  “What’s wrong? What did I do?” I regretted the second question immediately.

  “I just want you to go,” she said, and then folded her underlip into her mouth.

  I drifted through those next few minutes in confusion, standing from the bed, leaving the room, bending to pick up my clothes. In the dark I also groped at objects that weren’t actually there, reaching for nothing but shadows. Dressed, and standing outside the apartment now, I turned to face her. She wouldn’t look at me. Her hair was flattened against her head and she was wearing one of Micah’s large, colorful T-shirts.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, and extended my hand out to her.

  “I have to finish packing for my flight,” she said, and my hand dropped.

  “Cody, I don’t understand—”

  “You’re no kind of friend,” she said, and then she closed the door.

  The meditation ended up going well for me. Sinking into it felt like escaping the harsh midday brights of August and entering the darkened cool of the movies. Emerging from it, I found things milder, like a mellowing extension of a movie theater itself. Everything was at a fuzzy distance, and I felt a chest-calm. Smiling, the women unfolded themselves, and some of them gathered around the basket of fruit resting in the grass. A few began to discuss the details of a rally against police brutality happening the next weekend. Micah approached me, eyebrows raised. I thought I understood something about him then. His appeal wasn’t about him as much as it was about the happy story he made of the past. He fully believed in that story, and he believed that its glories were still with us. Why wouldn’t he? I thought. Why wouldn’t any of us want to believe it? It’s a generous story in which the universe has a definite shape and its movements throb with personal significance. Everything—even life’s routine tragedies, even death—is a sign, and every sign can be understood, and language never seethes against you. Of course Cody still wanted him. She wanted a role in that story, and I did too. What could I offer her, what could I offer to myself, that would ever compare? All I had was a mess of sadness, with no language to clear the way.

  Micah grabbed my shoulders and shook me playfully. “Righteous, right?” he said.

  “Actually, yeah,” I said. “I feel pretty good.”

  He looked at me in a serious way, and the lines disappeared from his face. “Meditation, man, it carries you to the truth.” He exhaled loudly and nodded with conviction. “I gotta come correct. I gotta do better.” He smiled again, and for a moment he looked wise. “The party can’t go on forever. She’s a queen.”

  I knew before Micah said this that I would never tell him about me and Cody. I knew another true thing—that I would go with him to LaGuardia and the three of us would go get dinner, together again, restored. What I didn’t know was that on the way to the airport, in the car, it would be difficult for me to tell which of us was more nervous. I didn’t know Micah could get nervous. I didn’t know how surprised Cody would be that I was there, how awkward and terrible it would be at the airport, how her gaze would keep shifting from him to me. I didn’t know how awful it would feel to receive a half smile from her, or the insubstantial pressure of her lips on my cheek. I didn’t know that there would be nothing there, absolutely nothing.

  I didn’t know, hadn’t noticed at all, how comparatively little I’d thought about Cody that day. I hadn’t thought about the possibility of us being alone together at the restaurant. I hadn’t thought about what would actually happen. Enough time has passed that I now face my own middle years, and I finally understand why I hadn’t thought much about Cody: it was hardly about her.

  At dinner Micah would excuse himself from the table to take a call outside. Cody would draw her eyes up from the scraps of injera left on our communal plate and look at me cruelly, as if to ask, Why are you even here? With a nod, she’d acknowledge the pact of silence we had tacitly made, but it would be a pathetic gesture, meaningless for having to be made at all.

  I didn’t know it as I stood in the park with Micah grinning at me, but that dinner would be the last meal any of us would ever share with one another. All I truly knew then, in my heart, was how open I felt, how full.

  “Hey,” Micah said, “what did I say about the honeys?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, you were right.”

  He gave a sideways jerk of his head. “Over there, check it out. Yeah, those two. They look like twins, right, but they’re not. I’ve already been blessed by the one on the right. Ridiculous, blood, both of them. Tiny little waists but then …” With one hand he drew an exaggerated curve in the air. “Horn of Africa!” he cried. “It hurts so good.”

  What he said about them was true. They were stunning, and their bodies were incredible.

  “I gotta behave myself,” he said. “New life, reincarnation. But I’ll go say peace to homegirl so you can see what’s up with her sister.” He drilled one of his knuckles into my arm. “I can hook it up for you. Come on, king. She’s so honey.”

  He was right, she was. Still, I wasn’t interested at all. I agreed to meet her though, just for the hell of it, just for the beauty.

  As we walked over to the sisters, Micah asked if I wanted to tag along for one last errand, to go with him to the airport. He said we could pick up A Black Girl Named Cody and go have dinner together at that Ethiopian spot we hadn’t been to in a while. I said yes. He said it would be like old times.

  Wolf and Rhonda

  The reunion happened in the party room of the Tavern on Bruckner, which wasn’t actually located on Bruckner. Purple and white balloons floated free to the low ceiling, just above the heads of St. Paul’s Class of 1991. The elderly priest sat in a corner, nodding helplessly at his lap, lifting his wan head whenever someone came by to greet him. Old rap songs and declarations of love, music from twenty years ago, when they were in high school, played at a low volume from the wall-mounted speakers. The cake, frosted white and garnished with roses cut from gumdrops, would have stripes of rich pineapple filling between its layers. Wolf knew this. It was always this way at their reunions. Maritza Lopez, the organizer, was again wearing her formal, brightly colored dress. She had planned these gatherings from the start, and treated them like re-enactments of her quinceañera. Wolf admired her consistency, the sheer force of her determination.

  The Tavern on Bruckner was in Mott Haven, near St. Paul’s School and Church. Years ago, if Wolf and his friends had hung around long enough after dismissal, playing at the arcade or lingering in the magazine shop, they’d often see some of the faculty. These teachers would pass the church, turn the corner, and walk the long block to the bar for afternoon drinks. It had been funny for the boys to think of the teachers being driven to alcohol, funny to imagine them losing themselves, flirting, cursing, and shouting, breaking rules they enforced so strictly during the school day. Wolf found it less funny now.

  Like many Catholic schools, St. Paul’s was closing. In June it would recognize its final graduates. Other members of the Class of 1991 gave a few token acknowledgments of this fact and wondered aloud if today would be the last time they all gathered together. Although Wolf wasn’t close to anyone from St. Paul’s, he resented the school’s closure but felt convinced the reunions should continue until they were all in their graves.

  In the brightly lit room, he stood
with a quartet of high school friends who still lived in the Bronx. They had all made something of themselves. Maritza co-owned a beauty salon, Lizzie Barnes was in line to manage a small office, Chucho Hernandez and Duncan Wardell were climbing the ladder at the same local company. At the reunions, they never got tired of discussing how pleased their parents were with them, and they even competed to show whose parents were most proud. Wolf, an advertising man, had done better than any of them, but his father never seemed happy with his achievements.

  While they drank now, his childhood friends gabbed about the reports in the news, accusations that priests had molested children. Wolf hated when people treated disturbing matters with mere curiosity, gossiping like old gods high up on their mountain. It was as if achieving modest success meant they had never felt molested by life, as if making contact with the air never gave them the sensation of a cold, ash-white hand touching them.

  “Jesus,” he said to them, nearly shouting. “And what the fuck is it to you?”

  They all stared at him. Their expressions changed from total confusion to wide-eyed alarm. A couple of them glanced over at the priest, Father Grancher.

  Wolf vigorously shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “Hell no. Nothing like that.” The old man had never done anything to him. He wasn’t like that. If only the problem were that simple. Wolf took another tack: “Hey, what about Sterling? I just can’t stop thinking about it.” Sterling was a professional football player, an outspoken star who had died in a crash last month while racing his car. Controversy had followed him throughout his career.