“You came for your watch?”
“It was my father’s.” Not addressing her, making a show of looking around the place, overturning and sifting through a tin soup can filled with pennies. “It’s got sentimental value.”
“I’ve heard of that.” Rose gathers and smooths the hem of her dress. “Micah, I’m married.”
“I know. Consider it one more thing we have in common.”
“I didn’t say you could come inside, Micah.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Can I come inside?”
The two of them clamped together again, how he missed her! How her eyelashes spread like Oriental fans when she closed her eyes. The smoothness of her skin, how it blushed and darkened around the buttocks and labia. The sink into her gluey depths echoed by the revelation of his own substance, shockingly white. Her unself-conscious wonderment at things—how, when he urinated after it was over, she’d marveled over the organ of micturition and procreation both: “It’s like a train conductor switching tracks.”
She told him everything: how Marblestone had stiffed the nonunion workers of their pay; about the latest police raid at the Honeypot; about the humiliating rent parties she’d been forced to throw, endurance tests replete with endless aluminum trays of macaroni and cheese, oxtail stew, red velvet cake, and gossipy neighbors; about the terrible desperation and self-betrayal she’d felt over finally accepting the marriage proposal of Jacob Dobie, the fifty-three-year-old barber who’d been pursuing her for more than a year; about the squalid nonevent of their City Hall wedding, wildflowers swiped from flower boxes for a bouquet, a Bronx-accented court officer the couple’s only witness. “The dress you saw me wearing in the doorway was the one I got married in,” she says, showing off the modest engagement ring planted on her hand, stone no larger than a shining snowflake, a chip of glitter embedded in the sidewalk.
“Why’d you do it, hon?” he asks her. “Why’d you marry him?”
“How can you ask me that, Em? I wasn’t expecting any proposals from you, now, was I? I’m thirty-one; I don’t make a sale now, who’s going to buy it?”
“I’m sorry, honey.”
He told her everything: about the light show of Africa; about the dignity and grace and generosity of the people he met there; about muntu and Malwiki notions of deep time and the spirit world; about the lion attack and Spiro’s getting killed; about her own brother’s gradual emergence as a serious young man; about how Izzy had found happiness, at last, in the arms of his African prince; about how he had checked in with her constantly in his mind.
“That’s easy,” she said, having nestled into his armpit during storytime. “It’s easy to feel those things when you’re apart. You can always make things work when you’re alone in your head.”
And there was the thing she didn’t have to tell him. The beat of his heart, the beat of her heart, the merging of those two marching bands, and dawning recognition of still fainter percussion. That and the pleasing roundness of her abdomen that she’d tried to mask. Three months apart wasn’t a long time, but still.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “it’s not yours.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I wouldn’t have let that happen between us.”
They’d gone for it a second time, dorsalwise (Micah, mindful of the child, taking in the view), when the bedroom door opens a crack. For so large a man, Jacob Dobie makes practically no sound at all. Instead he quietly takes up a chair in the corner of the bedroom as Micah, eyes closed in rapture, continues working on his wife from behind.
“Micah,” Rose says, gripping the back of her lover’s thigh.
He opens his eyes and pops out of her, slick and upright before them all, the persistent asparagus the room’s throbbing focus of attention.
“Slip that back in, son,” the man says in a voice rich with burned tobacco leaves and swill and dark polished wood. Biting his lower lip and nodding in appreciation, he folds his hands across his chest as he nestles back in his chair, as relaxed and untroubled as a man taking up his favorite spot next to the radio after a long day’s work. “Got to finish what you started. Daddy taught me anything, it’s that: got to finish what you start.”
“Do as he says, Micah.”
“That’s right, son. You look like someone who can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Dobie says, crossing his legs and—was it possible?—reaching into the night table, removing a bottle, and pouring himself a drink. “Listen to the wife.”
They both keep their eyes on Dobie sitting in his chair as they resume the act. Stretched across the length of the barber’s wide forehead is a horizontal line as deep and insistent as a mouth, from which all the man’s facial expressions appear to be rigged. Dobie’s cheeks are lightly mottled, like brown arts-and-crafts paper where drops of water have spilled and dried, and above his lip resides a patch of mustache that looks like it was penciled in that morning by a cartoonist, a thick black bar that glistens vaguely wet. After he’s shrugged out of his checked suit jacket, the man exposes a great dignified gut that’s rounded but firm and without flab, a prideful stomach that announces to the world that its owner would never go hungry.
“Just so we clear, Eagle Scout,” Dobie says, stretching his long legs straight out in front of him, swirling his drink and sniffing its mystic brown vapors. “Man who don’t know what his bride up to a cuckadoodle. I know what my Rose been up to. I’m privy to everything happens in my house.”
God Almighty! Micah thinks—working himself into a pleasurable rhythm despite himself—not another one of these! When would Micah stop encountering these characters, these proscenium-faced men—these ghouls with great, gargoyled, Grand Guignol masks? Marblestone, Mr. Waldo, now Dobie—this tribe needn’t say nor do anything to broadcast aggression or threat; it was all mapped right there on their epidermis. You’re not talking about human beauty or ugliness or even anatomical necessity with these characters. Instead their features work as cartoon projections of personality: noses that thrust and jab, eyebrows that punctuate like typewriters, assaultive eyes and mouths that poke you in the chest. When would these men—these lunatic men with their terrible, insistent faces—stop haranguing him?
Dobie begins to undress.
“Moviemaker,” he says, standing and kicking off an enormous pair of black shoes, broadcasting to Micah that he knows some facts about him, that his name hasn’t gone unspoken in the apartment since Dobie had begun sharing the address. “I’d ask if you gift-wrapped the package, but that doesn’t much matter nowadays.”
Dobie scoops out of his suspenders—each loop diving away from him and smacking against his thigh in suicide leaps. Then up come the shirttails. He goes after his shirt buttons with nimble fingers, as expert as a society matron wielding a lobster fork, and Micah begins to sense what an excellent barber the man must be. Next the belt lashes off in a single stroke, its clanging brass buckle suggesting a deadly double life. Off come the heavy wool trousers, accompanied by a musty, shameful locker-room smell. Down come the boxers, the jaundiced T-shirt is lifted overhead, and Dobie stands before them completely nude. Even partially obscured in the dark, it is clear he is a powerfully built man; thick-armed and stocky-legged, with skin marked by unexplained scars and large ashy patches. Micah—inside the man’s wife still—climaxes and dismounts just as Dobie takes up residence at the edge of the bed, causing that side of the mattress to sink.
“If you’re finished up in here,” Rose’s husband commands, slapping her nearest thigh, “why don’t you go the next room, put on some cocoa.”
Dobie stares at Micah’s shriveling member with its exposed mark of Abraham, slick with his wife’s slime. Micah stares at Dobie’s veined purple thing.
“Yeah, I heard of you, moviemaker,” Dobie says as his wife exits the room. He is spilled out on top of the covers, as resplendent a physical presence as an Alaskan grizzly.
“I’ve heard of you, too,” Micah says. “W
ould it be all right if I put something on?”
“You spend all afternoon rocking-and-rolling with my wife, engaged in all kinds of skulduggery, you going to ask my permission to get dressed? You go ahead, do what you like.”
Micah remembers that relations with Rose started in the other room and that all his clothes are scattered there. So he rises from the bed, reaches into the closet, and pulls out the first thing that greets his hand. He can’t explain why, but Micah feels safer, less ill at ease, wearing the man’s bathrobe. It’s crumpled and brown and smells of cod liver oil and cologne, and Micah cannot imagine the barber—a person who drapes protective aprons around his customers—bringing harm to him while he is wearing the man’s own clothes.
“Back down on the bed, son,” Dobie instructs, folding his hands across a barrel chest covered in curly black wire, his body heat and weight erasing the faint imprint of adulterous elbows and knees. “You got some good fuck in you, I’ll tell you that straight off. Most white boys I seen in the army just hit that honeypot fast as they can, only take but a minute. But with you, I could tell, you and Rose’s got chemistry, you’re trying to communicate something, take your time. I see that, I think, watch that, let they mind they business, enjoy they fuck, see if they can’t get to the bottom of it. Sit in the corner, fix myself a drink, see if we can’t discuss the situation like equals. Honey!” Dobie barks into the next room. “Is our refreshments ready?”
“Not yet!” Rose calls back in a voice different from the one Micah recognizes.
“Save some of that hot water! Bring me a bowl of that and my razor and shaving brush.” Turning to Micah: “You ever have a hot lather shave?”
“They’re not my favorite.”
“Well, you’re going to get a proper one today.” Dobie rises from the bed, lifts the wooden chair from its corner, and slams it down in the center of the room, making four exclamation points where its legs connect with the floor. Naked still, he hoists the adulterer off the bed and drops him into the chair like a sack of potatoes. Rose reenters the room, now also dressed in a bathrobe. Over one forearm hangs a towel. A porcelain bowl of steaming-hot water presses against her middle, and around it her hands hold a folded straight razor and a sudsy brush in a shaving mug.
“Rose …?”
“Don’t worry, Em, he’s a professional,” she says, placing the tools on the nightstand. Her eyes are steel, her mouth a nautical horizon. “Just promise to stay very still.”
Rose takes her leave, and Dobie begins to whip the black badger brush around the inside of the shaving mug like he’s beating an egg. “Rose is past thirty. She’s no spring chicken, I got no illusions about that,” he says, continuing the conversation as he clockwises generous helpings of hot lather over Micah’s face and neck. “No illusions about her arriving to the ball with a past that isn’t folded into the present. No illusions that the past don’t breathe the air of the present.”
The barber returns the brush and mug to the nightstand and retrieves and opens the black wood-handled razor—as simple and elegant an implement as a fountain pen or a pocket lighter. He takes up his position behind the chair—the man’s soft privates brushing against his guest’s back—and begins waving a thick, weapon-wielding arm in front of Micah’s face. “You go with or against the grain?”
“With.”
“Good,” the barber says, the first impeccable stroke down Micah’s right cheek making the sound of a skater’s initial push out onto the ice. “You got some ingrown hairs there you should be mindful of.” He switches sides, swooping down the planes of the left half of Micah’s face. Next Dobie pinches together the wings of Micah’s nostrils, lifts his nose, and begins scraping away at the ill-defined territory between his jaw and neck. “Careful your chin doesn’t grow a second cousin down there.”
“Thanks.”
“So a piece of advice my daddy gave me I’ll pass along: Some women worth killing for but ain’t worth dying over.”
“I’ve met a few of them.”
“You ever been to Europe?”
“Yes.”
“Well, in Eye-talian cultures”—scratching at one side of his mustache—“there are powerful men keep in their lives important ladies who’s not their wives. They have a word for it in Sicily. You been to Italy?”
“Uh-huh,” Micah says without moving his lips. “You?”
“Harlem Hell Fighters,” Dobie says, stanching a nick with the towel. “Little blood there, my apologies. Anyway, I know Rose is more than just another lay for you. I know you and Rose got history. But I want you to know I chased that girl for years and won her honorable, and she’s … well, she’s my Rose. Leave the sideburns long, right?”
“Yes, please.”
“What I’m saying is this: I’m a man of the world, too, about as much as a colored man can be in this piss pot, and I’d rather accept the known than be fearful of the unknown. So long’s I know whose potato she’s peeling, I’ll run my marriage best I can, and my business best I can, and when the baby come, if you like you can be a silent partner in that enterprise, too.”
Dobie finishes his work, wiping stray stripes of foam from Micah’s cheeks and neck with a warm towel. Micah’s face stings with cold. “There, you been laid, shaved, and filleted all in the same day. What I say sound like a fair proposition to you?”
“Does Rose know exactly what it is you’re suggesting?”
“Know? What know? The world is what it is, what’s to know?” Dobie says, bending down to retrieve his boxers, giving Micah a view of his powerful haunches. “Just leave the back door free. Leave that pudding for me, son. Some things got to belong to a husband alone.”
TWO
They worked together in silence. After weeks of riotous stimulus, the return to the editing room came as a sanctuary, offering monastic quiet and concentration that was itself a form of prayer. The brothers were relieved to find themselves back in this ascetic arena. They worked twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-hour days, cataloging Marblestone’s Noah’s Ark of stock footage, putting together a rough assembly of the location sequences for Pot of Trouble, and working most diligently and worryingly on the roundup, village massacre, and slave-ship passages for O, Africa!
Izzy had initially been inconsolable following the brothers’ return. He ignored Howard’s entreaties to meet for drinks, limited spoken communication to monosyllables, ate hardly at all, bathed little, slept less. Once, confronted with a bar of Palmolive soap as white and substantial-looking as a boiled chicken breast, Izzy sniffed it, then began eating. Micah was so worried about Izzy that a few days after their return he’d installed him on his family’s living-room couch, his brooding brother’s newly brown and slim form an immediate object of fascination to Micah’s sons, who at first mistook their uncle for a dusky native their father had smuggled home in a box.
“Prove you’re Uncle Izzy,” Benjamin pleaded, fingering the stranger’s brightly beaded African necklaces.
“I can’t,” Izzy answered, his head a crate packed with cotton. “I don’t remember what it was like being Izzy.”
“What’s your name, then?”
“Hiding Feather.”
“Then where’s Uncle Izzy?”
“I’m not here.”
If since their return Izzy had been as listless and withdrawn as a tortoise, there was one thing over which he couldn’t mask his anticipation: the arrival of the developed reels. As for a virginal groom approaching his wedding night, expectations mounted. What would he find? Would the brothers be greeted with something revelatory as anticipated, or would the reels come back damaged, ruined, blown out? It was only once the work print came back from the lab and they began the arduous labor of sifting through all they’d shot that some atavistic reflex took over and Izzy was able to replace his catatonia with fierce concentration and critical discernment. This was craft. After everything else had left him, after all the old ways had been hollowed out, what remained was craft. Terra firma to which he could retreat, his
mechanical certainty was the shoreline that absorbed the waves of his erratic emotional state. Sitting in the editing room in his brilliant red dashiki, though he looked like an unemployed Coney Island swami, bangles and beads clanging as he went, Izzy could function so long as he was working.
The editing facilities were situated on Forty-First Street and Fifth Avenue, near the epicenter of the brothers’ lost, glittering city of white. When they arrived back in New York in early February, in the post-holiday gloom Manhattan looked as tired and lonely as an outdoor pool in midwinter. But that was just street level. Lifting their eyes by degrees, the brothers found the metropolis in the midst of convulsions, the city’s vertiginous skyscape tarpaulined in struts and girders, ladders to some imagined empyrean, a child’s game of pick-up sticks writ large.
“It’s not about better views or more office space,” Marblestone suggested to the boys one time he was in New York, zipping through the city’s canyons in a crowded yellow cab. “It’s the old child’s game with the building blocks: ‘How high can I make it so it won’t fall down?’ ” They were zooming along Lexington, all the lights falling for them like dominoes, each of them a brass-buttoned marching-band leader bracketed on either side by brick and steel walls of brown and gray lined with relentless shoppers and businessmen and matrons in overcoats and furs and fedoras carrying bundles and newspapers and suitcases and umbrellas, and Marblestone loved them all.
Though the sixty-story Woolworth Building still reigned as the tallest building in the world, Micah and Izzy could on clear days mark from the editing room’s window the progress of the Bank of Manhattan Trust building downtown and, over on the East Side, the skeletal frame of the Chrysler Building on Forty-Second and Lexington, its silver silhouette gleaming like an ancient spike. Most days, however, the blinds remained drawn. They worked dispassionately, never once referring by name to lost ones as they encountered them through the Moviola, but always objectively, as in, “I like what he did there” or “I prefer the way he steps into the light in that take.”
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