When no ideas came, he turned off the lamp, hoping that darkness would provide an answer. It didn’t. He was trying to recapture the moment when everything had made sense, when he took action without second-guessing his motives.
Feeling lost, he looked across the room and saw a blue luminescence. It was the phone trying to reach out to him.
Half an hour later he went to see who was calling. There had been a dozen calls. Most of the entries were unfamiliar, but one, instead of a number, was a name that he knew.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Balkan?”
“Mr. X?”
“No, no, this is Michael.”
“Oh.”
“Did you call me on city business?” Michael asked.
“They wanted me to call, but this is your nickel.”
“I’ve been looking at the Internet,” Michael said. “People all over the place want to protect me. They’re offering money and legal support. One guy named Strummer wants to hire me and my ex to do a podcast for him.”
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“I thought you said that you wanted people to realize what they had in common.”
“But between them,” Michael said, “not through me.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Not like a natural disaster or some enemy,” the young bearded man replied. “I don’t want to be the discounted meal at the fast-food chain that you can buy in Anchorage or Dade County. I don’t want to be anything except an idea.”
“But you’re a man.”
“Thanks for that, Bob.”
“For what?”
“I needed to talk to somebody about these thoughts in my head. I couldn’t get them out if I didn’t have anybody to talk to. I know that you’re working for them, but right now they don’t know what to do. In that little window you helped me. You really did.”
“Helped you what?”
“I got to go, Bob.”
“Where can you go, Michael?”
“You always ask the best questions.”
The next morning Michael was standing in his kitchen eating from a can of pork and beans with a teaspoon when he noticed that the spigot had a slow drip. Michael wasn’t sure if it was the dripping or his talk with the city psychologist that made up his mind.
He tested the hot water and then called Melanie. She was surprised to hear from him and happy that he had decided to do his first podcast. He was careful, and she was too, not to talk about love.
At four in the afternoon Michael was ready. He had refused to allow Strummer to dictate what he said. He ignored the checklist of subjects his Internet listeners might want to hear about.
Michael had the bathtub draining when he started recording and had to close the bathroom door to keep out the noise.
“My name is Michael Trey,” he said into the receiver, with no notes or even a notion of what exactly he’d say. “I have lived in Manhattan for seven years, and I was scared about Hurricane Laura—so scared that I haven’t left my house since it broke. Because I wouldn’t go out, I lost my job and my girlfriend, and the landlord has been trying to evict me. I’m broke, and they keep turning my utilities on and off. I have hot water right now, and so I’m going to take my first real bath in weeks.
“My neighbor, Tommy Rimes, pushed a power strip and a little hose through the ventilation duct, and so I’ve been able to get by. I’ve seen videos of people down in the street supporting me. I like that, but it’s misguided. What they should do, I believe, is lock themselves into their own houses and turn off the world outside. I don’t know if this would be possible or if it would make any difference at all, but that’s all I’ve got.
“What I’m saying is that the president didn’t talk about me because there’s nothing to say. It is us that should be talking to him. It’s us that need to get the red lines out of the bottoms of our screens, because we’re in it together as far as we go. But maybe, maybe that’s impossible, because we do things primarily as mammals, not men and women.
“That’s really all I have to say. I know there are people out there that want a daily report from my musty apartment, but really all they have to do is listen to this, what I’m saying right now.
“Goodbye.”
Michael turned off his phone before running the hot bath in the deep iron tub. It was this tub that made him take the apartment in the first place. The hot water felt so good that he groaned when he first sat back. The stinging in his wrists subsided, and he wasn’t frightened except when he concentrated on the hue of the water.
He was exhilarated at first and then tired, in the way he used to be as a little boy getting in his bed. He wondered if anyone would ever make sense out of the fear-herding that all the people, and maybe all other creatures, of the world lived under.
He would have liked Melanie to say that she loved him, but only if he didn’t have to ask.
The Black Woman
in the Chinese Hat
Imeant to spend Saturday walking from Lower Manhattan back up to my neighborhood in Washington Heights, but I didn’t make it very far.
I took the IRT from 157th down to Battery Park late that morning, then headed north on foot. I made my way up the promenade, such as it is, on the West Side. It was hot, and so there were lots of swimsuited skaters whizzing past. Most had nice bodies, almost everyone with a date. Men and women, men and men—hand in hand. There were some female couples, but most of them seemed more like just friends.
There was a sprinkling of solitary skaters and joggers, even one or two walking alone. Almost all of the singles wore earphones. Some danced to the silent music, others stared doggedly ahead.
It’s not that I would have talked to anyone not listening to music. I was hiding under my hayseed straw hat and behind mirrored sunglasses. I wouldn’t have been able to pass more than three sentences with a stranger on the street. Making friends has always been hard for me. Even after four years at Hunter College I had only two friends from there—Eric Chen, a history major from Queens, and Willy Jones, a psych major from Long Island City. Both Willy and Eric lived in Brooklyn. I liked them, but spending time with them was always the same. We’d talk about women and movies at coffeehouses until we got hungry and went for junk food. It was always the same. So that Saturday I decided to walk around and look at people and places that I hadn’t seen before. Anything would be better than a day at home alone or with Willy or Eric.
Just a few blocks north of the Financial District was a large lawn filled with the prostrate bodies, primarily white, of sunbathers. Men with bulging muscles and women with the top straps of their bikinis undone to get a smooth tan. It didn’t look comfortable. There was no ocean or nice air, just the filthy Hudson on one side and a line of brick-faced office buildings across the West Side Highway on the other. And it was over a hundred degrees. Actually it was ninety-six, but the weather man said, from a sunbather’s radio, that the heat index, whatever that is, made it “feel like” a hundred and two.
There was a black woman, medium-brown really, lying amongst the others. She had on a one-piece fishnet bathing suit that, being almost the same color as her skin, gave you the idea you could see more than you really could. She was lying on her back with her head propped up, wearing a Chinese peasant hat and rose-colored sunglasses. I looked at her at first because she was the only Negro in a sea of white bodies, and then I noticed how good-looking she was.
I stared longer than I should have, and she noticed the attention. She propped up on an elbow and smiled. She had a good-size gap between her two front teeth. My heart skipped, and I felt a chill in spite of the heat.
She pointed at her hat and then at mine, as a kind of recognition, I guess, and then she waved for me to come over.
I didn’t move. She smiled again and waved more insistently. I found myself walkin
g over, between the five or six lengths of sunbathers, to get next to the black woman in the Chinese peasant hat.
She pulled up her legs to make room for me to sit down next to her.
I’m a very uncomfortable person. I’m big, not quite portly or fat but large enough to make simple motions like running or sitting on the floor difficult. I negotiated the maneuver as well as I could, managing not to step or sit on anyone.
“Hi,” the woman said. She was young, some years older than I but not yet twenty-five.
“Hey.”
“I got to go to the bathroom,” she said with a grimace.
“What?”
“I got to go, but if I leave, one a’ these white people gonna take my spot. But if you could hold my place while I run over there.” She pointed at a squat concrete structure about a hundred yards away.
I nodded. She grinned and reached over to squeeze my wrist. Then, with the slightest pressure against my arm, she was up more gracefully than I could ever manage. I watched her lope away toward one of New York’s few public toilets.
After she was gone, I stretched out to save her place, relaxing into my job. That’s why I liked work and school; there you had something to do and someone to be, and people treated you in a certain way that you didn’t have to think about. I mean, even if the boss didn’t respect you, he still had to ask you a question now and then. And whenever I was asked a question, I knew the right answer. And as far as girls and women were concerned, even the prettiest ones had to say hello if you were in the same class or worked on the same floor.
I felt a sense of purpose on that lawn, even though anyone looking would have thought I was out of place.
I say that because I wore a heavy pair of black jeans with a lightweight gray jacket cut in the military style. I didn’t wear a shirt that day. Everyone near me was nearly naked. One man, in the middle of a group of men, had taken down his trunks and was lying facedown, naked. Butt all up in the air, my mother’s voice screeched in my ear.
I heard a sound behind me. It was a young woman’s voice. I turned my head and saw that the woman wasn’t complaining, as I had at first thought. Her boyfriend had gone beyond kissing and had his hand down in the towel that barely covered their lower bodies. She smiled at me over his head and then made a face that said something felt good.
A broadcast reporter was saying that a policeman had been shot while sitting in a car out in front of his house. I was wondering why he’d been sitting outside rather than in his house. I was still facing the girl but thinking about the man in his car.
“Hey! What you lookin’ at?” The woman’s blond-headed boyfriend had noticed her looking at me. His face was red. I didn’t know if it was colored from anger or the sun.
I turned around quickly and raised my knees to my chest. My back felt vulnerable to attack. I didn’t know if he was going to get up and hit me. I would have walked away, except for the black woman in the Chinese hat.
I had been sweating all morning, but now I could feel the moisture gathering under my arms and across my thighs. Thoughts kept coming in and out of my head. He wouldn’t be so tough if I had a knife . . . I should go . . . I should carry a kitchen knife with me . . . Where is that woman? . . . Is a kitchen knife legal? . . . Is that him standing up behind me? . . . Where is that woman? . . .
I felt a hand on my shoulder and let myself fall sideways, thinking that I could kick him from the ground. I fell against a man’s hard body.
“Hey, guy, what’s wrong with you?” the man I toppled on complained.
Hovering in the sun above me was the woman I waited for.
“I knocked him over,” she said to the balding bodybuilder. “I hit his tickle spot by mistake.”
While the muscle man groused, I saw that the lovers had gone. My heart was thumping, and sweat was stinging my eyes. The black woman in the Chinese hat descended to her knees and said, “Hey, you OK?” in a tone that I’d never heard addressed to me before.
It was like she was my oldest friend or my wife or one of those social workers who put their life on the line to help someone they don’t even know. I saw that she had some kind of leotard on under the fishnet bathing suit.
“Yeah,” I said, sitting upright. “I’m OK.”
“You fell over just like a stack a’ bananas.”
“Yeah.”
“My name’s Chai,” she said.
“I’m Rufus.”
“How come you wearin’ all them hot clothes, Rufus?”
“I thought it was gonna be cold this morning.”
“I don’t know where you comin’ from. It’s been hot every day this summer. Real hot.” Chai licked her lips. My eyes were drawn to her mouth. I wanted her to say something else that sounded like before.
Chai smiled and took a water bottle from her oversize bag.
“It’s hot,” she complained.
“Yeah, it sure is.”
“I thought it would be nice to sit out here, but it’s too hot.”
“Today’s a good day to be in air-conditioning,” I said. “That’s for sure.”
“You got air-conditionin’ at home?”
“No. But they have it at the World Trade Center.”
Chai frowned. All I wanted to do was to keep her talking.
“Want to go down to the World Financial Center and get some lunch?” It took all the breath in my lungs to get those words out.
“I don’t even know you, Rufus.”
“There’s air-conditioning down there.”
“You got money?”
“Enough for lunch.”
“Enough for a taxi to take us down there?”
“Wow, this is nice,” Chai said, when we entered the glass-walled hall of palm trees in the lower court of the financial center. My friend Willy calls it the hall of palms. In the center of the vast room there are eighteen slender palm trees that reach thirty feet. Between them are benches like you’d find in a park. The benches were all occupied by people trying to escape the heat.
“I never even knew this place was here,” she said, taking my arm.
I could feel her breast against my shoulder. I wanted to swallow but couldn’t make my throat cooperate.
“I’m hungry,” Chai said.
We went under the Merrill Lynch mezzanine into the upscale food court. Past the Rizzoli bookstore and behind a yellow pillar was Pucci’s Two, an Italian restaurant I sometimes went to on my lunch break from Carter’s Home Insurance.
“No swimwear inside the dining room,” said the slender host at the podium that led into the restaurant.
Actually, there was no inside to the restaurant. There was just an area where there were about thirty tables cordoned off by a thigh-high green fence. The only inside was the kitchen.
“How’s this?” Chai said. She pulled a large piece of brown cloth from her bag and wrapped it around her waist. The skirt accented her figure, made her seem more womanly.
The host was obviously perturbed to see a woman dressing right there in front of him. He was an older white man with a full head of white hair. He stared at Chai for a moment and then a moment more. Finally he got two menus from a slot on the side of the podium and strode toward our seats.
It was just noon, and so the restaurant was nearly empty. He led us to a small table for two in the back.
“I don’t wanna sit in the back,” Chai said, when he held a chair for her.
“I thought you wanted privacy,” the maître d’ replied.
“Ain’t nobody here,” Chai said. “All you could have is privacy.”
We ended up at the thigh-high fence watching people walking by.
“Anything to drink?” Our waitress was a black woman with seven silver studs in each ear, a gold ring at the outer corner of her right eye, a tiny silver circlet at the left corner of her lower lip, and a
blue stone in her nose. She laid down our menus and smiled.
“Red wine,” Chai said.
“We have a Merlot and Beaujolais,” the waitress replied. She was looking somewhere beyond the confines of the restaurant.
“Whatever.”
The waitress looked at me. I’m only twenty. I went to college early, at sixteen, but I look older.
“Beer,” I said. “Whatever you got on tap.”
The waitress moved away.
The maître d’ seated a couple at the table next to us. There was already a line of couples waiting to get in.
I noticed that Chai was still wearing her rose glasses and peasant hat. I removed my hat and glasses, hoping that she’d do the same.
Instead she reached across the table to caress my cheek.
“You have a nice face, Rufus.” Her hand slid from my jawbone and across my lips. “Nice lips too.”
“They have really good pasta,” I said, opening the menu.
Chai smiled at me and leaned forward.
The maître d’ sat another couple on the other side of us.
“How old are you?” Chai asked.
“Twenty-three.”
“You in school?”
“No. Uh-uh. I just graduated from Hunter a few months ago. Now I work at an insurance company down here.”
“I used to work down here,” she said. “At Crystal and Pomerantz. I typed and stuff. But I don’t do that anymore.”
“What do you do now?”
“I do clothes for a couple a’ black magazines. Clothes, and I help out on the photography shoots.”
The waitress came with our drinks then.
“Are you ready to order?”
“Do you have specials?” Chai asked.
The waitress frowned and then produced a pad from the pocket of her blouse.
“Angel hair pasta with a sauce of fresh tomatoes sautéed in olive oil with garlic, kalamata olives, fresh basil, and finished with crumbled goat cheese. Broiled scrod served with an anchovy sauce . . .”
“Ugh! Anchovies is nasty,” Chai complained.
The Awkward Black Man Page 12