Jonah brought up the issue over drinks one night.
‘What?’ Gordo said. ‘Are you crazy? Why would I repo your car?’
Jonah shrugged. ‘Money. Why else?’
‘Man, you are crazy. You’ve obviously lost your marbles. Listen, I’m not even going to dignify this by talking about it.’
Now Jonah owned a brown 1992 Toyota Corolla, which he rarely even drove. Jonah was just not the type of man who spent his days scrounging for gasoline. In any case, the car was a joke. The rear bumper was missing, although the black rubber covering of the bumper was still there. To the naked eye it seemed as if there was still a bumper, but there was no substance to it. If he ever got rear-ended, the other driver would be sitting in the front seat with him.
The cable TV was gone, and had been for months – no more watching the big booties shake it on BET, no more watching the white girls spank each other on the Playboy channel. He was months behind on the telephone bill, and every now and then the phone company sent him a threatening letter. When the letter came, and he knew the letter by the red envelope it came in, he would open it and send them a check for half of what he owed. Otherwise he didn’t open their letters. Losing the phone wasn’t on his mind. What needed to go was the apartment itself – it was the crib of a man who could blow money on Hudson River views. He was no longer that man, but he had renewed when the lease expired, more out of a misplaced sense of optimism than anything else.
He’d had a bad couple of years. Every time he thought he’d hit bottom, that things couldn’t get much worse, life dropped him another notch. A few weeks ago, he would have thought this had to be it – flat broke, deep in debt, working with Gordo, wrestling crazies back into police custody for chump change – that had to be the bottom. But today was a new bottom. He had risked his life for nothing, no reason at all. Tomorrow he’d probably get killed for the same reason.
If he really wanted, he could remember the exact moment when things in his life first started going dark. It was the day Melinda met Elaine.
***
Melinda kept her pubic hair shaved clean.
Whenever Jonah thought of her, that bald mons was the first thing that leaped to mind. She was a nice little white girl and Jonah often worried that he didn’t deserve her. She worked that body until it was lean and tight and hard. She cut her brown hair in a short bob. She wore Donna Karan for nights out, with white gold from Fortunoff. For casual times, she picked the smallest clothes she could find at Eileen Fisher. Beneath everything, she wore only Victoria’s Secret. When she slept she wore nothing.
She and Jonah looked good together, whether sitting at a table in Carmine’s after taking in a Wednesday evening Broadway show, or cruising home in the Jag with the sunroof open, or wrestling nude on silk sheets later that night. She was fair and small and smelled like money, and he was brown, but not too brown. No, too brown wouldn’t look right, but the kind of brown that came from his mother’s honest blackness and his old man’s rumpled, cigar-chomping whiteness, that was a good soft brown. Jonah thought Melinda liked them together, the look of it. She liked his money, although she had her own, more than he would ever have. She liked that he was strong. Above all, she liked his skin against hers. Yes. She had a taste for brown. It made for three years of damn fine rutting.
But Jonah had a problem. He was not a one-woman man.
It was the Sunday morning just after Thanksgiving. It was rainy and overcast, and they had wasted the weekend and each other in bed. By Jonah’s count, they had fornicated nineteen times since a good-morning romp on the kitchen table the day before.
He lay sprawled on his back in the bed, head resting on the pillows, watching himself in the mirror embedded in the ceiling, and listening to the sound of Melinda taking a shower in his bathroom. After a moment, the water stopped and he waited for her to come out. He felt sexy and pretty damn good about himself. The soreness, the physical emptiness was like a tingling throughout his body. Just seeing his body made him feel pretty good, too. It always did. Other men bought magazines and lotions and uppers and downers because they wanted a body like his. He worked out like they did, but not as hard and not as long. The body was just there for him, better than most of them would ever have. Washboard abdominals without the infomercial gimmicks. Wide round shoulders and a broad chest. And down below the waist… If he was half-black, it was the half that mattered. Little Melinda was fascinated by his size, obsessed with it, maybe addicted to it.
He ran a hand along his chest, played with his nipple ring, and rested his hand on his stomach. He didn’t know why he got that ring. He just did it on impulse one day, walking past all the freak shops on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. It was a small gold hoop like a pirate would wear in his ear.
Melinda came out of the bathroom holding something.
He knew she saw all of him from where she stood. She was already dressed. Dark tights clung to her legs. She wore a blue boiled wool jacket, what he thought of as her fuzzy coat, against the chill of late fall she would face outside.
He figured if he played the next few minutes right, he could get something moving inside her body. If she watched him a few seconds too long, she would take all those clothes off again and they’d go for it one more time before she left for the day. Make it an even twenty.
‘What are these?’ she said.
He caught a note of alarm in her voice. It made him look at what she was holding. The first thing he noticed was a pair of black panties, too large for Melinda. His heart did a lazy belly flop as he responded.
‘Looks like underwear.’
‘I found them in the bathroom drawer,’ she said. Now her voice began to shake and her chin began to tremble. She held the label in the waistband face out so he could get a good long look. ‘They’re La Perla.’
‘OK.’ His mind went dumb, searching for anything, any thought.
She shook her head so hard that her hair bounced back and forth. It returned to almost the same position from which it started. ‘Wrong. Not OK. They weren’t there the last time I went in that drawer. Neither were these.’
She offered her other hand for his inspection. That hand held big trouble. Jonah recognized the items, a tube of KY Jelly and a clear plastic applicator which resembled a toy syringe. They came as a kit and were designed for women who had a hard time maintaining lubrication during sex play, a problem Melinda just didn’t have.
‘Where did these things come from, Jonah?’
There was nowhere to hide. He saw this and he didn’t run from it.
In his mind’s eye, as though it were showing on a giant high-definition liquid-crystal television, Jonah watched his relationship with Melinda collapse and crash apart. It was an awesome thing to behold, like a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island calving away from Antarctica and falling into the ocean.
‘They belong to a woman named Elaine,’ he said. ‘She’s my boss at work.’
Melinda nodded.
She left without another word, but that wasn’t the last he saw of her.
‘I make myself sick,’ she said two weeks later.
She pulled on a thick wool sweater as she readied herself to leave. She checked her look in the full-length mirror. She was satisfied with what she saw. She turned to Jonah. As usual, he lay on the bed watching her dress.
Tonight had been a grudge match.
‘You know that? I make myself sick by coming here again. Already I feel horrible about what I just did. I don’t know what I ever saw in you. I don’t know what you even see in you. On the surface, you seem so arrogant, so self-centered. But what you really are is weak and pathetic.’
‘I’m weak,’ he said. ‘In what way?’
She laughed at him then. ‘In what way aren’t you weak? You’re like a weak little white boy, an accountant maybe, in a nice body. Oh yeah, you have a nice body, not the best, believe me, but nice. But inside, you’re weak and ugly, and when I think of you touching me tonight, it makes me sick.’
‘Come on, Melinda,’ he said. ‘Be honest. It was good, wasn’t it?’
She was dressed, had tousled her hair some, and was ready to go. ‘I need a man, Jonah. I need a real man, not some Oreo cookie, not some pretty boy who never passed a mirror he didn’t like, not some coward.’
She stood by the door, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, she went on without waiting. ‘You’re hiding, Jonah. Big ladies man. Flashes his money around. Smiles his pretty smile. Talks all that sincere bullshit. Gets whatever piece of ass he wants. Right?’
‘Hey. You said it, not me.’
‘But without all that, you’re nothing. I can’t believe I didn’t see through you sooner. You always need a new one, right? A new little piece? Because without it, you’re nothing and you know it. You’re not a man, and you think maybe if you can fuck every woman in sight, that’ll make you seem like a man. You’re so weak. You keep acting this way, you’ll be their slave forever.’
He laughed. ‘Whose slave?’
‘The people who own you.’
‘Nobody owns me.’
She pointed at him. ‘Wrong! They all own you. The job owns you. Your little boss lady owns you. She’s using you, Jonah. You might think you get something out of it, but you don’t. She uses you. And you let her do it. You’re like the house slave. They dress you up nice, and they teach you to talk nice, but you’re still a slave.’
She had something more to say, he was sure, and he couldn’t think of anything. She had him, calling him a slave. It caught him off guard. It hurt, that word.
‘Fuck you,’ he said.
She laughed, not a sound of mirth but a burst of stale air from a deflated tire. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s the best you can do.’
With that, she went out.
He lay still for several minutes after she was gone, his mind dark and quiet. Then he got up, put his robe on, and went about making something to eat in the kitchen. He picked up the remote control off the counter, leaned back into the living room and started a compact disc going in the stereo.
He figured he would just put Melinda out of his mind, like he had all the others. But in the days that followed, Melinda stuck with him, more than he would care to admit. She was always simmering on a back burner of his mind, and too late he realized he had ruined a good thing. What’s more, the things she said stayed with him. He began to see how some of it made a certain amount of sense.
Jonah knew what people thought of him. He wore a pinstripe three-piece suit, Armani; a gold Seiko chronograph, stylish because it was shockproof – he also could wear it mountain biking if he wanted; silk tie, also Armani; alligator shoes; a smooth hundred dollar fade that enhanced what one art director had called his ‘delicately-shaped’ skull. He was a young executive now, working big advertising accounts. Two belated years of night school at the Westchester Business Institute got him in as a glorified secretary, but he moved up fast. He didn’t handle the accounts, no, he was too brown for that, but he was in the meetings, eating the lunches, bouncing the ideas back and forth, selling the people yet another light bulb that lasted even longer. The honchos liked having him there, and not because he ever hit the home run. They liked him there because they needed a lapdog. They paid him well. In exchange, he smiled and looked good and smelled good and didn’t cause trouble. He did what they wanted.
Sometimes what they wanted was sex.
Elaine was not the first well-kept middle-aged lady executive to bed Jonah, but she was the most giving. Even before Melinda found him out, Elaine’s generosity had begun to make the whole thing look like a job, one that paid in sushi and nights out and new clothes.
Now, with Melinda gone, Jonah was free to spend more time with Elaine. Elaine must have sensed the change, because right away she took him for a weekend on the East End of Long Island. They stayed in a rental cottage hidden back in the scrub pine and sea grass along Old Montauk Highway, with Dom Perignon on ice, a Duraflame burning in the fireplace, and the surf crashing outside and just down the hill from the sliding glass doors.
When any bill came, he reached for his wallet.
‘Oh please,’ Elaine would say. ‘Put it away. I enjoy paying for you.’
Later, after a nightcap, his bill would come. And he always paid in full. Elaine was divorced, and she made love in absolute darkness.
‘Jonah,’ she said as she drifted off to sleep on his chest. ‘Don’t let me fall in love with you.’ As if such a thing could happen. For him, maybe it could. He often fell in love. Women were exotic and wonderful creatures to him, no matter what Melinda said. He felt it for them down deep. It might last for just a little while, but it was there, like the best music. When the music was right, when it was some smoky Miles, or some funky driving hip hop, he caught the line and felt it all over his body.
Love was like that.
But for Elaine, love was improbable at best. She had scraped and crawled and scratched people’s eyes out to get her position, and it had cost her half a lifetime to get there. The wars had taken their toll. Even in her most human moments, even in passion, she was like a granite cliff face warmed by the sun. The heat was there, but then so was the stone.
Jonah grew weaker and less alive the more time he spent with her.
Show up, smile at the dumb jokes, fuck the expensive lady. He knew why he was moving up. He was the thinker who never had a decent idea. But behind the scenes, people pulled strings – Elaine was the chief string-puller right now.
Bending had become routine for him. He came in one morning and some comic genius had cut a picture of Step’n Fetchit out of a book and taped it to his computer. All he did, he pulled the picture down and threw it in the trash.
They were laughing at him.
Meanwhile, shopping had become his consolation. He bought so much expensive shit his apartment looked like the inside of Home amp; Garden magazine. In fact, he subscribed to Home amp; Garden and got his ideas from there.
He lived through his things: the car; some pricey Crate amp; Barrel knick-knacks gathering dust on his shelves; a couple of one-of-a-kind ironwood Nubian sculptures, one of a man and woman making love, the other of an old man’s balding head, both of which were good at gathering dust; the cleaning lady from Romania who came in once a week to wipe the dust off everything; his hanging ferns and aloe plants, which the Romanian gave him a hard time for neglecting; a Trek mountain bike (which he sometimes rode on the streets near his apartment); his two year old Rossignol skis (he had gone skiing once since buying them); his bedroom set, his living room set, his home entertainment center; that river view, don’t forget that, put that first on the list; his Ray Bans; his jacket from the Leather Factory…
He couldn’t afford any of it. The pay was good, but not that good. He carried nearly forty grand in balances on four credit cards. Some days it made him want to cry. But the fun didn’t stop there. As the economy went down the tubes, the firm started letting people go. The citizenry stopped buying things, the companies that sold things started going under, and there came a steep decline in the need to advertise things – especially in the need to have a whole creative group sitting around, throwing out ideas about how to advertise things. Jonah sensed that Elaine protected him as long as she could, but there came a day when even she couldn’t do anything for him.
He remembered the day they pinked him, going on two years ago. He was in her office that day. He could tell from her tone that he was dismissed in every way. ‘Baby doll,’ she said. ‘You’re going to do great things one day. I know that about you. This downturn isn’t going to last forever, and when it ends, even before then, I’m sure you’ll be doing better than ever before.’
Half an hour later he was out on the bright and cold evening streets of the city, the people a faceless swirl around him. Christmas coming – the shop windows were all dressed up for the holidays. Tourists ran around, all bundled up and carrying packages. Downtown, the spire on the Empire State Building shone green and red.
/>
He went down into the subway and made the long ride up through the Bronx. He stood at the head of the first car, looking out the front window at the tracks ahead. It was a place he had stood many times as a child. The mystery of it, the vastness of the dark underground empire, never lost its hold on him. He stared and stared as the train roared through tunnels, lights zooming by on each side. The train changed tracks, never hesitating, as workmen with lanterns stood to the side in the gloom. The train passed through stations that were out of service, darkened corners, graffiti-stained walls, empty platforms long disused. Sometimes there’d be no lights at all out there, and he’d catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror of the black window. He stared back into his own eyes.
Who was he? Where had he gone?
Now, Jonah poked his head up and was almost surprised to find himself still in Kelly’s Bar. He glanced around. The long hairs had gone. The juke box was silent, and the only sounds came from the television and a few people sitting along the bar and talking in low voices. Jonah’s head had settled down to an almost pleasant thumping.
Three pints of beer hadn’t hurt him any.
Thump.
Thump.
The pain beat slow and gentle, like the bass signature on a sad love song. He was already thinking better about the day’s fiasco. At least one good thing had come out of it. He had sure flown across that alley. There were many days when he felt he wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, but man, what a feeling today. He envied the birds. He was beginning to think he should take up hang-gliding.
Gordo nudged him. The big man sat with three piles of Foerster’s open mail before him, one pile for possible leads, one for garbage, and one for mail he hadn’t opened yet. That third pile had dwindled away to almost nothing.
The Hit Page 6