Bed-Stuy Is Burning

by Brian Platzer

  Chapter 15

  The cops had murdered the Blau boy in cold blood Saturday night, so this would be different. Not just the usual letting off of steam. Community organizers had shown up, and gang leaders, too. Jupiter had heard they’d stepped away together to discuss the issue. Jason Blau was a big, imposing, eccentric boy, but his father was the sort of man who was everywhere in Bed-Stuy, the sort of man who made people feel good to be around him. He had a good job running a painting operation and was trying to do better for himself.

  Earlier this morning before going over to see Antoinette, Jupiter had been home in front of the oven, baking her a cake. Dark chocolate all the way through. No marshmallows. No milk chocolate. Just flourless dark. Jupiter could tell. Both pieces the last few times, she’d saved the dark chocolate for last. And with some women you didn’t know. Maybe they ate what they wanted first. But not Antoinette. She was a savorer. No doubt in his mind. Muslimah or not, she was a sensualist. A hedonist, maybe. Hopefully. He’d get there. Slow and steady in his middle age. But he’d get there. He preheated the oven to 375 degrees and buttered a six-inch round baking pan, then tossed it into the sink and buttered his eight-inch pan instead. Lined its bottom with a round of parchment paper and buttered that, too.

  The cops expected a reaction to Jason’s death. Jupiter chopped chocolate into small pieces. More cops had been out yesterday than he’d ever seen. And twice as many as that this morning. Those posters were everywhere: Monday Morning We Stop Following Their Rules. It sounded so goddamn fucking young. But Jupiter envied the sentiment. At the same time, he feared what it would do to his son.

  Derek had told him this morning that something was going to go down because half—his boy said half, which meant in reality a couple, but still that was a lot—of his friends had already been arrested in the last twenty-four hours. Jupiter wouldn’t be shocked if his boy had had a hand in those posters. In a metal bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water, Jupiter melted chocolate with butter, stirring, until perfectly smooth. Derek used to love this cake. It used to be the cake he took to school with him on his birthday. The other kids did cupcakes, but Derek would show up with three cakes for the class that he’d slice himself. Jupiter had always included the cake knife with the dull blade so Derek could cut slices without getting hurt.

  Jupiter knew that Derek was angry. Angrier than he’d ever seen him. The neighborhood violence had mixed into the Malcolm X he was reading. If he was reading that at all. Jupiter was the one who’d given him that. Along with W. E. B. Du Bois and the Hardy Boys back in the day. All that good old stuff that Jupiter had read in high school. And a subscription to Yankees Magazine before that. Jupiter didn’t know if Derek read anymore at all. He used to be glued to books. Jupiter used to have to make him go to sleep, to turn off the lights. Or maybe that was in a movie Jupiter saw—a character that reminded him of Derek. But now Derek was getting into fights. He’d even jumped a white guy for an iPhone, from what Jupiter had heard at the plumbing supply store. Jupiter had given Derek a cold look when he saw the phone in Derek’s room, but Jupiter didn’t have a full confrontation in him. Things were tenuous enough between them at the moment, and he didn’t want to lose Derek completely.

  Derek had always defended the police to his slacker friends—“Someone has to do the job,” he’d say—but now they were all he could talk about. How the police were just bullies. Bullies in school that grew up to become bullies on the street. “Stop and frisk is a political tool, victimizing one group of people so another group feels protected. It’s humiliating hundreds of thousands of people, for what? In stops, weapons are found less than two percent of the time, and sure they say that’s because people don’t carry anymore, but everyone knows that’s bullshit. Was there any evidence of Jason fucking Blau carrying last night before he was shot ten goddamn times? No. None.”

  Jupiter didn’t know where his little boy was getting this stuff.

  He knew that if the neighborhood’s anger was to be expressed it would be directed first against the cops and then against white people.

  Everyone knew that the only white-owned house on this block, the nicest block this close to the subway (which was where all the cops hung out), was two doors down from his, and it was where Antoinette spent her days.

  And he knew he liked Antoinette.

  He removed the bowl from the heat and whisked a lot—but less than Derek liked—of sugar into the chocolate. He added eggs and whisked again. He sifted cocoa powder over the chocolate mixture and whisked again. He turned on the radio to NPR, but they were talking about Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan and Ghana and elephants and Haiti and rights of pregnant women. He poured the chocolate batter into the pan and slid it to the center of the oven. He left it to bake while he went down to the basement for the boards, hammers, and nails. He hammered the boards into the wooden window frames, took his shower, and rang his neighbor’s bell.

  This was only the tenth or fifteenth time he’d talked with her indoors one-on-one, but he’d been watching her, looking out for her in a nice way, not a creepy way, for almost three months, and he could tell she was a good woman. She was pretty enough, but more important, she was good. Christian or Muslim. She was a single parent like he was. She was originally from out of the city like he was. She liked kids like he did. She was two doors down every day. She liked his baking. And he thought he could tell she liked him.

  So needless to say, if some kids knocked on the door hoping to give Aaron or Amelia a hard time today not realizing it’d just be Antoinette there alone with a little white baby, Jupiter wanted to be there to make sure they didn’t get any farther than the front door. He couldn’t tell this to Antoinette, because she’d tell him he was overstepping, that he was crazy, that she could handle herself. And though she’d probably three-out-of-three be correct, he still didn’t feel it’d be right to leave her alone. He didn’t want to.

  Now, having returned home for just a moment, he was back at 383 in his clean white T-shirt and cargo pants holding the warm, still-breathing cake. Antoinette, having waited at the door, greeted him there, because she didn’t want him to ring again and bring Amelia downstairs.

  Antoinette wanted for herself whatever Mr. Jupiter was going to bring. He plated the cake for the two of them. It was just off the cooling rack, dusted with coca powder.

  Antoinette laughed, and so did Simon, whom she forgot for a moment she’d been carrying in her arms.

  Chapter 16

  Amelia’s computer voiced: “You’re back on!” when her Internetless hour was up. But her iPhone had been on her desk the whole time. She’d answered a dozen emails and checked Facebook (babies, Obama), Instagram (food, babies), and Twitter (#12yearsold10shots was trending). And Snapchat. She’d done a story on Snapchat for Marie Claire and convinced her friends to try it in the process. Now they used it all the time. Messages that disappeared. Teenagers used it for pictures of their nipples, but Amelia and her high school friends, closer to fifty than fifteen years old, Snapchatted pictures of torn seams, of humungous diapers, of their sleeping husbands’ asses. Not Amelia. Aaron wouldn’t approve.

  But that was what had taken her away from Jonah Hill: Amelia’s friend Megan’s husband, Jesus, had carved out the bottom of an egg carton and put his hairy, purple testicle in among the brown eggs. It was the kind of thing that would have been hilarious at thirteen, pretty funny at eighteen, tired at twenty-five, and at thirty-three?

  Amelia wondered what her friends said about her life. Divorced at thirty. Baby out of wedlock. Living in sin with a former rabbi. Hanging out with celebrities and writing articles that had to simultaneously celebrate and mock them. And why was the baby out of wedlock? That was what everybody wanted to know. It was what Aaron wanted to know. And her parents, and her friends. And Aaron’s father, who was physically falling apart and addicted to good news from his son. He called every day. He’d even told Aaron that Aaron’s happiness was the only thing keeping him alive. He meant it literall
y.

  She couldn’t have told her friends about Aaron’s addiction without revealing too much. So she answered honestly and evasively about wanting to live like the Europeans. She didn’t see any reason to get married. “Because it worked out so well for me the first time?” she said. And deprecatingly with a greater gesture toward self-knowledge and sincerity, “Because it was so embarrassing the first time to put on a dress and parade in front of all my friends and family and say until death do us part and then fail at it, or, whatever, admit that I couldn’t hack it with Kevin, that even if we didn’t pay sixty grand and have the biggest party in the world again I just hate the idea of going through the whole lifetime commitment thing.” She’d only said something like that to Aaron once, because when she’d said it, he looked at her as though she’d taken the chair beside her and lifted it off the ground and smashed it across his face.

  That had been two weeks ago, and of course it had something to do with their not having slept in months or having had sex for about that long, too, but when she’d said it she’d both wanted to take it back and leave it said, because she’d meant it. In the moment, she’d added that she was elated to have a child with Aaron because she loved him and was happier with him than she’d ever been with anyone or imagined she could be with anyone, but 100 percent confidence still seemed an unattainable goal.

  “I mean, look at my parents,” she’d said.

  “Then why would you want to have a child with me?” Aaron had said.

  He was crying. He was looking away from her furious and terrified.

  Simon had meant everything was stable for him and would be for the rest of his life, Amelia saw, and her one comment about not being able to guarantee a lifetime commitment had taken it all away.

  “Because I love you,” she said, wanting to give back to him as much as she could. “And I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love you. I want a family with you. And I want to spend the rest of my life with you. But that’s a really long time. People change. As hard as we’re going to try. And I don’t see the need to swear it in front of a judge or minister or rabbi.”

  “Or my dad.”

  “Yes! I’m sorry! Or your father. I can’t—neither of us can live our lives to make your father happy.”

  “But it would make me happy.”

  “I don’t want to promise if I can’t be one hundred percent absolutely sure that either of us can keep that promise. I can promise that I love you and I feel incredible affection for Simon and I can’t see that changing. And more, not only do I love you, but you’re the only thing I love. You and Simon are the only thing that matters in my life. Yes, I’m saying that might change. But for now, there’s Megan, my mom sort of, and who knows how long she’ll live—I’m being as honest as I can—maybe a couple college friends I’m seeing less and less since Simon—and you and Simon. There are probably twenty people in the world I’d care about if they weren’t alive tomorrow. I mean it. More like ten, probably. And you are at the top of that list. You and Simon are that list. Why isn’t that enough for you? And I don’t know if I ever felt that way about Kevin. Which was maybe why I already got the marriage thing wrong once. And since I got it wrong once, I don’t want to go through it again. Why do you want to make me?”

  Still, Aaron was furious. Or, rather, he was sad, and his sadness made him embarrassed, which made him angry. He didn’t hear the loving parts, only that she wouldn’t marry him. He was grinding his teeth and clenching his fists. He was a tiny little boy who couldn’t have what he wanted. Amelia wanted to give him what he wanted, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t make her body want to sleep with him, either, which would have solved things in a different way, so she blew him for the first time since Simon was born, and afterward, in a joking voice, he said, “Don’t think this makes up for not wanting to marry me,” and in a joking voice she said, “Not even a little bit?” and in a joking voice she said, “Maybe a little bit?” and in a serious voice she said, “I love you,” and in a serious voice he said, “I love you, too.”

  • • •

  She did love him. That first time she’d met him, she’d felt the potential of it. Then over a month with no contact. She’d tried to forget him. Then a second date talking about how he’d been a rabbi until he could no longer pretend to believe. When they’d finally had sex, he’d told her ten minutes after that he hadn’t quit his job as a rabbi. They were at his small apartment. He’d been so attentive to her body. He told her about the stolen money, how he’d needed to steal it. She’d tried to give him the most forgiving smile she could. She’d been married at the time. She was disappointed in him, but she wasn’t perfect and couldn’t expect perfection. She wanted to help him. No one had been hurt other than him. She’d wanted to help cure him. She’d never been able to help Kevin in any way big or small. He’d never even let her hammer in a nail or make a reservation. Aaron kissed her.

  She asked him the next time they were together to tell her about it again. And then again. She wanted to understand it better, but she couldn’t. He was just an asshole. A thief. He had his reasons, sure, but he was a thief. Who stole from decent people and could steal again.

  He told her the story fifty, a hundred times. They slept together sometimes afterward. It was sick, for a while. She’d ask him to tell her, he’d tell her, and then they’d sleep together. It was a routine. They couldn’t get past it, even after Kevin. She liked him so much. More than Kevin. It wasn’t fair that the man she liked, really liked, the first, only man she really liked—loved—was rotten like this. She wanted to make him better, to care for him as she’d never been cared for, but she couldn’t. She wanted to hear nuances in the story that made it different from how she understood it, but there weren’t any.

  She tried to stop thinking about it until it consumed her. They stopped seeing each other. Then he showed up at her apartment one night when she was thinking about him, and they slept together in a messy, full-bodied way that was more like how she’d slept with Kevin. She and Aaron started seeing each other again. He apologized. Said he wasn’t that man anymore. It was a one-time mistake. He’d been seeing a psychologist. He was getting better, he said. Just look at his life, he said. When she’d been in it, he was getting better. Her, and his new job. Things were good. He didn’t gamble anymore. He’d only stolen because of the gambling. And he wanted her in his life more than he wanted anything else, more than Kevin had ever wanted her.

  But she couldn’t take his word for it. They talked about it sober and drunk. He didn’t know how to convince her. She suggested they see his therapist together. She wanted to understand what the problem was from an objective professional.

  And it made all the difference.

  “A hypocrisy driven by living under untenable circumstances. Being a rabbi in a doctrine he didn’t believe in. We don’t think gambling is his problem,” the psychologist had said. The psychologist had been a warm, young guy.

  “No?” she had said.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Aaron had said. “Risk taking is the problem that presented as gambling because of how much stress I was under. Because I was in a situation that was rife with hypocrisy. I’ve always been a risk taker. Since grade school when I ran away from home to live with my mother at the hospital for a week. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “And now that he’s no longer a rabbi, it shouldn’t be a problem,” the psychologist had said. “We are monitoring it closely, but we feel that the crime was one of context more than character.”

  “But still,” Aaron had said, “the doctor has set me up to see someone, a specialist in risk addiction. I’ve asked him to, because I felt it was important. For us. The truth is: I am an addict. But not to gambling.”

  “It was just a product of his environment, what led him to bet? And steal?” Amelia had said.

  “Yes,” the psychologist had said. “That’s what we believe.”

  “And I can create an environment for him? So he doesn’t feel like
that again?”

  “Not alone, but you two can do it together,” the psychologist had said. “Which was why I was so pleased when Aaron said you wanted to come in to talk to me together.”

  So she could start a new life with him.

  And Aaron was wonderful. Wonderful with Simon. He worked hard every day to pay for more than half the mortgage. He loved her. She loved him.

  The one time they’d gone to the track together, he hadn’t bet more than ten dollars on a race. He had let her choose the horses. He’d been in control.

  And before they’d bought this house together, she’d asked him point blank if he had a problem, and he’d sworn he could manage it. What more could he do than swear? The Gambling Anonymous programs were God based, and he disbelieved. He’d been seeing the risk-management therapist.

  She was taking care of him. He was on the right track. He clearly had his moments—a basketball game he seemed to care too much about—but nothing out of control. She was putting him in a position to succeed. They were building a life together, even if she wasn’t ready to call that life a marriage.

  • • •

  Amelia heard laughter downstairs. Adult African American laughter. The kind that wasn’t meant for the sake of a baby. She heard plates and forks. She was happy for an excuse to get away from Jonah Hill.

  “Remember Superbad:” she’d written, “that 2007 ballad to teenage ineptitude starring Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. Hill was the intensely, caustically funny one. Even so, you probably thought, Brother, you just hit it big; enjoy it while it lasts, because you’ll be playing second fiddle for the rest of your career. And for a minute there, it did look like Cera would be the one on first violin.”

  After Antoinette said Jupiter wouldn’t come over, here he was. Less than an hour later. Surely that was grounds for dismissal. Amelia liked Antoinette as much as she could like anyone her son loved more than her, but this was Amelia’s home. And workplace. How was she supposed to get work done if Antoinette was downstairs with friends all the time.