Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  Having dressed, I fall on the bed, on my back, and find that the shadows have lost most of their color. I find a gray dog there on the ceiling, and plastic diamonds that show up as negative space in his green leash. A cornflower-colored man walks slowly across my ceiling, half a violin case sticking out from under his arm—it’s August. “Wake up,” he hisses through the bars over my window. If he ever came downstairs and knocked, Edith would have me assassinated.

  “Coming!” I yell. I fit my wig over my flattened hairstyle and run upstairs to meet him.

  On the street, the tall church secretary unlocks the door of Make Me a Herald, looking with malice at the two men congregating outside of the liquor store. They’re regulars, she and I and they and the rest of the block know, and before she enters the church, she spits in their direction, shocking none of us. A White woman emerges from the funeral parlor, holding a sheaf of papers and crying into a handkerchief. She stops in front of the colored brick to blow her nose, and she steps up close to look at the inlaid centerstone that reads THEODORE MEDFORD & SONS, MORTICIANS. The deaf girl from Edith’s second floor is standing in front of the wig shop, signing to the man who moved in with her last week. They must be married—­otherwise Edith wouldn’t allow it—but they both seem far too young. The deaf girl throws her fingers in patterns I can’t decipher, and her husband laughs. He laughs louder than a hearing person, as if notions are even more absurd when they’re not connected to sound.

  When I get to the bottom of Edith’s front steps, I don’t ask August how he is or even say hello. Instead, I make him chase me down the street, and he says it when we’re running in the rain, about to miss our bus—“You’re beautiful.” He stops in the middle of the street to tell me, and a car swerves to miss him; its driver yells a crush of nasty words out the window, but August stays straddling the yellow divider, looking at me as if I’m Saint Agnes weeping on a rosary card. “Beautiful,” he says again.

  I pull the sides of my shawl together and keep running for the bus—it’s Saturday, and they come only on the half hour—but the blood does stop for one second in my arteries. Weightlessness rolls under the soles of my feet. Cold, petty rain stabs the skin on my hands and face as I look back at him, but I try to smile in such a fashion that he’ll keep thinking me beautiful. “Beautiful.” The word is a fragile pipette, one I can’t recall ever hearing aloud.

  “Princess,” my father called me. “Sharp,” pronounced Mrs. Dickerson. “Quite a talent,” said Mr. Glaser. But no one has ever measured me beautiful, and I’m afraid that the smile I give August is too big, too ridiculous, not comely at all. “You’re going to get hit,” I say, to break the moment, and he runs with his violin case to catch up, but the bus pulls off its spot and grunts away through the drizzle. We have twenty-eight minutes to get to our wedding appointment, a blue veins affair at Abyssinian Baptist Church.

  We’ve had an interview with the bride’s mother, Mrs. Sloan, a short, sour duck of a woman with china plate skin and a permanent crease in the middle of her eyebrows. When August suggested the Brazilian Wedding March, Mrs. Sloan gave him a stare so icy it froze his mouth for the rest of our meeting. “I’m trying to insert some Negro heritage into the ceremony,” she said, “not sponsor a party for the Puerto Rican dishwashers.”

  Without August’s voice, I had single-handedly to collect the rest of her opinions, which included a distaste for costume jewelry and virgin cocktails. At the end of the interview, she asked me to stand. “Turn around,” she said, and I did, slowly so that I wouldn’t stumble, and I was remembering a day when Hattie Lee Grainger gathered all us country blackberries from the ninth grade into the A.M.E. church basement and taught us how to curtsy. Frances Tate had actually fallen down trying to sink lower than anyone else, and Caroline had laughed into her own mouth until the rest of her face turned as red as her freckles. Hattie Lee demonstrated crossing one’s legs at the ankle when seated, and convinced us that it was rude to sprinkle salt on a meal before tasting it. She said she’d come back the next weekend and teach us the subtlety of makeup, and all six of us ninth-grade girls showed up that Saturday but she never did, and so our charm school was much abbreviated. As I turned in Mrs. Sloan’s 132nd Street parlor, I felt certain she could tell as much. Later, August would say Mrs. Sloan was either making certain I was pretty enough to play at her daughter’s wedding or making certain I wasn’t prettier than her daughter. We didn’t meet the bride or the groom that day. After meeting Mrs. Sloan, we weren’t sure we would have wanted to.

  The bus moves an unbreachable half avenue and I run up Lenox waving my arms, because Mrs. Sloan doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who’ll stand for lateness. A small boy in the bus’s back window points at me and turns around in his mother’s lap to tell her, but there’s so little traffic on a Saturday morning that the bus is already at 126th. We’re left behind watching its exhaust rise and disperse in the mist.

  “Oh, hell. We’ll be late, August.”

  “Who cares?” he says, and with his free arm he hugs me, warming my body as we walk. “We’re playing the processional. They can’t start without us.” He kisses me again on the lips. It’s the twelfth time—I’m keeping count. The sixteenth time, I’ll slip him the tongue.

  “We’ll have to walk,” he says now, swinging his violin case at his side.

  “Thirteen blocks?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  It wouldn’t be if it weren’t drizzling, but neither of us has an umbrella, and by the time we get to church, we’re wet as cows.

  “Late,” says Mrs. Sloan, when we step into the vestibule, “and looking like slaves.”

  In the church proper, beneath its Gothic towers and crystal chandeliers, the most well regarded lawyers in Harlem frown at their wives, and their wives turn into their purses to check the freshness of their lipstick. Polite aggression hovers in the dim light. Adam Clayton Powell, the Harlem hero, is here. He’s gotten people like Edith to pay their Con Edison bill in pennies until the company hired more Negroes, and every time I look up and see him sitting with his wife, Hazel Scott, I think I might applaud. “Keep the faith,” he always says, but right now, in this church, the faith is in preciously scant supply. The melancholy among these churchbound rich resists him; it glances off silk hat flowers hung in resignation and leaves girls glassy-eyed in the choir loft. The ushers seat a sprinkling of final stragglers as August and I begin Pachelbel’s Canon, then a large woman and her small man enter and must be seated separately, because save for a few tight spaces, this church is full even unto its balcony. As we break into the gospel Mrs. Sloan has asked for (and by all means don’t make it Pentecostal), the groom stands in the altar with the round, open face his mother-in-law will never take seriously, and the bridesmaids wait at the rear of the church with their bouquets clutched in fright. The first and youngest one steps forward, wobbly on her pumps, and August starts his Bach fugue. The clasp of her pearls has slid around to the front of her neck. Seventeen, I’d say: in Kentucky, she’d already have two children and rotten molars. As she walks, I connect with August on the piano in a flurry of sixteenth notes, but I’m deaf to my own frequency, lost in thinking that Caroline should be here with me to see all these magnificent Negroes.

  Only Caroline would think of that day in the A.M.E. basement too. And only Caroline would understand the rest of New York City as I do. She’d understand what I’m seeing when I walk down Edith’s front steps and find the congregation of Make Me a Herald, holding handmade signs and shouting to passersby about the coming end of the world. She’d know what I’m really hearing when I walk by someone’s open window on my way to the Apollo and hear a record skipping, damaging its own groove, playing the line “Someday you’ll want me to want you” over and over again. Whoever Caroline is with at this very moment is seeing a false version of her, just as everyone around me—even August, dear August, who has spread himself over every crevice of my brain—is seeing just the New York shadow of me. I can’t be sure the green
he sees is the green I see; can’t be sure that his orange is my orange. I can’t be sure, even, that he’s seeing the same wedding as me, because his face is completely unreadable. The fifth, sixth, and seventh bridesmaids break free of their escorts, I bring the congregation to their feet with the opening notes of The Wedding March, and the day becomes perfectly grotesque.

  At first, the bride looks, coming up the aisle, like any bride standing atop a cake, with a floor-length veil and bouquet of Dutch roses and ribboned stephanotis that trail the ground. I can’t see the detail of her face or neck, but I can make out her crimson lipstick, the diamond choker encircling her neck, the glittering solitaire half tucked into the fold of her father’s arm. Her shoulders, though, are quaking. She’s sniffling back tears. Her exquisite collarbone says this girl will be fine in this life: she has enough money to last it. But the beads on her train dance in the light every time she sobs, and under the bright lights, her dress shimmers over her body as though she’s someone’s sugared meal. She manages up the aisle to the altar, but her father has to untuck her fingers from his arm when he gives her away. From the piano, I see Mrs. Sloan roll her eyes.

  “Dearly beloved,” the minister begins, but the bride never stops crying, not even when he’s pronounced them man and wife. She hiccups and gobbles, and the acoustics of the church’s high ceilings work too well. Mrs. Sloan never stops grimacing. When the groom lifts his bride’s veil, he wipes her eyes before kissing her.

  The bridesmaids rush out, in order, with their escorts, and none of them smiles. Not one of them even looks at the bride. “What do you suppose was the matter?” I ask August.

  “Butler had the day off,” he says, not caring. We’re still under the choir loft, where he’s unlatching his violin case, taking out a rag to wipe the place where he held it under his chin. He’s forever packing and unpacking and repacking some instrument. He’s never quite free. Mrs. Sloan’s brother brings us payment, a fluttering of six twenties from inside his tux. He thanks us, but it’s as if he’s a robot, he shuffles away so fast.

  “August!” someone screams, and a girl comes galloping out of the crowd. She’s five foot nine at the very least, and she has hazel eyes and a perfect nose. Before she even says hello, she kisses August full on the mouth. “I’ve missed you,” she says. A dimple in her chin. A lilt in her voice. She’s never had an ugly day, this girl. If August thinks me beautiful, he can be thinking only in relative terms.

  “Well, who is this?” she asks.

  I can’t help it—I scowl.

  “Liz, meet Audrey. She’s in the house band.” Not my girlfriend Audrey. Not this is Audrey, as if my belonging to him were obvious. I’ve been reduced to bandmate, workhorse, a piece of his life as functional as a dinner table.

  “And who is this?” I ask, and August coughs, or laughs. I know how sore I sound, and I’m perfectly aware that this is 1959 in New York City, where men and women of a certain age feel free to do whatever they wish. But my love is deeper, wider, richer than hers. I need him to know.

  “I’m Elizabeth Pounds Johnson,” she says, offering a hand I won’t take.

  “What a pleasure.”

  The sarcasm in my voice doesn’t stop her from sitting in the seat next to August’s, or from leaning forward so that her head hovers over her crossed ankles and her hair hangs over one knee. She looks at August out of the corner of one fetching eye, watches him stuff the rag in the bottom of his case to keep his violin from bumping around. She watches him pat it, in superstition, the same way I watch him pat his bass each night, and she seems neither surprised nor amused at the gesture, and I’m amazed that he’s shared something so private with someone other than me. Still, I don’t know they’ve lain in bed together, not really, until August closes one latch of his case and smiles at her as if she’s communicated something just by sitting down.

  “Will I see you around?” she asks.

  “Hard to say.”

  She rolls her eyes, tosses her head back so we can see her strong heartbeat under the skin exposed by her low collar. “You will. You’ll see all of me again sooner or later, August—believe it. Oh and Audrey—” she says, as she stands. “There’s some hair sticking out from under your wig, dear.”

  I offer to carry August’s violin, so he lets me carry it down 138th Street, and I try to tuck it under my arm and then cradle it like a baby when it gets uncomfortable. I almost drop it down the bus steps and he takes it back. “There is a handle, you know,” he says. “And we’re not in a hurry.”

  But I am. Running from something. I’m counting the passing bus stops, even when the bus doesn’t stop at them all, trying to get to sixteen just once. Twenty-seven blocks up, we transfer to a westbound line that takes us to August’s building, at Riverside and 163rd. Far from Harlem and its bejeweled princesses, but August chose this building for its marble-floored elevator, because with his bass he can rarely take the stairs. As the metal grate closes and the cage pushes us gently up to the third floor, he pinches my ass. “New York ain’t agreeing with you,” he says. “You need some a that squirrel meat back on your bones.”

  August lives just down the hall from the elevator, in 3D, a huge crate of a place with bay windows to let in sunsets and river air. Even his dining room offers a view of the Hudson, and every one of his three bedrooms is bigger than my sleeping box on 123rd. Weekend afternoons, this far up Manhattan, are almost without traffic, and in the absence of screaming wildlife, it can be quieter here than it is in Mt. Sterling. I flop faceup on his couch and count the boat motors I hear, and wonder what it must be like to be floating toward the Atlantic, casting nets in the rain and breathing in boat fuel. August’s bass sits upright in a corner next to the window, as if it, too, is sniffing for river dreams.

  “Stay for lunch?” he asks. “I’ve got chicken from last night.”

  “Sure. Why not?” Though I wonder who might have made dinner in his apartment, what woman’s batter I’ll be eating. August might be liberated enough to keep a lady dentist, but he just isn’t the chicken-frying type.

  Outside on the fire escape, a black cat lifts his paw one step as if to climb, but a piece of fish falls down to the landing and he charges. He licks, chews. Moves his head in feeding. “Oh, that thing,” August says as he passes through the living room, pulling his tie from his collar on his way to another bedroom. “Close the blind or he’ll come scratching at the glass.”

  But there’s no need, because the cat is lost in eating, blind to human existence. A robin flies low over his head, taunting. He flies away and perches again on a step of the fire escape, flies back to the cat and away to a perch, but the cat simply watches the robin as he gets a better hold on the bones trying to slip from the back of his jaw. His ancient green eyes are lost in survival.

  “Whose cat, anyway?”

  “Nobody’s,” August yells from a bedroom. None of the three rooms are used for sleeping, since August favors his couch.

  “Then why doesn’t he just go away?”

  “He used to live here. Whatever person lived in this apartment with him moved off and left him here.”

  “Poor thing! How does he stay so fat?”

  “Everyone else thinks no one feeds him, so everyone feeds him. They put out milk. One time I even saw him down on the sidewalk working over a ribeye. He’s the best-fed cat in five boroughs.”

  On the river, a motor chokes to a stop. Children’s voices travel down the sidewalk outside, until they’re so far away and so faint, I can hear the cat purr.

  “Can I give him a chicken bone?” I yell.

  “Absolutely not. I’ve never fed that cat a damn thing. He bothers me. Always looking in my window like I owe him something.”

  I consider the cat’s point of view, how he’s been denied by the one window he knows. “Why don’t you just let him in? Make him your pet?”

  “He’s not cultured enough to live in here with me.” He’s half-serious, but here’s what walks down the hallway: a scarred bear of a
man in a stained T-shirt, a cigarette hanging from a bottom lip, his conk sticking up in places where his fedora crowned it at the wedding. A breath of nicotine, a soft belch. “Why don’t you move in here with me? You come feed that stupid cat.”

  “Me? Move in with a man? My mother would die.”

  “How would your mother ever know?” He sits on the couch and gathers my skirt up around my waist, and the chill in the parlor brushes against my legs.

  I push his hands away. “My mother knows everything.”

  He pulls my blouse from the waist of my skirt and slides a cold hand under my buttons. Keep your gentlemen above the neck, I remember from Joyce Nettles’s weekly column for single ladies, but he caresses a nipple and wears me down in an instant. The chill in his sitting room raises tiny bumps on my body at the same time the heat he’s causing makes my upper lip sweat. “Honey, I’m a needy man,” he says, past me to the couch. Above the waist, I’ll let him.

  He circles his other hand around my waist so I can’t pull away, and he gets on top of me. “I need you here with me all days, little mama,” he whispers. And I let him some more, because I feel like he’s playing me like his big, beautiful bass, and because I don’t have music or numbers in my head to make me feel anything else. And then I feel something I’ve never felt before, and I can’t help but whimper, because his cold finger feels so strange where nothing else has ever been, in this negative space I never quite knew existed. But by the time the pigeons start their afternoon warbling and the furnace kicks on, it feels as if that’s just where it belongs. Thunder rumbles over the sound of the furnace and he rolls off me. “Shit,” he says, and before I know it, the rain has come and he’s lightly snoring. With him, I fall into shadow dreaming—orange juice puddles, wet babies drying in clay ovens, a patch of thunderclouds like a model of the sea. When the rain stops, I’m awakened by the sound of my own breathing, that and the moisture in my panties. I’m wondering if the bride ever stopped crying.