Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  “Well, since you’re some sort of fortune-teller, what happened to his face?”

  “I wouldn’t possibly know,” she says, blotting her chin with a napkin, then swigging up a third of her soda in one beat, “but he obviously messed over somebody somewhere. Most likely a woman. Or better yet, that woman’s man. A fiddle string? Doesn’t that sound like a bucket of piss to you?”

  “I trust him, Letty. I’d trust him with my life.” I’ve written it all to Caroline, how August waits on Edith’s stoop for me every morning on his way to the Apollo, how I’d lie on a bed of nails if only I could make certain that happened every day for the rest of my life. August’s orange is my orange and his green is my green, I wrote her, and I’ve almost convinced myself that it isn’t a lie. Caroline didn’t write back. Perhaps she’s too busy. I want to believe she’s happy for me.

  “You go ahead, then,” Letty says. “You move in with that idiot. You marry him and you get pregnant and then see what happens. Neither one of you will be working at the Apollo, I can tell you that.”

  “We’re not talking about all that right now.”

  She sinks her straw down into her glass, but it rises again through the floaty bubbles. “Of course he’s not talking about any of that right now,” she says. “He’s found his dumb ass some young stuff and he wants to carry it off before it grows up and gets some sense. You will see.” What’s left of her malt is mostly cream, and to get at it, she has to suck in her cheeks until her face is narrow as a fox’s. “Joe Glaser. Now there’s someone to hitch up to. Slick. Keep hanging with him, you’ll meet some fine people.” August has told me all about it, how slick Mr. Glaser is, how he’s double-booking the band for shows outside the theater through his Associated Booking Corporation. He pays us at a lower rate than he’s booked for, then takes the difference plus his percentage of the door. August found out through Honi Coles, the theater manager, who told it as a joke, and he’s raged about it to Letty and Verner and Roland, but they turn him a deaf ear. “It’s a boat I ain’t going to rock,” is how Letty put it to us the last time August brought it up. “You know they ain’t had breadlines since the Depression.”

  “I don’t need to meet fine people,” I tell Letty now. “I’m moving in with fine people.”

  “Child-friend, you haven’t been in New York long enough to know what fine people are.” She smiles and studies me like a cat, takes the straw between her second and third fingers and stabs her cream with it. Half-moons, she makes. Tiny wounds. “If you’re going to listen to the trash coming out of some man’s mouth, at least hear the one who can do something for you. Joe Glaser can show you the world.”

  She doesn’t seem to understand—I’ve already seen it.

  When the other table leaves, I notice the gummy dirt on the edges of the white chairs where people have scooted on and off them over the months since they’ve last been cleaned, the city’s soil ground into the shop’s creamy tiles over the years. I stab my straw into the bottom of my malt, mining the same hard cream that Letty found, but mine is all melted into the soda I haven’t felt like sipping. Soft and miserable, my lot, not at all like Letty’s. Though when I sip, the compound tastes of a certain kind of holiness.

  “So what day are you going down to Kansas?”

  “Kentucky.”

  She waves her hand. “Wherever.”

  “Twenty-ninth of December. I’m going to buy my ticket in a few weeks.”

  “Excited?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Well, good,” she says, smiling. I rarely see her smile. It’s nicer than anything August, in his imaginings, would grant her.

  Early on a Sunday morning, the first day of snow in New York, I’m moving. Packing my three teacups and four show dresses, ripping down my magazine pictures. I meant to take them to August’s, to smooth down their wrinkles and let them have another life on his walls, but when I peeled back the very first piece of tape, some of the picture ripped off with it, so I just started throwing the pages one by one into the wastebasket. Gone my pretty pictures of blue adobe houses atop a mountain in New Mexico. Gone my boat-size trees in the middle of an Oregon forest. August’s walls live empty, and I don’t know how he’d feel, anyway, about taped-up magazine pages with serrated sides: now is as good a time as any for me to grow up, buy gilt frames, love opulence. As for the natural world, I’ll be happy with the sad slice of Hudson I get if I put my face right up against his window, press my nose against the glass until it hurts. That, and a park across the street no bigger than Granddaddy’s backyard.

  For lack of packing space, I have to throw out all those thin little country dresses. The thinnest, a sundress I wore once to a dance in Hope, goes first. I remember loving it, fingering the pink scallops Mother had sewn on its hem while I sat in the metal folding chair watching boys pass me by; I remember watching the bottom twirl when finally I linked arms and spun with Caroline. Mother wrote me when Miss Myrtle died, and I wrote Caroline, to say I was sorry. To cheer her, I told her of playing at an after-hours jam at the Blue Note, and I told her of sitting backstage at the Apollo only three feet from John Coltrane, separated by a curtain but feeling his vibrations as strongly as if I were in the bell of his horn. Still, Caroline hasn’t written me back.

  The delicate, crisscrossed back of the dress from Hope is held in place by buttons too small to hold the jostling of the nine o’clock train, and anyway Manhattan isn’t a place for pink scallops. Not a place to remember Hope. Neither is it a place for this peony-covered dress, thin as a bedsheet, with little pills napping up all over the material where I’ve washed it half to death. The blue peonies never quite wash clean of citydirt, and a hillbilly’s color doesn’t walk well with the sweeping crowds of Harlem, the sober browns and blacks behind which Harlem women hide their worries. My thin-strapped sandals are store-bought, but they only attract pity in a world of stiletto heels—in the basket they go. The only dress I keep is the black one that Mother wore to Daddy’s funeral, and when I’m finished, the wastebasket stands so full of cheapness that I can’t imagine anyone willingly digging the things out. And if they did, they’d only make themselves into a walking country girls’ museum. The velvet ribbon can’t go around a wig. In the wastebasket, though, it’s a cinch.

  When I go upstairs to tell Edith, she shakes her head so hard her curlers click together. “And you just a child. Mm, mm, mm. Ain’t no limit on what menfolk will do these days.”

  “I am not a child.”

  “How old is he?”

  “I am not a child.”

  “Where are your people, anyway?”

  “I am not a child.”

  “And in the season of Christ, too. Running off to live in sin on the first Sunday of Advent!”

  “It is not in sin.”

  “I bet your poor mama don’t know. I sure do wish I could tell her. I get a hold of one of them letters with her address, I swear to you and to Jesus Christ, I’ma write back and tell her.”

  “I am not a child, and she is not my mother.”

  I hand Edith the five dollars I owe on the last week’s rent and drag my burgundy Cartier out the front door. Even with all the Kentucky clothes gone, I had to sit on it while I buckled it closed, and now a green blouse strap hangs out the edge and trails through the snow, clearing a route down Edith’s front steps. Sunlight shoots through a cloud, a string of sequins shines in the faded light, and I feel more like a little girl than I ever have, like a child with a bag full of Halloween costumes.

  August is waiting in a taxi he’s hailed and paid a dollar to hold, but I can’t see his face for all the frost grown on the windows. I do wonder whether he’s happy behind the frost, or whether he’s sitting in that taxi thinking he could have done better, for his first moved-in woman, than this string bean coming with her tiny burgundy suitcase down the steps of a dilapidated apartment building. I wonder, too, why I’ve never met his mama. She lives in Brooklyn, only twelve stops on the IRT. I’ve counted.

  “Any
trouble?” he asks, when he gets out to hold the door open. Meaning Were you able to pay your landlady? Or have you run out of money, as you usually have by Sunday? On average of three days a week I get docked pay for being late to rehearsal, and August always shakes his head at me when Letty announces it. Before I got the money from Columbia, I would get paid on a Monday, need a new silk scarf on a Tuesday or a fancy downtown dinner on a Wednesday, and be going without chips for my fish by Friday.

  “I’m okay,” I say. Meaning Don’t worry—I’m not here to drain you. The backseat, when I slide across, makes my skirt ride up my thigh; the taxi driver catches himself looking, quickly turns back around in his seat, and starts the meter. August hasn’t seen. He gets in and closes us into our uncertain future with a loud, final thunk of the door, the sound of men finding young girls lost in the city.

  “Riverside and 163rd,” he tells the driver, and as we turn west down 123rd, past the building supers out throwing sand onto stair­steps and the children drawing their names on the sidewalk with mittened fingers, I remember about the bread and salt.

  “Excuse me, sir? Could you make a stop at the grocery on 132nd?”

  “Why?” August asks.

  “We need bread and salt. For good luck.”

  “No,” August tells the driver. And tells me: “We are absolutely not going there.”

  “Well then, drop me off. Take my suitcase home.”

  He stares out the windshield. In the rearview mirror, I see the driver eyeing both of us.

  “I won’t even be half an hour. I’ll take the bus up to your place. I’ve got the fare.”

  “No.”

  The driver has taken sides. He keeps steering, denying me, past the 132nd Street grocery and faster up Riverside Drive, around its twists and curves, through the rocks on either side of us in the 150’s. Past the huge stone buildings and the wealthy mothers pushing their prams in the falling snow.

  “This is New York, not some bayou,” August says.

  “I’m not from some bayou. There are no bayous in Kentucky. And everybody knows bread and salt is good luck when you move into a house.”

  “Old wives’ tale.”

  “My father told me. He wasn’t an old wife.”

  “Well, we ain’t stopping this cab for some superstitious bullshit.”

  “It’s the bullshit I grew up with. I ain’t some soft-handed uptown Negro who was twelve people’s Cotillion date.”

  Without taking his eyes from the windshield, he grabs my wrist and squeezes. “Don’t be disrespectful,” he says. He doesn’t mean to hurt me, but his grip is pinching a piece of skin, and it stings, and water comes to my eyes.

  “All right, then,” I say. In just twenty blocks, the snow has picked up its pace so rapidly that buildings are mere outlines of their roofs, and our driver has slowed the taxi to a creep. We can barely make out the blue jackets hurrying into buildings, the red hats running up the street to escape the cold, the people holding their gloved hands in the air for this taxi, which they can’t see is taken. The driver leans forward in his seat, wipes the windshield with the sleeve of his jacket. August coughs. I count blocks. Forty of them; four tens; good enough luck. I clench my legs together, to stave off a draft. And I suddenly know what anger tastes like when I have to bite my tongue.

  LAUNDRY

  “Like a hotel I slept in once,” August says, hiding his head in the wire basket. He raises his shoulders to exaggerate inhaling. “Smells so damn clean.” He’s never had such clean clothes, he says: he’s always bought them from the laundryhouse in a paper bag. They come back to him smelling of other people, of the sadness of the Chinese washer­woman and the frustrations of the roofer whose gritty pants have tumbled around in the tub with his own, of the longheadedness of the bookmaker whose shirts are never dirty to begin with, but get extra bleach nonetheless. August has never had his clothes run through a washboard, never had them whipped in the tub so they dry less stiffly. He’s never had it done right like this, by a girl from the mountains.

  He doesn’t know the half of it, how beautiful a bedsheet can smell when you’ve just run out to the line and rescued it from a drizzle, how you can sink into it at night and know that the mountain’s dew has become part of the threading forever. He can’t know what a side of ham tastes like when it’s not that long dead, or what it’s like to crack open an egg wondering if there’ll be a stillborn baby chick inside. I fry ham and eggs every morning—he says he’s going to die from the richness of it—but really he doesn’t even know what he’s missing. Clothes can smell only so clean once cityair has gotten a hold of them. And the food of the city is dead, truly dead. A man’s body, this food can’t help.

  We’re both strangers to his bed. August bought it just to please his mama when he started making money, but he’s spent his entire bachelorhood sleeping on the couch, above the sweet echo of street sounds. Sometimes the cat, who we’ve named Jelly Roll, sneaks into our room and hops into bed, running his tail along our faces. It turns out Jelly Roll is a tom, but he brings out something deep down feminine in me that I didn’t know existed, and there are moments, when I’m watching him lap milk or clean his fur, that I want to drop everything and have a million babies. August loves Jelly Roll grudgingly, it seems, and only because I love him. I want to think it says something about how much August loves me. Nights when Jelly Roll wakes him, August takes him out to the living room and stays there, back on his couch. In a bed, August has no cushions in his face to push him straight into dreams, and the mattress is so very hard. My first early morning night here, he turned over and put his arm around me, burrowed his nose through my hair and against my skull, perhaps reinventing the couch. He slid his hands onto my belly, began bunching up my robe.

  “Above the waist,” I said, and though I said it softly enough not to mean it, he flopped back over so his back touched mine, warming us both. I was sorry, then. I’d said it more to prove something to Edith than to follow Joyce Nettles’s advice.

  Our bodies have told the same boring story every night this week—back to back like sideshow twins, sometimes breathing against each other, sometimes inhaling opposite each other’s exhale, as one perfect pump. This afternoon, he rolls over and lays his hand on my thigh. It was a long, hard night, watching August play an after-hours studio session behind Milt Jackson: fourteen takes of one song, two glasses of cognac, and a joint. I sat, waiting, drinking, smoking . . . reading through Herbie Nichols’s columns in the pile of New York Age magazines stacked neatly in front of Wynton Kelly’s piano. I’m in and out of sleep still; the noon sun warms my closed eyes; I will myself back into dreaming. He’s staring at me—I can feel his breath on my face—but I don’t want to wake. Don’t want to have to remind him again where his hand should be.

  “Your eyelashes,” I think he says, “are long as those angels’ in Columbus Circle.”

  I open my eyes and clear my throat then, but he gets out of bed, still twisted in the sheet, leaving me naked to the cold air. He unwraps himself, then snaps the sheet in the air so that it floats down to cover my body, though I’m still left cold. He kisses me on the cheek before he showers, and I hear him turning on the living-room television, cracking eggs for himself, pouring a dish of milk for Jelly Roll. I fall back asleep, into my headache, and miss the rest of his morning. He’s dressed and rolling his bass out the front door before I even open my eyes again.

  On the television, President Eisenhower stands in front of the White House, saying how “deeply sympathetic” he is toward the four boys sitting in at the Woolworth counter in North Carolina. A man’s been beaten and hanged upside down in a tree in Houston because of it, the initials “KKK” carved on his chest, yet Mr. Eisenhower says nothing of this. “I have a disdain for symbolic actions,” he is even reported to have said, when questioned about the sit-ins. But now they are happening at lunch counters in Charlotte and Richmond and Nashville, and so Ike has to stand before the microphone, speaking of a nation’s search for equality. No d
irt will come this morning from the Rose Garden.

  There are sit-ins in Lexington, Kentucky, Walter Cronkite is saying on the TV news, and I get a sheet of stationery and write to Caroline, asking her if she’s gone to one. I don’t expect that she has, and after five letters home with no return letters back, I figure she won’t write back to tell me, either way. But it’s always a comfort to write her, to tell her everything I see and feel. I’ve told her that I haven’t yet let August. I tell her again that she should come live here. I tell her how Schiffman booked me and August for a private party on 131st Street last Saturday night, how, in the woman’s brownstone, there bloomed an enormous, brilliant flower near the half-open window at the edge of the hall. “A corpse plant from Sumatra,” the woman told me. “It blooms one day in five years. How lucky that you’re here to catch it.” I write to Caroline, too, of how a Nigerian prince refilled my glass of whiskey last night. I tell her how I fell asleep through the eleventh and twelfth takes of Wynton Kelly’s solo. I tell her she would love Jelly Roll.

  August’s left eggs in the skillet, but they’re cold, and my stomach is telling me no—I leave them, then, to rot. Dress myself in black slacks and a gray sweater, tie the sash tight around my new wool coat, and walk myself out of August’s building and over to the Broadway bus stop. Ride the forty blocks down, and when I get up to ring the cord for my stop, startle the hunched-over nurse sitting next to me. She’s still in uniform, her white hat still clipped around her hairstyle with bobby pins. She’s not much older than I am, and she has the most beautiful, tired eyes. Eyes that will always look to be remembering seeing something nice, even if they’ve long since forgotten. It’s not even two o’clock, and at 125th I’m the only passenger off the bus, the lone haunt passing through the cloud-covered chill. I find a box to post Caroline’s letter, then enter the Apollo, and make my way up to rehearsal. Halfway up the stairs I slip, twisting my ankle enough to say shit—it’s the fifth time in my life I’ve said it. I’m supposing that the next eleven might happen soon, here in New York.