by Dale Peck
“I’m-a go say hi-lo to Reggie,” she said, patting her stomach. The smile smeared across her face seemed to have less to do with me than the rest of the room. “Wish me luck.” My face must’ve betrayed me because she put her hand on my shoulder and leaned as close to my ear as her belly would allow. “I just want to get this out of the way,” she said, then suddenly stopped, looked around. “Jesus, we can’t get out of basements, can we?”
My beer was so cold I could feel its passage down my esophagus, felt its swell inside my empty stomach, where it settled next to another, warmer feeling, this one generated not by beer or the thick smoky heat inside the club, but by Claudia, and the memory of everyone’s face lighting up at her radiant smile. I’d never seen her outside No. 1’s context before—I didn’t count our trips Upstate since I’d hardly been present myself—and so I’d never seen her charisma at work on anyone other than me or Nellydean. Her smile was like a spotlight, her eyes little cue cards from which you read glad tidings, and it was almost as uplifting to watch her give those gifts to everyone she encountered as it was to receive them. But it was also, I could reflect in her absence, a little disconcerting: now that I watched as a spectator I could see it as the performance it was.
I was halfway through my second beer when she came back. Something about her face had changed. It wasn’t a relaxing as much as it was a softening, and the first thing she did after she sat down was reapply her smile. The beer had left me a little buzzed—in the absence of our basement routine I’d gone a couple of days without eating, and my digestive tract sucked the alcohol directly into my veins.
Claudia smiled at me with freshly purpled lips. She put a hand on her drink, lifted it to her lips, then caught herself and pushed it toward me. “Here you go, baby. On me.”
“Do I have to tip you too?”
Claudia stared at me blankly, then blinked. “What?”
“Claudia, are you stoned?”
The crowd saved her. Applause sprang up as Reggie bounded onstage. He was taller than I remembered, and thinner, and in the time since I’d last seen him he’d spun his hair into dreadlocks as Claudia had, a lumpy mass that only made the angles in his face stand out more sharply. In three long strides he took his place at the upright microphone. The microphone only came to his chest, and he bent his knees slightly, curved his back, inclined his head so far I didn’t think he’d be able to speak, let alone sing. He held this pose until the last claps and cheers died away. There was a tinkle from the piano answered by the smooth watery noise of a brushed high hat, then the more insistent gurgle of a bass, and then Reggie opened his mouth.
“This is going out to my…”
He let his eyes fall to our table. I felt them pass over me on their way to Claudia, and he sang the next words in a voice that could have broken your heart.
“To my baby.”
Two hours later he straightened up and said, “Peace,” blew one last kiss to Claudia and left the stage.
I shook myself as if from a dream, looked around and saw through the clear air other listeners doing the same thing. I turned to Claudia. I raised my hands, I opened my mouth, but no words felt adequate to the task.
Claudia gathered both my hands in one of hers; it was warm from her stomach, where the other remained. “I read somewhere that some women play their babies classical music in the womb to soothe them. I figure if Divine can hear what’s going on, he’s got a leg up on all those other kids.” She stroked her stomach. “Balance out all the other shit I make him put up with.”
Suddenly I remembered. “Claudia,” I said, “did you smoke—”
“Baby!” she said over me, and I looked up up up to the impossibly distant face of Reginald Packman. He put one hand on the back of Claudia’s neck as he sat down, the other high up on her thigh, and he said something in a voice so normal I was suspicious: either this wasn’t the man I’d just heard singing, or that other voice was faked.
“You remember Jamie, don’t you?”
Both of them found this extraordinarily funny. Reggie turned and smiled and his face was so handsome I couldn’t look directly at him.
“Thanks for dropping by.”
I stared at him for a long time and then I just said, “Wow.” Reggie’s face remained fixed in his blissed-out smile, but out of the corner of my eye I saw his hand squeeze Claudia’s thigh.
The club was longer and narrower than I remembered as I walked out between the two of them. On the street they exchanged some words over my head, but all I heard was Claudia’s “Well then, he’ll just have to sleep in Ellis’s bed.”
The cab ride would have been okay if the road hadn’t been bucking up and down like river rapids, and I remember Reggie saying, “Not in the car, little man, not in the ca-ar,” and on the second syllable of the second “car” there was a hint of his singing voice, just enough to distract me from my seasick stomach, and this was enough to last me until the cab stopped.
“You got money?” Claudia said to Reggie.
“I thought you had it.”
“Let me,” I said, and thrust the third hundred-dollar bill of the evening through the partition.
Then Claudia’s building: I didn’t remember the elevator man from our first trip here, but there he was, helming a wheel the size of a ship’s. He was very tiny and very, very old, and he looked at Claudia and looked at Reggie and looked at me, and then he looked back at Claudia and shook his head and chuckled, and Claudia said, “Dirty old man,” and blessed him with a kiss before leaving the elevator.
Then a toilet. Then a bed. Then the toilet again. Then, one more time, the bed, and this time Claudia kissed me and pulled the covers up to my chin, Reggie standing in the background, arms crossed, foot tapping an impatient rhythm. I smelled flowers—heliotrope—and dust, and something I want to call anticipation, but maybe it was just sweat: Claudia’s cheeks were glistening, and I was afraid I’d been too much of a burden during the long walk down the hallway. But then I realized it wasn’t sweat on her cheeks. It was tears. Suddenly Reggie’s shadow in the doorway seemed sinister, and I pulled Claudia close.
“Ooh, Jamie, my back!”
“Claudia? What’s wrong?”
Claudia stroked my hair gently, then sat up, stood up, walked to the door. “Good night, James Ramsay,” is all she said. “Sleep tight.”
WHEN I THINK BACK to the night I spent in Claudia’s house, in Claudia’s father’s house, in Claudia’s brothers’ bedroom, what I remember first is the smell of dust, so thick, even in memory, I feel the need to sneeze. I suppose if I’d grown up differently—a little poorer or a little richer—then the smell of that dusty bed might not have affected me. A different person might associate it with nothing more than the slightly neglected bed in a spare bedroom. God knows I’d been assigned to one spare bedroom after another during my childhood, spare bedrooms and guest bedrooms and extra rooms and sewing rooms or just the couch, dear, in the living room, it’ll be fun, like a camp-out. Perhaps it might remind you of a sleepover, or the first night in a summer house. But what it reminded me of was Cousin Benny’s bedroom. The bed he slept in, the bed he made me sleep in too, beside him. Bedside him, bedded down, bedridden. The weight of that memory was as heavy as his body on that sagging mattress: all night long I had to fight the downhill slide toward his bulk.
Then: sounds. Of, as I fell asleep, fucking in the room next to mine (I can remember only that the room was beside mine, but, try as I might, I can’t remember which side) and, in the morning (which was really the afternoon), fighting in the hall outside my room. In between there’s a single image, beacon bright but timeless, marked by the whooshing nonsound of a door being swept open. My door; and when it opened I saw a small neat old man, a little plump, a little bald, and directing at me a look of such murderous rage all I could do was close my eyes and will myself back to sleep. Later there was the sound of fighting between Claudia and her father, a verbal argument that escalated so smoothly to its climax (“No, fuck you!”)
it felt rehearsed, and besides those three final words—Claudia’s surely, although I don’t remember them in her voice—and the slam of one door, close by, then another, farther away, I remember only one other word: “blasphemy.” That word belonged to Claudia’s father, and somehow I knew it referred to me. To what I was doing: sleeping in her dead brother’s bed.
When I woke up I jumped out of bed. If I’d been drunk the night before I certainly wasn’t hungover. I was full of energy—but I was immediately stopped by the sight of the other half of the room. Which was empty. Emptied, I should say, as hollow as the Incomplete Poems back in my room. Two faded squares marked absent pictures on the wall, a set of four indentations in the carpet marked the missing bed, another four the missing desk. At first I thought the furniture on my side of the room had been moved from that side but then I realized Claudia’s brothers must have shared this room, and that at some point half the furniture had been removed, leaving the room looking like a chamber in a House of Mirrors, only here the mirrors didn’t distort your reflection, but swallowed it whole.
Outside the doors were closed as they had been the first time I visited, the red Bible still atop the small bookcase, Gwendolyn Brooks right where I’d left her. The beigey walls were full of framed and faded things, needlepoint creations and the covers of song books, hymns mostly, maybe gospel’s a better word, and one small batch of photos. They were all formal poses, not a snapshot among them. The children were both shown in graduation regalia, Ellis’s face a paler, more angular version of Claudia’s plump cheeks and round forehead, his tassel of academic distinction markedly thicker than the skimpy strands hanging off his sister’s mortarboard. There were two separate takes on the wedding: one of the bride, alone, and another of the groom standing behind her with his left hand protectively on her shoulder; in both shots Claudia’s mother’s veil was down, her smile the thinnest glimmer behind it, and if her left hand hadn’t been prominently cupped over her right in order to display her wedding ring I’d’ve never noticed that she wasn’t exactly light-skinned as I’d thought when I’d seen the picture of her in the garden. She was actually white. Was that important? Was it important that Claudia hadn’t mentioned it? I noticed then the faint outlines of four missing pictures. By now I understood enough about Claudia’s family to know they’d contained images of Parker. The blanked rectangles were barely visible on the dingy walls, their excised frames having been gone so long that the patches of paint they’d covered had aged almost as much as the rest of the wall. I wondered what Parker could have done that required the complete removal of even his memory from his father’s house, and I also found myself wanting to tell Joseph MacTeer that you can never cut a child out of your life—the best you can do is cut yourself out of theirs. Then I saw Claudia through the kitchen door.
They say a woman shows her true age in her neck, but I always thought they meant her throat, in the lines that come to circle it like tree rings pushed out by the force of years. But Claudia sat with her back to me at a small round Formica table and it was the back of her neck I saw, the last few vulnerable inches of spine poking out of her robe. Within the robe’s shiny color-absorbing material Claudia’s shoulders were as round as her cheeks had been in her graduation photo, but the neck that poked from them was thin as a weed grown between the raised lines of a plowed field. Winter had paled her skin, and a love bite showed up clearly on its dust-yellow pallor; underneath it the bumps of bones were visible, the cords of muscles straining to hold up a head as disproportionately large as an infant’s, and as I came up behind her it was all I could do to put a hand on the collar of her robe.
“Morning, lazy bones.” One of Claudia’s hands held a glass of what looked like iced coffee, the other was hidden beneath a page of newsprint as she read the paper.
“Afternoon.”
“Is it?” Claudia turned a page. “I never know anymore.”
I glanced at Trucker’s watch. “Coming up on three.”
Claudia took her hand off her glass just long enough to wave at the counter. “There’s coffee. Hot in the pot, iced in the box.”
“Where’s Reggie?”
“In the cabinet over the micro—” She looked up then. Her eyes were a little glassy from the pot I suspected she’d smoked last night, or maybe she was just tired. “I’m sorry. Reggie left hours ago. The cups—”
“Got one.”
I poured myself hot coffee and sat down at one of the three empty chairs at the table. Claudia handed me a section of paper, again without looking up, and we sat there sipping coffee and reading. Some instinct guided me to the listings, where I found a tiny note: “Reginald Packman Trio. Two nights only. Uptown Underground. ‘One Stop Shopping!’—Blues Vanguard.”
“Hey. Here’s Reggie.”
Claudia looked up, her eyes brighter now, more focused, a little smile on her mouth, still faintly rimmed with last night’s lipstick.
“That’s funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“You’re sitting in Ellis’s chair. You slept in his bed.”
I shrugged to cover a shiver. “I would pick the dead person’s chair.”
Claudia pointed at the chairs one by one. “Mom, dead, Ellis, dead, Dad, should be dead. The odds were against you.”
“And Parker?”
“Parker,” Claudia repeated in a wistful voice. She nodded at an empty space at the table, where, with a little squeezing, a fifth chair could have fit. “Parker.”
Suddenly she pushed herself to her feet. Her robe was so tiny I could see a slice of belly where the two halves didn’t quite meet, and Claudia, seeing where I looked, put her hand over the bare skin.
“Let’s get outta here before my dad gets back. You hun—” She cut herself off. “Well, it’s not like I don’t know the answer to that question. Just let me squeeze myself back into”—she groaned—“that dress.”
Up here—137th, according to the first sign I took stock of—the buildings were low and the road was high. Tenement rooflines were etched so sharply against the clear sky they looked like backdrops, as if on the other side of their tin cornices the city just stopped. But in the street’s gully it was all crowd and noise and cars, the competition of radios, hand-held and car-driven, the sustained note of a bus’s squealing brakes, the overcall of hands laid too hard on horns. The cold air was so thick with the smell of fried food I could almost hear that too, the sizzle of floured meat dropping into hot grease, the crunch of crispy batter between chewing teeth.
Claudia walked a half step ahead of me. Her dress was covered by a long black overcoat she’d pulled from a closet, and from the back you couldn’t really tell she was pregnant unless you paid attention to the way her legs moved, the slightly reluctant lag of one of her shoes as it left the ground, the slightly heavy slap as it came down on the frozen sidewalk. Her head moved deliberately back and forth like a queen taking stock of her possessions, her breath described horizontal arcs through the air. When I caught up with her she took my hand. She’d pulled a second coat from the closet for me—“Ellis’s, of course”—but neither of us had gloves.
She laughed now. “Oh, James. My little Jamie. The way you let a woman hold your hand. You’re like a five-year-old with his mommy on the way to the dentist.” She ran the back of my hand along the fabric of her coat and I could almost feel the silk under the wool, the skin under the silk; she ran her hand along my back and it seemed as though her knuckles pressed all the way through to my spine. “It’s more like a dance, except the man usually leads.”
“I think my hand’s too dizzy to do that.”
She laughed, gleeful, triumphant; to this day I’ve never met a woman who enjoyed being desired as much as Claudia MacTeer.
“So that, um, that, last night,” I said. “I think it…thank you.”
Claudia gave my hand a final squeeze, let go. “Yeah, well, you think he sings good.”
“I heard a bit of that too.”
Claudia burst out laughing. �
��Oh, shit! I didn’t even think about that. That room’s been empty for so—oh shit, you must think I’m a total ho.”
“Claudia,” I said then. “I mean, how did…?”
She snickered. “I imagine we did it like you do. I must have looked like some slack-bellied sow at the trough.”
I hadn’t been referring to sex actually, but I took a moment to enjoy the image, then said, “So I guess he took it okay?”
“Took what? Oh!” Claudia’s hand went to her belly. “Jamie, Reggie’s known for a while now. Our little Divine will not be ignored.”
“But when did you? I mean, you never go out.”
“Laundry day.” Claudia pinched me through her brother’s coat. “You’re not the only one with a libido.” She laughed. “I came up here to tell my father. Otherwise we’d’ve dragged your drunk ass downtown last night.”
“Oh. So how did he take it?”
“That did not go so well. Luckily he was distracted. By you. When he opened that door and saw you in Ellis’s bed he like to have a heart attack. He was so mad he just had to leave the house.”
“Why’d it upset him so much?”
“Number one Dutch—” Claudia cut herself off. “Number one son, dead at eighteen. You do the math. Hey,” she interrupted herself again. “I thought we came out to get some breakfast. I hope cuchifrita’s okay.”
Cuchifrita turned out to be cheap Spanish food: Claudia was pushing open the door to a brightly lit little restaurant from which wafted the odors of grease and garlic and some kind of peppery spice. My empty stomach knotted at the thought of jalapeños but I followed her in. There was the business of ordering: the waitress greeted us in Spanish and the menu was in Spanish and Claudia even ordered in something that sounded like Spanish—“jamon y huevos, por favor”—and after the waitress had gone I said, “Can I ask?”
“Ham and eggs, don’t worry.”
“I meant Ellis.”
“Oh,” Claudia’s eyes went wide with feigned surprise. “Ellis.”