“I’m not beautiful,” she said, and he laughed. “Why you laughin’?”
“Because I am a fool and there’s nothing I can do about it. Or … better still—I am a fool and I haven’t been able to do anything about it until I jumped on your boyfriend, and I don’t even remember doing that.”
“And you did it because you love me?”
“I’m not jealous,” he assured her. “It’s just that I haven’t been able to feel much for so long, and now that I have you, or had you, in my life I feel like I can go outside.”
“I don’t know what that means, Mr. James.”
“It’s like I was blind before I was blind, and losing my sight brought me ’round to a place that I had never seen even though I was sighted,” he said, realizing that his comprehension was mostly gibberish.
“But what’s that got to do with Lemuel and you sayin’ that you love me?”
“Everything for me has always been a secret,” he said, feeling that these words were somehow bedrock. “My father’s father couldn’t make a woman pregnant but his wife had my father anyway. I never told anybody that. The people who I employ are part of a one-man conspiracy to take over the white business world one hire at a time. I want to be with a woman and so I give her a job taking me around just so I can sit next to her in a movie theater and listen to her laugh.
“The only straightforward thing I’ve done in a very long time is beat on Lemuel. Even though I don’t remember it, that came from the heart.”
“Don’t you feel guilty?”
“I am guilty,” he said, “so I don’t have to feel anything at all.”
“You want me to come ovah there, Mr. James?”
“More than anything I ever wanted, Miss Loam.”
The phone rang late that night. Toni Loam was half out of the covers, her butt partly revealed. The room smelled of sex, and Sovereign felt the stirrings of an erection as he looked down on the young woman’s strong right leg.
The phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hail King James,” a man’s voice intoned. There was the hint of an unidentifiable accent in the otherwise American voice.
“Eddie?”
“They been callin’ me Jinx for the last twenty-five years or so.”
Toni was sound asleep. The digital alarm clock next to the bed read four-oh-seven. There were four used condoms under the green glow of the clock, strewn on the night table. Sovereign got up with the cordless phone and walked out of the bedroom to the high counter that separated the living room from the open kitchen. All across Lower Manhattan electric lights glimmered and winked from ten thousand office windows set in a hundred and more skyscrapers. The New Jersey skyline rivaled Manhattan’s.
“Eddie?” he said again.
“Fit as a fiddle and tight as a drum.” It was something their father used to say when he wasn’t disciplining the boy.
“How’d you get my number?”
“I call Mama once a year,” he said. “That anniversary happened to be yesterday, and she said that Lurlene Twyst said that you went blind.”
“It was a psychological condition. I got better.”
“That’s good. I thought I might have to pony up for a Seein’ Eye dog. You know, the kind that carry a keg of brandy ’round their necks.”
“You talk to Mama every year?”
“Ever since Daddy died.”
“FBI still after you?”
“Statute of limitations is up on that.”
“Where are you, Eddie?”
“You okay, Jimmy James?” Drum had half a dozen nicknames for his brother.
“A guy attacked me and I got mad. I beat him pretty bad … at least, that’s what they tell me.”
“Wow, Jimmy J, you gonna be a bigger gangster than me.”
“You didn’t say where you were, Eddie.”
“Down around São Paulo, man. Down around there.”
“Brazil?”
“Portuguese and Carnival.”
“So Mom has known where you were all this time?”
“I didn’t want her to worry more than she had to after Pops died, and I wanted to know if she needed anything.”
“She sure kept your secret. Does Zenith know?”
“She been talkin’ to Mama, man.”
During the long span of silence Sovereign studied the muted colors in the dim rooms: reluctant blues, hesitant red, and yellow remembering light gray in its sleep.
“You need any help, JJ?”
“I’d like to see you, Drum.”
“Come on down. I promise if you get here I will show you the best time you ever had.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“No wife and kids, huh?”
“No … not yet anyway. You?”
“Consuelo’s my bride. Pedro, Sistene, and Sovereign the kids.”
“Oh.”
“Catch you later, brother. Don’t give ’em an inch and they can’t drag you down.”
The phone disengaged but Sovereign stood there with the receiver pressed to his ear, the caress almost unconscious. He had missed his brother from the day he’d gone.
“Sovereign?”
Her standing there next to him was almost a crime; that was the first thought he had seeing the naked girl. She kissed his lower lip and bit it lightly. He touched her shoulder and she bent her head to caress the sore knuckles.
“Who was that?”
“My brother.”
“What he want?”
“He heard that I was blind and was worried.”
She took his hand in hers.
“I never knew you liked me that much,” she said.
“Maybe I didn’t either.”
“Why didn’t you say sumpin’?”
“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know that I wanted to say anything.”
“You gettin’ hard again.”
“Maybe we should calm down a little,” Sovereign said, feeling that he was both pleading and lying in the same statement.
“Is he comin’ ovah?”
“Who?”
“Your brother.”
“Let’s go to bed.”
Lounging on her back in the bed, Toni had her head on his thigh.
“I thought you said that your brother robbed a bank and disappeared thirty years ago.”
The sun was a crack of silver and scarlet at the far end of the horizon. Sovereign once more had a full erection, due partly to Toni Loam running her thumb up one side and down the other. The motion was an idle one and this excited the older man all the more.
“That’s right.”
“How he even know your number?”
“Drum-Eddie can find anything he sets his mind to,” Sovereign said, experiencing jealousy and desire, despair and satisfaction.
“That’s a funny name.”
“He called me out of the blue. For all I knew he was dead.… No, that’s not true. I never really thought he was dead.”
“Are you going to see him?”
“I shouldn’t be seeing you,” Sovereign said.
“Why not? You like me, right?”
“Our ages, our needs make us different enough. Too much.”
“Felt to me that you needed exactly what I did,” she said. “Feels like it right now.”
“Then there’s Lemuel.”
She moved her thumb away.
“If the court sees us as lovers they’ll believe we set him up,” Sovereign added.
“But we didn’t, and they gonna have to believe that.”
“Just because we say it’s true doesn’t mean that they will believe us,” Sovereign said, thinking that the way Drum-Eddie and Toni spoke was similar.
“That don’t mattah … not if you really love me.”
“How can we know something like that, Toni? I mean, I only said those words on the phone yesterday.”
“I always liked you,” she said. “I just thought that you was too fancy and the only reason you ha
d me around was to keep you company until you could see again.”
“You thought that I’d regain my sight?”
“You wasn’t evah blind, not really. I mean, if a bird went by the windah or a fly flew past you’d always flinch. You didn’t seem to know it but you did. It’s just that you didn’t want to see anything.”
She ran her thumb down the underside of the older man’s penis with a little more pressure and the phallus pushed back.
She smiled at that.
“But I’m so much older than you are,” he said, feeling the thrill and rise in his shoulders.
“Up where I come from, girls got boyfriends twenty years older than them all the time.”
“I’m even older than that.”
“We been together, Mr. James,” she said. “We got to know each other. So what if they think sumpin’ else?”
“What if they hold it against us in court?”
“So what?” she asked. “I’m’a cut off my hands so they cain’t put handcuffs on me?”
Sovereign laughed and Toni climbed up to kiss him. He moved his head once but she took hold of his hair and lowered her lips on his.
After a long and promising kiss, Sovereign said, “I’ll call the lawyers and tell them what we’ve decided. But right now I have to start getting ready to go to work.”
“Do you have to go?” she said with a playful whine.
“Yes. We’re going to need the money.”
“Can I stay here and watch TV?”
“My house is yours.”
Sovereign arrived at Techno-Sym at nine fifty-seven that morning. The company had done well forming partnerships throughout Asia, making tools that facilitated the furtherance of mass production techniques that helped the Eastern juggernaut compete so well with Western corporations.
We are a cancer on the American labor field, Martin LeRoy used to say to Sovereign. Sometimes the White House and Senate send people down here to question us about what we’re doing for the Chinese and Vietnamese factories. They can’t shut us down so they use us kinda like spies.
“Mr. James!” Shelly Monteri, Sovereign’s secretary, was surprised to see him that morning.
“Miss Monteri.”
Her parents were Bolivian but despite her ecru skin she seemed to identify herself as white. He didn’t mind her internal confusion. The war he was conducting had nothing to do with consciousness. A black pawn could think that it was a migrating flamingo for all he cared.
“We …” Shelly stammered, “we weren’t told that you were coming back.… I … I … I mean coming in today.”
“Who’s been doing my job while I was gone?”
“Mrs. Malloy.”
“When Myrna gets here tell her that I’m back and that I’ll be resuming my duties.”
His office was longer than it was wide. But it felt substantial—not like a tunnel or passage. The broad cherrywood desk sat at the far end under a high window that opened upon north 5th Avenue. His back had always been turned to the outside. He rarely stood by the old-fashioned green-tinted glass to look down on the avenue and its denizens.
The corporate persons, those institutions that have hijacked the rights of citizens, Professor Jane Mithrill would lecture, have effectively reduced Americans’ status as citizens to that of mere denizens.
Sovereign looked at the people in the street, hundreds of them, walking with purpose down the sidewalks, on green and amber lights. There were cars and taxis, buses and bicycles rushing along, carrying passengers with feigned citizenship. Or maybe, he thought, Jane had been wrong—not wrong exactly, because it was true that a mere majority of votes could not enforce the will of the people, not wrong but off about the misplaced emphasis with which she had arrogantly dismissed the only chance that the servants of business had.
“Miss Monteri?” Sovereign said into the intercom.
“Yes, Mr. James?”
“Get in touch with Darius Maynard and ask him to come to my office … if he will.”
“Yes, sir.”
After that he entered his home number on the phone’s number pad, something that he could not remember ever having done before.
“Hello?” Toni Loam said.
“Hey.”
“I was thinkin’ about you,” she said.
“What were you thinking?”
“That I like a uncircumcised man. It’s like he givin’ me a handle and a place to put my tongue.”
“You know I don’t need you to talk to me like that, girl.”
“You just don’t think you do,” Toni said. “You think that ’cause you fi’ty, you done lived all them years and gathered up everything there is to know. But I know things that you don’t know. I know that you need me to talk about your dick because I seen it and it was mine.”
They talked awhile longer and then the intercom buzzed.
“I got to go, Toni.”
“What time you comin’ home?”
Home. He thought about the word. It meant something different when Toni said it. There were echoes and reverberations in that shivering syllable.
Darius Maynard was tall and brownish yellow in color. He wore light suits as a rule and hand-knotted bow ties. He never wore a white shirt but dark primary colors, like navy or twilight-forest green. His hair was thick and nappy, not too long, and not processed either.
“Mr. James,” he said with only mild belligerence in his tone.
“Sit down, Darius.” This was the first time that Sovereign had ever used a first name when directly addressing a fellow employee.
Maynard seemed to recognize this transgression, giving his superior an odd glance as he sat.
“You wanted to see me?”
Unconsciously, Sovereign brought all the tips of his fingers together before his chest. Neither was he aware of the slight smile on his face.
Darius was the ideal employee, in the older man’s eyes. He’d come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh and had attended a state school. He was smart and, even better, hardworking. He knew how to get along with others but had not forsaken his race for a paycheck.
“I read about you in the paper, Mr. James,” Maynard said to fill the silence.
“Oh?”
“It was in the Post. They said you were in jail.”
Anger mixed with hope, Sovereign thought. Millions of everyday denizens had wasted their lives sipping on that cocktail.
“Do you have something to ask me?” Darius Maynard said.
The question startled James.
“Excuse me, Mr. Maynard,” he said, coming back to himself. “The … the experience of blindness has made me talk a little less. I think it was because I was listening all the time.”
“I wasn’t sayin’ anything.”
“I know. The listening is kind of a peripheral exercise. You know, like seeing out of the corner of your eye. For some reason sight and sound are connected.”
Sovereign put his hands flat on the desk and stared at the brown bow tie with its little yellow polka dots.
“Am I here for some reason?” Darius Maynard asked the odd inquisitor.
“Do you remember the day you came to me for your last interview?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I asked you about your socks. You wore a coal-gray suit with bright pink cotton socks and black shoes.”
“I remember. You said that you expected any man you hired to wear sensible socks to work.”
“That was two declarations in one sentence,” Sovereign said. “First that you were hired, and second, that I needed a certain sense of decorum from you.”
Darius’s face was vaguely square shaped, though to James it seemed that it should have been round. The young man’s expression was serious and wondering.
“You know what I would have said to a white man wearing a black suit and pink socks?”
Darius just stared, waiting.
“Do you?” James prompted.
“No.”
“Nothing. Not a goddamn
ed thing. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
For a while the employer and employee sat facing each other. Sovereign, for his part, could feel the world spinning and other worlds within turning on their own gyres.
Finally the older man said, “I tell you this because I have a question for you.”
“For me?”
“Yes. I want you to tell me if what I’ve been doing is right.”
Darius glowered.
“How can I answer that?” the younger man said.
“If you can’t, you can’t. I won’t hold it against you. I never told anybody about this before. Nobody.”
“You use that criterion on every hire?” the data analyst asked.
Sovereign nodded and looked away.
“The whole time you’ve worked here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Is your question the answer to mine?”
A look of confusion passed over Darius’s face and then he shook his head.
“If it isn’t, then I’ll keep my answer until you give me yours,” Sovereign said.
“I think I should go back to my desk,” Maynard said.
“Okay. I’ll be here until I’m not anymore. You can come up anytime. I’ll be looking forward to it.”
At noon doughy Martin LeRoy showed up at Sovereign’s office. Over the day many of his fellow workers had come by to wish Sovereign well and say that they were happy to see him. Not one of them had called him in his absence. He knew somehow that this wasn’t because he was black but due to the fact that he was unapproachable, even aloof. No one, except LeRoy, felt close to him. And even though Martin hadn’t called he had sent a letter telling Sovereign that he hoped he got better soon.
Sending a letter to a blind man.
“Sovereign,” the short and chubby VP greeted him.
“Mr. LeRoy.”
“You can see again, huh?” LeRoy said, peering into the taller man’s face.
“Yes.”
“What was wrong?”
“No one knows. I was blind and then I could see.”
“Like they talked about in my grandmother’s church.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
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