The Right Mistake

by Mosley, Walter

  “Damn,” Billy said.

  Socrates looked around in wonder.

  “So this is how the other half live?” he said.

  “More like the other one percent,” Tinheart replied.

  When Socrates got to his room the first thing he intended to do was call Luna. But he was distracted. The ceiling was low and the furniture all had an Asian cast but the windows went from floor to ceiling and he could see almost half of the beautiful city. The nighttime city was a carpet of electric lights.

  “I’m not here,” Luna’s answering machine told him once he had made the call.

  A knock came on the door.

  “Hey, Socco,” Billy said as he entered the posh room. He opened the bar and said, “Look here, brother. They don’t have them li’l bottles but whole fifths up in here.”

  Psalms brought out a bottle of cognac and poured them both a generous four fingers.

  After a few sips Socrates relaxed. He and Billy talked like they did in the days before there was a Big Nickel or a Big Table or cops that wanted to bring him down because he frightened them with his words. The ex-con philosopher and the gambler laughed for two hours before Billy yawned.

  “That was a long mothahfuckin’ day, man,” Billy said. “I need some shuteye.”

  When Billy left Socrates called Luna again. “I’m not here,” the taciturn recording said. After that he sat in the sofa chair and watched San Francisco’s darknesses and lights.

  When the knock came on the door he started awake and glanced at the digital clock. It was 10:30.

  Opening the door he expected to see Billy again. The gambler was a light sleeper and probably couldn’t keep his eyes shut.

  He was surprised to see Brigitta Brownlevy dressed in a kimono-like robe of shiny red silk that barely made it down to her thighs; surprised but not bothered. Brigitta had shapely legs and a smile that was an invitation to a closer inspection.

  She hesitated a moment and then found her resolve.

  “I was going to tell you that I was locked out and could I use your phone but. . . .” She shrugged. “Can I come in?”

  “Where’s Mason?”

  “I told him that I had a headache. I live north of here so he got me the room.”

  Socrates took a step back, almost stumbled on his own feet. He felt a foolish grin invade his stern features. Brigitta smiled going past him. She placed a hand against his broad chest for a moment and then pulled it away.

  She took a seat on the small upholstered chair that stood next to a loveseat.

  “Can I get you a drink?” Socrates asked, remembering his manners.

  “Seven-Up and vodka please.”

  Socrates took another four fingers of cognac after pouring the nordic beauty’s glass. When he sat down she crossed her legs. His brows knitted.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Those are some nice legs you got there, girl.”

  Brigitta smiled and leaned forward to take her drink from the jade colored coffee table. Her cleavage was impressive too.

  “I want to come spend the night with you, Mr. Fortlow,” she said.

  His breath became as shallow as a man slowly dying from emphysema.

  His lips parted and his tongue clove to the back of his front teeth. A sound escaped his chest that was both deep and animal.

  Brigitta’s smile broadened.

  Wonderment was there next to lust in the ex-con’s heart. This was the first time in nearly forty years that a chance meeting with an attractive woman hadn’t called up the wrenching guilt for the violence of his past crimes.

  Brigitta sat back in her chair, twisting to the side so that her robe opened even further.

  Time came to a still-point for Socrates; it stopped midheartbeat and hovered in the air like Judgment Day or maybe just the day he’d die. There were no deep thoughts to accompany this paralysis. The room was silent. The light, he noticed, was low. Brigitta’s smile faded into something more sensual and urgent but Socrates couldn’t even take in a full breath.

  “Should I take off my robe and come sit on your lap?” she asked.

  “No.”

  This small utterance took his full strength.

  “What do you need?” she asked.

  “I . . .” he said and stalled. There was a vast ocean underneath him, a depth so great and crushing that he was exhilarated by its power and slow certainty.

  “What?” she asked confidently, seemingly aware that she was the power in his mind.

  “Uh,” Socrates grunted. It was the sound of a moose rutting in the deep forest where men had rarely gone.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Brigitta?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head.

  “Have I done something?” she asked, her hand closing the

  bodice of the sexy garment.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “Damn.”

  “Should I go?”

  “No. No, no, no, no. It’s just that sumpin’ like this haven’t happened to me since I was ten years old.”

  Sensing a story Brigitta tucked her calves up under her thighs and huddled down in the chair.

  “My Aunt Bellandra once took me to Iowa to visit her friend lived on a farm out there. She told me, before we left, that I ain’t nevah had no real pork roast before. But I told her that my mama made a pork roast on the first Sunday of ev’ry month, when we could afford it.

  “Her friend, his name was Ira, slaughtered a pig the first mornin’ we was there an’ he cooked the roast the next night. He used rosemary he grew in his garden and garlic that he harvested too. I took one bite and was amazed. I had never imagined that a pork roast could taste that good.

  “Bellandra was always tryin’ to teach me sumpin’. It took fifty years for me to see it an’ here tonight I’m still learnin’ my lesson.”

  “What lesson?” Brigitta whispered.

  “That there’s somethin’ better out there. That I don’t have to settle for what has been or what people told me would be.”

  Brigitta wanted to ask another question, Socrates could see it in her face, but she kept silent.

  “I never just met a woman and wanted her and didn’t feel like I was wrong.”

  “It’s not wrong,” she said.

  “No,” he said, making two replies in one. “But you know I got a li’l brown girl down there in Watts would cut my throat if I did what I wanna do wit’ you.”

  “We don’t have to tell her. It’s just us here tonight.”

  “She’s here too,” Socrates said. “You the light shinin’ in my eyes, Brigitta, but Luna done opened up the window shade. She the one pult me outta the shell. And if I do this with you I’d be goin’ right back in.”

  The blonde woman’s blue eyes shifted and once again Socrates was reminded of the ocean.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  Brigitta smiled and then looked up at the ceiling, a little dramatically, Socrates thought.

  “I am a pretty girl,” she said. Her mouth curled into a smile around the last word. “When I go places men want me. Rich men, after knowing me for only a few minutes, offer to take me to beautiful places. Once a man I didn’t know gave me a four karat deep green emerald gemstone because, he said, he wanted to show his appreciation.

  “I never really understood them until I met you in the interrogation room. I wanted you like those men wanted me. I could feel it in my chest and in my sex.”

  “I ain’t no beauty, Brigitta.”

  “You are too beautiful,” she said, “like a mountain or a bear or maybe a fresh pork loin.”

  She stood up, allowing her robe to fall open for a moment. She looked at him before tying the sash again. She smiled, enjoying his restraint.

  “Can I be your date at the dinner tomorrow night?” she asked.

  “I thought you was with Tinheart?”

  “Not tomorrow night.”

  “I’m not here,” Luna’s answerin
g service said. “Leave a message or call me back.”

  4. He called her sixteen times between that night and the next. Luna was not answering her cell phone, at least not when Socrates called.

  He spent the day walking around San Francisco with Billy. They shopped at Gumps, a posh department store where he bought Luna a teddy bear. They ate fish and chips at Fisherman’s Wharf and saw Lombard Street, the crookedest street in the world.

  “You that man right?” a middle-aged black man in a well worn gray suit asked Socrates at the entrance of the art museum.

  “I know you?” Socrates replied.

  “Naw, naw. My name’s James Tippton. I live in Oakland but I read an article in the Chronicle. They had a picture looked just like you. Aristotle right?”

  “Socrates.”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s it. I told you it was him, baby.”

  A taciturn fifteen-year-old girl tried to smile but only managed a sneer. At first Socrates thought that the man had found a child to make him feel young in bed but then he saw that their eyes and cheekbones were the same.

  “I read that article three times, man,” James Tippton was saying. “You know I’m a social worker. I go down in the hood an’ meet with teenage single mothers, gangbangers, dope addicts, winos, and just plain crooks. I do it all, brother. All of it. They get AIDS an’ they come to me. They get put in jail an’ they call my number. You know I thought I was the shit. I was the man who was trying to make a difference. But I read that article and I knew that I was just another sold out brother makin’ a paycheck.”

  Socrates often ran into men like Tippton; confident and insecure, fifty but holding himself as if he were twenty years younger, both bold and restrained. These men wanted to talk but rarely felt that there was anyone to talk to and so when they met Socrates the dam broke open and all he had to do was stand there and listen.

  “You the real deal, man. You live it and you makin’ a difference too.”

  “Amen to that,” Billy Psalms said.

  “I decided aftah readin’ ’bout you that I needed to quit social work. Either I should make some real money or do sumpin’ mean sumpin’.”

  “James?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No disrespect but I’ma ex-con, man. They wouldn’t hire me to flip burgers in one’a these fast food restaurants. I do what I do ’cause I am what I am. That’s all. You made this child here. You give people a phone number an’ answer day or night I bet. We together in this. It ain’t no race.”

  The girl was staring at Socrates as he pulled a card from his work shirt pocket.

  “Here, man,” Socrates said. “When you down in L.A. come out to the Big Nickel. Ask for Billy Psalms here. He’ll remember you. He remembers everything. You spend a day there wit’ us and you’ll know that it ain’t no competition. It’s just you an’ me an’ all the rest of us.”

  That evening Brigitta came to his door to get him. She was wearing a mid-thigh tight green gown that came nowhere near her shoulders. There were diamonds in her ears and she smelled like the ocean with a hint of something sweet buried deep within.

  “How do I look?”

  “Like a mountain climber on vacation.”

  Her laugh nearly broke him.

  “We’ve come here this evening,” Mason Tinheart was saying, “as we do each year, to raise money while raising awareness for the plight of our fellow citizens that have the good life dangling in front of them like a carrot in front of beast of burden . . .”

  Brigitta drove them to the hotel in her two-year-old silver Jaguar. Billy rode with Tinheart. Socrates had his phone with him. He had not turned off the ringer.

  “But tonight we have a special treat. A great man, a teacher, has come to us from the southland. This man has had a hard life and has turned not only his life around but he has also helped his entire community to come together and transform.

  “On his way here to us in Billy Pslams’s beautiful red 1969 Cadillac the police stopped them for being black. They searched the car, found nothing, and then arrested them for being black . . . literally.”

  Gasps and other sounds of protest rose from the round dinner tables that filled the hotel ballroom.

  “You thrill me, Mr. Fortlow,” Brigitta Brownlevy whispered into his ear. She shoved her hand into his pocket and squeezed his thigh under the table.

  Before this interruption Socrates was thinking that Tinheart was competing with him on that stage, though he probably wasn’t aware of it. It wasn’t because of race or class. It was because Tinheart could see the desire in mistress’s eyes. She was hungry for Socrates’ violence and desperation.

  “. . . I’m talking about Socrates Fortlow, the new conscience of SouthCentral, Los Angeles.”

  The applause was loud and long. People rose to their feet, following Brigitta Brownlevy’s cue. They cheered him all the way to the podium, while Mason Tinheart shook his hand and then hugged him.

  Socrates squared himself behind the microphone not knowing what he was going to say. He perused the crowd of faces; there were Asians and Latinos and some black people too but mostly there were white faces, people in tuxedos and gowns. They were concentrating on him while he had Luna standing silently at the back of his mind.

  “I fount out a few weeks ago that I was gonna be a father,” he said.

  He did not expect the renewed applause. The women were smiling more openly now.

  “That’s a natural thing for most people,” he said when the clapping died down. “Most of you have had kids, or will have. And all of you been children. Maybe you had a happy childhood and maybe not. But you most likely had parents that ooed and cooed when you were in the bed. My mother wanted to love me but couldn’t because I was the product of a rape . . .”

  Socrates had not ever uttered these words and wasn’t expecting to.

  “I was the result of violence and the child of unhappiness,” he said. “I only evah had one woman that cared for me when I was a boy. Her name was Bellandra and she had a life so hard that she didn’t know how to love straight forward like most folks. We were made for each other, me and Bellandra. She told me stories about real people and she told me the truth.

  “I learned her lessons but it took a whole lifetime. In between then and now I murdered and raped and murdered again. I lived twenty-seven years in a prison that would kill a normal man in ten minutes flat. I done things would make you so sick you wouldn’t evah sleep right, evah again.

  “That’s the man you clappin’ for. Not no hero on a white horse. Not no victim but a man that preyed on his victims. Not no innocent man but a man did the crime.

  “And so I nevah thought about bein’ a father. I nevah dreamed I could be that kinda man. These hands so rough I could wash’em with sandpaper. What right I got to stand here in this fine hall or to have some child call me daddy?

  “That’s why I started the Big Nickel and the Thursday night Thinkers’ Meeting. I don’t care ’bout them cops stoppin’ me or takin’ me to jail. They looked at me and saw what they thought they saw. I don’t give a fuck about them. They the cops and I’m the killer. That’s why you rich people pay taxes—so that I don’t get too close and do to you what I did to my own people.

  “You cain’t th’ow sugar on shit and call it chocolate cake. You cain’t clap away a man’s sins. Ain’t nobody can turn that train around.”

  The hall was silent. No one was smiling. Socrates had finished his speech but he didn’t know how to get down off the dais.

  Brigitta came to his side then and led him away by the hand. He didn’t look up and so had no idea if people were watching him leave. He felt the way he had when he’d been stabbed by a man named William Haddon. The wound was bleeding and gave him a sharp pain.

  On the car ride back to the hotel he stared out the window at the lovely city. He didn’t speak and neither did his beautiful date.

  She walked him into the lobby and took the elevator with him to his floor. She walked him to the door.
r />   “I had it all planned you know,” she said as they stood there not knowing what to do with their hands.

  “What’s that?”

  “I was going to walk you to the door and say that after all my makeup and chauffering that I deserved at least one kiss.”

  “That’s an awful lot for a kiss,” he said. His voice could have come from a corpse.

  “It was going to be a great kiss,” Brigitta Brownlevy said. “It was going to be so good that you’d have to invite me in and throw me down on the floor.”

  Socrates felt a shock go through him. Suddenly his depression turned into lust.

  “What changed your mind?”

  “I have never seen the truth before,” she said. “I didn’t know it until you started speaking. You, you were standing there talking to us but finding yourself. They wanted you to be one thing but you didn’t care.”

  They came together in a gentle embrace. She kissed him, lightly at first and then with fierce determination. Socrates pressed his body against her and she pushed back, moving from side to side, pressing her thigh against his erection.

  They grunted together and then Socrates’ phone sounded. The ring went through one cycle and he kept kissing. It went through another turn and still he pressed. But in the middle of the third ring he moved away and took the little phone from his pocket and flipped it open.

  “Yeah?” he said in a thick voice.

  “I wake you up?” Luna asked.

  “No,” he intoned. “I was just thinkin’.”

  Brigitta moved away to give him room to talk.

  “’Bout what?”

  “’Bout when you was gonna return my call.”

  “I was waitin’ for you to call me twenty times before I was gonna answer. You only did nineteen but it was gettin’ late an’ I thought if I didn’t call, you an’ Billy might fall into some wild couchie up there.”

  “Is that it?”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “You know what.”

  Socrates looked up and saw Brigitta Brownlevy getting into the elevator down the hall.