The Right Mistake

by Mosley, Walter

  3. Everyone left except Marianne Lodz and Luna Barnet. Darryl had gone back to Cheviot Hills with Chaim, and even Billy Psalms, who had taken to staying after the meeting to discuss the talk with Socrates, had driven off in his red Cadillac.

  Socrates went up to his office/bedroom and closed the door. He sat there in his favorite chair watching the wall and pressing the thick fingers of his right hand alternately against his jawhinge and chest.

  The knock was soft, almost contrite.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me,” Marianne Lodz said through the door.

  Socrates smiled in spite of his pain because if it had been

  Luna he would have sent her away, told her that he wouldn’t be embarrassed into taking her back into his heart. But Marianne was another case.

  “Come on in.”

  The door opened and the light-skinned singer entered. She went to the chair across from the bed and sat on the very

  edge. There they sat, she watching him while he regarded the floor at their feet.

  He was sullen and aching and she was the light breathing of a world that feared his mood.

  “You have to take her back, Mr. Fortlow,” she said after a very long time. “She’s gonna be the mother of your child and she didn’t know you were under arrest.”

  “That’s not what this is about,” he said, his gaze still earthward. “I don’t expect nobody to come get me outta jail. Either I get out on my own or I don’t. I ain’t called her to help me.”

  “Then why?”

  Socrates looked up and Marianne leaned back out of reflex.

  “She ain’t called me in ten days, more. That hurt me more than I could tell you.”

  “She was with me.”

  “I don’t care where she was. I care where she wasn’t. She didn’t call me. And when I asked her to marry me she didn’t even have the decency to say no. She just went away. Okay, okay fine. I don’t need her. I been on my own for longer than anybody you know. My own mother wouldn’t love me so I can just go on doin’ what I been doin’. I don’t need her or anybody.”

  There was fear in the young singer. Socrates’ voice had gotten low and deadly. She heard the danger in a register below the deepest bass.

  “You got to get over it,” she said, her voice quavering slightly. “Luna couldn’t help what she did any more than how you felt about it. You got to forgive her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that child you made will not survive without the both of you. Alone you both too hard and too sensitive. That baby need the mother to be held up by the father and the father to be held up by his wife.”

  At first Socrates heard what she’d said without understanding. It was just a bunch of words but they seemed to sink into his skin. Child and baby, mother and father, held up. Then the ideas came into being as if they were somehow his own thoughts. They transformed into his past and experiences; his mother telling her boyfriend Beaumont that Socrates would not be going on vacation with them, Bellandra making him little cupcakes to cut the pain.

  “Well?” little Marianne Lodz asked bravely.

  “Take her home wit’ you, Marianne,” he said. “Tell her that I will be at your place at noon tomorrow. Straight up noon and I won’t be late. If she wanna see me then she’ll be there.”

  “Don’t you wanna go down and tell her yourself?”

  “No, baby. Uh-uh. You done your job. Take her home. Tell her what I said.”

  “You got my address?”

  “It’s in our mailing list. I know how the buses work.”

  “I could send a car to get you.”

  “I move under my own power.”

  Lodz hesitated a moment and then she stood.

  “You know that we all love you,” she said, looking down.

  “You keep on talkin’ an I’ma drop dead right here on the floor.”

  At 11:58 the next day Socrates Fortlow walked up to the concierge desk at the Pacific Rim Condominiums on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. It took him two and a half hours on three buses but he only had to walk five blocks to get there. On the way he met a woman whose husband had beaten her and she didn’t know what to do.

  “He drag me out in the yard an’ slap me in front’a ev’rybody but when the police got there I told ’em that it wasn’t nuthin’ but a argument,” she said from behind big sunglasses.

  Socrates hadn’t invited her confession nor did he ask her why her husband had done what he had done or why she hadn’t pressed charges. He knew that there were no sensible reasons behind his violence or her protection. He didn’t ask her why she changed seats to sit next to him when the Asian woman who had occupied that seat had gotten off the bus. She knew who he was, many people did. At least she knew his face and name. Very few people outside of the Thinkers’ table really knew what Socrates stood for or what he would do and what he wouldn’t.

  “He beat me all the time but I cain’t fight back an’ I cain’t leave,” the nameless and bruised black woman said.

  Socrates regarded her but did not speak.

  The bus stopped, its brakes hissing and complaining in a high whine. Socrates wanted to get out and wait for another bus but that would have made him late for his appointment and he prided himself on being a man of his word.

  “Can you help me, Mr. Fortlow?”

  He couldn’t make out her age because of the scarf wrapped around her head and the dark-lensed sunglasses. Maybe she was twenty-five, maybe thirty.

  “No,” he said thickly.

  “What?”

  “I said no.”

  “But what am I gonna do?”

  “There’s only three choices,” he said.

  “Wha?”

  “Either you wait till he sleep and you kill him, or you let him keep on beatin’ on you till one day you dead, or you transfer from this bus to the bus station downtown and go back home to your mama or daddy and try to get some knowledge ’bout why you let a man beat on you like that.”

  The woman took off her glasses to get a better look at the man talking to her. She was younger than he thought, not yet twenty. Her right eye was swollen and raw, barely open at all.

  “What kinda help is that?” she asked.

  “It’s not help, sugah, it’s the truth. Either you leave him or one’a you be dead. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Cain’t you people take me in an’ protect me?”

  “No.”

  The bus was slowing to a stop.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she asked, anger thrumming under her words.

  “You didn’t press charges. You didn’t leave a man treat you like a punchin’ bag.”

  The brakes began their perennial complaint. The bus lurched forward on its chassis and Socrates said, “This my stop.”

  “You just gonna leave me like this?” she asked.

  “It’s the way I found ya. Only way you change is if you do what you blamin’ me for.”

  “May I help you?” the concierge asked. A young black man sitting on a chair in the sun-drenched lobby raised his head.

  “Luna Barnet in Marianne Lodz’s place,” Socrates said.

  The young man rose to his feet in Socrates’ peripheral vision.

  The concierge, who was wan and white and thin, smiled, his young face looking like an unspoken lie. He was wasting time, waiting for the muscular man to make it to the marble podium.

  “Hey,” the black youth said.

  Socrates turned to regard him. His strength was from exercise with weights. On his throat there were four dark blue Chinese characters tattooed in a vertical row.

  “Hey,” Socrates replied, pretending that the young man was speaking in greeting.

  “What the fuck you want, man?” The tattooed youth’s right hand lifted up to his chest.

  “Touch me and your mama will bury you this weekend,” Socrates said, replying to the gesture not the words.

  The young man threw a punch with all the slowness of a body builder. Easily S
ocrates grabbed his wrist and with one downward thrust forced the young man to his knees.

  “This ain’t no play yard, baby,” the ex-con told the boy. “Just ’cause you in this white boy’s neighborhood don’t mean you cain’t get killed just the same.”

  Socrates released his grip and the young man bounded to his feet. He took half a step back, looking for a way to regain his pride.

  “She’s coming down,” the concierge said, his voice hysterical and high. “Miss Barnet knows him, Craig.”

  Craig’s eyes opened wide in rage and fear.

  Socrates’ smile turned into a sneer.

  “What you laughin’ at, man?”

  Socrates waited a moment before saying, “I cain’t smile up in here? You gonna tell me what to do wit’ my face?”

  “Ain’t no niggah gonna laugh at me, man,” Craig said with wild courage.

  “I ain’t laughin’ at you. I ain’t laughin’ at all. I just come up in here an’ ask a man to ring a numbah. If they don’t wanna see me then they don’t have to.”

  “I kick yo’ ass mothahfuckah,” Craig warned.

  Again Socrates paused. He pretended to be watching the youth’s face but really he was aware of the boy’s hands. If he reached for something it would be his last grab.

  “Hey, baby,” Luna said from some unseen corner.

  “Hey,” Socrates replied, not taking his eyes from the young, tattooed black man.

  “It’s okay, Craig,” Luna said as she came into sight. “This is one’a Marianne’s best friends.”

  Craig began to shiver, which made Socrates laugh audibly. “What you laughin’ at, man?” Craig shouted, aggressive fear lacing his words.

  “Nuthin’.”

  “Craig,” Luna said. “Craig, do you hear me?”

  “What?”

  “Marianne want you to go get Tina and bring her to the recordin’ studio. She need her makeup.”

  The powerful young man slowly shifted out of his deep concentration on Socrates.

  “You should show some respect, brothah,” he said after a long moment of introspection.

  When he turned to go Socrates stifled a grunt. Luna put her hand on his forearm.

  “Let’s go upstairs, Baby,” she said.

  Marianne Lodz’s apartment was the penthouse of the Pacific Rim Condominiums. There were windows on all sides of the split-level living room and a brilliant skylight in the ceiling. Through sliding glass doors she had a sundeck that was almost as large as the lot on which the Big Nickel stood. There were chaise-lounges and a round table with a huge red umbrella opened to shade it.

  Luna led Socrates to the table and he sat.

  “You thirsty?”

  “After almost three hours on the bus you better believe I am.” While she went into the apartment he looked out over the

  green Westside of Los Angeles. There were hills and beyond them mountains. This was a paradise compared to where he came from. It was no surprise that Darryl wanted to stay in this part of town.

  “Marianne’s cook made this lemonade last night,” Luna said

  as she placed a large and frosty tumbler before him. “Fresh?”

  “I think so.”

  She wore short red pants that opened wide just below the

  knee and a yellow T-shirt. Her belly was round but not that large and the rest of her was as slim as ever.

  “What you lookin’ at?” she said.

  “You never dress like that down at my place.”

  “Your place?”

  “Yeah. My place or the Big Nickel neither.”

  “Ain’t it our place no more?”

  “Luna, you haven’t called me in a week and a half. You said that you was wit’ Marianne and that was it.”

  “You could’a called me.”

  “I stopped callin’ you after Frisco with Billy.”

  They were both silent for a spate of minutes. Socrates sipped his lemonade, which was delicious, and watched helicopters as they patrolled the city like huge mosquitoes sniffing for fresh blood.

  “What if I say that I won’t never do that again?” Luna said, her eyes squinting against the sun.

  Socrates turned his palms upward and gazed at the light on them. Someone had once told him that sunlight had weight like any other thing in the universe but that it would take the sun shining on a whole city block to make up something he could feel pressing down; and even then it wouldn’t be heavy.

  Then he remembered Craig and how he had sneered at the boy and the nameless woman on the bus.

  “What’s wrong, Baby?” Luna asked.

  “What? Why?”

  “You look sad.”

  A story that his Aunt Bellandra had told him came into his mind. It was a tale about an old man, burned black by the sun because every day it was his job to carry the huge ball of fire from the east to the west, “rain or shine.”

  He considered rushing to the edge of the twenty-story patio and leaping off the side. Suicide was a common companion to the lifelong prisoner.

  “What is it?” Luna asked, seeing something of his mood. She pulled her chair next to his.

  “I met a woman on the bus told me that her husband beat her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I was cold to her. I told her that she needed to move away from him.”

  “That’s the truth you told her, baby.”

  “And I threw Craig down on his knees for tryin’ to do what he thought was right.”

  “So?”

  “We ain’t supposed to treat people like that.”

  Luna watched his face a minute and then took two of his fingers in her hand.

  “What else can you do sometimes?” she asked gently enough to surprise him.

  “We need to ask each other that question every day, Luna. Even if it take all week to understand we got to ask ourselves that and we got to see.”

  Luna kissed him on the lips and leaned back to gauge the effect.

  “You could’a told Craig that you was a friend’a Marianne’s and that you had a meetin’ wit’ me,” she suggested.

  “And I could have taken that woman’s hand and said what I said in a gentle voice. I could have taken her for a coffee and explained what I said.”

  “And I should have called you . . .”

  DETAILS

  1. “This is our community,” Leanne Northford said at what should have been the midway point of the next week’s Thursday night Thinkers’ Meeting. “We are colored people and we need to think like that.”

  She was responding to a comment made by “White Robert” the partner of “Black Robert.”

  White Robert had said, “It’s time to move out from the oppression that all people, both black and white, put on themselves. When Robert and I look out of our window in Venice we see every color and it doesn’t make any difference who we are.”

  “Excuse me,” Socrates said before Ron Zeal could jump into the conversation. “But I would like to table this discussion for next Thursday.”

  “Why?” Black Robert asked. He was a handsome young man who wore black pants and a rose colored T-shirt.

  “I want every Negro member of this meeting to come back here tomorrow night at seven,” Socrates replied. “We need to have a conversation among ourselves before we go on with this talk.”

  “That’s racist,” Minna Pope, a red-headed Irish girl from Bellflower said. “I thought this meeting is for all of us.”

  “That’s two things you said, Miss Pope,” Socrates replied in his mildest tone. “To answer the second I’ll tell ya that I want to have the special meetin’ Friday so it won’t be this meeting.

  “The first thing, the one about racism, is that, yes, it is racist. We are all racists here. You, me, the baby inside’a Luna and the one on Cassie’s lap. In this country you born in racism, bathed in it every day of your life. But the reason I wanna meet with my black brothers and sisters is to go ovah how we talkin’ here in this room on this night. We sayin’ things that w
e never think about, not really. I wanna go ovah that so that at least all the racists be talkin’ the same language.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Minna said.

  “But I ask you to trust me anyway,” Socrates countered. “I wouldn’t be doing for this if I didn’t think it was right and if I’m wrong I will apologize.”

  “What’s this all about, Socco?” Billy Psalms asked him after the Thinkers went home. This was the second week in a row that the meeting was cut short. Ron Zeal and Mustafa Ali complained audibly while others simply looked confused.

  “We not just a bunch’a black people on wood crates in the alley, William,” Socrates said. “We got a responsibility in here.”

  “What kinda responsibility?”

  “To see open and clear, to make a mark in the world that don’t have to be a black mark.”

  Psalms frowned at his mentor but he did not argue. He just hunched his shoulders and said, “Okay, Brothah. You lead and I’ll follah. At least as long as I can.”

  “I ain’t no leader,” Socrates complained.

  “Oh is that so? Now you sound like a real convict.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I ain’t nevah been in prison,” Billy said, showing his dark smile, “but everybody I evah met in jail, on the way to trial, always said that they was innocent. It’s like the man whose wife come home an’ find him in bed with another woman, humpin’ away.”

  “What he say?” Socrates asked.

  “He look his bride right in the eye an’ say, ‘Baby, the lights was out an’ I thought it was you.’ ”

  Socrates’ laugh started out mild but before Billy went out of the door his chuckling had turned into a roar.

  At home that night the big man lay next to Luna stroking her tight belly with his killer’s hand. “What you thinkin’ ’bout, Baby?” she asked, snagging one of his restless fingers.

  “My people.”

  “Black people?”

  “Them . . . and the others too.”

  “What others?”

  “Luna?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Do you love me, Baby?”