Brooklyn closed in around our boys. It hugged the car.
“Volvo. Volvo.”
“Volvo.”
“Volvo.”
“Right at the light.”
“What’s the deal with the house?”
“You mean why have you continued to live in it when your roommate is abhorrent to you?”
“Roommate, Jesus.”
“And will you own it when I die?”
“Yes.”
“And what exactly did your mother stipulate about the house before she died?”
“How’d you know that’s what I meant?”
“Brooklyn-induced telepathy.”
“Your dickness knows no bottom.”
“You’ll never own the house.”
“You said you wouldn’t retaliate.”
“That’s not a retaliation, it’s a fact. There’s a parking spot.”
“I hate parallel parking.”
“Is that why you tried to kill me? To own the house? What a moron.”
Karl parked angrily and walked around to open Jones’s door. Behind, in a sense, the two-story vinyl-sided house they’d left on Long Island were ranged the set of twenty-story mud-gray residential towers they now walked toward on cracked concrete.
“Or maybe I’m the moron for telling you you’d get the house only if you were to live in it with me till my death, since I didn’t anticipate you’d try to hasten the arrival of that event.”
“You didn’t tell me that, my mother did.”
“No, she didn’t. I told you she’d told it to me and asked me to pass it on to you, and I did so just after she died, when you were delirious with grief. That was underhanded of me, I admit now with little or no compunction.”
Karl stopped on the short, poorly maintained path between the street and the closest of the ugly concrete towers that seemed designed to deprive the two men of the sun. On this late, mild Sunday afternoon in spring, isolated pairs and groups of kids walked and rode their bikes nearby, talking, shouting, laughing at jokes Karl thought would make him wince if he could understand them, making all in all a hard sound whose purpose was to strike back against a place whose purpose was to thwart purpose, and whose name—the projects—had come to mean its own opposite. While trying to comprehend Jones’s incomprehensible words, he looked around desperately for the sun. His hand, groping for a solid mass with which to steady him, landed on his companion’s shoulder in a parody of affection.
“You’re lying,” Karl said.
“No. Then I was lying, now I’m not.”
“Why did you lie?”
“I was delirious with grief too. I wanted you to stick around.”
“Why?”
“Just because I’m not nice to you doesn’t mean I’m not fond of you.”
Jones moved them toward the tower’s dirty plexiglas door as Karl attempted to parse Jones’s trio of negations. A boy on a bike sprang into existence before Karl and bore down on him shouting, “Move out the way!” His last contact with a teen still vivid on his face, he stepped aside fast enough to receive the bike’s wheels only with the toes on his left foot, a medium-intensity pressure he found almost pleasant. They arrived at the door.
“What are you stopping for?”
“Doesn’t she have to buzz you in?”
“Yeah, right.”
As they walked across a lobby not painted in years, nor mopped in months, nor swept in weeks—hygiene having abandoned its vigil against destitution—the questions Karl meant to ask about the house were shoved aside in his mind by questions to do with this other house of sorts and its occupant. Jones had found a way to assault his stepson’s head that did not require a physical implement. Jones removed his phone from his pants, poked it, pressed it to his head, said, “We’re in the elevator.”
“I’ll alert the press,” said the woman in the phone.
He glanced at Karl and raised his eyebrows that were impatient when unraised.
They walked down a stale-bread-smelling hallway with peeling linoleum tiles. Jones knocked on a door. The woman who opened it was black, Karl noticed right away. She called Jones “Monty” and kissed him on the mouth. “Come on in,” she said to Karl, “you can’t catch it like a cold.”
He felt her apartment was nice and as he tried to figure out why he also tried to notice things about his stepfather’s girlfriend other than that she was black; this he did with mixed success as his noticing muscle after years of semi-atrophy had seen a lot of use this weekend.
“Henrietta Jones, Karl Floor.”
“Now, Karl Floor, what are you having to drink? Because I’m going to serve it to you and sit with you and find out what possessed you to attack your father’s head. Monty, the boy’s not answering me. What do you suppose he’s stunned by?”
“What isn’t he stunned by?”
He gave his drink order and watched her move into the kitchen. His impression was of high energy and speed impeded by slow, pained flesh, surprised by the impediment though it was not new, annoyed by it, not resigned to it. Her feet, both of them, hurt, for which her strategy was to try to walk so quickly that neither would bear her weight against the hard kitchen floor for more than an instant, a strategy hindered by the slow movement of her legs, but aided by the light tan cushioned shoes. There were colors and shapes of ultracushioned late-middle-age shoe into whose mysteries Karl had not been initiated. The shoe was an item in the costuming scheme for a set of rituals designed to manage the bearable terror of bodily decline. That Henrietta’s kitchen table supported a stack of magazines called Prevention confirmed this for Karl. He did not yet have to know about the shoes, the pills, the ointments and outpatient procedures of this period of his life, but when he did he’d be able to rely on Prevention, the monthly Leviticus of those Americans for whom retirement was no longer an abstract concept. The word chosen for the magazine’s title, though, struck a note of hope belied by its own negativity, being the noun form of a verb whose implied object was death. No matter: this nice lady, despite the pain it caused her, was fixing him a coke. And here she came with it now on a tray, undergirded by the shoes. The color of the shoes, really, though found here and there in nature, was not found in the shoes of anyone under fifty. It was a few shades lighter than the current wearer’s ankles; than, presumably, the feet inserted into them, than the arms and hands, the neck and face, though each of these parts was of a shade different from the others, making black a discordant word for anyone to whom actual skin color was relevant information. Her soft, short, kempt Afro, its tinge of red and streaks of white, her body shape and movement style, her mock-acerbic talk, her eye and mouth shape all suggested to Karl that a degree of goodwill was being extended him, a form of self-presentation deeply absent from “Monty,” whose physical gestalt had given off practically the opposite vibe upon Karl’s first meeting him and consistently thereafter.
Karl said, “So you wanted to know why I, uh, why I, uh—”
“Oh, forget it,” she said.
Jones said, “Remember it.”
“I’m not your confessor, for God’s sake, just an interested party. Boys and their fathers are in a duel to the death the boy feels it’s his birthright to win, and if he feels himself losing more often than not, he’s liable to help nature along with sticks and stones. You’re not the first. Should have done it about eight years ago though, when he could’ve hit back.”
“Why are you both named Jones?” Karl felt sufficiently encouraged by her warm remarks to say.
The Joneses looked at each other as if their precocious three-year-old had asked how babies were made.
“Twenty-five years ago, Henrietta was my wife for a dozen or so years.”
Karl silently tested the ramifications of this news while gazing idly at the forearms of the two older grownups as reflected in the pale brown tabletop whose high shine he associated with underclass striving.
“Why do you live here?”
“What do you mean?”
“If God forsook it, it’s in good company,” she said. “You done with your soda?”
“No.”
She removed it from his hand and brought it to the kitchen with that efficiency of movement pain had taught her. From a kitchen egress Karl couldn’t see, she vanished into a part of her home undreamt of in his philosophy.
“She can’t hear you now so go ahead and say it out loud.”
“Say what?”
“That my girlfriend is a mulattess.” Jones settled back into the worn vinyl dining chair with an air of accomplishment Karl recognized from those moments in his youth when this man had announced he’d won ten thousand dollars betting on the New York Knicks, though now the somewhat stiffer body looked as if under contract to give a performance it did not fully believe in.
Henrietta returned in a pale yellow button-down sweater beneath a bright red spring-weight coat. But to call the coat bright red was not adequate. It had something in it—blue, maybe—that stained the retina. Nearly everything and everyone had something in it or them that you didn’t notice at first, and if you did eventually notice it you semiconsciously elided or erased the noticing because you needed to conserve your limited energy even though you were beginning to suspect that the erasure cost you more energy than the noticing would have, and the accumulation of erasures made its own hungry mouth to feed, and this added burden made you feel fifty when you were twenty-six, and not a robust and productive fifty but a worn-out, diminished one, as in that guy in that poem who’s just lying there in a hammock on someone else’s farm and sees a butterfly and smells some horse shit and hears a cow moo far off in the distance and then he tells you he’s wasted his life all the while freeloading off someone else’s hard work.
“Well, so,” she said, “we have met, and will meet again, and now it is time to begin my date with your step-pop, so grab your coat, get your hat, remove your worries from my doorstep, and direct your feet to your Volvo.”
“Actually, someone took my hat and hasn’t given it back.”
“Was that person Charles Stonington?” she said.
“How did you know?”
“He’s of the hat-taking kind.”
The three were now bathed in the jaundiced hallway light.
“How do you know him?”
“He’s done some business with my boyfriend and is a friend of our daughter.”
“Sylvia?”
“The same.”
“Then why is she white?”
“Oh, Monty, did he really just say that?”
“At least he’s talking instead of hitting.”
“Son, though I feel little good can come of knowing, I must ask why you are making a face as if a boa constrictor ate your poodle,” she said.
“Because this hallway smells bad, and look at that paint peeling off the ceiling, I bet it’s lead-based.”
“So don’t eat it.”
“It’s depressing here,” Karl said.
“Why does he act like he’s never seen a ghetto before?”
“Maybe he hasn’t.”
“I wish I couldn’t remember the last time hanging around white people meant feeling like an education instead of a person.”
Silently but with, it seemed to Karl, a wild energy beating back and forth among their bodies like a trapped bird, they rode down to the earth in the elevator’s round-the-clock fluorescent gloom, and walked out into Brooklyn. The sunshine had all but drained from the sky and left a pink-brown residue of urban light. They walked toward Karl’s car on the path between and beneath Hart Crane Towers.
“But you have to admit,” Karl said, not knowing what compelled him, “that when you plunk down all these big, ugly, twenty-story slabs next to each other like this you create dark spaces no one wants to be in and everyone rushes through in fear for their lives, except the miscreants who want to rob them, or worse. There’s no organic reason for people to be out and about in these dead zones between the buildings. If the city had thought to put the buildings next to the street, with retail shops on the first floor, then they would have created a natural social space everyone could move through without fear of mayhem.”
“I find your thoughts on urban planning not without merit, but your math is a little off,” she said.
“What math?”
“The part where you counted up to twenty.”
Karl counted, blushed, said, “Twelve.”
“Do you not, moreover,” she said, “spend much time around grown-ups?”
“Why?”
“You act like someone who doesn’t converse much. You blurt.”
“My social skills are not very good.”
“Come around again in a while and we’ll practice. I’ll leave you two to say farewell.”
She eased herself back up the path. The boy who had ridden not quite unpleasantly over Karl’s toes passed Henrietta, said, “You look like a flower today, Miss J.,” and rode off. She sat down on a bench. Karl looked at her profile, was exhilarated by the mystery of another human being, and then was sort of lightly crushed by it.
He turned to Larchmont Jones and said, “Is Sylvia black?”
“Depends what you mean by black.”
“Am I black?”
“Probably not.”
He drove home, that long, pocked, near accident, the BQE, a blur.
At last he came that night, the end of the longest weekend of his life, back to his solitary cell. He looked at the sad, mottled brown of his faux wood walls and wondered who had chosen them and why. What good could come of such a choice? Did anyone in the world feel that this was the best, or second best, or third best of all wall coverings? Karl doubted it, and yet here it was, this décor abortion, flush against a million walls across the land. How many man-hours had been spent, how many contractors and day laborers had come into how many homes with their tape measures and their circular saws? How many fingers had been lost in the cutting of this grim stuff to fit snugly between the ceilings and floors of rumpus rooms and hapless boys’ lairs? In what factories had it been made, in what nations of the world? How many men, women, and children had used up years of their lives at ten hours and one dollar a day in the service of people with so little imagination? How many dinosaurs had died to give the precious contents of their noble bodies to all the humans who could have done anything to their walls but chose to do this? The mass of men are hobgoblins of desperate conformity, wrote the great American poet Waldo Whiteman. Karl liked being solidly in the conformist camp, it gave him a place in the world, lent a sheen of dignified restraint to his daily hobgoblin behavior. He loved his faux wood walls. He turned on all the lights and watched them. He memorized each mark, line, ridge, and false wood-grain pattern some unremembered Audubon had painstakingly drawn while staring at the whorls the years had made in the flesh of a cut tree. Karl pressed his sad and damaged face against the gorgeous artistry. He paced around. He looked at all his posters. He loved his Hendrix and his Springsteen, his Klimt, his Klee, his Hulk, his Matisse and Van Gogh and his three Belgians, Brel, Magritte, and Van Damme. There was enough visual richness here for a lifetime of looking. Inevitably, he found the only object in the room more surreal than a painting of a giant green apple in front of a man’s head, and that was his own head, as seen by him in the mirror. How unlikely that this bruise-green and pink-faint straw-covered irregular surface, wrapped around an oblong spheroid form, after millennia, should have arrived at this place at this time.
He rattled down the hallway, brushed teeth he’d soon lose, rattled back, extinguished the lights, went to the window, looked at the yard purposelessly lit by the moon. A nightingale, upon a branch of his bedroom window’s maple tree, as Karl eased into bed, sang to the moon in full voice what was probably in the bird world a lay of love, which filled Karl’s heart with sorrow. He listened to it long and well till sleep, that burglar of consciousness, carried off the beautiful sound. A
nd then an eagle, feathered black as tar, flew in through his window, landed on his chest, sank her long claws down past his ribs, tore out his heart, tore out her own heart from her own chest with her other set of claws, and replaced his heart with her bloody little bird one, all of which scared him more than any other thing he had ever experienced, and hurt like hell, whereupon she flew out his window and up toward the moon, still in the process of stuffing Karl’s outsized human heart into her black little bird chest with her claws, or paws, or whatever those appendages were called on birds.
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