by Peter Golden
They were walking up Ocean Drive when Julian suggested that they get a drink. Kendall, as if explaining the situation to one of the less astute seagulls winging above them, replied, “I have to be off Miami Beach by sundown. You have to cross the causeway to get to Overtown, the guard at the gate will ask me for my pass, and I’ll get arrested. They say the police chief down here once caught a colored boy without a pass and beat him to death.”
“I wouldn’t let someone hurt you.”
“We’re in the South, and I’m not white.”
“We can have a drink here,” Julian said, nodding at the building behind them, a five-story, white-stucco hotel that brought to mind a steamship, with porthole windows shaded by mauve concrete eyebrows and a vertical marquee with an orange-neon sign.
“The owner’s a friend of yours?”
“Your friend too. Me.”
Kendall looked at the sign and laughed. “Hotel Jerusalem?”
“My little joke. The drinks are up in my suite. So’s your pass. Joe’s owner knows this cop, and I bought one from him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did. I said I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you.”
Julian’s suite was on the fifth floor, and after he poured two glasses of Chablis in the galley kitchen, he led Kendall out to the rooftop deck. They stood at the railing, gazing over the palm trees and traffic. The ribbon of beach glowed whitish gold, and the ocean was pale green close to shore, turning a darker, more ominous blue as the Atlantic spread out to the horizon, all of it bathed in the violet and peach light of sunset, as though flowers and fruit had burst into flame.
Kendall said, “I wish I could paint it.”
“The beach?”
“No, this moment.” Kendall smiled, which was when Julian realized—and this he never forgot—that Kendall had sixteen or seventeen different ways of smiling, and he didn’t fully understand any of them.
Kendall sipped her wine, and Julian guzzled his like seltzer, an effort to blunt his jitters.
“I love the Florida weather,” he said. “I could stay here all—”
“Will you kiss me?” Kendall asked.
Their kiss was long and slow and soft, and Julian felt a tremor of panic when she broke away.
“I have my own room at the Mary Elizabeth, so no one will know I’m gone if you take me back before breakfast.”
“You planned ahead?”
“Options are a girl’s best friend.”
When Kendall came out of the master bath with her hair brushed out and wearing the Brooks Brothers button-down she’d found on a hook behind the door, Julian was in his boxers, smelling of Pinaud-Clubman aftershave and lying under the sheets of the double bed. It seemed to take forever before she joined him and they lay facing each other in the light of the hurricane lamp on the nightstand.
“Who goes first?” Kendall asked, treating him to smile number six or seven, he couldn’t be sure, and Julian answered by kissing her neck. She shifted on the sheets like a cat stretching in the sun, and he inhaled the vanilla tanginess of her perfume and unbuttoned his shirt. He caught his breath at the sight of her breasts, so round and full, her nipples unbearably sweet in his mouth. His hand went under the ivory silk of her panties and gamboled in warm damp curls, while she tugged down his boxers and her hand stroked him—slow and fast and slow again.
Julian reached over to open the drawer of the nightstand and removed a tin of Trojans.
Kendall whispered, “I haven’t done this.”
“You’re very good at it.”
“I mean I’ve done what we’re doing but not what you’re getting ready to do.”
“You don’t have to whisper. No one else is here.”
She had a sheepish expression now. “I was taught to hang on to my virginity till a boy marries me.”
“We can wait.”
“I don’t want to wait anymore except—does it hurt the first time?”
“We’ll go slow. Gentle.” He kissed her chin, then headed down past her breasts.
“Julian, where you going?”
“Sightseeing.”
“Why?”
“It’s Florida. Everybody goes sightseeing.”
“Not down there they don’t.”
Thinking she’d be less shy in the dark, Julian paused to switch off the lamp.
Kendall said, “What’re you—”
“A surprise.”
“I don’t always like surprises.”
“You’ll like this one. Trust me.”
She allowed him to slide off her panties, but kept her legs close together, so he worked his hands under her firm buttocks, massaging her until gradually her thighs parted, and he buried his face against her, losing himself in the brazen spices of her body. Her back arched and every one of her sinews seemed as taut as piano wire as she strained against his darting tongue, moving closer and moving away, and moaning as waves of pleasure rolled through her.
Julian spooned himself around Kendall, and she said, “Quite the education I’m getting. Where’d you learn—”
“The library.”
“From a book?”
“A librarian.”
She chuckled, and fleetingly, Julian thought back to Berlin and Trudie. He was so young when they started, and when it was over he was never young again.
“I should send her a thank-you note,” Kendall said, and pressed backward. Julian felt the full length of her nakedness against him, and he touched her shoulder so that she turned toward him. They began again, their languid rhythm broken only by his sliding on a Trojan. Then he was above Kendall and, in that velvety instant when he entered her, he nipped at one of her earlobes to distract her from any pain. She gasped and lay still, though evidently her discomfort was brief: she scissored her satiny legs around him, thrust upward, and rotated her hips with a nimble deliberateness that Julian struggled to match. For a while they could hear their murmurs and the thrumming of bedsprings, but soon enough they heard nothing at all, and in that astonishing silence their movements seemed no more under their control than the rising and falling of the tides.
Chapter 12
Julian awoke dreaming of Trudie and felt guilty that she’d appeared with Kendall nestled beside him. In his dream, Trudie—a pixieish blonde in a beaded black dress—had been passing through the neon green of the sign outside Ekstase. The proprietor of Ecstasy, known as Kaiser Wilhelm, was an ex-cop who had all his graying hair and most of his yellowed teeth. He took a liking to Julian, a rangy fourteen-year-old who was always hanging around the nightclub, and the Kaiser paid Julian to pick up cocaine for him and to carry payoffs to the police doctors who issued cards certifying that his girls were free of disease.
Trudie was the star of the Kaiser’s stable, with a genius for keeping middle-aged men drinking overpriced champagne. Julian had a crush on her but was too shy to talk to her until the evening a drunk Russian nobleman tried to fuck her on a tabletop. Julian cracked a champagne bottle over the nobleman’s head, and Kaiser Wilhelm emphasized his no-fucking-downstairs policy by tugging on the knob of his cane, withdrawing an eighteen-inch blade, and carving a KW on the palm of the drunk’s right hand.
“You are very brave,” Trudie said, her German accented with the lilt of Bavaria. Emboldened by her compliment, Julian offered to escort her home. She lived in a basement flat in one of the dreary buildings near the Alexanderplatz railway station. It was a single room, with a toilet and bath down the hall, and the sole place to sit was on the lumpy mattress of the four-poster. Trudie removed a record from the stack on the bureau and put it on the gramophone.
“What’s that music?” Julian asked.
“Bessie Smith. An American blues singer. When my last boyfriend sailed off to Australia, he left me his records. I wish I understood English.”
Julian liked Bessie Smith’s clear, plaintive voice and that he could translate the lyrics of her songs, which he did several nights a week along with the repertoires of Ma Rainey, Big
Bill Broonzy, and several other blues singers. As the music played, Trudie smoked greenish chunks of hashish in a vermilion porcelain hookah. Julian hadn’t smoked before and he discovered that the hash made the blues bluer, and when he got hungry, Trudie gave him coffee and slices of pumpernickel with strawberry jam.
“You’re shy,” she said to him one night. “That’s not unusual. But you’re too sad for a boy your age.”
Julian hadn’t mentioned that he’d never kissed a girl and hated seeing her with the men at Ekstase. He said, “Why don’t you get a different job?”
“I haven’t decided whether to be a film star or the Queen of England.”
That summer, Trudie announced she was going to cure Julian of his shyness, and for six weeks she was good to her word, teaching him to perform acts that he’d been too timid to imagine. As school started he could only see her at night, but she was in no condition for sex. She was taking pills, Eukodal—like codeine, she said—which left her flat on her bed gazing at the water-stained ceiling. And Eukodal wasn’t her most dangerous problem. She was skipping work, enraging Kaiser Wilhelm, who limited his girls to six days off a month for their periods.
One evening, Julian arrived at Ekstase to find the bartender cleaning up shards of glass and explaining to the girls that Trudie had come in earlier and swept the liquor bottles off the shelves, hollering, “I quit!” and stumbling out. When Kaiser Wilhelm had heard about it, he’d said, “I better go talk to that lazy cow.” Julian was unnerved that the Kaiser was still gone. Riding the underground, he had a sickening feeling, which didn’t improve when Trudie didn’t answer her door. Removing her spare key from behind the baseboard, he went in. Trudie was lying on the floor, blood spread across the front of her shirtdress. She had a jagged hole in her throat, and in a flash Julian understood what had happened. The Kaiser had spoken to her through the door as if all were forgiven, and Trudie, stupefied on Eukodal, had let him in, and the Kaiser had plunged his sword through her neck.
Bending over her, Julian pressed his lips to her bare shoulder. He felt no sadness at her death, only a glacial rage. The next afternoon, Julian went to Kaiser Wilhelm’s place. He lived a block from Ekstase, in a stone house with crumbling scrollwork around the windows. Julian had been there to deliver the doctor’s certificates. As instructed, he’d used the back door, since it was left unlocked, and he rapped on that door now. If the Kaiser appeared, Julian would ask if he had any errands for him. No one came to the door, and Julian entered the kitchen. He’d expected silence and almost fled because classical music was leaking from a stairway. Julian went up, gripping the paring knife in his coat pocket.
Down a hallway, past a half-open door, he saw Kaiser Wilhelm sitting in a claw-foot bathtub. A radio shaped like a church window was on a three-legged stool at the other end of the bathroom, and Julian stepped in, startling the Kaiser, who snapped, “You ass-fucked turd! What are you doing here?”
“I have a message for you.”
“Stop standing there like a dumb cunt. Give me the message and get out.”
“Trudie,” Julian said, and feinted toward the radio, as if he were going to tip it into the tub, an option he’d contemplated and dismissed as an untested experiment.
The Kaiser jerked forward, which made it easy for Julian to lock his hands around his neck and force him into the hot, sudsy water. Julian heard him gurgling over the radio—a piece Julian recognized as one of his father’s favorites, Strauss’s “An der schönen blauen Donau.” It seemed to Julian that the Kaiser was kicking his feet in sync with the Strauss, as if he and Julian were partners in a macabre waltz. Julian pressed harder and when, after several minutes, he let go, the Kaiser’s face bobbed up with foam oozing from his nostrils.
When Julian got home, his mother was preparing dinner in the kitchen. For the last year, she had been so distraught over the battles between her son and husband that she had urged Julian to go to America. Julian had hesitated—at first, out of concern for Elana and then because of Trudie. Now, after telling his mother that he wasn’t hungry, he said that he was ready to leave. Then he went to his room, having learned two new facts about himself: one, he could kill a man, and two, he could go to sleep without giving it a second thought.
Julian was startled by a car horn honking out on Ocean Drive, and Kendall murmured, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Julian put an arm around her, remembering that stricken, twisted-up boy in Berlin and believing now, as Kendall shifted her head onto his chest, that he could leave that boy behind.
Chapter 13
Walk into the administration building at Lovewood and there it was, centered on a wall, a huge photograph of Garland Wakefield in her high-necked blouse and ankle-length skirt, raising her eyes to the statue of her father.
The picture had been taken by Simon Foxe, who had dated Kendall her sophomore year. He had prevailed upon Garland—who regarded the ambitious young man as an appropriate candidate for a son-in-law—to enlarge the photo and display it as an inspiration to the students. Nevertheless, while a picture may be worth a thousand words, in this instance not one of those words was true. Staring up at her father’s pitiless expression, Garland felt more resentment than awe. The seeds of her rancor had been sown when she was a girl and Ezekiel told her that he’d banished her mother—an illiterate slattern, he’d called her—back home to her snuff-dippin’, tobacco-pickin’ family in Virginia. Nor did Ezekiel have a higher opinion of the governesses he’d hired—and quickly fired—to care for her, teaching Garland that the one person she could rely on was her father.
That reliance had determined her choice of a career and husband and stifled her desire to search for her mother, so that by this Sunday afternoon, as Garland glanced at the statue, she wondered if Ezekiel had escaped one form of slavery only to impose another form of it on her. Lately Garland had been beset by these musings, which she blamed on her battles with Kendall over her refusal to learn the intricacies of managing wealth and operating a college; the girl insisted on spurning the achievements of her grandfather and mother for the puerile scheme of relocating to New York City to become—and this literally made Garland retch—an artist, which Garland considered a hobby for white men who’d been dead at least a century. And that was the good news, for if her daughter’s aesthetic pretensions had prompted Garland to up her daily dose of Pepto-Bismol, Kendall’s flirtation with Julian infuriated her to the point that at work she often had to fight off the urge to bite anyone within range of her teeth.
Garland reckoned that Kendall’s eagerness to join her Alpha Kappa Alpha sisters in Miami had more to do with Julian than it did with her sorority. She intended to give her daughter a talking-to after tidying up her in-basket, and she was resigned to confronting Kendall without a shred of evidence until Professor Rose, in a bowler and three-piece suit, came striding between the banyan trees, doffing his hat at the students who greeted him with exuberant hellos. Garland reasoned that the professor would know the whereabouts of his son.
“Good afternoon, President Wakefield,” Theodor said, taking off his bowler as Garland approached.
“Good afternoon. I see you have your devotees.” Through the grapevine, Garland had heard that Professor Rose had become quite popular. She hadn’t observed him in the classroom but knew that it was rare for Lovewood students to encounter a white authority figure who treated them with such Old World courtesy and respect for their intelligence.
“My students are splendid. And I have been meaning to thank you for helping Elana pick up nursing again. It’s been a boon to her spirits.”
“Professor Rose!” someone called, and Theodor and Garland spotted Otis hurrying down the library steps.
Otis arrived out of breath. “Ma’am. Professor.”
“How you doing, Otis?” Garland asked. According to Kendall, for a month after Otis came back from Derrick’s funeral, he’d been drinking day and night at Hazee’s juke. Kendall had stepped in, making sure he completed his assignmen
ts and eating with him in the dining hall. That was her daughter, Garland thought. Compassion for everyone—except her mother.
“I’m doing this paper for Professor Rose on Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy.”
“I remember it well,” Garland said. “ ‘Cogito ergo sum.’ ”
“That’s my question for Professor Rose. That whole thing—I’m not down with it. Sometimes I can think myself into believing I don’t exist at all.”
“Fair enough, Mr. Larkin,” Theodor said. “How do you prove your existence?”
Otis recited, “Ego can . . . Ego canentium piano ergo sum.”
“Intriguing. ‘I play the piano; therefore, I am.’ Plato wrote that music bequeaths a soul to the universe. Perhaps the same holds true for the individual.”
“Professor Rose, I think we listen to music so we can hear our own hearts.”
“Then I look forward to your defending that position in your paper. And Mr. Larkin?”
“Sir?”
“Over my many years, I have taken comfort in the idea that the mind can conquer any event that torments the spirit.”
“I appreciate the advice, sir.”
Theodor and Garland watched Otis go toward the library.
“Professor, I meant to ask: how is your son?”
“His mother tells me he is in Miami Beach on business.”
“Business,” Garland muttered, as Theodor headed into the shade of the banyan trees. “Is that what they call it now?”
Kendall was a resident assistant for the second floor of her dorm. The job paid thirty-five dollars a month and let her live without a roommate in a space she believed had once been a broom closet. She’d hung some of her paintings on the walls—copies of her latest obsession, cityscapes of the Ashcan painters, John Sloan and George Bellows; the revelatory light of Edward Hopper; and her favorite, the psycho-realist Dodd Brigham, who taught at the Art Students League. Their renderings of New York were as powerful and detailed as color photographs even with their wet, buttery brushwork, but they didn’t make her room any bigger.