“What,” I said.
“I mean, if it don’t offend you. I’m not tryin’ to use you. I ain’t tryin’ to belittle. Just wondered if you might give us a little meow.”
I coughed back in my throat, and it seemed to echo in the taut quiet.
“Don’t you,” she whispered. And I knew then that I’d have to. Otherwise it was the two of us opposing him, and I couldn’t allow anything like that.
I knew I had to spin the sound somehow, or it’d come out like a pitiful, forced thing. I imagined a man sitting in the back room of a restaurant, his hands on a checked cloth, tilting back his chair, flushed with power and an acceptable meal and the respect of the street. He brushes the backs of his fingers over his chin, and—
“Meow,” I said, shrugging.
“Meow,” Calyph repeated, in a reasonable tone. His whole posture was bent to his wife in appeal. His hands were cupped together.
Now she looked really furious. Her whole face was flushed, the tips of her fingers bloodless where she gripped her thighs through the thin cotton.
I don’t know what he saw in her that told him her anger was endangered. But suddenly he smiled at her very carefully. “Errbody meows,” he said wisely.
Her lips moved at him in silent fury.
“Don’t everybody meow, Jess?”
“Everybody I know,” I said.
We watched the flush creep down her neck. “You are the fucking—”
She turned suddenly, lithe and alive and faking the fury now. Before she could avert her face I saw the severity straining to hold. With the cuss she’d forgiven us, and now she had to book it before she laughed and lost all face.
“You are the princes,” she said savagely, going away. We listened to her footsteps recede.
“Oh, where my kitty cat, where my kitty cat?” Calyph sang softly. It was the first moment of brotherhood I’d felt with him since the day he hired me. My nerves tingled, as with a flush of some golden liquor. I had to struggle not to grin like a boy. I felt my face slowly go still, and the self-mastery gave me a second flush of strange ecstasy—I felt my face glowing behind the mask.
It wasn’t until that day that I ever understood them together. While I kept my eyes down and pretended to work, I watched them at rest and at play. I got up to get a glass of water and sat back where I could get a good angle of them. Antonia was still wearing her pajamas, but I wasn’t so concerned with watching her in them. She could have been asserting her rights, or daring me to find the line of her terry underwear, but I just wanted to be sure they couldn’t go off and have some moment together behind a wall where I couldn’t see.
Calyph got up and put a record on. I’d noticed the turntable before—it was one of the few items on the main floor of more than token quality, and I envied it, because back in the Midwest I’d had a much lesser version of the same. I knew his taste went beyond the blunt mainstream rap I assumed of most athletes—the stuff I used to hear swelling the glass on aptly named Suburbans in the parking lots of once-segregated fraternities. But when he put on Pavement on blue vinyl, that was a little past my expectations.
“Ice baby,” he sang. “I saw your girlfriend, and she blah blah lo-fi singer, why won’t you let me hear?”
Antonia snorted.
“What? I put it on, didn’t I?” He leaned out to catch my eye, his voice carrying easily through the rooms. “This was the first record she gave me in college. This was the music that was gonna bridge all our gaps.”
“You like it,” she said dismissively.
“Sure I like it. Remember back when making music on the cheap was a big art movement? The culture was like, shit yes, white people finally made some tinny sounds for us.”
“Did you get her something back?”
Calyph looked quickly away.
“Fear of a Black Planet,” he said at last.
“He wanted me to know who he was,” Antonia said, drawling.
I heard a noise on the stairs, and Antonia whistled and clapped her hands. The serval ran into view, chirping, and lay down at Calyph’s feet. He rubbed it with rough affection, as if it were a dog. “How’d you get aloosed?”
The serval was interrogated about its day, and lay there wide-eyed, as if listening intently for some distant sound far beyond the trivial noises of its feeders. It had huge ears like lacrosse pockets, and its alertness made it seem a living mechanism for sensing far-off danger. Every few minutes some inaudible provocation would stir the creature, and it would go trotting swiftly out of the room. “Siren goin’ off,” Calyph would call after it.
After it came back the first time, Antonia brought it over to me and reintroduced it as though to an old benefactor. Her manner showed no shadow of the previous night, and I was glad. I worried he would notice any change, and for the time being I was just glad to get a taste without upsetting anything. Siren was a savannah, technically, smaller than a true serval but about twice the size of an ordinary house cat, with limbs like a giraffe’s. It butted at Calyph’s knees while he stood to take a call, eighteen feet of legs between them.
Most any time somebody called Calyph on the phone, he seemed to step out of our polite, muted world and into somewhere far away. The phone made him street again, and he had the self-possession to go there, to make no concession to the fact that while he was talking twice as loud and half again as fast, and ending an impressive percentage of his sentences with freshly coined insults, he was still standing on plush carpet looking out through lace curtains at something people might yet want to call a greensward.
Meanwhile, Antonia, paying him no mind, went calmly on, cutting from a magazine with a pair of nail scissors.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen them so. I remembered standing by their door in the food-delivery days, the curry-smelling food bag at my feet. He was gone to get her card; she must have insisted on paying that night. We had some complicated system if you didn’t pay cash—they gave the numbers over the phone and then we had to see the card again and take a rubbing on carbon. I always did it with the side of a pen with the name of my college on it, so they’d know I was a man of promise.
Antonia was tinkering with something on a laptop. She was deep into it, and he had to put a hand on her shoulder before she looked up. She brought up the card, a little annoyed at the interruption, but polite, trying not to lean her mood onto me, while he got a call. He walked back and forth, in and out of view into rooms I hadn’t yet seen. You could tell he was talking to some old homeboy. His voice had changed, and the old hood slang was brought alive to enrapture the beige sofas with its complexity and sure cadence.
They seemed so separate there, each with their own incompatible histories, which their marriage had bound together. Her cool hands were clicking away, buying this, matching that shade to another shade, contributing to an election campaign, who knew what, and then she came forward, while he strode around, getting the updates. “That Nutella motherfucker?” he’d said incredulously. It was the same now, only she was cutting, and it was some other man he was dubious of, saying, “He think he could take who? That boy couldn’t take a shit.” They were so completely distinguished and different, so entirely themselves, it warmed me to watch them—they almost stood a chance. They offered two complete worlds to the marriage, two worlds in opposition, the pressures of which the marriage would have to stand against and be made stronger. When two white people married, God help them. Unless they had some deep division of class to bless them, some irreconcilable political difference to light their way, what was there to toughen them, to strengthen their bond together, but their own selves? And when was that ever enough?
I felt so kind toward them that day. Calyph got off the phone and sat back down, and again the serval ran off, and Antonia went on snipping, snipping, and he picked up one of her cuttings and turned it like he didn’t know where the up of it was, and then set it down again and sighed, and his head sank as though he were resuming the pace of this world. After a moment her hand ca
me quietly out, and ran down his arm, and cupped the elbow. It was a privilege just to watch them, really. It filled me with a funny feeling, a healthy jealousy, so warm and peculiar it was like the beginnings of love itself. The strength of their smallest gestures filled me with hot liquid light. I didn’t want to break them up at all—I just wanted to sit there and take notes. In that moment I really did want only the best for them.
And then he began to kiss her. He leaned down over her, their faces were obscured. And why should he not? Well and good, I told myself. Let him have her. I bent to my work, my hand firm on the paper.
“You know he’s watching us,” she said.
It must have been the sudden noise in the quiet, but my hand jumped then. I’d been writing out the details of the best cars and in the midst of “tape deck” I made a deep slash across the paper. The page was ruined—I’d have to begin again.
“I’ll go out back,” I said quickly, very nonchalant and businesslike, but even as I stood I could feel myself seethe. I’d not been watching them, or not when she said I had—and not ever in that way she meant. And all at once it was too much for me. I felt almost spat upon, like she’d walked over and called me a peeping little lackey. I felt the affectionate jealousy cool and harden into something other, and, whistling, telling myself I was brushing it off, that I still felt happy, I went out to the car. It was misting, and when I went in the glove box for the house flyer, with the Realtor’s little handscrawled note in the corner—“Great to meet you, Antonia!”—I put the thing carefully in my pocket, so the ink would not get damp.
When I stepped back into the kitchen, the serval came running. “First alert,” I heard Calyph cry, and then the thing was circling my legs, chirping. I knelt down and knuckled it beneath its chin and along the sides of its face as the streaks of scent faintly wet my knuckles. I looked into its eyes to see if it saw trouble; it stared back at me blankly. I folded up the flyer and slipped it into one of his pricing guides, protruding like a fat bookmark.
When I crossed to go out back, I saw he had her in his arms. They were dancing. I stopped in the doorway, and I could not look away. She reached both her hands up to his face and ran her thin, splintered-looking fingers through his beard. Then she reached up again and pulled on his ears to make him bend down, her face flushing with the quick, childish assertion of need. It was adorable, and bending down he was so swelled with pride and calm he looked bored, as a lion looks bored. I watched their lips meet once more.
Swaying to the song’s tender mope, she drew away, and their dance became goofy, and entirely unselfconscious, and when they began to kick up their feet and shimmy at one another, I knew I’d been forgotten. I didn’t know whether to break something minor so they would look at me, or grit my teeth and try to forgive them, or just to go away, and then Calyph pivoted, as if to give a specially strong kick, and his knee gave way beneath him, and as he crumpled to the ground I heard a little pop, as if a jar had been unsealed.
4
The next morning was cloudless again. In a breeze sweet with the smell of pines baking in the sun, I took my laptop to the window, found an unsecured connection, and looked across the Internet for Calyph. I found him on the ESPN sidebar, with the secondary news:
WEST TO UNDERGO MICROFRACTURE
SURGERY, MISS SEASON
Portland, Ore.
Less than a week after agreeing to a five-year, $32 million contract extension, the Portland Trail Blazers announced that forward Calyph West will undergo microfracture surgery on his left knee, and is expected to miss all of the upcoming season.
West, the 14th overall pick in the 2004 draft out of North Carolina, was expected to compete with Travis Outlaw for a starting spot at the small forward position. Last year he averaged 10.7 points and 3.9 rebounds in 21.5 minutes a game.
“Calyph’s been a great addition over the past three years,” Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard said. “Obviously, we believe he’s a core part of our team, and fortunately we think he’s young enough to make a full recovery. In the meantime, we do feel we have great depth at the position.”
West is scheduled to fly to Birmingham, Ala., where the surgery will be performed by Dr. James Andrews. He is expected to be on crutches for up to eight weeks. Full recovery likely will take six to 12 months, the team said. The Trail Blazers would not comment on the status of West’s new contract.
It was a distant, ignorant thing, and I wanted to pour more life into it. Never having been close to an event worthy of the sporting news, it’d never occurred to me that every dry summary must be backed by a weight of intimate and unprintable detail, the meows and dances of a private life. I was there, I wanted to shout, I know about it all. But what was Calyph to them? The next year would be the worst of his life, his career could be in jeopardy, and yet all the people open to that page at the same moment as I, what did they feel? A distant satisfaction. They had gone hoping for news and there was some. The world was going round. Even if they were fans, they’d say, “Well, that clears up the rotation.”
It was hard to know whether to feel responsible. I went back and forth about the sculpture a thousand times. He’d seemed fine afterward, had worked himself out and been satisfied. Still, I remember the look on his face when he leapt away from the ice. With knees sometimes it’s the smallest thing.
After we heard the pop, he lay there a moment, looking only perplexed, like he’d tried to sit in a broken chair. I could see Antonia’s face go gaunt with uncertainty, frozen in the last moment when denial was still possible. He clutched his knee with both hands, slowly, not like it pained him but like he wanted to gather it up and put it back together. Then he whimpered, once, a reedy, terrible sound, so distant from his ordinary voice it was like a note from a flute. He shook his head fiercely.
“I’m hurt,” he said. “I’m hurt.” And then she was on her knees.
The cat, sensing fun, bounded over and began to frolic. Antonia pushed it away, which only made it more rambunctious. Calyph shouted for me and I came out of the doorway and tried to grab the thing. I whiffed and it leapt away, chirping ecstatically, then rounded on me, waiting gamely for me to fail again. It led me from room to room, hunched over and mortified, locked in perverse and overmatched contest. The beast was spouting a sort of joyous horking sound. I remember thinking they must be able to see me hunching from room to room, the sounds of my hushed and desperate coaxing an absurd backdrop to their misery. At last I got the thing cornered in the kitchen and took it in my arms. I could barely keep from hurling it into the sink and running the disposal, just to see if a bit of limb might get nicked off. With the thing pinned writhing to my chest, I took back the house flyer and slipped it in my pocket. I guess I felt I’d done enough.
“Hush now,” I heard him say behind me, as I went up the stairs to lock the cat in. “It’ll be all right. Get the phone.”
When I got the serval in a bedroom, it was bouncing and chirping all over. I looked around to see if the thing had a bed somewhere, like that would calm it, but all its things were in some other room. I tried the closet, and when I opened it the cat darted right in and plunged its front paws into a laundry basket, its hind still protruding into the room. It seemed occupied with snuffling the whites, so I made a move for the door. The next I knew the serval was busting past me into the hall, free again and horking joyously, a pair of Antonia’s dirty silks dangling around its neck. It ran round and round the upper floor, sounding its triumph. I was looking for something to club it with when it ran back into the bedroom of its own accord. I locked it in the closet, and when I got back downstairs Calyph had his T-shirt pulled over his face. They told me to go right home and talk to no one.
He must have been on his way to Alabama already, but no one had called me. Someone else must have driven him to the airport. Throughout the night, while I slept, forces had been moving, and by dawn the panic was gone and agents of supreme competence had converged to handle everything. Hours before my first yawn of the mo
rning I’d been cut from the loop and replaced.
When afternoon came and there was no word, I called the house line and his brother Talib answered.
“This is Jess,” I said.
“Who?”
“The driver.”
“Oh. Just, uh, sit tight. We’ll let you know when he get back.”
“Is everyone else there with him?”
“Where with him,” he said curtly.
“Birmingham. It’s in all the news.”
“What do the news know?” he said, his voice aggressive with the strain of keeping up the cover.
“I just want to know if I’ll be needed. How long does the surgery take?”
“Surgery?” he repeated incredulously.
“I was there.”
He sighed. “Listen, people been callin’. Wantin’ to know. I don’t know who’s who—I’m just tryin’ to hold it down here. I wouldn’t expect anybody back for three, four days at least. All right?” Then he hung up.
I tried to think of the time off as a luxury, but there was little to do. Some cloths I’d ordered for the car came in the mail and I touched the fine, soft fibers sadly. Once more I moved listless through the downtown streets, walking past the old happy-hour bars that had been nightly destinations in my past life as an ordinary Portlander, with a job at a nonprofit and a social life beyond my place of employment. I’d hardly been back from Northern a week when I realized all that was gone, that the whole scene I’d known had moved on, to marriage or to new discontentments I had no place in, or to California. My return to this city of youth, this city I’d once moved eighteen hundred miles to on the basis of a simple Web survey at FindYourSpot.com, had made me a stranger again. On my third morning off, I got a text that said “home soon,” and I was glad.
Antonia’s absence had made me feel the leanness of my life, and that night I bought a magnum of Belgian tripel, to remind myself of my proximity to eminence. As I drank I wandered through the bachelor’s rooms, looking for treasures. I found a collection of foreign hotel soaps, a couple of bottles of white rum with faded Spanish labels, and, lying in a corner amid some camping gear, an old hickory switch, as smooth as if it had been oiled. A closet I’d never inspected before went back and back, and I took a flashlight in, expecting a grow room. Instead I just found the light switch, and, in an immaculate corner, a small lamp that lit up a tiny shrine to the bachelor’s departed cat. The shrine had a Buddhist air, but its centerpiece was a Polaroid of the old tabby crouching proudly behind a dead bat. The cat was obese, and it was hard to believe the thing had come across a bat pitiful enough to be killed by it. It looked a little puzzled at its own prowess, crouching there in a crooked shadow that must have belonged to the bachelor himself.
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