“Was it Napoleon who liked Hennessy?” the woman asked.
“Courvoisier, Shida,” Ras said in a flat, learned voice, like a historian of the haute, moving away as Pharaoh signaled him.
“I thought that was Busta,” she chuckled, remaining.
“I thought you didn’t talk,” I said, looking curiously into her warm, dark eyes. Beyond Ras there were three other servants, all black. Maxim was a sort of butler and the daytime staff leader, and Wedge did all the outdoor work and made the espresso and was as tall as Pharaoh himself. Then there was this woman, Shida, who could make up my room expertly in about forty-five seconds, whose cooking was badly hit-and-miss, and whom I had never before heard utter a word.
“I talk,” she said shortly. “I talk to people harmless like you.”
“Busta’s a Courvoisier guy, too,” I said, like I’d made a chart of this all sometime back. “I’m not harmless, I’m just biding my time. Who’s Hennessy got?”
“Hennessy got Kim Jong-il! Who else they need?”
“Okay okay,” I said. “I’m writing this all down. Rémy got anybody?”
“Dre!”
“Rémy and soda pop.”
“You judgin’?” she asked suspiciously. But still her eyes were laughing and dark.
“It’s easy to disagree with Napoleon,” I said. “I mean, if I don’t want to eat a leg of lamb every day, that’s fine too, right? But Dre . . .” In my mind I saw the rapper turning to me from the grainy videos I’d puzzled over the lyrics to in middle school, compelling belief, and then the squat, florid conqueror at his oaken table, mutton juice on his sleeves, looking like anything but a reliable judge of taste.
“Always easier to cross your own,” she said, and I felt a strange rush at being instinctively understood.
The double doors swung open, and Goat and Odette came in. Her hair was damp and she was wearing a thick green robe. She seemed to exist in a constant state of going to or coming from the shower, and it was maybe this as much as anything that lent her the air of accidental provocation. She would put on a dress for every dinner, for an hour or two, and then it would be off again, on some pretext. Goat had changed into a black silk shirt, buttoned to the neck, and to talk to her he had to bend down cripplingly.
“And then as a sophomore I broke my foot,” he was saying. “I broke my collarbone at Red Rocks. And of course I’ve sprained my ankles five or six times each, that happens to everyone. But that was all kid stuff next to the ACL.”
She nodded up at him, then lifted her hand. “Look at my bruise,” she implored. They went past.
“Have they been here before?” I asked.
“He hasn’t. She comes and goes.”
“Are she and Mr. Ramses . . . ?”
Shida scoffed and looked at me sideways.
“It’s not like that,” I said, not sure what I was denying.
She nodded wryly and the short, banded knots of her hair bobbed. “We don’t ask. While he’s here, Mr. Ramses prefers to live chastely. What happens in the city isn’t our business.”
“Nor what happens here,” I reminded her, very noble, with what I thought was a flash of Upstairs, Downstairs inspiration.
She looked at me and made a little choking sound in her throat.
In the center of the room, Odette sat with Calyph on a tan leather couch. It had a faded, Western-looking throw over the back, and as I watched she lifted a corner and sniffed discreetly, as though it were full of the pungent musk of woodsmoke and men.
Odette still changed every room she graced, but after a day and a half the other guests were starting to get acclimated. Belmont still tried to ignore her, becoming involved in some game or conversation whenever she came near. The first night he’d roped Calyph into a game of dominoes on sight of her. Calyph soon got tired of it, leaving an opening, and to Belmont’s obvious distress Odette had asked to be taught to play.
“I got to go to bed,” he said, racing the dominoes back into the box, and then of course staying four more hours. Maybe Belmont was shrewd, and knew that by denying her so completely he was piquing interest. More likely he had a new wife.
By the first night she’d already broken Goat. He was docile, and held in her sway. Now he stood a little off, glancing at her with uncomfortable frequency. Pharaoh sat in his own chair, his back to the fire, eyes drooping but never closed. The skin on his forehead stood out in furrows too deep for a man who was all of about twenty-six. He was dark as French roast, and it looked like it withered him to be so tall and thin and black all at once.
Calyph had most nearly adapted to Odette. He acted amused all the time, and held his own. Whenever her flirting and uncertain relation to the Pharaoh caused a contagion of embarrassment, he looked not away but at her, and talked to her normally.
“You thought any more about your job?” he asked her now.
“Why would I?” she cried.
“I asked her today what she want to do with herself,” he said, leaning over to Belmont. “She said she wanna be an art star.”
“Huh!” Belmont said, making a big, square sound of it.
“I don’t propose to discuss it with you.”
“Art star,” Belmont repeated. This phrase again stirred the sensation that I’d seen Odette somewhere before, but I still couldn’t match her to a memory.
“And what would you be?” she pressed him. “If you didn’t play?”
Calyph looked at her flatly, pretending to chew on something. “Rapper,” he said, out of the side of his mouth.
“Come on!”
“Entrepreneur. Record producer.”
“Don’t mock me,” she said, and for an instant her voice came out clear and strong. “What I want isn’t anything like that.”
He put up his hands for peace, and his pale fingers and palms had a sensitive look—they seemed to calm her. Still the Pharaoh looked on impassively.
“What does your wife do?” she asked him shrewdly, after a few moments had passed.
“Who?”
“Your wife. You have a ring,” she said, pointing.
His hands flashed out, almost violently. The ring he still wore caught the light. “What?” he asked, louder.
She was flustered; she must have seen she was paining him. But her curiosity was implacable. “If you’re not married, take off your ring,” she told him.
He looked down and I saw him start to shake his head, but then he stilled himself, and only looked at the ground, bright-eyed, saying nothing.
Odette patted him on the shoulder gently with her wounded hand, on which the smallest two fingers were splinted together.
I hadn’t heard anyone say Antonia’s name in his presence for a month. He’d trained us; I hadn’t heard him say it for two. When he learned of her other house, I got a voice mail from his mother out of nowhere, telling me to take a long weekend off. The weekend stretched for ten days, and I walked down through Jamison Square and past the early happy-hour crowds every night, like taking a walk was the new going out, and came home to watch the beginnings of the Brewers’ wild-card run on the bachelor’s tiny television. When I was finally called back to Dunthorpe, half the garage was filled with cat toys and old boxes meant to hold high-end cookware, and which now contained among them a few hundred cubic feet of Antonia’s life.
The door in from the garage was ajar, and when I knocked the small sound flew through the empty space, as though her absence had opened the house up to new, desolate echoes. I couldn’t find Calyph until I stepped out into the yard and heard him call down to me from the balcony in a flat, exhausted voice. All I could see were his hands, the nails bright where he gripped the rail. “Got some bags by the stairs,” he said. “You gonna need a week’s change. We goin’ on vacation.”
What followed were three grim days in Vegas, where Calyph met up with his best friend in the league, Tony Allen, to seek consolation in brotherhood and surface beauty and gambling and loss. It was clear from the first he was not going to find it
. The nearest he seemed to get to solace was sitting at a poker table all night with his hood up and his leg splayed out on its own chair, ceaselessly shuffling his chip stacks and trying to ignore the continuous passive motion machine encasing his knee that he had to wear eight hours a day to help with his rehab. I wasn’t much help with any of this, and he decided to send me home early.
On the last night before I flew back, after two days of sobriety, he and Allen split a fifth of scotch and some room-service sushi, and I pretended reluctance while they dragged me along for a limo ride down the Strip. Abruptly Calyph was happy, dangerously happy, lit up with the flashing, restless, ever-dissolving energy that is that city’s promise to everyone. It came from everywhere but within him, and he must have felt almost obligated to go after his forty minutes of cathartic joy, juiced as it was with the premonition of its own passing and a return to his rightful state of sorrow with nothing but a new and more tangible pain in his head to console him. “I’m free,” he said softly, addressing himself to the open window and the passing twilit city. “I’m free.”
“You free,” Allen said. “You’ll get her back if you want her back.”
“Who back?” Calyph asked.
“Don’t say her name.”
They’d brought along another fifth, and I had enough of it that whenever I breathed out my nose I felt like I’d inhaled a little of the North Sea. I felt full of solemn excitement and decided this was true of everyone. We drove through the city with no music in the car, going station to station with fleeting bits of other people’s gaiety, and I decided all three of us were contemplating our futures. I wanted America’s conception of how long youth could last to continue to recede conveniently beyond my aging, and yet also to stop so I could settle down swiftly and fulfill my promise. Calyph must have known his dreams of an All-Star Game were probably dead, but he knew that he could still aspire to a ring, and to matter in the getting of one. Maybe Allen was already thinking of where he would go after Boston. We all nodded slow at one another, as though to affirm my speculations, and my vague future seemed no less firmly possible than their specific ones.
We knew, I decided, that the fact that we were on the Strip in a big tasteless car without destination said nothing good about us, that this was, for the aging non-baller crowd, pretty much a painfully spring-break play, and for them surely something better savored when one was sixteen and in town for an AAU tournament, the cup of glitz still new on their lips. But we knew, too, that it was within us to justify this extravagance, to carry it right, with the weight of our accumulated actual lives and our allowance that, yes, we were poised delicately between the present eagerness to lose ourselves and the indisputable future likelihood of gradually becoming the wrong people, of failing at everything worthwhile, and absolutely knew it. In front of the Venetian, Allen threw up violently out his door. He swore it all still tasted good.
At the Pharaoh’s, the night passed. Belmont and Goat played spades with a couple of the entourage, Goat laughing noisily at Odette’s lisping jokes. Around midnight the host roused himself and called Calyph over to a sideboard, where Ras pulled out a plain decanter of dull metal. When he laid three stemless glasses on the polished wood, they rolled their way to rest like spinning tops. Ras poured and I watched Calyph take the liquor and swirl it around under his nose awkwardly, like a parody of a tony gent. I was relieved to see there was a culture to which he, too, aspired but didn’t know the gestures for.
I saw Ras signal for me. I crossed the room and they put a glass in my hand.
“Let’s take a walk,” the Pharaoh said.
I didn’t know whether to be honored or afraid, but I drank, and my willingness was sealed. The cognac was finer than what I’d drunk before, less sweet. I was given the metal bottle to carry—I knew its shape inside the black velvet bag, and I knew that what they’d given me, however fine, had come from somewhere else. Shida handed Calyph his crutches, and then the three of us were moving out of the room, and I felt buoyed by the curiosity of everyone left behind.
When we came out onto the terrace, the path through the darkness lit up in stages with blue running lights.
“Didn’t press nothin’,” Pharaoh said slyly. “It just know.”
I walked behind them along the narrow stone path, and watched the rubber ends of Calyph’s crutches plant on the flat centers of the wider stones. We moved out beyond the tent until the vast dark roar of the Pacific opened in front of us. The wind blew stiff down the north coast, and the moon lit up the whites of the waves, and, on the beach beneath, great strewn timbers and bits of scudding spume.
“Look at this shit,” Pharaoh said softly. “It always doin’ this.”
“There it is,” Calyph said. “There it go.”
The sound of the sea rolled up and over us, timeless and elemental, the somehow reassuring noise of a crushing immensity patiently crashing against the human shore.
“Seem like every time I open up the house this gotta happen,” Pharaoh said obliquely. “Somebody come and wanna drink liquor at five. Somebody show up with no girl and don’t know which here is free and which not. Boys see a little structure to a thing and can’t help theyselves but break it.”
“It’s his first taste in awhile,” Calyph said. “He think he in a mansion video. Got that wild look in his eye like he about to turn the corner on that pool where the girls just stand around and jiggle, day after day. He forgot the rapper ain’t own that mansion.”
“Let ’em try to own one! Debauch the body all year and not put no rules to the thing. Sit by the pool and feel sick.”
They were both quiet a minute, and I guessed each was ruminating on his first flush year, the brevity and disillusion of the supposed endless summer.
“I always invite too many people,” Pharaoh croaked finally. “That’s all it is. So what you think of my staff?”
“All good people,” Calyph said carefully.
“Take what you want,” Pharaoh said, and brought his glass to his lips.
Calyph was facing away, and I could only wonder how he took this blunt invitation. Once more they let the ocean swallow up their silence, and I turned the bag around in my hands. Its velvet and soft string made it feel like some particularly important object—a sack of gold or a prisoner’s hood.
“We oughta be gods,” Calyph said quietly, looking out at the sea.
“Ought?”
Calyph didn’t reply. He looked out, and I could see maybe half his face, and somehow he had just the right balance there, in the cast of his eye and the set of his mouth. He looked noble, and it pained me. His face was equal to the vista and the question, and I wanted to mimic it, or else scrub it all out. It’s the black Lewis and Clark, I wanted to shout.
“No ought to,” Pharaoh said. “I made this. Somewhere there some boy in North Lawndale, restin’ he head on bricks, on the side of a stoop, he can make this. We got to heaven, Yoshi. It’s here. God’s just some man who knows how to make laws for hisself. So he can stay in the place he made, and know it’s good.”
Calyph nodded, remotely.
“So listen here,” Pharaoh said, louder, turning halfway away from the sea. I saw his eyes flash to mine. “You havin’ a nice time here, I hope.”
“Sure,” I said. My voice felt rusted from disuse.
“Good. How you feel about looking after Mr. Montaigne a little bit? He don’t have nobody, see. Yoshi and I been talkin’, and he say he don’t need you too much here. Shouldn’t take much time. Whatchu say?”
“Okay,” I said.
“See, Goat, he lost,” the Pharaoh said sadly. His voice took on a new sensitivity, and I mistrusted it. “Might benefit him to have another boy to talk to. Tell him how we do here. Like we been sayin’ just now—rules of staying in heaven and whatnot. What to talk on and whatnot. Who to dote on and who not. You having similar backgrounds and whatall, I thought you might could do it.”
I wanted to tell him I’d not gone to Boise State, but to the Harvard of
the Midwest, but of course I only nodded, as if this were all easy business.
“He know the code, right, Leef?” Pharaoh asked.
Still Calyph looked remotely out at the waves. “Far as I know,” he said.
Pharaoh nodded, like this was good enough and we’d struck some definite deal. Raising his glass, he sent me back to the house, and I felt the swagger come up in my legs a little, for being confirmed a man of code. In the dark of the path I felt the fine strings of the bag loosen between my fingers, and lifted their bottle to drink.
I was taking my contacts out for the night when Calyph came crashing into the bathroom. I’d read for an hour or so, and then, disdaining the narrow utilitarian bath near my own room, gone upstairs to use the one on the main floor with the bronze fixtures and the raised copper sink.
“Hup to,” he said, stumbling past me toward the toilet.
I had one eye out already. “Do you mind?”
“This the colored bathroom. Hup to,” he said again, giving me a little push toward the door.
I wasn’t about to stand there and watch him rain down, so I put my eye back in and went. Five minutes later all was silence.
I knocked softly. “You all right in there?”
Eventually I heard him clear his throat and come back to life. “Get in here,” he said.
He was slouched on the closed toilet with his hands on his knees, wearing the blank, patient expression of a man waiting for something beyond his control.
“Drink some cognac?” I asked.
“Snuck up on me.”
“Can you stand up?”
He thought on this. “Don’t seem advisable.”
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