When the car came to rest, the security lights clicked on, and I got out to retrieve the bags. Everything I did seemed to make a lot of noise. Calyph stood on his sticks, looking up at the dark windows with an unreadable expression.
“Told the fam I wasn’t coming back till tomorrow,” he explained at last, handing me a ring of keys. The use for each was written on it on tape, and I crunched the front door key into the lock.
As I carried the bags upstairs, Calyph swung into the living room, but when I got back he hadn’t turned on any lights. He stood awkwardly looking out the window at the driveway, and the last weak traces of day just lit the edges of the suit of armor behind him.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
He waved off a flashlight, and we circled around the edge of the house in the gloaming. The grill that had shone so blindingly that midsummer day was covered in canvas, but the outdoor court looked like it might have still been full of hidden children. We passed by the spot where I’d been berated and then given a sandwich, and I thought how long it had been since Calyph had worn his aviators to upbraid me. That joke wasn’t funny anymore—it seemed the tic of a younger man.
Along toward the Japanese garden, we stopped on the path, and I saw that flowers grew at our feet in a rough half-moon of dirt. Most of them were dry and withered, but a few yet stood upright, bright yellow even in shadow. There was a tentative look to them somehow, like they’d been planted by a regular person and not a landscaper. They must have been Antonia’s flowers.
Calyph tried to lower himself to look, but his braced knee could hardly bend, so he only hung there, half-swooned between the crutches.
“Getting late in the year I guess,” he said at last.
As he stood meditating over her little half-withered garden, I heard the drone of an engine coming nearer. He straightened quickly, and the same unreadable expression came onto his face.
“We left the gate open,” I said. “Should I—”
“I got it,” he said, and as he swung himself quickly through the wet grass, I saw his face was lost in hope, and guessed the source of his strange mood at last. He’d hoped to come back to find her home.
I trailed him as the sound grew louder. As he went around the front corner of the house, the engine quit, and when I came around I saw a big red Avalanche sitting in the driveway like a giant toy. Calyph stopped short at the edge of the drive.
“’Sup, Greg,” he called.
“Hi,” said Oden, stepping down from the cab with a tin in his hand. His ancient child’s face jutted forward eagerly. “I brought you some macaroons.”
“That sweet.”
“Mom made ’em. Haven’t seen you round the way, so I thought I’d bring ’em by.”
“It’s lucky I’m here,” Calyph said quietly.
“What?”
“I said it’s lucky I’m here,” he said, louder, and his voice went out among the trees.
Sometimes I’d have dreams of staying with them forever. Getting an omelet in the kitchen, or even caught in traffic on some blue fall day, I felt at peace with my devotion, and optimistic of its future. If I could just find something to do, some act that would restore me to the dignified position they’d so naïvely started me in. All it would take was one perfect stroke, to bind me to them more tightly than ever.
Other times I felt just as sure we weren’t really friends at all, that he was having me on. It was a social experiment, watching my character bend under his influence; or maybe he’d just grown accustomed to the queer allegiances of white boys tired of their own skin, and had got to missing them in the married, professional life.
As the days drained away, the only acts that made sense were the selfless ones and the sabotage. I knew there was only one thing of any value within my power to recover for him, and I daydreamed great plots for getting Antonia back. I wrote elaborate formal letters, all unsent, and imagined the day when I would don my somber best and ring her bell and tell her simply, we need you, come home.
But at the same time, on the same day even, I’d get suspicious and want to terrorize him a little, just to see if I could get away with it. When he was asleep and there was no one around I’d whisper at him through the intercom. I put a shard of ceramic flooring in his eggs and then pointed it out before his fork could reach it. He’d given up his crutches—I was sad to see them go—and I liked to loosen the rubber end of his cane.
But mostly I spent my days on some of the most trivial errands of my tenure. All the afternoon and into the evening we’d go to one wholesome place after another. To his local knee doctor, to the rehab center and the practice facility. One day, as though inspired by all this self-maintenance, he made me get a pointless oil change.
“You only need it every five thousand, minimum,” I said. It was one of those quick-change places and we were waiting in the queue.
“Ras says we should dump the oil, go synthetic.”
“It’s synthetic now.”
“He say it’s dirty. He tested it.”
“He’s just trying to discredit me.” Although I didn’t have the equipment to do the change, the pan and the wheeled board and whatall, during my first week on the job I’d bought the stuff myself to take to the shop. I’d done my research, found the part number for the filter, got the finest oil and the best price.
Now we rolled forward and I watched these men with old-timey hats and mustaches eagerly undoing my work. One of them even had to pull out the air filter to show us how dirty it was.
“Yeah, yeah. Change that, too,” Calyph said.
I turned on him. “It’s supposed to look like that.”
“Then it’s your job to hide it from me,” he said, shrugging.
“That’ll be eighty-four ninety-five,” a mustache told us.
“This is why Antoine Walker is bankrupt,” I said as we pulled away.
“Motherfucker, drive.”
“Pip, Spree, AI. You next,” I said. “You think you can live off what that suit of armor get you, you got some surprises ahead.”
The intimacy of getting cussed at had been the highlight of my day, and I thought we could take it a little further. I thought I’d wade in for once. He came back at me, and at first I didn’t even really hear the words; I thought we were in for a good tussle, that I’d be able to hold my own. Then I started to process, and at the same time he seemed to lean forward into another gear of anger. When he got loud, his mouth seemed to move twice as fast. His contract still in doubt, money was probably the wrong subject. His anger flared and I realized I stood no shot, that I would be destroyed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you start to talk different? Seem to me you did.”
“Naw,” I said, fatally.
“Naw! Yeah, seem to me you left your white voice off back there with those bow-tie men and now you wanna talk in mine.”
“I hardly think . . .”
“You hardly do! I try to vouch for you the length of a week and damn if you don’t jump that lisper in the tub. You try to transcend your hanger-on self, but you think that’s how to do it. To get up in what’s spoken for! You can’t find your own white girl getting naked on the Internet and calling it art, in this town? That’s some sorry shit, J.
“But you wanna talk about my expenses, so let’s talk about why I keep you on with this thirty here. I need to keep you a few more weeks, see, under observation like. I figure in ’bout three weeks, you might just be the lightest-skinned brother I ever saw. One of these days it’s gonna come Black Like Me up in this car, and no amount of green is gonna make me miss that fuckin’ miracle.”
I was quiet. I didn’t think he knew about that book.
“So who next?”
“You are,” I said softly. “You are the next.”
Now that I only lived there on my days off, the bachelor’s house was full of sad, warm light; it felt homey for the first time. Full of his own nostalgia for the place, the house cat followed me up to my narrow door.
From atop a
stack of books on Native spirituality, the bachelor’s ancient answering machine was blinking for the first time in months. I’d been asked to monitor his affairs in the lower forty-eight for emergencies, so I hit play and sat stripping off my socks, yellow with sweat and wood dust.
“Hello, Thomas, this is your mother,” said a dry, querulous voice. “Please call home. I never know where you are or what you’re doing anymore. Your father’s getting holes in all his socks, but he won’t let me take them, he says he doesn’t notice. Something to remember for his birthday, which is the twenty-fourth. You know that, I’m just telling you. Wool socks are a nice gift, I don’t care what anyone says. I’m worried about you, Thomas, so please call as soon as you can.” A hoarse, strangled voice came roaring up inarticulately in the background and the message beeped off.
A picture of the bachelor’s parents hung just above the machine, next to the watercolor nude. They both had big thatches of seventies hair, and it was hard to attach them to the voices in the message. I’d never heard someone so old talked to like they were so young. I was about to go for a clean shirt when my phone trembled and I saw I had my own message waiting.
“Hello, Jesse,” said a tired voice. “Your grandmother’s not well. Please call when you can. This is Rose.” My aunt always left the brusquest messages. All the family knew it would be grandmother’s time soon, that she might not be with us at Christmas, drinking brandy in her immobilized rocking chair. Hearing one message after the other, I felt a lack in my family’s ways, an absence of color.
As I flipped the phone down, I saw that a text had been waiting, hidden behind the voice-mail prompt.
“Do you still work for me?” it read.
Portland opened on the road that year, Calyph’s absence lost amid the hype of Oden putting up 14, 10, and 5 in his debut. Calyph hadn’t traveled with the team, and after their three-game trip ended with a loss to the Rockets I drove him to a rap show.
“Come in and kick it awhile,” he said. “I might need you.”
I couldn’t imagine what purpose I could serve. “Won’t I need a ticket?”
He pulled two from an envelope and spread them with a little flourish, like they were hundred-dollar bills.
I wondered for what better company the extra had been meant. “Thanks,” I said, and he made a sharp negating noise through his teeth, as though he were spitting out the negligible value of the gift.
Later, under the hype man’s harangue, stiff white hands were being raised in the air and waved like they just did not care.
“He’s just a rascal,” the sampled soul singers cried as the beat kicked up. Behind the hype man a figure lurked in the murk at the back of the stage, shadowboxing in the unshadowed black. The wavering hands reached out to him.
“He’s just a rascal,” the sample cried. “Dizzee Rascal!”
With one more call from the hype man, the figure hopped forward into the light, wearing a silky gray hoodie, the unbent brim of his black-on-black Yankees hat skewed stage right.
“Oi!” he shouted boisterously. “G’won boi! G’won . . . Portlan’!” And at this, Dylan Kwabena Mills, the Dizzee Rascal, looked out over the cluster of cloud-pale faces, the women with boyish haircuts, the men with effeminate ones, their hands raised limp as the drowned, and yielded to a brief fit of hysterical giggling. The hands fell down in relief.
I was glad to be at the bar, drinking root beer and enacting only the safe, familiar gestures of my awkward race. It felt good to be a white man who was not making a spectacle of himself. Over in the merch booth, two girls selling shirts that said “Buck the Blitz and Blamma” leaned on plump piles of hoodies with the confidence that they were not there for pleasure, and so need not be embarrassed, and I watched them watch Calyph.
He was alone on the far side of the room, and the light from the glowing log walls lit up half his face as though in gold leaf. We’d been sitting during the opening acts, and no one’d really noticed him, but now he stood tall and looked out upon the stage, projecting a tolerant repose against the slow accumulation of curiosity. In the absence of his crutches he looked freer and wilder, and I felt a certain relief at how thick his cane was, how much weight he had to put on it. He couldn’t run off anyplace yet.
I felt my pocket vibrate with a single buzz. “Greyhound w Belvedere.”
I tried to put the drink on Calyph’s tab, and the bartender eyed me doubtfully. When I told him I was his chauffeur, he snickered and handed the glass over as though I’d earned it with a clever lie.
When I brought him the drink, I could feel the heads turning around me. Our hands met around the glass, his fingers in mine, and the room’s curiosity was so palpable that for an instant I was sure I was bathed in light.
Later still, when the curious girls had come and gone, and given me cool conspiratorial looks, and Calyph thorny looks from the hothouse flowers of their eyes, and left us feeling entirely alone, we went upstairs to a table in the corner. So far that night I’d not come out from behind my uniform at all, and that seemed to make it easier for us to sit together and order two plates of biscuits and gravy and drink Hennessy and Sprite. We drank fast, and the second glass fell over us like the lens of a nostalgic film. We talked about being in college in the same year, when I was a senior and he a freshman, and I looked into the street expectantly, awaiting the women in skirts and bright letterman’s sweaters who would twirl romantically along the sidewalk, kicking up rich clusters of leaves. I never went to college with anybody like that, but that’s just how I remember the autumning of the old quadrangle.
Tipsy and restless, he was hot to talk, and suddenly his wife was an open subject again. I felt vaguely gratified to learn that Antonia had loved a woman before she loved Calyph, and when he tried to shy away from the details of his persuasion I wasn’t about to let him.
“And then you . . .” I said. “How did you?”
“Didn’t do nothin’, really. Think I wanted to be one more fool who thought he could turn her? I was kinda militant back then—think I even wanted to date a white girl?”
“So . . .” I said.
“You know, destiny and shit.”
I stared him down, unsatisfied.
“I dunno. I felt it, but it was just like this distant overpoliteness between us at first. Then I started getting scouted, started seeing my name in the draft lists and thinking about jumping. I knew I’d be in some random city the next year, getting a house, a money manager, all that. College was winding up quick and all these other folks seemed like kids suddenly. Like amateurs at whatever they did, who didn’t know just how green they were. Who might just go on with their playtime lives for years, just dabbling in this and that, like for them it wasn’t gonna come to this adult shit too soon. Except A. Her family had expectations.”
He tossed a big cube of ice into his mouth and chewed it violently. “I didn’t turn her,” he said finally. “I was just inevitable.”
He started in on their courtship, full of sexual ambiguity and openhearted gestures and race hate and other meaningful things. I imagined what it might be like, to be high on some campus thick with rolling greens, towering and lithe; to be one at whom small women made rare with blue money, who smelled like summer for three whole seasons, and in the fourth maybe the leather of old libraries, sighed, and put aside what had only yesterday been desire, and said: All that, enough of that; this man, he is inevitable.
Well, I was inevitable too.
“I thought she might be going with a girl,” I said, very by-the-by.
“What?”
“I’m sure she wasn’t,” I said quickly. “There was just this girl who came to your party. I saw them together a couple times, but before I could feel anything about it enough to tell you, it was over.”
“What she look like?”
I tried to describe her, and watched his hands curl tight around the glass. I could feel my face go masklike in the presence of his suppressed emotion.
“I’m sure it wasn
’t anything,” I repeated.
“That’s the same girl,” he said. “That’s Frances.”
I’d described her terribly, only really remembering her tattoo. “How can you be sure?”
“I’m sure,” he said.
He looked so stern and righteous, it was easy to provoke him. It was wonderful to see someone so noble about love.
“So. You worried?” I asked.
I expected to see him rear up proudly. Instead he gave that short asthmatic laugh, and a defensive look came into his face. “Should I be?”
“I don’t know.”
“You ever see anything?”
“I never saw anything . . .”
“I can’t be worried,” he declared.
“You could,” I corrected him.
Now he pulled up. He raised his chin and looked down at me, proud and faintly terrifying. His face had a stony, Old Testament quality—he was like some priest of love, frowning at a blasphemy I’d made against the purity of his position as a faithful and unwavering lover.
“Well, you had to wonder,” I said, almost disdainfully. “After you found out about the house.” I wasn’t only goading him. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t some stage at which, even against his will, he gauged the legitimacy of the threat. He’d kicked her out alone into the whole world.
I could see the anger in his face advance and retreat. “Boy, whose wife is this?” he said, and then he looked away. “She knows she couldn’t enjoy it,” he said at last, and I felt my mind hurry in vain to see everything about Antonia new again in the light of this observation, this flare shot into the murk of his wife’s mystery.
I left him at the table with his heavy soda and his pride and made for the bathroom. When I got back the food had come, and there was a guy in our booth getting his ticket stub autographed. He had on a stocking cap, and his face was angelic and slightly askew.
“Don’t you eBay that shit,” Calyph warned.
“You aren’t worth anything,” the guy said, beaming.
“Put it in a drawer, you’ll see.”
“My drawers are full,” he said, leaning back like it was he who was the one getting approached by the random public. “I live in the moment.”
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