Gilles said booze had made Miss Beane’s generation too Freudian. The more peculiar the behavior, the more fascinating it was to them, and rather than not know or be the last to know something, they jumped to malicious conclusions about everyone.
Bargetta said she hated people who called only when they knew something or wanted to know something.
“They forgot that sex is comic and love is tragic,” Gilles said.
“Dee Dee Beane didn’t,” Bargetta said. She usually felt better after a deep-dish session about Miss Beane, but the therapy wasn’t working anymore.
I was homesick for the anxious gullibility on the other end of the wire and Bargetta slid under from something like ego disintegration. “This life isn’t mine, I’m only squatting in it.” In front of a hotel she asked some black women from Abidjan who admired her diadem if they knew of any work cleaning up.
Every generation is an enemy of its father’s and a friend of its grandfather’s, and maybe that was why, when I pontificated to myself about Bargetta, her spirit of contradiction seemed more like nostalgia for an earlier era of philistine terror about nigger lovers and honky lovers. I felt disloyal when I thought this way about her.
“He owes you,” I said.
“Only when he gives,” she said.
Elderly animals patrolled the lanes of Père-Lachaise, silent women washed the panes of Gothic-revival sepulchers. Initials sprayed inside hearts guided the way to Jim Morrison. A dozen figures with acoustic guitars or yellow ribbons for the hostages stared at the unmarked square of earth. Bottles poked through the hallowed ground. A girl began to sob, a man crouched. Incoherent poems in English adorned the surrounding stones.
Gilles went to pay his respects to “C.3.3.” Bees chased me from one sector to another. I heard the rolling vowels of the Antilles. Festively clad black women walked the road, ahead of them matrons added gifts to a mound of floral tributes. A large bust stood at the center. It was the grave of Allan Kardec, the mystic and healer who succored women from the beyond. Housewives wept like Ceres and entreated his thorax of marble. I found Bargetta, her head swathed in a blazing scarf. She towered above the profusion and raised a tentative hand. Masochists are the proudest people on earth. Unfortunately, masochists also make gifts of themselves, and the recipients are obliged to lug these gifts wherever they go, much like the old woman in the story about the dead dog in the suitcase.
Bargetta knew what she didn’t want: that the beneficiary of her fine feelings think of them as the bars of a cage. She said it was a terrible disadvantage to have the omniscience of a narrator or the audience at the theater, the prior knowledge that before the first act is over extraordinary behavior will be necessary. “What others missed or messed up I found.” The payoff was an injection of aching goodness, but Bargetta was a purist in her mad way: never, with her, the beatific glow of the injured, just as she never referred to the helpful things she had done for others.
She could have been the star at many tables; instead, she waited for Pierre-Yves’s crumbs of affection. Perhaps it is true that you fall for someone from the inside, and that when you do, you see what your friends can’t and let them think you’ve lost your mind. Like many superior girls, Bargetta had a talent for getting the man she asked for instead of the one she needed.
“Get off the stage,” a roadie once said to Bargetta at an invitation-only sound check in a lower Bowery rock club.
“She’s with me,” the star of the band said. He, her charismatic deliverer, looked down and smiled in a confident way that made a dozen girls in Bargetta’s immediate vicinity want to throttle her. But Bargetta saw the pink slip in his eyes.
“The hell I am,” she said. In those days, when she knew her own worth, Bargetta had been as elusive as an eel.
“I can’t let this man dance on my last nerve. You get the pitcher’s mound down,” Bargetta said, “and they go and juice up the ball. If they give you the hesitation then they’re throwing heat.” She never could drink. Her speech began to puree. “You don’t see it, you hear it. You hit what you think you hear. You get your front foot out, get your weight balanced, follow through, and hope it’s not a gooseball.”
“Have you ever considered going home?”
“Right? Niggers and flies, always hovering around some shit.” Bargetta sprang up and barely looked back over her jacket. A fabulous murkiness obscured the tips of landmarks, gases divided façades into worshipful colors, and I half hoped she would keep walking. I let go and surfed until I saw Bargetta as I first knew her, when she looked up from a book as if she’d alighted from a calèche that had just flown over the steppes.
Bargetta had never been driven into the ground before, but she lay around as if Gilles’s place were a preparatory tomb. She was superstitious about going out, leaving the telephone unattended, though she traced her nausea to the phenomenon that the floors of the apartment slanted. She chose carefully from her duffel bag. “I mixed this one myself. It’s called Maginot. Wear Maginot and get invaded.” She painted her mouth, allowed Gilles to move discussion to her hair, but wouldn’t report to the record company or to any of the piss-chic parties Gilles always knew about and avoided mention of to me. I didn’t know Verlan, the “in” slang of the moment. I could smile in French.
Gilles lectured on the military strategy of love, that the minute you told the Other how to treat you, the battle was lost. “But your manners won’t matter if you’re dull.” He helped Bargetta tape note cards on the wall beside the mountain of dirty sheets so that she could write down her dreams without spilling a drop. She was desperate for a sign.
Charlotte Forten came to Bargetta in her rocky sleep. Forten had left her prominent black family in Philadelphia to teach the freedmen in South Carolina after Appomattox. Dr. Rogers, a New England gentleman, read Emerson to her under the magnolias; Colonel Higginson took her riding in the lunar bloom. Bargetta believed in Forten as the patron saint of interracial dating.
“I was walking around with my dry cleaning when I fell in this big hole. Then they started burying me, up to my neck, and there was all this old newspaper hitting my face, but I couldn’t move. I saw these headlights. They were coming right at me. Then Charlotte got out of a jeep. I heard her skirts in the dust.”
Gilles played with the jewel in his left earlobe. “What was she wearing? How do you know it was her?”
“Because she said, ‘You’ve had it rather easy, my dear, and that ain’t good.’”
Gilles, a “sexual realist,” chatted up the postman and Bargetta abandoned herself to her impasse. “You could get the idea that I think not being happy is boring.” She muted the television, used it as a night lamp, draped scarves on light fixtures until they threatened to burn, aligned her shoes with the radiator, counted the packs of Marlboros she tucked around the apartment. “My mother would pray up a way out of this feeling. Guide my feet while I run this race.”
Bargetta made unanswered calls that she would not admit to. The thought of Pierre-Yves’s fresh paint led her to reach for Gilles’s pipe. “The smart thing would be to keep my mouth shut and live with it. Maybe he didn’t ask me to come over here, but he’ll beg me to stay. I want to do my mother proud.” She struggled with the latch of the gray bathroom. Gilles inched to the door and raised an eyebrow over one of his green contact lenses.
Sometimes I hardly recognized her and couldn’t understand how the former Bargetta, with all her merry ferocity, had been swallowed up by the obsessive girl slamming things around in the bathroom. She said when Pierre-Yves first left, she kept his toothbrush in a glass, consciously in the spirit of the candle the sailor’s wife places in the window. “I can’t find the next righteous move.” She explained things to the ruined parquet. She said no one was more ruthless than a guy trying to get out of a relationship. “Adulthood had no gender, but you get to it one way as a boy and another way as a girl.”
I waited for the real Bargetta to emerge and make war on the world, but nothing could penetrate her
indifference to ugly weather. “When you’re dying and wondering if anybody ever really loved you.” She wrote furiously, tore up what she had scribbled, rewound the B-52s cassette with a pen, wrote again, and once more shredded pages into strips. She hugged her shoulders, a piston at the end of its cycle: intake, combustion, power, exhaust.
She said she used to keep a list of the return addresses on his mail. She said she could pick up one of his books, not that he was much of a reader, and just by sniffing the pages tell where he had given up. Was it, she asked, what she had given or what Pierre-Yves had taken away? “What can happen can be so bizarre. He maintained a berserk posture toward me for days. His expression didn’t change. This wild, unenlightened look. I thought he was going to kick down the door. Instead, he opened it.”
Not long after I had gone back to Holland to wipe away some of the protection I thought I had acquired from my distasteful, true self that may yet turn out to be merely provisional, when wind carried inland the scent of peat, I received an unsigned, antique postcard. It showed one of those scenes of a bygone, music-hall Paris. The original message had been painted over. I recognized Bargetta’s handwriting, lovely as an anchorite’s:
Rule #1: Don’t think he’s better than you are and don’t think he doesn’t think he is.
Rule #2: Eat first—then storm out.
11 /
Minority Business
The beige stepgrandmother gave up the ghost in her sleep. Her sister was furious. Their plans had depended on Grandfather, who was many years older than his wife, being the first to die.
The funeral home, a brownstone on Lenox Avenue, looked too cut-rate to advertise. A sign claimed that it had been serving the community for thirty years, but something about it was so provisional that I doubted it had ever known Harlem’s golden age of three-day wakes, marching bands, and corteges followed by lines of mourners that stretched around the corner. It was the kind of place that said, “This won’t take long.”
The ground floor of the house was bare except for potted trees that added to the anxious silence. The place was wildly humid, as if the basement were flooded and the furnace going full blast. How much the bereaved paid did not appear to influence the set. I had the impression that the staff recycled its props in order to hang on to something like a profit margin.
When I arrived for the “viewing” a man was pushing a trolley of flowers across the hall. Another man in a shiny black suit carefully packed away folding chairs. I expected him to reappear as the presiding minister. Grandfather used to command $2.50 per funeral during the Depression. A woman in a frilly blouse laid a mop against the banister, tucked her apron behind a curtain, and asked whom I had come to see. She preceded me and shut doors as she went.
I hung back by the door she left open. The stepgrandmother’s sister had my aunt by the arm. My aunt, a teacher who wore her skirts well below her knees, called the sister “the Judge” because she talked continually about using a gun to clear the nasty teenagers from the playgrounds. The Judge led her to the casket. “Don’t you think she looks like herself?”
“No.”
She hadn’t reckoned on my aunt’s Episcopalian control of Old Country emotion. I hurried away while the Judge insisted that the stepgrandmother had been that light as a girl, that everyone knew black people got darker as they grew older. My aunt said the stepgrandmother looked artificially brightened, like black singers who have their skin peeled for the video mass market. “Those blue lips,” Tsvetayeva instructed Rilke. “Negroes’ lips are not red.”
The brownstone was surrounded by small storefronts, few of which were open for business; nevertheless just having gotten away felt like life. Though the days of militant graffiti on the brick walls had given way to the art of senseless nicknames inside fancy designs, vendors tried to keep warm before the usual pile of knitted goods in the three colors of Pan-African unity. The proprietor of a liberation-books table wheezed, stacked Van Der Zee postcards, and complained about the uninterruptible plot to keep the ghetto quiet with drugs. Since the assassination attempt Angel Dust had been known on the streets as “Hinckley.”
The cold pressed into my clothes. I ducked into a fast-food restaurant on 133rd Street. The huge steel oven sent out gusts of heat mixed with the odor of fried chicken. People seated at the counter passed the napkin dispenser and a city marshal said without preamble to the woman on his left that what wouldn’t change was white people thinking he had his rights only because they decided to let him have them, and they were the rights nobody cared about anymore anyway.
The woman said, “If you’ve been around the Afro-American community for any length of time you know things change. I always knew things would change up.”
The city marshal polished off a bucket of extra crispy and said white people were always trying to do something on black people. More sad than Europe paying to dump its garbage off the coast of Africa, he said, was West Africa taking the money.
The woman, a private nurse whose three sons were in the army, said he should go live in Russia. The KGB would dig him. The KGB was desperate. The Soviet police resorted to psychics and, because of Afghanistan, doused the drinking water with a chemical that induced docility.
He said he wanted her to be able to identify disinformation when she was exposed to it, to “get” the connection between the eye in the pyramid on the dollar bill and the Trilateral Commission before it was too late.
The nurse said she didn’t have to get anything, but he ought to quit using the seat of his pants as a soap box. The rest of us became intensely interested in our chicken.
He said with an eloquence I had not expected that all he knew was that he was not patriotic about any one country. He didn’t know how to answer where he came from when he filled out a form. There were substitute countries, but prior to them his parents had been his homeland.
I knew it was the beginning of the end for Grandfather because though he was present we referred to him in the third person. We threw together some of his clothes without consulting him. He paced the hall, smiling on the deliberations around him.
Perhaps the thing he feared had come. His son, my father, the boy he used to accuse of either hanging out or wanting to hang out in pool halls was about to pull the plug. Lots of parents would like to give up their children and there are many socially acceptable ways to do it, about which Grandfather knew a thing or two. The converse was another matter. My father said that when it came time for us to put him in a nursing home to shoot him instead.
The first thing the Judge had wanted to know after the lovely ceremony was who was going to reimburse her for the funeral and what say she could have over the savings account. The sum involved was pitiably small, which probably made her all the more determined. Job’s comforter was the beneficiary of her sister’s life insurance policy and a Christmas account. She was so efficient at cleaning out the stepgrandmother’s closets she had to send one of the teens who lurked about the basement incinerator to steal another grocery cart. My aunt said that her scheming proved she did not believe in an afterlife.
The Judge had not forgiven Grandfather for his impetuous changes of scenery and hunts for new stimulation in the past. It was the thought of Grandfather sitting on the purse strings she had wanted to be rid of. She had dreamed of bank books resting and accruing where they belonged, in sisterly possession. The dream had vanished with the coroner’s van.
Grandfather could neither feel nor answer her questions. Having done his duty, he was gliding out of his mind. When he discovered his wife lifeless in her bed he had remained sufficiently conscious to make the necessary calls, ever a gentleman when talking officially, enunciating carefully and too loudly, the way a rural person not accustomed to telephones would be portrayed on television. His sense of honor would not permit him to abandon even the enemy dead. But after the family had been notified and the body removed, he graciously spaced out.
He set out to water the plants and in his eagerness to make up for hav
ing forgotten to do it, to do it because the stepgrandmother did it, he got water over everything. The Philco radio was suddenly a measure of time. I could see how much smaller he had become when he stood next to it and apologetically dabbed with his tie at the spills. He obeyed when anyone suggested that he take a seat. Watching him follow orders was disorienting. He used to descend on us like a stage director who worked on the principle that to get the best work out of his cast he had to maintain a high level of terror. The Judge said he was as lamblike as if a white person had been in the room.
She worried because that morning he’d been distracted enough to burn the stepgrandmother’s best pan. She said to me in the corridor by the elevator that Grandfather was a fire waiting to happen. Balancing boxes of monogrammed handkerchiefs, the sort found unopened in every old woman’s drawers, she wanted to evacuate the Spode before the china cabinet went up in smoke. I said a fire provided motivation for finding a new home.
I told her about the time I was living near campus, boiled an egg, passed out, and woke in time to say goodbye to the firemen. The following month my ashtray sent flames up a pair of jeans that hung on the door. The fire spread so fast my neighbors had to flee to the roof. The inferno and the building’s inoperable sprinklers were more than my business student roommate had wanted to experience in New York and he went back to Japan. The Judge said I was as disrespectful as the rest of my family.
In her nest across the playground, the Judge was waiting to swoop down on the carcass of an uninhabited apartment. Had my aunt not had to catch the shuttle back to Boston, she would have changed the locks just for fun. The wicked sister wanted Grandfather out so that the apartment could be sold—not that it was worth anything. I didn’t see Grandfather’s lucky lemon plant anywhere and grabbed the nearest clay pot of leaves. I had never grown anything. Already I was engaged with the Judge in a contest over the spoils.
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