by Jeff Hobbs
“It’s frustrating as hell,” he said in the kitchen at 34 Smith Street in early September. He’d just come home from the airport. Flowy, Curtis, and Tavarus were there, smoking, having their first drinks of the evening over aluminum containers of chicken wings. The first thing Rob did was crack his joints the full length of his body while his friends cringed. Rat-tat-tat-tat, endlessly, impossibly, grossly realigning his diarthrodial joints. Then he poured himself a tall vodka with cranberry juice, sat at the table, and took his boots off.
“Well, shit, you thought it would be easy building an empire?” Flowy asked.
Rob shook his head and exhaled. “Just didn’t think it would take this long.”
Rob hadn’t discussed the move to Continental with his friends. He hadn’t discussed many decisions at all since he’d taken the St. Benedict’s job four years ago.
“Anyway, fuck it,” he said, meaning, Let’s talk about something else.
Tavarus had a son now, named Christopher, who was a year old. The mother was his girlfriend, Darlene. Their living situation was precarious at the moment, crammed into a small one-bedroom in the North Ward of Newark. The baby had been accidental, and they had no plans to get married, but they were both working and seemed happy, above the line of self-sufficiency for the moment. When their own personal topics became grim or redundant, the friends talked about that: the first child born among the Burger Boyz, and a boy no less.
Flowy had been with his girlfriend, LaQuisha, for six years, but they’d been careful about contraception. His foremost reasoning for choosing St. Benedict’s had been to avoid getting someone pregnant; childbirth and education were more or less mutually exclusive in the neighborhood where he’d grown up. Now that his education was over, Flowy thought of fatherhood in terms of leaving the hood. He’d seen babies become anchors among many of his friends; the new costs paired with the necessity for proximate family child care rendered moving even a few miles away impossible. Tavarus’s situation served as a prime example. Flowy didn’t know how he was going to move, but he talked about it often, the dream of getting out of Essex County and settling down someplace where there was space, trees, and no gangs. The problem was that in places like that there were no jobs, at least not for him. There were enough indoor and outdoor pools in Newark for him to be lifeguarding most of the time, and the job required more than CPR training. He also had to keep gang fights from breaking out using skills he’d developed growing up. Where neighborhoods were more spread out and the pools belonged to country clubs, this particular job qualification didn’t help him, nor did the dozen-plus tattoos he now wore, many of them the result of “tattoo parties” he sometimes hosted: Matthew 20:7, Psalms 23, and numerous tributes to friends he’d lost.
Curtis’s marketing job was secure but promised no upward mobility, and being beholden to corporate types had been grating on him for two years now. In high school and college, he’d been the dynamic center of his social circles, the person others looked to when they wanted to know where to go. He’d been always in motion, planning the nights, planning the weekends, planning the future. Now he worked on a team of public relations people servicing energy companies, which seemed pointless to him, since energy was an inelastic demand and thus had no real need to be promoted. He’d lived in a condo in South Orange for a few years but had ultimately moved back to Smith Street when his mother had moved away; after more than thirty years there, the neighborhood had come to feel too dangerous for her. The house was fully owned, and the economics made enough sense to justify the more precarious environment. He didn’t know what his next job should be, just that he was gaining weight, both physically and mentally, in his current job.
They talked in and around these subjects, but mostly they talked about other things—such as their high school years and how theirs had been the best class in the history of St. Benedict’s.
They had a good night; each of them felt his various pressures easing off, as always happened when they were sitting at this table in this house: their shared stories, their verbal shorthand, the nonjudgment that was the rule, and the feeling of total seclusion from whatever was going on outside these walls. Though they had congregated at this table less often as the years rolled by, the feeling it gave was vital, knowing that on a random weeknight like this, one or all of them would always be here to download.
The blunt came around to Rob and he passed.
“You’re really still worried about that?” Curtis asked. He was referring to the random urine tests at Continental. Rob hadn’t smoked since before he started working at the airline, and that helped explain why he’d been so uncharacteristically short-tempered; he’d given up his most effective outlet for stress, could no longer release it from his chest alongside artful plumes of smoke. “C’mon, man, no one’s gonna test you. It’s just to keep you scared.”
“They’ve tested people,” Rob said. “It’s real. We’re talking about airplanes. Big ones. Lots of them. You think they fuck around with that?”
Actually, his friends had been floored when Rob quit smoking marijuana, even more so than they were when he stopped dealing. Rob Peace, who had smoked practically every day since high school, had quit cold turkey. And he’d done so almost imperceptibly, just passing joints and blunts and bowls along when they came to him, saying quietly, “I’m good,” or, “I already had,” or, “Heading to my ma’s house in a few.” This meant that he was beyond serious about real estate, and the job that allowed him to pursue it. This was not a whim or a stopgap; this was what he wanted to do. Even when he sounded as he had tonight, pissed off and slightly helpless about repeated setbacks, they didn’t worry. For as long as they’d known him, Rob Peace had always achieved what he’d wanted.
In the fall of 2007, just as Rob began to feel that he’d gotten a sense of the hidden intricacies of the real estate market—that when the right property came up, he’d have the wherewithal to get in first with confidence—the housing bubble burst in earnest. Plummeting prices and the mass offloading of property should have been a stroke of luck in the arena in which Rob was trying to operate. In theory, he would be able to grab up the properties even cheaper than they already were, and then wait for the rebound. But along with the fall in prices came the breakdown of the subprime lenders market. And Rob, whose whole business plan hinged on being a good subprime lending candidate himself, learned gradually over the course of the fall that even if he were to find one or more properties that fit his designs, there wouldn’t be any money available to him. For the foreseeable future, the holdings of Peace Realty would be limited to one property at 122 Greenwood Avenue. And Rob would be using his free flight benefits less for business and more to travel the world.
WE TALKED TWO or three times that year. These conversations were typically brief; my soft-spoken, halting voice did not lend itself to cell phones. “Damn, why can’t you speak up?” he said more than once.
“I’m trying,” I replied. “Can you hear me now?”
He laughed. “You sound like a mouse, same as you did in college.”
He talked about all the traveling he’d been doing—Rio again, South Korea, and an aim to visit Croatia soon—but he never told me that the reason he was able to do this was that he worked in the luggage department of an airline. I told him about the release of my novel the previous spring, right around Rob’s departure from St. Benedict’s.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I heard that some magazine was comparing you to The Great Gatsby or some shit?”
“That might have been a stretch,” I said.
“Look at you, Da Jeffrey, my boy, all famous now.”
I just laughed, and as he’d withheld the specific nature of his employment from me, so, too, did I avoid informing him that this novel had sold only a few thousand copies, that my second novel had failed to sell to a publisher on the first go-round, and that, while working insecurely on a third, I was copyediting self-publis
hed self-help books in order to pay our rent in Los Angeles. I didn’t tell him anything about my life that would suggest I was doing anything other than what I’d always aspired to do. As far as either of us knew at the end of these calls, we were both all good, and always had been.
I asked about Katrina, the girl he’d brought to my wedding. The psssshhh sound he made told me what direction that had gone in.
He asked about Rebecca, and I said she was fine.
“She knocked up yet?”
“No. But we’re psyched to start a family, we’re trying.” We’d been trying for two years, in fact, and Rebecca had had three miscarriages. I didn’t feel comfortable revealing those troubles, either.
He laughed. “Good luck with all that. Trying’s the fun part, from what I’ve heard.”
We ventured no further. The distance between us and the maleness of our friendship precluded revealing anything that truly mattered, and at the time I was too naïve to know that if you were friends with someone—truly friends—then you told him what was going on (“It’s called ‘catching up,’” my wife informed me when I asked how it was possible for her to yap with her girlfriends for as long as she did and share every innocuous detail of her life). Instead, I thought that by concisely presenting the most easygoing and put-together version of myself, I was being “all good.”
Really, I was just fronting. And Rob was doing the same.
“‘I’M starting to fucking hate you’ . . . Nah, nah, I didn’t say that, I didn’t say, ‘I fucking hate you’—I said, ‘I’m starting to fucking hate you.’”
Victor and Big Steve looked at each other for a moment, then both of them began hysterically laughing. Rob pinched the phone between his cheek and shoulder in order to raise his arms and give them a helpless, exasperated look, and he mouthed, I can’t believe this bitch. They were in the small house Victor and Steve shared in Browns Mills, a little over an hour south of Newark. Rob had come to spend the night. Then a girlfriend of his, whom he referred to only as “Philly” (where she lived), called and hassled him about not telling her where he was. The conversation had escalated, as his conversations with women often did. “Female shit,” which was what he called pretty much everything women did or said, was one of the few things he had no patience for.
“Thug love,” Victor said after Rob finally got off. “That’s what I’m going to start calling you.” And indeed, that night Victor changed Rob’s contact name in his cell phone from “Shawn” to “Thug Love.”
His close friends had always been flummoxed by Rob’s approach to romantic relationships. He loved women, and he had little trouble getting them to love him. His tell-it-like-it-is approach to humor, for whatever reason, was attractive. (“You’re just mad cuz I’m prettier than you,” he’d once said to a girl giving him attitude outside an East Orange bar; a few minutes later, he came away with her number.) But once a relationship started, all he did was complain and provoke. He would say he was going to be somewhere, and then he would be somewhere else, and when the irritated call came, he would feign ignorance and improvise creative new ways to make the problem her own fault. Rarely did his friends meet the women with whom he was involved; to parties, he would bring other girls—often unattractive ones, what his friends termed “busted”—whom he cared nothing about. Not many nights passed without a phone call that he would take into the next room while Curtis, Victor, Drew—whatever guys he preferred to hang out with over his girlfriends—overheard him progress through the beats of the same self-wrought arguments, almost as if following a script. Typically, these had to do with time, his lack of it, his inability to respect it. When the relationships ended, as they invariably did, his friends would crack that the girl in question had “been Robbed.” Victor traced this pattern back to Zina, his freshman-year girlfriend at Yale. Before she’d broken his heart, Rob had always been shy and hesitant around girls. Afterward, almost instantly, he’d become bold, crass, and too often mean.
“Why do you do this to yourself, man?” Curtis asked him after a particularly vitriolic phone spat with a woman Rob called “Lawyer Girl.” “I mean, damn.”
“When we’re together, it’s cool, but when we’re not together, she goes crazy.”
“So bring her over here sometime.”
“Nah, you do not want to see what this looks like in person.”
Curtis laughed; never did his best friend seem so helpless, so not in control, as he did when a girlfriend called to chew him out. But he was also concerned. He didn’t know anyone else who was better equipped to care for women. Rob had his mother and grandmother, of course, whom he doted on religiously even when they’d been fighting about his airline job. He checked in on Raquel Diaz and Daniella Pierce often and listened to their problems with attentive thought if not always with patience. Shannon Heggins, his junior high girlfriend who was now raising a daughter alone, relied on him to bring dinner to her apartment multiple times a week. He had cousins, neighbors, former classmates, so many others whom he took care of devoutly. The fact that Rob could spend so many of his waking hours—the majority, it sometimes seemed—tending to the women in his life, and yet he couldn’t get through one phone call with a serious girlfriend that didn’t bring him to profane heights of frustration, was bewildering. Both his male and female friends egged him on in this regard; they found no end of amusement in seeing Rob Peace, the Man, reduced to a stammering, flailing, one-dimensional sitcom character. And yet they also believed this repetitive playacting embodied a greater struggle inside him, one he refused to discuss. The fact was, he seemed positively determined to stave off anything resembling a functional personal relationship until he reached a place where he could take care of Jackie. And in the fall of 2008, with the housing market stalled and Rob’s savings drained once again, that place lay farther and farther away.
“The only thing that will save you,” Raquel had told him in her apartment one night, “is a good woman.”
Rob sipped his Hennessy and smiled, though not the grin she expected, the one that both absorbed and deflected. This smile was fainter, almost wistful. “Girl,” he said, “at this point, I wouldn’t know what to do with a good woman even if I found one.”
Raquel’s belly was round and her skin glowed. Six months earlier, a two-day bender had found her in the bathroom of a friend’s apartment on the Upper West Side, peering into a mirror as blood crept from both her nostrils. Her friends were all asleep, and she had scraped up the dregs of the party powder, trying to figure out how she might cram another spoonful of cocaine up past the source of the bleeding, thinking, If you’re going to do this, then you have to watch yourself do this. She did watch herself, then stemmed the blood flow with toilet paper and continued. At four or five that morning, in a cab on the way back to East 119th Street, it occurred to her through the haze that she could conceivably have died at some point during the last forty-eight hours. Simon was sitting calmly on their futon. By now the home renovations were finished, and their apartment was modern and roomy. He hadn’t heard from her the whole time she’d been out. She started weeping in front of him, certain that he was about to tell her to leave both the room and his life. Instead, he said in his calm, steady, devoted voice that contained a love she suddenly knew how to receive, “Where’ve you been, baby? I missed you.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I have to slow down. I have to change. I have to stop.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m glad you’re home.”
She nodded, wiping constantly at her numbed nose, and sat beside him. Simon had never been a physically emotive man, but now he put his arm around her and savored the press of her head against his shoulder.
Ten days later, she learned that she was seven weeks’ pregnant. In November 2007, she gave birth to Felix Rodriguez, a healthy ten-pound boy. Ten days after that, Raquel and Simon were married at City Hall.
In the meantime, Rob had become involved with I
nayra Sideros, her aunt.
Ina was only a year older than Raquel, whose mother’s and grandmother’s pregnancies had overlapped by a month. She had penetrating eyes and olive skin. Her thick, dark dreadlocks fell below her waist. Rob had met her in 2003, when she’d come to New York to visit Raquel. He’d keyed in on her immediately, but not with any of his worn-out lines. Raquel had noticed the spark, and in the same way that Rob had subtly arranged her own first night with Simon, she returned the favor in kind by asking Rob to show Ina around New York. He’d taken her to a restaurant in Manhattan, then to a few parties in Newark. He employed the same gentle mannerisms with which he treated his platonic female friendships, and that’s how they related to each other for the first four years of their relationship: friends, what Rob was best at being. During that time, he’d been teaching at St. Benedict’s while she worked as an office assistant at a plastic surgery practice in Miami, and they kept in touch over the phone. Now that he worked for Continental and an airplane was akin to a taxi, he traveled down to see her all the time beginning in the fall of 2007.