I had taken the Beginner class at Daily Planet Writer’s Workshop in the fall, the Building class in the spring. Jim had been my teacher last semester, and was this one as well. His mother founded the program, so he knew the lesson plans well and interpreted them liberally. He had practical advice: “This is how to brainstorm, this is how to be more consistent with your writing, this is how to link one idea to the next using prepositions but avoiding prepositional phrases, here is a gramophone [he drew] and here is a phonogram [he wrote],” or, “This is Chekhov’s device [he chalked a rifle]. Always write like this. If you begin the story with a gun, make sure it is used before the end of the final act. This is a red herring [he drew a fish with smoke rising from it]. Never write like this. If someone is smoking a herring in the background, make sure there is a reason you have included that detail in your story.” When it came to the act of creating—the what—he would say, “Write about something you know well so you can give us details an outsider would take years to learn.”
As I read the syllabus, I noticed the first five thousand words of our novels were not due until the middle of October, and we did not finish the manuscripts at tier three, but at tier four, after which they gave us the certificate that proved we were novelists. The first assignment was to go to the library and read books of poetry—it would help us with dialogue. Jim presented the information with a devious smile, so we would think he had invented this trick. I tried to pay attention but Melody’s silhouette kept coming to my mind. Next week, I would have to get the bus earlier so as to spend more of the day with her. I calculated: bus 7:30 a.m., arrive 10:30, Melody’s apartment 11:00. How long would she enjoy these Saturday visits before she became curious about what I did with the rest of my week? All of that seemed far in the future, so I focused back on the lesson plan and tried to absorb more of Jim’s teaching.
Chapter 3
I woke up on March 28 and Doris was in my room singing. “Happy Birthday to you” rang out over and over again. I realized the power of the song was in its repetition.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m fine.” There was a manila envelope on the kitchen counter with my name on it. “That is for you.” I opened the envelope to a card, which had a bear telling a donkey, “I would wish you a happy birthday . . .” The inner flap read, “. . . but I know you find this holiday unBEARable.” It had sixty dollars in it and a small journal. I hugged her. The erection that followed a night of rest was shrinking, but still swollen enough to cause a moment of discomfort between us. I went back to my room and got dressed before heading to the front door.
“Where are you going?”
“To hang out.” I closed the door before she could object.
The path sloped down toward the center of town. I turned right, into the cove before the public beach. There was a patch of grass in front of me where the carnival was hosted annually. Two robins were foraging for worms. As my body approached, they floated away, squawking to the nearest tree. I continued down the paved roadway until I reached the wooden gate that separated the town from the bay. There was a white pickup truck in the parking lot next to small bushels of sea grass, stalks of sea oats. I sat on the thick wooden fence and looked beyond the silver slide and the teenagers from my school I pretended not to know. Small waves marbled then crashed. The light blue sky was interrupted by white clouds. I left the beach.
I was thinking of a book my English teacher had assigned us: Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck. The book began with the protagonist (Steinbeck) leaving Sag Harbor (this town) with his deceased wife’s poodle, to drive across America, a country he had written so much about but had not traveled around in twenty-five years. I walked through the center of town, as I knew Steinbeck had, and made my way to the John Jermain Memorial Library to finish reading his book. It was a mass of wooden shelves and hard wooden chairs. The librarian was new, though she resembled the old librarian. I thought to ask for Travels with Charley but was embarrassed by the inferences she would make about my taste, so I tried to imagine a serious book of fiction, written by a black author, though nothing came to mind.
“I’m looking for the Harlem Renaissance books,” I said.
“Were you thinking of a specific work?”
“No.”
“I’m sure we have a copy of Cane here. Do you want to see that one?”
I nodded. She took me down one of the rows and went looking through each shelf. We stopped at what seemed to be in the geometric center of the library. Cane was bound in green and gold painted leather. The image on the front was pastoral, and I didn’t understand most of the sentence—neither “Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon . . .” nor “Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones are sharpening scythes.” As the librarian returned to her desk, I asked, “I thought this was a novel?”
“It is.”
“But there are a bunch of poems in it.”
“Well, that is a part of the novel.” She continued along her way. I propped myself against the shelf, reading until I became light-headed. On page 63, there began a section called “Theater,” which featured a character named Dorris. Seeing a name so similar to my aunt’s in a book I opened at random was like a sign from God. I wondered if anyone else could enjoy the story like I could. I continued through it, too lazy to get a dictionary, memorizing the words: “Cassava, hone, palabra, profligate, vesper,” repeating them as if they were an incantation. I waited for the librarian to return from the bathroom. “May I check the book out?”
The clouds made no distinct shapes. From the top of Doris’s street, I saw the florist’s car outside. The garage was not open, which was abnormal. I stubbed my foot on the front steps, and the nail of my right big toe felt as if it was beginning to come off. I ran into the bathroom for the peroxide and a Band-Aid, and the house was unusually quiet. Curiosity overtook me. I walked down the hallway, across from my room, and put my ear to Doris’s door. I heard her moaning, like after a wheeze, or when she sat on the toilet late at night, but this moan was deeper—like she was reaching out. I opened the door; Jeff, the florist, jumped into the closet. When the sheets settled, she was staring at me, grinning. “Did you want to see this, you little nasty—” I closed the door and went to the beach before she could finish her phrase.
The clouds were still nondescript. Doris came to pick me up. I looked at my hands and saw Cane, which I hadn’t released since leaving the library. It was like the book had directed me to this truth about Doris. The Band-Aid was collecting sand. The bay was calm; sailboats bobbed in the green breeze. The horn beeped four times, but I didn’t go to the car. I wanted to get far away from this small town, but at fourteen, the farthest I could go was inside a book. I sat in the shallows of the bay and began to read the final chapter, entitled “Kabnis,” paying closer attention to detail.
september 12, 2009
I called Melody on Friday and asked if we could see each other but she was busy with something, she said—her father was going on a trip, and she wanted to be with him before he left. She asked me to come over on Sunday, but I told her there was no way, so we agreed to see each other next weekend. I had to go to the city early Saturday morning, anyway, because I had already lied to my mother.
The bus dropped me off at Fortieth and Third. I walked to Grand Central and took the S train before transferring to the C at Times Square going north. I exited on 135th Street and walked uphill across a park, paying scant attention to the green, and arrived at the east gate of City College, my mother’s alma mater. I had memorized the route from here to the closest public library, on 125th Street, so I could finish my homework for the workshop. I walked down St. Nicholas Terrace, passing young white and brown people, not three blocks south from where the campus ended. I crossed 127th Street and counted the building numbers—356, 358, 360—and stopped at 362, where my mother had raised me for five years. Curious, I thought, that it was so close
to her former university, and, of the ten or so identical apartment buildings on 127th Street between St. Nicholas Terrace and Convent Avenue, it was the only one that had been destroyed by fire. Earlier that week I had taken a book from my mother’s shelf entitled Harlem: Two Centuries of Architecture, because I wanted to learn more about the neighborhood in case Melody happened to ask me any questions. The place had been settled by the Dutch first, then became an enclave of working-class Jewish and Italian immigrants, who gave way to other peoples with histories of being colonized, starting in the 1900s. By the 1930s, Harlem was 70 percent black. I was not sure if this information would be useful. At the corner of 125th Street and Morningside Avenue, a Puerto Rican man came rolling by. He mumbled something unintelligible. I looked to his dry lips, with small bubbles of spit, to his shoes, wing-tipped and spotless, with the desire to wash his feet. The ecstasy was fleeting, and I left the interaction with a vague idea of my emotions as patronizing and out of touch. I felt there was some disconnect between the history I had learned and the people I now saw.
I entered the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library. It reminded me of the John Jermain library in Sag Harbor, which was built in 1910, and I wondered if the similarities were due to their both being public libraries or to a greater trend in early twentieth-century American architectural design. I strolled down the poetry aisle and picked up The Cantos of Ezra Pound, because it was orange and reminded me of The Count of Monte Christo as I said it fast. I opened to the day of my birth. Page 28, Canto VIII, read:
These fragments you have shelved (shored).
“Slut!” “Bitch!” Truth and Calliope
Slanging each other sous les lauriers:
That Alessandro was negroid . . .
The rest of the poem bored me. Next to The Cantos there was a maroon book, with a middle-aged black man in a newsboy hat and gray suit on the cover, holding flowers close to his chest. The book was some combination of photography and poetry, based on Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava’s Sweet Flypaper of Life. I found myself assaulted with colloquial mannerisms—“Hey brothah, what happened”—which I didn’t like, even when they appeared in Cane. I skimmed to the middle of the book, stopping at the picture of a solitary black boy, sitting on his heels while staring west on 125th Street. Adults gathered at the entrance to the Harlem State Office Building. I felt the picture was missing something. I put the book down and walked to the computer. I typed “State Office Building Harlem” into the browser, viewing the images tab, finding the same office as in the picture. If I had guessed the date correctly by the style of clothes, it was the renaming ceremony for the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Building, an event that occurred in 1983. Had the picture in the book been captured after the year 2005, I thought, the photographer would have been standing against the statue of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., which held three golden bubbles against its base. They read “Keep,” “the,” and “Faith.” It stated neither to whom nor in what.
september 19, 2009
I passed the statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle and stopped across the street from a pharmacy and a luxury hotel. I looked at a gray sculpture, cut to resemble two humans in seated positions, outside Melody’s apartment building. The entrance was on the south side of the street. As I spun into the lobby, the doorman was blocking the entrance, his face uncomfortably close to my face.
“Which apartment?”
“Richard Gilbert.”
“I’m sorry, he is not in.”
“Melody told me to come over.”
“Hold on.” He walked back to his stand, mumbled something into a telephone, then waved me on—“Forty-three c.”
“Thank you.”
The elevator doors opened, and I turned right, pushing the small gray button next to the eyehole of the apartment. Melody’s footsteps echoed into the hallway.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” There was an awkward silence.
“Beautiful,” I said.
“Shut up.”
The artwork on the walls was sparse. Melody’s father had moved in five years prior, but the furniture was left over from the showing. They had boxes of paintings and posters, but nothing from the Lower East Side, where they used to live, had made it to the walls of the Upper West Side home.
“Nice place.”
“We haven’t settled in.”
“I can tell.”
“I don’t know if he wants to stay.”
“Why did you move?”
“Something about his father’s spirit and this neighborhood . . . I don’t listen to him when he talks about his father.” I stood over by one of the windows looking out on Central Park. “He gets back next month. Do you want to meet him?”
“Not really.”
“I don’t blame you,” she said, then walked into the kitchen to heat up a Cup o’ Noodles. “He doesn’t like to hang things on the wall.” When I roamed to her bedroom, it became apparent she did not either. There was an easel in the corner, and a white dresser with a framed picture on it. A woman in a swimsuit stared down the lens of a camera; her legs, crossed at the ankles, shifted her weight, and one hip seemed to curve up in a smirk. Her hair was ’80s big. On the wall next to her bed, Melody had painted sketches of birds: parrots, doves, finches, and hawks, in different primary colors that descended into the point of a triangle.
“It’s like cave paintings,” she said, entering the room with noodles in her mouth.
“This is a high cave.”
“That’s why I painted so many birds.” And they were composed with great attention to detail.
“Do you want to be a painter?”
“That sounds so simple. I am having fun exploring art right now. I don’t know if it is evocative to others yet, but I don’t care either.” She put the foam cup next to a picture frame on her desk.
“But are you going to do it in college?”
“I haven’t decided yet. How about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you going to continue to write in college?”
“I think so.” Her eyes began to crease; her cheeks rose, baring a sliver of teeth.
“You should try poetry.”
“I don’t like poetry.”
“Rick’s got a couple of poet friends. Literal couple. He says they are annoying, but they are the smartest people he brings here.”
“Why do you call him Rick?”
“What else would I call him?”
“Father.” She tilted her head. I crossed the wooden floor to her window and tried to look out to the east side.
“You’re staring like you have never looked out a window before.”
“I haven’t looked out of one this high.”
She touched my back. “What floor is your mother’s apartment on?”
“Four.” I turned to face her. “It’s just funny to be this far from the ground.”
She stood in front of me with her jean shorts down near her ankles, unfastening the straps of her bra. I closed the distance between us.
“Hold on.” She drew the shades, placing a red T-shirt over the lamp beside her desk.
We were lying down together. I kissed and rubbed her stomach. The birds, now covered in red light, seemed less childish. She had painted all of their irises golden, which made them appear to be alive. I stared at her nipples, which were just below the beak of a green dove, the tip of the upside-down triangle, swooping low from the mass of other bodies. It was not just the sight of her nakedness that caused my arousal, but the fact that while she lay bare, I was still concealing myself. I began to laugh. My penis became more erect. I took off my clothes and kept trying to put myself inside her. She just smiled shyly and turned away. “Not yet.” I checked the clock on her wall, 5:37 p.m., and decided to cut class. She hugged her breasts to my torso before pushing away to marvel at
my skin. She grabbed it, pulling slowly, stretching my body flat with her other hand. When she put her thumb to my neck, I came. She let go, and as I started to get up, she said, “Don’t move,” then walked to her dresser and pulled out a camera. “I’m just going to take a picture of your stomach,” she said, adding, “I promise,” before standing over my legs with the lens pointed at my belly. I lay still and let her finish. Melody waved the image in the air, trying to quicken its development, then let it rest on the bed. The scale of the brown body and the three pools of liquid would have been inconceivable had I not been there for the creation of the picture. We stared at it in silence.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Already? Can you come back tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow will be difficult.”
“Why?”
“I have to make sure my mother takes her medication tonight.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I’d rather not talk about it. For now.”
“But what’s wrong with her?” I shook my head, and she stopped asking questions, realizing how forward she was being.
I said, “I feel—” before cutting myself off. I fixed my face again, held her shoulders in my palms, and we stood there for a while before I descended the elevator, and then the escalator that led to the train beneath Columbus Circle.
september 26, 2009
I crossed Morningside Avenue and passed Saint Joseph of the Holy Family Church, reading, “Daily Mass, 9:00 a.m. in English, 7:00 p.m. in Spanish.” The building had bright red doors, and the bricks were red as well, though not as loud as the entrance. Beneath the belfry there was a golden-domed chamber facing the street. St. Joseph stood, holding the baby Jesus in his left hand and a scepter in his right. I daydreamed it was not Jesus but Jean Toomer in the chamber, and not Joseph, but Toomer’s grandfather P. B. S. Pinchback. I walked across 125th Street, due west, toward the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library. I didn’t feel much like reading, poetry or fiction. I searched some bookshelves, in a very inefficient manner, for the late author’s work, discovering what I had hoped to (nothing). Not sure what to do next, I sat at one of the public computers. My guidance counselor had given me a list of colleges to look through, most of which were part of the State University of New York system. I went on websites for SUNY this or SUNY that—pages that took too much time to load—then I looked at the schools he had listed as reaches, ones I might not have been focused enough to attend: Pepperdine University, Cal Berkeley, Oberlin, and Rice. The idea of being so far removed from my mother calmed me, then I became upset about what the distance would do to Melody and me. It was now 11:30, and I found myself looking at an encyclopedia article about Melody’s father. “Richard ‘Rick’ Gilbert (né Richard Murzynowicz II) grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father was a gynecologist, and his mother, Dorothy, was a schoolteacher. Richard Sr. was dismissive of his son’s aspirations to be an artist. When he passed away in 1987, Rick did not attend his funeral.” I skimmed some more passages, but the synopses became briefer as the late ’80s turned to the early ’90s. By the mid-’90s, the article had all but fizzled out. The last sentences read, “In 1994, Rick’s girlfriend Magda passed away in their home from heart failure. This death, and the rearing of the couple’s child, Melody Gilbert, made him retreat from the public sphere.” I looked at the article’s picture of Melody’s father. He was smiling. There was stubble on his chin and circular green sunglasses covered half of his face. I typed “Rick Gilbert paintings” into the browser and found The City’s Forgotten, Richard Gilbert, 1982, which was linked to www.metmuseum.org/. I tried to make sense of the brown and gray blotches, before closing out of the browser to meet Melody.
As Lie Is to Grin Page 4