Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  I didn’t look away. “What’s going on, Victor?”

  He shrugged. “You didn’t read it.”

  “Damn. You sent me an essay, right? The Kool-Aid.”

  He nodded. “I e-mailed it to you last week. But my laptop’s been messing up. It’s old. I thought you would call me.” He let out a breath. “I want to send it to a magazine. If you know someone.”

  “Victor, I never check e-mail on the road. It takes me out of how I feel about a place. I just got back today.” I put my hand on his shoulder, that knobby bone like a bottlecap. “Look, on Saturday we can go to the concert, and then you can hang out here in LA for a few days. You want to visit colleges, right? Tell me the plan.”

  “I have a 3.85,” he said. “I got a B in math.”

  “Me, too,” I said, smiling.

  “The plan is I got the honors award, and some other stuff, but I need to fill out the applications by December. And Professor Zelman’s gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked at Jazen and Alfonso, who’d pushed off from the wall. “The plan is I need your help. I need to be out of Rio Seco.”

  After he graduated in June, we’d gone to USC for a day. “Okay,” I said. “Next week we’ll check out Occidental and UCLA. They should love a brotha like you. All wrecked.”

  Riding in the Navigator was like being on drugs, as I imagined it. I had never tried anything stronger than my father’s rum.

  But when I sat in the window-tinted back, the world slid by gangster-lean slow. No cheap speakers that fuzzed the air but an expensive system that sent the bass through the seat clean and layered as thunder. The music was so deeply loud that it danced in my bone marrow. The drums were inside the flat bone over my heart. And the world looked absolutely different from when I walked. The sidewalks and buildings—the apartments, even the brick buildings with signs that read ELEKTRA and ATLANTIC RECORDS—were small and insignificant, and the people only puppets moving dispiritedly in the heat. It was like being in another country.

  Victor lifted his chin when we passed Dimples and said something low under his breath. In the front seat, Alfonso watched everything, head moving smoothly left to right. He had a Chinese symbol tattooed on the left side of his skull, I saw now through the stubble. Jazen’s sunglasses glinted in the rearview mirror.

  Beside me, Victor craned his neck when we crossed over the LA River. He said softly, “I started working on a piece about rivers. You sent me that CD for my birthday. Water Music.” He leaned back against the seat. “I listened to it back here with the headphones, and Jazen was playing Lil Wayne, and the drums mixed up with the oboes. It was a trip. I read the liner notes, about King George and the Thames and the barge. This was like the barge, and we were driving on the freeway. Eight lanes. Black like water. Then we went off on a little tributary, and all the people were on the banks watching us go by.”

  I said, “Who are you writing the paper for?”

  He said, “I got bored after graduation. I should have done my applications last year. But Grandpère was sick and I thought he was gonna die.”

  “He had pneumonia. I remember.”

  “You were in Belgium.” He turned toward me now. “I wrote the papers for Zelman. He said the same thing happened to him when he graduated, so he gave me fake deadlines. He called them artificial assignments, and he was gonna send off the Kool-Aid paper to some journal. But he left.”

  “He left the college?”

  He shook his head. “No. He got some grant to go to Brazil for a year and study rap in the favelas. He booked up last week.”

  Jazen said, “This the freeway?”

  I leaned forward and said, “Right there.” His cornrows were blurred and needed redoing. At home, Jazen and Alfonso drove through the alleys, watching their small empire, their rock stowed safely somewhere. Where had my brother Lafayette said they kept it—in a dryer at the Launderland?

  What if they had drugs in the car now, and the cops stopped us?

  They wouldn’t be that stupid. Someone had to be holding their stuff at home. They couldn’t have planned to do anything here.

  Jazen kept up a steady stream of comment about the elevator. “She gon say am I a LA rapper. I’m from the Villas. Westside.”

  That singer had forgotten about Jazen the moment she stepped inside the glass door of the studio. The men had hardly noticed him, except to wonder whether he had a gun.

  Of course he did. Somewhere in that big jacket? They always needed a gun.

  He said, “Shit, it’s all about the Dirty South now. Don’t nobody care bout no LA niggas. It’s all about Juvenile and Mystikal and Lil Wayne. New Orleans and the ATL. Don’t nobody care about no Warner Brothers.”

  “You have about five exits,” I said loudly.

  We drove toward Los Feliz. She got them big-ass triple Ds, but she still need to get on her knees. Who was this singing? Sold on the market down in New Orleans. Brown sugar. We were still nothing. All of us. Glorette, me, Gloria. Tiffany. Breasts and ass and mouths. My arm was ghostly blue reflected in the window.

  “Check that big old white house,” Alfonso said, pointing. “Look like a plantation.”

  “Forest Lawn,” I said.

  “Oh, shit—the cemetery? A plantation fulla dead people,” Alfonso said. “Look like Louisiana for a minute.”

  “You been to Louisiana?” Victor said.

  “Hell, yeah, my moms used to send me there in the summer, when I got in trouble. Plenty trouble down there, too.” Alfonso laughed softly. “I was way out in the country. Sarrat. But they had fools just like us.”

  Jazen said, “Man, I stayed in the Lafitte last summer in New Orleans. Call it the Bricks. Niggas was poppin each other there, too. Make LA look like kindergarten. VP, you never been?”

  “Nope. Marraine, you been to New Orleans?”

  I was still trying to process Lafitte. A project named for a pirate? Our pirate? I said, “I went to Azure, with your maman. Down south from New Orleans. But we were only ten.”

  Jazen said, “Wait—them horses?”

  Fifteen feet from the freeway was a bridle path, and two people rode palominos whose long tails swished gently. “This shit don’t even look like LA. I thought it would be clubs and stores. Hollywood,” Jazen said.

  “LA’s so big you can’t even see it all,” Victor said. “It’s forever.” He sounded like a little kid. “The Getty Villa and Leimert Park. We saw poets there, right?”

  “You’re gonna exit on Los Feliz,” I said. “We have stores.”

  “Marraine’s crib is fit,” Victor said. “Check it out.”

  Winding through the eucalyptus and magnolia that towered over us along Los Feliz Boulevard, then the beautiful pastel buildings along the street, they were all quiet until I pointed at a space along the curb.

  “Nella Vista Street,” Victor said. “I remember.”

  I loved my apartment building. It was like a small French chateau, but wrought-iron letters spelled out EL DORADO at the entry. The walls were buttery yellow, the steep mansard roof was all coppery and green, and I kept red geraniums in blue pots at the base of the steps.

  When we walked into the courtyard, I wondered who was watching. Sherry was home. Her fan made the silky butternut curtains dance in the window. Violin music trailed from #6, where Jae, who played with the LA Phil, lived.

  If people weren’t sure what I was, they could speculate now, I thought, leading the way up the pebbly stairs with the three boys—I was just going to think of them that way, because I couldn’t think of them otherwise. They were sons of people I knew and always would seem like boys to me, even though their feet shook the narrow steps.

  EL DORADO

  VICTOR WENT STRAIGHT to the pictures gathered in silver frames on the ebony sideboard. He picked up the one of the five of us, after graduation. Then he touched the smaller snapshot of Glorette holding him on his first birthday; he is nestled into her shoulder, looking suspiciously at me, the stranger home f
rom college who held the camera. His cheek is fat, his hair is uncut tumbleweed, his eyes are slanted and glowing.

  I saw his backpack, then, on the floor beside him. He thought he was staying. Tonight.

  Jazen and Alfonso stood uncomfortably in the doorway.

  I called out, “Come in and get something to drink.”

  In the kitchen, I got out bottles of iced tea. I looked out my kitchen window at the eucalyptus forest up the hill near the Griffith Observatory. Tony’s house was up there. He’d been in Oaxaca doing the photos for my essay. I didn’t want Victor here tonight. I wasn’t ready to think about him being in LA.

  Their voices floated through the arched entry to the kitchen.

  “Nigga, you stayed up in here before? Yeah, my godmother hooked me up with a college visit. Shit. Two more years of school? For what? So I can still make more money than your ass? I make more money than your godmother, too. Bet. Hold up—Jojo callin. Jojo? Why you callin me again? I told you I got bidness in LA. Yeah. LA.”

  Jazen went out onto the balcony. The only man who ever came here was Tony. My neighbors—the only two I knew were Sherry and Jae—were probably past curious about these visitors. And if they’d seen Jazen’s big jacket and Alfonso’s tattoos, they were probably nervous.

  Alfonso said to Victor, “He got so many bitches callin—” I put three glasses of iced tea on the coffee table, and Alfonso said, “Sorry, Auntie Fantine.”

  Because when Jazen was not in the room, Alfonso was still my nephew. Four of the women in that photo were his aunts. During his three years in prison, Clarette had kept an eye on him, kept him from too many fights.

  I said, “And you’ve got two little girls, right?” I folded my arms and gave him my best imitation of Clarette’s prison guard look. “No bitches.”

  Alfonso pulled down the neck of his white T-shirt. On each side of his collarbone rode a name: Egypt and Morocco. Twins. They were about five—I’d seen them at Bettina’s, their braids thick as ropes.

  He sat heavily on the couch and drank the entire glass of iced tea, his throat working. With his head thrown back, another tattoo was visible on his neck, but I couldn’t read it.

  Victor said, “This is my favorite picture. And I ain’t in it.”

  I said, “You’re right off to the side, in your grandma’s arms. That’s why your mom’s glancing sideways.”

  “For real?” He held it close. “Was I bawlin?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I took the photo from him. “Always.” I picked up the smaller one, of Glorette holding him, and said, “But not here.”

  Jazen came inside, closing his phone, his wide forehead furrowed with right angles. He’d look old fast, because he carried all that anger in the front of his head. Who told me that? An old man in Spain. He’d demonstrated on the forehead of his friend, in the small bar with a bowl of tiny dark olives near us.

  Victor sat near the window, in the low-slung wooden chair with leather backing where I usually read. “This from Pottery Barn?” He grinned, and I saw his father’s narrow gap between the front two teeth. The lie gap. The generous gap. Depended on which African-descended person you asked—my friends all disagreed.

  “Very funny,” I said. I’d told jokes about Pottery Barn when he was here before.

  Jazen’s eyes went from the chair to the window to his buzzing phone. “A barn? In LA? And fuckin horses everywhere?”

  “It’s a store,” I said. “But that chair’s from Indonesia. I got it from a friend.”

  Victor said, “Mayeli said we should go to Belize.”

  Alfonso said, “That fine short girl talk so funny? The one we saw at the store?”

  “Yeah,” Victor said, quietly. “Belize. Mayeli could show you all around. She says they got Indians, Amish people in those buggies, and brothas they call Garifunas.”

  “See the sights and shit,” Alfonso said, but his head was drooping, as if he were going to fall asleep.

  Victor stood up and went to the hallway, where I had hung twenty pictures in different-sized frames. I wanted it to look like Mrs. Mingott’s stairway in The Age of Innocence, though I never told anyone that. “You got new ones,” he said. “These are from Italy?”

  “From everywhere.” They were mostly museum catalogue photos, or large postcards I’d gotten from exhibits, or small posters I’d bought on my trips. An English landscape by Constable, a Renaissance landscape from Dosso Dossi. I put them in gilt frames and changed them often, except the very first print I’d ever bought, when I was eighteen—an etching of a desolate landscape with one tree, by Rembrandt.

  “This from Africa?” Jazen held up a glossy silver-black vase with filigreed openings like flowers. He stood in the living room. He couldn’t sit anywhere but his own car or his own couch—just like my father. “You been to Africa?”

  “It’s from Oaxaca,” I said. “Mexico. A special kind of pottery made in only one tiny village. The kiln makes that black finish. I haven’t been to Africa.”

  He put down the vase and walked over to the dining room table. “Why you ain’t been to Africa?”

  No use in lying, not in front of Victor. “I’ve been too nervous to go. African people can be pretty suspicious about Americans who look like me.” Taupe. Vague. Nothing.

  “So you write about clothes?” Alfonso looked at the magazines on the coffee table. Immerse, Travel and Leisure, Elle, Vogue.

  “I write travel pieces about different places.” It sounded foolish said aloud. I thought about how Tony always said our journeys were imaginary—people wanted to pretend they were there with us, so they didn’t have to take all the trouble to go. “I try to tell stories about people and food and places most writers don’t go.”

  Jazen said, “You should go to Africa. I always wanted to check Africa.”

  I couldn’t help it. “The whole continent?”

  He looked up from the table. “Hell, no. Just Senegal. That’s where my gramma said her people was from. Call her gramma Singalee when they lived in New Orleans.”

  “Our people were from Senegal, too. My great-great-great-grandmother. Marie-Therese, and her mother Amina. They came on the boat.”

  “Where these from?” He nodded at the three huge brown leaves in a line on the teakwood table. I’d filled the veined bowl of one leaf with coffee beans, one with pebbles from a beach in Italy, and one with three of my mother’s wooden clothespins. Jazen actually sounded curious. “How you pack a damn leaf?”

  “They’re from Sarrat,” I said. “From my father’s sycamore tree in the yard. I picked them up in January.” They were big as dinner plates, edges jagged, veins still vivid.

  “Sarrat,” he said dismissively. “How y’all always call that place by a name? Just some old houses.”

  Alfonso and Victor knew better.

  “It’s a neighborhood,” I said. “Like this one.”

  “This place?” He looked out the window at the roofs of the other apartment buildings.

  “You guys were in Burbank before. Now you’re in Los Feliz.”

  “The happy place,” Victor said.

  Jazen’s phone buzzed. He looked down at the number. “We gotta go. I gotta handle my bidness.”

  Alfonso opened his eyes and said, “Something smells good. Makes me hungry.”

  He was young again. He was Bettina’s son, always hanging around my mother’s table at dinnertime because his mother was out partying. “I can make you some rice,” I said.

  Victor was still in the hallway. “I don’t remember this one.”

  “That’s from 1636,” I said. “A painter named Sebastien Bourdon. The Encampment. See what they’re doing?” I pointed at the men sitting in the foreground. “It’s like rock, paper, scissors. Called mora. It’s just the hands. They’re on the road, they don’t have anything. Look at the tent—it’s cloth strung up on those ruins.”

  “Who are they?” Victor said, leaning closer.

  “I don’t know. I counted eleven of them. They must be running from som
ething.” The painting was dark, the ruins shadowed, but the men were smiling. “I got it at a museum in Oberlin, Ohio. I did a piece on art collections in the Midwest.”

  “Nigga, you don’t need no rice,” Jazen said. His phone was a bee trapped in his big palm. He looked at the number. “Shit, I gotta talk to this one girl. No lie. She’s gonna do my braids.”

  “Go out to the car and handle her,” Alfonso said. “Lemme just get some rice. My auntie make some hella good rice.”

  Jazen went outside. The living room was quiet. I bent to pick up Alfonso’s empty glass, and saw he was asleep, his head thrown back. Under his jawbone, small words curved—Live My Life.

  Victor whispered, “Said he didn’t sleep for three years inside. Fool falls asleep in a heartbeat.” He put in his earpieces, turned on his iPod, and sat in the leather chair with a book of Brassai photos.

  In the kitchen, I got out rice, saffron, Creole seasoning, garlic, and pepper. I sautéed the garlic in butter, added the rice and stirred until it was translucent, and turned the heat up high under the water. I’d been gone so much there was no meat, no eggs, no shrimp. Nothing but this and canned red beans.

  My mother would shake her head. She cooked three full meals a day. Alfonso had eaten a hundred meals in my mother’s kitchen. She never said no. Anyone could get a plate at my mother’s table.

  I stirred the rice. Fifteen minutes. I had never eaten a meal alone in my life until I went to college. I ate breakfast with my mother and brothers; my father and Gustave ate in the barn. At lunch, I ate at school with the girls. And dinner was with whoever stayed judiciously visiting in my mother’s kitchen. Gumbo, etouffee, rice and beans, stewed chicken in sauce picante. The table never had fewer than ten people.

  I picked up the Creole seasoning. Tony Chachere’s. I hardly ever cooked—I ate out all the time. And my Calphalon pots were not my mother’s heavy cast-iron pots. Iron gave everything a smoky, rich undertone.

  Once, I’d read in a food magazine how old pots leached a little iron into the food, and I thought of how my ancestors—Amina, Marie-Therese, Moinette, and the other slaves—had survived. My brothers and I were always strong. We ate beans and rice, rabbit and wild pig and duck my father shot, and always oranges.