Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  Victor came inside and said, “Smells good.” He leaned against the refrigerator, holding one of the framed 5×7 prints from the hallway. The Constable.

  “Why are you riding around with these guys?” I said.

  “I got no hooptie,” he said, palms up, joking. I folded my arms and gave him the look. The one my mother was so good at.

  “It’s—it’s like runnin the world. Especially at night,” he said, and his voice was low, his eyes distant on the flame under the pot. “Last night we were at Sundown Liquor, and I was thinkin about my moms. And this song came on. House of Pain. The drums, man, they were like—like a gong. Like, here we are. We were ridin and it’s like bein inside this bubble, floatin down the street. Checkin people. Like—surveyin the world. And nobody can touch you. I kept thinkin about Water Music, and the Navigator.”

  “I thought you won the tickets last night?”

  He grinned, and beside his eyes, a flourish of lines appeared. “I did. I had my headphones on later, cause they won’t listen to that station, and I heard caller twenty and I got it.” He went to the doorway and glanced out. “JZ still on the phone outside,” he said. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and turned over the frame. I’d written the name of the painting on the back. “So tell me about View on the Stour Near Dedham 1822.”

  “Dedham,” I said. “Not dead ham.” I had to laugh. I checked the rice. “Constable painted these huge landscapes for six years. All views of the river where he’d grown up. All at noon, I think. My friend Jane says there’s going to be a big show of his landscapes next year in London.”

  “What does she do again?”

  “She’s a museum curator in Switzerland.”

  “She make good money?”

  “Nope,” I said. “But she likes it.” I took coffee beans out of the refrigerator to warm. “So tell me about your Kool-Aid piece.”

  He put down the Constable and looked at my refrigerator door, which was blank and silver. “We were in class and some dude was all right-wing and Zelman said, He’s got you drinking the Republican Kool-Aid. And somebody said, Yo, Zelman, you had us drinking the Led Zeppelin Kool-Aid.”

  “Why’d you write about that?”

  Victor rubbed his hands through his hair. Brown and red and gold, the artful messiness and little twists at the ends. “I met this guy from Oakland. His mom and grandma and aunt all died in Jonestown. He told me about it. They left him with his pops. His pops wouldn’t go down there to Guyana. Kool-Aid. A crazy white dude with shades got all these black people to believe in him and go to Guyana and when it came down to the shit, he gave em a ghetto drink.” He looked down at the River Stour, the limpid water, the small boat. “Now it’s a joke. But I looked up the pictures. Where the words came from—dead people blowin up in the heat.”

  The front door closed, and he stood up. I peered through the arched doorway. Alfonso murmured, “She cool?” Jazen stood near the window, looking out at the roof of the next building. Victor passed me and sat down again on the leather chair.

  I leaned against the doorway. Victor wrote in a small notebook. He was smiling again, saying, “So we could be DJ Sonic, DJ Phonic, and MC Catatonic.”

  “Shut up,” Jazen said.

  “Or you could be Laconic.” Victor grinned up at me.

  “SAT words,” I said.

  “Rappers could make a hella SAT test,” he said. “Like Chamillionaire.” He pointed at Jazen. “I saw Yella Nigga in a magazine. I could be Ochre Fool, Fonso could be Burnt Umber Fool, and you could be—” He looked down at the notebook. “You said brothas call each other soldiers down in New Orleans. You could be Siena Soulja.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Jazen didn’t move.

  It was like they were speaking a code. But then Victor said to me, “We could go to Belize,” he said. “Mayeli’s from some little town called Teakettle. That’s a story.”

  I nodded. Travels with My Aunt—like Graham Greene. That would be cute and magazine-acceptable if he were a kid—like Eloise. Travels with Charley—like Steinbeck. If he were a poodle.

  He nodded his head to the beat inside his brain. “ ‘Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals, I put my back into my living,’ ” he sang softly.

  He was a twenty-two-year-old orphan, son of a man buried before he was born and a woman he held in his hands. He was a young brother with little dreads and eyes like velvet night, listening to The Who, remembering his SATs because he was sitting in my living room where he’d studied for them.

  The smell of garlic and saffron floated among us. He pulled out his concert tickets. “This Sunday! August 28.” He glanced down at the tickets again, and then put them in his pocket. “Home Depot Center. It never sounds as good as when guys used to say they were going to the Fabulous Forum. That was old school.”

  Jazen said, “We need to bounce. I gotta get my braids done.”

  Victor looked at me. “So the store’s around the corner, right? I need to grab a couple things. If I’m hangin here. Or are you goin home later?”

  “I’m going to Sarrat tomorrow,” I said. But I looked down the hallway at my bedroom door. My suitcase was in there. My notes from Switzerland. Tony’s gift.

  I could take Victor to the Graves reading. He wasn’t scary without Jazen or Alfonso. Not to me.

  “The rice should be done,” I said. In the kitchen, I turned off the flame. I was so tired. I hadn’t listened to any music, hadn’t laid out my notes. I’d spent an afternoon in a tiny village above Brienz with an old woman whose nephew brought her mushrooms. From the forest behind the wooden house. Mushrooms in a basket, and she weighed them with her two hands and clapped. If I didn’t write that tonight—organize the piece on paper and in my mind—some of it would be lost.

  I went back to the living room. “Why don’t I meet you in Sarrat tomorrow night and you can come back up here after that? I’ll talk to my neighbor—she’s a history professor at Occidental. Maybe she’ll take us on a tour. You can stay till the concert on the twenty-eighth. Then I’ll probably be going to Italy.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He bent to put back the Brassai. “You see the full moon was Friday?”

  His T-shirt stretched tight over his shoulder blades when he kept his back to me, bending at the bookcase. Damn. Now he was sad.

  I knew what he meant. His mother had taught him about palm tree sparklers, lit by the full moon. But Jazen said, “Nigga, shut up about the damn moon. Sound like a freak.” His phone rang again. “I’m out.” He went through the door without looking back.

  “The rice is done,” I said. “Let me get you a plate, Alfonso.”

  “When he say he out, he gone,” Alfonso said. He actually sighed. “I hate Burger King.” But he stood up, his pants so baggy he had to rehang them precisely on his hip bones. His jacket clanked against the doorway when he turned. “Thanks, Auntie,” he said. “For the tea.”

  While they went down the stairs, Victor lingered in the hallway. He said, “The Huntington, huh?”

  “I’m sorry, Victor, I’m just so tired. Tomorrow’s better.” I looked at the pictures above him. “We can go to the Huntington on Sunday.”

  “That’s where this one’s from.” He held the Constable print. Not leaving yet. Stubborn. Trying not to be Jazen’s boy. He said, “I like that one.” He pointed at The Annunciation. “Baby Jesus got a halo like a little satellite dish.”

  Then he swooped past me and picked up the silver-framed picture of the five of us. He fit it onto the Constable. “I gotta borrow these two, okay? I’ll bring them back.”

  “Victor,” I said. “I’ll make you a copy.”

  “I need them right now,” he shouted, and ran down the stairs.

  THE GOLDEN GOPHER

  FIVE YEARS SINCE Glorette was murdered. I sat on the couch with rice in a blue and white bowl from Vietnam that Tony had given me.

  The Navigator started up—drums and bass came through the stucco and shook the whole apartment. I went outside to the balcony, but
I couldn’t see the car. Lil Wayne’s voice was dim and tribal. Everyone who lived here felt those drums, every day. All the kids played Fifty Cent and Lil Wayne. Everyone looked like what they thought black was, from inside their tinted windows. They all wanted to be Jazen and Alfonso—legends in their own minds, until they got to college class or to Starbucks.

  The sounds faded. Victor had left behind his little notebook on the table, in his hurry. The picture of him in his mother’s arms still there.

  He wanted the picture without him.

  What did he want? Did he want to be me? It flew through my mind—his hair, his height, his voice. He couldn’t pass.

  I wasn’t passing. I was floating. I was invisible. He couldn’t be invisible.

  Glorette stared at me from the table. I picked up the photo. I had seen her only a few times in the last years before she died, and never in Los Feliz. But I had brought Victor here with me one weekend to study for the SAT.

  It was March, and I was visiting my parents, sitting on the porch because the orange blossoms were like fragrant stars sending perfume through the yard. Victor had come out of his grandfather’s house across the road with a huge book. SAT study guide.

  DJ Laconic. Catatonic.

  We’d sat at my mother’s table, going over the word choices. I showed him how to use Latin roots, to think of all the French and Spanish and Italian words he already knew from common use. Not to panic when faced with a random list of freaky words.

  Then he said, “I gotta go home and check on Moms. I been here at Grandpère’s for a few days, cause she was gone.”

  He had been coming to stay with his grandparents since my brother Lafayette was on a plastering job and saw Victor alone on an apartment balcony, sitting with his back against the wall and his eyes closed, shirt filthy. He was four. Glorette had passed out in an alley and been taken to the hospital days before.

  But Victor always went back home. Home was just his mother.

  I drove him to the apartment. She was sleeping on the couch, her body curled like a cat, one hand dangling over the edge, fingers fanned elegant even when she was unconscious.

  “Hey,” she said, opening her eyes. That was the first word she always said to me. Hey. Like it had been a week. Not a year. She watched Victor go into the bedroom.

  “Hey,” I said. “How you been?”

  She sat up and shrugged. Her collarbone was stark and the hollow in her throat deep. Like a model. No matter what she did to her body, she looked good. If I hadn’t slept for two days, I got dark crescents under my eyes, but Glorette had lavender smudges over her eyelids that could pass for faded eye shadow. “You got your hair in a braid.” She grinned faintly and lifted her chin. “You remember? That time?”

  We could be eighty and still speak shorthand like this. I said, “Yeah.” I wanted to sit on the couch, but it was heaped with clothes she was using as blankets. There was no chair, no coffee table, no other furniture except her favorite glass-topped round table, the one that looked like a patio set, in the linoleum patch that was the dining room.

  I sat on the filthy carpet. “I remember.”

  “Clarette and Cerise braided our hair together that one time. We were twelve, huh?”

  We each had an outside braid, and our skulls were held close together with a single thick braid, fat as an arm. They put us into one huge sweatshirt belonging to Bettina’s mother and called us Siamese twins.

  “We were exactly the same height,” I said, as I always did. Glorette looked at the closed bedroom door, where Victor was. I looked at the fist-sized hole in the wall near the front window, where the white plaster looked like hard cracked frosting.

  Even our bones matched, back then. Our wrists hung at the same distance from our shoulders. Our temples touched when we lurched forward in that sweatshirt. But then Glorette became beautiful, and I was still a child.

  Beauty was the arrangement of the flesh on the bones, the way the mouth stayed still while the eyes moved under their fringe of lashes.

  He had come out of the bedroom with a gym bag. He said to Glorette, “I’m gonna study for the SAT.”

  He’d slept here on this couch, after we studied all weekend at the teakwood table. We wrote hundreds of sentences, and broke down the words. Lucid. Lucidity. Elucidate. Liquidate. Luminous. Loquacious. Laconic. Ludicrous.

  We got stuck for a while on the F words. Febrile, fervid, feverish. Fervent. The sentence I said: “Every woman wants a fervent declaration of love.”

  Victor had laughed. “Like the dude has a fever?”

  I laughed and thought Jane Austen, Edith Wharton. “Like his words have a fever.”

  Then Victor said, “Who did you love? Back then?”

  “Marcus Thompson. You knew that.” It was awkward, because Marcus was his history teacher at the high school. I hadn’t seen Marcus in a long time.

  “But who else?”

  I couldn’t tell him. Because after Marcus, there was not love. There was Skeet Howard, in college. Then a young pianist in France, and Simon, who played the oboe and lived in Cambridge, and a basketball player I met for a day in Pisa. Now there were the few men I slept with during assignments, carefully, in hotel rooms.

  “Nobody fervent, okay? You better tackle the L words again.”

  We’d sat here and watched TV that night, and he was still saying, “Liquid. Liquefy. Liquidation. Livid. Lipid.”

  I couldn’t believe the easy way he played with the words, the way he could free-associate forever with me. Eventually, he fell asleep and I got up to go to bed. He turned over when I moved, and a long indentation from a pillow with braided cord ran along his cheek like a scar. How did blood work? He was Glorette’s son—she was the only living child of Anjolie, who rarely used words aloud, though she might have thought thousands of them, and Gustave Picard, who had never known how to read or write.

  My own father’s mother, Antoinette Antoine, had never learned to read. She had worked cane all her short life. Her mother, Anjanae, could sign her name and write her children’s names—in laborious capital letters. But her mother, Marie-Therese Antoine, though she had been born a slave, owned four books and could read. The books had been given to her by her mother, Moinette Antoine, my ancestor, who was taught to read by the young woman whose hair she curled on the plantation called Azure. It was named that for the color of the young woman’s eyes.

  When I was ten, we had visited Anjanae on the place still called Azure, and she showed me the four books. They were on a shelf high in her living room, next to pictures of Martin Luther King Jr., John and Robert Kennedy, and a Jesus who had been blond but had darkened with age and firesmoke to the color of us.

  A Shakespeare collection, a novel called The Blind Heart, a book of Edgar Allan Poe poems, and the Bible.

  When he was here, I had listened to Victor’s lips pop softly, twice, in his sleep. Like two bubbles bursting inside his mouth. He would never startle if he felt safe, I realized, hovering over him with a blanket. But he’d slept around chaos and danger all his life. I’d seen Glorette’s apartments—always one bedroom, and she slept on the couch, while he had the futon in the bedroom. He slept in his clothes, even his shoes on, so visiting crackheads couldn’t steal them. He kept his headphones on all night for the same reason, and to erase the noise from his mother’s friends in the other room. But his books were safe, he told me once. No one tried to steal those.

  Maybe I should have let him stay tonight. But I was so tired. Too tired for words. I just wanted to sleep for a minute. I pushed myself off the couch, put my bowl in the kitchen, and went back to the bookcase near where Victor had sat in the leather chair. A pile of books on the floor. Victor had taken out the Brassai photos, and two books by my friend James Ralston, whose nom de plume was Jimmy Taco. His new book was Handheld Heaven: A History of the Taco. Victor had been reading his first: National Treasure: A Cultural and Personal History of the Sandwich.

  Two pieces of paper fell out from the pages. Victor’s tin
y perfect handwriting. You Can Eat It Dry: A Personal History of Ramen. Rock Cane Candy: A Cultural and Personal History of Crack in Southern California.

  I sat on the edge of the chair and laughed. Arthur Graves would read tonight about the Argentinean woman in a dry, astonished comic tone. Victor was probably funnier than he was. Maybe I could get him to write a piece for the LA Times, to start. Not a scary one.

  I opened the second piece of folded paper.

  The Villas—#24—The Balcony

  What you don’t understand

  Is

  The snarling jeweled nightbird can be

  Beautiful

  Even when it wakes you up at two flying in circles

  A silver rope a silver beam tied down? tethered anchored

  No escape for the pilot

  Either

  Balcony. Tethered. Beautiful words.

  He struggled with the seventh line. A rope. I had seen it over and over—the helicopter circling forever, as if held by a child. A kite. A lasso? Maybe that word.

  He just loved words. Where did that impulse come from, deep inside his brain with its folds and crevices? His father had loved music. Maybe Sere Dakar’s love for the notes and where they flew inside their lines, or outside, had been filtered down into his son.

  That weekend, I’d taken him back Sunday night to the Riviera. It was near ten. We had stopped at the store for orange juice, his favorite Corn Pops, and a pack of #2 pencils with a small sharpener. His mother would have been out on the sidewalks near the Launderland and Sundown Liquor.

  Thinking of Glorette, I brought my left wrist up to my face. No one could really see the tattoo unless I pointed it out, which I never did. The flowers on my skin might look tribal. Moroccan. Algerian. Berber.

  Glorette and I had lain under the orange trees one summer when we were twelve. We had seen the jailhouse tattoos on Alphonse, Clarette’s older brother, when he got out. He had a crude drawing of a woman on his forearm. He’d bragged to my brothers how a Mexican inmate did it—with an ink pen and a needle and a cassette recorder.