“I’m digging it,” he said, slipping on a striped gray top. “I can see where you’ve grown.” He pointed to a silver halide print of three black men, all with white hair, sitting on the stoop of a rooming house, their eyes fearless, but their coats drawn tight around them, showing their vulnerability. “Now this here is the boom shot. It’s not just about technique. It’s about empathy. You’ve steeped the essence out of these men like they were tea leaves. This is the kind of thing that Cartier-Bresson and Roy DeCarava do so well.”
“I like it, but it’s not the kind of thing that editors are looking for, I’m afraid.” She leaned across him and skipped a few pages. “This is more like it as far as they’re concerned.” Three naked women seemed to be making love to a draft horse. One had her nipples thrust toward the horse’s mouth. One had her face beneath the horse’s tail. The third was draped over the animal’s back. Adding to the quote unquote complexity was the fact that it was a mare and not a stallion.
“Well, it’s up to you to decide who you are, y’know, Nan. I’d say if this is what you have to do for a while to get through, then do it—bearing in mind, though, that with these kinds of deals with the devil you can easily forget the original intent and end up being a part of the very organism you used to run away from. So, who are you?” He flipped between the images. “This or that?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
He put his hand in hers. She played with his fingers, as she used to before she and Courtney started going out. They’d met through their parents, who’d known each other from jet school. Her dad was a pilot for BA; his mum had flown for Air Jamaica.
“You have to decide,” he said, pulling away from her. “I hate to sound bullshitically existential, but life really is about the choices we make given our situation. You know your situation, Nan. It’s up to you to make the choice.”
“I guess.” She looked away.
“How’ve the interviews been going?”
“Not well … It’s the book, I think. It’s not very good.”
He felt a twinge of annoyance, but he didn’t show it. He resented weakness in the people he loved; that was why he did his best to make them strong. He couldn’t count on weak people during the times when he needed to be held, and reassured—which was more often than he led others to believe. This was a part of Blanche’s appeal. It hadn’t been all about love. She was the only person in the world on whom he could depend, into whose arms he would fall backward with his eyes closed, knowing she would be there to catch him with hands as big and soft as mittens.
Looking at Nan now, he saw not an old friend, but yet another person who needed to draw strength from him.
To whom, he asked himself, would he turn if he needed help right now? He couldn’t think of anyone except Blanche. And maybe not even her anymore. For she was a part of another set of problems. He thought about the letter he had written her from Brooklyn and wondered if he’d been right to mail it. Yes, he decided. She deserved it. She’d done so much. Even this house. She’d helped him to pick it out. Explained to him the nuances of down payments and mortgages, things he still didn’t know or care that much about.
“Well, Nan,” he said with a smiling face, “just put together a new one.”
“It’s expensive to do and I can’t afford it.”
“I’ll give you the money, Nan.”
“I couldn’t do that, Fire.”
“I’ll lend it to you.”
“It wouldn’t matter. I’d only fail.”
“So why’re you going to the polytech then?”
“To get out of the house. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy.”
She broke down and started to cry.
“I want a steady job, Fire … I’m tired of having to ask Courtney for things … I want to be my own person.”
She fell on top of him and he held her, stroking her hair with one hand, ignoring the discomfort of the other, which was trapped awkwardly beneath her.
Nan was depressed for days after that. There were days when Fire wanted to sit down and talk with her, but that would’ve been helping her to cheat, he thought. It was her situation. And she had to make the choice—after which, he believed, she’d be stronger.
Soon after his arrival, Fire settled into a daily rhythm anchored by his need to paint, a violent primal urge that would punch him in the belly in the middle of the night and drag him half asleep, half awake to the bathroom, shove his face under a bracing stream, kick him down the stairs to the shed in the back of the house, and jab him even as he worked furiously, in different media on different days, but never the same thing in a row, and never anything that he would have recognized as his own had he not been there to witness the work being released from the tip of his brush, which he maneuvered like a machete, slashing back and forth across the canvas as if its whiteness, its neutrality, were something that had to be destroyed, had to be chopped open and gutted so that its hidden emotions could spew forth, staining its skin with a multicolored stream that shone like blood and was bitter as bile.
This is not me, he said to himself one day after being kidnapped during a lunch break at one of his workshops. He hadn’t even bothered to wear an apron. Paint was splattered all over his shirt, his jeans, his boots, all over the floor, even on some of the work that he’d done over the previous days, work that had been left to dry against the moldy brick walls that sucked the life from the one bare bulb that hung from the ceiling by a length of cord.
Why this, and why now? he asked, considering his stylistic evolution. At home he’d been influenced by the work of his father, a master draftsman and composer in the Western realist tradition. At Yale, where he first began to imbibe the ink of Derek Walcott, he was seduced by the light of impressionism. After that was a leap to constructivism and the work of the Mexican muralists, which led him to Cuba, where he was drawn to the vibrant, rhythmic art of the color-intuitive campesinos.
And now he had done this, he half-said, half-asked, hearing in his head the feathery tenor of his father’s voice. This. The impact of the word flung his arms out wide and spun him around, showing him in the swirling abstractions a vision of himself that he recognized as neither past, present, nor future.
Sitting on the dull cement floor in a corner, beneath a tent of cobweb, he tried to remember if he’d ever experienced anything like this, resting his chin on his knees for support as his head filled up with thoughts and memories. After sorting and stacking and counting and filing and cross-referencing for date and subject and characters and ideas, he was as unclear about his compulsion as he’d been at the beginning. He checked his watch. He was fifteen minutes late. Today they would have to wait. Because the feeling was pulling him up now, and shoving him toward a canvas.
You’ve survived three weeks of this, he said to himself as he mixed some green on a palette. But what is this? he asked again. His brush bit into the unknown. What the hell is this?
With the ballerina still on her toes, floating across the stage like a mast on the horizon, the applause went up and the curtain came down, and the Dance Theater of Harlem’s benefit performance for the United Negro College Fund broke for intermission.
Sylvia, in a black dress, a string of pearls around her neck, took Lewis’s hand and walked with him, cutting her steps short, as equally handsome couples who had paid to be seen in the right company poured into the center aisle and streamed into the lobby of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.
Patting him on the arm as she spied Boogie Boo, Sylvia asked Lewis where he’d be. He pointed to Virgil and patted her shoulder.
“Oh, Boogie, I feel like I’ve died and gone to negro hell.”
“Oh come on, Syl,” Boogie replied. “You know black folks ain’t got money till they showing it. And ain’t nobody can work an evening gown like a sister who knows her hair’s a-yit. After looking at some o’ them hairstyles tonight I’ve got a mind to quit work tomorrow and open me a shop.”
“Stop, Boogie, stop,
” Sylvia whispered through her teeth. “Can’t you see I’m being sophisticated in my too-high shoes. Goddamn, girl, if these hooker pumps don’t kill me, you will.”
“Oh come on, Syl, you know whamtalkin about. Just check it right. On the night before an event like this a stylist is a sister’s best friend. See, cause sisters know they can’t always vouch for black hair. Cause black hair likes to improvise. Black hair is like fucking jazz. And not swing either. Bebop. Why d’you think so many sisters are wearing dreads today? Dreads can’t do shit but stay nappy.”
“So where’s your date, by the way?” Sylvia asked.
“The fellas I talk to wouldn’t wanna be here.”
“They might have if you’d told them it was a Dance Theater of Harlem event.”
“Oh, it’s not about ballet or anything like that. It’s about the people they’d have to deal with. The men I talk to would see right straight through this bullshit. This has nothing to do with ballet or the United Negro College Fund. Come on now, Syl, you’re older than me. You know that. If it was all about helping they’d donate the money at the end of the year and claim it on their taxes. Why pay a toll from Jersey to be here, and add to your expenses? But it’s all about macking. They make it seem like only ghetto people mack. It’s the same thing. This is like Bentley’s on a Friday night. But instead of mail room clerks in their one tired suit, you have CPAs in their one tuxedo.”
“By the way,” Sylvia asked, through a laugh, “how’d you get tickets to this?”
“Well, you only needed two, right? It’s not like you have a family or anything.”
As she laughed with Boogie Boo, Sylvia asked herself, Is this really how I want to live my life … surrounded by these people? She didn’t. Then why, she asked, did I telephone Lewis and make up with him two weeks ago?
“Virge.”
“Lou.”
“How’re you doing?”
A photographer for Jet magazine was right on cue, documenting this historic occasion for black posterity. Two black men in black tuxedos hugging.
“So how’ve you been, stranger?” Virgil asked, keeping his arm around Lewis’s shoulders.
“Good. Just busy trying to make some money.”
“And how’s that going?”
“Let’s put it this way. If I complained I’d be ungrateful. They believe in me. No one asks any questions.”
The lights blinked.
“What’re you doing later?” Virgil asked as they headed back to their seats. “Come uptown with me for a private after-party. A little group’s getting together.”
He whispered the details in Lewis’s ear, nibbling a bit on his earlobe.
“You’re gonna get yourself in trouble,” Lewis said with a chuckle. “You’re looking too good tonight.”
“Oh, I keep forgetting,” Virgil muttered, as Sylvia approached, “that we’re not like that anymore.”
“And I think it might be best if it stayed that way.”
They’d been “like that” as a matter of convenience five years ago. The involvement lasted a few months, then petered out after they both realized that the essence of the attraction had been neither love nor lust, but status—like the feeling of wanting to drive a Rolls but not really wanting to own one.
They remained in touch, however, which wasn’t difficult, the black bourgeoisie being so small and inbred, and washed each other’s back over the years. But it was always conditional. Scrub for scrub. A rule that was never made explicit, seeing that they both accepted recompense as a very basic principle.
The after-party was held at the home of a prominent attorney on Hamilton Terrace, a crescent of limestone houses on a hill above City College. There Sylvia suffered her way through an evening of cocktails and banal conversation with a group of politicians, businessmen, and academics. Where are you, Boogie Boo, when I need you? she thought, as she listened to Lewis drone on about his latest redevelopment plan for central Harlem.
As a leading attorney tried to impress her by reciting Phyllis Wheatley, she asked, “Have you read Rita Dove? Or Yusef Komunyakaa?” He had not. She asked to be excused and locked herself in the bathroom for ten minutes to renew herself. Her arches were killing her. She wanted to take her shoes off. But it wouldn’t look good, now would it?
While she was gone, Lewis and Virgil withdrew to the terrace.
“Did you hear that Sekou’s wife is leaving him?” Lewis asked, referring to a Columbia professor whose marriage seemed Kodak-perfect as they spoke.
“No,” Virgil said, leaning closer.
“For a white man,” Lewis continued. “Brother Africa is dying, I hear.”
“Actually, I don’t think it’s because it’s a white man. He doesn’t want her with any man. He doesn’t want competition. You’ve heard about him, haven’t you?”
“I’ve heard rumors, but I don’t pay them any mind. Niggers talk a lotta shit.”
“Speaking of niggers talking … I heard the other day that you and Sylvia had broken up.”
“Oh. That was a big rumor. Everything’s fine.”
“Can I tell you something frankly, Lewis?”
“Go ahead. If you’ve got something to say, don’t hold back.”
“I never thought you two were a good match. I mean … I can’t tell you who to choose, but … let’s see … how can I put it? … Sylvia is just not grounded enough for you. She lacks a certain aggressiveness. She’s talented enough to be a queen bee but she’s content with being a worker—does that analogy make any sense? She doesn’t place herself in the right contexts to get noticed. I used to think she was lazy. I’m inclined to believe that she’s just not ambitious. And her politics are just so bizarre. I don’t think she understands the black experience. I couldn’t believe it when I saw her résumé: she’d never worked for a black organization in her life. That should’ve cued me in. Suffice it to say, we have political problems …”
“Like what?”
“And I know I don’t have to say that this is just between us, but take Congressman DeVeaux …”
During his time of great confusion, Fire received several letters from Blanche, and wrote to her in return.
In the beginning it was little more than an expression of obligation. She had responded to the letter that he’d mailed her from Brooklyn, explaining with economy and mature composure that she had used the time away from him to think about their history, and that she had now come to the conclusion that her desire for a relationship was selfish and unreasonable, and that she would simply like to be his friend. Why lose that? she asked. Who knows me better than you do? She didn’t mention the flowers; neither did she comment on the story he related. And she completely ignored his mopey expression of love, which had begun to worry him after he’d dropped the letter in the mailbox, for it promised much more than he thought he was capable of giving.
His reply, hastily drafted in pencil on composition paper while he rode the bus to his workshop, was brief, considerate, and sincere. She shouldn’t call. They needed distance for the new reality to set in. Writing was fine, but he couldn’t promise either long or speedy replies. And although she was under no obligation to agree, he thought it would be best if she immediately returned the house keys to Miss Gita and took any belongings that she might have at the house back to her apartment. Sarge would take care of his things at hers.
He heard from her within a week. A cheery note saying that she’d done all he’d asked, reminding him however that Sarge couldn’t locate his set of keys for her apartment. Did he have them in London? And would he, if he did, send them via express mail along with a few books she hungered for.
He went to Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road and the next day mailed her five volumes, two collections of poetry and three long novels, along with the keys and a rambling letter of apology that found its purpose in the last line: “There is something unsettlingly final about this.”
To which she replied in a postcard delivered via two-day service: “That is not what I
want to hear. What I want to hear is, ‘Blanche, I don’t need you to look after me anymore.’ Can you say that, Fire? Can you honestly say that?”
Shortly thereafter he was faced with a second compulsion—exchanging with her, by express post, thick, honest letters examining their history from the beginning till now.
One morning, just before sunrise, five weeks after he arrived, he was drawn from sleep by a sound that seemed to be calling from a distance. A sound as soft as it was beautiful, like moondrops falling on a mountain lake. Still groggy, he opened his eyes and made out through the mist of semi-consciousness a ghostlike figure drifting across the room—shirtless, he gathered, from the flash of pink that leaped from the dark when the man, as he now realized, passed under the trickle of window light.
As he sat up, unsure if he was dreaming or awake, the figure leaned against the back of a chair, revealing its familiar profile—the long neck and narrow shoulders that seemed to have been drawn by Dr. Seuss.
“Phil,” Fire said, fully awake now. “How the fuck’re you doing?”
Gangly, with buzz-cut sandy hair, Phil held his horn like a baby and slapped him five, taking a seat on the edge of the futon.
“So when’d you get in?” Fire asked.
“Oh, I just got in about a half hour ago,” he said, gray eyes bulging. “Fuck, after hearing you snoring from downstairs, I said I’d have to wake you up so I could get some sleep.” He began to laugh. Spastically. Which is the way he did everything except play music—as if God felt guilty for giving him so much talent and chose to deny him many other qualities, including shrewdness. As Ian liked to say, Phil was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Neither was he stylish. His glasses, which were clearly too large, bloomed out of his nose like the wings of a moth.
What he was, though, was loyal and genuine. And giving. Qualities that Fire could not always ascribe to Ian. As a result, there’d been a time when Phil had replaced Ian as the person closest to him.
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