He’d never known New York to be indifferent. There was always something calling out to the lonely. Good things and bad things, novelties and fixtures, bright lights and dark places, saviors and con men. But tonight, though, the city just went about its business.
Raising his head slowly, he looked up at the sky and couldn’t see the stars through the mustard gas of smog. Jesus Christ. This place would deny him now the basic right to wish.
“Whassup?”
He looked over his shoulder and saw a guard—a one-eyed youth with two gold caps.
“Why you looking like that, B? One o’ your boys up in here?”
He nodded.
“Whassup? He got shot?”
“He might have tried to kill himself. We’re not sure yet.”
“He white, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“Cause when niggers get upset they kill another nigger.”
Fire shrugged his shoulders.
“But yo, I gotta go finish my shift. I just came out for some air. I don’t know how they expect a mofucker to get well with that death smell they got up in there.”
Fire shrugged again.
“But yo, don’t worry about your boy, man. What’s gotta be gotta be. Go home and chill with your lady, man, and don’t give a damn about a thing.”
He slunk away. Fire found a phone and called her, tapping his feet as he dialed, trying to ignore his stiff chest and trembling jaw. She wasn’t picking up. He called again. Same thing.
He didn’t know what to do now. Didn’t know what to think. Call again now? Call again later? If so, how much later? Don’t call and just show up? Go to Brooklyn, then call again from Brooklyn Heights? Go to the hotel and sleep and call her the next morning? Is she sleeping? Is she out? Is she on her way here because she’s concerned about me? Is she home but doesn’t want to pick up because she’s changed her mind about me coming over? Is she okay? If she’s not okay, what would I do? Call the cops and send them there? Or would that be a job for EMS? Fuck, maybe Lewis came over and she doesn’t want to pick up? Or she wants to pick up but knows that she shouldn’t? What if she isn’t okay? Is she okay? What if he’s there? What are they doing? Are they talking? Are they eating? Are they sleeping? Are they making love? Are they fucking? If they are, is she liking it? Is she on top? Or is she on the bottom? On her back or on her belly? Are they standing up against the fridge? Is she bent over with her head in the fridge and her legs apart? Is she okay? Is she okay? Is she okay? Did she really mean to tell me to come over? Did she mean it then change her mind? What if I went over there now, what the fuck would we do anyway? Talk? Sleep? Eat? Make love with her head in the refrigerator? Or would we start kissing at the door then make love right there—half in, half out, half clothed, half nude, half sane, half mad—and roll down the steps halfway into the street and confuse a drunk driver? Is she okay? Is she okay? Is she okay?
He decided to call her again, but he was out of change. As he stood at the curb to cross the street to get some, a cab discharged a fare in front of him. He stood there looking at the open door, not knowing what to do until the driver, a Russian with limp brown hair, asked him where he was going.
“Brooklyn.”
“Where exactly, sir?”
He thought for a minute. Should he go to his or hers? He mumbled directions to the driver, leaned against the door, and went to sleep.
Like a higgler, he stood at the top of the steps with his shoulders straight, his back erect, his body aligned to ease the burden that weighed on his head. Through the door a bunch of keys were tinkling like a kora, and soft feet moved on the floorboards like mallets on the keys of a marimba.
She was home. A sigh curled him over like a bent blue note, giving him release, toppling the basket of woes at her doorway, where she was standing now, in slippers and white pajamas, framed by yellow light, needing only wings to be an angel.
“Come,” she said. “Come inside.” She led him to the couch and helped him remove his shoes, leaving him to return with a pail of water foamy with bath salts, aloe vera, and mint leaves. Working quickly but with care, she rolled up his trouser legs, exposing his calves, which were round and firm like cantaloupes, and helped him settle his feet in the warmth.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, standing now. She lit two candles and turned off the lights. “I was out at the grocery when you called. I needed some ingredients for something I wanted to make you.”
“Thank you so much,” he said, as bands of muscle laid down their arms. “You’ve gone outside yourself tonight.”
She went to the kitchen, pulling his eyes like smudged ink on wet paper, and returned from the oven with a saucer of cookies, trailing behind her the scent of almonds.
She slipped a cookie between his lips, allowing her finger to linger there as he licked it clean of crumbs and butter.
“You are too sweet to me,” he said, floating off to sleep.
She had begun to massage his neck now.
“So you’ve finally gotten your cookie then.”
“Finally … after such a long time. Can I have the recipe?”
“No. I want you to come here whenever you need them.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know what makes them special.”
“Oh do you?” she said, wrapping his hair around her fists like reins.
“Yes,” he said, languorously, lulled even more now by the scalp massage, by the ebb and flow of pulling. “Molasses.”
“How’d you know?” she asked. “I only used a drop.”
“A man can smell these things.”
He woke up on the couch, draped in bedding, blue-gray sheets like rain observed from a distance. The basin was gone, the plate cleared away.
As he rose he heard her breathing, sucking in and heaving out with concentrated effort as if inhaling and exhaling were not instinctive, but skills she’d learned from a teacher who’d told her to practice always—even in her sleep.
He followed the sound, and found her lying in bed, on her side, in a corner, with her spine against the wall, curled back into herself like a fist.
If he’d fallen asleep with her, would she be breathing easier? He felt his own breathing slowing down, changing its pitch, sounding like cassava being grated for a pone. And as he was swallowed by the rhythm of her back and forth, he sensed with his spirit and not his mind that maybe, if he just tried hard enough, he could breathe for her and lighten her slumber.
Pulling the door halfway shut, he took the phone to the kitchen and called the hotel to check his messages. There were three from Margaret. He called her and received good news.
Phil would be fine. The pills were an accident. And he’d be staying in New York for a little while because his audition would have to be rescheduled. This, she said, would give them time to know each other. The story was quite funny, she said, but it was best to hear Phil tell it.
“Phil.”
“Fire.” He was as happy as a dread with an ounce of weed.
“So how are you? Margaret said you’d be coming out in a few days. So what’s happening with the two of you, by the way? This is all quite strange and new. What’s going on? What happened with the pills?”
“It was an honest accident. The kind of thing that could happen to anybody. D’you know what feng xiu is? It’s the extract from the smegma of this rare Chinese deer. And they use it to make a pill called feng xiu xiang, which you can get in Chinatown.”
“What are these pills good for?”
“Long erections. You can pop one and stay up for twenty minutes. I was having some problems with Margaret and Ian told me what to get and where to get it. You can’t get it everywhere. It’s sold from this little hole in the wall in a cellar on Mott Street. And they’ll only sell it to you if you give them a code word.”
“What?”
“It’s really potent stuff. It’s illegal, actually. It has dangerous side effects.”
“Like what?”
“Well,
taken without a meal it can shrivel your cock.”
“So how is this connected to the sleeping pills?”
“Well Margaret’s a hard revver—Ian says she’s the town bike but I don’t take what he says seriously—and we were supposed to be getting together later, so I figured I’d take an extra dose to make her happy. Well, I thought if I took a lot of them I could make her really happy. And I took the wrong pills by accident.”
“Whose pills? And where did this happen?”
“Oh, the pills are mine. I haven’t been sleeping well in the last couple of months. I’m a bit concerned about my career, actually. Good gigs are hard to come by. I’d just left a program at the New School and—”
“Phil, are you serious about all this? I don’t want to laugh then find out that you’ve got, as they say, issues, you know.”
“Fuck, I wish I were joking. But it was kinda cool though. Have you ever had your stomach pumped? Oh, it’s really cool. They hook you up to this big machine and they run a tube down your throat. You should try it just for the experience.”
“Phil, can I ask you a question? Does anything ever bother you?”
“Sure. Not having a gig. But I’ll be fine though.”
“So I’ll come and check you this evening then. I have to take care of certain things in the day. You need anything from the outside? Food or anything?”
“No, the food here’s great.”
“Phil, it’s hospital food.”
“The only thing better is airline food. It’s not the food so much. I like the way they separate everything into compartments. Okay, you could bring me something, but make it something that’s easy to fix up like that. Don’t bring a burrito or anything.”
“So by the way, how’s Ian taking this thing with you and Margaret?”
“Fine. He’s the one who arranged it.”
“Whadyou mean?”
“It started as a threesome, actually. Sort of like the blackbirds on the wall. Now there’s two. I think they’ve just gotten tired of each other, Ian and Margaret.”
“I see … Well, she seems quite nice. Very bright.”
“She knows a lot about music, too, man. We learn a lot from each other. But what are you doing over here?”
“A little business.”
“Give over, Fire. It’s Sylvia, isn’t it?”
“Just cool, man.”
“Come on, Fire. I’m not stupid y’know. I was the one who brought the parcel for you.”
“Just cool, man. I can’t really talk right now.”
“Come on, Fire. I won’t tell.”
He leaned into the phone. “Okay … but this is between me and you.”
After washing the dishes from the night before, and sealing the cookies in sandwich bags, he trawled her fridge and cupboards for a sense of her taste and went out to the shops to get ingredients for breakfast, leaving behind a note to say he’d soon return.
On the night when he’d dropped her off at home, he was remembering now, the driver had taken a route past some Middle Eastern shops.
After a few wrong turns he found it, the old Lebanese quarter along Atlantic Avenue near Smith Street—not so much a bazaar as a throwback to the civility of prewar Beirut—where men with dark mustaches and open-necked shirts sipped cardamom coffee at sidewalk cafés and women dressed by Macy’s ordered baklava and pistachio cakes in French as well as Arabic as their Segaddicted kids waited outside to make sure the cops didn’t ticket the Camry.
Inside Sahadi Importing, a neighborhood suprette whose informality seemed to mock the yuppies who wanted to insist it was gourmet, he edged around barrels of bulgur wheat and fava beans, and squeezed by counters lined with five-gallon jars of dates and figs and nuts and sun-dried fruit, choosing for his basket carefully by using his senses the way his mother had taught him—sniffing for signs of fermentation, squeezing for fitness, even listening. The sign of a good avocado is a rattling seed.
On the way back he picked up a shirt, some socks, and some boxers at a Gap on Montague Street. Once inside the apartment, he checked to see that Sylvia was fine and then went about prepping breakfast. He showered and changed and waited for her to rise, feeling quite at home now after taking a seat on her toilet.
In the living room again, he turned on the telly and switched back and forth between a key contest in Mexican-league soccer and an episode of Xena, wondering as he smothered his laughter who was the worse actor, the striker taking a dive in the penalty box or the gladiator trying to sound like Kirk Douglas in Spartacus.
Still tired from the night before, he nodded off to sleep, waking up a little after noon. She was still not awake, so he occupied his time by wandering through the apartment. She had a decent collection of art, including Elizabeth Catlett and Romare Bearden originals. But it was clear that she hadn’t bought the work just for its investment value. A lot of it, he concluded, she simply liked. Crossing his legs on the floor, he rifled through her music, a collection that was deep and wide, ranging from jazz and classic soul to soukous and qawwali. She particularly liked Al Green and Marvin Gaye, and Cassandra Wilson and Sweet Honey in the Rock. Her library, though, was deep but narrow. Her tastes were decidedly American, and didn’t seem to stray beyond the French and Russian must-reads like Camus and Dostoyevsky. It’s fascinating, he thought, how difficult it is to predict people’s tastes. For judging from the art on her walls and the music in her racks he’d expected to see well represented the work of writers like Naguib Mafouz and Nadine Gordimer and Maryse Condé. But greatness was the dilemma of America, wasn’t it? It was a large, rich country with only two neighbors, so one could easily live here in comfort without considering the rest of the world—as the rest of the world has to consider itself in addition to considering America. His novels, for instance, had sold a million and a half copies in the Commonwealth, mainly in Britain, Canada, and Australia, but had done about twenty-five thousand in the States. Which didn’t bother him. Success in the States would come—if it did—like most things … in the fullness of time.
There were some photo albums on the bottom shelf. He took his time going through them, struck by the absence of childhood pictures or any group shots with family. Why is that? he wondered, adding this to the list of things he wanted to ask her later.
Gaps notwithstanding, the albums gave him a bit of context. And after going through them he felt as if he knew her a little better. He knew where she went to school. And had an idea of her career track. He knew now, as he’d suspected, that she’d traveled fairly widely, and also, as a photo in a carnival costume showed, that her bottom was fuller than it appeared in her clothes.
The scene looked like Trinidad or Barbados. His lashes licked her image from the page. Her body was in profile and her face was turned toward him, smiling, as if she knew, as the shutter sliced away this moment of her life, that one day a man would recognize this as the essential her—a lover of life and its possibilities.
He was pulled out of his thoughts by a rustling, and what he thought was her voice. But he wasn’t sure. For he’d heard it across time and space—from within the paper on which the picture was printed, on that layer just below the ink, where the life behind the image really exists, where he’d held her hand and danced with her behind a float, imbibing rum drinks and diesel fumes and salt-laced sweat, dancing on the street in a crowd with the same vitality with which he would shuffle inside her sweaty shabeen as soon as they were alone.
Going to her room, standing by the door, he found her still sleeping, and realized, as he watched her mumbling groggily, that the rustling had been the friction of her clothes against her skin. For she was lying on her belly, naked, her white pajamas crumpled with the sea green sheets, one leg splayed, the other drawn up the way women do when they want to feel a deeper heat.
Moaning from the depths of her unconscious, she rolled onto her back in a settling of shimmering flesh, falling now beneath his shadow, which splashed over her breasts, draining away through her cleavag
e into her navel.
As he leaned against the doorway of this quiet room whose drawn shades granted privacy, he felt every hair on his blood-hot body filling each pore in hers.
He pulled away. This place was hers. And therefore privacy wasn’t theirs until she’d given him permission.
He returned to the couch. There he pondered the possibilities of her body: the lean torso, the full calves, the firm thighs that melted like pitch into soft hips. And her bottom, which he knew now had not been overdramatized by a wide-angle lens. It was tight at the sides without dimples or blemishes, but filigreed, as women’s bottoms should always be, with stretch lines.
He channel-surfed, trying to get away from it, but it followed him to talk shows and sports roundups and cartoons and sitcoms and rescue reenactments … this big, brown batty on a string.
He heard her stirring again, and her voice calling his name, then a pause, during which, he could tell, she was dressing.
“Oh, it’s so late,” she said from the bathroom door, a little bit shy before brushing her teeth. “I’m sorry … I really didn’t mean to oversleep like this and pay you no mind. I’m being such a bad hostess. I hope you found ways to entertain yourself?”
“That you don’t have to worry about.”
“Good. I’ll be with you in a minute. And did I tell you good morning? Good morning.”
“Good morning to you too.”
“Are you hungry or anything?”
“Yes, but I’ve started breakfast. I’ll finish now that you’re up. Go ahead, shower and all that, then we can eat.”
“You’re making us breakfast. I was wondering what that smell was. Okay, two more points for you. I’ll be really quick then.”
In the shade of the cherry tree in the small backyard, in a corner by the fence, they spread a blanket and had a simple meal: buljol, chips of salt cod tossed in thyme and olive oil with garlic, diced tomatoes, chopped onions, and minced bell peppers; and bake, an unleavened bread made from flour and salt with a pinch of baking powder and butter. On the side they had avocado slices, cubes of feta cheese, and, to cool their lips, sugar and water with crushed ice.
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