She seemed satisfied.
“And you and Ian have known each other since childhood?” she continued.
“Through an uncle of ours, I-nelik, who’s a musician.”
A breeze flipped her dress above her knees, flashing her thighs, which were pressed together, forming a shape like the trunk of a cotton tree. He glanced at the strollers and sunbathers. If he were alone with her … or if the sky were darker … or, he was thinking now, if they were far away from her home, he’d slip his oarsman in her canoe and grunt her name as he paddled.
“I-nelik … I-nelik …”
One thought was overtaken by another, causing the first to stall then stop. She was standing with her legs slightly open, and the sun was shining through her dress. And it seemed as if—he wasn’t sure, for it was just a shadow, wasn’t it?—that she wasn’t wearing underwear. Because that shadow there, that murkiness below the fabric, was not a wedge of well-cut silk. It was triangular though … with wavy edges … like a delta seen from a mountaintop.
“You know bout I-nelik?” he said, wondering if she’d seen him looking. “I-nelik is my ole man’s youngest brother. I used to find every excuse to spend time with him when I was young. I used to think he was so cool.”
“What was so cool about him?”
“He’s only fifteen years older than me. So he was in his late twenties, early thirties when I was growing up. So I felt like I could talk to him about anything, especially guy-things I couldn’t really talk to my ole man about. Plus he was a romantic kinda guy. I-nelik was a dentist, y’know—did his D.D.S. at Tufts. He’d always wanted to do music, but the whole family was against it. Not because it was the arts or anything like that—they never fought against my ole man wanting to paint—but because he wanted to play reggae. And in those days—we’re talking like the late sixties, early seventies—reggae was street music. You couldn’t play it uptown. It was just a ghetto thing.
“The same people who are praising Bob Marley now used to fight it. So about four years after coming back and setting up a practice, and playing one or two sessions at places like Randy’s and Dynamic, rasta just buss in him head, and he just knew that he had to play music. That that was his calling. And he sold the practice and became a full-time musician. Of course there were some really hard times. He started growing locks and because o’ that people wouldn’t rent him a flat in a good neighborhood, so he just went and lived in the ghetto and did volunteer work two times a week at an area clinic. There wasn’t much money … but he was happier than when he was a fat cat named Jonathan Heath. But the thing is that he’s all right, now. After linking with Bob and all that, everything worked out. So anyway, I met Ian because he and I-nelik were neighbors. Then when it got back to my father that Ian was a prodigy, it became almost like trading places. Ian would spend most of the summer by me and I would spend mine by him.”
“I gather that you didn’t spend all your time in Jamaica,” she said, intrigued now, seeing in his personality the convergence of two others.
“I came here to go to college.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Yale.”
“Impressive.”
“It’s a school.”
“Well, be modest. What did you study?”
“Painting and art history.”
“Like your father. Is that what you are? An artist?” Her voice rang out as if she’d made a discovery.
“Not anymore. I gave that up a while ago.”
It settled again. “Well, what are you doing now?”
“A little o’ this and a little o’ that? A little writing, a little farming.”
“Writing? What kind of writing?”
“Oh … I have an idea for a novel,” he said dismissively. This wouldn’t draw attention in New York, he thought, where ideas for books were as commonplace as ideas for films in L.A.
“Doesn’t everyone,” she said, proving his point. “Me too.”
“So there you go.”
“And this farming thing?” she asked. “What kind of farm is it? Where is it? How big is it?”
“Well, that’s a new thing. About a year now. I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do with it. It will reveal itself. Sarge, the man who grows that coffee I brought you, has some ideas. We’ll figure it out when I get back.”
“So you didn’t plan this whole farming thing?”
“No, it just worked out that way.”
“Is that how you run your life?” she said, throwing her hands in the air like a magician demonstrating that the dove has disappeared. “You just let things happen?”
“Pretty much.”
“That’s so alien to me,” she said, shuddering in jest.
“Different strokes,” he said, cocking his head and smiling, sure now that she was clothed beneath her dress. The flesh-colored panties were sheer and full-cut.
“So how d’you get by while waiting for this novel to write itself, and the crops to just spring out of the ground?” she asked, sitting on a lower rail. Her face had become serious now. Her tone was not unlike the one a cynic uses on the eve of religious conversion. Respectful but ironic.
“Travel,” he said, spreading his arms along the back of the bench. He crossed his legs, trying to make a joke of looking serious, then decided to go along with it when he saw that something in her was demanding to see that. “Read. Listen to music. Talk to people. Maybe take a stab at some writing.”
“How long have you been living like this?” she asked. She opened her palms, set to catch an answer.
“Like how?”
“Writing, traveling, painting …”
“Pretty much since leaving college.”
“Doesn’t this make you nervous? Don’t you ever start saying to yourself, ‘Time’s going, I better start living like a quote unquote adult and get a real job and settle down’?”
“No.”
“Don’t you worry about money?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because my needs are pretty simple.”
“What are they?”
“A place to live. Food to eat. Good friends. Good health. That kinda thing.”
“Oh, come on. If I didn’t like you so much I’d smack you.”
“Why?”
“Cause you’re full of it. Those shoes are a coupla hundred dollars.”
“But how many do I own?”
“I don’t know. Tell me.”
“Shoes total? Four and that includes a pair of sneakers.”
He stared at her. She held his gaze, then broke out laughing. He was joking, obviously.
“You’re such a liar.”
They talked for hours, sitting together on the bench, sometimes getting up to stroll, but talking always, about whatever came to mind—music and art and books and travel and history and politics and cooking—teaching, learning, questioning, and explaining, but always talking, the words splashing down with the authority of abundance.
An observer would not have seen in them the heat of new desire. For this passion that they were feeling now, but hadn’t yet announced, was old, having existed for thousands of years, in thousands of stories, in thousands of minds as a thought: If you were going to spend a month on a desert island and you could only take one person, who would it be?
That evening, the sun hit the water in a cataclysm of streaking pebbles. Orange balls with fluttering tails of purple, red, and gold.
Sitting on the bench, high above the water, Sylvia imagined herself far away. In her mind the Promenade was the terrace of a house on a hill. And the rippling waves, clay-colored from the sun, were the overlapping roofs of the nearest town—a hundred miles away.
She’d used their hours of conversation to shade in the sketch he’d given her. She knew now that he’d lived in several countries, had met Claire through Ian, and had published two collections of poetry with a small press in England. But more important, she now had a sense of his visions and values.
He was an idealist. A romantic. If he weren’t so phosphorescently intelligent she’d be inclined to say naïve.
How does he function in the modern world? she wondered. He didn’t have a computer, and had no plans of getting one. He wrote in longhand, then transcribed on a manual typewriter. He didn’t even own a date book. He’d never held a job in his life, had never even tried, and had always done “this and that” to support himself as he pursued his art.
This and that. She chuckled to herself now, still surprised, as she considered some items on his résumé—bartender, English teacher, factory worker, translator, jeweler, cab driver, auto mechanic, florist, short-order cook, farm laborer, nightclub bouncer, roadie, encyclopedia salesman, market huckster. And what did he have to show for all this grunt work? Where was his payoff after the sacrifice? Where was his Wailers gig?
What did he have to show? she asked herself again, as if the answer were merely waiting on a prompt to reveal itself. A noncareer as a painter? A coupla poetry books and a piece of land he was thinking of farming?
And he clearly hadn’t settled down. What had he been doing in London? “Visiting friends,” he said, “and doing some writing workshops.”
There was something compelling in his madness, though … something inspirational … something noble in his pursuit. Because he was someone with choices who had chosen to do this, to live simply.
As she thought about this it occurred to her that she was feeling something for him that she’d never felt for any other man in her life. Respect. What she’d thought was respect in the past, she was realizing now, had simply been consideration and courtesy. She’d never been enthralled by their beliefs or opinions, largely because none of those men had equaled or surpassed her in intellect or experience. She had never wanted to be with a man simply for how he made her feel, she admitted to herself now. It had always been for other reasons, none of which, she thought as she looked back now, had been valid.
She looked at him, he was looking back at her … and as the air around them was empurpled by the twilight, she sensed the gap between their faces dissolving … and his breath searing her nose … and his lips steaming the wrinkles out of hers.
“Weren’t you scared all those years when you were living hand to mouth?” she asked as they walked along a path to Montague Street, where activity had begun to stir beneath the awnings that shaded the windows of the shops and cafés.
He palmed the back of her head and massaged her scalp, then slid his hand across her shoulder, allowing it to freefall down her back, where it seized the stem of her waist. “No,” he said. “I was able to buy all the things I needed. I really don’t need many material things to be happy y’know, Sylvia. Not a lot.”
“What are some of them?”
The taste of her lips still fresh on his, he steered her down a side street overhung with trees that seemed to drink from the pools of darkness.
“Cut flowers … not necessarily fancy ones either,” he told her, as his eyes scanned ahead for a recessed entrance where he could lean against her and squeeze the flesh on her hips as he kissed her wetly. “Freshly brewed coffee, two good speakers, enough money to buy a book and a couple of CDs a week. Throw in a nice white shirt and a pair of dress shoes. After that everything is gravy.”
“You believe that?” she asked, wondering if that ridge that she’d noticed on his trouser leg as he sat on the bench had all belonged to him, or whether he’d been assisted by a flattering accident of pleating.
“I’m not saying everybody should do this,” he replied. “But that is how I feel.”
“And you’ve always felt this way?”
“I’ve never had any evidence to the contrary. Americans are the richest people in the world—but are they happier than anybody else? Watch the talk shows or the evening news. Look at people’s faces on the subway.”
She began to think of herself now. A near six-figure salary, an Ivy League diploma, and no dependents. She should feel an incredible sense of possibility, shouldn’t she?
A young man on Rollerblades slowed down and gave them a flyer, then sped away into the night.
“Would you like to go to this?” she asked, looking at the flyer. “I know the place. I used to read there quite a bit at one time.”
They were standing beneath a hedgerow. They stared at each other, daunted by the challenge of forging a new alphabet to create the new words to describe this new feeling that was causing their skin to gooseflesh. Stymied, they reached out and held hands and began to kiss slowly, braiding their tongues like a poet plaits metaphors.
After walking down a hill through the urban campus of the Watchtower Society, they came to Old Fulton Street, whose old brick buildings had been turned into restaurants and bars. Holding hands, she led him as they ran across the wide street like kids on a great adventure, first to the median, then through traffic to the other side.
They walked down the gradient toward the river and the old ferry landing, which was marked by a lighthouse and a jetty—a narrow strip of planks where a wedding was taking place on the roof deck of a moored white barge that was strung with balloons and flowers. Beyond the barge, across the river the twinkling skyscrapers seemed to be moving toward them like a hundred tornadoes of light.
Just before they reached the lighthouse she led him round a corner, into a different world, a different time. Behind them was blacktop; here they walked on cobblestones crisscrossed by trolley tracks. Passing under the Brooklyn Bridge, they slithered past the skeletons of old warehouses and rehabbed factories, occupied now by photographers and artists, and filed beneath the Manhattan Bridge, continuing now along silent streets with broken hydrants and pavements overgrown with weeds. They stopped now and then in doorways to kiss and rub against each other, commingling their fluids and scents, till they arrived at a low brick building with arched metal doors, where a crowd of mostly young people were comparing the work of Baraka and Ginsberg. “But neither of them could exist without the jazz poetry of Langston Hughes,” a newcomer said. “So y’all better get him up in there.”
They paid their five-fifty and climbed a flight of dusty stairs to a third-floor performance space dreamily lit by hundreds of candles fixed in bundles to the chipped and moldy walls. Wading through the tide of dreadheads and baldies they stopped at the bar—two sawhorses and a sheet of ply—and got a lager for her and a stout for him and found a corner in the back, by a window ledge; there she sat with her legs apart and drew him into her private space.
Claiming him completely now she rested against his back, her chin on his shoulder, knotted her ankles in front of him and chilled. As a kid with yellow glasses freestyled with a three-piece band comprised of turntables, harmonica, and electric guitar, Sylvia wondered if Fire had noticed that she’d answered yes to the question: Do you feel like reading tonight?
Three hours later, at a little after ten, the emcee, a bodybuilder in carpenter jeans, called her name. As he leaned forward to give her way, Fire asked by puckering his lips, When did all this happen? To which she replied by blowing him a kiss, Wouldn’t you like to know.
This is me, she thought, as she made her way to the podium. All around her, hands were fluttering to mark her return. She felt sexy and powerful—a cat among a flock of birds. She felt so natural. Here in this place. With these people. With this man who understood her need to be there. Who could share it with her. Who’d appreciate it. Who could drink a beer with her and sit on a ledge between her legs in a place that smelled of mold, sage, sandalwood, and myrrh.
“Whassup, Brooklyn!” she said, waving her hand in a general salute. “It’s so good to be here again, after not taking this stage for … what?”—she turned to the emcee—“almost eight months?”—he shook his head—“eight months. But you know how it is. Nine to five and all that.
“This poem is something that I just wrote in my head on my way over here. Maybe some of you won’t get it because it’s really personal. The title is ‘Exile.’ ”
It is wanting to hear the lisp
of the sea, curled on the tongues of passersby.
It is wanting to smell wind, heavy
with rain, wrap itself in the skirts of trees.
It is wanting to see the sun slide
down banana leaves into the thighs of a valley.
It is wanting to taste beads of tamarind
that drop from terraced hillsides.
It is wanting to feel the pulp of star-apple,
its dark flesh, moist between my hands.
It is, it is wanting you.
The declaration startled them … scared them like an accidental discharge from a gun … warned them with a sharp report that Russian roulette was not a game for the faint of heart. So when they left, shortly after her performance, they refrained from touching as they retraced their steps past walls and doors still wet with the memory of slow-burning kisses that dribbled like wax. As they passed beneath the bridges, the tremor and hum of traffic was the sound of hot blood rushing through their veins.
“Did you like the music?” she asked, as a police cruiser slowed then continued on its way.
He said yes.
“Is that what you listen to mostly? Hip-hop?”
“I listen to very little of it, actually. But I can dig it.”
“Why very little?”
“Hip-hop is the only black music that doesn’t have a healthy engagement with women. It’s not self-assured when dealing with women. I mean, you can go from funk to blues to afrobeat … in black music, even when the lyrics are about heartbreak, the delivery is always from a place of awe, or at most fear, of the feminine—but never hatred. Don’t get me wrong, y’know, I still dig it … but not to purchase and keep in my personal space. But … it’s a new music, it will work itself out over time.”
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