For the next few
weeks, time seems to take on a mind of its own—swirling in and out, stopping at times, moving forward at a speed I’ve never known, quietly and pervasively rearranging things in my life: relationships, eating habits, even hygiene, the state of my dreams changing all the while. In a way I had to become a boy again and start over, little by little, reconstructing the mountains in my mind, the immovable structures that kept me hard and unreachable and so goddamn heavy it felt as though I couldn’t move myself during some of those years in Dallas.
I’d never really been with anyone my whole life, never really honored or revered a person; everything began and ended with me, with what I had to prove, or the thing I felt I needed to forget. It was all new territory to me.
“Baby, just let me in,” sometimes she’d plead with me, circling her long arms around me, the smell of her skin like pumpkin pie and lilacs. I melted and all the lines blurred within me. I didn’t breathe for fear of dislodging a single sensation.
“Z, I’m here, I’m here. It’s just that I don’t know if I can…” And then I would need to flee; I’d leave the room or jump in the truck and drive. Other times, I was better, brave; other times I leaned into the fear, the same way you have to lean into the turn when your car is spinning out of control, the white ice beneath it turning it in circles, I was afraid of the slipperiness of love.
Sometimes I’d ask her opinion on things like God or politics, and it always came back to color and the way the world is melting together, slowly, she says.
When I got home that night, I finally told her about Eric. She was part of the reason I’d found the courage to do it, to try to make something right come from such a wrong past. I wanted to have a real chance with her, and I couldn’t let the weight of my guilt hold us down, keep me from her.
“I’ve lived with it my whole life, Z. And now I’m here with you, and it ain’t right. I wanted that woman to know how sorry I’ve been, how I’ve carried that weight, how often I’d wished it’d been different, that I’d’ been different. I want you to know that, Z.” I’m sitting on the steps of my porch; she stands in front of me, and I can see a sliver of the moon behind her, hear the trees push with the wind.
She looks at me for so long, and I’m not sure if she will turn and walk away. I wouldn’t blame her if she did. I stop breathing, wait, feel a sense of relief and fear all at the same time; the rest is out of my hands.
“I’ve been dealing with this stuff my whole life, Carmine, my whole life. It ain’t a season to be black, Carmine; it’s a life, and in these parts you get used to watching your back and you get used to people’s ignorance, you get used to getting less.”
Her voice reminds me of the way it sounded at the club that first night, sharp and jagged. I think I’ve lost her.
“I understand, Z.” I stand up, start to walk toward her.
“No, you don’t understand, Carmine, you don’t understand at all.”
I try to put my arms around her, but she pushes me away. I sit back down on the steps of the porch. I can hear Ma shuffling around in the house; a few of the floorboards creak, and I can smell the dryer tumbling.
I think about the morning at the table with Pa, how he excused it all so easily, a person dying because of his skin color. I wince as I remember the KKK rallies in the town center and how I watched his brown skin turn gray in the mildewed air of that building. If you ain’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, I can hear Diego saying.
She rubs her face with her hands, smooths her hair, taps her feet, and then lets out a long sigh. “But it’s not your fault.”
Her shoulders turn in a bit. She walks up the steps and sits down beside me. It is so quiet now I think I can hear her heart beating.
“I’m sorry, Z. I hate that part of me.” I slide my hand into hers, hold it tight. “It ain’t right.”
“You did the right thing, you did the right thing by going to her. It doesn’t make any difference, but it was right.” She squeezes my hand.
“I want the world to be different for my children,” she says. “But change doesn’t come easily, especially not in the backwoods on these old clay roads.” She smiles, crosses her legs, and stretches them out.
“But it has changed, Z, it has, and it will continue to.” I desperately wanted to believe this.
There were only a handful of black people on one side of town and there was the side of town where the old whites lived, and our house was somewhere in between. A place with more fresh air than you could breathe, with dark and foreboding mountains full of life, in the pocket of earth, something else.
People looked at us, people watched the sun set in the hills beyond us, and we kept our eyes there. On the thing that was bigger than us, on the thing that we were trying to be, to unite with. But it wasn’t always easy.
People made comments and my fists would tense as I searched the crowd for a face belonging to those words. I wanted to fight. To hurt. To beg Z to talk to them about all the colors, about our brown world, all the things she knew so well. It was hard to keep believing in a world that said love wasn’t true.
“Baby. This is us. It’s not them. We’ve got nothing to justify. Don’t make it about them.” I look into the darkness of her brown eyes and understand immediately what she means. I had spent my life living by the demands of my ego. I relaxed. Walked with her. We grew.
We tried to spend time in Atlanta, to make plans, to live her life and then mine, to be in a place where we could be swallowed up for a while, where changes are less noticeable, contrast is expected and appreciated and glossed, and life rushes on with a pace that is like a soft hum and everyone spins the kaleidoscope. Atlanta is a reflection of many things.
I liked being in the city, but I couldn’t stay away for long; I worried about Ma. In my mind, I could see the darkness and the loneliness erasing her when the pencil lines were just starting to be noticeable. I’d drive back to Eton, take her to lunch, walk her around the block, talk to her, reflect herself back to her so that she could see life.
Sometimes she put on lipstick and began to transform. Sometimes she showed me pictures of herself as a girl. Sometimes she asked Z about music. Other times, she bled out, said she didn’t know how much longer she’d be around, smoked more cigarettes, refilled a flask, walked from room to room with one of Pa’s old shirts.
“Carmine, everyone is dead, you know.” She was sweeping the kitchen floor slowly, and her new yellow dress brushed her knees and I wondered if she could feel it as I could see it. Everything, for me, had become about color and about sensation. I could hear the car alarm five blocks away, feel the hum of the train at the station on the other side of town; life had given me powers, life had become something else.
“We’re not all dead, Ma, and neither are you.”
She stopped sweeping and looked at me for a long time. I watched her every movement and realized I still wanted the thing I’d always wanted: her love. She put the broom in the closet and went back to her chair, but she didn’t light a cigarette and she didn’t take a drink.
Z became the center of our solar system, and the two of us orbited around her. We all wanted something to do. Z had her own hills to traverse, a journey to navigate, somewhere to go herself.
“Mama never really did anything, but she was always so busy.” Z rests her thumbs in the belt loops of her jeans as we walk the streets of downtown Eton at dark, and sometimes right before breakfast. Storefront windows glow or stand still, little stores for everything: shoes, books, greeting cards, even a store with just rope.
“I adored her, wanted nothing but to be close to her, but she always seemed so temporary to me. She was never in one place very long. Mama, Daddy, if they stood or sat in a room for longer than five minutes, it was a holiday or some other ritual; it never quite came together.” A smile forms at the edges of her lips and her eyes reach for something far away, something she can’t yet see.
“Daddy’s skin was so black. So dark. Like coal. Mama’s was lighter. Like sandpaper. These nuances are very important to black people, Carmine, did you know that?” She grabs my hand and we keep walking.
“Your mama doesn’t seem to like me, Carmine, but I know it’s not because I’m black.” She laughs as she says this and then pulls me into an ice cream shop.
We took turns being the navigator, leading the way. I opened the shed door without going in and closed it; she began to paint and then folded up the canvas and threw it away. We wanted movement, but we were afraid of it, too.
Her stories continued. “We wore elaborate clothes. Everything had a meaning. Our slippers. Our names. We built our life around these underlying meanings; so did our neighbors. It was our identity. But I could never find anything original in myself, and that troubled me deeply.” She sighs so deeply I think she might collapse.
It’s a warm Tuesday
when I decide to open Pa’s work shed and let the light in.
The insides of it are dusty and stale, full of broken pieces, sharp corners, furniture so close to being completed. There’s a half-completed bench and an armchair done but without the arms. I can feel the wood shavings beneath my feet and smell the sawdust in the air, and it’s so different from the balmy and translucent light of a high-rise office building.
I sit on the bench near the worktable and pick up a rusted saw, run my fingers over its teeth, feel the cold metal on my fingers. Ma tells me how Pa always dreamed of having a real studio somewhere, with new and shiny tools, lots of space to spread out.
I sit on the bench for a long time looking around, watching how the dust particles float in the air, realizing they are the same ones that floated around Pa as he worked, and that he wasn’t an ending and I am not a beginning.
I see a small piece of carved wood on top of a pile of raw cypress. It is a horse, small, with muscular legs and a long back, so intricately carved and smoothed, so solid. I hold it in my hands for a long time and run my fingers over it; in my fingers it feels warm.
I look into the pile and there are other carvings: a small plane, a tiny baseball bat, even an intricate train with wheels on the caboose and windows and pipes coming from it. I imagine Pa, old Ron, chiseling and smoothing and working until his fingers ached, while I was in the house aching for him, longing for his tenderness, understanding, something softer than the back of his hand, the sting of his words.
I walk out of the workshop, horse in hand, and slam the door behind me. I want to leave it all behind, but I don’t know if I can.
* * *
I am in the tavern again, with a beer and a shot, the horse warm in my pocket. The smell of old cigarettes and sweat and dark corners smells foreign and rotten, but it’s a cocoon, warm and cradling, and I enter it again, its shape molding to me like it has always done.
I’ve been sober a few weeks now, trying like hell to stay present and to watch and feel what love brings, what commitment asks of you, to be something that I always knew I could be. It’s so much easier in theory than in practice. But I don’t understand it, the way it was, the way it feels now, why it keeps coming back. That old me just won’t die.
My skin feels like it’s crawling, like my insides are trying to climb right out from within me. I order a third shot of Patron and wait. The back of my mind is filled with red, and my fists open and close.
There’s a small window at the end of the bar, and I watch the day turn into evening, then into night. I keep slamming drinks, and inside I feel like choking and hurting someone, but I don’t. I just want to know where he ends and where I begin and what one has to do with the other.
* * *
A few hours later I am walking down the alley, and I hear that little horse in my pocket saying, “She loves you, Carmine, she really loves you.” I take it out of my pocket and look at it one last time before I throw it in the dumpster and walk away.
I walk through the dark streets of Eton right along the railroad tracks, and I watch the stars up above move in and out of the sky while I am still. I kick rocks down the block, and it is so quiet I can hear each one until it hits the curb and stops completely. In the distance that old train whistle howls. I walk toward the edge of town, to meet the tracks; I want to stare the eye down again.
I pull out my cell phone and dial Z’s number and hang up. I dial home and hang up too. I don’t know if I can be anyone’s man or son or if I can be anything other than what I’ve always been.
* * *
The phone rings, and I hear Melanie pick it up. I can’t remember a whole lot from the night before, but I remember Melanie showing up at the door, and the bottle of wine and pretty little things in her suitcase and the softness of her short skirt and then the back roads of Eton, the feel of the old truck’s interior, her sweating on top of me.
“Hello?” Her voice is smoky and naked. I know it’s Z on the phone. I wake up from a light sleep and stretch my legs, my pupils dilate and I hold my breath. I am trying to remember the day, the week, the contours of my life, where it’s been and what this moment means, the blonde, the me, the scope, the hills, and the consequences.
She rolls over and hands me the phone. I am unshaven and hungover, full awake, but I don’t grab the receiver. I lean over the bed and remember the dream I was just having where I am a superhero flying above Eton; I’m wearing a cape, and my special power is that I can tell the truth, see the future.
I am wearing my old gym shorts, the ones I wore way back in Port Arthur; and in the dream I have the angst and the buckteeth and the burning desire to be something else, but I am smiling so much that my mouth is dry and I can hear Ma laughing somewhere in the clouds and I swoop in and save the day every day.
I hear Mel laugh then speak into the phone. It’s what she does, without knowing how or why. She is trouble.
She thinks nothing of it, women, there’s always been women, a collage of them streaming in and out of my past, my future. She’s known me for years but she makes no claims to me. She’s troubled not in the least but knows the caller must be.
“Honey, I am just an old friend of Carmine’s. He’ll call you back. Okay?”
“Did someone call earlier?” I ask uncertain, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I feel Z, a distance, a brush of cold air, a missing piece. Melanie laughs again; this too, familiar.
“Yes baby. I think she said her name was Zee. Does that sound familiar to you?” She’s only half-kidding. She knows, too; the same way Z does but differently.
I jump out of bed. The drunk from last night has worn off in a single instant. I’m naked and my limp cock bounces in the air and takes a short moment to settle before I speak. I look down at it briefly; the way I might make eye contact with someone when they enter the room.
“Oh my God. What’d you say to her?”
I’ve never been so afraid in my life. Again, I’m the kid on the 3-point line; the court is dangerously silent behind me.
“Shit, Carmine, I didn’t say anything.” She’s still lying in bed, but now she’s smoking a cigarette. Her left breast has snuck out of her nightgown and suddenly it looks stale and indigestible. I look at my penis again and wonder what we ever saw in her.
“I’m not kidding, Melanie. What did you tell her?”
I’m pacing the room now, completely butt-naked, nervous, on the edge of enraged. I look at her for a long time and see her the way I would have from my bike, as a teenager, and I think
gross, she’s old and she looks cheap and she smokes
. . . I don’t know what to do with her or the me that is here in this room.
I feel like a block of stone and look at her for a long time. I smirk. Shake my head. Tell her to go back home, watch as she picks up her clothes, scattered around the room, rubs the old mascara from her eyes. It’s like another scene of my former life run over again and again.
“Carmine…” she starts to say, looks at me for a long time, her eyes begin to pool, but she rubs them and pushes the emotion away.
“You know where to find me.” She smiles lightly, without emotion this time, as though this doesn’t mean anything, as though she was already on her way out. I wait and listen for the front door to close behind her. I can’t help but think she somehow likes these terms, this way of coming and going, being pushed out the door when real life needs to take over.
I grab the phone and call Z. While it rings, I walk around looking for Ma, try to feel her energy in the house, needing, wanting something to be the same, there and reliable. She is not home, and I try to remember if she was there when we came in the night before. Sometimes she sips one small glass of whiskey the whole night long, refilling it with ice as the hours pass, never going to sleep; other times she slips into bed by early evening, not to be seen until late the next morning.
Z’s machine picks up. It feels cold on the other end of the line.
“Z, please pick up. I need to talk to you. See… I just… I don’t know… it’s just… Anyway, please pick up, please call me, something. I’ll explain everything. I promise.”
I am the adolescent boy again, pleading with my father to understand why I’d stolen the pack of cigarettes. The harsh buckle of the black belt is near me, and my legs are short and I can’t run fast enough and there’s nothing I can do to get away from what is.
I brew a pot of coffee in the old percolator and sit on the corner of my bed. The Eton light is trying to sneak through the blinds of the room, but I pull the big drapes closed and refuse to look out.
The next thing I know, I am at the Atlanta airport standing in front of the Continental Airlines kiosk, swiping my credit card for a flight to DFW airport. All I know is that I have to get back on solid ground.
* * *
On the plane, I imagine how my updated resume will look on white weighted paper, how Ma will have the best of semiretirement homes, how Z will find the black man of her dreams.
I can feel my new self crawling back into the folds of my old skin, and it feels good. I step off the plane and leave Eton behind.
“Cabby, take me to the Sky Bar now. I’ve got some celebrating to do!” I laugh out loud, the way I would have six months ago, and lean back into the vinyl seat. I drift off into a meditative state and try not to think. But I do. I think of the Carmichael account for the first time in months, about that cat Carmine that used to be me, the man I want to be again. I place myself back into the role: clean, cold, well-dressed, calculated, in control; I don’t owe anyone anything.
I know I could easily find a new firm to work for, even if it wasn’t advertising, a new ladder to climb. I know there are always women to monopolize and drinks to chill and money to be made, and that unlike God or health or Christmas, they would always be there, waiting and willing, and you don’t have to give them any notice or promise them any love. I tried to change, for a minute or two, I thought I was actually capable of being that good guy, fair and honest, something like light, hanging in there like the rest. But I was wrong.
The Sky Bar is as loud and as welcoming as I remember. The club music thumps and the Thursday night crowd sways and moves, and I manage to get a place at the bar by the dance floor. It is worlds away from the Shack with its expensive lighting and high-priced drinks and marble and manicured skin, and I take it all in. I drink another martini and watch a woman on the dance floor closely. Her skin looks pasty and clean, her shape young but solid, twists and soft curves and an empty mind; I want to taste her. I watch her as if she is my prey, but my concentration is off; images keep floating into the scope of my vision: Pa’s thin body, Z’s jeans, Ma’s hands on my shoulder, the leather of the Bible at the Baptist church, Pastor Stanley’s shiny head. I look at the veins in my hand and try to get control of my thoughts, to find my lines, to step into my old role. I know I can.
I order another drink and move in closer. I want to be that guy again—ruthless, easy, removed. I want to go back, to rewind. I want to hunt, be hunted, to gather and to hoard, to not know again, the way it once was, me apart.
I drink two more martinis before finding my way to the back side of her, the deep bass of the music under my feet, her hair on my face. My hand finds her back, its polyester dress, the bumps of her spine. She turns around.
“Hey,” she whispers into my ear.
I can smell the alcohol on her as if I’ve never had a drop of it in my life.
“I’m Carmine.” I say it directly into her ear so she gets it, feels me; my eyes dilate and my blood moves faster.
“I know,” she says. “I know exactly who you are.” She’s still smiling and closes the space between us. I feel her hands on my lower back, and she begins to move me and breathe into me. I can feel the martinis swirl around my head, the jet lag in my feet. Somewhere in the distance, I think I hear thunder. For a second, I think I am him again: I move like him and I sound like him when I speak and in my hands, she feels like the others did, but I am not him anymore. I am not him. I stop moving and look at her for a long time.
“What’s wrong?” She keeps her hands on my waist and smiles.
“I don’t know,” I tell her and walk away. I take my place at the bar again. I sit there until closing time, waiting for the answer, waiting for the fog to lift, waiting to know something.
* * *
The Dallas skyline looks like I remember it: cold and docile in the day, piercing in some spots, and so big, stretching farther than my reach is these days. When I wake up in my penthouse the next day, I feel overwhelmed by the vibrations.
I look out onto the ledge, to the night that it almost ended for me. I think back to the curve in the road, the scalding hot hours watching Pa die, the screeching of Ma’s grief, and losing the Carmichael account seems like one of those problems on sitcoms that can be fixed with a hug. I don’t know what problems are anymore, or how to distinguish them from the folds of life; they just are. Everything feels like warm liquid around me.
I remember the girl at the club and the sour in my stomach when she moved close to me, acknowledged my reputation, claimed to know me.
I think about Z, the weeks we’ve spent together, the future we’ve talked about, the way I’ve learned to care for my mother. I can’t believe that any of it is really true, that I actually had any of it in me.
I can smell the newness in the air, the gleam, the anesthesia of my former self; the penthouse is a prop, I see that now.
Ma’s message is still on the answering machine. The light blinks red, on and off, and I want it to turn off forever; I want to let go. I listen to Ma’s voice on the machine and hear Pa in the background again, feel the red energy rise up within and twist my stomach, and then watch it go.
I remember a slogan I once wrote: “Start where you are.”