Gilles played with the jewel in his left earlobe. “What was she wearing? How do you know it was her?”
“Because she said, ‘You’ve had it rather easy, my dear, and that ain’t good.’”
Gilles, a “sexual realist,” chatted up the postman and Bargetta abandoned herself to her impasse. “You could get the idea that I think not being happy is boring.” She muted the television, used it as a night lamp, draped scarves on light fixtures until they threatened to burn, aligned her shoes with the radiator, counted the packs of Marlboros she tucked around the apartment. “My mother would pray up a way out of this feeling. Guide my feet while I run this race.”
Bargetta made unanswered calls that she would not admit to. The thought of Pierre-Yves’s fresh paint led her to reach for Gilles’s pipe. “The smart thing would be to keep my mouth shut and live with it. Maybe he didn’t ask me to come over here, but he’ll beg me to stay. I want to do my mother proud.” She struggled with the latch of the gray bathroom. Gilles inched to the door and raised an eyebrow over one of his green contact lenses.
Sometimes I hardly recognized her and couldn’t understand how the former Bargetta, with all her merry ferocity, had been swallowed up by the obsessive girl slamming things around in the bathroom. She said when Pierre-Yves first left, she kept his toothbrush in a glass, consciously in the spirit of the candle the sailor’s wife places in the window. “I can’t find the next righteous move.” She explained things to the ruined parquet. She said no one was more ruthless than a guy trying to get out of a relationship. “Adulthood had no gender, but you get to it one way as a boy and another way as a girl.”
I waited for the real Bargetta to emerge and make war on the
world, but nothing could penetrate her indifference to ugly weather. “When you’re dying and wondering if anybody ever really loved you.” She wrote furiously, tore up what she had scribbled, rewound the B-52s cassette with a pen, wrote again, and once more shredded pages into strips. She hugged her shoulders, a piston at the end of its cycle: intake, combustion, power, exhaust.
She said she used to keep a list of the return addresses on his mail. She said she could pick up one of his books, not that he was much of a reader, and just by sniffing the pages tell where he had given up. Was it, she asked, what she had given or what Pierre-Yves had taken away? “What can happen can be so bizarre. He maintained a berserk posture toward me for days. His expression didn’t change. This wild, unenlightened look. I thought he was going to kick down the door. Instead, he opened it.”
Not long after I had gone back to Holland to wipe away some of the protection I thought I had acquired from my distasteful, true self that may yet turn out to be merely provisional, when wind carried inland the scent of peat, I received an unsigned, antique postcard. It showed one of those scenes of a bygone, music-hall Paris. The original message had been painted over. I recognized Bargetta’s handwriting, lovely as an anchorite’s:
Rule #1: Don’t think he’s better than you are and don’t think he doesn’t think he is.
Rule #2: Eat first—then storm out.
M
inority
B
usiness
T
he beige stepgrandmother gave up the ghost in her sleep. Her sister was furious. Their plans had depended on Grandfather, who was many years older than his wife, being the first to die.
The funeral home, a brownstone on Lenox Avenue, looked too cut-rate to advertise. A sign claimed that it had been serving the community for thirty years, but something about it was so provisional that I doubted it had ever known Harlem’s golden age of three-day wakes, marching bands, and corteges followed by lines of mourners that stretched around the corner. It was the kind of place that said, “This won’t take long.”
The ground floor of the house was bare except for potted trees that added to the anxious silence. The place was wildly humid, as if the basement were flooded and the furnace going full blast. How much the bereaved paid did not appear to influence the set. I had the impression that the staff recycled its props in order to hang on to something like a profit margin.
When I arrived for the “viewing” a man was pushing a trolley of flowers across the hall. Another man in a shiny black suit carefully packed away folding chairs. I expected him to reappear
as the presiding minister. Grandfather used to command $2.50 per funeral during the Depression. A woman in a frilly blouse laid a mop against the banister, tucked her apron behind a curtain, and asked whom I had come to see. She preceded me and shut doors as she went.
I hung back by the door she left open. The stepgrandmother’s sister had my aunt by the arm. My aunt, a teacher who wore her skirts well below her knees, called the sister “the Judge” because she talked continually about using a gun to clear the nasty teenagers from the playgrounds. The Judge led her to the casket. “Don’t you think she looks like herself?”
“No.”
She hadn’t reckoned on my aunt’s Episcopalian control of Old Country emotion. I hurried away while the Judge insisted that the stepgrandmother had been that light as a girl, that everyone knew black people got darker as they grew older. My aunt said the stepgrandmother looked artificially brightened, like black singers who have their skin peeled for the video mass market. “Those blue lips,” Tsvetayeva instructed Rilke. “Negroes’ lips are not red.”
The brownstone was surrounded by small storefronts, few of which were open for business; nevertheless just having gotten away felt like life. Though the days of militant graffiti on the brick walls had given way to the art of senseless nicknames inside fancy designs, vendors tried to keep warm before the usual pile of knitted goods in the three colors of Pan-African unity. The proprietor of a liberation-books table wheezed, stacked Van Der Zee postcards, and complained about the uninterruptible plot to keep the ghetto quiet with drugs. Since the assassination attempt Angel Dust had been known on the streets as “Hinckley.”
The cold pressed into my clothes. I ducked into a fast-food restaurant on 133rd Street. The huge steel oven sent out gusts
of heat mixed with the odor of fried chicken. People seated at the counter passed the napkin dispenser and a city marshal said without preamble to the woman on his left that what wouldn’t change was white people thinking he had his rights only because they decided to let him have them, and they were the rights nobody cared about anymore anyway.
The woman said, “If you’ve been around the Afro-American community for any length of time you know things change. I always knew things would change up.”
The city marshal polished off a bucket of extra crispy and said white people were always trying to do something on black people. More sad than Europe paying to dump its garbage off the coast of Africa, he said, was West Africa taking the money.
The woman, a private nurse whose three sons were in the army, said he should go live in Russia. The KGB would dig him. The KGB was desperate. The Soviet police resorted to psychics and, because of Afghanistan, doused the drinking water with a chemical that induced docility.
He said he wanted her to be able to identify disinformation when she was exposed to it, to “get” the connection between the eye in the pyramid on the dollar bill and the Trilateral Commission before it was too late.
The nurse said she didn’t have to get anything, but he ought to quit using the seat of his pants as a soap box. The rest of us became intensely interested in our chicken.
He said with an eloquence I had not expected that all he knew was that he was not patriotic about any one country. He didn’t know how to answer where he came from when he filled out a form. There were substitute countries, but prior to them his parents had been his homeland.
I knew it was the beginning of the end for Grandfather because though he was present we referred to him in the third person.
We threw together some of his clothes without consulting him. He paced the hall, smiling on the deliberations around him.
Perhaps the thing he feared had come. His son, my father, the boy he used to accuse of either hanging out or wanting to hang out in pool halls was about to pull the plug. Lots of parents would like to give up their children and there are many socially acceptable ways to do it, about which Grandfather knew a thing or two. The converse was another matter. My father said that when it came time for us to put him in a nursing home to shoot him instead.
The first thing the Judge had wanted to know after the lovely ceremony was who was going to reimburse her for the funeral and what say she could have over the savings account. The sum involved was pitiably small, which probably made her all the more determined. Job’s comforter was the beneficiary of her sister’s life insurance policy and a Christmas account. She was so efficient at cleaning out the stepgrandmother’s closets she had to send one of the teens who lurked about the basement incinerator to steal another grocery cart. My aunt said that her scheming proved she did not believe in an afterlife.
The Judge had not forgiven Grandfather for his impetuous changes of scenery and hunts for new stimulation in the past. It was the thought of Grandfather sitting on the purse strings she had wanted to be rid of. She had dreamed of bank books resting and accruing where they belonged, in sisterly possession. The dream had vanished with the coroner’s van.
Grandfather could neither feel nor answer her questions. Having done his duty, he was gliding out of his mind. When he discovered his wife lifeless in her bed he had remained sufficiently conscious to make the necessary calls, ever a gentleman when talking officially, enunciating carefully and too loudly, the way a rural person not accustomed to telephones would be portrayed
on television. His sense of honor would not permit him to abandon even the enemy dead. But after the family had been notified and the body removed, he graciously spaced out.
He set out to water the plants and in his eagerness to make up for having forgotten to do it, to do it because the stepgrandmother did it, he got water over everything. The Philco radio was suddenly a measure of time. I could see how much smaller he had become when he stood next to it and apologetically dabbed with his tie at the spills. He obeyed when anyone suggested that he take a seat. Watching him follow orders was disorienting. He used to descend on us like a stage director who worked on the principle that to get the best work out of his cast he had to maintain a high level of terror. The Judge said he was as lamblike as if a white person had been in the room.
She worried because that morning he’d been distracted enough to burn the stepgrandmother’s best pan. She said to me in the corridor by the elevator that Grandfather was a fire waiting to happen. Balancing boxes of monogrammed handkerchiefs, the sort found unopened in every old woman’s drawers, she wanted to evacuate the Spode before the china cabinet went up in smoke. I said a fire provided motivation for finding a new home.
I told her about the time I was living near campus, boiled an egg, passed out, and woke in time to say goodbye to the firemen. The following month my ashtray sent flames up a pair of jeans that hung on the door. The fire spread so fast my neighbors had to flee to the roof. The inferno and the building’s inoperable sprinklers were more than my business student roommate had wanted to experience in New York and he went back to Japan. The Judge said I was as disrespectful as the rest of my family.
In her nest across the playground, the Judge was waiting to swoop down on the carcass of an uninhabited apartment. Had my aunt not had to catch the shuttle back to Boston, she would
have changed the locks just for fun. The wicked sister wanted Grandfather out so that the apartment could be sold—not that it was worth anything. I didn’t see Grandfather’s lucky lemon plant anywhere and grabbed the nearest clay pot of leaves. I had never grown anything. Already I was engaged with the Judge in a contest over the spoils.
I was killing the roots of my prize with an overdose of plant food when my father called. They hadn’t left for Indianapolis. Grandfather had set up such a racket that the airline wouldn’t let him on board. He screamed that he was being kidnapped. Grandfather saw the next plane at the ramp and jumped over the wheelchair. Security agents chased him up and down the LaGuardia terminal, astonished that a man his age could move so fast in so many directions.
My father brought Grandfather back to the pigeon coop. When I got there Grandfather was very quiet and it was my father’s turn to pace. He reasoned and begged. Grandfather simply said he had some papers to go over, which was to make me hope, long after it had ceased to be possible, that there was some method to his alternating periods of catatonia and excitement. We heard him in his room. He sounded like a burglar and then like a mouse. I struggled not to interfere, not to get up and ask what he was doing. Worry can be the worst form of control. I was afraid he was destroying his shoeboxes and folders of Right Opinions.
There was an argument with my mother in Indianapolis on the wisdom of renting a car. The time not so long before when Grandfather inexplicably leaped into Washington traffic was fresh in our minds. My father said Grandfather got away from him in Washington by trickery. He’d pointed to a character standing under a heated hotel awning, sworn that he knew the man, urged my father to stop the car, and bolted. My father said
he should have known better: Grandfather didn’t have any friends.
It was true that, apart from family, Grandfather hadn’t had anyone to call. Though he had long been at the age where his peers would have begun to die, I’d never heard Grandfather speak of any. It was impossible to think how many days or months he had passed at a stretch within his wheat-colored walls with no company other than that of his wife. He struck me as being very much like a jailhouse scholar. “I have something on the inside that the world can’t take away. I’m going to let it shine.”
Once I paid a surprise visit. The stepgrandmother was in the middle of an unstoppable complaint. Grandfather said she was wasting her time. The stepgrandmother said she could cook for her sister if she wanted to. Grandfather said she would have to do her cooking at her sister’s because he would not have them eat his food. She said he didn’t like anybody and nobody liked him, not even his own children had any use for him.
I said I liked him. “He that fears shall find friends.” I was pleased with myself. I’d come up with something at least atmospherically biblical to show that I had sympathy for Grandfather in his line of work. The stepgrandmother said I wouldn’t like Grandfather if I knew what he really thought of me.
Grandfather passed over my offering and said to his wife that peace on earth was predicated on never telling one man what another man has said about him. I was stunned that he had not risen and roundly contradicted her. It had never occurred to me that he didn’t dote on me or that, if he did, his feelings could change. An old man’s loyalties were, I assumed, like a fixed income: barely enough for necessities, a definite amount that didn’t stretch very far, but something to count on.
I’d gone so far as to think of my showing up with a sack of
desiccated fruit as a big sacrifice, and the dripping flowers plucked from buckets at the Korean deli as an addition to his life, like the sighting of a comet. She who had once stood behind Grandfather like a rock formation, his immovable support and foundation, said he just liked to hear himself talk and smell his upper lip.
Maybe she carried on every day between morning talk shows and the news. There was a time for lunch, a time for puzzles, and a block of hours left over for trying to get a rise out of Grandfather. She wasn’t going to let my presence throw her off. What I couldn’t tell was how much Grandfather’s restraint was due to me. He was quietly incandescent, saving it up, with traces of a smile playing about lidded eyes.
The stepgrandmother never raised her voice. She kept it to a growl, like the motor of their old refrigerator. She said she was worse off than a woman busting suds. She even had to go out in the rain for light bulbs. Were it not for her he’d be sitting in pitch-dark and not doing a thing about it. Grandfather calmly took her gibes and handed back a guffaw, as if he were passing the salt. She snapped a pencil. Grandfather, she said, was of no use to anyone.
To save the day, I asked what Atlanta had been like in the time of his early mentor, Hugh Proctor, then an important black Congregational minister. The past was Grandfather’s high ground. But he’d long since stopped talking about his past, as if, to live with the stepgrandmother, he had given up memory.