Jazz Moon (5 page)

B
reakfast was a war zone. Waiters soldiered from the kitchen to the trenches of the dining hall, servicing abrasive guests irritated that their Sunday agendas—church at St. Patrick's, breakfast at Delmonico's—had been scuttled by an exuberant downpour. Ben capitulated to the hard work, partly to garner the plump cache of tips, but mostly to keep moving. If he achieved a certain physical velocity, perhaps
this thing
would shrink away.

The war relented when the rain let up. Without work to do, Ben's energy waned and with it, his ability to keep
this thing
at bay. Then Mr. Kittredge arrived and seated himself at his usual table. He didn't wait for the host. He never did.

“Hello, sir. How are you this morning?”

“Benjamin! Here on a Sunday? What's the special occasion?”

“Have to make sure my favorite guest is taken care of.”

He poured Earl Grey tea, then tipped his head to see the title of the book in Mr. Kittredge's hands:
John Keats: Selected Poems.

“I commend your taste in literature, sir,” Ben said.

“
You
know Keats?”

“Yes, sir. Is ‘Endymion' in that volume?”

The Englishman eyed him with skepticism, suspicion. “Why, yes. I'm reading it for the thousandth time. It's sublime.
You
know ‘Endymion'?”

“What can I get you this morning? Grapefruit?”

“No,” Kittredge said, mystified. “Toast.” He arched his eyebrows. “Dry, and not too crisp.”

Mr. Kittredge always ate lightly. Ben fancied that his physique was lithe, supple. He had only seen Kittredge in his jacket and vest and could only ruminate on what dwelled beneath. A lean, compact stomach? Muscled chest? The few times he'd seen a white man shirtless, he'd marveled at the hair—sometimes wiry straight, sometimes curly—that fleeced their chests. Or perhaps Mr. Kittredge's chest was smooth and warm to the touch. Or cool. Or—

He breathed to regain his balance. Flustered, he placed Mr. Kittredge's order with the kitchen, then returned to the table—with a wedge of grapefruit. He was shaking as he approached the table. “Here you are, sir. Anything else?”

Mr. Kittredge eyed him. A mix of irritation and reproach. Ben realized his error and whisked the grapefruit away. He had never made a mistake with Mr. Kittredge's orders, and rarely with anyone else's.

“I'm sorry about that, sir,” Ben said when he returned with the correct food.

“Are you all right, Benjamin? You seem rather out of sorts.”

Ben looked away.

“There
is
something wrong,” Mr. Kittredge said. “Well, sit down, dear boy. I'm happy to listen.”

“Sir, thank you. But I'm not allowed to do that.”

Kittredge's face reddened. “No, of course not. I wasn't thinking.”

Ben started to leave the table. Kittredge stopped him.

“Oh, Benjamin.”

The Englishman handed him the Keats book. His hands were smooth, his fingernails buffed and manicured. “Please have it. We can't sit and talk together here, but I'd like to do something for you. Perhaps this will cheer you a little.”

Ben accepted the book. “Thank you, sir. I'll use it well and often.”

In a dream world he would have sat at that table and confided in Mr. Kittredge about
this thing.
But in a dream world
this thing
wouldn't have existed. It wouldn't have poisoned his anniversary the previous evening.

A week had elapsed since that night at Teddy's, its shade hanging large and chilly. Silence consumed the apartment. Angeline hadn't once sat on his lap while he labored at the typewriter. The shade towered largest and chilliest in their bedroom. But they went to dinner for their anniversary and Ben unveiled a new poem, reciting it between the main course and dessert.

“It's . . . beautiful, Benny. Thank you,” she said. But her bloodless smile and tepid kiss she tapped on his lips betrayed that this consolation prize insulted her.

Back home, they undressed on opposite sides of the bedroom, eyes evading each other. Ben battled the discomfort. He set her down on the bed.

Concentrate
.

She twitched and writhed as he strove into the familiar regions of her body. But he couldn't get aroused. He concentrated. He groped himself. He prayed. But he stayed soft as cotton.

“Shit!” he said, dismounting, leaving Angeline disoriented and still aroused.

Her eyes shot down to his groin and her expression degraded from concern to horror. She crouched over him to take him in her mouth, but he threw up a hand in refusal. She retreated to her side of the bed. She began to cry. He closed his eyes and he clenched his dick and he concentrated again. When lukewarm fantasies of wifely intimacy failed to ignite him, he did the unthinkable: He summoned a vision of Willful Hutchison.

Sugarfish Pond; Willful naked in the water; his luminous brown body. It worked. He mounted Angeline again and began to drill, the image of Willful the engine that powered him as he thrusted as hard as he could, his face buried so deep and rough in her neck, the next morning a bruise would show.

Angeline groaned her satisfaction as a pinprick of lightning struck somewhere at the base of his dick. He concentrated to keep Willful firmly in his mind's eye, but the image blurred to a smudge and reemerged as Baby Back. The pinprick bloated. Ben ruptured. He lay collapsed on top of her. A heaving, sweating mess.

“That's my Benny. You ain't going back to being
that way,
” she said with the relief of a woman who has rescued the paradise of her marriage. “No, sir. My Benny keeps his promises.”

In the morning Ben lay awake. Angeline lay blanketed across his body, motionless, at peace. As if the tumult of the previous week was an inconvenient memory.

Sunday morning.

Ben remembered Sunday mornings in Dogwood. A day for church and, supposedly, for rest, but chickens still had to be fed and cows milked. A farm never put itself on hold. Ben hadn't crossed the threshold of any church since he left Georgia. He wondered if his ma and pa still went. When he was a kid, they attended service like dutiful Christian soldiers. God's Valley Baptist Church was a derelict building with crumbling brick stilts and white paint that had sickened to a flaking gray. Weeds gashed through the gaps in the steps. With Sugarfish Pond so close, some days a damp, muddy scent invaded the air. Inside, parts of the floor caved steeply. But fresh, white linen always arrayed the altar, and twice a month a squad of volunteer ladies deserted their sharecropping and farming to scrub the wood pews.

A week after the pond incident Ben saw the Hutchison family at Sunday services, occupying the same bench they always did—the one set against the wall beside the altar. It was originally intended to accommodate additional worshippers on Easter and Christmas, but the Hutchisons had colonized it like squatters and made it their own private pew.

What a sight. Mrs. Hutchison, Willful, and five pitiful-looking girls. A husbandless, fatherless clan. Two versions of how that transpired had infiltrated the folklore of colored Dogwood—one official, the other scandalous. The official version decreed that Neale Hutchison had journeyed out of town to purchase farm supplies, and died. His body was never brought back and no funeral was ever held, which lent credence to the scandalous version: that he ran off with “Loose” Louise, a harlot in a shanty out on Ol' Cane Road with a door painted red, the same as the brazen coloring on her lips.

Most of Dogwood scorned the official version.

“That woman lyin'.”

“How your husband gone die and you don't hold no funeral?”

“
Widow,
my foot. She made it up. Don't wanna sully her reputation.”

But regardless of what folks thought of the “Widow” Hutchison, she and her brood were destitute, subsisting on the kindness of their neighbors, costumed in other families' hand-me-downs.

Mrs. Hutchison sat spine-straight on the bench in an ancient dress and a white bonnet that had sallowed to a pale yellow. Her five girls sat next to her in rags that had been cleaned up just enough and shoes that hung off their feet in shreds. They had sunken cheeks and ashy skin. Seated next to the girls: Willful. Slumped back, bored, like he couldn't be bothered. Oddly, he didn't wear tatters like his sisters. He was almost dapper in his fresh shirt, suspenders, and woolen pants. Even fully clothed Ben could see how muscular he was: stalwart thighs, prominent chest, hulky forearms revealed by his rolled-up shirtsleeves (a no-no in church). Ben's heart flipped and flopped at the sight of Willful's long legs spread wide into the shape of an inverted capital
V
.

Ben became aroused. It appalled him that his body would go rogue in the house of God. He couldn't stop looking between those legs. He wasn't alone. Young girls caught gaping at Willful's wide-open legs got their heads lurched back into place by fathers or slapped by mothers.

Because the handsomest boy in Dogwood was also its biggest scoundrel. Everyone knew he frequented that brothel over in Robertville, though where he got the money was a mystery. And when Ned Raymond's fast daughter got pregnant, Willful had topped the list of suspects.

When Mrs. Hutchison saw the gaping and slapping, her eyes automatically went to her son. She whispered in the ear of the daughter next to her and that daughter whispered to the next daughter and the message traveled down the bench to Willful. He rolled his eyes, lengthened his shirtsleeves, sat up straight. He made a scene of closing his capital
V,
so lazily, so dramatically, that it magnified the tension in the little church.

He turned his head randomly, caught Ben staring, and stared right back.

Services started. The Reverend Ledger began lecturing his congregation on the Beatitudes. Willful switched his attention to the reverend. Ben felt forsaken.
Why won't he stop looking?
became
Why did he stop looking?

After church, Ben stood outside with his ma and pa as they spoke to a neighbor. Mrs. Hutchison led her offspring in a line as they clattered down the church steps, Willful at the back. As he passed Ben, he whispered, “Meet me at Sugarfish Pond. Two o'clock,” his mouth so close, it almost brushed Ben's face.

A
ngeline wanted to fuck. She bowled him onto his back and attempted to ram herself down onto him. He clinched his eyes shut and conjured up Willful. Then Baby Back. Then Reggie.

Nothing.

He couldn't do his job as a husband. Couldn't do his job as a man. Hadn't done anything in weeks.

Next day, he rose before dawn, as he always did these days. Summer had evolved into September and mornings were cool. Angeline had covered herself with the blanket. She slept on her side of the bed.
Her side of the bed
. A new phenomenon. He shut the door softly as he left the bedroom, then sat at his desk and began writing. He'd write for hours until it was time to go to work. Or until Angeline woke. At work his boss lauded him as his “best colored worker.” But he was really an obsessed man who had to keep occupied to prevent perverse desires from crawling up and strangling him.

He was about to start the next stanza, but the bedroom door opened.

“Good morning,” Angeline said, more yawn than words.

He didn't look up. “Morning.”

She contemplated him from the doorway, waiting for something from him. “I'll get your breakfast.”

He brushed by her en route to the bathroom. “I don't want none. Thank you.”

Half an hour later, he found Angeline at his desk reading the poem he had neglected to remove from the typewriter. He ran and tore the page out so hard, the paper ripped.

“Don't!” he yelled. “It ain't none of your business!”

“ ‘
I regret, sweet angel dear, desire has gone away.
' That ain't my business? That ain't my fucking business?”

She rose and advanced on him. He instinctively backed up.

“I didn't mean for you to see that,” he said.

She trapped him at the front door. “Have you . . . Have you been—” She ran away. “No! I don't want to know. I don't
ever
want to know.”

“Angeline—”

“Get out of here, Ben. Go to work. Go. Now!”

On the subway, streaking toward downtown, he realized he still carried the ripped poem.

 

He worked an extra shift and dreaded the thought of home. So he got off the subway at 125th Street and kept walking. Even on a weeknight Harlem throbbed. The same verve as Saturday night at the clubs, but filtered into workaday tasks. Ben passed a store on 126th where two old ladies ganged up on a helpless grocer, complaining he was charging “too damn much” for vegetables they considered less than fresh. An ice man walked toward him carrying on one shoulder a wood bucket with a single, bulky slab of ice. He wore overalls over a sweat-soaked union suit snug enough to highlight his stevedore's build. His hair was gray, but his haggard face hovered between young and old. People scurried into drugstores and delicatessens, then scurried out with items wrapped in brown paper. Old men sat on crates and smoked pipes outside a barber shop while those inside leaned back in the chairs for a cut and a shave and a helping of timeless barber wisdom. A man waiting his turn joked around with the barber, told him to take his time with the customer in the chair. “Don't slice his ear off, like you did mine last time.” The barber replied, “What you complaining about? It grew back.”

Outside a beauty parlor on 129th, a street preacher evangelized. Nearly seven feet tall, his huge hair and beard were wild explosions of solid white, flying in every direction. He preached barefoot and rattled a tambourine for emphasis. “My children, God never saddles a man with a burden larger than he is capable of bearing. So accept your burden humbly and bow down before The Lamb who bore a cross and a crown of thorns so that you might be redeemed and one day walk with Him in the kingdom of heaven.” The ladies in the parlor got their hair straightened and marceled and paid the barefoot sermonizer no mind.

At 130th, a painter displayed canvasses smoldering with Negro life. One depicted a pastoral scene of weary cotton pickers, the sun seething down on them. In another, musicians jammed in a dark speakeasy. Magnificent African women clothed in a sunset of colors emblazoned a third.

Ben reached 131st Street and Seventh Avenue. A crowd assembled near the corner. Some musicians—trombonist, a couple of trumpeters, sax player, a violinist—were blowing up an improv session. These cats didn't know each other. They just showed up and played, driving off of one another, coaxing chords and melodies out of each other, each musician challenging himself and the others to scale that next plain, and creating an impromptu jazz symphony right there on the street.

He listened a while, but when the notes roiling out of the trumpets recalled Baby Back, Ben fled, pushed up the avenue, and turned east onto 135th Street. Before he could think about it, he had marched through the doors of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. A sign inside read
POETRY READING TONIGHT. DOWNSTAIRS
. Ben walked down to the basement, and seated himself amidst a small audience.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” a lovely colored woman said from the podium. “I'm Regina Anderson, assistant librarian here at the Harlem Library. Thank you so much for being here. At this time I'd like to introduce our featured poet. He recently published work in the March edition of
Survey Graphic
and in the anthology
The New Negro
. His poems have also appeared in
Opportunity
and he was a recipient of that magazine's 1925 literary awards. He'll read tonight from his first poetry collection,
Heart of Pearl,
which will be published this fall by Alfred A. Knopf. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Marcellus S. Gibson.”

He was a pretty young man with beige skin and a small frame. He held his manuscript in delicate hands. He wore a cravat instead of a tie. As he read his first selection, Ben became alarmed at his girlish voice.

Ben despised it. It was nothing but entanglements of silly rhymes and embarrassing clichés. But a group of men in the front row applauded stupidly at the conclusion of each piece. Apparently Mr. Gibson's friends, they were as mincing and effeminate as he. Squealing laughter. Limp wrists. Ben envisioned them jostling around in bed together, touching one another, squealing the whole time. Fairies, not men. They were the essence of everything he struggled so hard against with
this thing,
but he wasn't like them. He—

He leapt out of the room in the middle of the poet's next piece as people scowled at his rude exit. The crisis had ended. He swaggered up Seventh Avenue, feeling strong enough to test himself. Because he wasn't like
them
.

 

Teddy's couldn't sizzle on a Tuesday like it did on a Saturday. No brusque conversations shouted from opposite ends of the room. Only a light smell of reefer in the quarter-full room. The absence of the riotous hostess made the place a cave. Fanny—the hourglass-shaped waitress—worked the room solo. But the band was there. Baby Back was there. They played a popular tune, something hummable, not as untamed or low-down as their Saturday night fare.

Ben sat right up front so Baby Back couldn't miss him. He ordered bourbon and watched the band, antsy for the break between sets when the trumpeter would step down to schmooze. He thought about the effeminate men at the poetry reading. If he wasn't like them, then he couldn't have the desires they did. He would test himself when the trumpeter approached.

But he couldn't suppress the memory of another time when he tried—and failed—to prove that
this thing
was gone.

One morning, Ben's ma came into the barn and shoved a crate at him.

“Take this over to Miz Hutchison,” she said, her eyes swollen and wet and red.

The thought of seeing Willful petrified Ben.

“What you waiting for, boy? Get yonder and get on back here. There's a lot of work to do.”

Wildflowers—white shooting stars, orange butterfly weeds, and purple ironweeds—poked out of the grass bordering the dirt road. The grooves of wagon wheels and the indentations of horses' hooves pockmarked the path along with the occasional impression of an automobile's tire treads. On his way up the path, he peeked inside the crate. It was full of little girl's clothes: bonnets and shoes; a pretty white Easter dress with pink lace hand-stitched around the collar and sleeves. Emma Jane's clothes. His sister who died of pneumonia a year earlier. Ol' Doc Cullen never left her side, but he hadn't had enough medicine and there had been no point in beseeching the town's white doctor.

Emma Jane. His baby sister whom he had loved and, sometimes, loathed. Loved because she was pretty and she was dear and she was bubbly and she was blood. She'd giggle and he couldn't help but giggle, too. She'd hold his hand and something protective flitted up inside him. But Emma Jane was their ma's precious baby, Pa's too, and she'd monopolized their attention and their love, leaving Ben with scraps.

He continued up the path, intentionally taking his time. Another hot day. Summer never let up. It got under your skin so that you felt hot from the inside out and from top to bottom. He needed a swim. It was the only relief: to take off all his clothes and dive into cool water. Just the vision brought a semblance of relief. But he kept it at bay. Because every vision of Sugarfish Pond also contained Willful Hutchison. He couldn't control it. What would happen when he saw him? In a town as tiny as Dogwood, permanently eluding another person wasn't an option. This afternoon would be a useful test.

The Hutchisons' deserted yard and fields surprised him. “Anyone home?”

The only answer was the high-pitched, insect-like call of a grasshopper sparrow.

The barn walls were pimpled with holes. Fences foundered. A laundry line hosted a few bedraggled dresses that flapped in the wind. But the fields mostly thrived with leafy stalks. A small garden abounded with tomatoes, carrots, corn. Inside the barn were a gaunt mule, an ancient horse, and Willful asleep in a chair. Head furled back. Mouth open. Legs spread into his signature capital
V
. Ben lowered the crate to the floor noiselessly, then tiptoed back to the door.

“Please don't go yet.”

Not the bullish voice you'd expect from a strapping male. Not childlike, but not quite adult. A half voice. “Don't go.”

Ben stopped and turned, then wished he hadn't. Willful's legs were still amply spread and his eyes were aimed at him.

“You ain't meet me at the pond like I told you,” he said, part disappointment, part rebuke.

“My ma gave me a whole mess of chores,” Ben said.

Willful chuckled. “My ma gives me chores all the time. If I don't feel like it, I don't do 'em.”

Ben already knew that. Tales of Willful's laziness were legion. The Hutchison women ploughed, planted, and harvested while Willful did little or nothing. “I would'a kicked his freeloadin' ass out the house a long time ago and not thought twice,” Ben's ma once said. But six colored women alone—five of them budding young girls—needed a man's presence to avert catastrophe.

Willful kept chuckling, as if obeying a parent was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. Ben retaliated with the best defense he could think of.

“The Bible say you gotta mind your ma and pa.”

“The Bible say a lot of things. Don't mean you gotta believe any of 'em. What's in that crate?”

The blasphemy sauntered off Willful's tongue as casually as spit. Horrified, it took Ben a moment to remember why he'd come.

“Clothes for your sisters. My ma sent 'em over. Miz Hutchison around?”

Willful eased toward him. “She and them gals is over to the church, helpin' Reverend Ledger with . . . something. Anything in there for me?”

“No.”

He was in front of Ben now. He punched him softly, playfully, on the arm. “Why not?”

“I don't know.”

Willful punched him again. “You don't know?”
Punch
. “You don't know?”
Punch
. “Why don't you know?”
Punch
-
punch-punch.

“I don't know.”

A giggle spurted out of Ben and once he started, he couldn't stop.

“That's what I thought,” Willful said. “Got me a boy in here don't know
nothin'
. That's what I'm gone call you: Know-nothin'. 'Cause you don't know nothin'!”

The punching transitioned to tickling. It felt good to be teased, touched, paid attention to. Willful smiled like a prankish adult savoring his fun with a delighted child. The tickling stopped, but the smile remained. He touched Ben's cheek, skimmed his thumb along his neck, under his chin, along his Adam's apple.

“I'm glad you here. I don't got nobody to talk to most times,” Willful said.

“You got your ma. Your sisters.”

Willful snorted. “A bunch of jibber-jabbering women. Please. It's hard when you ain't got nobody to talk to.”