By the time I got home I was so numb I’d forgotten the book clamped beneath my arm, and when I dug in my pocket for my key it fell to the sidewalk beside me. I stared at it the way the first chicken must have looked at the first egg, wondering where in the hell it had come from, then picked it up and made my way upstairs. I’d forgotten the envelope Sonny Dinadio had given me last night, but there it was when I walked in my bedroom, the envelope and five wadded hundred-dollar bills scattered around it. Again I thought of chickens, eggs. An idea came to me, and I turned around and headed back down to the shop. After an hour of searching I found the sword I’d used to hack away the vines from the table where Claudia used to have tea with her brothers—the vines that hadn’t been itch ivy, and hadn’t been HIV, but had made me break out in a rash nonetheless, a rash that only K.’s soothing touch had been able to cool. It was awkward work, trying not to slice my fingers open as I cut the meat from the
Complete Poems
, but in the end I rendered my stolen book a hollow paper shell. I had to fold the envelope in half to make it fit in the place I’d carved for it, and then I slotted the book in with all those other books I’d stolen from all those other bookstores and libraries over the years. When I turned from the shelf, though, I saw the shorn pages scattered over the floor. My first impulse was to eat them as I’d once eaten grass, but like any good pirate I felt I had to leave a clue behind. Because it’s not buried treasure, after all, unless someone’s looking for it. It’s just buried.
I opened the window, looked up to Fulton, down toward John. When I was convinced Dutch Street was empty I hurled the 152 sheets of paper in the air, and even as I watched them flutter down to the Belgian blocks I thought of the last time paper had showered down on these streets, a true library of the dead. I heard a throat clear behind me then, followed by a quiet knock.
I whirled around. Claudia stood in my bedroom doorway. I noticed two things: first, that she was carrying a large suitcase, and second, that she had somehow managed to squeeze herself into the silver dress she’d been wearing the day I met her. At first I thought she was moving out, and a bolt of fear shook me so hard I almost fell out of the window with the pages I’d just dumped onto Dutch Street.
Claudia must have seen some sign on my face, because she smiled suddenly and, straining mightily, hoisted the suitcase over my threshold.
“Oof,” she said as it stirred up a cloud of dust from the floor. “Room 42.”
I swallowed my heart out of my throat. “Or forty-one,” I said. “Or forty.”
Claudia puzzled through the arithmetic as I walked over to her, tested the suitcase’s weight, set it down again.
“Recovered from The Garden of Lost and Found?”
Claudia laughed. “In a manner of speaking. Endean gave it to me.” She let her voice trail off. Then: “I hope I’m not being presumptuous.”
I looked at the suitcase, then back at Claudia. Suddenly it hit me. “Oh my God! Do you need me to take you to the hospital?”
Claudia jumped back at the force of my tone. Inside the straining confines of her dress, everything shook and shivered, and I thought it might rip open at the seams. “Yes! I mean, no. I mean, not right now. I’ve got another month or so. I just meant, when the time comes.”
“Oh. Oh, of course.” I picked up the suitcase. Room 42, or 41, or 40: it was every bit as heavy as Claudia’s strained face had made it out to be, and I almost had to drag it to the corner by the bookcase with its recent, hollow addition.
“It’s just that, I mean, there’s Nellydean, and…” I broke off. Then, perhaps because there were no more walls to tap, I decided to poke at Claudia instead. “And Reggie. And your father.”
“Oh please, cease with the roll call of ignominy. When I’m screaming for the epidural I want someone there who gets me.” She waved a hand. “I thought yesterday was laundry day, right? Isn’t it time you got out of the pirate suit?”
I just stared at her until I realized she was actually asking me to change. I remembered how she’d dropped her dress in front of me that first day and, shrugging, started to undress. The pirate suit, never washed, was scratchy, stiff; even after I stepped out of the pants they stood at half mast for a moment before falling to the floor.
“So what’s with the dress?” I said as I reached for Johnson Montgomery Croft’s pants. “Going out?”
I could feel her eyes boring into me as I stepped into the pants. Both of my legs would have fit into one of the pant legs with room to spare, and in my haste to cover myself I tripped, nearly fell. But all Claudia said was,
“There’s more to this city than a cold and moldy basement, you know.”
I reached for the shirt. “I get out plenty often.”
Claudia snorted. “The apartment of someone who calls himself ClobberU isn’t the kind of culturally edifying experience I had in mind. Don’t play dumb, you left his address on your desktop.”
“Claudia—”
“Jamie, please. This is going to be hard enough. And besides, you’ve never heard Reggie sing.”
Suddenly I understood: she was going to tell him.
I reached for the vest, stepped into the sandals. “I heard him hum once.”
Claudia stared at my feet. “Don’t you have any other shoes?”
I looked at hers. Divine’s old shoes had to stretch to contain her swollen feet almost as much as the dress had to stretch to contain the new Divine growing in her stomach.
“Don’t you?”
Claudia looked down. “I haven’t been able to see my feet for the past six weeks.” She laughed slightly. “He goes on in an hour. At least put on a pair of goddamn socks.”
By the time we got out of the Number 9 at 116
th
and Broadway she was practically giddy. The club was just a few blocks east, but we took a cab rather than walk. “Girl may be knocked-up but she got to arrive in style. Can’t be looking like no subway-taking-too-poor-for-a-cab-ride street trash.”
As our cab moved slowly up Broadway Claudia peered out the window at the people on the sidewalk, students mostly, the stiff, square buildings of their schools ascending both sides of the street: Manhattan School of Music, Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia, Barnard, Horace Mann.
“Here’s something,” she said. “Consider it my burnt offering for the evening. A little story, like the ones you told me in the basement when I wasn’t feeling so hot.”
She paused, then began. “I used to come here, not so long ago. Oh well, maybe it was so long ago. Before Reggie at any rate, which means at least seven years. Eight? Jesus, I don’t even know anymore. I used to wander over here and hang out for a few hours, check out the bookstores and those guys on the sidewalk pushing their used magazines and the one dumb-ass hippie chick who’d always be hanging out in front of Tom’s Diner wearing her fake sixties-like-ish-esque print skirt and singing
that
song
. Okay, okay,” she said as if I’d protested, “why dress it up? I came here to troll for college boys. Eighteen-year-old white kids from Minnesota or Massa-two-shits who thought fucking a real live black girl in her Harlem apartment—cause I’ll tell you one thing, Jamie, I refused to have sex in a
dorm room
—was like something outta Spike Lee. Jungle fever, baby. Put your lips on mama right here and don’t be telling me Susie and Janie back home have titties like these.” She grabbed them through her dress, and even she seemed surprised at their milk-filled heft. “Oh, Jamie,” she went on, “those were the days! Not once but twice did I make a poor boy come in his pants. The first was this kid in a pair of Umbros, I called him the Soccer Player. He had seven zits on his forehead like the Big Dipper, and he ended up slinking off with his tail between his legs and a wet spot on the front of those shiny blue shorts. But the second kid was this freckle-faced redhead who practically fell on his knees in his eagerness to make up for his little accident. I was worried about his braces at first, but they added an entirely new and pleasurable sensation, and as it turned out his recovery time was amazing. He certainly earned
his
gold star. Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,” Claudia wound up as we stopped in front of a line of well-dressed people shivering on the wrong side of a velvet rope. “What were we looking for in that basement, when there are so many miracles in the real world?” She laughed, and without giving me a chance to answer she pushed open the door of the cab and said, “Now pay the man, would you?”
Claudia’s generosity was catching: I gave the driver one of Sonny Dinadio’s hundred-dollar bills. “Keep the change.”
Kisses awaited her at the bottom of a long narrow flight of stairs: the cashier, who took them instead of money, a couple of waitresses, the bartender. Claudia made a show of introducing me to her friends. “This is James,” she said, then “This is Jamie,” then just “This is J.” Music was playing over the speakers, something female and just a little bit down and dirty, and Claudia had to raise her voice to pierce the noise.
“This is J.! He a friend-a mine!”
The bartender took the time to wink at me, then spoke to Claudia in a voice so quiet she had to turn her ear toward his mouth to hear. As he spoke he mixed a cocktail, and after a few seconds of conversation Claudia burst into giggles, at which point the bartender handed her the glass and turned my way.
“What can I get you, my man?”
“Um, a beer?”
He reached beneath the bar and pulled out a green bottle.
“On the house.”
I nodded, turned to follow Claudia, but she stopped me.
“You tip the man?”
“He said it was on the house.”
Claudia rolled her eyes. “A word of advice. Unless you’re fucking the bartender, always leave him a tip.”
“But you—”
“J.,” Claudia cut me off with a smile. She grabbed one of her breasts through her dress as she had in the cab. “Collateral. Remember?”
I just nodded, turned, put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar, then Claudia took my hand and led us toward the front of the small room. I let myself be led, conscious of more than a few looks from the people we passed, although I wasn’t sure if they were looking at Claudia, or Claudia’s belly, or me, or me and Claudia’s belly. She stopped at a small circular table up close to the stage. There was a
Reserved
sign on the table, a small drum kit and battered upright piano on the stage. Claudia sat me down and set her glass on the table.
“I’m-a go say hi-lo to Reggie,” she said, patting her stomach. The smile smeared across her face seemed to have less to do with me than the rest of the room. “Wish me luck.” My face must’ve betrayed me because she put her hand on my shoulder and leaned as close to my ear as her belly would allow. “I just want to get this out of the way,” she said, then suddenly stopped, looked around. “Jesus, we can’t get out of basements, can we?”
My beer was so cold I could feel its passage down my esophagus, felt its swell inside my empty stomach, where it settled next to another, warmer feeling, this one generated not by beer or the thick smoky heat inside the club, but by Claudia, and the memory of everyone’s face lighting up at her radiant smile. I’d never seen her outside No. 1’s context before—I didn’t count our trips Upstate since I’d hardly been present myself—and so I’d never seen her charisma at work on anyone other than me or Nellydean. Her smile was like a spotlight, her eyes little cue cards from which you read glad tidings, and it was almost as uplifting to watch her give those gifts to everyone she encountered as it was to receive them. But it was also, I could reflect in her absence, a little disconcerting: now that I watched as a spectator I could see it as the performance it was.
I was halfway through my second beer when she came back. Something about her face had changed. It wasn’t a relaxing as much as it was a softening, and the first thing she did after she sat down was reapply her smile. The beer had left me a little buzzed—in the absence of our basement routine I’d gone a couple of days without eating, and my digestive tract sucked the alcohol directly into my veins.
Claudia smiled at me with freshly purpled lips. She put a hand on her drink, lifted it to her lips, then caught herself and pushed it toward me. “Here you go, baby. On me.”
“Do I have to tip you too?”
Claudia stared at me blankly, then blinked. “What?”
“Claudia, are you
stoned
?”
The crowd saved her. Applause sprang up as Reggie bounded onstage. He was taller than I remembered, and thinner, and in the time since I’d last seen him he’d spun his hair into dreadlocks as Claudia had, a lumpy mass that only made the angles in his face stand out more sharply. In three long strides he took his place at the upright microphone. The microphone only came to his chest, and he bent his knees slightly, curved his back, inclined his head so far I didn’t think he’d be able to speak, let alone sing. He held this pose until the last claps and cheers died away. There was a tinkle from the piano answered by the smooth watery noise of a brushed high hat, then the more insistent gurgle of a bass, and then Reggie opened his mouth.
“This is going out to my…”
He let his eyes fall to our table. I felt them pass over me on their way to Claudia, and he sang the next words in a voice that could have broken your heart.
“To my
baby
.”
Two hours later he straightened up and said, “Peace,” blew one last kiss to Claudia and left the stage.
I shook myself as if from a dream, looked around and saw through the clear air other listeners doing the same thing. I turned to Claudia. I raised my hands, I opened my mouth, but no words felt adequate to the task.
Claudia gathered both my hands in one of hers; it was warm from her stomach, where the other remained. “I read somewhere that some women play their babies classical music in the womb to soothe them. I figure if Divine
can
hear what’s going on, he’s got a leg up on all those other kids.” She stroked her stomach. “Balance out all the other shit I make him put up with.”
Suddenly I remembered. “Claudia,” I said, “did you smoke—”
“Baby!” she said over me, and I looked up up up to the impossibly distant face of Reginald Packman. He put one hand on the back of Claudia’s neck as he sat down, the other high up on her thigh, and he said something in a voice so normal I was suspicious: either this wasn’t the man I’d just heard singing, or that other voice was faked.