Three-Martini Lunch (14 page)

O
n
the way back uptown I wondered if it was true. The optimism I possessed when I'd arrived in New York had fallen into some dark, irretrievable place, like a key dropped down a sidewalk grate; I'd begun to doubt I'd ever get it back again. Then a funny thing happened on my way back to the Barbizon.

A bit more sober but still very warm and slightly pink-cheeked, I passed a beauty salon and peered into the window. I'd passed by before and knew it was a cheap place that smelled of permanent solution and bleach. A young hairdresser was stooped over the back of a barber chair, leaning idly on her elbow while she flipped through the pages of a magazine propped open in the empty seat. She yawned with boredom. I could see someone had instructed her not to sit while on the job and she was waiting out the end of the day, which was likely near now. All of a sudden, an impulse seized me. The bell over the door tinkled as I pushed my way inside.

“Cut it short,” I said, once she'd scrambled to scoop up the magazine from the empty chair and I'd climbed in. “I need a change.”

“How short do you want?” she asked, looking at my long black ponytail with the skeptical expression of someone who is uncertain whether or not she is talking to a crazy person.

“
Very
short,” I said. She raised her eyebrows, a bit frightened.

“Say, I'm not trying to chase away business, but I'm new here. Are you sure?” she asked, biting her lip. Across the room a woman was gossiping to a manicurist. They paused and turned to look me over, intrigued.

“I'm sure.” I glanced at myself in the mirror. A reckless fire smoldered in my eyes.

“Would you mind picking out a photograph at least? Something for me to model the cut on,” she said, handing me the magazine she'd been reading. I took it and turned a few pages, then stopped.

“That,”
I said, pointing to a starlet in a Max Factor ad.

“Boy, you weren't kidding!” she exclaimed. “That
is
awfully short.” She tried to smile, but when she picked up the scissors and comb, her hands were trembling slightly. She took a breath and set about her work. I didn't watch. Eventually she needed to reach around to the other side of my head and pivoted the chair away from the mirror. She frowned. Her brow furrowed. She bit her lip. When she was done, she took a step back and looked me up and down very carefully, squinting. Then she giggled with proud delight.

“Gosh!” she said, covering her mouth.

The haircut was striking: Suddenly I looked very modern with my dark hair clipped close to the back of my neck and my bangs trimmed across my forehead in a tidy black line. I had wanted to emulate a New Yorker, and now that I had failed in all the important ways I had finally—and ironically—gotten the trick of it, if only on the surface. The manicurist in the salon whistled and winked, exclaiming, “It's
Roman Holiday
all over again! Look out, Gregory Peck!” I thanked the hairdresser and paid for the cut and left in something of a daze.

I bought a bottle of vodka on my way home—another purchase I
couldn't really afford, but I was so far down the rabbit hole, I figured I may as well reach the bottom—and snuck it upstairs into my room at the Barbizon. I sat on the floor and stared at myself in the mirror, taking swigs directly from the mouth of the bottle and breaking down in sobs until I could barely breathe. Finally, I passed out lying facedown on the rug, my skin hot and sticky with the brine of evaporated tears.

It was not until I woke up and looked in the mirror the next morning that I realized: My hair
was
different. But moreover:
I
was different. I looked like a new person. And just at that moment I remembered something else, a seemingly tiny insignificant detail I'd forgotten about. I flashed back to that day on the university lawn. Mr. Hightower had written me
two
letters of introduction. I had given one to Miss Everett. The other was still tucked away in my underwear drawer along with my passport.

An idea occurred to me.

20

T
he day after the Hamilton Lodge Ball, I was preoccupied with the worry that someone from our neighborhood had seen me there. Janet was not one to jump to conclusions, but I pictured the gossip reaching my mother, and the look that was likely to appear on her face. I knew I would never be able to convince her it was all a big mistake. Unable to put this worry completely out of my thoughts, I decided the best thing to do would be to go straight home after finishing my messenger shift. If she had indeed heard about it, she wouldn't have to say anything; I would know. My mother was capable of many feats, but hiding her disapproval was not one of them. Besides, I reasoned, it was time I paid some attention to my younger brother, Cob. “Cob” was a nickname; his given name was Malcolm. He was called Cob because by the time he was three years old he'd adopted a habit of smiling so wide, folks liked to say you could fit a whole corncob in there. He was an impressionable boy on the verge of turning eight that year. To look at Cob made one's heart fill with joy; there was still a happy, unspoiled innocence about him. It was an innocence that
made me glad, but also nervous. Wendell despised teenagers, and every year Cob inched closer to adolescence he likewise unwittingly inched his way closer to becoming a scapegoat for Wendell's wrath.

As it turned out, it was a good evening to spend some time at home, because Wendell was not around. According to my mother, Wendell had left the apartment that morning with his rod and tackle in tow. This meant he was likely to spend the entire day fishing at the East River and wouldn't come home until after sundown. I never understood the men who did that—men who sat sipping a bottle of beer wrapped in a brown paper bag, staring sullenly at their giant fishing poles jerry-rigged to the fence along the East River. But if there was any man who was suited to this curious variety of sport, it was Wendell.

“Miles!” Cob shouted when he saw me come in the front door. He charged my body like a small bull and wrapped his arms about my waist. Poor vision must've run in our family: I also wore glasses, but Cob required Coke bottles so thick, it was a wonder he could see anything at all. The doctors said that if he wore them throughout his youth, he might be able to get on without them as an adult. In the meantime, the glasses were an obstacle to his popularity in school. He had always had a strong affinity for insects, and I sometimes wondered—perhaps insensitively—if it wasn't in part because of his awkward resemblance to a praying mantis.

“Hey, Cob,” I said, hugging him back. “Tell me something: What day is it tomorrow?”

“Friday.”

“It's not the weekend yet, then, is it? You done your schoolwork?”

He sighed and shook his head. He was a good kid. Whether he did his homework or not, Cob still maintained the stunningly beautiful quality of never lying about such things.

“How about we do it together?” I said.

He gave his assent in a vigorous nod. “And then after I can show you the new bugs I caught?” he prompted. If there was one thing Cob cared
about, it was adding to his insect collection and showing it off to people. He knew the world's geography in shockingly precise detail, but only in terms of what beetle lived where and which butterflies migrated with the seasons. For birthdays, my mother traditionally gave him socks and footballs, but I had taken to giving him heavy hardbound books on entomology, and while he showed little interest in the socks or the footballs, he never expressed disappointment with the books.

“Go fetch your books and bring them into the living room.” I nudged him into motion and he ran off to find his schoolbag. I moved in the direction of the kitchen to find my mother.

“Ma?” I called, feeling slightly apprehensive.

“In here.”

I found her at the kitchen table peeling carrots.

“I hear you say you gonna help Cob with his schoolwork?” she asked with no further greeting.

“Yes,” I said, relieved by her tone; I knew no malicious gossip had reached her ears.

“Good,” she replied. “I was helpin' him last night, but Wendell was in one of his moods, so we had to quit.” This, I knew, was getting to be a common occurrence. Whenever my mother paid attention to Cob, Wendell grew blindingly jealous and got into one of his “moods,” as my mother called them. The fact that a grown man should be jealous of a mother paying attention to her seven-year-old son baffled me, and the fact that my mother—a strong-willed woman and breadwinner to boot—should cater to these childish tantrums baffled me even further.

“I remember when I used to do my schoolwork in the living room when I was Cob's age,” I murmured, half to myself. “Father never got in a mood. He had so much
curiosity
about what I was studying,” I said, recalling the way I'd sit cross-legged on the floor next to my father's easy chair. It was a pleasant memory, the way he would lean over my shoulder and
watch me solve algebra problems and balance chemical equations as if I were performing one magic trick after another.

My mother chose to ignore my digression.

“Who that old man you runnin' errands for in the mornings?” she asked. My sense of alarm perked up again. She meant Mister Gus. I'd told her a little bit about the extra money I was earning. “That a lot of money to pay for jus' bringin' him the daily paper,” she said now, frowning. “You know, they gots paperboys for that. Why don't he jus' subscribe?”

“He says subscriptions make newspapermen lazy,” I said, repeating a line from one of Mister Gus's tirades. “He doesn't want any paper thinking they've got him on the hook.”

She grunted. “Sounds like you got yo' hands full with that one.” She twisted from where she sat at the table in order to heap the carrot peels into a small rubbish pail. “Well, just don't let him take advantage of yo' time or yo' kindness. Rich white folks always trying to take
advantage
.” For a moment I worried she was implying something sinister. I knew some part of my recent employment was a function of Mister Gus's loneliness, but I had not yet admitted as much to myself outright.

I glanced at my mother, nervous. But then I reminded myself of the time she had worked as a personal nurse to an elderly lady on the Upper East Side. The woman had requested my mother take on more and more work, yet was often forgetful when it came time to pay my mother. Finally, when the old lady passed away, a tally of her outstanding debts was revealed. My mother's name was not listed among them. Even now, years later, I could see it still galled her to be reminded of how she had worked like a dog and been shorted nearly two months' pay—two months she could not afford.

“I'll be mindful,” I said.

“Be mindful all you wants,” my mother said. “Just get yo' money up front.”

•   •   •

I
spent the rest of the afternoon in the living room with Cob, the two of us crouched over the coffee table, going over parts of speech and then afterwards the finer points of “borrowing” when subtracting two-digit sums.

“Are you going to California to look for Daddy's journal?” Cob asked while in the middle of working out a math problem.

“Ma told you about that?” I was surprised and faintly annoyed. I was nervous enough about how things would turn out; I didn't need to be nervous for two. Cob nodded, and my stomach lurched with a sense of responsibility for him.

According to my parents, I'd had another brother, too: an elder brother named Marcus who as a boy of only six had drowned in the East River as a result of accepting a neighborhood dare. He died shortly after I was born, and I'd developed a kind of reverse magical thinking about this fact, as though my coming into the world had accidentally pushed him out. A photograph of him hung on the wall in my bedroom. From this image I was able to extrapolate all sorts of memories, with no true gauge, of course, to measure their accuracy. Every once in a while, I talked aloud to his photograph in a familiar manner, the way children sometimes do when they are confiding secrets to a favorite rag doll or asking favors from an invisible god. I had the details of that photograph memorized. Marcus was a handsome little boy, with a confident smile and his shoulders thrust proudly backwards, and I wondered sometimes whether, if he had lived, he might've become the man I know my father was hoping one of us would become.

There were times, too, when I imagined the day of the tragedy. On late summer afternoons when there was nothing to do and the heat of the day was trapped in the apartment, I would lie around my bedroom, watching dust motes falling idly through the air, and allow my eyes to slide shut despite the fact I was hardly sleepy and not in need of a nap. My waking
dream was always the same. I envisioned Marcus picking over the steep boulders of the urban shore as other boys jeered at him and egged him on, his small, tough little body easing into the filthy waters and then pushing off into the current. The way I pictured it, he must've been a brave kid, the kind of kid who would not have been able to turn back defeated. The challenge was to swim clear to the opposite shore and back again. Of course no child in our neighborhood had any business being in the water, let alone a six-year-old. The sum total of a Harlem kid's swimming experience was generally limited to a handful of summer days spent splashing chlorinated water into one another's faces in a rec pool packed with hundreds of other children, the pool shallow enough to stand on the bottom and so packed with bodies you couldn't reach out an arm without touching someone else. But heroic leader that I imagined Marcus to be, I theorized he'd been completely lacking in fear. In my most morbid musings, I wondered if he'd been surprised, in those final moments, to feel his head dipping under the water for longer and longer periods, until he had been swept all the way downstream, past the tip of Randall's Island, and he finally failed to come up altogether. I used to lie in bed and stare at that photograph, searching Marcus's face for some kind of sign, as though somewhere in the gleam that shone within his eyes was a hint of premonition, a signal that he understood his fate was already sealed. I considered whether, if he were in my place, Marcus would make the trip out to California now.

“Are you going to go?” Cob repeated his question. I considered how to reply. I thought some more about how different things were when I used to do my schoolwork with my father leaning over my shoulder and smiling in proud amazement every time I wrote a sentence or solved an equation. There was a particular sensation that went along with it—a sensation I wouldn't trade for the world—and I wished Cob could somehow know it, too. But he never would.

“Maybe,” I said finally. This was honest. “If I can manage it.”

“Ma says you're going to bring back Pa's journal,” Cob said. Then he gave a shy smile and peered back into the open pages of his schoolbook, shrugging. I could see he wanted something; he always got shy when he wanted something. “And maybe . . . if you go . . . you could bring back some bugs, too,” he suggested. “I've never been able to catch a monarch. Lots of monarchs migrate through California.”

“Do they?” I asked. He nodded enthusiastically. “Well, I, for one, would like to know more about that,” I said, and sat back, listening to my kid brother explain to me all about the beauty of love and death within the insect world.