Three-Martini Lunch (24 page)

O
f course, it was only natural to invite Swish and Bobby and Pal, and even though the party was something Rusty had demanded it was nice having all the gang back together and it wasn't long before Eden and I began to feel like the whole thing had been our own idea in the first place. The early-autumn chill had let off a bit and everyone was in good spirits that night. Pal had just had a little poetry chapbook printed and it was impossible not to smile back into his friendly blue eyes as he passed it around with a look of sheepish pride. Swish also was in fine form: He had gotten a haircut and dropped the ratty hobo attire for the evening and stood in the corner hunched over with his characteristic wiry thin-guy posture, debating politics with a freckly blond kid dressed in glasses and a rumpled checked shirt. The blond kid didn't so much debate back as listen and nod.

Bobby was always the last to turn up at parties and we all knew this about him and even had grown to like it. Whenever things started to slow up and get dull, Bobby would crash through the door with all his explosive
energy and inject the atmosphere with new life. True to form that night, after we'd all been sitting around for a while and had gotten a few drinks into things, Bobby showed up with a couple of huge hash bricks he'd gotten off a crazy Frenchman and a trio of girls whose names he hadn't even bothered to learn but who he'd decided to call LaVerne, Maxene, and Patty after the Andrews Sisters. I didn't talk much to the girls that night as it was clear they were all in it for Bobby and were trying to outlast one another to see which one of them would finally wind up basking in Bobby's beauty for the night. I remember they giggled every time he called them by the Andrew Sisters' names despite the fact no one liked the Andrews Sisters and it was clearly a condescension and we all found their lack of dignity mildly irritating.

Overall, though, even the Andrews Sisters couldn't ruin the mood that night, which was good. We were all keyed up and ready to get our kicks. After Bobby made his entrance the room suddenly got very full and all the conversations began going a million miles a minute and nobody paid much attention to Rusty, so for a moment I thought he might get bored and go home. Of course he didn't, because he was waiting for Miles to turn up, and eventually Miles did turn up looking very clean-cut and muscular and then a little later there was some bad business that I'm ashamed to say I hadn't anticipated and so did very little to stop. The bad business started when we had all moved the party up onto the roof.

When Miles got to our apartment he poked his handsome dusky face into the room with an uncertain air and knocked timidly on the open door, despite the fact he'd obviously found us. Sonny Rollins was piping hot and loud out of the record player. Eden waved and left my side to go over to his. The two of them were joined by Swish and very shortly afterward all three of them were locked into one of Swish's great debates. By the time I made my way across the room Swish was heavy into a diatribe about whether or not it would be better to live as a colored man in the U.S.A. or in Russia.

“Don't get the wrong idea,” Swish was saying when I walked up, “I hear what you're saying about Dos Passos because I have a true affection for that cat of course and all his politics, too, and I would like nothing better than to agree but what I'm saying is a man of color—a man such as yourself—might do better to live in a foreign nation where his people haven't already been harnessed to the government like a godforsaken capitalistic extra appendage of the state and you could start over without the burden of your people's history and maybe with the right intellectuals even make a new history of your own . . .”

Miles frowned in a friendly way and shook his head at Swish and I saw Swish's body tighten in the pleased apprehension that someone was about to disagree with him. “You're assuming I want to forget my people's history,” Miles said. He inflected the words
my people
in a kind of wry way and I think this was meant to imply Swish was using an expression he had no right to use. The point was lost on Swish, because Swish had always been of the opinion that simply being born had entitled him to all rights of every kind and most especially the right to talk about anything he wanted to with whatever expressions suited him best.

“Well, why wouldn't you?” Swish asked. “It's a beggars' history, cobbled together by the very people who have made you beggars. The Negro will never be equal to the white man until he sheds his history as a slave and gets everybody to forget all about the shame of letting himself be enslaved.”

“It's a history of adversity,” Miles said, suddenly very quiet and serious. “And adversity is what makes a people strong in their own conviction of themselves as a people.”

“Well, you're hanging on to your own noose is what I say, and in the larger order of things this is why your people have stayed exactly where they have stayed.”

It was almost imperceptible but I saw Miles flinch at Swish's words. Very coolly he collected himself and cleared his throat and I could see
then that Miles had probably had more than one conversation with the kind of intense white guy Swish was and had learned long ago not to rise too passionately to the bait because that was exactly what these guys always wanted. “I see,” Miles said. “And would you have the Jews forget their persecution during the war, too?”

“You bet I would,” Swish said. “The war of course was awful for the Jews, but the survivors only make themselves into victims by sitting around talking about how awful it was for them.”

This time it was Eden's turn to flinch. Most of the time I forgot that Eden was Jewish and now as I saw her flinch I remembered her true name again. But before I had much of a chance to reflect on this fact I felt the short, stingy, hovering presence of Rusty at my elbow.

“Tell your friend to stop being a drip,” Rusty said in a low voice into my ear, meaning Swish. I hated that he knew I would do what he told me to do, but he did have one thing right and that was how gloomy the conversation was getting. Swish meant well but he liked to stir up controversy—he saw it as his way of upholding American democracy—and conversations that started off in an unassuming tone could sometimes turn sour and poison the night and cause everyone's mood to take a turn for the worse.

“How about we all go up to the roof,” I said, and everyone but Swish shot me a smile of relief. The great political debate was dropped as we headed in the direction of where Bobby and the Andrews Sisters had disappeared minutes earlier by climbing out the open window and up the fire escape.

The roof was really the only place for the party to go. Over the first few months following our honeymoon we had discovered the apartment was tolerable for two people, but only by a slim margin. Certainly it was much too small to host a full party, so one by one people crawled out the fire escape and climbed up the rusted iron ladder that led to the roof.

When I got to the top of the ladder I inhaled a lungful of thick sickly sweet air and I knew Bobby had decided to try the hashish. As a group we
mostly smoked tea and not hash, because sometimes hash gave you bad returns at the end of the night, but it's also true that whatever Bobby did we were all likely to follow suit and so it wasn't long before everyone on the roof was smoking the hash and it turned out to be okay stuff. The temperature was pleasant and the night sky seemed wide-open and almost ghostly as it glowed with the dim buzz of a million refracted city lights. Pal called up to us from the fire escape to lower the bucket and rope that we kept on the roof. When we lowered it he filled the bucket up with bottles of beer and whiskey and vodka and we hauled it all up and after that the party had officially moved to the roof for good.

Once we'd settled into our new location, some of us stood holding drinks and talking, some of us jazzed about to the music floating up from the windows below, and some of us spread old blankets on the tarred ground and lay down to smoke and look up at the sky. Eden and I found a dark corner and got to talking. I took her small, fine-boned hand in mine and thought again of how wise I'd been to marry her.

•   •   •

I
didn't notice when Rusty and Miles disappeared from the party and neither did anyone else, but later when we tried to figure it out we guessed it must've been an hour or so after we all adjourned to the roof that Rusty was bold enough to slip the Amytal into Miles's drink. I heard that, just like the bennies, Rusty had gotten the Amytal off his old aunt with all the health problems. In any case, wherever Rusty got the stuff he gave Miles that night he must've underestimated Miles's body weight and tolerance, because when we heard the ruckus coming from the little antechamber of a shack that enclosed the air shaft over the building's main stairwell, we opened the door and there was Miles thrashing around with a discombobulated groggy sort of violence, giving Rusty a real ring-dinger of a black eye as his arms and legs flailed out in all directions and he fought against the effects of the drug.

It took us a while to react. We were all still very stoned on the hash, which had turned out to be smooth enough but very strong. We stood staring at the two struggling figures in a state of shock as they thrashed about and before long Rusty had a bloody nose to go along with his black eye. Blood and snot poured down in a pattering dribble as Rusty bent over to pull up his trousers, which were still around his ankles. The motion of it set off a new wave of terror in Miles afresh and his muscular back jerked against the stairwell door inside the rooftop antechamber. He thrashed about, and then all at once the rusted chain that had likely kept that door sealed for the better part of two decades broke loose and the door flew open. Miles staggered through it and stumbled wildly down the stairs in a horrible, sickening way that made my stomach lurch; it was like watching a confused animal fight for its life.

We stood there listening to the sounds of Miles thump and tumble his way down the stairs. I didn't move until I heard the familiar clatter of the building's front door. At that point Eden and I dashed to the other side of the roof to peer over. Far down below, Miles limped blindly out into oncoming traffic. Although it was difficult to tell from his body language, I think in his confused state he was trying to hail a cab. Several taxi drivers avoided him until finally one pulled over. Seeing too late his passenger was a crazed colored man in torn clothing, the driver tried to pull away from the curb but was ultimately saddled with Miles as his fare.

With shock and shame we all turned to look at Rusty.

The party was more or less over after that. People trickled down from the roof and out the front door of our apartment talking in private rumbling voices about where to go next. I took Rusty downstairs to the bathroom down the hall from our apartment and gave him some towels and told him to clean himself up. I shut the door. I didn't want to watch him fix up his cuts and scrapes and I sure as hell didn't want to help him. When Rusty emerged forty-five minutes later, he limped quietly down the hallway without so much as glancing back into the apartment at us and we
watched him make his pathetic journey to the stairs, looking a little like a pirate hobbling along on a peg-leg. Just like that, he disappeared without another word.

The mere fact I had helped him with the towels meant Eden wouldn't look me in the eye for the rest of the evening. When we finally switched out the lights and lay down on the mattress on the floor that night, she turned the cold moonlit expanse of her back to me and in a voice so soft it was barely audible murmured:
We led him to the fucking slaughter.

I reached for her hand but she pulled it away.

39

I
slept for days. The occasional sound of Wendell yelling in the living room drifted into my bedroom, and even further, into my dreams, but I could not care. At regular intervals, my mother bustled in and out, depositing plates of food and later, seeing them untouched, clearing them away. She washed in and out like the tide. Cob materialized at my bedside, pushing his Coke bottles up the bridge of his nose, holding up a glass jar, showing off a cicada in the process of molting. The grotesque sight of it entered my nightmares, slowly bursting out of its own body like a monster in a horror movie, leaving behind a dead, brittle sculpture of itself still gripping a broken branch.

On the third day, I got up and looked at myself in the mirror.

Even in its worst state, the cicada was more attractive by a long shot.

Janet could not understand why I insisted on saying good-bye over the telephone as opposed to meeting her, as we had planned, in our usual spot in the park. But it was time to go. As soon as I could stand upright
without seeing purple spots, I packed a small suitcase and made my way to Port Authority, where I purchased a ticket for a Greyhound. I sat in the back. The engine rumbled to life. We plunged into the Lincoln Tunnel and came up into the light. Marshland and factories. Pitch pine and birch flashing by in chaotic rows, soldiers breaking ranks on the battlefield. Hour by hour, mile by mile, the earth began to flatten. The driver braked at hamburger stands, rest stops. The bus shuddered each time the engine was cut. I imagined the death rattle of a dinosaur. Faces changed, a revolving cast of characters. Smells of grease, of garlic, of cigarettes, of body odor. A tuba was lugged on and carried off. A little girl threw her doll out the window and was spanked very horribly and publicly for all the passengers on the bus to witness.

Woods gave way to corn, corn to wheat, wheat to desert, desert to mountains. A bizarre feeling of disbelief each time the scenery matched expectation: red barn over the cornfield, cartoonish cactus standing in one-armed salute amidst sand, tumbleweed. Everything as different as you could want from New York, everything exactly as promised. The final leg, craggy granite melting into a valley, into foothills and oaks, folds of land opening at last upon the nickel-colored bay. Soaring over the bridge and into the heart of San Francisco, tinge of salt in the air.

Later that night, under the dim bulb in the cramped bathroom of my hotel room, my face in the mirror revealed a map of healing: faint traces of yellows, purples, and indigo dying out under the canvas of my skin. A scab like a thick leathery patch on my cheek, beginning to fall off. An exoskeleton to leave behind.

“What happened to you?” a nosy woman in the bus seat next to me had asked, meaning my face.

“An accident,” I said.

I should have answered,
I am molting.

I climbed into bed, muscles sore from disuse, bones still vibrating from
the rumble of a phantom engine. Images flashed against the black screen of my closed eyelids. Those last nights in Manhattan. Rusty. Cob and his cicada. Trees flashing by, tick-tick-tick, until they transformed into steel bridge girders and petered out at the end of the earth. The task still before me. Always the thought of my father.