Mysteries of Motion (25 page)

“I’m always dying,” Vivie had bounced at a too commiserating island neighbor, but up here in New York she couldn’t believe she was settling down to it. “Someday, take me with you on that job of yours,” she’d say. “What we races do to each other don’t get melted down to scratch by a good job—but how it helps.” Veronica herself began to realize the gradations of what it had meant to this high-nosed, charged woman to cook or not to cook. One of Vivie’s forebears had been a white Bermuda landholder whose daughter by a native had in turn “housekept” for a white Jamaican hotel owner. “No Spanish in me. Your half-tone person always likes to claim some, your father used to say.” She talked more now of the father.

Veronica recalled him as a giant of a man, with a calm maintained at high speed. A parliamentarian since the age of twenty-six, he’d been in the habit of saying that he’d always meant to take time out for race prejudice, but something else always came up. “I have got absolutely no prejudice against myself,” he used to tease. “That’s where people of color get it worst.” But when he was crossed unfairly, or saw unfairness exerted against others of the race, the whites of his eyes turned oxblood. “You ever know,” Vivie said, “the year you were born, your mother and father, he was in Rome for the FAO, they lived in a palace?” The ground floor of it, a UN rental. The girl had been shown pictures of the palely frescoed rooms, scantily furnished with huge pre-Victor Emmanuel sofas whose cracked-gilt curves exploded at the lens. “Your people always lived well.”

After an attack, high on her crumpled pillows like a deposed queen, earrings awry, Vivie talked faster the more narrowly she’d escaped death; the megalomania was coming out in her, for “my girl.” Like a last tenderness for me, her girl thought, kneeling at the side of the bed, fist clenched over the pill bottle. A tender oozing formed in her, for all the put-upon, living in courage, dying in protest, with all their passion for a wider expanse spread out exaltedly before them. The heart in Vivie’s breast was breaking into floral offering. “Your father said I wasn’t ever to hold you back from your own terrors, just because I didn’t have them.” Eyes closed, Vivie snorted. The heart beat visibly. Her girl laid her other hand on it.

They’d come back also to an Ollie changed to Ali by the turban whose expertise he demonstrated for them. Standing in front of Vivie’s triplepaneled dressmaker’s mirror with his arms stretched wide holding taut the two ends of snowy cloth, if he wasn’t quite an Indian, nor an angel nor a devil, he did seem of a genus almost his own. When the turban’s fat peak was complete he stuck a glass topaz at the crest, ramming in the stickpin so jauntily that it drew blood from his scalp; all his actions were flawed alike. Full-face, his upper lip was a cupid’s bow nearly touching his nose. Glossy words came often from it, never outright lies. In contrast, when he was in a scrape his silences were thick with little peripheral fears from which Vivie would have to puzzle out what the main chance had been, and what had gone wrong with it.

Grinding her chair roughly back, she strode to the kitchenette, opened the fridge on the food party waiting there—what had possessed her, to buy two of this, two of that?; she wasn’t hungry for any of it—slammed the door, and poured herself a club soda. To the left of the tiny counter, in the wall just above, a black mouthpiece protruded, the intercom between this flat and Ali’s just above. Quick as that man had been, he hadn’t noticed it. If she let her mind loose on him, she could imagine him and his life in more detail than he would believe, fleshing him out from others of his kind he might be superior to, yet still resembled. But don’t dwell on him. By letting him be the first to come here, hadn’t she already changed this place—since Vivie’s death kept solely for the desk’s contents and all allied broodings—into just that “little suite” she’d downgraded to him?

Meanwhile, knowing damn well that the idea of such a place, nested in the heart of the city and for her adventures alone, had excited her ever since Ali used to take her to those other more “executive” suites. With her orange lamps and the misty gray curtains shopped for like any bride, she’d made the place a hope chest for illicit weddings with the unknown, a den which only a certain diffidence and leanness of taste had kept short of the sordid. Was there any difference between her and him because this place was primped with books? Or because, unlike Ali, she didn’t use it for livelihood?

Hers was a woman’s fantasy. On the same level as any roving male’s, but not stopping there—and poignant against her own will. For, in the fantasies of most women, these fests were never communal, jolly and shared, but private; their little magic carpets were still designed for only one guest.

Her own harsh laugh startled her. He hadn’t liked that laugh—the man. Vivie too had always been at her to change it consciously, the way you’d change a name that didn’t go with your beauty. But the laugh came from her cells, satirical. She put her mouth to the intercom and blew.

If her stepbrother, who always proudly referred to himself as “a 4
A.M.
person,” did prowl beyond the hours of even his raunchy crowd, this was partly because his milkweed energies collected late. According to Vivie, when he was a boy she couldn’t get him up in the morning either for school or fun, and one exasperated afternoon had brought in all the neighborhood boys to see him drowsing in his tousled bed, hugging the pillow like a girl. The ruse had only put him farther outside the pale of ordinary boys. To Vivie’s rage, he’d liked it there.

Perhaps there were even certain body rhythms, after-evening cycles, which helped make you a pimp. Ali the grown man complained to his mother that he wasn’t “Garuda evil”—referring to the Thai devil doll he kept to scare the girls upstairs—but merely “fancy-chancy” in his tastes, meaning that his spirit oozed most comfortably into corners where moral standards were relaxed. His ever-pubescent good looks put the seal on that, as Veronica herself knew good looks could, verging with you to emphasize any path you took. Ali’s skin color, though, which could pass for a number of indeterminate races, allowed him more experiment with truth. Long before she’d realized it, her stepbrother had served as her spore collector down among some of the world’s dirty businesses she’d been spared but ought to know about. For this she was grateful to him. He’d saved her from being an aristocrat—the fake one that Vivie otherwise would have made of her.

As for Ali’s rites with women, luckily his sadisms must be as relaxed as the rest of him, at their worst little social cruelties. Beyond that, there were many males not pimps who liked to have a woman only once. She understood this, or had. She’d brought men “home” in many parts of the world—hotels, apartments borrowed or rented for her travels, only never here. “Slap death a little, after I’m gone,” Vivie had said. Her pupils had glazed, never her brain. “Young ones have to.” Make this place yours, she meant; she’d known how much it wasn’t yet. So—seized by that man’s eyes, so ready to own the city as he stood on those steps, by that lion hair of his so maverick to the “business” rest of him, and most of all by the mane of travel floating behind him so clear—she’d told herself she was courting him as the first candidate, to make the home-place hers.

Ali wasn’t answering. Barred from here, he probably never now listened for the intercom. After his mother’s death, unable to come to Vivie either for the advice he asked for after the deed like a chaser after whisky, but never took, or for the bail money, which he did, he’d started coming to Veronica, until she’d at last shut him out. The house had been left to them jointly—by that same Vivie who’d sworn “on your father’s head, and mine” to keep her girl from “Ollie’s muck.” After years of waiting for him to change, she’d finally conceded there was nothing to wait for. “When I’m gone, let him go.” Yet in the end she had bound them together, in one of those counter-actions with which people both denied the whole tenor of their lives and admitted it.

Like me, she thought. Like mine. The unknown is harder for a woman to acquire. When will I learn that mock weddings are not the way to it?

She bent her head to the next stanza, of which, though it wasn’t done yet, though nothing in the manuscript was final, she was beginning to be proud.

Upstairs, as the man and I bedlock, the alley panes blaze.

Is that three zombies combing their hair,

Or three hairy pots on the windowsill

Of those boys who give harlequin cookouts?

(Two pairs of opera glasses lying there, and a riding crop)

And no wonder, with the MONY time-tower opening its dark

redoubt

On a climbing string of light it douses again, dickering

Like a stepmother letting you in, closing you out.

Alto night birds scream in the late coffee shop

“Look boy, you gave me a nigger cigar!”

What’s that mean? Why’s there always a 2
A.M.
pistol shot

But never a 6
A.M.
corpse?

Toward morning the harbor’s talking,

Grave hulls at sea, yawing broad thoughts.

The avenue rings with heels, like an apse,

Society shadows the streets, the nation begins living,

The day ferry jams the pier, the fur stores kneel in prayer.

This street never wears out.

Nothing too big for it, nothing too small.

But how will Lacey come again, to Carnegie Hall?

With this addition the poem became a poem—she was almost sure of it. And the next stanza—would there be one? From day to day she was never sure. What would happen there? Each stanza so far was an era. One could never see at the time the eras of one's life. To say “Lacey,” not to call her “Miss”—that was a change. She was concerning herself with that when the downstairs buzzer was pressed.

Who?…
My name is Mulenberg
…
Oh no, you don’t. The night’s over. I’ve shut you out.

Then she heard the elevator, sighing upward. To get to it, if no one upstairs answered your buzz, you had to have a key.

Ollie, then. She was glad—that she was glad.

Sly, loose, mean—though never to her—and sweet (for until her teens he’d been the most beguiling companion), yes, he lived in the mulch between good and bad, and had taught her it was there. Yet he had an odd loyalty to what he was, a need to be consistent with it. Reject him from your life, as she and Vivie, clasped in desperation, had once tried to do, and you carried him like a stone in your consciousness, as if you’d resisted a natural force—which perhaps you had. The elevator passed her floor, sighing. Why’d he rung the buzzer then? Here it came, the old confusion, hot and binding, the shifty yoke Ollie always brought along with him. Behind her, the intercom sibilated. “Sister?”

He’s safe. He’s home. But don’t answer. Don’t get into it. Better to carry the stone.

“Y-yes, Ollie?”

“Shhh-h-h.
I must come down. And speak to you.”

She clasped her hands tight. “Okay.”

“Lis-sen. Doose the lights.”

How Irish the Bejan accent sometimes sounded. It could pass for Anglo-Indian, leftover Hindustani or what-have-you; the old Empire on his tongue served him well. Whenever he had to light out, he fled to corners of that empire, small islands or outposts, never to the continents. In her own travels she’d encountered other people who too were bits and drifts of the Empire, as she was in part herself. Empires didn’t stop all at once, but turned human and fragmentary.

Ten minutes went by. Fifteen. Twenty. One of the things Ollie always did was to make you wait. Learn to wait.

He was there, scratching at the peephole. The minute she opened up and let him into the room he grabbed her wrist and led her quickly into the walk-in closet in the bedroom. He was always at ease in the dark; was that why his friends kept him on?

“There—” he whispered. “You can turn on the light now.”

She fumbled unwillingly for the string. Disaster from his second-rate crimes never touched his Roman-silk suits. Would blood have fallen on Ollie? Did she want to see that, or not?

He’d changed to his flight uniform, so who could tell? The vanilla suit and turban were gone. Sharp jeans and two sweaters now, the string one and the cardigan, and the Fendi shoulder bag. An admiring twinge pricked her. He dressed for travel better than anybody. Except her.

“You forgot to change shoes.” Tawny suede, high-heeled and buckled.

He hadn’t been able to bring himself to. Or to divest himself of his rings. Garish ten-carat love knot or true green-gold scarab, fake solitaire and dim carnelian Greek seal from the first century, he’d kept them all.

Why was he looking at her that way? Pityingly.

“You’ll have to get out of here,” he said hoarsely. “By tonight.”

When he saw she couldn’t answer, he smoothed her cheek. “They’ll be coming to wreck this place.”

Vivie and she had lived under the shadow of many such “theys.” “So you got out of the washroom.”

His neck arched like a cat’s. “She came here, the c—?” He always curbed his tongue to her. She was Sister. “Where’d she go?”

“Back to her Queens bar. In Mamma’s gold dress.”

“Mamma’s—The one I gave her? What the hell you—?”

“She had to change too.”

He put his hand to his mouth.

“You help kill him?”

He shook his head. “But they know I know who.” From behind the hand, sludgily. Above the hand his eyes, brown and humid, were from a father Vivie’d never identified. Veronica’s own father hadn’t much wanted to give him their name, confiding wryly, People’ll think he’s mine.

“I’ll have to make a clean break,” he said. “This time.”

This time. He’d never said that before. The times were always separate, always a surprise to him.

“Where’ll you go?”

“Better you don’t know.” He always said that, heroically. Then came the letters for money, loud and plain, in between hints of return. Money to come back, money to stay—all the same money, Vivie said, and said. By the time he did come back it was all over, for one more time.

The weak bulb shone down on him.

So many things they knew of together, no matter what. For a moment she dreamed there, discounting what he’d said about the place. One of his little fears, which were relieved the minute he’d confessed them. “You hungry?” she said absently. What Vivie always said to either of them—the only way she showed her feelings. Before you go, let me pack you a lunch.