The Man in My Basement (10 page)

I wasn’t aware of falling into sleep. It was a deep, deep rest. The electric light moving across my face as I shifted around felt like a cloudy afternoon. The silence of my cellar spoke glowingly of eternal rest.

But when I woke up I was disoriented. I had forgotten where I was and the reality of the cell scared me. I jumped to my feet, trying to find a way out. But there was none. At least that’s what I thought.

I shouted for help, running from side to side, hitting the walls, but there was no give there. Finally I forced myself to sit down. I was shaking and wondering in spite of the situation how much of the shakes came from whiskey. Then I saw the door. It was down and unlocked, but the fit was snug and I had to push pretty hard to get out.

When I crawled out of the cage, the shakes got even worse. Cold and nauseous, I couldn’t rise from my knees. It came to me that I had never known real fear before, that I had lived a whole lifetime in complete safety. But there was no solace in that knowledge. I rolled up into a fetal ball and began to moan. Salty sweat trickled down between my lips. The shuddering music of a mothlike throbbing played along the nerves of my neck.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that. It may have been an hour or more. But when the fear subsided, I experienced a release so profound that even breath was an ecstasy of incredible joy.

It was dark outside. The evening was cool and clear. I got into my car and drove out to the beach past Bridgehampton and parked. I walked for hours down along the shore. The ocean played its music and the moon cast shadows through the clouds. My feet were bare and the wet sand was cold, but this was a good thing. I needed sensation in my body to counteract the fear that had not left but simply subsided.

Many miles down from my car, I came to an empty parking lot. It was 2:30 in the morning. There was a phone booth in the lot. Information gave up Bethany’s number, and she answered on the fourth ring.

“Hello?”

“Bethany?”

“Hi, Charles,” she said, suddenly awake and happy.

I told her about the lot and she knew where it was. She didn’t ask how I got there or what I wanted.

“I’ll be right there,” she said.

I sat on the ground next to the phone and waited.

After nearly half an hour, a pair of headlights came down the long path from the road. A fog had rolled in by then. This softened the beams and tinged them with yellow. I stood up and began waving at the same time, wondering whether or not this late-night motorist was Bethany. The car veered toward me and I felt a catch in my lungs, fear that I was alone in the dark.

“Charles!” Bethany yelled out the window. “Charles!”

She applied the brakes, making the car squeal and slide on the gravelly asphalt. It was right out of an old movie, where the star-crossed lovers finally come together after war and famine and other cruel twists of fate.

A short black dress with no hose, lips a deep red, and every hair in place—that was Bethany.

“Baby,” she said. And then she took me in her arms. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said and it wasn’t a lie. “I need to take a bath.”

It only took ten minutes to get back to her place. She kept asking what had happened, what was wrong, but I said I couldn’t talk yet. My teeth were chattering and I blamed the cold. She accepted my excuse. Maybe that really was why I couldn’t talk.

“My roommate’s gone back to Baltimore for the week,” she told me as she gave me a big towel.

I spent a long time under the shower. I washed completely, even brushed my teeth with a blue brush I found on the sink.

When I came out, draped in the towel, I was ready to talk but the time for talking was over for a while.

We kissed more than I had kissed in my whole life. Long wet osculations with hungry little grunts punctuating our pleasure. I kissed her breasts and her toes, the round crack of her buttocks and spaces behind her thighs. I massaged her shoulders while licking the back of her neck. When she moved back to watch me, I kissed the blankets on her bed.

After we had made love, I held tight.

“Charles,” she said. “Hold me.”

The hugging went on into the morning. It led to many more bouts of passion. I was making up for a starvation diet, broken in a fit of fear.

The next day I asked Bethany to take me back to my car.

“When will I see you?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll call you when all of this is over.”

“All of what?”

“I don’t know what, okay? I don’t know.”

She drove me without asking anything else. At the car she said, “Charles?” and hesitated. “Charles, I want to see you again.”

“Me too,” I said.

I left her feeling no shred of the love we’d shared the night before.

A
fter that night with Bethany, the days passed quickly. I spent most of the time reading sci-fi novels, but I unpacked the rest of Bennet’s boxes too. There I found three tin plates, each broken into different-size segments like a TV-dinner tray, and a portable toilet unit that was to be connected by rubber tubing to a canister designed to empty the contents of the toilet. There was a box of books and various elastic exercising devices. A cigar box held three pens and two pencils with a dozen cream-colored envelopes along with a small ream of blank sheets of notepaper.

It seemed as if Anniston Bennet had everything he needed to live in that hole for a very long time.

The books were all hardback.
The Wealth of Nations, The Prince,
the complete collection of Will and Ariel Durant’s
Story of Civilization.
Maybe ninety books in all. About fifteen of these were nonfiction (not including the Durants’ eleven volumes), and most of these were economic texts and not titles that I knew. The fiction and poetry was of a high quality, for the most part. I recognized
The Alexandria Quartet
by Durrell and
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
He had the collected works of the poet Philip Larkin and
Four Quartets
by T. S. Eliot.
Moby Dick
was there and a book called
Vineland.
He also had the Bible and Koran. He had one very large atlas that didn’t have any publication information in it. I got the feeling that it was privately published and contained specialized geographic information. Many of the maps were color coded with initials that made no sense to me and were not explained in any table.

They were all books that I would’ve liked to have read at some time in the past. I mean that I would’ve liked to know what was in the Bible and the history of the world so when I had arguments with Clarance I could sound smart. But I can’t concentrate on that kind of reading. My mind just drifts when there are too many facts or tough sentences on the page. That’s one of the reasons why I finally left college. As long as classes were lectures, I picked up most of what I needed by ear. But as soon as I had to read some heavy text, I was in deep water.

There were two sets of powder-blue pajamas decorated by red dashes at all angles to one another. All in all it was like a summer camp for a cracked adult.

All except for that cage.

Three days before Anniston Bennet was due to arrive, I received a telegram. It had been slipped under my front door sometime the day before.

Mr. Blakey,
After numerous attempts to reach you by telephone, we are contacting you by this method to confirm the appointment and to ask you to meet the client’s train at 12:04
A.M.
Please confirm your agreement by calling the number on the card that the client gave you at your first meeting.

There was no signature, but of course none was necessary. I thought the secrecy was strange, but then again Bethany had told me about rich people and how odd they were.

It took me the entire day to find that card. I turned the house inside out. Finally I found it in the upstairs hamper, in the pocket I had put it in after calling Bennet the first time.

“Hello,” said a familiar voice. “You have reached the Tanenbaum and Ross Investment Strategies Group”—the click—“Mr. Bennet”—the next click—“is not in at the moment but will return your message at the earliest possible time. Please leave your name and number after the signal.”

“I’ll be there at midnight,” I said and hung up.

And I was there, in the lamp-lit parking lot, at midnight. An obese family—the Benoits, mother and children—was also there, waiting. The Benoit family had come down to the Harbor from Montreal at the turn of the century. I don’t remember ever having spoken to Raoul, the father, or any of his clan, but I knew them because they were part of my community. Trudy, the mother, looked at me nervously, a black man at midnight and the train not in yet.

“Hello, Mrs. Benoit,” I hailed. “You meeting Raoul?”

I said it to put her at ease. It worked too. She smiled and nodded. She didn’t remember my name. Maybe she couldn’t distinguish between black men. But it didn’t matter what white people saw when they looked at me. Why would I care?

The train came in and a few people got off. Most of them got into cars. Three taxis rolled up from the colored company that Clarance dispatched for. The few travelers who did not have cars climbed into the cabs. Raoul Benoit, a thin and dapper man wearing a silver-gray suit, tried to get his arms around his wife and failed. He kissed his children and herded them, like so many beach balls, toward a blue station wagon.

“Hey, Charles,” a man said. Behind me Clarance had driven up in a cab. In the back there were three passengers, and another, a woman, sat beside my childhood friend. All of the passengers were white. The riders looked uncomfortable. One man in the backseat checked his watch.

“You drivin’ now?” I asked.

“Athalia needs braces, so I’m drivin’ three nights a week. How you doin’?”

“Fine,” I said, looking over my shoulder.

“You need a ride?”

“No.”

“What you doin’ out here?” he asked. “Meetin’ somebody?”

“Can we get going, driver?” the woman next to Clarance asked, barely restraining her impatience.

“Must be the next train,” I said vaguely.

“Next train’s tomorrow,” Clarance informed me.

“Oh.”

“Driver,” a man in the backseat said.

“What?” Clarance’s tone was sharp.

In the darkness, on the platform next to the station sign, I saw the silhouette of a small man.

“We need to get home,” the passenger was saying.

“Well if you can’t wait a minute while I find out how my friend is, then you could walk.” That brought silence.

“You go on, Clarance,” I said. “I got my car. I can drive home.”

“I tried to call you,” Clarance said.

“I been thinkin’,” I replied.

“You wanna get together?”

“I’ll call you next week,” I said.

Clarance looked at me a moment. There was concern in his face. He was a good man, and we had been friends as long as either one of us could remember. But there was no way to talk to me. He shrugged.

“See ya,” he said and then drove off.

As he left, Anniston Bennet approached from the platform. I stood my ground, waiting.

“Good evening,” he said.

The air was cool but my windbreaker was enough to keep the chill off. There were moths floating around the floodlights, and I detected the barely distinguishable motion of bats feasting on the fluttering bugs in the hovering darkness.

I took a deep breath and prepared myself. I wanted to start this thing with Bennet on the right foot. I never had a tenant before and didn’t want to be taken advantage of. Everything mattered. The fact that I waited for him to walk to me, that I didn’t offer to take his satchel. All he carried was that small leather bag. I wondered what he was planning to wear for two months.

“Mr. Blakey,” he said.

“Mr. Bennet.”

“I tried to call,” he said. “But there was no answer.”

“I know. I got the telegram. Did you get my message?”

He shrugged his shoulders, indicating that he was there because he received my message. That would have been a good moment for me to take his bag, but I did not.

“My car is over there.” I indicated the brown Dodge.

We made our way. Bennet threw his bag in the backseat and we were off.

“Why did you need me to pick you up?” I asked, turning onto the highway. “You know we didn’t say anything about you paying for a limo service.”

“I want to be circumspect about this retreat, Mr. Blakey. No one knows where I’m going. Part of the idea is that I am to be kept from everything in my world—completely. I don’t want my car in your driveway or some driver who remembers where he dropped me off.”

“That sounds illegal, Mr. Bennet. I don’t want to be involved in anything that’s against the law.”

He looked at me and laughed silently. Then he said, “Not illegal. No. You see, in my world I’m pretty well known, and some people think that I’m important—for their money. I don’t want anybody finding me. This time is my own.”

Off the side of the highway, I spotted three deer, their luminescent eyes transfixed by my high beams. We sped past them. I thought that at least they were witnesses to our passage.

“What were you laughing about?” I asked.

“Ask me later.” Bennet sat back in the passenger’s seat, letting out a deep sigh. It could have been pleasure or the last breath of a dying man.

“Can you pull into your garage?” Bennet asked me as we drove up my gravel driveway. “I mean, if we’re going to see this secrecy thing through, we might as well do it right.”

I almost sneered, but then I remembered Miss Littleneck. She was probably sitting on her front porch, smoking a cigarette and spying on the night. I wasn’t sure if I wanted the neighborhood to know about my tenant, so I opened the garage door and drove in. Bennet and I exited out the back door of the garage and down through the hatch to the cellar. I snapped on the light and immediately Bennet began to inspect my work. I had unpacked and constructed a small red plastic table and chair. These seemed to satisfy him. There was also a futon that I had unfurled.