The Man in My Basement (17 page)

I wanted to deny it. I wanted to holler him into dust. I was so angry that I didn’t trust my actions, so I left the room. I never spoke to Brent again. I didn’t touch him again. I couldn’t. The nurse was always telling me that a kind word or a gentle touch would be the best medicine. But I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t think of one kind thing to say. His smell made my stomach turn. I would have liked to jab knives into his eyes.

I didn’t touch or talk to him; I didn’t go into his room at night. Every day he got weaker and I thought to myself,
Good, I hope he dies soon. I hope he dies tonight while I’m in my bed thinking about the
Playboy
magazines that I stole from under his bed.

One morning the nurse found him on the floor next to the door. He must have been trying to get out. Maybe he was trying to get to me. I heard something in the night, but I really thought that it was squirrels in the gutters, not my uncle scrabbling on the oak floor trying to escape from death.

The police asked me if I had heard anything. Everyone knew how much I hated Brent. But nothing came of it. He died of cancer. They couldn’t arrest me for not being friendly, for rubbing my urgent erection on the mattress while thinking about impossibly endowed Tammy Lee Naidor, the Playmate of the month.

“No,” I said to Bennet. “No, I’ve never killed anyone. And now I have to go. I’ll come down tomorrow and ask you some more.”

“Whatever you say, Warden.” Bennet smiled.

“You want a book?”

“If I may,” he said.

I passed him a paperback that I brought in my pocket.
Hothouse
by Brian Aldiss. It was a book set millions of years in the future, where plants had ascended to be the dominant species on Earth. Maybe I gave it to him because it was one of my favorites. I don’t know.

I sat up at the head of my bed and communed with my ancestors. I didn’t know a damn thing about them except that my family had kept and then forgotten them in the basement for hundreds of years. They were the only thing in my life of value right then—a hope that I came from somewhere important.

I was looking at the ivory faces and thinking about myself as an embezzler and a murderer. Brent had always called me a malingerer. Maybe I was that too.

Early in the morning, about 3:00 or so, I pulled out an old spring binder that I had used in college. I started writing ideas for questions. By the time the sun came up, my tin trash can was filled with the failures I had penned.

B
reakfast for the prisoner was shredded wheat and skim milk with no sugar and no fruit. I went in having resolved to deliver the food and leave.

I put the tray down and he said, “So what are we going to talk about today, Warden?”

“Is Anniston Bennet your real name?” I asked without thinking. But as soon as I asked, I was happy. It was only one question. I had to ask three before having to answer one of his.

I was so intent on the silly rules of the game that I almost missed Bennet’s reaction. His head twisted to the right an inch or so and the skin around his eyes momentarily tightened into a network of fine wrinkles.

“Yes,” he said.

But I knew better. The problem was that I had to ask another question to dig the truth out.

“Was it your birth name?”

“No.”

“What was that name?”

“Tamal Knosos.” He stared blue comets at me. No further information was forthcoming.

“It’s your turn,” I said.

“I’m thinking,” he responded lamely.

“If you don’t have anything to ask, then you forfeit and it’s my turn again.”

“Are you a child?” He sneered and frowned. I might have felt victorious at causing him to lash out like that, but there was a force behind his condemnation that unsettled me.

“No,” I said. “And that was a question. So now you tell me where that name came from, why it was changed, and by whom.”

I counted the inquiries on the same three fingers he had used the day before.

Tamal Knosos considered me for a long time. It took all of my concentration not to break away from his gaze. I knew somehow that if he stared me down, I would never regain the advantage.

Looking back on that morning, I can see how it might seem foolish, childish really, the game we played. Two full-grown men in that ridiculous situation. But if you were there, you’d have felt how deadly serious we were.

“I don’t know,” he said at last.

“You don’t know what?”

“I don’t know the answers, not the real answers. My mother’s name was Maria Knosos, and she was unmarried. My father’s name was Tamal. The birth certificate only had his first name. His nationality was Turkish. My name became Tamal Knosos because my mother died before she could give me a name. She had come to New York from Greece and met this man, Tamal, somewhere. He was already gone by the time I was born. I was neither Greek nor Turkish but an orphan in America. When I grew up I named myself. I didn’t know a thing about either parent or their cultures. I was here and I meant to thrive. I created a whole history based on the name Bennet. The ancestors I chose came over on a boat before the American Revolution. They had died out mostly, except for Anniston, except for me.”

I was looking closely at my prisoner. At his bald head and impossible eyes.

“Contact lenses,” he said and then leaned forward, putting his fingers against his left eye. When he leaned back he had in his hand a big lens, whites and all, of a blue eye. The black eye that looked back at me from the left socket could well have been Greek or Turkish.

“I had my scalp done by an electrologist,” he said. “In the kind of work I do, there’s no promise that you will have a razor ready to shave the black locks.”

“You’re passing as a blue blood,” I said. “But you’re really nothing. You don’t even know if your father was Turkish. He could have been Arab or even African.”

“My name is Anniston Bennet,” my prisoner said with conviction.

“It’s your turn,” I replied.

“I don’t want to play this game anymore,” he said.

“If you don’t play my game, I don’t play yours,” I said simply. The power I felt was stronger than any alcohol.

Bennet replaced his blue eye and shook his head.

“You don’t want to fuck with me, Charlie.” He was another man again.

“Oh no?” I walked out of the basement and up to the house. In the pantry I had two loaves of white bread and three cans of Borden’s condensed milk waiting for just this moment. These I carried back down into the hole. I shoved the food under the gate, smashing the bread in the process, and then threw a can opener through a cell diamond.

I went back to the hatch and snapped off the light. I called down, “See you in four days, Tamal.”

He yelled something unintelligible as I slammed down the door to the cellar. He was still shouting as I secured the locks to the basement. But you could barely hear his shouts just five feet away from the hatch. It was a well-built stone cellar and the door was insulated, almost soundproof as it turned out.

I went up to the house listening for his shouts but heard nothing. At about noon I figured that he stopped, so I went back down to the cellar door. He was still shouting, loud and deep for such a small man.

I almost broke then. I almost threw the door open and set him free. I could have saved face by saying that I just wanted to throw a scare into him. I could have freed him and sent him packing. I knew that that was the wisest course to follow, but something else had taken me over. Perverse pride left Tamal/ Anniston in his hole.

Ever since the first day he stood at my front door, I felt that Bennet held the upper hand. He was self-assured and a man of the world and rich and white. I was permanently unemployed and broke. Putting him in that cell and serving him was like tying Joe Frazier’s right hand behind his back and then picking a fight with him.

The only way I could beat Bennet was to break him, to show him that I was boss of my house. To show him that I meant what I said and that I would not break down. After all, he agreed to my rules. He had said okay. What did he expect? He told me that he wanted to be punished, that he wanted me as his warden. I had warned him.

I was late getting out of the house and late to Tiger Tanaka’s, the Japanese restaurant. Narciss was waiting patiently in the display window at a table for two.

“Hey,” I said as I walked up. “Sorry I’m late. I had some business with Mr. Dent that I couldn’t break off.”

“That’s okay.” She smiled, looking down at first, and then in an act of will, she looked up for me to see her pleasure. “I was just thinking about the notes in your aunts’ diaries. You know, I don’t think that you should sell them either. So much of them is about everyday life in the black community out here, and there are names, names of your relatives back more than two hundred years.”

“They got the guys that brought over those masks in there?”

Narciss beamed. “Not their names but there is a reference to three Africans that came over on a Spanish ship before the Revolution. I don’t think these ladies knew about the masks. Now, either they didn’t know of their relation to the three African sailors or somehow your family inherited the masks from another clan.”

She was wearing a dark-blue dress that came to midthigh when she sat. It was a sharp number—new, I believed. I sat down, put my hands across the table, and touched her elbows with my fingers.

“I was thinking,” she continued. “I mean, I haven’t really pushed ahead with the sales yet. I was thinking that maybe you would like to start a museum.”

“Museum?”

“Yes. An African American museum of the life out here. We could use my upstairs. I could charge admission. You wouldn’t make as much as you would if you sold the pieces, but you could keep them and share them too.”

“It’s nice to see you, Miss Gully.”

She struggled not to look away.

“What did you want to talk about?” she asked.

Her skin enchanted me again. The subtle variations of color gave depth to her.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Again words came out of my mouth as if they were uttered by some stranger. “I felt bad about how we got off the phone the other night. I like you and I was hoping that we didn’t have to stop talking before we had a chance to be friends.”

Narciss smiled and sighed. She touched her long fingers against my forearm, and the waitress, a blond teenager, came up to take our order.

I ate raw fish for the first time in my life. Yellowtail and tuna, and smoky and sweet-tasting sea urchin on a mint leaf. I paid for the meal and then took Narciss on a long drive out to Montauk. I kissed her the first time on the beach. We had been walking for more than an hour. She had done almost all the talking—mostly about the museum she wanted me to contribute toward—but there were details about her mother and father and her activist / lawyer sister, Rochelle, who lived in D.C. and had three children by as many men.

“She’d be a welfare mother if she wasn’t a lawyer,” she said at one point.

I was thinking that Rochelle didn’t sound any different from many men that I had known. Men who bounced from woman to woman, creating babies as they went. Clarance was like that. There were at least three women who he admitted having children by. He was proud of his virility.

I was thinking about Rochelle’s masculine approach, but I didn’t care. Instead I stopped there on the sandy beach and kissed Rochelle’s girly sister.

Narciss didn’t resist. She had been waiting for it. Her left arm snaked up around my neck while her right hand gripped my biceps. Her tongue was quick to find mine.

We stood there in each other’s arms until my legs began to ache. That was about 5:30. I broke away long enough to suggest that we drive back to my house. We made it to the car, but it was almost 7:00 before I turned the ignition key and started back toward home.

All that time we had only been kissing. Lips and necks. Her dress was sleeveless, so sometimes I kissed her arms. She leaned over me now and again, resting her forearm on my erection, but that was as close as we came to sex until we got back to my place.

The drive back was more than an hour. She filled up the minutes talking about my aunts’ diaries and what importance they held.

“It’s what real history is made of,” Narciss said. She was reclining comfortably in her seat. The window was open and the wind blew across her face. “Recipes and funerals, petty disputes and detailed explanations of social gaffes. There’s some talk about race but not as much as you’d expect. Your aunt Theodora was very religious, but Penelope and Jane-Anne hardly ever mentioned the Bible or the Lord. Just the leaves of the diaries under a glass case could be the room of a museum.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, reaching over to rest my hand on the upper thigh of her left leg.

She shuddered, but I didn’t know if it was from the anticipation of sex or the chance she had to become a curator.

“P
ut your arms up over your head,” I said to Narciss Gully.

We were both naked and lying on my mother’s bed. She hesitated but then complied. I bound her wrists together with my left hand and proceeded to take her nipple in my mouth.

Her breasts were small, but the nipples were quite large. Though darker, they had the same multicoloring as the rest of her skin. The nipples were very hard against my tongue. I worked my hand down between her legs and flicked my finger against the moist flesh under the mound of hair.

“Oh God!” she hissed. “Oh no.”

I continued to tease and nibble until her hissing turned into a shout.

“Oh God, oh no. Stop! Please. Too much.”

“You want me to stop?” I asked while still licking her nipple.

“Please.”

“First I’ll count to five,” I said.

“Oh.”

“One…”

Narciss raised her head between her extended arms to look down at what my hand was doing.

“…two…”

She grinned and then grimaced…