“Yeah. I’m not hatching any chickens before they’re cooked.” She laughs. “That’s not right, is it? Oh, God, I’m so happy. Hello, Tolya, darling,” she says, hugging him as he appears, diamond Obama button blazing on his black silk shirt, magnum of champagne in his hand, pouring it in her glass, in mine, in his. Lily gulps her drink.
“God, I wish they’d hurry the fuck up.” She glances at the TV screen. “So you guys thought I’d be here?”
“Luck,” I say. Lily smiles. Tolya laughs. He knows I’m lying, knows I picked this joint because I thought Lily might come. He keeps his mouth shut. We’ve been best friends a long, long time.
Suddenly, the noise in the club dies down. There’s a sudden hush. One more state. He’s almost in, somebody whispers.
The anxiety is so solid it forms a sort of invisible shelf everybody seems to lean on. We’re glued to the TV. Lily clutches my arm. I smell her perfume again. Joy. It’s perfume I gave her.
“What time is it?” somebody calls out. “Eleven,” somebody yells back. The bartender gets up on top of the bar so he can see better. In one hand is a red-and-white-checked dishcloth. In the other, a martini glass, as if he was in the middle of making a cocktail. He stands there, suspended, waiting.
As I drove uptown on my way to Lily that Saturday morning, the weather guy on 1010 WINS was reporting lousy weather-snow, cold, sleet, airports shutting down, flights cancelled.
Sudenly, I skidded. For a few seconds I was out of control. Like the silver van on election night.
I got through it, kept heading north, trying to get to Lily as fast as I could. Where was she again? 155th Street? I knew she was in big trouble. I had heard it in her voice. Call me, I yelled into the phone, even though I was alone in the car.
I was heading for a part of town I didn’t know at all. It made me edgy. If something went wrong-a crime, a death, an accident-I’d be a white cop in a black neighborhood at the other end of the city, where I didn’t know anybody, the Saturday before Christmas with a storm coming. Last time I’d been uptown was election night and that didn’t count, that had been a night out of real time when the whole city had dropped its tribal attitudes and celebrated together.
Maybe I should call somebody, make some kind of contact in case I needed help, I thought. But until I knew what was wrong, I didn’t want to involve other people. Maybe Lily was just unhappy. She wouldn’t call me for that. Would she?
I turned the radio up. The news was all bad. Financial shit, the system coming apart, Madoff’s arrest. The election, the blaze of optimism, the joy, already seemed a lifetime ago.
“We did it!”
Eleven o’clock. Eleven p.m. Somebody yells it out: “He’s in!” The club goes nuts. Somebody pounds out “Happy Days Are Here Again” on the piano. Up on the screen, I can see people going crazy, not just in New York, but in places like Iowa! Iowa!!
Everybody is hugging and kissing, we’re all drunk, the bartender pops corks on bottles of pink champagne, somebody hands me a huge glass of bourbon. A girl in a silky red dress jams an Obama hat on my head and kisses me on the mouth. She’s drinking flavored vodka; she tastes like pears. Outside, cars are honking, people singing. Inside, everybody is yelling, crying, hugging, singing, high-fiving.
Tolya, bottle in one hand, is dancing with a pretty woman almost as tall as him, in a silvery top, silk pants, high heels. A girl who looks like Beyonce-at least she does to me, drunk as I am-bumps into me, and apologizes and laughs, and Tolya pours her some wine, too, and she says, “It’s sweet, isn’t it? Tonight it is so sweet.”
“Where were you on election night 2008?” people will ask, the way they still ask each other about 9/11 or about the day JFK was shot. When I was a kid in Moscow, older people sometimes asked, Where were you when He died? and they meant Stalin. Where were you?
But this time, this night, we’ll remember it differently, this life-changing event. We did it!
On the TV, there are all the faces, people crying, older black people unable to stop crying. There’s Jesse Jackson in Chicago, face swamped with tears. Enough to break your heart.
“We want Obama,” a guy near me in the club shouts. He says something in Italian. In English he adds, “Fuck Berlusconi, we want an Obama.” An Irish guy is hanging all over me, moaning, “I love this place. I love you guys.”
“Now I can stay in America,” says Tolya. He’s never loved America the way I do, but tonight it’s different. He hugs me. “Now I can stay here.” In Russian, he adds, “Maybe I buy nice house in Harlem. Become black Russian.” He laughs and can’t stop.
I put my arms around Lily. I can smell her hair, feel her against me. I kiss her. She doesn’t seem to mind, maybe because everybody is kissing, and for a moment, she’s with me again, and I’m lost.
“ ‘Where were you that night?’ We’ll say that, won’t we?” she says, half to herself. “We’ll be able to say to each other, ‘Where were you that night?’ And we’ll be able to say, ‘I was there. I saw him elected.’ We did it.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
And then Lily is pulled away from me, dancing now with a good-looking black guy, a young guy.
They’re holding each other tight on the floor, and I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything, that tonight everybody’s dancing, everybody’s in love, it doesn’t mean anything at all. Does it?
For a second I lose sight of her, then she surfaces near the bar, her back to me.
I think to myself: If she turns in my direction in the next five minutes, I’ll go to her. If she turns around, I’ll go over, I’ll tell her how I feel.
But she doesn’t. She doesn’t turn around.
By the time I got off the Drive, the snow was coming down heavy, and I took a wrong turn. I found myself on the Harlem side street where I’d parked on election night, then turned the car around. For a second or two, I was lost. I felt uneasy. The streets were empty.
Finally, I pulled into Edgecombe Avenue. I found Lily’s building. Over the front door a plaque read T HE L OUIS A RMSTRONG A PARTMENTS. I looked up. The tall building was made of old brick. From a second floor overhang gargoyles-grotesque stone animals-leered down at me. The snow had settled onto the creepy figures.
I got out of my car, left it near the front door, and ran up the steps to the building, bumping into an elderly man in a tweed coat and cap, who muttered at me. A woman trying to get a little girl zipped into a pink jacket looked up at me and looked pissed off, maybe because I was parked in a delivery zone, or maybe she didn’t like my looks. Or my color. Dog walkers emerged from the building, one of them stopping, fussing with her hand to get the snow off her shoulders. Except for me, everybody was black.
I dialed Lily again. No answer. Anxiety, the kind that feels like a gust of icy wind on the back of your neck and along your spine, suddenly got to me. I stopped for a second, then I went inside.
CHAPTER 4
Red hair held back with a rubber band, face white, Lily looked frightened. Green sweatpants, an Obama shirt. She was waiting for me as I came out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor.
“God, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, taking hold of my sleeve. “Thank you for coming.” Her voice was flat, but she was shaking. With cold? With fear? She led me down the long corridor, stopped in front of a door marked 14B and hesitated.
“This is your place?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go inside. It’s cold.”
“No. Across the hall.” Lily gestured to the door opposite hers.
“What is it?”
“Come with me.” She unlocked the door. We went into the apartment.
“Whose place is this?” I said.
The woman lay on a worn brown velvet sofa. Lily, who had locked the apartment’s front door behind us, pulled back a purple shawl to reveal her face.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” said Lily.
I felt the woman’s neck for a pulse. “Yes.”
