“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“Sober. Get my flowers?”
“Uh-huh. Not very original. But the note was.”
“You liked it?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I got the part about you being a perfect slob. And the apology. But what are you now, an Indian? I mean you signed the note ‘Tongue of Snake.’ What’s that got to do with the price of beans?”
“If you’d like” I said, “I’ll just come on in and show you.”
A moment later we were against the wall near the hall closet where, in a mindless rush, I penetrated her with my trousers heaped down around my shoes. Then, carrying her, still inside her, with a Chaplinesque waddle (my pants still binding my ankles) to the living room rocker, I set her down, pulled out, and with my chin scraping the perforated cane seat, her legs veed out over the Brentwood’s lacquered arms, I chased the sliding chair across the hardwood floor, as I sunk my face into that slippery thicket of sweet brine, and showed her, with workmanlike pride, just what my tongue had to do with “the price of beans.” During her first orgasm, her muscular thighs clamped down so tightly on my head that I thought for a moment she had dislodged some vertebrae. Her second spasm, marked by her cool dry lips and a visible shudder of her damp shoulders, was less dramatic. Then we were down on the floor and I was inside her once again, in an undulating crab walk that ended with her head tilted against the base of the sofa and me baying unashamedly, like the dog I was, at the low white cei Clowndeling.
Afterward we sat naked on the couch and drank a bottle of Chilean cabernet and listened to the “Reggae Splashdown” on HFS. We were both fairly quiet that night and both of us wanted it that way. The sex and the wine and our nakedness had thrown a calming blanket over us and the entire room. Somewhere in the evening I told her about Jackie Kahn’s proposition.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. I searched for a trace of jealousy in Lee’s voice, but there wasn’t one. Instead there was interest and the genuine concern that I was not setting myself up for a brass-knuckled punch in the heart.
“She’s going through with it,” I said, “whether I agree to be the one or not. We’re friends. I can’t turn her down.”
“How does it make you feel, to think you might become a father? Even though, you know, you’re not really going to have the responsibility.”
The chugging rhythms of Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It” filled the room. I finished off the goblet of wine and placed it on the glass table in front of the couch. Lee leaned into my shoulder and I put my arm around hers. “There was a long while, after my marriage flamed out, I resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to have any kids. It’s not an easy thing to come to terms with, believe me. Having kids always seemed to me to be the most elemental thing to do. But there’s certain people maybe shouldn’t have kids, even if they want to. I’m probably one of them.”
“Cut it out,” she said.
“It’s not self-pity,” I said. “What’s the old expression? ‘Kids shouldn’t have kids’-Lee, that’s all I’m saying. But when Jackie explained the deal, I’ve got to admit, I got excited. I can be a father, Lee. I can be. And I don’t have to screw anybody up by doing it.”
“You’re just too hard,” Lee said, and kissed me on the mouth. But she knew I was right, and she couldn’t look me in the eye.
“I know who I am,” I said. “That’s all.”
The clock on the nightstand read 4:39 when I awoke in Lee’s bed. Lee’s hip was warm against mine, and her breathing was like a faint wind slipping through the crack of a pane. I watched a tree’s shadow shimmer across the bare white wall of her room. The shadow became more detailed as my eyes adjusted to the light. I thought about the weekend and felt my blood jump and knew then that it would be a while before I would return to sleep. I reached for the pack of Camels on the nightstand, found a matchbook, and struck a flame to the tobaccoed end.
The first lungful was toxic with sulfur, but I held it in and tried to watch the smoke of my exhale drift up toward the ceiling. What I saw was a subtle change of the spare light, like the slow movement of deep water on a moonlit night. I studied the lit end of the smoke and made a trail of it with a small circular motion of my hand. Lee woke and got up on one elbow. She put one small hand on my chest and with the other brushed the hair back away from her face.
“What’s up, Nicky?” she said.
/p›eight='0em'›
“Just thinking,” I said. “The thinking woke me up, and now it’s keeping me up.”
“Thinking about what?”
I took a deep drag off the cigarette. “I had a run-in with this guy yesterday. This guy just happened to be Italian. Anyway, I belted him across the mouth. And after I did that I called him a name.”
“What kind of name?”
“A Guinea. A dago. I don’t remember.”
“Go to sleep, Nicky. You didn’t mean anything.”
“Something like that always means something.”
“Go to sleep.”
“I got a feeling here,” I said. “That this whole thing with Billy Goodrich-his wife, the DiGeordanos, all of it- there’s something not right about it. Nothing ever good comes from situations like that, Lee. It’s going to turn out bad.”
SEVEN
Washington, D.C., is laid out in quadrants with the Capitol serving as the point at which they all meet. Numbered streets progress, well, numerically, and run north to south. Lettered streets are arranged alphabetically and run east to west. At the border of each quadrant this numerical progression begins again. Thus it is nearly impossible to get lost in our nation’s capital. Unless, of course, one hails from some hotbed of logic like, say, Baltimore.
I had parked my Dodge early Monday morning on Florida Avenue, facing west. Florida Avenue bisects the city at the fall line of the Piedmont Plateau. It is no accident that well-to-do whites live on the more stable high ground of upper Northwest, while moderate to poor blacks reside in North and Southeast; rather it is a geographic divination that seems to evolve in all the major cities of the Northeast. It is also no accident, then, though it can be said to have been mildly prophetic, that Florida Avenue once went by the name of Boundary Street.
I turned the collar of my overcoat up to warm my neck against the stinging wind and walked beside a retaining wall toward Sixteenth. On the wall was spray-painted, in red, STOP THE PHONY U.S. DRUG WAR IN PANAMA. At the corner of Sixteenth and Florida, on the opposite side of the street, was the apartment building gone condo where William Henry had lived and died. I gave it an uncritical eye as I waited for the light to change. The light changed, and I crossed Sixteenth and passed beneath a concrete archway, on which was painted the slogan CHE LIVES!. When I was through the archway, I was in Meridian Hill Park.
Meridian Hill Park could have been the most beautiful park in the city, a cross between a European palazzo and a garden. Neighborhood people in the pre-air-conditioned forties used to sleep here on summer nights and enjoy starlit concerts ranging from classical to swing. The park also had a grand view of downtown, until a high rise erected a F@etart Florida and New Hampshire avenues put an end to that. Sometime in the seventies the D.C. government renamed it Malcolm X Park, though since they had no legal right to do so (the Feds owned it), the place is still known officially as Meridian Hill. Most people who follow the teachings of Malcolm X agree that this is for the better, since Meridian Hill Park is now little more than a drug market.
I walked across a balustraded promenade that spanned an empty pool situated at the foot of a graduated series of empty fountains. I passed the large statue of James Buchanan on the east side of the park and climbed a set of concrete steps that led to the mall. On the wall that bordered the steps was painted the names of the members of a local gang called the Crew-Easy E, Duck Derrick, and Million $ Eric.
