She reached into a well-concealed pocket and pulled out a small blue hardcover, scarred with water and the multicolored mold of several continents. She pushed it across the zinc bar to Dev. A book of poems by Sarojini Naidu, who I had only heard of because Dev had mentioned her to me in an unguarded moment three years ago, after Charlie had played until dawn and the ten of us left weren’t so much standing as draped over tables and one another, buffeted by clouds from sweet spliffs whose spent butts crunched beneath our feet like roaches. His gaze intent upon Tamara, tears or sweat rolling down her cheeks while another man kissed up and down the soft inside creases of her joints, Dev had lifted his soft voice like an axe beside me and swung down:
“Shelter my soul, o my love!
My soul is bent low with the pain
And the burden of love, like the grace
Of a flower that is smitten with rain:
O shelter my soul from thy face!”
I caught my breath, hard. “What’s that?” I had managed.
He told me her name then. “An Indian nationalist and poetess from Hyderabad. They say I met her when I was younger, but I don’t remember now.”
Tamara had been with us for just a few months then, but I knew: not that he wanted her, because everyone wanted her, but that Dev would have her soon enough.
“I confess,” Tamara said now, smiling at her lover, “that poetry still ain’t exactly my bag, but there were two or three I swear I … well, I don’t know if I liked them, but they made me want to dance.”
Dev lifted the book, gazed at the smudged and blackened gilt on the embossed cover. The Golden Threshold, I read. His eyes met mine for a fraction of a breath. Then he smiled at Tamara and hid the book beneath the bar. “I think that’s even better,” he told her. “You should dance it one Thursday night. Isn’t that something they’re doing in the Irish theater these days?”
Tamara nodded while her gaze shot beyond us, glowing distantly with calculation. She could not stop, our Tamara. With Victor she had found something better than a safe haven or a sugar daddy: she’d found someone who gave her power. Sure, Tammy had to sell a lot of herself, piece by piece, to keep it. I could tell her what the view was like from fifteen years in Victor’s back pocket. But like I had once been, she was still too young to care.
She was the mistress of the Pelican’s off-nights, the goddess of our integrated Village oasis, the bleeding heart of an artistic mecca that privileged the iconoclast and stylized and generously syncopated. She could be thoughtless in her majesty, she could even be cruel, but I knew the sweetness underneath it all: she fed the alley cats with scraps after closing, no matter how many times Victor told her to stop. She bought everyone drinks and cadged everyone’s cigarettes, in a proportion dependent on which member of her extended family currently occupied her spare bedroom. Her family, it seemed, was uniformly parasitic, and none as amiable as Tamara, who yet loved them all as genuinely as I had to suppose she loved me, or Dev, or those yowling cats behind the Pelican. She danced like an earthquake and she sang like a bullet, and some nights my heart felt bruised and overripe just to look at her.
I had never been that young, that beautiful, that good.
Tamara swam back to reality and shook her head to see me there. In a lower voice, not one for show, she asked me, “Everything all right?”
She squeezed my hand and I wished Dev would hurry with those drinks just so I’d have something else in my throat. “Got your cards on you, Tammy?” I said, hoarse.
She was surprised. “I always do. But you don’t usually want to hear what they say.”
Tammy had a way of reading not just the numbers, but your future from a regular playing deck. Even old Widow Baker had used her cards to play policy, but Tammy claimed the numbers carried your fate on their backs like firewood. She said an old conjure woman from Baton Rouge taught her the trick when she was living in Brooklyn, but you never knew with Tamara—she’d bet her life on those cards, but she liked stories, too.
“I had a dream. A second dream, Tammy.”
Dev finally handed us our drinks. She left hers sitting on the bar. “As soon as I’m done here, we’ll go back to my place. I’ll light some candles, burn some incense, and do a layout in three sets. The cards speak clearly in threes.”
“It’s the hands, I swear it is. They want something from me, or they’re calling me to account, but for what? I haven’t done a job, Tammy, not for months, so why now—”
She put a finger on my lips. “Don’t you worry, sugar, we…”
She trailed off and tipped her head, looked through me as though I’d faded out in front of her. I turned around and saw that my fellas had come after all, the three of them fine as new pennies: shoes shined, uniforms pressed, and hair smooth and stiff with the combined efforts of Murray’s pomade and a boar-bristle brush. I waved and they hurried over, but I didn’t have any illusions about my own appeal beside Tamara’s. What surprised me was how Tamara was staring at them—particularly my admirer from this morning. She took her drink from Dev without so much as a glance in his direction, and tossed it back like Romeo took his poison.
“Tammy?” That was my admirer, taller and broader than his friends, with the gap between his teeth.
Tamara shook her head, not in negation, but as if she’d been sleeping and wanted to clear the fog. “My God, my God, Clyde, what the devil—you got some nerve—oh, you’re looking…”
She would have dropped her glass if
