It will be over soon, I told myself, because Victor and I, we are not good people.
Dev wrenched the knife from Victor’s chest and brought it down again, a few inches to the right. Victor whined like a dog. He grabbed a fistful of Dev’s hair with a flaccid, bloody hand and pulled down.
“Phyllis,” he said, a rasp stripped of everything but hate, “I will haunt you for the rest of your life. You will never have a moment’s peace. Dev, you will regret the day you ever met this nigger bitch and I’ll—”
Dev wrenched out the knife one final time and slammed it—with a crying gasp—into Victor’s temple. Victor slumped away from him, sodden and dead.
Dev didn’t move. He knelt on his heels with his back to me, so still that I checked the rise and fall of his shoulders to make sure he breathed. I couldn’t look at Victor’s body; I couldn’t stand my cold joy at his death, and my relief at not being his executioner.
My hands cramped once more with an awful, final pain, and then subsided.
Perhaps they were right; perhaps I had never been worthy of them.
I found my courage, held it in the hands I had betrayed and which had at last repudiated me, and knelt to face him.
“Let me take you home, Dev.” A small house, but you can see the river from the west windows and roses grow in the garden—he had said that to me, the night we ran away.
A banked light flared in his eyes, and he seemed to see me for the first time. “Oh, Phyllis, how do you stand it?”
I pulled him to me, as close as I could with one arm. He smelled of a kill—blood and sweat and excrement—but still like himself beneath it all. We were both shaking.
“First,” I said, “you wash off the blood.”
THE VIEW
FROM
THE RIVER
Zero. A grifter pawning painted glass; a king of scorched desire. You like long-odd bets, don’t you, sugar? Never happier than when you’re struggling? And there’s no struggle like being in love.
I went up to Hell’s Kitchen. That time of summer it was a honeycomb of open windows and hard-baked asphalt and exposed tracks that merited its name. I was chasing another lead from another badly overheard conversation: She’s up on Galvin Ave., should be done in an hour. None of those other conversations in the mob joint where I spent hungry nights had panned more than fool’s gold. I went anyway. That’s what detective work is, Dev, I told myself; diligence and boredom that snaps without warning, but never unexpectedly—and then you die, or get promoted.
I was thinking about that promotion. I was wiping sweat from my eyes. I was hungry and hungover because I only had enough money for food or alcohol—
—an angel in a blood-drenched evening gown staggered into the alley and vomited into a garbage bin.
“What are you?” I asked. I already knew. I was holding her around her waist while the last spasms passed through.
“A knife,” she told me, and it snapped again, the way it would for the rest of my life. Because I would never really know.
A knife, an angel, a saint. Colored lips in a light-skinned face that parted to speak in tongues, in layers, in seconds and holy eternities. The moment before I knew her and the moment when I loved her. Everything that she held in that pair of uncanny hands.
In my grandmother’s temple, the goddess Kali wore a skirt of them. That’s what I thought when we kissed later that night, that I could feel the ghostly brush of twenty living fingers. The hard press of a dozen dead hands stiff with rigor mortis against my erection. She asked me what I was thinking and if I hadn’t known I loved her already, I would have known then, because I answered.
“A skirt of hands?” she said and laughed and shook her hips against mine. She had killed a man two hours before. I would fall in love with other women, but there would never be anyone else for me.
1
Whenever my mother writes, she asks after her roses. Has the Angèle Pernet dodged the black spot this year? Did you try an application of vinegar in the spring, as your aunt suggested? Do send pictures, if you can, Dev.
I send pictures, which I frame to avoid the curling watermelon vines. These sprawling, gloss-green cables lounge at the feet of my mother’s prized hybrid tea roses like fat neighborhood dogs—pampered, entirely unaccountable. I avoid responding until summer is safely passed. I send a stark image of a bare frosted bush alongside an apologetic note.
I could refuse to photograph the roses my mother has not tended in over a decade. But she misses our American house, as she calls it, and she misses me. She has remarried a respectable white gentleman with whom she has borne properly white babies. Her half-Hindu son is now—to her new family and friends—an excess best forgotten. She did not forget me. Sometimes I thought the Angèle Pernet’s persistent black spot was the only reason she remembered. And yet I considered refusing her requests.
I did not consider destroying the watermelon.
I did not consider photographing it.
I came to think of those strange yellow and purple globes as tea leaves and dowsing rods. I gave them minimal care. I stayed away from the River House for weeks at a time in the summer, just as a test. But they lived, year after year, and the fruit’s yellow flesh was so sweet and fragrant it turned my stomach. I gave them to some neighborhood boys, who thanked me with wide eyes until their mothers called them back inside. Afterward, they refused to speak to me.
She’ll come back, those vines told me. You’ll take her back. You still want her.
I did, though for years I hated myself for it. Then I resigned myself to it. Then I killed a man so she wouldn’t have
