candy-stripe wings and Dick Van Dyke. Archy directed Flowers’s crew to install it behind the glass counter. When they had everything squared away, the nephews palmed the lid, preparing to lift it off the coffin, and that was when Nat found himself obliged to ruin a perfect start on one thousand years of silence and converse with his betrayer.
“We really are doing the open casket?” he said.
“You have a problem with that?” said one of the nephews.
“Just, I’ve bought records in a lot of sketchy joints,” Nat said. “None of them ever had a dead body you could look at.”
Archy seemed to weigh this as if searching for a counterexample, a used-vinyl store on the South Side of Hades or Philadelphia. Then he turned to the nephews. “Well,” he said. “How’s he looking in there?”
After a few seconds of mutual consultation, the larger of them nodded slowly, once.
“Real nice,” the other one said.
Archy said, “Go on, pop the top on that thing, we can take a look.”
The Flowerses lifted the lid, and Julie and Titus pressed in close to see what would be revealed. Julie’s first dead body: Nat felt a sudden panic at the thought. He had prepared no words, no commentary, no sidebar or protective formula to contextualize or cushion the moment for Julie or, for that matter, for himself. In his lifetime, Nat had seen maybe half a dozen people laid out dead, and each time the sight seemed to brown the page of life, to tarnish the world’s silver and dull its gold. For no good reason but the paralysis of masculine panic, he suppressed the urge to put his arm around Julie, turn him away from the sight.
“Damn,” said Titus with unfeigned admiration.
“Come on, Nat,” Archy said. “How you going bury that, not even take a look?”
The leisure suit that Cochise Jones had prescribed for his interment was nothing so common as loud, ugly, or intensely plaid. The gem of his collection, it was profound and magical in its excess. White, piped with burnt orange, it had a rhinestone-cowboy feel to it, except at the yoke and at the cuffs of its sleeves and trousers, where it flamed into wild pseudo-Aztec embroidery, abstract patterns suggesting pink flowers, green succulents, bloodred hearts. Cochise had worn this suit, which he always called “my Aztec number,” three times before: once backing Bill James at the Eden Roc on the night when Hurricane Eloise hit; once at the Sahara in Las Vegas, where it attracted favorable comment from Sammy Davis, Jr.; and once, with improbable consequences, before a hometown crowd at Eli’s Mile High. After that storied night in the annals of Oakland rumpus, Cochise had retired the Aztec number, sensing that it was a leisure suit of destiny. A suit not to be squandered on an ordinary day in a man’s life, even if that man, on an ordinary day, rocked the B-3.
Nat looked at Julie. The boy was hugging himself. It took another few seconds for Nat to shame himself into providing this service for his son, and put his arm around the boy. Julie wore a too-tight short-sleeved button-down shirt patterned in black-and-white microcheck. His shoulder bone found a familiar notch in Nat’s inner elbow. His broomstick arm still had an infantile give. As soon as Nat touched him, the boy relaxed.
“He looks awesome,” Julie said.
“Yeah?”
“Totally.”
“Okay,” Nat said to Archy. “We do it open.”
Aviva showed up at a quarter to eleven, snaking a spot as it opened up for her, in front of the hearse parked outside of Brokeland Records.
Nat was hanging around on the sidewalk, trying to look like he was not waiting for her. But she knew how he looked, standing at a bus stop when it was raining and the bus was late. He was waiting.
When she pulled into the spot, he got into the car and closed the door. Kind of a bank-robber move, Aviva thought. A man in a hurry to get away.
“Doris Day spot,” he said.
“Totally. Anybody here yet?”
“Just the home team. And, of course, the corpse. The cadaver.”
An off note in his voice, a hollow thud of irony. Looking rumpled and disenchanted in his Belmondo suit. Not even a glance at her to see what she had chosen to wear to Mr. Jones’s wake or whatever this thing today was supposed to be. For the record, she had on a black Donna Karan pantsuit, bought at Crossroads, over a pearl-gray shell and a staid pair of walking sandals. All business for the business at hand, except for the scarf, which she had tied into a headband. A birthday gift one year from Mr. Jones, it had belonged to the late Fernanda. It was patterned with peaches and peach-tree leaves, and it was a fiery thing for a funeral. Nat really ought to have remarked on it.
“I went to Smart and Final. It’s all in the trunk.”
“Thank you.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. Then he hid his face in his hands. That was as close to a breakdown as Nat ever got, the heroic attempt to confine his weeping to the region encompassed by his palms. It always slew her.
“Oh, baby, what is it?” she said. “Come here.”
She held him, ready to ride it out while he massaged his sadness, pushed it all back up into his face. During the first part of their marriage, Aviva would have encouraged him to go ahead and let himself cry. But Nat, she had finally learned, would not, possibly could not, let himself cry, and maybe it was not fair to try to make him all the time. Maybe it was better to leave the poor man alone.
So now Nat really shocked her as his hands fell away, like youthful illusions, to reveal a man in the grip of a full-fledged jag. Soft, damp, and almost grandmotherly in his sorrow, mooing dolefully. Shoulders shaking. And all for old Mr. Jones. Imagine that. After so many years of wishing and resignation, Aviva saw her husband dissolved in tears, and found that the sight, this soft crumbling of his castle, kind of irritated her. It was not Nat: a dweller at the poles, prone to transports of anger and tantrums of joy.
“I know how much you liked him,” Aviva said, taking some Kleenex from her purse. “I liked him, too.”
Nat blew his nose, took a deep breath, let it out. “I did,” he said. “I really did like him. But that isn’t—that’s not why—”
“Then what’s wrong? Nat, what happened?”
“I had a fight with Archy. We’re breaking up.”
“What?”
“He’s divorcing me. Because? He’s sick of all my fucking bullshit.” He gave another snort into the Kleenex, equal parts mucus and derision. “What the hell kind of reason is that?”
“He’s taking the Dogpile job?”
“I hope he is. I sure as fuck don’t want him around anymore.”
“Nat.” It was not that Archy wanted a divorce; Nat, she understood from his petulant tone, felt like he was being dumped. “Archy and Gwen are clearly going through some kind of a thing right now.”
“Yeah. It’s called real life.”
“You’re saying that until now Gwen Shanks and Archy Stallings have been living in a fantasy world.”
“I bet Gwen feels like she’s been living in a fantasy world. Black midwife and a million white mommies. Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it’s just not
“Uh-huh,” Aviva said, sensing with a migraine throb a session in Jaffean theoretics coming on. “So, okay, let’s talk about what you’re going to do.”
“What I’m going to do. Okay. Let’s. One thing? I don’t want to sell fucking used vinyl records anymore.”
“Nat.”
“I actually, you know, I actually hate records. No. Let me restate that: I hate
“Nat.”
“Think about it, Aviva. Music actually has us to the point, we’re walking around with fucking pods, with buds in our ears. Nah, I’m out. I think I’m going to get into, like, I don’t know, cheesemongering. I’m going to monger cheese. You can help me. Forget birthing babies. Christ, we already have enough babies in the world. What we
