Disgruntled: A Novel Page 21

  I leaned in close to your mother and made a motion as if to wring my handkerchief into the soup. She said my name sternly.

  “What can they do?” I asked her. “Dismiss us?”

  I sought a smile, but she began to weep!

  “I know this is hard,” I said. “But you must trust me. If this woman doesn’t want us in her—”

  “It’s you, Julian, she doesn’t want in her house. She does not think you fit here,” Elizabeth whispered harshly, tears streaming down her face. “She has asked me to stay on and I have said yes.”

  I am not sure, but I think I staggered back onto my heels. I remembered once when I was quite small and knocked over a bowl of dry beans through which my mother was sorting. She was very angry. As I was on my hands and knees, picking up the beans, she kicked me. Though she had been in a rage when I turned the bowl over, I could tell that the kick was casual, an afterthought.

  I loved your mother, but I could see behind her eyes. Though her cheeks were streaked with tears, I could tell that she had said yes quickly. While I was down there groveling among beans, she had kicked me. Or perhaps the groveling among beans was what I was doing with my days and nights in the service of the Architect, and the mistress’s firing me was the kick.

  “Does she know you are carrying a child?” I asked in a hoarse voice.

  “She has offered to help.”

  “She has offered to help my child?”

  The housemaid was in the kitchen wiping sweat from her frizzy brow. “Julian Curtis, the table is waiting,” she announced. She then looked at Elizabeth with an expression I could not quite read, but it had the feel of a conspiracy.

  “Please go,” said Elizabeth.

  I hit my head on the way out of the kitchen.

  * * *

  A thought occurred to me while I stood in my usual position on hand as the mistress, her children, and the Cro-Magnons scratched their fleas and ate their dinner. I thought that before I left I would burn the Architect’s blanket, and instead of waiting until I was meant to leave, I would do it today. I would say it was an accident. It was as if the mistress heard my thought, for she looked at me strangely.

  “That will be all for the moment, Julian,” she said. “Please come back in a quarter of an hour.”

  “If you please, ma’am,” I said. “I will start on the rugs.”

  “Very well.”

  In the shed, I found the gasoline that we used to clean the rugs. Then the ax caught my eye, and I imagined breaking up the Architect’s precious chaise longue. The place where a person like him could lie down in the daytime. When I walked back through the kitchen, Elizabeth was there alone, icing the small cakes beloved by the little girl. I watched her lovely profile for a minute. I was speaking before I could catch myself.

  “You must not do this,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and out of the dining room. “You must not leave me.”

  “I am carrying a child,” she said, her voice even lower. “I cannot leave here right now.”

  “My child. That is why you must come with me.”

  “I’m sorry, Julian,” she said. She looked around the kitchen, as if she’d find something to say there amid the clutter of cooking. Then her eyes rested on the gas can and the ax. “What are you going to do?”

  “Clean the rugs,” I said.

  “What are you going to do, Julian?” Elizabeth asked again, her eyes getting wide.

  I looked at her. And then I saw myself take shape in her eyes as someone terrifying.

  “Please,” she said.

  In a way, then, it was her idea. In a way, it was your mother who pushed me to do it. Because as I looked at and smelled her fear, I suddenly knew that I would not only burn up the blanket but burn this house to the ground. I also knew that because of you, I would spare her.

  “I cannot forgive you, Elizabeth. But if you leave this house immediately, you and the child will live.”

  I clamped a hand on her mouth before she could scream. I hated to touch her like that. The dining room bell rang again, making a tinny, impatient sound. I felt her go slack in my arms. And then I pulled her to me for the last time in this life. Our clothes and skin stuck to us unpleasantly in the steaming kitchen on that August day.

  It was the instinct of an ignorant animal that made me go back into the dining room at the sound of the bell. The mistress spoke sharply to her son, for singing at the table. I could see from my position all of the crumbs that the dairyman had dropped at his place and the nails of his nephew, which were ringed black with manure.

  “Julian,” said the mistress, “it has been nearly an hour. I know Elizabeth made something special for A—. If you would please clear the table and bring it. The men need to get back to work.”

  I did not trust myself to speak. I picked up an armload of plates and took them into the kitchen. I heard the little girl’s voice: “Mama, why is he so mad?”

  The kitchen was empty.

  Elizabeth.

  I stood at the window, straining to see the receding figure. But the waves of grass were still and empty. She had disappeared, leaving behind the tray of iced cakes, which I brought to the dining room.

  I pictured it before I did it, pouring a thin trail of the gasoline along the bottom of the study wall, and from there throughout the house. Then it was happening. I threw a match and the flames answered. Through the smoke I made my way back to the door out of which your mother had fled. I posted myself sentry with the ax. Those who made it through the smoke and flames at the front of the house would try to get out of the back. But none would make it past me and the ax.

  There was nothing to do now but wait.

  * * *

  Commodore had been admitted to Tyler for his realistic, colorful paintings of the people in the neighborhood where he grew up. Despite his obsession with the Eakins painting, he made pretty pictures of black folk: churchy grandmothers, empty-eyed men on the corner, drug dealers dripping in gold. All of them had similarly haunted eyes. The one his teacher labeled his “statement piece” was a glum-looking baby who wore a heavy gold chain and an equally heavy-looking diaper. He grasped a gun in his little brown fist.

  Once in art school, after he’d seen the ironic pornography his classmates were making, he’d become mortified by his portfolio. (“I wanted to take that gun and shoot the baby.”) He dedicated himself to a series of charcoal drawings of stick figures being executed that he called the Hangman Series. This change in direction was underappreciated, as were the harangues against his classmates’ work in his obscenity-laced open letter to the faculty at Tyler titled “A Plea for Black Complexity.” He lost his scholarship.

  According to Commodore, this was the best thing that could have happened to him. Now he could truly be an artist. “Studying and doing are not the same thing,” he declared. Of course, after a few days of staying with him, it became clear to Kenya that he was doing neither. If he wasn’t toiling at the Green Apple: a healthy cafeteria, he was either smoking pot or making plans to smoke. Occasionally he thumbed through a book.

  It wasn’t terribly surprising to Kenya that Commodore had come to this. It seemed to her that there had been something very wide-eyed about his pursuit of art. It reminded her of Lolly Lewis’s violent enthusiasms; this was a girl who had believed in Santa Claus until the sixth grade. Sure, Commodore had spoken passionately at the art museum, and he’d once claimed that he would paint with bloody stumps until he achieved artistic greatness. But none of that seemed real now.

  What did seem real, what Kenya could remember sharply, was him as a ten-year-old, waiting for her parents to leave the room so he could call her “Ooga Booga,” and being so distracted that he couldn’t follow the rules of Uno. She remembered his air of irony even in elementary school. She could not imagine him scowling with concentration at a canvas. The image of him sucking a water pipe, reclined on the couch, giggling at reruns of Inspector Gadget—which he had loved at the age of ten—well, it was sad. But it was more
fitting.

  The big surprise, noted nonchalantly by Commodore, was that he was living with Oliver Gold. Though she was relieved that his roommate wasn’t a girl, Kenya nearly fell off of the uncomfortable wooden chair in his apartment when he told her.

  “That lunatic?” she asked.

  “You know Oliver?”

  Kenya shook her head in an exaggerated fashion, as if to clear out the cobwebs. “Com, you mean the Oliver you used to talk shit about all the time? The one who called himself a ‘niggerpunk’ and talks with a British accent?”

  “That’s my boy,” Commodore said, laughing. “Crazy as hell. But one hundred percent original.”

  “You hated him!”

  “I never said hate. We don’t say that,” he said, grinning.

  That had been a big thing with the Seven Days. Never hating—except for the absolute worst white people and black traitors.

  “Is he still wearing that jacket with the swastika on the back?”

  “Naw. He had to give up his Sid Vicious stylings.”

  “I just can’t imagine why.”

  “Not what you’d think,” Commodore explained. Not the disgusted clucking of black people on the street—he could never please black folks anyway, according to Oliver. Not the skinheads who routinely started shit with him when he went to punk clubs—they had always started shit with him anyway. Not even the Jewish hotheads whom he’d numbed into silence with his complicated philosophical defense of his right to wear the jacket—well, that and the fact that Oliver’s mother was Jewish. No, finally an old woman in the Gallery mall drew back her coat sleeve to show him the number tattooed on her arm and then tried her best to knock him over a balcony with her cane. On the way to the hospital, where he received five stitches, the jacket had quietly disappeared and that had been that.

  “Yeah, I couldn’t really roll with him wearing that,” said Commodore. “He told me later that he wore it to an interview for a scholarship from the Alphas.”

  “Didn’t you get a scholarship from the Alphas?”

  “Well, I wore a suit to my interview. But forget about all that. He’s cool now. In fact, to be really real about it, he’s the man.”

  “Guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”

  Kenya, who’d turned up on Commodore’s doorstep in Powelton Village fresh from the farm, was prepared to deal with Oliver if she could crash in the apartment. When she’d found the address, her heart had sunk taking in the splintered stairs and curling paint. But the inside of the place was sunny and cream-colored, with soft wood floors and a skylight in the largest room. She felt, when she walked in and looked around, the way she’d first felt in the loft at her father’s house: like she could hide there.

  * * *

  It was after Kenya read her father’s manuscript for the third or maybe fourth time that she decided not to go back to her mother’s house. Her father was a dramatic idiot, her mother was a fool, and yet she understood both the butler’s feeling of being hounded and his wife’s decision to get away from the crazy person who supposedly loved her.

  Her parents didn’t know where she was. She had led her father to assume that she was going back to her mother’s house. She hoped that he’d call to make sure she arrived, only to find out that she’d disappeared. But she knew that he wouldn’t. Meanwhile, her mother was not expecting her until the end of the summer. She would find out that Kenya had disappeared only if she called Johnbrown’s again. But Kenya felt her mother’s shame might keep her from calling back.

  On the bus she wavered in her decision not to go home, but then she thought about her last conversation with Sheila, and it made her tremble.

  Denial. This had been a favorite word among Barrett girls some years back. They had hurled it at one another for months. You’re in denial: the Police are never getting back together. You’re in denial: Mademoiselle Lambert will never let us out early. You’re in total denial: this does make me look fat!

  She was considering her mother’s denial, and Commodore had popped into her head as the city came into view. It wasn’t quite true that he popped into her head. He was often there, lurking in the shadows, and he had sent her a letter at the farm filled with the kinds of declarations he’d made in “A Plea for Black Complexity.” She had kept the letter, which was how she had his address. But on the ride back to Philadelphia he strode to the center of her thoughts as more than a romantic fantasy. She had hesitated at first, not wanting him to think she was looking for more than a couch to sleep on. She didn’t want him to think she was in denial about who she was, or was not, to him. But as the highway exits became more familiar, Kenya practiced first in her mind, and then in a low voice, the businesslike manner she would use with Commodore. “I wondered if I could stay with you for a few days while I figure shit out,” Kenya mouthed, her voice going in and out. Her seatmate, who was wearing a Walkman, tossed her a couple of sidelong glares.

  Commodore said yes, but then it turned out that Kenya was beholden to Oliver, not Commodore, for a place on the couch. It was his name on the lease, and he paid extra rent to use two of the apartment’s three bedrooms. When he came home from classes at Temple the day she arrived and Commodore mentioned she’d be there for a few days, he simply nodded and said, “Cool.” Then he disappeared into his room to make grinding noises on an electric guitar. He kept odd hours, so she barely saw him for the first few days while she flipped TV channels, walked around the city, and watched Commodore get high, all the while pondering the great black maw of her future.

  For the first couple of days at Commodore’s, Kenya planned to call home. But she imagined her mother answering the phone while Teddy sat a few inches away or, even worse, Teddy answering the phone. So instead, she took to wandering the edges of Penn’s campus, near the library where her mother used to work before she’d finally gotten a job in one of the township libraries.

  One night she came home to Commodore and Oliver sitting in the tiny kitchen. It had been a week and she rarely saw them together. She had started to wonder if they were actually friends.

  “Hungry?” asked Oliver, gesturing toward a pizza. His nasal voice went up and down. He did not speak with a British accent, but his inflections were pretentious.

  Kenya demurred. She’d been using her savings to eat McDonald’s and the lo mein from the Chinese food truck near Penn’s campus that always had the longest line. It was certainly a comedown from Cindalou’s cooking, and she constantly had the taste of grease in her mouth, but as a guest she was committed to a certain standard of conduct.

  “Suit yourself,” Com said, helping himself to more. “I am starving like Marving.” He laughed at his own joke.

  “Kenya, you should have some,” Oliver insisted. “We can’t eat this whole thing.”

  “Oliver’s gotta watch his figure,” said Commodore. Kenya noted that Oliver’s body resembled a twisted-out hanger.

  “Okay,” said Kenya, picking up the last slice of cheese pizza. The rest was pepperoni.

  “Take my seat,” said Oliver. “I’m done eating and I have a crapload of work to do.”

  “I feel so bad breaking up your—” she began.

  “Our romantic dinner?” Commodore laughed and turned to Oliver. “Honey, we never talk anymore.”

  “Honey,” Oliver said with fake emotion, “all you want to talk about is that Mary Elizabeth. Do you know how that makes me feel?”

  “Who is Mary Elizabeth?” Kenya asked.

  “Some dizzy white broad,” Commodore said.

  “Your favorite flavor,” sang Oliver. “Now if you two will excuse me…”

  After Oliver closed his door, Kenya wanted to ask again about Mary Elizabeth, but she didn’t want to embarrass herself. Instead she gestured toward Oliver’s room. “He’s okay, I guess.”

  “Not so bad, right?” said Commodore with a grin. “He must like you okay, too. I mean Oliver’s not exactly what you would call a people person, but he said he’d clear out of his music room if you want i
t. There’s a futon in there you can sleep on. Of course I told him you weren’t planning on staying much longer.”

  Kenya was silent.

  “Ooga Booga,” said Commodore, laughing, “what is your plan?”

  Kenya felt sure that some earlier version of her would have started crying right then. Perhaps even the self that had been at the farm. But there had been too much crying and it had gotten her exactly nothing she wanted. She could hear Oliver’s guitar scraping in his music room. “The Sad Dry Blues,” she thought.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, like I said, you can stay here, and you don’t have to sleep on the couch anymore. Oliver said he’d clear his junk out of that second room. And you get the privilege of being in the room next to his. But you might want to get earplugs. This scraping right now is bad enough, but there’s talk of a Niggerpunk reunion.”

  “Oh my God. I’m staying with Niggerpunk?”

  “Little-known fact: originally they were Fucksauce.”

  Kenya pushed her plate away. “What’s the rent?”

  “Talk to Oliver. It seemed like he was planning to let you stay for free.”

  “How come Oliver makes all of the decisions and you’re the one who tells them to me?”

  “I told you. He’s the Man,” Commodore said. Then he was speaking solemnly. “Are you sure you really want to keep hanging around here? I mean, Oliver’s sort of in school for music theory or something, but there’s really not a lot going on here, you know, in the immediate future department for our merry band of black depressives.”

  “Well, the two of you aren’t exactly a band. You know, not like Niggerpunk. And what about your art?” Kenya asked.

  “There is that,” said Commodore. “That is there.”

  Kenya looked down for another slice of pizza. There was only pepperoni, but she reached for it.

  “Hold up! You eat pork now?”