Coney (30 page)

“Yah.”

“How, pray tell, does that come about?”

“Only de one on de bottom is de homo.”

“Why is that?”

“Because dat is de woman's position.”

Otto slid one palm quickly over the other, signaling an irrefutable fact.

“I think you really believe that,” Albert-Alberta said.

Otto stopped walking and twisted his body to flex the maximum amount of muscles.

“
Yah.
Could dis body be homo?”

Albert-Alberta mimicked the pose.

“Charles Atlas is a homo.”

“Liar.”

“I have a fifty percent chance of being right.”

“
Yah. Yah
. Fifty percent, dat is you. Fifty percent and fifty percent add to nothing.”

Albert-Alberta executed a bump and grind.

“I've also had women,” he said, squeezing imaginary breasts. “There was a German fräulein, a maid in my cousin's house in London. Big, fat, stinking, the way I like them. Would fart while fucking. A rare talent.”

“Englander pig, you make it up.”

“Otto, I make up everything. Just as you do. And then we believe. And that makes it true. Like your Mr. Hitler and my Mr. Chamberlain.”

“You crazy. Hitler is de great man. He not make up nossing.”

“Who's pumping on top, Hitler or Chamberlain?”

Otto's bent fingers clamped onto Albert-Alberta's shoulders and lifted him straight up, like a picture about to be hung on a high hook.

“Englander, I no bluff. You say like dat about Hitler, I kill you. No bluff. Trow you in ocean.”

He swiveled Albert-Alberta to show him his grave. They saw Harry. Otto dropped Albert-Alberta, who called to Harry:

“Have you got a ticket? The ride is open.”

“Is that an exercise?” Harry said to Otto, smiling at the strongman. Otto did not offer Harry his usual smile of greeting, but rather the menacing stare that threatened audiences as a prelude to running amok.

“You haff followed us,
yah?
”

“Followed you? Oh yeah. Up the …”

“What you see?”

“I see … saw you walking.”

“What you hear?”

“Something about Hitler. Otto, what …?”

“In alley, what you see!”

“What alley?”

Albert-Alberta splashed water on Otto, who spat and wiped his lips.

“Englander pig! You trow dirty water in my mouth. You make me sick. I kill you.”

“Otto, leave the kid be. Harry, how come you were out here in the rain?”

Harry explained. Otto shook his head, squeezed a bruise into Harry's arm, and said:

“Come, ve valk togedder. Get on bike. I help.”

Otto grabbed the handlebars with one hand, tilted the bike and Harry until the front wheel barely touched the water and ran. Harry screamed:

“Faster Otto, faster.”

Suddenly the bike gained weight. Albert-Alberta lay on his stomach, holding on precariously to the back of the seat and kicking his legs.

“What an act!” he shouted, before his lips went under water.

Otto turned right on the corner of Surf Avenue. A car traveling in the opposite direction made a skidding U-turn and mounted the sidewalk in front of Otto. A back window rolled down halfway. A gun pointed at Otto's forehead.

“Drop the bike,” a voice commanded.

Otto froze, still holding the bike.

“I said drop it!”

Albert-Alberta stood up. Otto let go. As the wheels hit the ground, Harry leaped off and spoke to the presence behind the gun:

“He wasn't hurting me, Mr. Policeman.” He pointed to Otto and Albert-Alberta. “We were just having some fun.”

“Don't I know you, kid?” the voice said.

Probably a cop from Woody's, Harry thought.

“I don't know,” Harry answered.

“What's your name?”

“Harry Catzker.”

“Catzker, of course, you should be home. We'll drive you.” He spoke to the driver.

“Vince, load the bike in the trunk.”

“You, bullet head,” he said to Otto, “take your freak buddy and move on,”

Otto began to protest. Vince stepped out of the car, gun in hand.

“Get lost,” he said, waving the pistol toward Nathan's.

“Don't do anything to Harry,” Albert-Alberta pleaded. “He's only a kid.”

“Get lost!”

Albert-Alberta grabbed Otto's hand and tugged. As they ran, their heads swiveled sideways to catch what was happening behind them. In front of Morey's custard stand, Otto stopped and shook a fist.

“I kill you!”

Harry got into the backseat.

“Now I remember you,” he said.

The man frowned.

“Being a cripple is a great identification.”

“I didn't mean it that way. Before, I couldn't see your face.”

“Oh, sure.”

The car pulled up in front of Harry's house.

“How'd you know where I live?”

“I know plenty.”

Vince unloaded the bike and leaned it against the car.

Harry opened the car door. Menter put his hand on his shoulder, restraining him.

“I just remembered, Harry. You can deliver a message to your father for me. Tell him that you are now part of the enterprise.”

“Huh? You know my father?”

“Sure do. Just tell him exactly what I said.” Menter put his hand on Harry's chin and turned his face so that their eyes met. “
Victor Menter says that you
, Harry
, are now part of the enterprise.
He'll understand.”

A
BA AWOKE FROM A DEEP, DREAMLESS SLEEP, SNIFFING THE SEASIDE
odor of female sex fluids. He extended his left arm and squeezed gently the nude woman's warm, ice-smooth breast, popping the nipple between his middle and index fingers. She hissed like an angry cat.

The woman was a creator of sounds. Sometimes the sound was an imitation, identifiable. More often her mysterious vocal cords whispered echoes of the familiar, pleasing the ear but teasing the brain, like an elusive word. He named them:
Love Song of a Dinosaur, God's Sigh, Thunder Squelched
. Each challenged him to a poem. He failed, piling up cosmic litter, dumping garbage on the moon.

He turned his head and lightly kissed her shoulder. Even in this sunless room, her brown flesh shone. He finger-walked through her coarse pubic hair. She yawned, slowly diminishing the sound, like the fading notes of
Taps
. It was a familiar message. She did not wish to make love. Last night's pleasure was still in her.

Stolz had tried to convert her to his way: however intense the pleasure, it can be exceeded. She answered with the humming sound of her own orgasm. Pressed for more precise explanation, she said:

“When
I
had enough,
I
had enough. Ain't no sense in lookin' fo' mo' than enough.”

He named the sound:
The Fo' Mo' Than Enough Blues.

She curled into a fetal position, firming her buttocks into beckoning mounds. His palm read their contours. His brain, however, stunned him by recalling a newspaper account of a first-century
city unearthed outside of Tel Aviv. Quick realization that
Tel
in Hebrew meant hill or mound made suspect his claim of being a pure sensualist.

The Marquis de Sade you are not
, he conceded, followed by a mental picture of Nietzsche as a lion tamer, instructing:
When you go to woman, do not forget the whip
, which segued into:
Is it perfume from her ass, that makes me so digrass?
” The literary free association stiffened him. He thanked his friends for their labor of love, but asked: What now? They were silent. He smirked in superiority and quoth himself:
I am a memory come alive
, the title of a poem in which memory is an ever-replenishing corporeal organ of pleasure.

The woman's fame had embarrassed him. When he had called the day following their first meeting, he had apologized for his ignorance. She had answered:

“That's the good part, honey. Ain't many dudes don't want Leslie Jones. But you put eyes on Hannah Brown.”

Over the next two weeks, seated at a table three feet from Leslie and Willie, he had watched them make love as the notes of his tenor saxophone penetrated her welcoming wet voice. After each performance, Willie claimed her. Finally, Willie took an out-of-town booking.

On a Sunday morning in early fall, he had walked from the subway stop to 143rd Street and Lenox Avenue. Negro men and boys in dark suits, ties and felt hats and women and girls in colorful dresses and hats, jabbering happy sounds, left their churches, locked hands and strutted in celebration of their own beauty. They were not threatening, but he could not suppress memories of isolated nakedness in Polish streets. His breath came hard. He walked sideways, trying to diminish his visibility, trailing his fingernails along the buildings like a blind man.

Wearing only a white slip, she framed herself in the doorway, her chocolate flesh an opaque feast. She encircled his waist and pulled him inside. They kissed. He closed his eyes, inhaled her scent and imagined her tongue fed him camellia petals.

He cleared his throat to speak. She placed her index finger on his lips. She led him to the bedroom and stood rigid before him. He bent down, pulled the slip over her head, kissed it and threw it on the floor.

He undressed. She pulled him onto a lumpy bed. She lay on her back, eyes closed. His hands smoothed and clutched her heat. She did not touch him, or move until she pulled up her knees and spread her legs. He mounted and penetrated.

Suddenly, the inert body bumped and ground like a burlesque queen in her final turn. Camellia scent carried by a continual
wheeeee
broke against his face. The savage surprise pulled from him a long orgasm, drained of pleasure by his panic to retard it. Desperately he returned vicious thrusts, pleading for her satisfaction before he lost his erection. Five minutes later, when she announced her orgasm with a low, deep hum and bumps that nearly lifted them off the bed, he also flowed. He collapsed off her, thinking of Gide's boast of having had fourteen Arab boys in one night.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” she answered, “but let's not get too personal.”

He became one of her lovers. She never deceived him about that. There was Willie and perhaps others, whether long or short term he did not know. When he asked, the reply was a blues lyric sung over laughing lips:
“She's yours, she's mine, she's somebody else's too.”

As a teenager, she had been a prostitute, or close to it. Men had given her money. She insisted that payment was not the object. She needed to be in their arms. He stopped asking about other men.

At her performances, he was awed by her ability to layer words with sounds of sadness or joy independent of their banal meaning, creating an emotional Esperanto. She was, he concluded, in a trancelike state of ecstasy which stunned her parishioners.

She took him to after-hours clubs in Harlem that opened at four AM, the mandatory closing hour for establishments that sold liquor, where famous Negro and white musicians played jazz and celebrities danced or listened. There, he had secured Joe Louis's
autograph for Harry, watched the British heiress Nancy Cunard dance with her hand on her black partner's penis, talked briefly with an intelligent but insane actor who wanted to put on an all-Negro cast production of
Macbeth
, and was asked by Tallulah Bankhead:
Do you still enjoy fucking?

He smoked marijuana with Leslie, but refused heroin. Pointing to her collapsed veins, he told her she was killing herself. She shrugged:

“It make me happy.”

“But I love you. I want to help you.”

“Don't need no help. Didn't ask.”

The only other irritation between them was the secret of her voice. His intellect would not allow such art to go unexplained or be explained as a dumb vessel carrying a treasure.

“When you sing, what do you feel?”

“I feel.”

“When you sing about a lynching, do you see a corpse on fire?”

“I'd puke.”

“What do you see?”

“I can't see nothing. The spotlight blinds me.”

“You know people commit suicide after hearing
Gloomy Sunday.”

“So.”

“You do that to them. Do you realize your power?”

“I don't mean to make them do that. But the song does remind me of a funeral in a way.”

“Aha, you see a hearse.”

“Aba, I don't see no fucking hearse. I had it. Now cut this crap or get lost. I sing what's in my heart and that ain't the same two nights in a row or two songs in a row.”

Eventually, he admitted that his supposed comfort at sharing her was a lie. I must, he concluded, marry her, immediately laughing at his Jewish cure for infidelity. He imagined the dialogue:

“Leslie, now that we've been married by a rabbi, you can't have any other men.”

“You Jews have heavy laws.”

“Yes.”

“I guess I'll pass on bein' Jewish.”

The words
She's yours she's mine, she's somebody else's too
gave him no rest. Once they sprang whole and audible into his reading of a Yiddish poem. Afterward, his host, a manufacturer of corsets, congratulated him on mixing in a touch of English. Aba was, he said, in step with the American product of the future.

Desperate for exclusivity, he suggested they have a child. She laughed, then suddenly began to cry.

In her teens she had contracted gonorrhea. A local Negro doctor in Baltimore said he could cure her for fifty dollars. He had performed a hysterectomy.

“I wish that doctor was still alive so's I could kill him.”

She had sobbed like a child. He had cradled her in his arms and whispered to her the soothing words of assurance that there was nothing to worry about, with which his mother had calmed him: