High Cotton (31 page)
Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
She refused any gesture I made toward her, but once she asked if I smoked. Only poor people, fat people, black people, and alcoholics were still smoking. Some people went to Europe just to smoke. It was the one day I wasn’t, but I also didn’t want to let the chance go.
She was way ahead of me, already pointing to the failing Palestinian deli at the top of the hill. Her words collapsed on top of mine, pushed them down. She moved across my hint as if I had placed a cape over a puddle. She said she was on her way to get some supplies: cigarettes, coffee, and doughnuts. She’d just had to rest first, take a breath from walking up the hill to the Muslims, as she called them.
Once, in a cloudburst, I saw her going to wherever she lived. I ran after her with an umbrella. She wouldn’t let me cross the street with her and indicated by the way she stood that she wasn’t going to budge until I turned back. My standing there in the rain would just make her get wetter. “Tell me your name so I can respect you the next time I see you.” But she never called me anything as she plied back and forth for her supplies, slow and soundless as a cypress canoe.
One night I skulked around the velveteen rope at the entrance to a disco on Fourteenth Street, a club where the music reached painful decibels, pounded the walls, traveled over the parking lot, and bounced off other buildings. It was a social clearinghouse where those going down in Manhattan tried to grab on to those on the rise. I made as much as $40 there selling the VIP passes sent to me in the mail by mistake, unloading them on Manny-Hanny types unwilling to risk the humiliation of not being acknowledged by the moody doormen.
New Age coolies—punks, students of free subjectivity, youths from immigrant families that had never participated in the census—intimidated the well-dressed and scrambled for the final edition of two yippie-like Xeroxes: one gave the telephone credit card numbers of major corporations, the other explained how to reverse electricity meters. And I ran into the very person who could make me feel my circumstances most acutely.
Trip stepped off the curb to avoid the throng and continued in my direction. His friendliness, honed in the anecdotal brotherhood of business pressure, had a quality of getting the other guy first. Brisk, extroverted, insensible—Trip, the black preppie, was so comfortably mainstream and having such a good time being casual there was no suggestion in him that integration was a kind of infiltration. The only chink in his armor as an insider I’d ever detected came from a story he told about arriving for the first day of school and being told that his fees were in arrears. His chic parents whipped him across Philadelphia and enrolled him in another elite academy.
I assured Trip that I didn’t hassle with queues either. He didn’t introduce me to the woman with him. She waved to a doorman, smiled on the general public, on the caravan of “stretches,” and told Trip she never noticed when people recognized her. I placed
her face: the actress who played the new black doctor in town on my favorite soap. They were on their way to the back door of the club that took the gorgeous, famous, and ultra-hip straight upstairs to private rooms. Trip said he was planning an informal “Easy Street Brunch.” I asked if he’d won the lottery.
her face: the actress who played the new black doctor in town on my favorite soap. They were on their way to the back door of the club that took the gorgeous, famous, and ultra-hip straight upstairs to private rooms. Trip said he was planning an informal “Easy Street Brunch.” I asked if he’d won the lottery.
“Life is brilliant, dude.” He pronounced “dude” like a surfer. Whites had made the word their own. Black guys didn’t use “dude” anymore; they said “homeboy.”
I said I would check my date book, though I had nothing on in the near future except a menu advertising the opening of an MSG-free Szechuan restaurant.
We’d met a few years before, when he selected a number of expensive works on architecture in the antiquarian bookshop where I got away with costly thefts and doing as little as possible. The shop owner muttered that if that black kid bought any of those books he’d eat his hat: he didn’t trust Trip’s khaki and flannel. Trip produced an array of credit cards for identification and told the owner he could hold the books until the check cleared. The owner sucked up to Trip when he returned to fetch his purchases and make others.
An analyst in a brokerage department that composed ecologically sound portfolios for careful pension fund managers, Trip browsed regularly in the bookshop with his girlfriend, Ellen, who collected books about sparrows. Trip’s grandfather had been the first black to sit on the Keystone State’s appellate bench, and his father, a banker, was tapped for political office but turned out to have questionable golf partners. Trip, however, was thoroughly contemporary. He amused himself by reading up on medical patent applications. He had a passion for jazz, but it was a Frenchman’s love, not a homeboy’s. Before Wall Street his work experience had been as a loose rider on a horse farm in Chester County.
He lived completely free of the entanglements of racial identity.
When he discussed South Africa, it was from the standpoint that apartheid was too antiquated for the demands of capital-raising mechanisms. His insularity had none of the revealing snobbery of the light-skinned, “Blue Vein” world. He was as dark as the Ethiopians Pepys heard turned white at death. If there was any hesitation in Trip’s pursuit of happiness, it came from the fat boy who lived on inside the dynamo who hit the gym at least three times a week.
When he discussed South Africa, it was from the standpoint that apartheid was too antiquated for the demands of capital-raising mechanisms. His insularity had none of the revealing snobbery of the light-skinned, “Blue Vein” world. He was as dark as the Ethiopians Pepys heard turned white at death. If there was any hesitation in Trip’s pursuit of happiness, it came from the fat boy who lived on inside the dynamo who hit the gym at least three times a week.
Ellen had an income and therefore time to schmooze. Her history of getting caught up in causes began with joining the picket line at Woolworth’s as a pre-teen. She and Trip were introduced at an anti-apartheid demonstration outside the English-Speaking Union. But he was not a cause. The shadow over their living together came from Trip’s parents, not her widowed mother. Their disapproval noted that Ellen was Wrong School and six years older than Trip.
At a Main Line dinner she complained to a Hungarian diplomat that a Filipino friend had been denied a visa to Budapest. The Hungarian was not surprised: the applicant was “colored.” Trip’s parents were enraged, as if Ellen had called attention to a man’s handicap.
After Trip took a job at a conventional Wall Street firm, he spent his weekends playing squash and elaborate computer war games, and came less to the bookshop. Trip’s secretary took to putting me on hold and then announcing he wasn’t at his desk in a way that made me think of myself as a social liability. He’d never let me pick up a check. As often happens with couples, the attitudes of one are adopted by the other, and after the bookshop folded I was not surprised that I lost touch with them both.
Trip’s name was still linked with Ellen’s on the code board below the camera, and their building on Riverside Drive hadn’t lost the smells of stuffed cabbage and gefilte fish. Puffy creatures
darted from Trip’s door. Ellen excused herself and caught one cat she said was a Blue Cream. Its eyes were as noncommittal as hers. Another Ellen identified as a naughty Shaded Cameo whined around her Mao slippers. She softly scolded the cat when its paws tangled her black hair, which showed luxurious ribbons of premature gray.
darted from Trip’s door. Ellen excused herself and caught one cat she said was a Blue Cream. Its eyes were as noncommittal as hers. Another Ellen identified as a naughty Shaded Cameo whined around her Mao slippers. She softly scolded the cat when its paws tangled her black hair, which showed luxurious ribbons of premature gray.
An Angora shook itself on the edge of a bookcase in the cavernous room where Trip sat in mussed painter’s trousers with two guests. Cat hair settled on avocado plants, on his collections of first editions and stamp albums ruined by pesticide, and in his ceiling-high, alphabetical library of rare jazz dust covers. Bright tropical fish flitted through Disney sets inside several tanks. Trip said the glass enclosure of lettuce and brown smears was home to Ellen’s accumulation of forty snails, which began with her discovery of two stowaways in a box of strawberries from Japan.
Trip said he had been drinking to his reincarnation as vice president for research for a “wholly black-owned” firm of corporate troubleshooters. They had just won their first big contract selling “computer solutions”—whatever they were—to Nigeria. I wouldn’t have been more surprised if he had become a trapeze artist. He asked that I do him the courtesy of never mentioning his former brokerage firm in his presence again. “I developed a destination problem.”
“I’m going to get mine. If that means taking yours, I will. Am I right?” Rayburn, the vice president for marketing and development for the meteoric black company, asked me if I knew that the future was in inductive computers. “Better move fast. The drawbridge is going up. You don’t need a weatherman, you need a probability theorist. Forget the Wagadus and get real. What’s the point of having a tank full of gas if you’ve no place to go?”
It flashed through my mind that Trip was doing a little window dressing of his own, scrounging up “homes”; that he had asked
me over after not having seen me in such a long time to show Rayburn that he had black friends. From the number of plates and forks stacked on the table, I suspected that he had dug out a lot of old telephone numbers.
me over after not having seen me in such a long time to show Rayburn that he had black friends. From the number of plates and forks stacked on the table, I suspected that he had dug out a lot of old telephone numbers.
Trip said they were going to get to the Pacific century early. Their ultimate objective was to penetrate the Korean markets. Ellen brought a tray and said she hoped their goals would be considerate of dissidents. Trip said she was asking for a black eye that would prevent her going to his new firm’s networking bash.
Rayburn, a big cuff-links type, said Ellen reminded him of a girlfriend he’d had to set free because she dragged him to church meetings and demanded that the Polish harmonium player, the Refusenik, or the Native American pro-incorporation advocate speak directly into the microphone.
Trip said Ellen was a liberal and, like typewriters, her days were numbered. “She tells me she can’t feel what I need her to, but I’m going to work with her on this.” She wouldn’t permit a television, let alone cable, in the house and wanted to cancel their many subscriptions. She retained the radio to listen for the lot numbers of products being recalled.
“I’m not a vegetarian,” Ellen said. “I’m a hysteric.” She dodged Rayburn’s jolly tap on the bottom and went back to the kitchen. Rayburn’s wife, who looked very pregnant in her red dress, finally spoke up. She said she perfected her English by tuning into American breakfast television. She came from Rumania. Pleased with her contribution, she settled the grape leaves on her stomach and eye-beamed her husband, handsome in the O. J. Simpson mode, through wispy bangs of platinum-blond hair. I imagined she was not above telling her struggling countrymen as she tipped them, “You should have married me when you had the chance.”
Rayburn said one day soon he would have a computer in his home that automatically transcribed Radio Free Europe, Radio Moscow, and Radio Peking. “I believe in communication.” He said that being computer illiterate was like not being a part of the gene pool. The bottles Trip poured lubricated Rayburn’s ego. His wife commandeered the bowls of chick-peas and leaned, intent on his every word, like a child on the alert in case a single part of her favorite tale is left out.
The cats nibbled the African violets as Rayburn recalled his days growing up in Los Angeles’s Baldwin Hills. The fish swam back and forth to his beach antics. The snails and I lost sight of Trip as Rayburn hacked through Yale, torts at N.Y.U. Law School, and an MBA. Trip came back into the saga the happy day Rayburn, stung at not having been made a partner, convinced Trip, disquieted at the prospect of being forever low on the arbitrage pole, that his fledgling black company was the fast lane to cooking the mark. I waited for him to fling open a window and roar, “Ali, boom ale-yay.”
“We’re coming on top,” Rayburn concluded. He varied his style of speaking: Eli one minute, street the next. Squeamish women in light-skinned social clubs like the Northeasterners would call it trying to sound black. He jived in the almost-Thonet rocker as he talked, in an I-don’t-need-no-chiropractor fashion. “No half stepping. You got to be down with me.” He high-fived Trip.
“I’m down.”
“Bhani ghani,” Rayburn said.
“Abari gari,” Trip said.
“What’s new,” they said in unison. Rayburn’s wife said their big noise was sweet. She pushed herself out of her chair to help Ellen. Trip looked bashful, which I hadn’t thought him capable of.
“This one bitch said to me when I got accepted at N.Y.U. and her silly ass boyfriend didn’t, ‘If anyone had to take his place I’m glad it was you.’ Let’s show some Jews how to shimmy.” We heard Ellen’s exclamation in the hall. “I meant Jew boys, not Jew girls.” Rayburn said he forgot Ellen was Jewish because her family came from Canada. “Man, this wine has been corked.”
Division of labor: the women looked at fish in the kitchen, and Rayburn held forth, mostly about his stick dipped in gold. “I put myself through law school by making deposits at the sperm bank. No lie. Good money.” He recommended pumpkin seeds to combat testicular exhaustion. He was a dog, he admitted. “Foreplay is for idealists,” his wife caught him saying. “I wasn’t in prison before you met me, baby.”
“Don’t, baby.”
“You love it, Malibu style, wicked and wild.” Rayburn had something to say at all times: the salmon steaks reminded him of Bonnard nudes; Dutchess County, not Connecticut, was the place to buy; and a black nationalist’s Letter to the Editor attacking a black professor began, “Laid up at Yale with a white woman,” which, to him, had the grandeur of “Sequestered at Troy.” He wasn’t sure Ellen’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt would do for an executive’s lady. Ellen said she had a black Mickey Mouse T-shirt for evening wear. Rayburn’s money clip came from Paul Stuart. I changed position to hide the sheen of Grandfather’s hand-me-down trousers. I was too ashamed to ask for an ashtray.
Rayburn made me think of the time a roomful of black girls in Indianapolis joked about the exploits of their maids and the girls whose mothers had in fact been maids laughed the loudest. I watched to see if Trip answered Ellen’s look at the way Rayburn patronized him. Rayburn found an opportunity to say free blacks had had it as bad as slaves, a dig at Trip’s ancestors, cabinetmakers in Pennsylvania before 1830.
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