Kingston Noir (10 page)
It’s not so bad, he said. He had stretched her out next to him on the couch, her head cradled in his lap.
If we had fucked, she said, this wouldn’t have happened. She meant it as a joke and she tried to laugh, but her lips were so swollen, they didn’t move at all.
He had a bowl of ice; he put a cube on her lips and another on his. Just rest yourself, he said.
I won’t rest till I finish what I started down there tonight.
People who can’t fight mustn’t fight, he said. If you step to a man with a piece of pipe and a Red Stripe bottle like that, what you think the man going do? It wasn’t right for him to manhandle you like that and box-box you up, but still … Is not just a defense thing, you know. Is a pride thing. A man thing. From the way he was box-boxing you up, I can tell it was about pride. That was a man defending pride.
He nursed her in his room for two days, and on the third day he asked her, What the hell is this about?
By this time all the swelling had gone down.
It’s a long story, she said.
They were in the tub, facing each other. They were like an old married couple. Naked with soft nipples. Familiar.
When she tried to blow him off, he said, We have time.
She hated to have to go back to those years. Travel down those memories. But there were his eyes, hard and steady on her.
Moira was about four, she said. And the marriage was pretty much done. We’d fight over everything. And sometimes it’d get so bad I’d leave and go and live with my sister. Then weeks would pass and he’d call and say we should try again and then we’d get back and the same shit would happen again.
And then his cousin came to live with us for a while and it was like evil had stepped through the door. She paused. She took a sip of the local rotgut rum Wallace liked. We couldn’t stop fucking, she said heavily. And all this time he was stealing from Errol. Errol had a used car business that was doing pretty good. And the two of them were always quarreling over money, and the accountant, Mr. Sams, was always complaining to Errol. And this cousin said it was money Errol owed him.
She stopped to drain the glass of overproof and then to pour a fresh shot from the bottle and to put in more ice from the bucket on the floor. She turned on more hot water as well, and when the temperature in the tub was just right she turned off the tap and continued.
I couldn’t stop it with this guy. It was like an addiction. And then one day Errol found out. After that, I took Moira and left for good. He tried to throw out the cousin, but he’d just come out of prison, he didn’t have anywhere to go. Week after I moved, the cousin called me. We met up in a hotel room. As usual we fucked. And before I even got back to my sister’s, the police picked me up. There was all this money he’d put in my purse, Errol’s money, and the gun, the gun that bastard used to shoot Mr. Sams with.
So Errol got the kid and you went to prison.
She said nothing at first. Then: Don’t even know what happen to that bastard Carlton.
Carlton who? He has a last name?
Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?
Please.
Lewis, she said. Carlton Lewis.
He described Carlton from head to toe. She shifted uneasily in the water.
Dead, he said. Big news in the papers. Police shootout some years back. Drugs. They kill him.
Jesus.
So what the hell is really going on with you?
I came so I could see my kid, she said. That’s all. Just to see her face again, talk to her, touch her hands, listen to her breath. She looks like my mother. Exact stamp of her.
Wallace looked up at the ceiling. I can get you the kid, he said.
Really? She stared at the long strong neck and the circles of hair around his nipples.
That easy to arrange. When you want her—today? Tomorrow?
He kept his eyes on the ceiling as they talked.
Just so? she said. Her stomach felt suddenly queasy. Who exactly was this man?
He reached over the edge of the tub for a glass of rum, took a sip. Looked in her direction but not in her eyes, just a bit above them, somewhere between her hairline and her brows. When he stopped sipping, his Adam’s apple kept moving up and down.
I think I need to talk to him first, she said.
He looked her in the eye now.
I can’t just take her like that. He’s holding her hostage. There’s something he wants from me.
He’s punishing you, he said, for fucking his cousin. As I said, what happened the other night was a pride thing.
I know, she said. But there’s something else. I have to figure out what will make him let her go. I have to give him something.
He started to speak and she raised her hand. Let me just think, Wallace, please. They were quiet for several moments. And for the first time, she was afraid. Genuinely afraid. Who was this man? And then she poured herself half a tumbler of rum and downed it quickly. She started to bathe him. Just so she could think, buy time. She soaped the wrinkles and folds of his skin speckled with moles and he brought his eyelids together and moaned. It was soft, his skin, and it hung loosely on the heavy bones of his slim body. For a while there was only the breath between them, loud and raggedy in the room, and the flickering candles making shadows on their faces. She wanted to just relax again, she wanted the innocence again, but all that was gone now. When the water grew cool again, they stepped out and towel dried.
I’m going over there, she said.
He looked at her. You want me close by, just in case? His voice was soft and it unnerved her.
She laughed. And it was a reckless laugh. I don’t think so, she said.
I wouldn’t play with that man, not after those blows he gave you.
I know, she said. But I’m putting down my weapon. I just going same as you see me.
That’s noble and all, he said. But let me come with you. I’ll park a little ways off so you can have your privacy.
She arrived just as the sun was sinking. The sky was a fiery red. Wallace dropped her off near the bus stop. And she walked. She had a gun. A Tomcat Beretta, semiautomatic, Wallace wouldn’t let up until she’d taken it. It was a nice gun, as guns go, small, light, easy to handle. She’d owned one before when she lived with Errol and they had the used car business. It gave her a little boost, though, the gun. She could feel it in her girth, the way she moved down the road, as if this earth belonged to her. She waved to the men playing dominoes under the tree. She stopped in a shop to buy tamarind balls and the
Star
.
She saw Errol before he could see her and she watched him for a long time. He was in the front garden, about ten paces from the fence. His brown face was wrapped in white gauze and he was there pruning a wild rosebush. As she got up closer, she could actually hear him. He was singing under his breath.
He jerked up suddenly, perhaps sensing her, and a vein as big as a pipe throbbed in his neck.
I know you know I didn’t shoot Mr. Sams or take your money, she said, her voice low. I know you put me away because of what happened with Carlton. What had happened to our marriage. I know you wanted to punish me. You wanted me gone. You wanted somebody to pay. And I paid, Errol, six years of prison time. Longer than anybody should have to pay for a little fuck. And maybe it’s my time to see her now, to raise her now. Maybe it’s my time now.
He’d been listening and studying her, but now he sucked his teeth, now he muttered something caustic underneath his breath and turned away from her, now he went back to his pruning, and he gave her his back.
She thought to pull out the gun and whack him hard across his face. Whack him until it was mush. She was talking to him. She was fucking talking to him. She at least deserved his attention.
But as she reached into her purse, she noticed the glistening lines on his cheeks. She noticed his slow-moving lips. How you could shame me like that? he muttered. How you could bring me so low?
Look, I had no business doing what I did with Carlton. It was wrong. Damn wrong, she said. And I know it cut you up. But prison, Wallace. Prison? You think I deserved to go to prison for that? Now you tell me. Six whole years I sat up in that hellhole. Because you feel shame. Because I bring you down low. Because of your pride. Your manhood. What if right now I should punish you for what you did to me? Cause I could very well do that to you right now. I could crush you right now, Errol. But I am not going to do that. I just want to be with Moira. That’s all. I just want to feel her close again. And so everything is up to you now. Everything is up to you. And I would advise you to make the right choice this time. I would advise you to act right.
She watched his shoulders heaving. She glanced at her watch. Ten minutes had passed. Wallace would be driving by soon. He would do so only once, he’d said. If she missed him she’d be on her own.
Errol still had not turned to face her, still had not said anything, but she knew him. He was listening; he was turning things over. His shoulders had grown slack.
She took her hand from her purse, backed away from the gate, and began walking in reverse. As she stepped away, she thought she caught the movement of a curtain. She stopped. Looked.
Errol threw down the shears and hurried inside. Should she wait? She continued her slow retreat, hoping to hear Errol or Moira’s voice, continuing to hope when it made no sense to think she’d be able to hear them from so far.
When she got to the main road she continued walking backward, stumbling at times, but her hand still in her purse, holding the gun.
Wallace was sitting in his Mercedes SUV at the bus stop.
Half an hour of driving elapsed before she spoke. She didn’t even recognize her own voice. You know what, Wallace? Turn round this damn vehicle right now. I can’t go home. I have to get my girl. I have to get her now.
H
ow my father came to die in Kingston, the unfortunate circumstances of his death there, remains unclear. Was it an accident? Nothing is known for sure. But this much I do know: my parents had gone to Jamaica for a winter vacation, which ended in a mortuary. Air-freighting my father’s body home to New York was an ordeal: few of us expect to die while abroad.
What can I tell you about him?
As a child I had been in awe of my father; daughters often are. His complexion was smooth and pink, his small, near-sighted eyes shone beadily behind horn-rimmed glasses. There was nothing tangible to dislike him for; Jimmy Ruff was my dad. He reviewed books for a living, and I guess he was doing fairly well at it, well enough, at any rate, to make a discreet name for himself at the
New York Times
. His forte was the savage put-down; any author he considered overrated (or who had simply won a literary prize) was tossed and gored. It took me awhile to work out that my father was not a writer after all, but a hack, though you might make it sound more important by calling him a literary critic.
My mother is the well-known food writer Fanny L’Estrange. By the time she met my father in 1984, she was the most infamously successful purveyor in New York of gaudy cookbook writing. “I want to bring out the
beast
in shy carnivores, and spur tenderloin-holics to tattoo
Fanny L’Estrange
on their rump roasts.”
I honestly believe that the worst writing in the entire world is to be found in my mother’s cookbooks. She, of course, does not know this (nor, one hopes, do her readers). But that was the first reason for her marvelous success as a food writer—her dismal taste. Mom had married young and she was even younger (sixteen, maybe seventeen) when she hung out with the Warhol crowd at The Factory in midtown. For all her outward propriety, she belonged to the age of New York punk and Patti Smith. This, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she had grown up on a pig farm in Ohio.
In my teens, distressingly for me, I had been handed a diagnosis of anxiety disorder. The diagnosis gave my mother the shock of her life. “Why can’t you be like other people?” The diagnosis was unmistakably accurate. I am prone to attacks of panic-fear and made easily depressed. At my high school in Brooklyn the feelings of social isolation—of mental
discomposure
—intensified. I was in a minority of white kids anyway, but my anxiety made me feel like a Martian in the classroom. Even now, at the age of twenty-seven, I have few close friends. I am unmarried, and am likely to remain that way.
I am not wealthy (I have no private means), yet I manage to sublet a studio apartment off Sackett Street in Brooklyn, between Hoyt and Bond. For years I have struggled to survive there as an artist. Awhile back I conceived and executed a mural on a wall in downtown Brooklyn, which won plaudits locally in the press (
How observant she is
.
She seems to notice everything
). The mural was followed by
Born Free
, a study of lions and other animals in the Prospect Park zoo; then, in close succession, by
Hereafters
and
Through the Void
, paintings on the theme of death and dying in general.
The recession has knocked the bottom out of the art market; I scrape by on a pittance. Sometimes I feel an itch of regret at not having tried my hand at accounting (I am good with numbers). But who would have had me? The smallest things distress me. The physical and mental effort it has cost me to write this story alone has been considerable.
Like I say, all my mother wanted was to ignore my diagnosis; she would not even discuss it with my father. If she was unhappy in her marriage, my father’s drinking did not help. It began tentatively, I believe, like going to a forbidden cookie jar; then it got worse. Bottle after bottle of bourbon. As their disenchantment deepened, my parents began to lose all affection in each other’s company; they became a mystery to each other. To my shame, Mom started to behave wildly, taking up with anyone who would have her. Her affairs came mostly in serial form. All that she required of her men was that they be young, good-looking, and less drunk than Dad.