Ten Stories About Smoking (14 page)

‘She really was, you know? People say that about people all the time, I know, but it’s true. I’ve been all over this country, seen most of the states, but
I’ve never seen a woman as beautiful as Leona. She was so beautiful that to me she looked like what every other woman had been practising at becoming for the past two thousand
years.’

He took a picture from his wallet and pitched it across the table. It was a Polaroid, smudgy and battered. Leona was standing outside Charlie’s gym, smiling, late afternoon sunlight
glowing around her. Despite the casual track pants and the UCLA sweatshirt, she looked elegant. High cheekbones led down to a mouth filled with prominent white teeth, gold hoop earrings contrasting
with her dark skin. She looked a bit like an older version of Lisa Bonet. I passed the photo back and he carefully replaced it inside his wallet.

‘We met in the market of all places. Just up the street from here. She was buying tomato sauce and I wasn’t looking where I was going. Our carts crashed into one another. She asked
if she knew me because I sure looked familiar. And then I remembered I’d seen her before but only from when she picked up her brother from the gym. She laughed and said, “Of course!
You’re Mr O’Neil. My brother talks about you all the time. Says you’ve got a story for every occasion.”

‘I must have coloured at that, ’cause she laughed again. I tried to smile but I guess it came out like a grimace, maybe, or bad stomach acid.

‘“I think that’s cool,” she says then. “I like people who can tell a good story.”’

Charlie let out a long sigh.

‘You see, son, I’ve spent my whole life around men. All of it. In the ring, in the gym, in the car on the way to the next fight. I mean I’ve not spent much time in the company
of women. And I don’t mean that in a queer way. It’s just that I’ve never really
got
women. I just wasn’t at the races. In the ring you see a punch, you block it or
you get out of the way or you take the punch. Simple. Black and white. With women I never found that. I’ve had women, but never for very long. Give me a wild kid from the Bronx ripped on
’roids and rage and I can do something about it. Show me an attractive woman and I’m looking for the nearest exit.’

He took a long sip of whiskey and made a fist with his right hand.

‘But that day, in the market, standing next to this beautiful woman with two cans of tomato sauce in her hands, somehow I grew some real
cojones
, y’know what I mean? Some
proper balls. So I turns to her and says: “If you like stories, maybe I can tell you some over a cup of coffee some time?”

‘She looks me up and down and says: “So long as I can get a donut too.”

‘I couldn’t believe it. We met an hour later and we drank coffee and ate donuts. Leona ends up telling me all about her life and I just listen, soaking up her voice like it was pure
gravy. She’d come to New York from LA when she was sixteen. She’d always meant to go back, but New York kept finding new ways of keeping her occupied. She worked as a clerk in a bank in
Manhattan and loved riding the subway. I liked the way she touched her hair as she spoke. I told her some of my better fight stories and her eyes dazzled as I told them. She said she loved tales of
the old boxers.

‘“These new guys,” she says to me after I told her a story about Sugar Ray Robinson, “they’re not real fighters. They’re like machines with muscles, or
something. It’s like they’re wearing battle suits. Gimme the old guys any day.” I couldn’t speak for about a minute. I was expecting Allen Funt from
Candid Camera
to
step through the door. She was perfect. Perfect in every way.

‘I saw her the next week. We met for coffee again. She asks me if I’d like to come round to hers for dinner. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t understand what a
thirty-five-year-old black woman would want to do with an old fool like me. She apologized and we sat and watched our coffees go cold.

‘“Is there something wrong?” she says. “I thought we were getting on real well.”

‘And I say, “Sure,” and then give her a compliment.

‘“So, are you afraid of my cooking? You expecting polk salad and chitlins and molasses?” she says to me just like that. And I start mumbling, that it’s not that at
all.

‘She puts her hand on mine then and starts saying about how age and all the rest of it means nothing to her. She likes me, is all. Likes my gentle hands and my muscles and the way I bob my
head as I speak. Then she kisses me. The next day I go round to her place for dinner. Six weeks later she’s moved her stuff in here and she’s talking about redecoration.’

Charlie paused and went to refill the glasses.

‘I don’t need to go into all the details. They’re not important. All you need to know is that I was the happiest I’ve ever been. It was like something out of dreams, or
off the movies or something. It was like we were fused together. We understood each other so well we didn’t need to communicate. We were just so happy that it seemed nothing bad could ever
happen to anyone.’

He laughed then and looked longingly for a moment at my cigarettes.

‘The only punch you never see is the one that puts you on the canvas. You can’t ever see that one coming, that’s what they say. About three years ago, things became a little
strained, somehow not quite as special. And it hit Leona real hard. She couldn’t understand it, couldn’t get herself excited about anything. She stopped coming to the fights, stopped
making dinner. She just watched television and cried sometimes in the night. It was strange. It was like someone had thrown water on a fire. She just seemed to run out of spark.

‘She was usually so active, but now she just wanted to stay home. She’d look at me with those beautiful eyes when I got home and she’d say: “I’m losing you. I
don’t want to, but I’m losing you.” And I didn’t know what else to say but: “No. No, you’re not losing me.”

‘This went on for a few months. She would read these books with titles like
You Can Change Your Life
and
The Seven Stages of Success and Happiness
. Y’know that kind of
Oprah stuff? They did nothing and she’d throw them across the room after just a few pages. “These people know nothing, Charlie,” she’d say, “they don’t have a
clue how bad it feels.” One day I came home and she’d been drinking. She spent two whole days throwing up. A month later, I said she should go and see a doctor.

‘I could tell she wasn’t sure about the idea, but she went along. And the doctor says to her to go and see this other guy, an analyst. So I take her to see this analyst, hoping that
everything’ll work itself out. She’s in there for an hour or so and comes out like she’s been sparring with Max Schmeling. On the way home she tells me that she talked for all
that time, but nothing seemed to make any sense. And then she starts to laugh. She laughs and says, “You know what this crazy man wants me to do? What’s going to fix my broken head? You
ready for this, Charlie? Running!” She starts laughing even more. “All this time and all I needed was to do myself some jogging!”

‘I went to see the shrink. He was a tall woolly headed guy. Still, he looked kind enough. Not a crank at least. I waited for him to finish his meetings then followed him out to the parking
lot. I told him what was happening and if there was anything I should be doing. He looked at me for a time and said all that usual stuff about patient confidentiality. Then he held my shoulder and
said, “Get her running.” I thought maybe it was time to get a different analyst.

‘But after I left him, I thought maybe it was worth a shot. So I got her a treadmill and set it up in the gym. She looked at me like I was insane. “Charlie,” she said to me,
“that guy’s crazy. Running isn’t going to make me any better.” I just told her to do it for me. I put the machine in the corner of the gym so she could watch me as she ran
and took her down to a specialist running store and bought her running pants and some shoes. I think she knew how hard it was for me too.

‘For the first two days I was treading on eggshells around her. Her sadness was filling up the apartment. It was like it was drowning us both. But she put on the jogging suit and the shoes
and did two miles the first day, two miles the second, then three miles on the third. On the fourth day we could feel it come back. It was like a homecoming.

‘“That doctor ain’t so crazy after all,” I said. And she kissed me like she had that first time.

‘Every day she’d come home from work, change and come join me in the gym. She’d run for as long as I’d train, then we’d have dinner. It was like the old times
again. It was perfect.’

He was shaking slightly now.

‘Feels like I’ve been talking for ever.’ He finished his drink then went to the kitchen and filled up a kettle for coffee.

‘It was like that for a few months,’ he went on. ‘Better than ever. Then Leona started to lose weight. At first it was gradual, but then it was hard to ignore. I reckon she
dropped maybe twenty-four pounds in about one month. I couldn’t understand it; but she was so happy there wasn’t any point in saying anything. She was eating, I knew that because I was
watching her. In fact she was eating all the time. I started putting protein supplements in her food, but it wasn’t doing any good. She just got thinner and thinner. She was wasting away in
front of me, but she wouldn’t have me call a doctor. “Charlie,” she’d say, “I’m fine, honey. You always liked your fighters lean, didn’t you?”

‘The happiness of those months disappeared as quick as her chest and her ass. When she wasn’t running she was thinking about it. I could tell. It’s like when fighters have been
hit so hard they can’t hear, but they’re still nodding their heads, pretending they understand the instructions.

‘One night I woke up. It was three-thirty in the morning and Leona wasn’t in bed. She wasn’t in the apartment either so I unlocked the door and went down into the gym. The
lights were off, but I could hear a noise inside. I called out and heard this scraping, falling sound. I pushed on the light and Leona was lying in a heap by the running machine. I ran over to her
and scooped her up, then called for an ambulance. She was barely conscious when they took her in.

‘Next day she was awake and lucid. I held her hand.

‘“I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m sorry,” she kept saying over and over again. Apparently it had been going on for months. “There was something there,” she says
to me one night, “I could see us together where no one could hurt us, where we were forever like we were before. All I had to do was keep running. If I kept running I knew we were both
safe.”

‘The doctors reckoned she’d been running well over a hundred and fifty miles a week, most of them late at night while I was sleeping. Her body eventually just gave out. Just like
that.’

He clicked his finger and took the whistling kettle from the stove.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. He made the coffee and handed me a mug.

‘I see her every day at the hospital, but she looks through me. “I used to love you, didn’t I?” she says sometimes when I see her. “But I could never run far
enough, could I? If I could run for ever, I’d find you again.”

‘They don’t think she’ll ever come back. It’s in the blood, apparently. Her aunt’s locked up in San Diego, convinced that Nixon’s put out a hit on her. Her
grandfather went crazy too, in the war, poor bastard.’

He blew on his mug of coffee. ‘Now isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?’ he said and gave out a low laugh. I thought of Helen’s body in the smashed car,
the blood, Lou Lou in the blue bottle. We drank in silence, then O’Neil woke up, looking confused like it wasn’t the room he was expecting. He looked at the clock and then at his watch.
It was late.

‘We should be making a move, Rob,’ he said. ‘We got meetings first thing.’

‘Thanks, Charlie,’ I said.

‘Yeah, thanks, Uncle Charlie.’

‘It’s my pleasure. See you boys soon, I hope,’ Charlie said.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow.’

Our baby cries, so I put him to my breast; his mouth greedy like his father. He is seven months old, but will not take to the bottle: instead he clings to me. Sometimes I
wonder if it will ever end, and imagine him a grown man with sharp teeth biting on my sore-swollen nipples; and this makes me both laugh and shiver. He has his father’s face then, the same
eyes that hooked me the first time.

Everything now smells of spilled milk, talcum powder and nappies. This is what he tells me, and I believe him; though since the birth I’ve not caught the scent of anything at all. He could
have started smoking again for all I know – the decision to quit was his and his alone – or he could have stopped washing. Or he could be coming home night after night smelling strongly
of his lover. He could stink of her sweat and her perfume. His breath could hum with the taste of her and I wouldn’t know. Maybe this is some kind of trade-off: my son for one of my
senses.