O, Africa! Read online

  “Well, if I never again see the underside of Barrymore’s chin, I’ll count myself lucky.”

  “That’s only because you don’t appreciate the theater’s rules and traditions, so you discount one in favor of the other. Whereas I—in my infinite sagaciousness and wisdom—prefer both plays and motion pictures.”

  “Huh.”

  “And this preference, I hope you will appreciate, is not a matter of morality but one of taste.”

  The martinis were immense. Izzy, not usually a drinker, consciously resists the alcohol’s rising effect as it sloshes over him, overcompensating by making himself purposefully rigid, straightening his posture until he is as militarily aligned as a West Point cadet, hands pressed flat on the table, displaying fingers for days.

  “Two martinis, please,” Howard taxi-hails the bartender. “And for my friend here—ha-ha—another?”

  “No, I’ll have a Tom Collins instead.”

  “Ooooooh, I bet you’d like a Tom Collins,” the bartender coos, sidling up to them.

  “Yes, please,” Izzy says, registering the hint of Cleopatra tincture around the server’s eyelashes, the eyebrows improbably sleek and well groomed.

  “Okay, honey.”

  This, too, Izzy finds disarming, having not been called by that term of endearment since his mother’s death. It hadn’t occurred to him that anything was amiss when Howard suggested they meet here, at a downtown place called Bacchus rather than one of their usual Broadway haunts. Izzy hadn’t considered anything suspect when they first entered and he espied the glossy poster of Michelangelo’s David in all his naked, ill-proportioned splendor. Nor did he really take note until now of the lighting in this poorly illumined room, more shrouded, clandestine-seeming than in other bars he had frequented, the darkness concealing rather than cradling the mysteries of romance.

  But now Izzy takes it all in, and all is full of shame. A uniformed man at a corner table loosens and removes his prosthetic arm and places it across the table, a line drawn in the sand, the first acknowledgment in the shedding of secret selves. A policeman, his face half swallowed in mustache, is chatted up by a man in a derby who holds an elaborately carved horn cane. A beautiful slip of a blonde in a short red dress who couldn’t possibly, but must, be a man, grazes the backs of patrons’ necks as she glides by. There are married men, too, square, boxy-shaped fellows in gray and black business suits and stiff hats, gold loops glinting around their wedding-ring fingers offering the protection of magic totems, rendering acts invisible. A border collie patrols the place, and even the dog is somehow effeminate, taunting them all by seeming to walk en pointe.

  “You know what I just noticed?”

  Howard pops a drunken olive into his mouth. “What’s that?”

  “There are no women in this bar. Only men.”

  “Well, you’re an observant one, Isidor.”

  Queer. Fruit. Twist. Fag. Pansy. Bent. Fairy. Sissy. Invert. Disturbed. Degenerate. In the life. Three-letter man. Winking, jeering, lascivious, effeminate men, Lady So-and-So of Such-and-Such. Ever since Prohibition came in, the fairy resorts on the Bowery and in the Tenderloin had been targeted by Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice, which made a practice of regularly raiding the places, bashing heads, and bringing patrons up on charges of lewd behavior and disorderly conduct. (After a magazine called The Little Review serialized passages from it, the society also managed to have banned a book by a lunatic Irishman about a Jew wandering around Dublin, thus protecting the populace from the dangers of literary modernism.)

  Being here was no good. Hollywood, for all its surface flagrant permissiveness, was in reality a very conservative place. The two things that could bring ruin there—sexual scandal and financial collapse—entwined like a pair of folded hands in a casket. Just look what they did to poor Fatty. Yet here Izzy was, with Imperial facing financial collapse, sitting enjoying a drink in this terrifying hole.

  “What is this place, Howard?”

  “Just a bar I know.”

  Izzy tries to get his breathing under control, to maintain a neutral tone. “Well, I’m not about to ask if you come here often.”

  “Just people relaxing, Isidor, getting to know one another, trying to have a good time. If you’re uncomfortable here, we can find some other place.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  And, in truth, Izzy is fine, the anthropological curiosity welling up inside him having extinguished any glow of betrayal. Removing himself by degrees, Izzy is able to appreciate the wit of the bar’s name—Bacchus—its classicism, its frisson of historic credibility, its economy in yoking perversity to antiquity. His eyes adjust to the dimness, and he recognizes that if the illumination of the room is indeed poor, the place is lit up like a castle from within, made resplendent with desire.

  “Meet my boyfriend!” Henry Till’s four-year-old son, Tom, had announced to the crew during a visit to the star’s compound, tugging Izzy along by the hand. Lost inside Till’s palatial residence, Izzy had stumbled upon Tom in the games room—the boy busy kissing his own reflection in a mirror—and felt an immediate kinship with the peculiar little Narcissus. Now the jig was finally up: the risk of rank exposure at the hands of an amoral child. “Izzy is my boyfriend!”

  “Your friend,” his mother corrected. “Not boyfriend.”

  “No, Izzy’s my boyfriend,” the child insisted. “I’m going to marry him when I grow up!”

  “Hey,” laughed Till, “wouldn’t that be something!”

  “Ha-ha!” Izzy ejaculated between clenched teeth, goose-stepping away from the incriminating scene. “Quite a precocious one you’ve got there, Henry! Quite … the … charming … young … lad.”

  Was Izzy’s hot human need so obvious that it was evident even to a child? Was his foulness that apparent? After everything Izzy had done, the lifelong project of negation, his monkish emptying out of desire? On the occasions when Izzy pleasured himself—a practice he engaged in with a kind of grinding, ritual obligation, sensations dense and dull as pound cake—if someone had ever bothered to ask, he would be hard-pressed to explain over what exactly he was laboring. Recalling grade-school grammar lessons, were he forced to sentence-diagram the occasion, Izzy would be a lonesome subject in search of an object. It was a biological procedure rather than a spiritual one. When it was over, wiping himself clean, Izzy was always amazed and humbled by the trials to which he had subjected himself for a result that was, on the evidence, a warm dollop of mother-of-pearl.

  “So, Izzy,” Howard prods, “you know the one about the fellow who goes to the doctor and says, ‘It hurts when I go like this’?”

  “Yeah. ‘So don’t go like this.’ ”

  “Right. But what if the patient says, ‘Doc, it hurts others when I go like this’? What does the doctor say then? If he’s any good, he says, ‘Well, I’m not treating other patients, I’m treating you. And you’re fine. Now, open wide and say “Ah.” ’ ”

  Izzy longed for Howard to reach out, he prayed for him to remain still. Just sitting here, close to it, swimming in suggestion, simply this triumphant acknowledgment of need was eros enough to sustain him for years. To bask in it. To baste in it. Disappearing into dark, masculine darkness. In the corner a hand drifts under a table. A shoulder begins rising, falling. Elsewhere, disappearances into alleys and men’s-room stalls. The sordidness of it excites him. The sordidness of it repulses him. If Howard’s touch arrives, Izzy’s life, his true life, may be forced to begin. Then it comes. A hand, rising out of velveteen black, brushes his knee. And stays there. His arm. Marvin’s arm.

  “So, ha-ha, I was thinking,” Howard says. “I make a mean Tom Collins, a much better-proportioned drink than they do here, actually, and it occurs to me also that you’ve never seen my apartment.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Well, it’s got a rather spectacular view, really something to see, if I do say so myself.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “So I thought
I might ask you back there for a drink, ha-ha, because, all kidding aside, I think I’ll die if you don’t touch me.”

  And out of the material of this dark room stretches before him the possibility of a city of bachelors. A city within a city. A city in waiting. A city within reach.

  “No, Howard,” Izzy says at last, removing his hand. “No, honey. No.”

  THREE

  Micah loved playing cards. There was the weirdly physical aspect of it, a kind of athletic ramping up while settling back in one’s seat. There were sensations of scent and taste, smells of cigar smoke, too-strong aftershave, green felt, fake leather, and spilled whiskey thickening the room, competing musical lines sawing away in an olfactory orchestra. There was the theatrical nature of it, the spinning of situations truthful and fictive, improvisatory fumes blasting away at full brightness. There was the narrative function of card games, how the best poker nights became lessons in storytelling, minor characters and subplots falling away, dramatic scaffolding revealing itself as empires were engineered and erased over single evenings. There was the oracular element, occult pleasures involved in testing one’s affinity with those fifty-two resistant slips, a local symptom of the general need to command mastery over the inanimate and indifferent. For all these reasons, Micah put card playing on a continuum with film shoots and fucking: heightened arenas in which one confronted the limits of skill, chance, imagination, and faith. One never knew how the thing would turn out.

  If Micah loved playing cards, he especially enjoyed games up in Harlem, where the card table served as the great equalizer. In these settings his colored acquaintances—actors, old-timers, and gangland associates—were relaxed, shrewd, noble. There was Mr. Waldo, leather-glove-faced at fifty, maybe sixty; there was the offhand, dismissive way he had of tossing chips into the pot like dirty plates in a cafeteria line; there was the way he’d shoot his shirtsleeves to show off expensive cuff links hanging one inch past the jacket; there was his low, tobacco-stricken voice, a physical thing you might find at the bottom of a well, like a moss-covered rock or a broken bottle. There was the gangster’s young lieutenant, Ellsworth Raymond Johnson, about Early’s age, pin thin, with fast, slashing eyes; a timeless, unlined face; the liquid hand movements of a deep-sea diver; and, planted prominently atop his forehead, a knotted carbuncle for which he’d earned the nickname “Bumpy.”

  Granted the occasional uptown invitation by James G. Wintz, a popular colored stage actor, Micah joined these Harlem games whenever he could and lost money to these princely black men liberally, almost merrily. Admission dues, he charitably thought, for exposure to alien realms. And he’d been prepared to lose again that night. But nothing like this.

  “I knew it!” Izzy erupts, hands waving up and down like a traffic cop’s. “I knew one day you’d bring us to ruin!”

  “Quit it, Itz.” Inhaling a cigarette. “I’ve not slept in days.”

  “Thirteen thousand dollars, Micah?! Why weren’t you put up for adoption?!”

  “You don’t understand, Izzy. It was a flush.”

  “But thirteen thousand dollars?”

  “Thirteen thousand three hundred, but who’s counting? Listen, Izzy, I was pulling cards I didn’t know existed. The twelve of unicorns, the eleven of rainbows …”

  It had been four days since the shoot wrapped, and Izzy had been looking forward to a triumphant reunion with his brother over dailies. Instead Micah had arrived hours late to the screening. He needed the extra time to achieve the effect of his appearance: cheeks spackled with crimson stubble; hair sculpted in a mad, woodpeckerish swoop; feathery trousers out of press; shirttails dangling freely behind him; his entire aspect as ruffled and dirty as a city pigeon.

  “Do you have it?” Izzy asks.

  “No, I don’t have it.” Lighting his next cigarette off his last. “I skipped out on a meeting I was supposed to have with them last night.”

  “What’ll they do to you if you don’t deliver?”

  “I don’t know, Izzy. These are serious men. Serious colored men.”

  “How could you do this to us, Micah?! What in God’s name were you thinking?!”

  This was the one trait of his brother’s personality—the parental scold—that Micah found entirely insupportable, and he recognized it as a form of self-punishment to have allowed himself to give Izzy free rein to this strain of moral superiority. Izzy had the luxury to be judgmental because he risked nothing, did nothing; Micah’s brother could afford to be unrealistic about need and motive and outcomes because he lacked the courage that comes with simple human sloppiness.

  In silence the duo jockey their way through busy midtown streets under the doleful watch of an electrified, fifty-foot Heinz pickle. A long ribbon flecked with green Coca-Cola-bottle slivers and pink bubble-gum wads, Broadway is parading with pretty girls, google-eyed kids, and cigar-chomping mugs; in the air, jabbing odors of boiling hot dogs, bright red candy, cheap wax cosmetics, newsprint, and sewer steam. To calm himself Izzy rummages a hand around in the paper bag full of novelty items he’d picked up for his nephews, identifying by touch a pair of fake plastic glasses, a toot-toot whistle, a flying dragonfly, a trick fountain pen, and a pack of black-pepper chewing gum.

  “Can you get an advance from Marblestone?”

  “I can’t go to Arthur with this.” Smacking the concavity of his brother’s chest. “C’mon, Marbles has got money troubles of his own.”

  “Well,” Izzy says, fiddling with the children’s gags and gizmos, “there’s one thing we could do that would settle your tab and help Arthur at the same time.”

  “Did I miss something? The way you described his proposal, the lunatic fat man wants to put us on a freight ship to Africa to take nature photos? Suddenly you’ve come around to the idea?”

  “I don’t know, the more I thought about it … The idea of being that far from home …”

  “You’ve been reading too much Kipling. Listen, Itz, you want to see lions and tigers, I’ll buy you a ticket to the zoo. I have obligations here: a wife, kids, a difficult mistress, a picture to finish. I can’t go traipsing off to the jungle just because Arthur’s skint. No, what I was hoping is that you might think to help me. You’ve always been good with money, and you certainly don’t have the competing financial obligations that I do.”

  “Absolutely not, Micah,” says Izzy, contemptuous satisfaction dripping in his voice as the pair make a turn at Forty-Third Street, elevated subway beams slicing the city into mad isometrics. “This is one debt you’re going to have to sort out on your own.”

  Micah usually approached the limestone façade of his apartment building at 802 Fifth Avenue with the caution of a man dipping a toe into a bathtub. He was, by any reasonable measure, a terrible father. In every practical sense, Micah just wasn’t around for the boys’ upbringing. He didn’t tend to the children when they were sick, didn’t help them with their schoolwork, didn’t know the names of boyhood friends real or imagined. He was, however, a thrilling presence in their lives. He showered them with fantastic gifts—hand-carved rocking horses and high-powered telescopes, Chinese checkers and chemistry sets, oversize director’s chairs and miniature cars—and filled their heads with storybook visions and tales of movie stars and oil tycoons, inventors and aviators, the jewel-laden and the glamour-drenched. One night when Micah had been away in California for a particularly long stretch, Margaret and the boys were listening to an Eastman Theatre radio broadcast when the announcer introduced as musical composer a “very special guest.” So enthralled was elder son, David, by the wording of this, by the concept of a “special guest”—a glamorous personage who swooped in to electrify staid proceedings—and so much did the boy identify this designation with his father that David began referring to Micah by the moniker, and the painful nickname stuck.

  Arriving at the building lobby, with its stonework details like wedding-cake piping, the brothers are surprised that the elderly Italian doorman is nowhere to be found. The man’s red-and-gold h
at, however, sits squarely in the center of the marble floor, lonely as a buoy at sea. The space always smelled of sand and salt—powdery white, ancient, oceanic smells—but it is an unlikely overlay that reaches Micah first. Card-game scents, starched shirts and peppermint-candy-stripe aftershave, sweet and noxious at the same time.

  Like an actor in a musical number, on cue Mr. Waldo emerges from a corner of the lobby and begins striding magnificently toward its center, approaching his mark with the authority of a born headliner. He walks like a man with all the time in the world, someone who sees the bus he’s meant to take pulling in to the station a few blocks ahead of him but in no hurry to catch it. Dressed in his familiar suit of candy-apple red, a solid-gold tie, and pitched at an improbable angle, a black fedora waving a velvety purple plume, he is altogether as resplendent and unlikely a presence in the great marble dome as a newly landed Martian.

  In a half-lit corner of the atrium standing hovered over the crumpled figure of the doorman is Mr. Waldo’s apprentice, Bumpy, decked out in dazzling bright blue pinstripes, midnight-blue snap-brim fedora, and squared-off bulldog-toed boots. In this strange environment, the young lieutenant looks hyperalert, cornered, dangerous, the air around him quickening with the movement of his hands and eyes. Micah recognizes with tightening rectal fear that Bumpy’s nickname is fitting not just for his swelling of forehead but for the unpredictable, spasmodic quality of his movements. There is a hurtling, improvisatory nature about the kid, present-tensing it the whole way, as if dwelling too long on the past or thinking too hard on the future would cause all physiological functions to cease. Unlike Mr. Waldo’s hardened sculpture, Bumpy’s clay is still settling.

  “Mr. Grand,” hisses the prostrate Italian. “I tell them you no home! I tell these mulignane leave this place and no come back!”

  “It’s okay, Joe.” Micah, holding his hands up, palms out. “I apologize for my business associates. They won’t be here long and won’t be coming back.”