O, Africa! Page 8

  “What do we know about Africa? Besides, if we do go, it’s got to be our decision, not because the fat man’s about to lose his shirt or a gun’s being pointed at our heads.”

  “They did threaten to do us harm.”

  “They suggested separating my son from his toes, Itz.”

  “Yes, they mentioned the removal of Benjamin’s pinkie toe, it’s true.”

  “And you’d let them do that to your beloved nephew before simply cutting me a check? What the hell goddamned kind of uncle are you, anyway?”

  “I won’t lend you the money because I’m tired of getting you out of scrapes, Micah. But also because they might have a point.” Then, plaintively, “There’s more we can be doing with all this. There are things I’d like to do.”

  “Things—what things? Don’t forget what business we’re in, Itz. It’d be worse than foolish to pretend otherwise—it’d be dishonest.”

  “And God forbid Micah Grand allow himself a moment’s dishonesty!” Turning away, Izzy rewinds a split reel and sends through the viewer a shot of Till’s face meeting a mustard-slathered hot dog. “C’mere, then.” Indicating for his brother to approve the cut. “Good?”

  “Good.”

  Micah returns to his stool. Izzy pulls the filmstrip off its three-inch core, locks the sprocket holes into the splicer, screws the strip securely into place, and prepares to make the perforation. Then the lapidary splice—a satisfying crinkly-elastic frisson as the miniature guillotine severs the magic thread. A second strip hanging from the bin is aligned with the first. Clear tape is laid across the dual frame line, and air bubbles are rubbed out with a gloved thumb. Then, pressing down on the device like a stapler, the splicer trims the excess tape off the frame edges while punching sprocket-hole perforations. Five feet of clear leader is tacked to the head of the sequence, “Till, Hot Dog” is scribbled in grease pencil, and the entirety is wound back onto the take-up reel.

  “Then there’s Margaret,” Micah says, twisting his wedding ring around his finger.

  “Margaret? You hardly ever mention her when making a decision.”

  “I know, but she’s told me only recently she’d prefer I not go traipsing off so much.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or nothing. Listen, Itz, appearances aside, I happen to like being married. It’s a relief living with a woman without the pressures of sex.”

  Izzy, working fast, squeakily finishes rewinding the take-up reel and motions for Micah to look at the rough assembly. A lag in one of the cuts between one of Mildred’s reaction shots—no more than a skip of a second—deflates a quantum of air from the topper with the toupee. Imperceptible to the layman’s eye, it’s nonetheless something an audience would register.

  “Good?”

  “Tighten that a hair,” Micah says. “Otherwise, nice work.”

  “Have you heard from them since the lobby?” Izzy asks.

  “Working on it. I’m not sure what to tell them yet.”

  “What about Arthur? You can’t dodge him forever.”

  “Abernathy says he’s got five or six months’ time before the bank defaults on his loan. Says the fucking shyster’s already been selling contracts for stock footage that doesn’t exist.”

  “Y’know, were we to go abroad, it’s not Arthur’s financial troubles or Bumpy or Mr. Waldo that worries me.”

  “What then?”

  “It’s what none of them have considered,” Izzy says, shaving a few frames from the end of the sequence like a chef slicing a clove of garlic. “Point a camera at something, you change it. It changes.”

  FIVE

  “Africa?” says Rose, lying naked on her side, the copper-penny smell of semen flowering fragrant in the room. “What do you know about Africa?”

  Micah was uncertain how to explain to her that he was considering the trip. He spent the cab ride over trying to determine which might be more impressive: a show of seriousness or a cavalier absence of the stuff. In the event, he chooses to test the idea aloud in jaunty, lighthearted tones—Arthur has this daft new proposal! Wouldn’t it be wild if we actually went?—and is surprised by the ferocity of her response. For a moment he sees himself as he fears she envisions him: one more in a long line of plunderers, a treasure seeker, a rogue trader, a safari hunter, only with a movie camera for a rifle. What did he know about Africa? What was Africa to him? A handful of Kipling stories. An undifferentiated jungle kingdom.

  “Hey, what do they speak there anyway?”

  “Christ, Micah, read a book!” The mound of her hip gyrating out of reach. “There are books here.”

  “I know,” he exhales. “I know.”

  “I ran into Jake yesterday,” she says about Jacob Dobie, the middle-aged barber who lives down the street, a figure whom Rose always invokes at the first signs of trouble. “He asked me to a dance at the community center next weekend.”

  “I think you should go,” Micah says with practiced disinterest, scooping her backside into his middle and worming his way in while digging a hand into her glorious mass of hair, hair that was forever holding ticker-tape parades for itself.

  “Caroline says he’s about ready to ask me to marry him.” Rising on him, falling. “What do you think of that, Mr. Man?”

  “Sounds like you landed yourself a good one.” Jostling for position, twisting, slipping, nearly snapping himself like a twig.

  “He’s successful, too, planning on opening another shop on 165th Street in the fall. Big, handsome man, too.”

  “You should do it. Were I your friend, that’d be my advice.”

  “You’re not my friend?”

  “No, I can promise you that. I will never be your friend.”

  “I had a dream the other night,” Micah says from the floor when it’s over, straightening and releasing coils of chest hair with pincerlike fingers, satisfied as a pasha. “I was wearing my father’s overcoat, this great big thing on me when I was a kid, and I draped it over the seat in front of me at a movie theater. And when the lights came up, a fellow in the next row started to put it on by mistake, and when I asked him to return it, he just took off running.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I chased him for a while but couldn’t catch him. Then I woke up.”

  “Well, show me someone who tells you his dream and I’ll show you a liar.”

  “Maybe … Hey, I brought you something,” he remembers, bringing up from beneath the bed a thin white box tied with a bow. He was abashed with the girl at the sales counter when he made the purchase—the expense of the gift a public proclamation of fidelity to his mistress. And he’s equally tentative now—buttocks warming wooden boards, floor fluff adhering to the clammy soles of his feet—as she opens the package with childlike greed.

  Gloves! She pulls one of the long black satin accessories up to her elbow, wriggling fingers into fitted sheaths. She duplicates the routine with the other, rises from the floor, and stands in the center of the room, naked barring the gloves, shimmery material marking off skin, nudity limned by boundaries, veiled fingers transformed into an immediate locus of eroticism. Then she begins pantomiming a series of activities for which she might have occasion to wear them: first accepting a gentleman’s hand at a dance, then observing the stage of the Metropolitan through an imaginary pair of opera glasses, then allowing a waiter to show her to the best table in the house, then, setting herself on the corner of the bed, sampling this and that delicacy with a lobster fork, daintily attending with a napkin to the corner of her mouth. That these actions are performed as parody, informed by a knowledge of operas they would never attend, fancy restaurants they would not enjoy together, hotel rooms they would not be booked into as a couple, did little to diminish the pleasure Micah took in watching her. A lady should have a fine pair of gloves. Rose should have a fine pair of gloves. She belly-flops back onto the bed, setting musculature joyfully abounce.

  His mother had worn gloves. As a boy how he had loved surveying her vanity table! How he
loved slipping his hands into her gloves, because she had worn them, because a remnant of his mother’s warmth lingered there, something feminine and delicate, crisp and warm, that he associated with the very best of her. What a pretty, elegant woman she had been! What horrors overtook her at the end. The white porcelain bowl full of bile by the bedside. Her stalklike arms and bruised yellow feet poking from the covers like rotting vegetation. Her eyes a pair of hard-boiled eggs peering out from skin pulled too tight like a sheet over a mattress. The most loved. The most, best loved. His parents, his own mother and father, gone ten years now, she from pancreatic cancer, he of coronary thrombosis, following shortly behind. This terrible visitation, this family catastrophe, occurring just as the twins turned eighteen, in the flower of masculine youth. No wonder magic, no wonder movies.

  He sometimes questioned if he would have been a more serious man had his parents lived, if his father’s example ultimately would have willed out. But once doubly orphaned, he felt freed from judgment, unmoored from seriousness, weightiness deemed the wrong kind of tribute. The scythe had swung too close, too soon, and now he felt forever on the run, dedicated to fleet-footedness, a man desirous of a life absent tragic possibilities. So, from woman to woman, picture to picture, gag to gag, never tempting the fates with a commitment to anything more substantive than pratfalls and tossed custard pies, this the surest strategy to slip the knot of adult responsibility. Would they be proud of him—of his professional regard and his boys and his material comfort—or find his life repellent? An oversize, overfed, overindulged boy taking daily delight in breaking God’s commandments as casually as breathing, shacking up in the arms of a colored girl.

  “Glad you like them,” he says, realizing as soon as the gift is given that it’s too much, too expensive, too tender, the entire apparatus of its giving and acceptance too close to the tragic thing.

  “What would you like me to do with them?” she says when she’s done with the pantomime.

  “Play maid,” he says. “I want you to get on your knees and scrub.”

  She looks at him squint. “You don’t have to ruin it, Em. I make you feel good, you make me feel good—it doesn’t have to be anything more than that.”

  “Don’t worry, sis. It’s not.”

  “Good, as long as we’re clear on that.”

  She rolls over, away from him. The sun hides behind a patch of clouds, casting the brass-colored room in pearlescent shades of gray. He looks at his lover, stomach down on the bed, legs slightly apart, hair like a banquet spread after a good party, a befouled Manet draped in a sheet. Rising, he catches sight of his own naked self in the oblong mirror, slouching, baboonlike, youthful but no longer young, an overhang of waistline-inscribed belly flab, pointillist freckles stippled across his shoulders and chest. Hovering over the girl, who is this clownish figure of lust? What crazy line of continuity connects this man to the boy with a hand in his mother’s glove? He would not stay here tonight and wonders for the first time if he’ll return.

  Jarring, tumbling noises rescue him from deeper introspection. From the next room comes crashing, glass and metal in poor negotiations with wooden floors, the sound of an excellent party or a lousy burglar. Earlier in the evening, Rose had told Micah about a series of robberies in the neighborhood, and a panicked exchange now passes between them. Suddenly feeling like a stranger here, in Harlem, he waits on her move. She removes from a bedside drawer a dark and heavy object and hands it to Micah, who has never before held a pistol.

  “Where’d you get this?” he asks, surprised by the weapon’s weight, heavier than a prop gun, the metal object as unlikely in his hand as a dentist’s drill.

  “Early left it.”

  Masculine prerogative dictates he’s to be first through the door. In the early days of his career directing Capering Cops shorts, he had shown any number of bit players how best to hold a gun so it registers well on camera, but now Micah comes up flummoxed, one hand limply wrapping around the cold, mottled steel, the other struggling to maintain a knotted towel around his waist. He inflates his posture before opening the door.

  “Put some clothes on,” he tells her, “this will just be a minute.” Propelling himself into the next room on waves of scrotum-tightening terror, he spots in the corner nearest the kitchen a hulking figure, kneeling down, broad back bent over milk crates.

  “Up,” Micah says softly, then with more conviction, “Up! With your hands! Up!”

  “Relax, Em, it’s me,” answers Rose’s brother. “Why is it every time I find you here, you’re walking round the place without any clothes?”

  As adrenaline drains from him, Micah physically compresses like a bicycle tire leaking air. “You’re young, you’ll understand these things someday.”

  A switch is flipped, and light lassos across the room. Refracted through thick old bottles, infusions of green- and yellow-tinged liquids cast kaleidoscopic patterns over the wall. Early, dressed in a bright purple suit and a matching fedora, looking suddenly older, taller, more fluent in the lexicon of violence.

  “What’s that you’re wearing?” asks Rose, framed in the bedroom doorway, still gloved, a sheet wrapped around her body.

  “Work clothes.” Fanning out his suit jacket like a torero.

  Micah nods at the bottles and their tacky, rising turpentine smell. “That’s moonshine.”

  “That’s pretty observant of you, Mr. Grand.”

  “So you’re working for Mr. Waldo now?”

  “Not for, Mr. Grand.” Self-satisfied, removing his jacket to reveal, underneath, a pair of matching purple suspenders. “With.”

  “Listen, Early.” Micah sighs. “I know those characters. You don’t want to get involved with that kind.”

  “Oh, please, them niggers are harmless. Showed me their idea for the Africa picture, too. You gonna make the movie with them, Mr. Grand?”

  “What, now you’re in business with bootleggers?” Rose demands. “It’s not good enough you’re ruining me, you going to lead my brother down the same path?”

  “That’s not what I’m doing.” Back to Early: “Jesus Christ, Early, I’m not in business with these hoodlums.”

  “Whatever mischief you’re mixed up in,” Rose says to her brother, pulling one of the milk crates across the scarred wooden floor toward the door, “you will not bring this into my house!”

  “Hey, y’know I love you, sis.” Pulling his suspenders out away from himself, and snap! “But you’re not my mama.”

  “No, you’re right, our mother’s busy spinning in her grave watching you strut around like a peacock. I’m just your sister, sitting by watching you become a common hooligan.”

  Doors are slammed, Rose retreats to the bedroom, Early to the corner of the kitchen, leaving the shirtless wunderkind sidelined in the midst of a family feud. He looks at the boy half admiringly, confident his life is hurtling toward some terrible statistical fate. Early smiles, and Micah can’t help but offer one in return, the two of them momentarily united against female outrage.

  Micah enters the bedroom. In the harsh light of a sixty-watt bulb, the dreamed-of utopia is revealed in all its poverty and dinginess. Spidery stains cover the ceiling, and mouse holes burrow into the molding. There are exposed pipes and decades-old water damage, the walls bubbling and cracked from a succession of poor paint jobs over peeling layers. Dressed now in a ratty robe, she turns on him.

  “Your boss still hasn’t paid me,” she says. Indeed, in the editing room earlier in the week, the brothers had received a telegram from Marblestone, the mogul’s gift for self-dramatization rising and falling with each day’s Dow: BALLS BEING SQUEEZED. LATEST PICTURE A FLOP. DEBTORS PRISON AWAITS. MAKE QUICKTIME A GOOD ONE.

  “I’m still owed for the final week of shooting,” she says, peeling the gloves off and discarding them like waxed paper off a roast. “Did you know I’m planning a rent party this Saturday? That the landlord’s threatening to evict me?”

  “It’s as bad as that?”

&nb
sp; “We had a good time together, you and I—what’d you want to know from that? What interest do you really have in my life when you’re not around?”

  Noting the verb tense she chose to deploy, Micah crosses the room toward the closet, opens the door, reaches into his jacket pocket, and removes his money clip. She sits scowling on the edge of the bed, holding her hand out, hating him, hating herself.

  “What does he owe you? Thirty?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Fifty, huh? Marblestone must be feeling generous these days.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Okay, doll, fifty it is.” He nods and begins peeling off the bills, placing them in her palm one by one for emphasis. The money, like the gloves, another prop that reinforces the dualism of the affair: a real experience, one with wounding emotional stakes, that also is a performance of itself, a piece of theater in which one is forced to play a predetermined role, the lovers buckling inside their costumes even as they recognize the refracted nature of their situation.

  “Micah,” she says, folding her hand over the bills once he’s finished dispensing them, “I need something from you.”

  “Name it.”

  “If you go,” meaning not just across the ocean but the greater distance, forever from this room, “promise you’ll bring back something good.”

  “Nice of you to put on a shirt,” Early says, covering his surprise to find Micah joining him in his private sanctuary on the top of the building, rooftops and gutters being the youth’s preferred settings.

  “It’s cold out,” Micah says, tapping a pack of cigarettes, passing one to Early, and inhaling through his own a skyline different from the one to which he’d grown accustomed, the cityscape looking from this perspective more than ever like the contents of a woman’s jewelry box—distant, fragile, irresolute. “How well do you know Bumpy and Mr. Waldo?”

  “Mr. W I know since I’m little,” Early says, lifting his legs off the tar, pulling them into himself, and beginning to rock back and forth. “He’s like Santa Claus to a lot of kids around here. Holds block parties every summer, gives out turkeys to families on Thanksgiving, looks after a couple of widows in the neighborhood, that sort of thing. Bumpy I’m just starting to get to know. Spent a lot of time in and out of the pen. Taught some of the younger boys how to read, though. Passes books along to us sometimes. Poems, Shakespeare’s sonnets, and whatnot.”