And Sometimes I Wonder About You

39

It was nighttime in Greenwich Village. I went to a bar on Second Avenue, had three cognacs to toast my lost and long-dead lover Gert Longman, and then trundled down into the subway to make it back home.

My wife and father were sitting in the little front room again, drinking wine punch and telling each other things. She was laughing. There was color in her face. My father might have been blushing too but his skin was as dark as mine so the blood stayed hidden.

“Trot,” he said.

“Clarence,” I replied.

“Are you hungry, Leonid?” Katrina asked.

“Why?”

“I made chicken and dumplings the way you like them.”

Chicken and dumplings brought to mind a pop song from the ’60s about a cuckold who came home early.

My father and wife joined me in the dining room. They asked a few perfunctory questions about my day and then went back to talking to each other.

The food was great. To accompany the protein and starch, Katrina had made fried okra in a roux — a dish she liked to call half-gumbo. There also was an apple-cabbage slaw and peach cobbler for dessert.

I found out a lot about my father as he regaled my wife. He’d learned how to be a potter in a small village in Bolivia. There, working on a kick-wheel in a shack the size of an outhouse, he started thinking about the few novels he’d read. When he was a young man he eschewed fiction, thinking that reality was all that mattered. But working at that wheel he had the time to remember the stories he’d read and somehow came to the realization that the novel was the only way a human being could truly express the lives he experienced.

“Lives, not life?” Katrina asked.

“If you live long enough,” Clarence explained, “you take on many personas. I’ve gone from sharecropper to revolutionary to scribbler in my seventy-nine years.”

“You seem so much younger,” my flirtatious wife chimed.

“I notice you didn’t mention ‘father’ in your list of personas,” I anteed.

I almost felt bad about the pain that wrenched Clarence’s face.

After the meal I looked at my phone and saw that there were fifteen texts and six calls. I wondered at that and then remembered that I’d turned off the sound to concentrate on Paulie.

In my office I listened to the voice mails first. That was easy because four of them were from Violet Henrys-DeGeorges-Trammel. She wanted that nine hundred dollars — badly. I thought that she’d probably get the money before the night was over; maybe even Paulie would get lucky.

Of the two other messages one was a hang-up and the other from Aura. Just hearing her voice set off a chill in my chest. It was a physical manifestation of love, just as the erections I’d experienced recently were from the lust Marella Herzog brought out in me.

“Leonid,” she said, “I need to talk to you right away.”

“Hello,” she answered, wide awake at 11:49.

“What’s up, A?”

There were no preliminaries, no “how are you doing.” Aura went right into the problem saying, “A man calling himself Abe Hollyman came to my office today and said that he was working for a lawyer who needed to serve a summons on you.”

“He show some ID?”

“Yes, but it was just a business card. He offered me five hundred dollars and promised fifteen hundred more if I would call to orchestrate a meeting with you in the meeting room on the fifteenth floor. He said all I had to do was make the meeting time and he’d be there to serve the papers.”

“What did you do?”

“Took the money,” she said. “You know I have college expenses for my daughter. Then I told him that I’d call as soon as I got in touch with you.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“This is serious, honey,” the woman I loved said. “He wore gloves and a hat.”

Sitting there in my dark den, I got a little light-headed. That, as the old folks used to say, was the last straw. It was getting to be time for me to push back.

“Call Mr. Hollyman and tell him that you set up a ten-in-the-morning meeting with me. Tell him that he can pick up the key from Warren at the front desk anytime past nine. Tell Warren that I’ll get the key to the observation room at seven. And don’t you go to work at all. Stay home till I call and tell you that it’s okay.”

“LT?” Carson Kitteridge said at a few minutes after midnight.

“Did I wake you?”

“What do you need?”

“It’s not about Jones,” I said. “Not yet. But I got this other problem you might be interested in.”

There was a lull in the conversation, such as it was, for ten seconds or so. Carson was wondering if he should hang up on me. But we’d known each other too long for that. If I was calling then there was something happening that he should be aware of.

“What is it?” he asked.

I told him Aura’s story and we made half of a plan.

As a youth, sitting in the dark was always a relief to me. An adolescent roaming the streets of New York, I was often in trouble with the older boys and some men, too. I was a killer before my fifteenth birthday and for some years I’d have night terrors over the man I strangled. If I was very quiet under the cover of darkness this panic subsided, somewhat.

As a man I put away my guilty fears; I was, I told myself, prepared for anything, always prepared. I saw myself like my favorite mammal, the honey badger — a squat brute with exceptionally thick skin, powerful long claws, and always looking for trouble. The honey badger spends his days trampling through the world killing, digging up corpses, and defying even lions if he has to. He’s always in danger, and danger is always in him.

With these thoughts I got it in mind to turn on the lights and then, just as if God heard me, there was light.

“You goin’ to bed, Trot?” my father said from the door.

“Come on in, Clarence.”

Shrugging, he walked across the slender glove of a room to the stuffed chair set to the side of my desk.

“You got trouble, son?” he asked.

“Don’t you have a home?” I replied.

“Sure I do. I just thought you needed a little help around the house with Katrina just back and that thing with your office.”

“What is it with you and my wife, old man?”

“Is that what’s bothering you? You actually think I’d go after my own son’s wife?”

“She wants you like a tick craves blood.”

I realized then that my father’s face used to be rounder. This was why he looked like a stranger to me. He’d been a portly revolutionary but old age and a long list of failures had reduced him. His face was now long and oddly empathetic.

“Women are drawn to me, Trot. It’s because I’m always thinking about something else, something that seems like it might be more important than them to me. They want the love I feel for the Revolution or great literature. It’s hard for a man to understand a woman because a man just desires her; but women, most of them anyway, desire desire.”

“They want you to want them,” I said. It felt as if I were a child again at my father’s feet.

“That’s it. A man feeling deeply about anything makes a woman want him to pay attention to her like that. When his passion is for something else she feels safe enough to look at it. And if you look long enough you want to try it out.”

“You know I hate you, right?” I said.

“I told you I’m not after your woman.”

“It’s not that, Clarence. You killed my mother. You promised me the world and then took it away. You save my wife and then tell me she yours if you want her but you don’t want her. I spent nearly half a century tryin’ to build back the engine of my life and here you come throwin’ a monkey wrench in the gears and ask, what did I do?”

To give him his due, my father didn’t try to argue or explain. He looked right at me, taking his medicine. I imagined that there were scars all over his body from South American torturers that didn’t hurt as much as the truth he was hearing.

“You want me to leave, son?”

“Not till this week is over,” I said. “Twill has to get out from under the mess he got into and it’s still a question whether or not I’ll survive till Monday. You stay a few days more and then you can get out of my life again.”