God Help the Child

PART III

Blood stained his knuckles and his fingers began to swell. The stranger he’d been beating wasn’t moving anymore or groaning, but he knew he’d better walk away quickly before a student or campus guard thought he was the lawless one instead of the man lying on the grass. He’d left the beaten man’s jeans open and his penis exposed just the way it was when he first saw him at the edge of the campus playground. Only a few faculty children were near the slide and one was on the swing. None apparently had noticed the man licking his lips and waving his little white gristle toward them. It was the lip licking that got to him — the tongue grazing the upper lip, the swallowing before its return to grazing. Obviously the sight of the children was as pleasurable to the man as touching them because just as obviously, in his warped mind, they were calling to him and he was answering their plump thighs and their tight little behinds, beckoning in panties or shorts as they climbed up to the slide or pumped air on the swing.

Booker’s fist was in the man’s mouth before thinking about it. A light spray of blood dappled his sweatshirt, and when the man lost consciousness, Booker grabbed his book bag off the ground and walked away — not too fast, but fast enough to cross the road, turn his shirt inside out and make it to class on time. He didn’t make it, but there were a few others sneaking into the lecture hall when he arrived. The latecomers took seats in the last rows and plopped backpacks, briefcases or laptops on their desks. Only one of them took a notebook out. Booker preferred pencil on paper too, but his swollen fingers made writing difficult. So he listened a little, daydreamed a little and covered his mouth to hide his yawns.

The professor was going on and on about Adam Smith’s wrongheadedness, as he did in almost every lecture, as though the history of economics had only one scholar worth trashing. What about Milton Friedman or that chameleon Karl Marx? Booker’s obsession with Mammon was recent. Four years ago, as an undergraduate, he’d nibbled courses in several curricula, psychology, political science, humanities, and he’d taken multiple courses in African-American Studies, where the best professors were brilliant at description but could not answer to his satisfaction any question beginning with “Why.” He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. So as a graduate student he turned to economics — its history, its theories — to learn how money shaped every single oppression in the world and created all the empires, nations, colonies with God and His enemies employed to reap, then veil, the riches. He habitually contrasted the beaten, penniless, half-naked King of the Jews screaming betrayal on a cross with the bejeweled, glamorously dressed pope whispering homilies above the Vatican’s vault. The Cross and the Vault by Booker Starbern. That would be the title of his book.

Unimpressed by the lecture, he let his thoughts slide toward the man lying exposed near the playground. Bald. Normal-looking. Probably an otherwise nice man — they always were. The “nicest man in the world,” the neighbors always said. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Where did that cliché come from? Why not hurt a fly? Did it mean he was too tender to take the life of a disease-carrying insect but could happily ax the life of a child?

Booker had been raised in a large, tight family with no television in sight. As a freshman in college he lived surrounded by a television/Internet world where both the methods of mass communication and the substance of mass communication seemed to him loaded with entertainment but mostly free of insight or knowledge. The weather channels were the only informative sources but they were off-base and hysterical most of the time. And the video games — mesmerizing in pointlessness. Having grown up in a book-reading family with only radio and newspapers for day-to-day information and vinyl records for entertainment, he had to fake his classmates’ enthusiasm for the screen sounds of games blasting from every dorm room, lounge and student-friendly bar. He knew he was way, way out of the loop — a Luddite incapable of sharing the exciting world of tech, and it had embarrassed him as a freshman. He had been shaped by talk in the flesh and text on paper. Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have? Over the years answers to the first question ranged from “Worms can’t fly,” “Ice burns,” “There are only three counties in this state,” to “The pawn is mightier than the queen.” Topics relevant to the second question might be “A girl slapped me,” “My acne is back,” “Algebra,” “The conjugation of Latin verbs.” Questions about personal problems prompted solutions from anyone at the table, and after they were solved or left pending, the children were sent to bathe and dress — the older ones helping the younger. Booker loved those Saturday morning conferences rewarded by the highlight of the weekend — his mother’s huge breakfast feasts. Banquets, really. Hot biscuits, short and flaky; grits, snow-white and tongue-burning hot; eggs beaten into pale saffron creaminess; sizzling sausage patties, sliced tomatoes, strawberry jam, freshly squeezed orange juice, cold milk in Mason jars. Some food she stored up for those weekend feasts because during the rest of the week they ate frugally: oatmeal, in-season fruit, rice, dried beans and whatever green leaf was available: kale, spinach, cabbage, collards, mustard or turnip greens. Those weekend breakfast menus were deliberately sumptuous because they followed days of scarcity.

Only during the long months when no one knew where Adam was did the family conferences and sumptuous breakfasts stop. During those months quiet ticked through the house like a time bomb that would often explode into quarrels, silly and pointlessly mean.

“Ma, he’s looking at me!”

“Stop looking at her.”

“He’s looking back!”

“Stop looking back.”

“Ma!”

When the police responded to their plea for help in searching for Adam, they immediately searched the Starberns’ house — as though the anxious parents might be at fault. They checked to see if the father had a police record. He didn’t. “We’ll get back to you,” they said. Then they dropped it. Another little black boy gone. So?

Booker’s father refused to play even one of his beloved ragtime, old-time, jazzy records, some of which Booker could do without but not Satchmo. It was one thing to lose a brother — that broke his heart — but a world without Louis Armstrong’s trumpet crushed it.

Then at the beginning of spring, when lawn trees started preening, Adam was found. In a culvert.

—

Booker went with his father to identify the remains. Filthy, rat-gnawed, with a single open eye socket. The maggots, overfed and bursting with glee, had gone home leaving fastidiously clean bones under the strips of his mud-caked yellow T-shirt. The corpse wore no pants or shoes. Booker’s mother could not go there. She refused to have etched in her brain anything other than her image of her firstborn’s young, outrageous beauty.

The closed-coffin funeral seemed cheap and lonely to Booker in spite of the preacher’s loud eloquence, the crowds of neighbors attending, the dish after dish of carefully cooked food delivered to their kitchen. The very excess made him lonelier. It was as though his older brother, close as a twin, was being buried again, suffocating under song, sermon, tears, crowds and flowers. He wanted to redirect the mourning — make it private, special and, most of all, his alone. Adam was the brother he worshipped, two years older and sweet as cane. A flawless replacement for the brother he’d curled up with in the womb. A brother, he was told, who didn’t take a single living breath. Booker was three when they let him know he was a twin to the one who did not survive birth, but somehow he’d always known it — felt the warm void walking by his side, or waiting on the porch steps while he played in the yard. A presence that shared the quilt under which Booker slept. As he grew older the shape of the void faded, transferred itself into a kind of inner companion, one whose reactions and instincts he trusted. When he started first grade and walked to school every day with Adam the replacement was complete. So, following Adam’s murder, Booker had no companion. Both were dead.

The last time Booker saw Adam he was skateboarding down the sidewalk in twilight, his yellow T-shirt fluorescent under the Northern Ash trees. It was early September and nothing anywhere had begun to die. Maple leaves behaved as though their green was immortal. Ash trees were still climbing toward a cloudless sky. The sun began turning aggressively alive in the process of setting. Down the sidewalk between hedges and towering trees Adam floated, a spot of gold moving down a shadowy tunnel toward the mouth of a living sun.

Adam was more than brother to Booker, more than the “A” of parents who’d named their children alphabetically. He was the one who knew what Booker was thinking, feeling, whose humor was both raucous and instructive but never cruel, the smartest one who loved each of his siblings but especially Booker.

Unable to forget that final glow of yellow tunneling down the street, Booker placed a single yellow rose on the coffin lid and another, later, graveside. Family members came long distances to bury the dead and comfort the Starberns. Among them was Mr. Drew, his mother’s father. He was the successful one, the grandfather openly hostile to everybody not as rich as he was, the one even his daughter called not “Daddy” or “Papa” but “Mr. Drew.” Yet the old man, who had made his money as an unforgiving slumlord, minded what was left of his manners and did not show the contempt he felt for this struggling family.

After the funeral the house returned tentatively to its routine, with the encouraging sounds of Louis, Ella, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll, King Oliver and Bunk Johnson floating from the record player in the background. And the conferences and breakfast feasts returned, with Booker and his siblings, Carole, Donovan, Ellie, Favor and Goodman, all trying to think up interesting answers to the routine questions. In time the whole family perked up like Sesame Street puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead. Booker thought their joking strained and their made-up problems both misguided and insulting. During the funeral and for a few days after, a visiting relative, an aunt they called Queen, was the exception to what Booker thought was mindless rote. She had a last name that no one remembered since she was rumored to have had many husbands — one a Mexican, then two white men, four black men, one Asian, but in a sequence no one recalled. Heavy-set with fire-red hair, she surprised the grieving family by traveling all the way from California to attend Adam’s funeral. She alone sensed her nephew’s anger-mixed sorrow and pulled him aside.

“Don’t let him go,” she said. “Not until he’s ready. Meantime, hang on to him tooth and claw. Adam will let you know when it’s time.”

She comforted him, strengthened him and validated the unfairness of the censure he was feeling from his family.

Wary of another crisis that might eliminate the soul-stretching music his father played, which Booker counted on to oil and straighten his tangled feelings, he asked his father if he could take trumpet lessons. Sure, said Mr. Starbern, provided his son earned half the teacher’s fee. Booker nagged his neighbors for chores and earned enough to skip the Saturday conferences for trumpet lessons that dampened his budding intolerance for his siblings. How could they pretend it was over? How could they forget and just go on? Who and where was the murderer?

His trumpet teacher, already slightly drunk early in the morning, was nevertheless an excellent musician and an even better instructor.

“You got the lungs, the fingers, now you need the lip. When you get all three together you can forget about them and let the music out.”

Which, with persistence, he did.

Six years later when Booker was fourteen and a faintly accomplished trumpet player, the nicest man in the world was caught, tried and convicted of SSS, the sexually stimulated slaughter of six boys, each of whose names, including Adam’s, was tattooed across the shoulders of the nicest man in the world. Boise. Lenny. Adam. Matthew. Kevin. Roland. Clearly an equal-opportunity killer, his victims seemed to be representative of the We Are the World video. The tattoo artist said he thought they were the names of his client’s children, not those of other people.

The nicest man in the world was an easygoing, retired auto mechanic who solicited home repairs. He was especially helpful with old refrigerators — the Philcos and GE’s built in the fifties to last, and ancient gas stoves and furnaces. “Dirt,” he used to say. “Most machinery died because it was never cleaned.” Everyone who had hired him recalled that advice. Another feature some remembered was his smile, how welcoming, attractive, even. Otherwise he was fastidious, capable and, well, nice. The single other thing people remembered most about him was that he always traveled with a cute little dog in his van, a terrier he called “Boy.” The police withheld what details they could but the families of the murdered boys could not be stopped or silenced. Nightmares about what might have been done to their children did not outweigh the facts. Six years of grief and unanswered questions coalesced around their recollections of time spent in the morgue, heaving, weeping, stone-faced or on their backs in helpless faints.

There was not much left of Adam when he was found, but the details of the more recent abductions were Gothic. Apparently the children were kept bound while molested, tortured and there were amputations. The nicest man in the world must have used his small white terrier as a lure. A central witness, an elderly widow, remembered that she had seen a child in the passenger side of his van laughing and holding a little dog up to his face. Later, after seeing the missing-child posters displayed in store windows, on telephone poles and trees, she thought she recognized a face as that of the laughing boy. She called the police. Of course they knew the van. It advertised in red and blue letters its promise: PROBLEM? SOLVED! WM. V. HUMBOLDT. HOME REPAIR. When Mr. Humboldt’s house was searched a dirty mattress sporting dried blood was found in the basement along with an elaborately decorated candy tin that held carefully wrapped pieces of dry flesh, which, on not very close inspection, turned out to be small penises.

Public demands and cries for vengeance disguised as justice were rampant and harrowing. Signs, rallies in front of the courthouse, editorials — all seemed unassuageable by anything less than the culprit’s beheading. Booker joined the chorus but was not impressed by so facile a solution. What he wanted was not the man’s death; he wanted his life, and spent time inventing scenarios involving pain and despair without end. Wasn’t there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice — to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation. The rage, the public clamor upon the conviction of the nicest man in the world, shook him almost as much as Adam’s death. The trial itself was not long but the preliminaries seemed eternal to Booker. Throughout the days of newspaper headlines, talk radio and neighborhood gossip he struggled to find some way to freeze and individualize his feelings, to separate them from the sorrow and frenzied anger of other families. Adam’s calamity, he thought, was not public fare to be confined to one line in a newspaper’s list of the six victims. It was private, belonging only to the two brothers. Two years later, a satisfactory and calming solution came to him. Reenacting the gesture he’d made at Adam’s funeral, he had a small rose tattooed on his left shoulder. Was this the same chair the predator sat in, the same needle used on his paste-white skin? He didn’t ask. The tattoo artist didn’t have the dazzling yellow of Booker’s memory, so they settled for an orangish kind of red.

Being accepted into college offered relief as well as distraction and he soon became enchanted with campus life — not the classes, not the professors, but his lively, know-it-all classmates, an enchantment that did not wane for two years. All he did from freshman year through sophomore was react — sneer, laugh, dismiss, find fault, demean — a young man’s version of critical thinking. He and his dorm mates ranked girls according to men’s magazines and porn videos, ranked one another according to characters in action movies they had seen. The clever ones breezed through classes; the geniuses dropped out. It was as a junior that his mild cynicism morphed into depression. The views of his classmates began to both bore and bother him, not only because they were predictable but also because they blocked serious inquiry. Unlike his effort to perfect “Wild Cat Blues” on his trumpet, no new or creative thinking was required in undergraduate society and none penetrated the blessed fog of young transgression. Student agitation about the war in Iraq that once roiled the campus had quieted. Now sarcasm fluttered its triumphant flag and giggles became its oath; now the docile manipulation of professors became routine. So Booker replayed those questions posed by his parents during those Saturday conferences on Decatur Street: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have?

1. So far nothing. 2. Despair.

So, hoping to learn something of value and perhaps find an accommodating place for despair, he applied to graduate school. There he focused on tracking wealth from barter to bombs. To him it was a riveting intellectual journey that policed his anger, caged it and explained everything about racism, poverty and war. The political world was anathema; its activists, both retro and progressive, seemed wrongheaded and dreamy. The revolutionaries, armed or peaceful, had no notion of what should happen after they “won.” Who would rule? The “people”? Please. What did that mean? The best outcome would be to introduce a new idea into the population that perhaps a politician would act on. The rest was theater seeking an audience. Wealth alone explained humanity’s evil, and he was determined to live without deference to it. He knew exactly the subjects and themes of the articles and books he would write and kept notes on his research. Other than the scholarship in his field he read a little poetry and some journals. No novels — great or lesser. He liked certain poems because they paralleled music, journals because the essays bled politics into culture. It was during his graduate school days that he began to write something other than outlines for future essays. He began trying to shape unpunctuated sentences into musical language that expressed his questions about or results of his thinking. Most of these he trashed; a few he kept.

Assured finally of his master’s degree, Booker traveled home alone for the celebratory dinner his mother had arranged. He thought about asking Felicity, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, to accompany him, but decided against it. He didn’t want an outsider judging his family. That was his job.

Everything was smooth and almost cheerful at the family gathering until he went upstairs to his old bedroom, the one he once shared with Adam. Looking for what, he was not sure. The room was not simply different; it was antagonistic — a double bed instead of his and Adam’s twin set, white transparent curtains instead of shades, a cutesy rug under a tiny desk. Worst of all, the closet that used to be jammed with their playthings — bats, basketballs, board games — now held his sister Carole’s girl clothes. But resentment choked him when he discovered that his old skateboard, identical to the one that disappeared along with Adam, was gone. Weak with sadness, Booker went back downstairs. But when he saw his sister, his pallid weakness changed into its blazing twin — fury. He picked a quarrel with Carole; she argued back. Their fight escalated and disturbed the whole family until Mr. Starbern shut it down.

“Stop it, Booker! You not the only one grieving. Folks mourn in different ways.” His father’s voice was like the steel of a knife’s edge.

“Yeah, sure.” Booker’s tone was hostile, laced with contempt.

“You acting like you the only one in this family who loved him. Adam wouldn’t want that,” said his father.

“You don’t know what he’d want.” Booker successfully fought back tears.

Mr. Starbern rose from the couch. “Well, I do know what I want. I want you civil in this house or out of it.”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Starbern whispered. “Don’t say that.”

Father and son stared at each other, their eyes locking in military aggression. Mr. Starbern won the battle and Booker left the house, closing the door firmly behind him.

It was fitting, perhaps, that after leaving the only home he had ever known he would step out into a downpour. Rain forced him to raise his collar and duck his head like an intruder thankful for the night. Shoulders high, eyes squinting, he moved down Decatur Street in a mood the rainstorm complemented. Before his quarrel with Carole he’d tried to persuade his parents to think of some sort of memorial for Adam — a modest scholarship in his name, for example. His mother warmed to the idea, but his father frowned and was decidedly against it.

“We can’t waste money like that and we can’t waste time raising it,” he said. “Besides, the people who admired and remember Adam don’t need to be reminded.”

Booker was already feeling a poisonous vein of disapproval not only from Carole, but his younger siblings as well. To Favor and Goodman it seemed Booker wanted a statue of a brother who died when they were babies. What Booker understood as family loyalty, the others saw as manipulation — as trying to control them — outfathering their father. Just because he had two college degrees he thought he could tell everybody what to do. They rolled their eyes at his arrogance.

When he visited his and Adam’s old bedroom, the thread of disapproval he’d felt during his proposal of a memorial became a rope, as he saw the savage absence not only of Adam but of himself. So when he shut the door on his family and stepped out into the rain it was an already belated act.

—

Felicity said, “Okay, sure,” when Booker asked if he could bunk at her place for a while. He was grateful for her quick response since he had no address of his own once he cleared out of the graduate dorm. On the bus back to campus reading the back issue of Daedalus he’d brought along distracted him from currying his disappointment with his family. But it surfaced powerfully when he got back to the dorm and began to throw the remnants of his college life into boxes — texts, running shoes, shapeless clothes, notebooks, journals — all except his loved trumpet. When he stopped wallowing in the self-pity of being outrageously misunderstood, he called his girlfriend. Felicity was a substitute teacher and their relationship had lasted two years primarily because there were sustained blocks of time when they didn’t see each other. Her call-ups, based as they were on the sudden illness of a permanent teacher, were irregular and often to distant districts. So he felt comfortable asking whether he could move in for a bit since both knew it was about convenience and had nothing to do with commitment. It was summer, and since Felicity would probably have no requests for substituting, they could enjoy each other’s company without deadlines: go to movies, eat out, run trails — whatever they felt like.

One evening Booker took Felicity to Pier 2, a run-down dinner-and-dancing club that boasted a live combo. Over the shrimp and rice Booker thought, as he often did, that the quartet on the little stage needed brass. Virtually all popular music was saturated with strings: guitars, basses and piano keys aided by percussion. Other than the big-star musicians like the E Street Band, or Wynton Marsalis’s orchestra, groups seldom featured, in backup or solo, a sax, clarinet, trombone or trumpet, and he felt the void intensely. So this evening at the break he went backstage to the narrow dressing room full of weed smoke and laughing musicians to ask if he could join their group sometime. Not wanting to cut their earnings with another player, especially one they didn’t know, they dismissed him quickly.

“Go to hell, man.”

“Who let you back here?”

“Well you could at least hear me,” he pleaded. “I play trumpet and you could do with a horn.”

The guitarists rolled their eyes, but the drummer said, “Bring it to the Friday set. That’s when it won’t matter if you screw up.”

He didn’t mention his future audition to Felicity. She couldn’t be less interested in his trumpet playing.

Booker did as the drummer suggested, trying out before them in the dressing room with as close as he could come to a Louis Armstrong solo. The drummer nodded, the piano player smiled and the two guitarists had no objection. From then on during the summer Booker joined the group calling itself The Big Boys on Fridays, when the place was so crowded the drinkers and diners paid no attention to the music.

When in September The Big Boys broke up — the drummer moved away; the piano player got a bigger, better gig — Booker and the guitarists, Michael and Freeman Chase, began to play on streets dappled with homeless veterans with cold fury in their eyes. Their anger was not dampened by the fact that they got more generous offerings by being surrounded by music. It was the sweetest season of Booker’s life but it didn’t last. By the end of summer the relationship with Felicity had frayed beyond any stitched-up remedy. They had enjoyed being roommate lovers the whole summer before each began to annoy the other with habits they had not previously paid close attention to. Felicity complained about his loud trumpet practice and his refusal to party every single night with her friends. He hated her cigarette smoke, her choices of take-out food, music and wine. In addition to insisting on constant visits from members of her family, she was nosy, forever prying into his life. Most of all he found her to be insufferably opinionated. In fact Felicity found him as unpleasant and annoying as he found her. She believed she might lose her sanity if she had to listen one more time to Donald Byrd or Freddie Hubbard or Blue Mitchell or any of his other favorite musicians. She began to regard him as a misogynist loser. Nevertheless they might have stayed together, in spite of the mutual hostility that was growing like mold between them, except for one event: Booker’s arrest and the night he spent in a holding cell.

He had passed a couple, parked near an empty lot, taking turns sucking on a crack pipe. The sight was of no interest to him until he noticed a child, maybe two years old, screaming and crying while standing in the backseat of the crackheads’ Toyota. He walked over to the car, yanked open the door, dragged the man out, smashed his face and kicked away the pipe that had fallen to the ground. Then the woman jumped out and ran to help her partner. The three-person fight was more hilarious than lethal, but it was long enough and loud enough to get the attention first of shoppers, then the police. All three were arrested and the little screaming girl given to childcare services.

Felicity had to pay the fine. The judge was lenient with Booker because the crackhead parents disgusted him as much as they did Booker. He arraigned the couple and issued a disturbing-the-peace ticket for Booker. The entire incident enraged Felicity who wondered aloud why he meddled in things that didn’t concern him.

“Who do you think you are? Batman?”

Booker fingered his right molar to see if it was loose or broken. The female had had more strength than the man, who swung wildly but never got in a hit. It was her knuckles that connected with his jaw.

“There was a little kid in that car. A baby!” he said.

“It wasn’t your kid and it wasn’t your business,” shouted Felicity.

A mite loose, decided Booker, but he would see a dentist anyway.

On the bus home each knew it was over without saying so. Felicity continued nagging for an hour or so after they arrived at her apartment, but up against Booker’s leaden silence, she quit and took a shower. He didn’t join her, as had been their practice.

Booker’s work history was thin — one embarrassing and disaster-ridden semester teaching music in a junior high school, the only public school teaching he could do since he had no certificate, and he was cut from the few music auditions he signed up for. His trumpet talent was adequate but not exceptional.

His luck changed at the precise moment it needed to when Carole tracked him down to forward a letter addressed to him from a law firm. Mr. Drew had died and to everyone’s surprise he had included his grandchildren — but not his own children — in his will. Booker was to share the old man’s constantly-bragged-about fortune with his siblings. He refused to think about the greed and criminality that produced his grandfather’s fortune. He told himself the slumlord money had been cleansed by death. Not bad. Now he could rent his own place, a quiet room in a quiet neighborhood, and continue playing either on the street or in more little rundown clubs. Having access to no studio, the men played on corners. Not for money, which was pitiful enough, but to practice and experiment with one another in public before a nonpaying, therefore uncritical, undemanding audience.

Then came a day that changed him and his music.

—

Simply dumbstruck by her beauty Booker stared open-mouthed at a young blue-black woman standing at the curb laughing. Her clothes were white, her hair like a million black butterflies asleep on her head. She was talking to another woman — chalk white with blond dreadlocks. A limousine negotiated the curb and both waited for the driver to open the door for them. Although it made him sad to see the limo pull away, Booker smiled and smiled as he walked on to the train entrance, where he played with the two guitarists. Neither one was there, not Michael or Chase, and it was only then that he noticed the rain — soft, steady. The sun still blazed so the raindrops falling from a baby-blue sky were like crystal breaking into specks of light on the pavement. He decided to play his trumpet alone in the rain anyway, knowing that no pedestrians would stop to listen; rather, they closed umbrellas as they rushed down the stairs to the trains. Still in thrall to the sheer beauty of the girl he had seen, he put the trumpet to his lips. What emerged was music he had never played before. Low, muted notes held long, too long, as the strains floated through drops of rain.

Booker had no words to describe his feelings. What he did know was that the rain-soaked air smelled like lilac when he played while remembering her. Streets with litter at their curbs appeared interesting, not filthy; bodegas, beauty shops, diners, thrift stores leaning against one another looked homey, downright friendly. Each time he imagined her eyes glittering toward him or her lips open in an inviting, reckless smile, he felt not just a swell of desire but also the disintegration of the haunt and gloom in which for years Adam’s death had clouded him. When he stepped through that cloud and became as emotionally content as he had been before Adam skated into the sunset — there she was. A midnight Galatea always and already alive.

A few weeks after that first sighting of her waiting for a limousine, there she was again, standing in line at the stadium where the Black Gauchos were performing — a hot band, new, upcoming, playing a blend of Brazilian and New Orleans jazz, one show only. The line was long, loud and jittery but when the doors opened to the crush he managed first to slip four bodies behind her and then, when the crowd found bench seats, he was able to stand right at her back.

In music-powered air, with body rules broken and sexual benevolence thick as cream, circling her waist with his arms seemed more than a natural gesture; it was an inevitable one. And together they danced and danced. When the music stopped, his Galatea turned to face him and surrender to him the reckless smile he’d always imagined.

“Bride,” she said when he asked her name.

God damn, he whispered.

—

Their lovemaking from the very beginning was serene, artful and long-lasting, so necessary to Booker that he deliberately withheld for nights in a row to make the return to her bed brand-new. Their relationship was flawless. He especially liked her lack of interest in his personal life. Unlike with Felicity there was no probing. Bride was knock-down beautiful, easy, had something to do every day and didn’t need his presence every minute. Her self-love was consistent with her cosmetic company milieu and mirrored his obsession with her. So if she rattled on about coworkers, products and markets, he watched her mesmerizing eyes that were so deeply expressive they said much more than mere language could. Speaking-eyes, he thought, accompanied by the music of her voice. Every feature — the ledge of her cheekbones, her invitational mouth, her nose, forehead, chin as well as those eyes — was more exquisite, more aesthetically pleasing because of her obsidian-midnight skin. Whether he was lying under her body, hovering above it or holding her in his arms, her blackness thrilled him. Then he was certain that he not only held the night, he owned it, and if the night he held in his arms was not enough, he could always see starlight in her eyes. Her innocent, oblivious sense of humor delighted him. When she, who wore no makeup and worked in a business all about cosmetics, asked him to help her choose the most winning shade of lip gloss, he laughed out loud. Her insistence on white-only clothes amused him. Unwilling to share her with the public he was seldom in the mood for clubbing. Yet dancing with her in down-lit uncool clubrooms to tapes of Michael Jackson’s soprano or James Brown’s shouts was irresistible. Pressing close to her in crowded rap bars bewitched them both. He refused her nothing except accompanying her on shopping sprees.

Once in a while she dropped the hip, thrillingly successful corporate woman façade of complete control and confessed some flaw or painful memory of childhood. And he, knowing all about how childhood cuts festered and never scabbed over, comforted her while hiding the rage he felt at the idea of anyone hurting her.

Bride’s complicated relationship with her mother and repellent father meant that, like him, she was free of family ties. It was just the two of them, and with the exception of her obnoxious pseudo-friend Brooklyn there were fewer and fewer interruptions from her colleagues. He still played with Chase and Michael on weekends, some afternoons, but there were glorious mornings of sun at the shore, cool evenings holding hands in the park in anticipation of the sexual choreography they would perform in every nook of her apartment. Sober as priests, creative as devils, they invented sex. So they believed.

When Bride was at her office, Booker relished the solitude for trumpet practice, scribbling notes to mail to his favorite aunt, Queen, and since there were no books in Bride’s apartment — just fashion and gossip magazines — he visited the library often to read or reread books he had ignored or misunderstood while at university. The Name of the Rose, for one, and Remembering Slavery, a collection that so moved him he composed some mediocre, sentimental music to commemorate the narratives. He read Twain, enjoying the cruelty of his humor. He read Walter Benjamin, impressed by the beauty of the translation, he read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography again, relishing for the first time the eloquence that both hid and displayed his hatred. He read Herman Melville, and let Pip break his heart, reminding him of Adam alone, abandoned, swallowed by waves of casual evil.

Six months into the bliss of edible sex, free-style music, challenging books and the company of an easy undemanding Bride, the fairy-tale castle collapsed into the mud and sand on which its vanity was built. And Booker ran away.