The Awkward Black Man

The Black Woman in the Chinese Hat

Imeant to spend Saturday walking from Lower Manhattan back up to my neighborhood in Washington Heights, but I didn’t make it very far.

I took the IRT from 157th down to Battery Park late that morning, then headed north on foot. I made my way up the promenade, such as it is, on the West Side. It was hot, and so there were lots of swimsuited skaters whizzing past. Most had nice bodies, almost everyone with a date. Men and women, men and men — hand in hand. There were some female couples, but most of them seemed more like just friends.

There was a sprinkling of solitary skaters and joggers, even one or two walking alone. Almost all of the singles wore earphones. Some danced to the silent music, others stared doggedly ahead.

It’s not that I would have talked to anyone not listening to music. I was hiding under my hayseed straw hat and behind mirrored sunglasses. I wouldn’t have been able to pass more than three sentences with a stranger on the street. Making friends has always been hard for me. Even after four years at Hunter College I had only two friends from there — Eric Chen, a history major from Queens, and Willy Jones, a psych major from Long Island City. Both Willy and Eric lived in Brooklyn. I liked them, but spending time with them was always the same. We’d talk about women and movies at coffeehouses until we got hungry and went for junk food. It was always the same. So that Saturday I decided to walk around and look at people and places that I hadn’t seen before. Anything would be better than a day at home alone or with Willy or Eric.

Just a few blocks north of the Financial District was a large lawn filled with the prostrate bodies, primarily white, of sunbathers. Men with bulging muscles and women with the top straps of their bikinis undone to get a smooth tan. It didn’t look comfortable. There was no ocean or nice air, just the filthy Hudson on one side and a line of brick-faced office buildings across the West Side Highway on the other. And it was over a hundred degrees. Actually it was ninety-six, but the weather man said, from a sunbather’s radio, that the heat index, whatever that is, made it “feel like” a hundred and two.

There was a black woman, medium-brown really, lying amongst the others. She had on a one-piece fishnet bathing suit that, being almost the same color as her skin, gave you the idea you could see more than you really could. She was lying on her back with her head propped up, wearing a Chinese peasant hat and rose-colored sunglasses. I looked at her at first because she was the only Negro in a sea of white bodies, and then I noticed how good-looking she was.

I stared longer than I should have, and she noticed the attention. She propped up on an elbow and smiled. She had a good-size gap between her two front teeth. My heart skipped, and I felt a chill in spite of the heat.

She pointed at her hat and then at mine, as a kind of recognition, I guess, and then she waved for me to come over.

I didn’t move. She smiled again and waved more insistently. I found myself walking over, between the five or six lengths of sunbathers, to get next to the black woman in the Chinese peasant hat.

She pulled up her legs to make room for me to sit down next to her.

I’m a very uncomfortable person. I’m big, not quite portly or fat but large enough to make simple motions like running or sitting on the floor difficult. I negotiated the maneuver as well as I could, managing not to step or sit on anyone.

“Hi,” the woman said. She was young, some years older than I but not yet twenty-five.

“Hey.”

“I got to go to the bathroom,” she said with a grimace.

“What?”

“I got to go, but if I leave, one a’ these white people gonna take my spot. But if you could hold my place while I run over there.” She pointed at a squat concrete structure about a hundred yards away.

I nodded. She grinned and reached over to squeeze my wrist. Then, with the slightest pressure against my arm, she was up more gracefully than I could ever manage. I watched her lope away toward one of New York’s few public toilets.

After she was gone, I stretched out to save her place, relaxing into my job. That’s why I liked work and school; there you had something to do and someone to be, and people treated you in a certain way that you didn’t have to think about. I mean, even if the boss didn’t respect you, he still had to ask you a question now and then. And whenever I was asked a question, I knew the right answer. And as far as girls and women were concerned, even the prettiest ones had to say hello if you were in the same class or worked on the same floor.

I felt a sense of purpose on that lawn, even though anyone looking would have thought I was out of place.

I say that because I wore a heavy pair of black jeans with a lightweight gray jacket cut in the military style. I didn’t wear a shirt that day. Everyone near me was nearly naked. One man, in the middle of a group of men, had taken down his trunks and was lying facedown, naked. Butt all up in the air, my mother’s voice screeched in my ear.

I heard a sound behind me. It was a young woman’s voice. I turned my head and saw that the woman wasn’t complaining, as I had at first thought. Her boyfriend had gone beyond kissing and had his hand down in the towel that barely covered their lower bodies. She smiled at me over his head and then made a face that said something felt good.

A broadcast reporter was saying that a policeman had been shot while sitting in a car out in front of his house. I was wondering why he’d been sitting outside rather than in his house. I was still facing the girl but thinking about the man in his car.

“Hey! What you lookin’ at?” The woman’s blond-headed boyfriend had noticed her looking at me. His face was red. I didn’t know if it was colored from anger or the sun.

I turned around quickly and raised my knees to my chest. My back felt vulnerable to attack. I didn’t know if he was going to get up and hit me. I would have walked away, except for the black woman in the Chinese hat.

I had been sweating all morning, but now I could feel the moisture gathering under my arms and across my thighs. Thoughts kept coming in and out of my head. He wouldn’t be so tough if I had a knife... I should go... I should carry a kitchen knife with me... Where is that woman?... Is a kitchen knife legal?... Is that him standing up behind me?... Where is that woman?...

I felt a hand on my shoulder and let myself fall sideways, thinking that I could kick him from the ground. I fell against a man’s hard body.

“Hey, guy, what’s wrong with you?” the man I toppled on complained.

Hovering in the sun above me was the woman I waited for.

“I knocked him over,” she said to the balding bodybuilder. “I hit his tickle spot by mistake.”

While the muscle man groused, I saw that the lovers had gone. My heart was thumping, and sweat was stinging my eyes. The black woman in the Chinese hat descended to her knees and said, “Hey, you OK?” in a tone that I’d never heard addressed to me before.

It was like she was my oldest friend or my wife or one of those social workers who put their life on the line to help someone they don’t even know. I saw that she had some kind of leotard on under the fishnet bathing suit.

“Yeah,” I said, sitting upright. “I’m OK.”

“You fell over just like a stack a’ bananas.”

“Yeah.”

“My name’s Chai,” she said.

“I’m Rufus.”

“How come you wearin’ all them hot clothes, Rufus?”

“I thought it was gonna be cold this morning.”

“I don’t know where you comin’ from. It’s been hot every day this summer. Real hot.” Chai licked her lips. My eyes were drawn to her mouth. I wanted her to say something else that sounded like before.

Chai smiled and took a water bottle from her oversize bag.

“It’s hot,” she complained.

“Yeah, it sure is.”

“I thought it would be nice to sit out here, but it’s too hot.”

“Today’s a good day to be in air-conditioning,” I said. “That’s for sure.”

“You got air-conditionin’ at home?”

“No. But they have it at the World Trade Center.”

Chai frowned. All I wanted to do was to keep her talking.

“Want to go down to the World Financial Center and get some lunch?” It took all the breath in my lungs to get those words out.

“I don’t even know you, Rufus.”

“There’s air-conditioning down there.”

“You got money?”

“Enough for lunch.”

“Enough for a taxi to take us down there?”

“Wow, this is nice,” Chai said, when we entered the glass-walled hall of palm trees in the lower court of the financial center. My friend Willy calls it the hall of palms. In the center of the vast room there are eighteen slender palm trees that reach thirty feet. Between them are benches like you’d find in a park. The benches were all occupied by people trying to escape the heat.

“I never even knew this place was here,” she said, taking my arm.

I could feel her breast against my shoulder. I wanted to swallow but couldn’t make my throat cooperate.

“I’m hungry,” Chai said.

We went under the Merrill Lynch mezzanine into the upscale food court. Past the Rizzoli bookstore and behind a yellow pillar was Pucci’s Two, an Italian restaurant I sometimes went to on my lunch break from Carter’s Home Insurance.

“No swimwear inside the dining room,” said the slender host at the podium that led into the restaurant.

Actually, there was no inside to the restaurant. There was just an area where there were about thirty tables cordoned off by a thigh-high green fence. The only inside was the kitchen.

“How’s this?” Chai said. She pulled a large piece of brown cloth from her bag and wrapped it around her waist. The skirt accented her figure, made her seem more womanly.

The host was obviously perturbed to see a woman dressing right there in front of him. He was an older white man with a full head of white hair. He stared at Chai for a moment and then a moment more. Finally he got two menus from a slot on the side of the podium and strode toward our seats.

It was just noon, and so the restaurant was nearly empty. He led us to a small table for two in the back.

“I don’t wanna sit in the back,” Chai said, when he held a chair for her.

“I thought you wanted privacy,” the maître d’ replied.

“Ain’t nobody here,” Chai said. “All you could have is privacy.”

We ended up at the thigh-high fence watching people walking by.

“Anything to drink?” Our waitress was a black woman with seven silver studs in each ear, a gold ring at the outer corner of her right eye, a tiny silver circlet at the left corner of her lower lip, and a blue stone in her nose. She laid down our menus and smiled.

“Red wine,” Chai said.

“We have a Merlot and Beaujolais,” the waitress replied. She was looking somewhere beyond the confines of the restaurant.

“Whatever.”

The waitress looked at me. I’m only twenty. I went to college early, at sixteen, but I look older.

“Beer,” I said. “Whatever you got on tap.”

The waitress moved away.

The maître d’ seated a couple at the table next to us. There was already a line of couples waiting to get in.

I noticed that Chai was still wearing her rose glasses and peasant hat. I removed my hat and glasses, hoping that she’d do the same.

Instead she reached across the table to caress my cheek.

“You have a nice face, Rufus.” Her hand slid from my jawbone and across my lips. “Nice lips too.”

“They have really good pasta,” I said, opening the menu.

Chai smiled at me and leaned forward.

The maître d’ sat another couple on the other side of us.

“How old are you?” Chai asked.

“Twenty-three.”

“You in school?”

“No. Uh-uh. I just graduated from Hunter a few months ago. Now I work at an insurance company down here.”

“I used to work down here,” she said. “At Crystal and Pomerantz. I typed and stuff. But I don’t do that anymore.”

“What do you do now?”

“I do clothes for a couple a’ black magazines. Clothes, and I help out on the photography shoots.”

The waitress came with our drinks then.

“Are you ready to order?”

“Do you have specials?” Chai asked.

The waitress frowned and then produced a pad from the pocket of her blouse.

“Angel hair pasta with a sauce of fresh tomatoes sautéed in olive oil with garlic, kalamata olives, fresh basil, and finished with crumbled goat cheese. Broiled scrod served with an anchovy sauce...”

“Ugh! Anchovies is nasty,” Chai complained.

“...and a thick veal chop,” the waitress continued, “flattened, breaded, and fried in olive oil, served with broccoli di rape.”

“I want the pasta,” Chai said.

I ordered the blue-cheese cheeseburger with a baked potato and salad.

“If you lost some weight,” Chai said, when the waitress was gone, “and did some weight liftin’, you’d be fine.”

“I’m gonna start my diet next week,” I said. “Monday morning. I got Special K for breakfast and seven grapefruits.”

“What kinda milk?”

“Milk milk.”

“If you gonna diet it’s got to be skim milk, fat-free.”

“Oh. Uh-huh. That’s why I was walking on the promenade today.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m starting to get healthy. I’m gonna walk up to my house on One Fifty-Eight.”

“You better walk up to one thousand fifty-eight if you gonna eat that hamburger.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“I want to be a nutritionist,” she said. “But first I’m gonna get into clothes design. I made my bathing suit.”

“You did?”

“Uh-huh. Made it fishnet to make you think you could see sumpin’ and then lined it so you couldn’t. You like it?”

“It’s beautiful.”

That was the only moment that Chai was at a loss for words. Her head moved back slightly, and her eyes opened wide enough that I could see them clearly through the flush of her plastic lenses.

“Where you from, Rufus?”

“I was born in Baltimore,” I said. “Then we moved to Portland and Oakland and then LA...”

“I wanna move to Atlanta,” Chai said. “Then go to LA after I get established. ’Cause you know they say LA is a hard town, and somebody black got to be ready if they want to live out there.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was only there for a year before my mom brought me to Brooklyn.”

“And then you moved to Washington Heights?”

“Yeah. My mom made sure that I was in school at Hunter, and then she moved back to LA to live with my uncle Lon.”

The food came then. I regretted every bite of my burger. I wanted to leave some, to start my diet a few hours early, but I couldn’t stop eating. I couldn’t even slow down.

“So you alone out here?” Chai asked me.

“My aunt Beta,” I said, shaking my head, mouth full of meat. “She lives in Brooklyn.”

“What kinda name is Beta?”

“Mom is Alpha, and her sister is Beta,” I said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s the beginning of the Latin alphabet. A and B.”

“They named two little girls after letters?”

“My grandfather. He’s like an inventor. He said that he thought all children were like experiments, that every child born was a test of nature to make a better human being.”

“Huh. That’s weird.”

“Yeah. He said that all the tests so far had failed, mostly, and that we should keep track of the failures, that one day the government would agree with him and start naming every person so that they could see how the process was coming along.”

“He sounds crazy.”

“That’s what my grandmother thought. That’s why she left him and moved to Baltimore.”

Chai had pecan pie and chocolate liqueur for desert. I had a bite of her pie. After that I showed her all around the World Financial and World Trade Centers. She’d been in them before but didn’t know all the ins and outs the way I did.

There was an award-winning exhibit of news photography in the sky tunnel that connected the two centers. The scenes were mostly of suffering in other parts of the world. The one I remember was an African soldier raising his machete to deliver the killing blow to an unarmed man that he’d been fighting. The man was already wounded, and this was obviously the last moment of his life. I was sure that there was another photograph — a picture of the murdered man, evidence that his attacker was a murderer — but that photograph, wherever it was, was not an award winner. Chai spent a lot of time examining each picture. She was interested in photography too, she said.

I kept close to her, waiting to hear that tone in her voice again, the tone that made me feel like I had always known her.

We went to J&R Music World, and she bought CDs for her sister. And then we went to the building where I worked. She said that she wanted to see it.

After that we walked some more, and then we had tempura at Fukuda’s Japanese restaurant.

“I don’t have just one boyfriend,” she told me when we were walking down Broadway in the early evening. I hadn’t asked her, but I did want to know.

“Right now I see two guys. One’s a cop, and the other’s a ex-con. I like the cop ’cause he know what to do, and I like my convict ’cause he make me feel it when we together.”

“They know about each other?” I asked, as practical as my grandfather.

“Uh-uh. Strong men like that cain’t share without fightin’. So I just don’t tell ’em.”

It was then that she took my hand.

“Take me to the movies, Rufus. Take me to see The Thomas Crown Affair.”

“I only have enough for two subway tokens.”

“You don’t have a bank card?”

“I don’t have any money in the bank.”

“I thought you said that you work for that insurance company?”

“I do, but I just started and I haven’t been paid yet.” This was mostly true. Actually I had worked at Carter’s Home Insurance for three months, but I was just promoted to my new position two weeks ago. Before that I had only made minimum wage.

Chai let my hand go. I thought that she would leave now that she knew I was broke.

“I know somethin’ we could do, don’t cost but fifty cent,” she said.

“What?”

Again she took me by the hand. We walked farther downtown, our fingers interlaced. My hand was sweating, and even though I always thought that holding hands meant something close and special, I didn’t feel the closeness that I had on that sunbathers’ lawn. It was just two hands and some fingers pressed together on a day that was too hot.

“What’s this?” I said, holding back at the outside escalator.

“The ferry,” Chai said. “The Staten Island Ferry. It only costs fifty cent. Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it.”

We held hands up the escalator and through the swinging glass doors. She had to let go in order to pay at the kiosk. We came into a cavernous room that was over a hundred feet across, and just as long. There was a magazine stand in the center of the room and wooden benches along the walls.

“Good, it’s pretty empty,” Chai said.

Now she held my arm. I still didn’t feel that closeness I craved, but there was security in the touch. I’d never been to Staten Island and said so. She told me that her cousins lived out there in Saint George. She used to visit them when she was a girl.

At the far end of the large waiting room was a huge door that sat on wheels. Through the door we could see a crowd of people all walking in one direction, toward the exit and the city.

“That means the ferry is unloading. When they’re finished and when the cars are all off, then we can get on.”

“They take cars?”

“Uh-huh. Right down below us.”

The door was pushed open from the outside by an older, red-faced white man. The color reminded me of the man who was so angry when his girlfriend looked at me.

“Great, it’s one of the old ferries,” she said as we walked up the ramp.

It was like one of the old barges that my uncle Lon used to take me on off of Redondo Beach. Lots of old wooden benches and a galley where you could get hot dogs and sodas.

Chai ran, dragging me along, to the front of the boat. There we looked out over the watery expanse.

“I used to love this when I was a kid,” she said. “Thanks for coming with me.”

The horn sounded, and the big boat lurched out into the water. Six or seven others came out onto the prow with us.

Chai grabbed my hand again and said, “Come on.”

She led me back into the boat and up a flight of stairs that went above the galley. Up there was another room full of old built-in benches. On either side was an outside area with a long bench that looked out to the water. On one side an old couple sat, and on the other two little kids looked out from the front.

Chai took me to the aft part of the side where the children were. We sat and looked out for a moment or two. We were going to pass Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. I was about to say how great it was when Chai kissed me.

What I remember most about it was her tongue. It was very large and muscular. My old girlfriend, the only girlfriend I ever had, Rachel, had a small tongue. When we kissed, Rachel opened her mouth, but her tongue didn’t do anything. But with Chai it was a real physical experience. The boat ride was smooth, but that kiss was like stormy seas. It still wasn’t the intimacy I had experienced on the promenade, but it was overpowering.

Chai laid a hand on my thigh, right on my erection. She didn’t move the hand or squeeze but just let the weight sit there. After a moment I was kissing back. Every time my tongue pushed into her mouth it was pressed back. It was almost like the tongues were engaged in a war or maybe a war game. My chest started to hurt, and there were sounds coming from my throat. Chai used her other hand to caress the back of my neck.

When I started to come, Chai moved back from the kiss to watch my face. Her hand was still just weight, but it was enough. I struggled not to make too much noise. I could see that there was someone down on the other end of the bench; I could see their form in my peripheral vision.

My body tensed, and my legs went straight. I wanted to cry.

It was then that Chai whispered, “So much.” Then she leaned closer and spoke right into my ear, “Don’t stop,” and I had another orgasm and I thought I was going to die.

There it was, cast in something stronger than stone, the intimacy, and the closeness I had always wanted but never suspected until that day. I panted like a dog, and Chai grinned broadly. My body was still shaking.

“That was good,” she said, and then she curled up beside me and put her head on my shoulder and her hand upon my chest. We sat there looking out at the water. The ferry slowed for landing and then jarred against the wooden pylons of the pier.

Whoever it was at the other end of our bench got up and left. I think Chai fell asleep. I did too.

“So I told my mothah I didn’t care what the hell he told huhr,” a woman said. It was real, and I heard it, but I was still asleep.

I felt a forward pitch of the boat and awoke. An old woman was sitting next to me. A man in some kind of uniform was next to her. Two young women were standing at the railing looking out over the water. It was one of them who had been talking about her mother.

Chai was asleep. Just seeing her seemed to fill my lungs with air. This time I watched the water and the sights.

It might have been eight o’clock. The sky was still light, and the ferry was full of Staten Islanders going out for the night in Manhattan. I stayed still, hoping that Chai wouldn’t rouse.

“Hey,” she said, when we were close to shore.

“Hey,” I said in a new voice, one that echoed the intimacy I craved.

She sat up and said, “I got to get home.”

“Can I call you?”

“I don’t really have a private line. But you give me your number, and I’ll call you, OK?”

There was a yellow nub of a pencil in her bag and the inner side of the ingredients flap from an empty package of trail mix that had been thrown away in the terminal building. There I wrote my full name and the phone number of my temporary desk at work. I hadn’t gotten a phone in my house yet. I didn’t have the deposit.

“Goodbye, Rufus Coombs,” Chai said after she kissed my cheek. “I’m gonna call you and see how your diet’s comin’.”

I wanted to walk her to her subway station, but she said she needed to walk alone.

The first time I woke up it was because of that pain in my chest. I guess I got excited in my sleep. The pain turned into fear of a policeman who found out that I had been kissing his woman. That fear gave way to fear of an ex-convict, a murderer, who would kill me for the same reason. I fell asleep again only to awaken to a phrase, AIDS kiss. I wondered if I had heard those words on the radio or read them somewhere. The thought of the disease crawling through my veins got me up out of bed. I went to my tenement window and looked out over New Jersey. I wondered if she would call me. It would have to be within the next six weeks, because that was how long I’d be in the claims department.

I sat in my heavy chair waiting for the sun, wondering if she would call and if I saw her would one of her boyfriends kill me. I wondered if she might die from AIDS and never call to warn me. Somewhere in the tangle of fears I fell asleep again.