When the Thrill Is Gone

41

Son — my father rarely called me son — you have to remember that when it comes to love, men are less experienced than women — much less. If a woman falls in love she knows just where she is. Her mind as well as her body comes into bloom. When a woman feels love it’s like a great mind opening, like Karl Marx when he first understood capital. When men fall in love, we just turn stupid. A man in love is a man operating without the benefit of history. He thinks that today is different from every other day, that the woman he’s lookin’ at is different, fundamentally, from all other women.

Love will beat you down worse than any bull or truncheon. Love will rob you of your reflexes and everything you know. And because of all that, it will be the greatest challenge you ever meet.

That speech came back to me as whole cloth in the backseat of the taxi I hailed in front of Aura’s building. I’d been thinking about Tolstoy a lot in the previous days. He was a philosopher in reverse; a man who had encountered the truth at an early age and then spent the rest of his life trying to get away from it. I understood, with little rancor, that my old man’s truths were the opposite of themselves, so much so that they appeared workable.

A feeling of filial ardor came over me. I heard my father’s voice again and loved him the way I had as a child. This feeling was like a parasite moving under the skin, that at first fascinates — before the terror sets in...

“Here you go,” the gray-headed white cabbie said.

We were in front of Cyril Tyler’s building.

I’d spent the whole time unaware of its passage.

...a man in love is a man operating without the benefit of history...

The light-colored doorman with the beautiful voice recognized me. He didn’t like me any more than the last time we met but posed no challenge to my entry.

I took the first elevator, negotiated the doorless hallway, and entered the second lift. This took me to the suburban New Jersey mansion on the top of the building.

There was an Olympian feel to the open space.

Phil, the whitest black man in America, was approaching from across the lawn. I waited for him to arrive, wondering what it felt like to work in a place like that.

“Mr. McGill,” Phil said when he reached me.

It might have been a greeting, but it lacked sincerity. His tone and the look in his eye said, Why are you here?

He was wearing a peach suit and a sweet, citrusy cologne.

“Phil.”

“What do you want?”

“Common courtesy would be nice.”

Phil had no response to that, so I said, “I’d like to talk to Mr. Tyler again. The real Mr. Tyler. Not his lawyer or his bastard brother — the man himself.”

“No.”

“No?”

“You can’t come up here making demands, Mr. McGill. You’re forgetting your place.”

My place. For a moment I was flummoxed by the young man’s words. This tickled me. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I was actually surprised by something someone said.

Phil believed that he’d gotten the upper hand due to my silence. He said, “So if you don’t mind...”

“You know, Phil, you’re right.”

“What?”

“Well,” I added, “not right exactly, but accurate — about place, I mean. You and I are in different places. You up here on the mountaintop, with blue sky and bright sun no matter what time of day it is. There’s never a shadow over you, and even on a cloudy day the light gathers in the clouds above your head.”

This high-toned language silenced the biracial aide.

“And me,” I said, “I’m from another plane completely. I live in a shithole where the gasses rise up to block the sun. Down where I am there’s serious global warming. Up here it’s cool and breezy, so much so that you might think you’re removed from the shit. You might make a mistake and think that you were born up here and not down in the muck where I live. But I’m here to tell you that I am the man that will drag your ass back down to where it came from.”

It was a muscular monologue, enough so that Phil became circumspect, both physically and verbally.

His stillness and silence were a balm to my rising anger.

“Now let’s try this again,” I said. “Leonid McGill here to speak to Cyril Tyler.”

“He’s not here,” Phil said, his face and voice devoid of animation.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me now, would you, Phil?”

He had no reply to my question.

I believed the young assistant but still had the urge to grab him and hold him over the side of the building just to hear him yelp and beg. This desire caused me, not for the first time, to wonder at my own motivations of late.

Quashing these violent feelings, I said, in a very mild tone, “Tell him that I have accomplished the task for which I was hired and that I have his answer.”

After that I followed the rabbit warren down to the street, an insane reinterpretation of Alice in pursuit of the ever-elusive hare.