Waiting in Vain Read online

  Silence reclaimed them. Filled their lungs. Made their breathing uneasy.

  “So how’s I-nelik?” Ian asked. He lit another Newport. Took a deep drag … glanced at his shoes … willing Fire to read his mind. Being here isn’t easy, he wanted to say. I always feel useless in front of you …

  “He’s awright,” Fire said, hoping Ian would ask about Miss Gita, hoping also that he wouldn’t ask about his father.

  Claire was having a smoke outside the gallery when Fire and Ian arrived.

  She started toward them, her form swinging loosely in an A-line dress that draped from a collar of beads. Her skin was black like a seasoned wok, and her dreads were long and crinkled. She was French, from Martinique.

  “How are you?” Fire said as he hugged her. Her body had the heft of an upright bass.

  “You were right about him, y’know?” Ian said. “The fucker always late but him always show.”

  Fire stamped kisses on her cheeks.

  This is the way it should be, Fire thought, as he remembered Lisbon. The villa they shared in the Alfama and light in the afternoon. Ambition mattered more than fame then … and friendship more than money. Fame and money. Ian had come to New York to find them. Mine them, he’d said. But after he found the mother lode the shaft caved in and trapped him.

  “I love the both of you,” Ian said as he joined their hug. “It should always be this way.”

  Fire looked at Claire and raised his brows. They were more than Ian’s friends. They were mother and father and brother and sister, nurse, teacher, counselor—specialists in seeing and satisfying his needs.

  Headlights lurched around the bend.

  “Oh, fuck,” Ian said. “It’s Lewis.”

  “The prick?” Claire asked with a chuckle.

  “He’s too fake to be a prick. The man is a fucking dildo. Send him home, nuh Claire. Is your gallery.”

  She made a funny face at Fire and rubbed Ian’s neck.

  “So who’s Lewis?” Fire asked as the lights grew brighter.

  “A collector,” Claire said through the crook of a smile. “He’s got some money. He’s my best client. He made his first million in college—exporting skin-fading to Nigeria. Then he made even more money on Wall Street doing whatever people do there. Then he left that a coupla years ago and started this company that does something with inner city housing … some nonprofit development thing … I don’t know. What I do know, and I guess what I really care about, is that he buys a lot of Ian’s work.” She turned to Ian. “So you better behave.”

  Lewis pulled up in a black Range Rover. At first Fire thought he knew him, but soon realized his error. He looked like a model he’d seen in an ad for Duke hairdressing cream.

  “Hey, guys,” Lewis called, “how are you?” His voice was warm and measured. Ian sucked his teeth. Claire said a bright hello. Fire nodded politely. “I’ll be right back. I’m gonna put this in a lot.” The engine revved. The big wheels turned. The rear lights faded to black.

  He was tall, Fire saw when he returned. And muscled. Very gymned. He could see it through his T-shirt, which was tight and ribbed like a condom. He had a really firm handshake, and had learned in a course, Fire guessed, that it was important to look people directly in the eye when being introduced.

  “So what’s going on,” Lewis said, turning to Ian. “Is Sylvia here?”

  “She gone to get some beer,” Ian replied. “She’s been gone a while though. Maybe she meet a man. Women like men, y’know. Trust me.”

  “That was funny. But do you know what’s funnier? I didn’t bring my checkbook tonight.”

  Claire giggled and Lewis laughed.

  “Don’t patronize me.” Ian’s cigarette glowed like a nova.

  “Why not?” Lewis said with a laugh. “I’m your biggest patron.”

  Claire sensed a flare-up and motioned Ian to be quiet. Lewis chuckled and went inside. Ian spat the butt against a car.

  “I don’t know wha Sylvia see in dat pussy.”

  Claire rubbed his back. “Love is blind, Ian.”

  “You see love when you see them?”

  She glanced at Fire. “That’s not my business.”

  Ian shrugged his shoulders and went inside.

  Fire was curious now. “Why Ian don’t like him?”

  “Who does Ian like? But in all fairness Lewis is an asshole. He’s very condescending. Sylvia and Ian have gotten tight, and I think Lewis feels threatened by that. And Ian doesn’t think that Sylvia should be with Lewis. He thinks she’s settling. But who cares?”

  “So who is this Sylvia?”

  “Nice girl. You’ll meet her soon. She’s a frustrated writer who’s been working on a novel for the last six years. She’s a magazine editor at Umbra. She’s good people, and a really good poet. She’s published two collections.” She peered at a figure in the distance. It wasn’t who she thought it was. “Ian has a point though. She and Lewis are kinda different.”

  Fire followed Claire inside and walked himself through the show, a collection of cast-iron tableware with a floral motif. What’s this about? he thought. He picked up a vase shaped like a tulip. The work was nice, very detailed, but he wasn’t sure if he would call it art. He’d never tell Ian this—not now anyway—but the place looked like a sample sale at Pottery Barn. The work was too—he searched for the word—neutral. It lacked perspective and conviction, subversion and commentary. Where was the wisdom and the humor? Ian’s work used to be ironic. Now it was simply iron.

  He saw some plates embossed with sunflowers and thought of the woman in the navy blazer. She hadn’t lost her irony. Muddy Waters.

  Water. He had to take a pee. His thoughts were still with her as he stood over the bowl. His cock filled his palm like a fat iguana. He should’ve asked for her name and number again. No, he shouldn’t have. She was involved … like Blanche had been, and in any event, pressing her might have turned the sweetness into vinegar. She had a vibe about her, though, that woman … and those sunflowers … it was all quite interesting … the sunflower field in the dream … the sunflowers on her blazer and again in Ian’s work. Did this mean something? Could she be the one? No, she couldn’t. She was involved, and therefore unavailable.

  He tried to forget her as he went upstairs to the office, a loft above the gallery floor with ocher walls, a wooden floor, and a pressed-tin ceiling.

  Lewis asked him to join the poker game. He told him he didn’t know how to play. It was one of his inconsistencies that he didn’t like to gamble though he loved to court adventure.

  Claire suggested dominoes. But before she could retrieve her set the doorbell rang.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked before leaving to answer it.

  He said yes and she told him there was food in the kitchen and directed him to follow her.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said at the foot of the stairs.

  “It’s good to see you too.”

  Her brows began to rise. She released her lower lip and her mouth began to open, but she changed her mind.

  She went to get the door. He passed beneath the office, down a wide hallway to the kitchen, which was tiled in black and what he thought was gray until he adjusted the dimmer and a fine rain of light washed over the stainless steel fixtures and the marble-topped workstation that filled the space like a carrier in dry dock. Rummaging through the fridge, he found and placed on top of this Intrepid some grapes, a fruit tart, conch turnovers, a platter of farofa, and a bowl of feijoada.

  He’d given up red meat for six years now, but like most of his actions, had not in fact declared it. With a few exceptions, he was wary of definitions, not because he was indecisive or undisciplined, but because he believed that bearings were more important than boundaries. Instead of definitions he preferred guidelines—points of departure that gave him the confidence to range across borders without losing his way.

  Feijoada. He stared into the eyes of the soft black beans and smelled the garlic sweat of cow tongue and s
alt pork, and thought of the women of Salvador, their skins as smooth as banana leaves, spicing their pots on Sundays with cheap cuts and scrap meat as they’ve done since the days of slavery. A little pork wouldn’t kill him, he thought. But then it might. He replaced the feijoada in the fridge. On the edge of his focus, footsteps came closer and a voice called out: “Excuse me, could you give me a hand?”

  He straightened up, and turned around. Standing before him with one arm along the door frame and the other weighed down by a shopping bag was the woman in the navy blazer, backlit from the hall, her skin shining like an almond glaze, her lips trembling like beds of earth about to burst with seed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is so embarrassing. I didn’t expect to see you of all people here … and I … and I’m … I’m …”

  “You are …?”

  She leaned backward through the doorway and glanced left and right.

  “Sylvia,” she said, her brows furrowed deeply. “Sylvia Lucas.”

  “Adrian. Adrian Heath. But people call me Fire.”

  She rested the bag on the floor, and gazed at him, slicing wide arcs across his body, trying to dissect him.

  “Where’d you get your buttons?” He was thinking now of all that he’d heard about her.

  She told him, as she rested the bag on the other side of the room, that they were not the originals but details she’d added on her own.

  “I’m sorry to put you through this,” he said as she unpacked. “You didn’t want to see me again. But we both keep bad company.”

  “It’s okay.” She turned her back to him.

  “I’d like to give you my number,” he said, driven by the momentum of habit, “so you can call to arrange another coincidence.” He was sure now that nothing would happen. He’d already met her man.

  “I shouldn’t take it,” she said without looking. “I’m never going to use it.”

  “That’s okay. Paper is cheap. And you won’t have to give me yours. We will only be in touch at your convenience.”

  She turned around, puffed her cheeks, and began to crease the paper bag against her body, working in the deliberate order of measuring, scoring, and folding.

  “I think we should go,” she said when the bag was the size of a change purse.

  He held his number out to her. “Take it,” he said softly. “There is nothing to fear.” He wagged his head when he said this, and closed his eyes in a languid blink that calmed her like a soothing fan and made her want to trust him with his muddy boots and knotted hair and basic Timex watch. She liked his mouth. It made her think of her clit as a shrimp in butter sauce.

  Slowly, she placed her palm on his. He let it rest there. She watched as his eyes changed from suns into moons and his face assumed the gravity of evening. Things were happening inside him that she didn’t understand, things that she suspected had to do with her, things that made her nervous—for they were things she’d like to do with him. In her head she heard a poem that she’d written the week before, “Dreaming of Mango”:

  Sunshine on some full-smack lips,

  mango dripping on the chest,

  sweeter at the raisin tips

  that look out darkly from the breasts.

  “I think we should go before we get in trouble,” she said.

  He smiled. She hoisted herself onto the workstation, and let the sight of his mouth suck her in.

  “Why am I doing this?” she asked. “Getting myself in trouble. Jeopardizing something I already have. Something … I don’t know what to call it. But something …”

  “That you don’t want to lose.”

  “Right.”

  “What would you do if it suddenly left you? Would you chase after it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not,” she said slowly.

  “Maybe yes?”

  “Maybe,” she said. She saw his lips now as through a microscope. The wrinkles and ridges that trapped his saliva. “One part of me would want to, and the other part would not. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  “Think about that before you call me.”

  He gripped her hand. And she blinked. And when she opened her eyes, thinking she was about to tell him to let her go, something rushed from his direction. This thing, this exploding ball of wetness, shorted for an instant her memory and will, so that she didn’t realize at first that it was she who had kissed him and not the other way around, and further, that it was she now—or a stranger who was misusing her body—who was opening her legs so that the body of this man whom she was pulling toward her for motives she didn’t understand, but which she realized she must now resist, could press itself against her, reconfirming her as soft by the hard truth of its intent. His waist was at her knees now, rushing toward her dampened groin. His lips were beginning to part now, and she could see their underside, where terra-cotta became wet clay.

  She had less than a second to act. And as she jerked her head to the side and closed her eyes, preparing for the adventure of impact, her involvement with Lewis, faced with its mortality, projected its history inside her head. She’d met him on the grass courts at a friend’s house in Martha’s Vineyard. He was sitting on the sidelines, shirtless, his muscles filmed with sweat, a strikingly handsome man. At first she thought he was a model, but as she learned when they met again at a dinner party, he’d grown up in Baltimore, the son of a shop clerk and a mechanic, and had become a millionaire through hard work, good schools, and a little bit of luck. He was unmarried, without children, respected by his peers and well connected, as evidenced by the people who made it their duty to say hello—filmmakers, congressmen, musicians, and bankers. And at some point in the evening, she asked him to write an investment feature for Umbra. The piece, which was never done, because he could never find the time, became the pretext for twice-weekly phone calls, which gave way to long lunches at good restaurants, then dinners and weekends, then … this.

  What had been the real attraction? It wasn’t just his looks. It was more than that. It had to be. It must be. She couldn’t remember. Then she thought of something. At some point early on it came up that she’d recently bought a Catlett silkscreen, and they began to talk about art. Was that it? She didn’t know. She’d never considered their happiness before. And here she was trembling in fear—her own fear of flying. This must not happen.

  As soon as she said this—which may or may not have been aloud—Fire’s kiss skidded across her cheek. She ran to the door, straightened herself, and went to join the others.

  * * *

  Fire returned from the kitchen with the beers, which she’d forgotten, and found her leaning against Lewis on a tasseled sofa that sat across a table from some velvet chairs. Her legs were drawn up, and she was shuffling a deck of cards while Lewis and Claire talked business about a pair of candleholders. Ian was in a corner muttering into his cell phone.

  Fire held the tray in front of Sylvia and she reached out without looking, which pricked him, although he knew her intent was not to snub. At the last second, as her fingers began to curl around a Red Stripe, he tilted the tray, causing a minor chink and splash. He derailed her focus as she helped him, rummaged her eyes for something—something he couldn’t describe, something he knew he’d know on sight.

  “I see you two have met,” Claire said, chuckling with Lewis.

  “And I’ve made a big splash.”

  Sylvia dabbed her pants with a napkin. Fire held his hand toward her. She took it charily as if it were a fish and said her name, framing her words with a fragile smile. He squeezed her hand secretly, wondered why, and concluded that he was teasing her. She was, after all, teasing him. It couldn’t be more than teasing, he told himself. It must never be.

  Smiling, he introduced himself. His voice flowed like water over river stones. She creamed warm sweat in his waiting palm.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said. “Don’t worry about the spill.”

  “There are more to come. I’ll be serving the drinks tonight.”

/>   They didn’t speak for the rest of the evening, but carried on a private intercourse through looks and gestures. A raised eyebrow meant, “Hi again.” A stroke down the nose was, “I like you.” Smacked lips said, “We’re really mad.” And a lowered head urged, “Let’s stop this now and get on with our lives”—which he thought would be easy because he lived in Jamaica to begin with, and would be leaving New York in two days. But also because she was involved.

  Late in the evening, after being quiet for a while, Sylvia raised her eyebrow again, triggering in Fire the memory of the first time he’d thought about sex. As he sat on the floor sorting records, he saw again the tenement yard ringed with zinc sheets where he spent as many summers as he could with his uncle I-nelik, a pudgy dread whose features were always hidden behind welding goggles and a beard that hung in clots. He saw the shotgun houses, scrubbed to pastel softness by the heat, and the wandering bands of mongrels—mangy beasts whose teats flip-flopped like paper bags.

  He was eight years old, on his way with I-nelik to Harry J’s for the first session of what would be Marley’s Natty Dread. They were driving along Molynes Road in the yellow Alfasud that I-nelik had bought before he left dentistry. As usual, they talked about whatever was on I-nelik’s mind. This day it was sex. He wanted to know if Fire had had it. Fire wasn’t sure. “Is that like kissing?”

  I-nelik laughed and asked if he’d ever woken up in the night and heard his mother breathing like an asthmatic. Fire told him yes.

  “That,” I-nelik said, “is sex.”

  “But what if Daddy kill her?”

  “Well, in a sense, you daddy kill her every night, but him have a special way of pumping her back to life.”

  He thought about his mother’s gasps, and began to really fear for her. What if his father’s pump should fail? Would he, as a male and the only child, be asked to revive her? One time when they went to Walt Disney World—he must’ve been four then—they all slept in the same room and he’d seen how his father held his mother at night … heard the words he breathed into her neck … but didn’t see anything that looked like pumping.