“Goodbye.”
Michael turned off his phone before running the hot bath in the deep iron tub. It was this tub that made him take the apartment in the first place. The hot water felt so good that he groaned when he first sat back. The stinging in his wrists subsided, and he wasn’t frightened except when he concentrated on the hue of the water.
He was exhilarated at first and then tired, in the way he used to be as a little boy getting in his bed. He wondered if anyone would ever make sense out of the fear-herding that all the people, and maybe all other creatures, of the world lived under.
He would have liked Melanie to say that she loved him, but only if he didn’t have to ask.
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? . . .