I peered into the night, which was broken now and then by fluttering moths or the passing headlights of some car. If I had just looked into that abyss by myself I wouldn’t have seen a thing; but through Sherman’s eyes I could imagine the way the darkness, with the partial architecture of the urban night, was magical, alive. When I inhaled it felt as if that night was coming inside me.
And so, when Sherman came on that lunch court and said that he needed me—I went.
On the A train to Manhattan we sat on a bench for three, and he looked me over.
“Your hair is all right,” he said, after a minute-long inspection, “but you gotta button that shirt to the top and tuck in those tails.”
I did as I was told.
“Did you brush your teeth this morning?” Sherman asked.
“Yeah.”
“How about a shower?”
“I took one after gym class.”
Sherman was still studying me. He seemed more like a teacher or a young father than my cousin and friend.
We were passing underneath the East River when he said, “I met this girl from California goes to a private school on Seventy-Second Street. Her parents are out of town tonight, and she said she wanted me to come by, only she had already planned to have one of her girlfriends come over, and so she asked if I could bring another guy.”
“Girls?” I was pretty sure that half the subway car could hear the fear in my voice.
“Don’t worry, man. Tanya—that’s my girl—Tanya said that Mona is fine. So you don’t have to worry about me puttin’ you with no ugly girl.”
I swallowed hard again and tried to think of some way out of that train, that destination. I had hardly ever kissed a girl, and when I had it hadn’t seemed so great—for her.
“When you kiss,” Sherman said, as if he could read my thoughts, “you got to give her some tongue. Girls like that, and you will too.”
We got out in lower Manhattan south of Canal. From there we walked west. On Washington we came to this modern-looking apartment building that had glass walls and a doorman seated behind a high desk.
Sherman walked right up to the desk, and I followed a few steps behind.
The doorman had bright copper skin and an accent from somewhere in the Spanish-speaking New World.
“Can I help you?” he asked, dubiously.
“Tanya Highsmith,” Sherman said. “Apartment fourteen twenty-seven.”
That was the most impressed I ever was with my cousin, in this life. Tanya Highsmith, apartment fourteen twenty-seven. He spoke clearly, with no hesitation or shame. He wasn’t some young tough from the ’hood but a man coming to see a woman.
The doorman nodded and picked up a phone.
* * *
The next thing I knew I was standing at an off-white door on the fourteenth floor in a wide hallway that had avocado-colored carpeting and muted rose-red walls.
When Sherman pressed the doorbell I got a little dizzy. Standing there I worried that I’d fall on my face. I do believe that the only reason I didn’t faint was so as not to embarrass my cousin and best friend.
The door swung inward, and I was surprised at the young woman who stood there. The beautiful teenager wore a gray silk T-shirt under an emerald cotton vest that had little red eyes stitched into it. Her skirt was a gold color with a blue hem, I remember. She was barefoot and a little breathless. But none of that mattered at first glance. What struck me was that she was a black girl; well, not really black but rather a creamy brown. At any rate—she wasn’t white. I figured that in a building that nice, with a girl from a private school, that Sherman must have found him a white girl to visit.
“Hey, Tanya,” Sherman said.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “You two look exactly alike.”
I’d been told before that Sherman and I bore a strong resemblance. I couldn’t see it; I think that was because he was so powerful and brave and cool, and I was just barely normal.
“They do!” another girl said. This one was also under the category of our race, what people nowadays call African American. But where Tanya was slender of face and body, her friend was a curvaceous girl with skin just a touch darker.
They were Sherman’s age, maybe even a little older.
“Mona,” Tanya said, “this is Sherman and his cousin Stewart.”
“If we look just alike,” Sherman said, “then how you know I ain’t Stew?”
The skinny girl grinned, cocked her head to the side, and said, “Because I know what I like. Come on in. I got it all ready.”
Tanya took us through the living room into a yellow-and-red-tiled kitchen. Past the stove there was a little nook of a room with no door, in which sat a small, square, orange table-booth. There she had set out a crystal decanter filled with amber liquor and four bulbous drinking glasses.
“Cognac,” Tanya said. “Like I told you.”
Sherman and Tanya sat on one side of the table, her in and him out. I climbed into our side, and Mona pulled in close beside me.
Tanya explained to her friend and me that she met Sherman on the F train and that the first thing he said to her was to ask if she had ever had champagne.
“I asked him why,” she said. “And he told me that I looked like I was rich and so I must have had some.”
“What did you say?” Mona asked. At the same time she laid her left hand on my right.
“She said that there was something better than champagne,” Sherman answered.
“Cognac,” Tanya finished, gesturing at the contents of the tabletop.
She poured us each a generous dram and warned us to sip it because the cognac was strong.
When Mona let go of my hand to reach for her glass, I felt both bereft and relieved. She got my glass too, turned toward me on the small bench, and clinked hers to mine. She smiled at me with lips that I will always think a woman’s lips and smile should be.
“Cheers,” she whispered, and we all sipped.
“Damn!” Sherman said. “This feels warm all down in my chest.”
“That’s what it does,” Tanya said, a note of triumph in her voice.
“This how rich people feel all the time?” my cousin asked.
Tanya’s reply was to lean forward and kiss him.
Sherman already knew how to kiss. After a moment with her mouth, he moved to the side of her neck. This caress brought out a smile, and the next thing I knew Mona gave me a peck on the mouth. My tongue was ready, but her lips moved quickly to my ear.
“We should go in the other room and leave them alone,” she whispered.