Bereavements (8 page)

It was time to stop the man, to imply a different reason for her “teacher’s” call, but there seemed no way to do so without knowing and using his name.

He went on—

“Them dumb mothers are fightin’ with
glass
now. They wire a piece on the end of a stick. Beats the shit outta you, don’ it? But
hey! He’s back.”
Whispering.
“I sent him for a six-pack.”

The man must have put his palm over the phone; then moments later loosened his grip. She heard faintly: “Put down that change. Now get over here and set her straight. You tell her I don’ lay no fuckin’ finger on you—ever. I’m one father loves his goddamn son,
loves
him, and you
know
it.”

The wait seemed minutes long and she pictured the boy half a room away, staring puzzled at the phone in his father’s hand.

“Who? Who
is it?”

“Your
teacher,
stupid! Miss Evans.”

“Miss
Evans?”

Muffled, barely heard: “Yeah! Yeah! What the fuck s’a matter with you? Here! An’ tell her the truth f’a change, like I said.”

She heard the boy breathing.

“Hello?”

“Angel?”—needlessly.

“Yes?”

“Listen carefully. Don’t speak for a moment. Your father thinks I’m your teacher, but I’m the . . . the . . .” Where were the words, any at all that would do? “I’m the . . .
person”
(how
awful!)
“who put the
ad
in the newspaper . . . the
Voice . . .
which you answered . . . with your card. Remember?”

After a moment: “Oh”—guarded, dead, but then “—
Oh!”
with faint surprise, perhaps even a hint of pleasure. “Yes.”

“Good. Very good. Now listen. I’m afraid I’ve created a terribly embarrassing situation.” (Her diction!) “I mean—your father thinks I’m your teacher. Could you—make something up?—explain that I called because. . . well, I’m missing a
composition
of yours, which you didn’t turn in? I need it in order to grade you?”

All of which must have sounded extraordinarily silly.

“Angel—?”

“Yes?”

“You
could
do something like that. I mean—a little suitable lie. After all, you and I . . . this is a private matter. I’m not sure your father would understand.”

“No.”

“Then will you call me later? Tomorrow perhaps? I’ll give you the number. Will you remember, or write it down? It’s 555-7274.”

“Yes.”

“Mrs.
Evans.”

“Yes.”

He had a
nice
voice. “You’ll call?”

“Yes.”

Not too unlike Jamie’s; slightly deeper, perhaps. “Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“555-72-74.”

“Yes. That’s easy.”

“Then we’ll talk, and arrange . . . a visit.”

“Yes.”

Pause. “Well. . .” She didn’t want to hang up, desiring to hear a thousand
yes’s.
“Well then—I’ll be waiting . . .”

Waiting . . .

Like Bruno David Carlson-Wade.

How few words there were for all the desperate, lonely people!

Angel replaced the phone, stood silent, head bowed, his back to his father, listening to the ripping of cardboard from the six-pack of beer. Mixing with it—from the bedroom down the dark narrow hall where a door was ajar—came a light thin moaning to which neither father or son reacted in any way; they were so used to the sound they didn’t hear it, or, hearing, ignored it, as they did the multiple, incessant noise, human and traffic, rising from the street four floors below.

“It ain’t cold enough, dummy,” came the barely audible complaint, more to himself than Angel. Then, loudly: “What was
that
all about? ‘yes, yes, yes.’ I din’ hear
noth
in’ like I tol’ you t’say.”

“She didn’t want what you thought.”

What?! What’s’at!”
—Teasing him, prodding him, desiring to irritate, like a sharp, annoying elbow in the ribs. “Speak up, love. I can’t hear you; I can’t hear what y’sayin’!”

“I
said
—She
wanted
something else. It wasn’t what you thought.”

“Oh?
She din’ see that spook-eye a’ yours? An’ that chop in y’head? Y’got hair missin’, didja
know
that? It
mars
y’beauty, spoils that spun-sugar hair-do we all love so well.” Pause. “An’
what’s
‘easy? What did
that
mean?”

Angel turned and looked at his father: Aurelio Carlos Rivera, seeing him with the usual tinge of resentment, envy and love-hate, for the man was so many things that the boy, at fourteen was not, and maybe never would be: a full, totally-handsome six-feet-two, with the body of an athlete, stone-hard and strongly muscled from the heavy construction work he did. The head, closely crew-cropped, was a dark magnificent skull, and the olive skin so deeply tanned from constant exposure in all kinds of weather, but especially now at summer’s end, made him seem more like a Black in the half-light of the room than the full-blooded Spaniard he was.

In the apartment, he sometimes, though not often, walked or lounged naked: big-balled and heavily-pricked, to Angel’s almost trembling rage whenever his infrequent eyes dared to find the man’s sex. At the moment, he wore a pair of white jockey shorts—occasionally the uniform of his beer-drinking evenings when he decided to say home. The briefs belonged to Angel but were wash-thin and stretched, one half the ass peppered with holes, much too big for the boy and too small for the man.

Angel’s eyes tried to hold his father’s and not wander to look at all of him. “What do you mean?
What’s
easy?”

“That’s
what you tol’ that woman: somethin’s
easy.”

Angel: “Oh! I got homework. She wants it tomorrow. I’m a week late.”

Aurelio staggered, pretending overwhelming shock. “Since
when?!
You kidding? I never seen you do no homework all your life.” A trickle of misplaced beer ran from his wet chin to the curled black hair on his chest, frothing a bit.

“Well, I got a composition to write.”

Aurelio pulled absently at a dark nipple the size of a quarter, teasing it until it was pointed and hard.

“What’s a composition?”

Angel laughed, genuinely pleased, with a sense of winning, as if they were at a game of checkers and he had just jumped his father’s last two kings.

“You don’t
know?!
Boy! That’s what I call asshole dumb.”

The man flushed, his anger always quick, and sometimes quickly deadly. He had once killed a man.

He could see the boy was deliberately provoking him, black eyes snapping.

“Look—I’ll break that
other
front tooth for you, then you’ll have a’ asshole up
front,
maybe where it belongs.”

He paused, giving himself time to recover, knowing the dizzying blood-rush quality of his rage and its dangerous potential, then made a display of indifference and ease, settling comfortably and self-loved into his own fine, handsome body, brushing the wetness from his chest.

“So tell me. What’s a composition?”

Angel was amazed. His father sometimes really
could
be shit-dumb.

“It’s a . . . ” He shrugged, impatient. “How can I explain? It’s jus’ some . . . writing: your thoughts and ideas about things, your impressions. Like—” (affecting exhausted boredom) “like—‘What I Did On My Summer Vacation’ . . . ‘My Visit To My Grandmother’s’ . . . ‘A Walk Through Central Park.’ ”

Aurelio’s body suddenly gyrated like a puppet with its strings tangled, his mouth wide open and explosive with exaggerated laughter.

“You
—! A
walk
through Central Park! Don’t make it at night, love. Sweet, juicy chicken like you gets laid, maybe gang-banged. They rape boys, y’know.” And with a fake leer—“What’s a’ difference?”

Aurelio’s deliberate confusion of sex, the reference to an easy interchange of male and female roles, frightened and infuriated Angel, but kept occurring so frequently he had learned to live with it, half pushing it down into the place where he kept all the things he dared not to think about too clearly.

“Besides,” Aurelio went on, but not without a sly, sidelong glance which he plainly wanted the boy to see, “that’s a essay;
essay,
you ass-headed kid.
Composition
is in painting; it’s like when you say—” and his mocking manner now became put-on fairy and fancy “—like when you say the composition in this here painting is good.’ ” Again manly, with a half-shout, as if angry: “Or’ it ain’t good!’ You don’t write no goddamn composition.”

“Auri—” which was what Angel had learned to call his father, “it’s the same word but a different meaning.”

Hands thrown, the boy pretended to “give up.” “Okay. So I’m writing ‘a’ es-say.”

Aurelio scratched thoughtfully around his navel, allowed a thick calloused hand a moment’s loving, possessive pressure over the heavy mass between his legs.

“On what?” he demanded. “You ain’t
got
no grandmother.”

The man was clearly out to needle him tonight, and now, for the first time, Angel realized that Auri had known all along what a composition was. He was sparring—always so neat, so slick. He could have Angel dancing around in the ring without even knowing it.

“And when you did,” his father continued with a big white-toothed teasing smile, “when you had a grandmother—on your mother’s side, she was
black.”

Always a reference to his blackness, as if he cared. Angel was fairer in skin than Aurelio, but perhaps not if he stayed as much in the sun; and if the blackness came out at all, it was in the small fullness of the mouth, his very slightly broad and flattened nose, but most of all in the hair; Aurelio’s was thick, heavy, straight, blue-black, fine; Angel’s was a dark cocoa brown with a tight if not kinky curl that made the most flattering and (he thought) impressive “in”-way to wear it, a modest Afro. To complete the disguise, he’d had his left ear pierced; in it he sometimes wore a tiny seed of silvered metal, or, on rare occasions, just for fun, or when there were rumors of an impending street fight, a thin, dangling, almost inch-long coke spoon. This, of course, he didn’t dare wear to school, and to let his father see it was to risk getting the shit kicked out of him.

“Why don’t you,” Aurelio continued, considering, his expression and posture one of put-on concentration, “write about what we’ve got holed up in there”—pointing toward the crack of light from the bedroom at the end of the long dark hall. “Maybe Miss Nosey-ass Evans would like to know a little more about the seamy, sad, sordid side a’ life.”

The man was, with these words, drained of energy and interest in both his son, and in the beauty and keen sense of full-flowered selfhood of his own exposed body.

“Go see her,” he advised Angel softly. “You haven’t looked in today; say hello. After all . . . ” He didn’t finish, but crushed the beer can, watching it crinkle like paper under the pressure of his broad fingers.

Angel didn’t move. His eyes dropped from his father’s now-expressionless face to the black curled hair on the chest, the flat expanse of clearly-muscled stomach with its half-hidden navel, to the rounded, too-f crotch; then quickly to knees, feet, floor, where they remained.

“After all . . . ” Auri repeated, concluding this time, “she’s your mother.”

Dear Bruno . . .

Among the very few options available to her, Mrs. Evans considered her salutation. She desired to write a brief, pleasant letter, but a preliminary one, subject to editing and thoughtful review, then copy a final draft.

She scratched out the
Dear Bruno.
Obviously, it was too personal; indeed, in bad taste, even to a boy.

He had addressed her
Dear Madam
—But to return,
Dear Sir,
would be offensively formal, defeating at the very start the purpose of her letter.

Dear Mr. Carlson-Wade . . .

That also seemed inadequate—more the beginning of a business letter than one designed to be a warm
gesture
of possible exploratory friendship.

Well, then, since she intended to give her “wheel of fate” a hearty if not totally vigorous spin, why
not, Dear Bruno?

She wrote it again. No; it was impossible, even after the boy’s daring exposure of himself, his extravagant, “I . . . mail to you what is essentially my heart.” Perhaps he regretted the words now; sobered, in the sane light of morning, they may have appeared an embarrassment.