Уолтер Мосли - And Sometimes I Wonder About You

“Trot!” my father called out. “Twill, come on over.”

He spoke to a waiter who pulled up another table.

Twill went to join the family affair while I remained there at the entrance trying to get all the pieces of my life into some kind of semblance of order. I stood there for a full minute and was at work on the next revolution of seconds when Dimitri, whom we all called Bulldog, came over to me and put his hand on my elbow.

“It’s okay, Dad,” he said. “Everybody’s fine.”

Looking at my son was very much like peering into my own face. He was almost a walking facsimile of me except for the fact that he was five inches taller and almost always brooding.

“Come on, Dad,” he said. “Come sit with the family.”

Twill took to Clarence like his wild feline totem; more by scent than logic.

After we were settled the party went back to the way it had been before we arrived. Clarence was telling jokes and Katrina was laughing at them. She had color in her cheeks and that look in her eye that always told me when she was falling in love.

After a while I got my equilibrium back and asked, “How did you get Katrina out of that bed?”

“He came in and told me who he vas,” my wife answered. “That made me sit right up. Then he asked me vhen vas the next bus due in? I said there is no bus and he said ve better hurry then if ve want to get out of there in time for dinner. It vas so silly that I started laughing. I’m still laughing.”

A waiter came up then to refill Katrina’s wineglass, but my father waved him away. Katrina saw this exchange but said nothing. If I had tried to keep her from a drink we would have fought the rest of the night.

“And where’d you pick up Bulldog and Taty?” I asked, feeling oddly jealous of my father and family.

“Taty finally got me to come by,” Dimitri said. “Twill told her that I might help Mom get up or something but when we got to the front desk the sister told us to come down here.”

Dimitri was grinning while Katrina beamed, placing her palm on my father’s forearm from time to time. Everyone was saying how happy they were that Clarence came out of the shadows and rejoined them. No one questioned his long absence except to ask where he’d been. My wife and sons were all happy just to see him. Only Tatyana and I seemed somewhat somber. She caught my eye at one moment there and we both smiled.

“I’m checking out of the sanatorium tomorrow,” Katrina announced after devouring a plum tart. “Will you come get me, Tolstoy?”

“Me an’ Trot’ll be there with bells on.”

What could I say? The only way to get Katrina on her feet again was for her to be enveloped in the euphoria of love. I wondered if any hospital had ever used love therapy to cure their depressives and other psychosomatic sufferers.

At about eight o’clock the party broke up. Tatyana and Dimitri trundled off to their new place.

They went maybe fifteen feet when Tatyana turned and came back, to me. She took my arm and leaned in close so that no one else could hear.

“Are you all right, Mr. McGill?”

“Sure I am, Tatyana. Why?”

“My father left me, my mother, and sister and never said a word. He left and I hated him.” She was looking into me.

“What can I say, honey? You’re right.”

She kissed me and then went back to her boyfriend.

I watched them walking away, wondering at the complexities of the semisocial, partially civilized human heart.

Twill went off to find Fortune and remind the Jones gang that he was still with them. Clarence and I saw Katrina back to her room. She kissed us both good-bye but the caress lingered on my father.

“Tomorrow,” she said, looking at him.

“That’s a fine woman you got there, Trot,” Clarence said on our walk back to the apartment.

“Not hardly,” I replied.

“What do you mean by that?”

“She hasn’t belonged to me in many a year.”

After a month of a dedicated housekeeper’s hard work the smell of old socks and twenty years of brooding had finally been cleaned away from Dimitri’s room. My father, whom I would always and forevermore call Clarence, was asleep therein. He told me that he felt best sleeping in a different bed every night; that he felt safer moving around.

I should have been asleep too. My days had been strenuous and the drinking wasn’t light. But there I was in my den/office wondering how it could be that I had discovered hidden feelings for my wife and once again lost her in just a few minutes’ time?

I picked up the phone at four minutes shy of midnight and dialed a number. After four rings a recording of Aura Ullman’s voice said, “You have reached me, so talk to me.” I hung up before the beep.

I’d called Aura hoping that there might be love somewhere for me, too. But if I couldn’t have love I had to dig deeper.

“Mr. McGill,” she said after the Hotel Brown switchboard operator connected us. “What revelation do you have for me at this hour?”

Just the sound of her voice brought up a vibration like a growl in my chest. The creature making this sound in me was like a wild thing — both hunted and free.

“I want you to know that I’m not asking you for anything, but...” I said.

“But what?” There was a lot of satisfaction in those two words.

“I’d like to come over.”

“I understand,” she said with no underlying gratification. “Come along.”

I walked there. The whole time I was thinking about how foolish it was to pursue a woman like that; a woman as dangerous as any killer I’d gone up against.

I was so wrapped up in these thoughts that I bumped into a pedestrian waiting for the light at Seventy-third and Broadway — a very large pedestrian male.

White, short-sleeved, and generously tattooed, the man made a sound like the one in my chest.

He said, “What the fuck’s wrong with you, nigga?”

We live in a brave new world. Many white people in their thirties, and younger than that, take the derogatory slang from the music they listen to with no notion of insult based on race. I felt, however, that this particular individual had learned his slurs behind bars and under guard; at close quarters and in situations that were life and death on a daily basis.

I smiled broadly and held my upturned palms near shoulder level.

“Bring it on, my brother,” I said. “Bring it on.”

The tattooed man moved his left shoulder to put himself in an advantageous position for fighting. My smile deepened. He took me in with well-trained eyes, and the anger he carried around like a weapon suddenly faded. The light turned and he walked away at a pace he hoped I wouldn’t try to match.

If there was anything that should have dissuaded me from going to the Hotel Brown it was that ex-con’s reaction to me at that moment in time.

Marella and I didn’t speak until after 4:00 that morning. With her eyes, teeth, and clawlike nails (both hand and foot) she dared me to do things to her that most women have no stomach for. And no matter how far I went she was ready for more. It wasn’t fun and it certainly was not love but more like an operation to amputate a gangrenous limb or to excavate a diseased organ. We were doing each other for survival, not edification.

When it was over I wondered how far I’d have to go to get back to some version of civilization.

“I know a man in New Orleans named Gregor Vincent,” she said as she was washing the sex off both of us with a warm hand towel.

“Yeah?”

“He thinks I’m a virgin.”

“And?”

“His family owns half of South America and they do business in gold, not currency.”

“Sounds like your kinda guy.”

“We could make enough off him to take a five-year vacation and not even feel it.”