Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

He strolls way uptown, along the landfill by Riverside Drive, past the shanties, then east toward a shop full of tuxedos.

A bell sounds at the shop door and a small black man with granite-colored hair comes from behind a curtain, a pencil at his ear. He looks down at the mud on Walker’s boots, gives a derisory eye-flick at his filthy overalls and the red hat strung under his chin, and goes immediately to a row of cheap rentals, but Walker directs the clerk to the expensive rack. Under a faint yellow light he tries on a large black jacket with a shiny velvet collar. It is so long unused there is a mothball in the pocket, but it’s the only one left in his size, since there’s a dance in Harlem that night and a skein of men has been in and out of the shop all day. Walker counts out money for the suit rental and a new shirt.

At home he washes his body in the porcelain sink and tries on the frilly white shirt. The buttons seem tiny and foreign. Arthritis has already begun to nibble at his hands. Walker can predict a rainy day by the pain in his fingertips. He doesn’t button the neck of his shirt but lets the bow tie cover the gap.

He can’t help chuckling at the way the shirt frills rumple at his chin, at how exceedingly white the cloth is. “You are so goddamn handsome, Nathan Walker!” he says to the dusty mirror, and then he leaps across the room in delight and nervousness, swinging around a broken stovepipe, his knees protesting at the sudden violence of dance, a silver cross bouncing at his neck.

The cross was bought for two dollars from a woman downstairs, a fortune-teller who always wears a long red dress and two feathers in her hair. She tells the future by the pattern of spit that tobacco makes in a spittoon. Men, and women too, lean across the metal cup and spit into it, the men in big gobs, the women in shy dribbles. She stares down into the tobacco grains and prescribes remedies for future despair. Everybody is due despair in their lives, she says, and therefore everybody needs a remedy — it’s a fact of life and it only costs two dollars to cure, a guaranteed bargain.

The cross, she has told Walker, will keep his heart from ferrying its way into his mouth when he is nervous. He must wear it against his skin all day long, no matter what.

Walker stands by the piano that has been given to him as a gift. A white ribbon has been tied around the instrument, so he doesn’t open the lid. He touches the smooth ribbon, and then he rubs his fingers along the piano lid, drags a stool across, and sits — in underpants and white shirt and silver cross — pretending to play, running his fingers through the air, inventing ragtime, until he gets so sweaty he takes off the shirt. He rubs his lips together for a tune and his music grows louder and louder until he hears a foot stomping on the ceiling above him and a roar: “Shut up already, down there!”

The following day he and Eleanor are turned away from four restaurants and refused admittance to a cinema despite their clothes. On the streets people mutter about them. Cars slow down and taunts are hurled. At home, in the apartment on 131st Street, Walker must bend his body to duck under the doorframe. Eleanor puts her hand in his jacket pocket as he carries her over the threshold.

Her waist is wren-thin and adolescent, and he whispers that he could carry ten of her and she says, “Don’t you even think about it, I’m the only one of me you’re ever going to get.”

She takes the mothball from his pocket and shakes her head in amusement, thumping him playfully on the chest. The long white taffeta of her wedding dress swishes as she walks down the corridor to the common bathroom. She flushes the mothball down the toilet.

“Get ready for me,” she shouts along the corridor over the gurgle of water.

“I’m ready, hon.”

Back in the room, she latches the door. She has translated her face by removing her makeup. Just seventeen, she looks even younger. Walker is out of the jacket and standing by the piano, motioning for her to play. She shakes her head, no, and drags him away from it, onto the single bed, where they fall in a rehearsal of many nights of dreams.

“Ready my foot,” she says, and her hands disappear inside his shirt, around to his back, and she pulls him very close.

They move like two chiaroscurists above the covers, black and white, white and black, then sleep under foreheads wet with sweat. They lie on their sides, arms around each other, one hip a hill of bony pink, the other muscular brown. Eleanor wakes and kisses the scar above Nathan’s eye. The clock on the wall cuckoos for eight o’clock in the evening. Desire lies on her tongue like morning breath, and she wakes him with a playful jab to the stomach.

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” he grunts.

“Don’t fall back asleep.”

He opens his eyes. “Did y’all ever see a crane dance?”

“No.”

“One foot first, then the other.”

“Show me.”

“Sandhill cranes,” he says. “Like this. I saw them all the time in Georgia.”

She laughs as he rises from the bed and dances on the mattress.

Later, there is a loud knock at the door. Walker, in his underpants, ritually bends his head at the doorframe. He scratches his belly as his eyes adjust.

Vannucci, Power, and the fortune-teller stand, grinning, with four bottles of champagne in their hands. The fortune-teller breezes in, clicking across the floor in gold lamé heels, her butterfly sleeves hanging down. Power limps after her, his teeth already pulling at the champagne cork.

Vannucci’s balding head peeps around the open frame, then backs away, embarrassed.

But the fortune-teller sits on the bed beside Eleanor and pulls back the covers to reveal the girl’s white toes. Eleanor flushes and draws her foot back. The fortune-teller chuckles and grabs again.

Walker, leaning against the piano, struggles his way into a pair of trousers, one foot in the air, while Power tries to push him over and spray champagne down his underwear.

Only Vannucci waits outside the door until the couple is fully dressed, and then the party begins, the handle on the Victrola wound up ferociously by the red-faced Italian. He stands above the machine as the needle travels over the grooves. It gives out solitary, beautiful notes. He smiles at the rhythm, clicks his fingers, drains a glass. Power puts an empty bottle to his lips and imitates a trumpet with it. The fortune-teller lifts her dress way up high to reveal two very red garters and seamed stockings. She scissor-kicks toward the ceiling, singing with the music, the songs slowly dropping down from her throat toward her hips, where they swivel.

“You’re a classy dame,” says Power.

“Thank you, sugar. You been at the laudanum, then?”

“Why’s that?”

“Either that or you’re drunk.”

“No I ain’t.”

“Then why ain’t you dancin’?”

“You just said the word.”

“He’s drunk as a stewbum!”

“No I ain’t!”

A hush descends when Maura O’Leary appears at the door. Still in mourning black, hair in a bun, lace at her neck, she says she hasn’t come to stay. She sighs and looks around the room, sees the piano in the corner topped with bottles and a lit cigar propped over the edge, smoke curling up from it.

“Well, well, well,” she says.

“Ma’am?”

“No more ma’am. No need to call me ma’am.”

“Yessum,” says Walker.

“Maura is easiest. Call me Maura.”

“Yessum. Yes.”

She sighs. “I never thought I’d see a day like this, never thought I’d see anything like it.”

“Me neither.”

“I’m not saying it’s the best thing.”

From the far side of the room Sean Power belches and says, “Nothing wrong with it.”