Ben Greenman - What He's Poised to Do - Stories

The following week, Hebert held another event at another rock club. She attended. He read. The audience was somewhat more hostile this time; a young man stood up without being acknowledged and challenged Hebert on his decision to speak only English. “Don’t get so exercised about it, man,” Hebert said, and enough of the crowd laughed that he was able to move on. Afterward there was a reception in the lobby, as before. Deborah stood in the corner with her legs crossed and watched Hebert work the room. It should have been a source of excitement to see him swerve from guest to guest. He noticed her and drew near. “Hello,” he said. He was looking at her like she was already hooked, and she decided to play along. She heard a murmur ripple through the crowd standing near the door. In the cab he said nothing. In the elevator he said nothing. They sat on the edge of his bed and watched television. At last she grew impatient, reached into his pants without an invitation, and began to work on him. The result was not what she had expected. His entire body was consumed by a spasm of pleasure. He leapt up and plunged back down. “Oh! Oh!” he yelled. His face was as red as his eyes were bright. During the next hour he made love to her three times, each more intensely than the last. He took her out to sea. Stretched out beneath him, she wondered if she would forget this, too.

SHE DID, WITHIN A DAY. She shut her eyes tightly and tried to recover it, any part of it, but she could not. She did not even tell Boatman that she had gone back to Hebert. “I have a magazine for you,” Boatman said. “How about lunch tomorrow?”

“I feel a little sick,” she said.

She canceled a second lunch date and then the cures began to come in on two legs: Wilbon, who owned a watch shop; Denis, a musician; Leigh, a British actor who had worked briefly in adult films; Charles, an optometrist. She even considered a dalliance with Boatman, raised the issue with him at lunch. He looked at her, then burst out laughing, then took her hand in his. “I’m going to have to say no,” he said. “I’d rather keep living through you, if that’s okay.” This she remembered down to the last precise thing — the streak of blue ink on Boatman’s right hand, which had the appearance of a vein — but she could not retrieve a single detail about Hebert. She went back to read his essays, found them brilliant as always, but had no memory of the man. What did he smell like? How did he conduct himself while at her breast? “What is happening to me?” she asked Boatman. He laughed but said he didn’t believe her. She flipped through the blips in her mind: the tall one, the skinny one, the goatee, the glasses. She could see them perfectly, but when she tried to come around to the other side of them, she could not. They were pictures in a deck of cards. She shuffled them, but it was no consolation. She called Boatman on the phone and was humiliated by the safety he felt.

She flew back to Miami on Labor Day weekend, leaving Hebert’s book in the small apartment off the rue Beauregard. Still humiliated, she met a man named James at a party in a friend’s backyard. He was large and dark and told her, soon after they met, that he thought of her as his girlfriend. “Oh?” she said. She was secretly pleased that someone was making this decision. On their fourth date he took her away for the weekend to a house he had bought with his ex-wife. “I always thought it needed a birdhouse,” he said. He fashioned the birdhouse carefully, and it was a testament to his skills as a carpenter. He made a frame. He added a round front door and a window as decoration. He shingled the roof with tiny shingles and hammered in a perch just beneath the door. She watched him from the porch.

James stood back and looked at what he had made. Deborah called to him. Her voice turned him. Just then an untimely gust of wind arrived. It knocked down the umbrella post, which bumped against the table, which tilted downward. The birdhouse slid into the creek. “Well, hell,” he said. “There it goes.” And there it went. It floated down the creek until the creek fed the river and continued on down the river, turning as if with purpose whenever the river turned. People on the opposite bank saw the floating birdhouse and laughed at it, amazed. James came back inside the house, his face darkened by his failure. Deborah was sitting in a love seat rereading the magazine that Boatman had given her. The piece about Hebert quoted one of his famous statements, that music was a superior substitute for time itself: “What is not remembered in a song is kept nonetheless,” he wrote, “because the next notes collect those that came before them.” She looked at the picture that accompanied the article. That was exactly how he had looked when he had taken her to bed, or was it? James kicked the wall next to her chair. “I want that birdhouse to roast in hell,” he said. She knew she would remember everything she was hearing. As she told Boatman on the phone that night, it wasn’t so much what James said as the way he was saying it. “Hey,” Boatman said. “That’s exactly why I’m going to remember what you’re saying now.”

I’M GOING TO MALAWI. I’M WRITING THAT DOWN ON A SINGLE sheet of paper, folding it into thirds, putting it into an envelope, and leaving it on the kitchen table leaning up against the sugar bowl. When I go, I don’t want you to have any outstanding questions about where I’ve gone. Though most of your questions are outstanding. Pause. Get it? Remember when I used to do that, make a joke and then wait a minute before announcing it back to you like you were blind or deaf or dumb? I’ve been doing that to you ever since we were kids, ever since I nicknamed you Tails on account of your pigtails and it stuck. Fifteen years later you are a grown woman with a fine shape, top-shelf and bottom-drawer both, and it’s that bottom drawer that lets the nickname live, even though I had to take off the s . I call you Tail sometimes because it makes you laugh and sometimes also makes you hot, but usually not in public, where you’re Angie.

Last year I made a mistake in this regard, and I apologize. We were out for a walk, talking, and Lee Johnson who joined the seminary overheard our conversation and told me he thought the name was disrespectful to one of our beautiful sisters. I explained to him that it wasn’t at all, that I was honoring one of the most divine aspects of you or any other sister, the woman’s form, and that he could see how it was intended if he watched me when I bent down in the morning to kiss you good-bye before I went off to the radio station for my shift. You are a beautiful sleeper. You are beautiful awake, too, except when you try to be funny, which is why you shouldn’t try to be. You look good, like I said. You’re morally certain. You notice things about people and comment upon them in a manner that almost always leads to improvement. You’re full of more love than hate. Why bother with funny? Leave that to me. You can come visit me in Malawi.

Let’s go back twelve days. You go first, and when you get there, take everything off and slip into bed. When I arrive, I’m bound to be disoriented and dispirited from the trip — no one likes going backward — and I want to get a little sugar before I head out into the cruel summer. You can leave the black bra on if you want. It does its job in the way of shaping and holding but is camouflaged against what you always like to call your African complexion. The first time you told me that, you were fourteen, maybe, and I was a year older, like always, and I was running with your brother Larry in that gang he had for a little while before he decided to become an accountant. Tough guy. The gang was called the Tigers, and Larry said we had to snatch a purse for initiation. I didn’t want to, so I went around to all the girls I knew and asked them if they had a spare purse I could borrow. The first two girls I asked looked at me crooked, like maybe I was going to wear it for my own pleasure, but you just said “sure” and ran upstairs and got me one. It was black and you said you preferred bright colors to go with your African complexion. “Complexion?” I said. “But Africa’s so simple. See lion, flee lion.” I paused. “Get it?” I said. “No cars, no bars, no drugs, no hustlers. Just a lion wanting you to be his lunch.”