Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

“What is it exactly you sell?”

“Skin lighteners and hair straighteners mostly. Our clientele is colored, you understand, and the women we cater to want to look good. That’s why I made sure from day one that I was the one who got the city. I drive up with a dozen cases of the stuff in my trunk on a Monday afternoon — you have to catch them when their husbands aren’t home — and by Monday evening I’m sold out. Sold out! Like that. I don’t even do any cold-calling anymore. I got my regulars and they show off for their friends and then their friends want to know where they can get their hands on it. Word of mouth. You don’t see the encyclopedia and vacuum cleaner boys racking those numbers, let me tell you.”

When the waiter informed them that the bar was closing and Freeport asked Lila Mae to join him for a drink in his room, she agreed. Because it had already been decided. She was an inspector. This was an investigation. Freeport extracted a bill from his gold money clip and set her still half-full glass atop it. His eyes shifted about the room, searching for thieves. “You never know with white people around,” he said, chuckling. Said, “And a very good evening to you, dear chap,” to the waiter as they departed the cocktail lounge, him on unsteady feet, her with sure steps. She squinted in the sharp illumination of the lobby after the intimate lighting of the bar. Freeport’s fingers grabbed at her elbow. Lila Mae turned toward the elevator bank — they looked like Uniteds, she thought, from the extra-wide doors — and Freeport said, “You thought — you thought I was staying here? I could never afford this place. No, I’m staying across the street.”

“Of course,” Lila Mae said. As they walked down the steps to the street, the doorman wished them a good evening. Freeport nodded.

He did not lie. His hotel was right there at the subway entrance, but across the street. The night man at the Hotel Belair did not wish the pair a pleasant evening, although the rotund cadaver behind the metal grille did perhaps raise an eyebrow at them. Lila Mae and Freeport received a heartier welcome from the five inmates crouched around the lobby’s radio. They turned their attention from the boxing match and watched the couple disappear up the stairs, the gentlemen’s thin brown bathrobes scarred by cigarette burns and untold greasy-spoon gravies. They watched as the man slipped his palm into the small of the woman’s back and led her from their collective moist-lipped delectation and up the stairs. Three quiet flights up, past racks that at one point fastened fire extinguishers but had been frustrated in their purpose by anonymous miscreants of uncertain intent. Walked past dull walls who declined comment. Lila Mae sniffed the stale air. Freeport whistled. No elevator, she thought. Freeport said, “Hold on a second, my dear,” as he struggled with the lock. It wouldn’t give in to his seductions. “It sticks,” he said, “hold on there.”

She had been in smaller rooms, lived in smaller rooms than this, and in the future would certainly inhabit rooms as suspect. The street noise returned to them after a few minutes’ reprieve, through the open window, marching across the dirty green blinds: honks, catcalls, collisions. The city’s raspberry. She saw the bathroom and its cold tile: Freeport was drying three pairs of exhausted socks on the shower rod. Freeport darted to the table by the lumpy bed and removed the bottle from its brown bag. Crumpled the brown bag and tossed it to the metal basket beneath the single window. “Like a nip?” he asked. “A little nightcap?” he offered, rubbing his handkerchief across a tumbler rim and holding the glass to the light.

She told him she would undress in the bathroom. The door wouldn’t shut for warping or too many ambitious paint jobs, thus allowing a ribbon of white light at the frame through which she could hear his quick fumbling movements out of fabric, the rasping and squeaking of the tiny bed as he mounted it. Lila Mae hung her pants on the shower curtain next to the man’s socks and laid her jacket and shirt and bra over them. She felt the sweat on her feet make the hotel disinfectant on the bathroom floor tacky. She checked her face in the silver glaze of the mirror: Lila Mae had her game face on, that rigid concoction of hers. Holy, it seemed to her, because that’s how she designed it. It accorded with her own definitions.

He said stuff but she ignored it because it did not pertain to the case. She did not concern herself with his breath, corrosive and slow to dissipate, a low foul cloud. She recorded the details of the investigation, his fingers and kisses, his slow tumble on top of her, which was awkward, as if he were a seal and did not possess arms to steady himself. Her first investigation. Lila Mae made a file for her first investigation and recorded the pertinent details. The language of the report was drawn from the lumbering syntax of bureaucracy. It preserved the details but did not retain the other parts, the ones this language did not have words for. He didn’t wake when she dressed and departed, as she knew he wouldn’t.

* * *

A week ago at this time, the night of the accident, she sat in a rocking subway car, returning from O’Connor’s and staring at a newspaper headline. The late edition carried the Fanny Briggs story on the front page. Rosacea squatted on the face of the man who held the paper, making his skin as rough as tabloid paper. His eyes scanned the cheap print. He turned the pages slowly, moving on to other metropolitan catastrophes, the next mithridatic outrage, the pages fluttered behind the front page but the headline remained the same, in the same place hovering across from her. CRASH.

Now things are quite different. The headline is there, bedclothes for bums, dancing on the plume of a midtown wind tunnel. But she is advancing on it, for it contains her name and she is reclaiming her name.

She arrives a half hour early and parks the sedan across the street from Bickford’s shiny windows. When she makes out Chuck’s distinctive walk (an idiot choreography of shoulders and hips, sockets working overtime), she searches the street for signs of his shadow, the silent men who might be following him. Waits another ten minutes after he sits down in one of the window booths (exposed), then enters Bickford’s: he has not been followed by Chancre or Internal Affairs or who knows.

“So what do you have for me, Chuck?” she asks briskly, squeezing into the booth.

“ ‘So what have you got for me?’ ” Chuck complains. “That’s all you have to say for yourself? I haven’t seen you since last week.”

She imagines this the voice he reserves for domestic mishap. Marcy-tone: whining, angry. “I’m sorry, Chuck. There’s a lot going on right now.” She takes the napkin into her lap. The restaurant has recently upgraded to stiff cloth napkins in an attempt to lure some of the theater crowd. Bickford’s is in a weird place: two blocks east from the warehouses, two blocks west of the Big Houses. Bickford’s humble days as a greasy spoon are waning, the nice money is in family fare, snaring the gullible and aimless tourist crowd as they bumble lost. No more haphazard blue-plate specials, no more handwritten signs describing the cook’s daily whim. Better plates, even-tined forks, opaque globes over the fly-specked bulbs. She doesn’t recognize the menu anymore.

“You look good, at least,” Chuck says, a sucker for an apology. “For someone on the lam.”

On the lam: she is that, she thinks. “What’s the mood around the office these days?”

“It’s been pretty hectic since Chancre’s accident. Hardwick’s really been driving us, which isn’t helping things. Chancre’s still in the hospital so it’s got them worried about losing election momentum. It was a real blow to their morale.”