Джоан Силбер - Improvement

“They’re coming again Saturday. You’re not coming Saturday, right?”

I never came on Saturdays. I cut him a look.

“Because if you are,” he said, “I’ll tell them not to come.”

You couldn’t blame a man who had nothing for wanting everything he could get his hands on. This was pretty much what I thought on the bus ride back to the subway. Oh, I could blame him. I was spending an hour and a half to get there every week and an hour and a half to get home, so he could entertain his ex? I was torn between being pissed off and my preference for not making trouble. But why had Boyd told me? The guy could keep his mouth shut when he needed to.

He didn’t think he needed to. Because I was a good sport. What surprised me even more was how painful this was starting to be. I could imagine Boyd greeting Lynnette, in his offhand, Mr. Cool way. “Can’t believe you dropped in.” Lynnette silky and tough, telling him it had been too long. But what was so great about Boyd that I should twist in torment from what I was seeing too clearly in my head?

I was sitting on the bus during this anguish. I wanted Boyd to comfort me. He had a talent for that. If you were insulted because some asshole at daycare said your kid’s shoes were unsuitable, if you splurged on a nice TV and then realized you’d overpaid, if you got fired from your job because you used up sick days and it wasn’t your fault, Boyd could make it seem hilarious. He could imitate people he’d never met. He could remind you it was part of the ever-expanding joke of human trouble. Not just you.

When I got back to the apartment, Oliver was actually asleep in his bed—had Kiki drugged him?—and Kiki was in the living room watching the Cooking Channel on TV. “You watch this crap?” I said.

“How was the visit?”

“Medium. Who’s winning on Chopped ?”

“The wrong guy. But I have a thing for Marcus Samuelsson.” He was the judge who had a restaurant right here in Harlem, a chef born in Ethiopia, tall and good-looking. Good for Kiki.

“Oliver spilled a lot of yogurt on the floor but we got it cleaned up,” she said.

I wanted a drink, I wanted a joint. What was in the house? I found a very used bottle of Beaujolais in the kitchen and poured glasses for us both.

“When does he get out?” Kiki asked.

“They say January. He’s holding up okay.”

“He has you.”

So he did. I’d gotten more attached to Boyd, from all my visiting in that place, from our weekly private talking in that big public room. We made our own little kingdom of conversation, however awkward it was, the two of us saying whatever came to us, with the chairs and the tables around us the sites of other families’ dramas. We had our snacks from the machine and our stories; the two of us and Oliver. Sometimes Oliver got us silly; it was all very precious. And every week I admired the way Boyd hosted us, the way he settled into the plastic chair as if we were just hanging out, waiting, on our way to some place better. Which we were.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but when you got divorced,” I said to Kiki, “was it because one of you had been messing around with someone else?”

“Hey,” Kiki said, “where did that come from?”

“Someone named Lynnette has been visiting Boyd.”

Kiki considered this. “Could be nothing.”

“So when you left Turkey, why did you leave?”

“It was time.”

I admired Kiki’s way of deciding what was none of your business, but it made you think there was business there.

And it was my bad luck that Con Ed got its act together the very next evening, so electricity flowed in the walls of Kiki’s home to give her light and refrigeration and to pump her water and the gurgling steam in her radiators. I called her to say Happy Normal.

“Normal is overrated,” she said. “I’ll be so busy next week.”

“Me, too,” I said.

Oliver hardly ever had sitters. He was in daycare while I went off to my unglamorous employment as a part-time receptionist at a veterinarian’s office (it paid lousy but the dogs were usually nice), and at night I took him with me if I went to friends’ or to Boyd’s, when I used to stay with Boyd. Sometimes Boyd had a cousin who took him.

“Oliver wants to say hi,” I told my aunt.

“I love you, Great Kiki!” Oliver said.

This didn’t move her to volunteer to sit for him again, and I thought it was better not to ask again so soon.

Oliver wasn’t bad at all on the next visit to Rikers. And one of the guards at the first gate was nicely jokey with him. Because he was a kid? Because he was a white kid with a white mother? I didn’t know but I was glad.

The weather was colder outside and he got to wear his favorite Spiderman sweater, which Boyd said was very sharp.

“Your mom’s looking good too,” Boyd said.

“Better than Lynnette?”

I hadn’t meant to say any such whiny-bitch thing, it leaped out of me. I was horrified. I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, was I?

“Not in your league,” Boyd said. “Girl’s nowhere near.” He said this slowly and soberly. He shook his onion head for emphasis.

And the rest of the visit went very well. Boyd suggested that Oliver now had superpowers to spin webs from the ceiling—“You going to float above us all, land right on all the bad guys”—and Oliver was so tickled he had to be stopped from shrieking with glee at top volume.

“Know what I miss?” Boyd said. “Well, that, of course. Don’t look at me that way. But also I miss when we used to go ice-skating.”

We had gone exactly twice, renting skates in Central Park, falling on our asses. I almost crushed Oliver one time I went down. “You telling everyone you’re the next big hockey star?” I said.

“I hope there’s still ice when I get out,” he said.

“There will be,” I said. “It’s soon. Before you know it.”

Kiki had now started to worry about me; she called more often than I was used to. She’d say, “You think Obama’s going to get this Congress in line? And how’s Boyd doing?”

I let her know we were still an item, which was what she wanted to know. Why in God’s name would I ever think of splitting up with Boyd before I could at least get him back home and in bed again? What was the point of all these bus rides if I was going to skip that part?

“You wouldn’t want me to desert him at a time like this,” I said.

“Be careful,” she said.

“He’s not much of a criminal,” I said. “He was just a bartender, not any big-time guy.” I didn’t have to tell her not to mention this to my father.

“Anybody can be in jail, I know that,” Kiki said. “Hikmet was in jail for thirteen years in Turkey.”

I thought she meant an old flame of hers but it turned out she meant a famous poet, who was dead before she even got there. A famous Communist poet. One of the prisons he’d been in was near where she went in her years there and people had pointed it out. Nice to hear she was open-minded on the jail question. Kiki had views beyond most white people.

Boyd wasn’t in jail for politics, although some people claimed the war on drugs was a race war, and they had a point. My mom and dad were known to smoke dope every now and then, and was any cop stop-and-frisking them on the streets of their nice neighborhood?

“So can I ask you,” I said, “were there drugs around when you were in Turkey?” What a blurter I was these days. “Were people selling hash or anything?”

“Not in our circles. I hate that movie, you’ve seen that movie. But there was smuggling. I mean in antiquities, bits from ancient sites. People went across to the eastern parts, brought stuff back. Or they got it over the border from Iran. Beautiful things, really.”