Richard Price - The Whites

Once they were inside the semi-darkened bedroom, Carmen immediately slipped back under the covers. But Billy, intuiting that she might need some breathing room for whatever was to come, opted for the lone chair, lugging it across the room from its spot beneath the far window to the side of the bed.

“When I was fifteen,” she began, “I would’ve done anything, anything to have Rudy Ramos like me, just like me. You have no idea what I thought of myself back then. My father was so rotten, such a lousy human being, and my mother was his dishrag. Then my father left her for another woman and moved to Atlanta. Which was good, I thought, because now it would get better between us, but she just, overnight, turned into this sour old widow. I would be like, ‘Mommy, be happy, you’re free,’ but no, she just, ‘Who’d want me now,’ I mean, she was good-looking, thirty-seven years old, but she shut herself down, started yelling at me and Victor nonstop over nothing, anything, just never let up…”

Despite the marathon hours she had spent recuperating in this room, Billy thought he had never seen her look so exhausted, her eyes like swollen almonds beneath half-mast lids.

“And I knew Rudy, Little Man everybody called him, from the building and from school, not ‘knew him,’ he was a year ahead of me, but… And I didn’t think about him all that much, then one day I just did and I couldn’t stop, it was like I had suffered a stroke, but I was nothing to him, just some ghost of a girl who lived where he lived and went to Monroe… He was a big deal on the basketball team, and between games and practices he’d hardly ever leave school before five o’clock, and a lot of those days I’d find things to do in the after-school program so I could go home when he did. I mean, I was so fucked up that I wouldn’t even walk on the same side of the street as him, but I’d always manage to enter the building when he did so we’d go up the stairs at the same time, and I hated that I lived one flight below him because if I lived on his floor or the one higher then that would be one more flight I’d have to be near him, just day after day like that, agonizing over how maybe tomorrow I should walk in front of him instead of behind him, behind him instead of in front of him… And his bedroom was right above mine, 3F and 4F, and I’d hear him walking around above my head and sometimes he’d be doing himself, and the bedsprings would creak and I’d lay down in my own bed and…”

“Whoa, whoa.”

“Billy, please, let me tell you.”

“Carmen, I can’t hear this.”

“Why? You’re the man I love, the father of my children, and I’m telling you things about me that I never could before.”

“OK, OK, Jesus.”

“What, are you jealous? He’s been dead more than twenty years.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Billy scoffed, thinking, She’s been cheating on me with this kid, walking around with him in her head since the day they met.

Then as quick as the feeling had come down on him it lifted, Billy recognizing that what was really getting to him was not jealousy but the realization that if he hung in for this right now, that baffling and invisible dragon he’d been protecting her from all these years might finally begin to take on form and he might not to be able to handle its appearance.

“Are you angry at me?” she said. “Do you want me to stop? I’ll stop, I will, just tell me to.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he repeated.

“I’m serious, Billy, I will.”

“I’m serious, too,” he said, then forced himself to add, “I want to hear it all.”

For a long moment, she looked at him like the liar he was, then carried on.

“It took me maybe two months before I had the courage to say something to him, even just bullshit, and I decided this one day, I was going to say, ‘Your sweater’s so fly.’ I thought about saying ‘so tight,’ ‘so dope,’ ‘so gangsta,’ ‘ill,’ ‘phat,’ ‘snap,’ ‘the bomb,’ ‘ da bomb,’ but I liked ‘fly’ the best, and at lunch I finally went up to him in the cafeteria, but instead of saying, ‘Your sweater’s so fly,’ I was nervous and I said, ‘My sweater’s so fly,’ and the kids at his table heard it and they all started laughing, and he was, he said, ‘Your sweater’s so fly?’ but looking at them not at me, ‘I’m happy for you,’ still looking at them, like to get their approval, and in that moment when he looked at them instead of me, with that stupid grin on his face? I saw him for what he was, a self-centered immature boy with a little bit of a cruel streak. But I had been in love, so the realization hit me like a train… I don’t know if I felt like I actually hated him? But God, did he put a hole in my chest that day.”

Carlos came into the room, climbed into bed, curled into Carmen’s side, and quickly fell asleep. Although his son still hadn’t said a word about the other day, he’d been sleeping, since then, almost as much as his mother.

“Later, after school, I saw him go into our building and I didn’t want to go inside, I didn’t want to walk up the stairs with him, didn’t want to be in my room and hear his creaky bed over my head, so I just sat on the stoop remembering his face when he said that, ‘Your sweater’s so fly?’ not even giving me the consideration of eye contact. And I’m just sitting there like that, feeling more and more humiliated, more and more like an invisible nothing, and then at one point I looked up and I saw these two guys coming towards our building, and the way they were carrying themselves made me nervous. Hoodies, sunglasses on a cloudy day, hands in pockets, they looked like surveillance photos of themselves, and then they stopped a few feet away, had a conversation, then one of them came up to me, says, ‘Where’s Eric Franco live at, what apartment,’ and I knew, everybody in the building knew, Eric Franco dealt coke, but these guys didn’t look like they were there to score, they looked like trouble.”

Carlos started to talk in his sleep, nonsense words addressed to his brother. Billy was deaf to it, but Carmen waited until her son was finished before going on.

“But instead of giving them his apartment, 5C… I don’t remember consciously thinking about what could happen if I said 4F? But that’s what came out of my mouth.”

Billy stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“What? Nowhere.”

“You’re leaving?” Carmen saying it like, leaving her.

“No, I was just stretching,” he said idiotically.

“Can you sit down?”

“I’m down,” he said, “I’m right here.”

He began to reach for her hand, then withdrew, sensing that whatever she needed right now, physical contact was not on the list.

“I don’t know if I really heard the gunshot from the fourth floor or just imagined that I did — I don’t see how I could have, it was a.22 handgun going off inside a six-story building, but all of a sudden I felt this, this gripping sensation inside my chest, and a minute or two later those two came back out of the building the same way they went in, not rushed, looking around without seeming to be. And after they walked past me they stopped and had another one of those side-mouth conversations, and I knew they were discussing what to do about me, the witness… I was staring at the ground, I could no more run at that moment than I could fly, I was totally theirs whatever they wanted to do with me, but when I finally managed to raise my head they were gone.”

“Carm…”

“What happened was that they rang the bell and when Rudy opened the door they shot him through the eye and the bullet went into his brain.”

“Carmen…”

“But I killed him. Nobody could tell me different. I knew what I knew before I knew it… ‘4F,’ I said.”