Paul Beatty - Tuff

Yolanda put the palm of her hand in Winston’s face. “Save it. You’re right, I like you — more than I should, but let’s not get into it tonight, we got the rest of our lives to kiss and make up. Let’s be carefree, like those white folks on that boat. Look, they kicking it.”

Winston reached into his backpack, pulled out a frosted black bottle of Freixenet champagne, two paper cups, a brown teddy bear with a hot-pink ribbon knotted around its neck, and a Christmas card. “Shit, we kicking it.”

Sipping her champagne, Yolanda opened her handmade card. On the cover was a surprisingly decent watercolor of a black couple sitting on a mountainside outcropping, hugging and kissing to the amusement of a brood of sad-eyed Disneyesque forest animals. On the inside, written in twiggish block lettering, was the following inscription:

The essence of beauty is —

[pocket mirror]

you .

Yolanda saw her reflection framed by the sentimental bromide and succumbed to the wanton manipulation that is romance. With a cheery “Clink,” she touched paper cups with Winston. “Let’s make a toast,” Yolanda said, trying to hide her wistfulness. “A toast to love. A toast to the man who got me open with no promises, no handsome-muscle-flexing tight-butt-wiggling, and no money.”

Winston rubbed his chin, trying to determine if he’d been insulted or not, then raised his cup. “Then a toast to the woman who loves me for me, though she don’t know me from the next man.”

“Fuck the next man.”

“A toast to a woman who knows what she wants.”

Yolanda and Winston unclenched from that first kiss, tongues numb with champagne, sex organs swollen with lust, and the axes of their young worlds permanently tilted. Or as Winston so delicately phrased it, wiping lipstick from his mouth, “Everything’s going jibbity-jibbity.”

“How did I fall for that bullshit, Tuffy? ‘Everything’s going jibbity-jibbity.’ It’s all jibbity-jibbity, because you always drunk, you wino.” Yolanda was still carrying on, and Winston found himself on the living-room sofa, obediently enduring his censure. Listening to Yolanda denigrate him was like going to church Easter morning. He didn’t want to do it, but he sat still out of obligation, hands folded in his lap, hoping his headache would prevent the sermon from seeping into his brain.

As Yolanda edged toward the bookshelf, Winston froze. “Come on, Landa, don’t.” Yolanda’s substantial archives consisted of well-kept stacks of Essence, Ebony , and Chocolate Singles magazines crammed with articles entitled “Hypnotize with Pumpkin Pie,” “Atlantis, Unicorns, Black Love — Fact or Fiction?” and “Ten Good Qualities About Black Men Other than Penis Size.” Next to the periodicals were the self-help books, all written by short-Afroed women from Philadelphia: Sisters Doing It for Themselves — How to Masturbate to an African Orgasm; The Black Women’s Guide to Finding a Real Man; and Yolanda’s bible, Nigger, Please Please Me .

What bothered Winston about Yolanda’s choice of reading material wasn’t all the doctoral-cum-beauty-shop research — anthropology seeking the missing link between prehistoric Stepin Fetchit man and the genetically engineered Denzel Washington that fossilized him, or the parascientific diaries that monsterized him. I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into this lifeless thing at my feet.… I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open —behold, I, Dr. Eula Frankenstein-Barnes, author of The Good Black Man: Some Assembly Required , have created life!

What irked Winston was that Yolanda started buying this trash after they’d married, when the relationship was problem-free, at least in his mind. When Yolanda sat up in bed after sex reading The Black Woman’s Guide to Finding a Real Man , he’d explode. “What, I’m not a real man? How come there’s never any doubt about you being a real woman?” … And I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! Yolanda would try to calm Winston with a lecture about the problems unique to black-on-black love. Winston argued that there were no differences between black, white, Puerto Rican, or kangaroo relationships. “Problems is problems,” he’d say. “The difference is, black couples have their bedroom behavior studied by every stuck-up bitch with a degree and a word processor.”

Yolanda blithely ran her hands along the paperback bindings of her library, drawing energy from the fiction section, like an Irish-woman kissing the Blarney Stone. Winston swore on the graves of every relative he could think of that he’d change his behavior. Pulling a slim volume entitled Pimp-Slapped to Oblivion off the shelf, Yolanda opened to page 1 and cleared her throat. Winston cringed, grabbing the arm of the sofa and awaiting the literary castor oil. The words “Clockwork Orange” involuntarily escaped from his mouth. Yolanda looked up from her text. “Tuffy, I’ll work your clock. After I read this, you’ll know what time it is.” Yolanda began reading in a voice so strong it pressed Winston into the upholstery. He was feeling a special kinship with the useless button in the middle of the pillow cushion. “ ‘Chapter One.’ ” Yolanda licked her lips. “ ‘Giorgio Johnson knew better than to disrespect the pussy.’ ” Winston stood up and objected with a stamp of his foot. “There ain’t no niggers named Giorgio!” Yolanda sat him back down with the cut-eyed look. Winston wondered why he hadn’t married a woman who solved word-search puzzles on the train instead of reading this trash. Yolanda continued: “ ‘The pussy is mighty-mighty, and Giorgio Johnson was letting it all hang out, his supplication total. His prickly tongue spelunked into the nether regions of my hot, drippy pubes.…’ ” As Yolanda read, Jordy crawled along the floor toward Winston and latched onto his ankle like a koala bear to a eucalyptus tree. “Shit is awful, isn’t it?” Winston said quietly to the boy, lifting him to his knee and dandling him about. “Ever notice that none of the female characters have names? They’re called Sister Child, Mama Doll, Cousin Girl, Queen Auntie Woman Purity Love. All this we-are-family, sisterhood bullshit. Fucking books should come with needlepoint and kinte-cloth headwraps. Don’t worry, boy, I’ll read you some Pippi Longstocking later.” Jordy responded with a toothless smile. “Ah, you like that, hunh? You remember my girl Pippi don’t wear no panties.” Covering his son’s ears, Winston gave thought to countering Yolanda’s redemption literature with the authors in his canon. He imagined tearing the book from his wife’s hands, pinning her to the carpet, and haranguing her womanist sensibilities with some macho, gonadal writing. A dose of Iceberg Slim’s or Donald Goines’s pimp/ho prose would restore some gender-role balance to the relationship.

“Winston!” Yolanda yelled.

“Hunh?”

“Look at the baby!”

Jordy had burrowed under Winston’s shirt, suckling and kneading his father’s fatty left breast. Yolanda was livid. “See, boy a year old and he don’t even know what parent is what.”

“He know I’m his father,” Winston said, wiping the spittle off his nipple.

“Then he don’t know what a father is for, because you be gallivanting the streets at all hours.” Exasperated, Yolanda massaged the bridge of her nose. “Winston, what are you going to do?”

Winston said nothing and eyed Jordy, who was straddling his thigh, for manly approbation. But the look on his son’s face seemed to say, “Yeah, nigger, what are you going to do?” The child’s forlorn expression triggered some handyman impulse in the father. Winston had an urge to fix a leaky faucet, sweep the sidewalk in front of his building, maybe check to see if the window guards were all securely fastened to their mounts. He’d been warned that having a kid would change him. Make him more responsible. Less impulsive. Winston had vowed that fatherhood wouldn’t change him, at least not permanently. He knew for most young fuck-up dads the post-partum conscientiousness lasted a year. After that they reverted to the old ways with even more zealotry than before: I gots mouths to feed, brother, mouths to fucking feed . So what if the individual changed — what did it matter if his circumstances remained the same? An angel in hell was still in hell. He removed the Wilfredo Cienfuegos handbill from his pocket. He read the tag line: Stop the Violence. Why?