Chapter IV - Family Matters
About the time Mitkin was hitting a comfortable stride and rounding Grant’s tomb with its beautiful ivory pillars and classic Roman dome, Raphaella and I were in a confused conversation about a visit to her mother’s house. Simon, her oldest brother, was having a birthday party and I wanted to go. But, somehow my words got twisted. We always had these cursed conversations in the sober light of day, and in the midst of it, I longed for the night.
“Whatever, Davey. You can go or not, do what feels good for you baby.”
She called me Davey for one of two reasons. One, she was absolutely enamored with me, or two, she was about to tell me to hit the road because she was starting to tire of me.
“But, I don’t mind going at all,” I said. I looked for an answer, but she had gone to the back of the apartment, to a closet, where she whisked a summer scarf off the shelf, around her neck and over her head. It was pink and white and stylish. Next she grabbed her cat-eye sunglasses, her purse and keys, and spoke to me as she went.
“Then go, Davey. It’s just that you’re doing that thing again, that high eyebrow thing where you want me to feel your answer instead of you just saying it, straight. You know, like a man.”
I frowned. “Do you want me to go, Raphaella?”
“My brother does.”
Her brother. I liked him, I liked all of her brothers and her mother too, but I didn’t care that her brother wanted me there. What about her? My puerile heart wanted a slobbering show of devotion, but she just didn’t get it. I hated her for not getting it. Not getting me. I thought of leaving her that very moment, but I stayed. I always stayed, always waiting for things to change, for her to do all the tender things I saw lovers do on sitcoms, or on the benches of Central Park. I was such a fool. I took the frames of people’s lives for the entire reel and then tried to live the fairy tale. And on this hot August day, I would do just that, live a fairy tale that seemed always about to deliver something other than the drab, damp shades of confused, misguided love.
“So that’s it,” I said. “That’s it?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” she sighed. “Yeah Davey, I think it’s time for us, or me, or you, or whoever the hell is headin’ out to this party, to hit the road.” She snatched her sunglasses from her face and eyed them. “What’s this?” she said using her shirt to wipe a smudge clean. Then as if doing the same with the conversation, she said, “You hittin’ it with me or not?”
I swallowed hard and tried not to show my anger. “Let’s go.”
We’d almost reached her mother’s house when traffic backed up and I realized it would remain this way until the invading suburban Yankee fans slipped safely back to New Jersey with their car windows rolled up real tight. This was how I’d come to think about the South Bronx since getting to know Raphaella and her family. I’d made their town my own, though I’d neither lived nor worked there. And I didn’t share the same skin color as most of its residents. I was a liberal white kid who wanted desperately to relate to a world I had only read about. Dating Raphaella, a mixed girl from the boogie-down Bronx, well, that just about made me authentic. I liked feeling authentic. Waiting in traffic, I was free to grumble at the stupid “outsiders” who hypocritically came to the jungle for some entertainment. I could smugly honk my horn and holler for them to “go back to the burbs.” In short, I could be what I always wanted to be, a New Yorker.
Of course, I wanted to be a happy New Yorker, not one under the enslaving spell of an enigmatic girlfriend with magnificent cheekbones. I shifted the car like a third world taxi-man and looked over at Raphaella. Would she at least say something civil before reaching the party? She didn’t look back. I shifted and looked at her again, this time purposefully in an attempt to start conversation. The silence she loved killed me.
“Come on, Raphie, lighten up. I don’t want your mom to see us fighting, besides, why are we fighting? What is it, huh? What’s wrong?”
“Well, one thing that’s really wrong is Michael Jackson. His skin is getting lighter every year. Don’t you find that odd?” She turned to me. “And what about famine in Mozambique?” She said Mozambique incorrectly, making it come out Mozambeekee.
“Mozambique,” I said.
“Exactly.”
I shifted again, and stared.
“David, do you have trouble dealing with silence?”
“No.”
“Then why all the angst?” Her beautiful scarf slipped back on her head, settling around her neck as if it were meant to be there all the while. Contrary to every rational thought, I wanted to kiss her.
“I don’t have angst,” I said.
“Ahh, yes you do.”
“Alright so I do, dammit,” I said just cracking a smile. “But not enough to make you torture me. You like torturing me, don’t you?”
“No, but you like the thought of me liking the thought of torturing you, because if I’m torturing you I’m caring for you in a sick kind of way, and then at least you feel wanted.” She laughed like she’d just seen a man slip on a banana peel and fall on his face. So smug.
Ouch.
“It’s a damn good thing you are a fine looking young man,” she added. “Sometimes, well, I could just kick your ass, and then kiss your ass.”
We were now only a block from 172nd Street, the street where her mother and brothers lived.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “Don’t think I couldn’t do the same.”
“Sshhhhhh…” she said. “Silence.” After a pause she yipped, “Yes! Get that spot.” She shimmied. “I love getting a good parking spot. Isn’t it just the greatest thing to get a good parking spot, Davey?” She pointed.
“I can’t get in there.”
“You can do it, Davey.” She lifted a fist. “You can do anything, I believe in you.”
I slowed and she clicked her door open. Peering out the door and over her shoulder, she directed me. She always did this, a sort of instinctual act of distrust. I bumped the car behind me and Raphaella clapped and hollered with her thumbs up, “Yeah baby.” A few more bumps and I was in. We both got out and made our way into the big brown building.
The place where Raphaella had spent the last two years of her high school life was unremarkable. There were six floors. The outside of the building was old brick but without character. A big, wide-open black gate lackadaisically guarded the entrance to the building. Just inside was a little cement courtyard. A parched and defunct fountain sat in the middle, its rust-red water scars running vertical where water had leaked. A handful of teenage kids sat on the fountain’s retaining wall. They looked bored. When we walked in, they followed me with their eyes. One kid I recognized from the few times I had come on my own to visit Raphaella’s mother. I hoped he would give me a familiar nod. Nope. We rang the battered directory board where it said HURSTON, and waited to be buzzed in.
Since moving to New York three years earlier, I had spent much of my time waiting to be buzzed up and into diverse buildings where friends and acquaintances kept watch over the solitary part of their selves. This was the ironic thing about New York. Without much effort, a man could become a recluse above the teeming streets. The rooms inside the pre-war apartment buildings were modern man’s phylactery, a place to store and mull over sacred memories before heading back out into the breaking waves of the city. Some folks, I imagined while staring up at the windows, never come out from these places. They live solitary lives with their televisions. There they remain detached from real people and real relationships, from eyes with horrible stories to tell, outstretched hands in search of lunch, or lips that hammer away in conversation all around them. Entering any building in New York was, in many ways, like entering someone’s soul. Holy holes in the wall, I thought as I stared. Some holes were open, others had lids.
“I love you, Raphie, let’s not fight upstairs, okay?”
“Alright Dave, don’t worry.” She moved toward the elevator. “No fighting.” She smiled.
All three boys would be at Simon’s nineteenth birthday party. Anthony was the youngest. At thirteen, he should have spent most of his time at school, but in fact, he managed to spend most of his time in his uncle’s “music shack,” a basement with recording gear. Anthony was going to be a rapper, and he never left the house without his new-style baggy pants made popular in the jail cells of Rikers Island. Julius was the middle brother. He was seventeen and close to Simon. They did everything together, though Julius read more books than Simon. Actually, everyone read more than Simon as it wasn’t clear that he could read at all. Julius was also a better athlete than Simon, and often schooled him on the basketball court. Simon, the birthday boy, was the oldest of the boys and at nineteen, three years younger than Raphaella. His baggy face and heavy jowls made him look more like thirty-nine, not nineteen. But his eyes were young, and they danced with enthusiasm for life. He was big and burly and much darker than Raphaella.
All three of her brothers were darker because they had a different father. Their daddy was Carl. He had been the “steady man” to Arlene for nearly ten years. Then Carl left, just two weeks before Simon’s eleventh birthday, because he sensed himself getting sewn in and too “tied down to it all.” Arlene learned later he left because he had a major gambling debt that would soon be knocking on the family door. As far as Arlene was concerned, he left to protect her and was to be commended for his courage. Everyone, however, knew there was more to it, and that Carl was an addict of gambling, or at least one of those skinny guys who hangs out in OTB’s and eventually loses lots of money and pretty much all dignity. The family didn’t talk much of this, everyone that is but Simon. He’d come right out with clipped phrases like “rat cheat,” and “punk ass fool,” and diatribes about how Carl couldn’t support his woman. Simon never mentioned his own pain directly, but rather wrapped it up in a withering defense of his beloved mother. Simon never spoke as if he were owed something; he was too proud.
And then there was Raphaella’s father, the white phantom. He had come and gone long before, leaving only his business card and a baby, my girlfriend. He was the mystery man of the Hurston family, a white man who was the punch line in more than a few Hurston family jokes. The boys called him The Roman, thinking this was what you called people from Romania. They’d put on a nasal white-man accent and Groucho Marx nose glasses. They’d tease Raphaella about her “white girl butt” and then wonder aloud if Raphaella’s father may have been the first man ever to have no ass, whatsoever. “A modern medical phenomenon,” Simon would say. “The man with no ass. Excuse me, sir,” he’d say, “but you have no ass.” He’d laugh. “You know he had to kneel on the toilet!” In general, Simon and Julius were merciless. They’d take her stockings and wear them over their head, parading around and “combing” their “white” hair. They’d put her frilliest panties on over their jeans and saunter around the house, just because. Simon called her Starsky because her hair positively bounced in the morning, just like Starsky’s did when he’d rush out of the striped Dodge Charger with Hutch, in pursuit of the bad guys. He swore that Raphaella had inherited the ultimate phantom gene, officially known as White Man’s Vinegar Smell. “Yep, you got the vinegar curse, Raphie, no doubt.” Then he’d put his nose in the air and say, “You smell just like the subway stop at Wall Street, straight up. They say the only way to get rid of it is to shave it off. Too bad for you.”
They teased her because they loved her and because she was different, good different. She was exotic and interesting and quirky, and she was their sister, entirely, wonderfully. When they crossed the line, Raphaella would let them know with medieval reprisals like duct tape and rat-tailed towels. She remained their elder. Still, for all the jokes and all the love, Raphaella’s center, her core, remained inviolable. Even to Simon, her closest brother, serious conversation was too ticklish, too uncomfortable, too filled with silent moments and perilous pauses. Besides, she was different, and not just older. She was restless and combustible. As Raphaella grew up, she eschewed the common causes of the ghetto. The righteous gripes of black rappers, black buppies, black Jacksons and black Muslims, all of them eluded Raphaella, even as her irreverent iconoclasm made her attractive for many a cause. “I’ll be a nigger for nobody,” she’d say. And that’s how she got her nickname, the only one that would ever really stick. “You just don’t fit nowhere sister,” said Simon one day after Raphaella turned down tickets to the Beacon Theatre to see a rap act called Doug E. Fresh. “You’re like one of those birds that’s a bird, but don’t fly.”
“An Ostrich?” she said.
“No, the other one.”
“A Kiwi?”
“That’s the one. You’re a damn Kiwi Raphaella. A regular Kiwi.”
It stuck, and I guess it makes sense, really. She was a different kind of bird, different from the very people that raised her and nurtured her, if you can call it that. The gambling addict, the Indian black named Freck, the music shack, the pigeons on the roof, and the loop-the-loop hairdos, all of it was unique. But most of all there was the Roman, the baker out there somewhere, selling little creamy delights to hungry Transylvanians without thinking much about the dark and mysterious Bronx, the place a daughter named Raphaella called home. For me, a rather simple product of two happily married people, the story was real scary and painful and reeking of disintegration, massive irresponsibility and urban decay. I rarely brought it up. It was too much like a caricature of slum living, the absentee father paradigm, the image that so many white, suburban Americans fear and disdain. It wasn’t really this of course, but I was too sentimental, too idealistic to see it otherwise. Besides, being so close to black family ruin allowed me to show I was more flexible than the next guy, the next white guy anyway. I could deal with a little big city dysfunction, no problem, piece of cake. I’m a liberal person, I thought. Go for it. Show how humane and tolerant you are. Rubbing shoulders with the dispossessed, now that was cool.
But for the Hurstons, their past was less loaded and nothing to be ashamed of; surely nothing massive or particularly inglorious. When they brought it up it was to make fun of Raphaella’s honky nose. Why not? The family was boisterous and raucous. They were classically fun, fun like white people in the suburbs think of law abiding black people in the city, if they think of them at all. They barbecued, went to family reunions (Raphaella always missed these since becoming an adult), had unruly “dancing” parties, played basketball in the park, went to the local roller rink, and had loud conversations about semi-personal stuff on entirely public transport. I wanted to love it all, and after I had dated their beloved Raphaella for two years, they loved me, though in a sad, kind of sympathetic way. It was as if they looked at me and said, “God bless your hopelessly overmatched soul, son.” I wondered if they knew something I didn’t, or worse, would not know, ever.
The elevator door opened, and the brothers pounced. Simon and Julius threw their arms around us, Anthony sort of stood off, posing almost.
“It’s a roof gig today, people,” said Simon before pushing us back on the elevator. “You’ll like it David, you can get some sun. You could use some sun.” He smacked me on the back and looked at Raphaella. “You too, Kiwi. You don’t get out?”
“No Simon. I’ve been sick. Hemorrhagic meningitis.” She stared plainly. “In the hospital. Why haven’t you come to visit me?”
“You lying.”
“Yes, I lying.”
Simon snickered and looked at me. “She crazy, right?” I looked at her and nodded. We all nodded.
“Nice belly, Kiwi,” said Julius, reaching over and rubbing her smooth stomach. “I’m gonna be an uncle.”
“Yes you are Julius.”
“Do you know yet if it’s a boy or girl?” asked Anthony, standing in the corner of the elevator.
“We don’t know yet, but what do you think Anthony? What are you hoping for?”
“Boy,” he said.
“Me too,” said Simon, and then the elevator stopped. The doors opened with a jerk. Simon led us around a corner, down a long hall and around to a cramped staircase. Rickety stairs had been pulled down like stairs to an old attic. These stairs were precarious. Climbing these things has to be illegal, I thought. Light from above streamed down and formed a square on the floor where we stood, the heat of the summer simmering inside it. Bass beats boomed above, and I could hear giggles. A pretty girl poked her head through the opening to the roof, spilled her drink in gulps, and said, “Oh, look, men.”
The boys climbed those illegal stairs real fast, with bright smiles on their faces. So did I. I was happy to be near the good food, pretty girls and the party music. The sky above was so blue and on the roof like this I could look down on that suffocating canopy of steel and brick which otherwise hovered over me as I moved about New York. Walking to the building’s southern edge I could see the colossal bend of Yankee stadium, its bright white awnings contrasting against the sea-blue, upper deck seats, some of which were spotted with spectators. I strained to hear the roar of the crowd but could not.
Turning around, I surveyed the rooftop and its green artificial turf. It had been converted into a social hall of sorts, and now nearly thirty people stood in little groups all about the roof. Someone, I guessed Simon, had hauled a fat and tall portable stereo up the stairs and at least four couples were swaying to its sweet, sugary rhythm. I saw a table full of food. There was more food than guests to eat it, and though Arlene’s dancing parties were usually like this, it still reminded me of Thanksgiving with all the leftovers and lovehandles. The baked macaroni and cheese was the only dish anywhere near empty, but it wasn’t because people weren’t eating. It had more to do with the industrial-size tins all the food came in. A pile of greens, dug out in the middle, poured out the smell of simple, country living. Getting closer, I could see a big bowl filled with chunky mashed potatoes, dotted in the middle with a soapy heap of daisy-yellow butter. I caught a wisp of honey-basted ham and then a hint of chili beans, specks of green and red peppers and chunks of white onions flecked throughout. The bouquet moved easily through the fresh open air. A garbage can full of beers got drenched from melting ice. I dug around in the icy can, fished one out and grabbed a chair. I was ready to eat.
Someone yelled, “Hey, good-looking.” With a fork full of greens poised at my mouth, I turned to see a large black woman, sprawled in a lounge chair, yelling at me with her hand out. “Hey there now, don’t try to ack like you don’t see me son.” Son? Shit. Of course, Arlene. Here I was, laid out with a beer, a fork full of food, and a flashing hunger-grin, and there she was, the mother of my girl, the grandmother of my unborn baby, and the hostess with a most fanatical jones for party decorum. This was Arlene Hurston, the dame of the uptown. And she was a dame, in the most classic sense. She loved drama. Big earrings, big long fingernails, big loud he-said-she-said fights, big dramatic pauses, and big hair. Today she had the hoop hair, that’s what I called the kiddy racer set on her head. It was like one of those loop-the-loop race car courses, the kind a father sets up late on Christmas Eve. She had three loops, they were shiny and hard and they rattled ever so slightly in the wind. She could press it like this because, as she often said, “I was blessed with some good hair, child.” Good hair equaled straight hair, simply. And she had good hair, dammit, even if Raphie and I had seen her at the Unisex just three days before getting a perm. “That wasn’t no perm,” she said, “that was a touch-up.”
She was a big woman, hardy, curvy, sexy if not a little scary. Today she was wearing a long dress that looked like a bathrobe to me, or maybe a housecoat. It was dark blue and satin. It glimmered. She looked good, somehow. She always looked good somehow. I think it was her face. Like her daughter’s, it was chiseled. High cheekbones drew in full lips that sat puckered above a strong jawbone. “I have full-on Cherokee blood in me. Anyone can see that,” she’d say. “You gotta be a fool to miss the Indian in me, my grand’s married into a whole teepee full of red-blooded Cherokees.” She could have been Cherokee from what I could see, but Raphie used to laugh at that.
“She’s Cherokee like I’m Roman,” she’d say.
Yes, Arlene Hurston was a real piece of work. She was a mother of four, lover to many, and wife to none. Sitting there grinning and grinding on a tough piece of beef I wondered how bad I’d get skewered up there on that roof.
“Hey, Momma Hurston,” I said, saying momma just like she’d taught me. “The mac-cheese looks great.”
“Had any yet?”
“No, I was—”
“Where’s crazy Kiwi?” She took a quick look around and then used her pinky nail to pick at a beef tendril caught in her teeth. “She puttin’ on a lot of weight?”
“Well, the usual,” I said, having no idea what that meant.
“Keep an eye on her. When I had Simon I must a put on four, five hundred pounds. It was like that child had six heads inside of me. Turns out he barely got his self half-a-head. Go figure.”
I nodded and said, “Go figure.”
Simon walked up and put his big hand on my back. “I like this fool Mom. I like the way he treats Raphaella, like he actually likes her. She pretended to like you yet, boy?”
Arlene chimed in, “My Kiwi don’t pretend about nothing son, don’t listen to Simon, David. Last time I ever seen Raphaella do anything but speak her mind is when I caught her runnin’ round in my bedroom with the super’s son. She did a little pretending that day all right. But you don’t have to worry David, if she’s with you, that’s enough to let you know she likes you just fine, even if she ack evil all the time.” She scooped up some potato salad and ate. “Simon’s just jealous. I mean, look at him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Ma?”
“Where the girls at in this party Simon? Everyone I see round here is related to you. Don’t girls like you no more?”
“Tina’s here,” he said, pointing across the roof to the same girl who had spilled her beer moments ago.
“She’s a whore, she don’t count.”
“Relax Ma. Damn. Tina’s all right, plus, she’ll fight you.”
“She’ll lose. I got my Vaseline and some knuckles right here in this pocketbook.” And like it was a Derringer, she patted it.
“You crazy, Mom. You crazier than Kiwi.” He left us with a dismissive wave. As he walked away I leaned a bit closer to Arlene and recalled something she had just said.
“You really think Raphaella is happy with me, you know, loves me?”
“Sure son, why not. She lucky to have you. You a steady young white boy.”
“Yeah, well,” I paused, “I wish Raphie knew that.” And the next moment a very saucy grin stretched out across her face.
“Okay then, here she comes, we’ll fix it up.” She raised her hand and sort of motioned me aside, “Raphaella, come on over here a minute.” Then looking back at me she snapped her fingers. “I’ll fix it up just like that.” She looked Raphaella up and down as she approached. “Kiwi, David and I were just talking…”
Oh God, I thought. Jump. Cover your head, run screaming and just throw yourself over the edge. Do it, I thought. Do it. I didn’t do it, instead I smiled like a man trying to disguise the onset of very bad gas.
“Hi Raphie,” I said, barely.
“Hey, David.” She spoke clearly, kindly.
“Raphie,” said Arlene, breaking in loudly, still splayed in her lawn chair, “why you so evil with this boy here. He’s telling me he’s not even sure you love him, and with the baby coming and all, why you being so evil?”
“He what?” She was wearing her cat-eye shades and I couldn’t read her eyes. “He’s wondering if I love him?”
“I know! I told him that the whole idea is just ridiculous, but he had to hear it from you I guess. So tell him honey, tell him it’s all just fine.”
I broke in, “Well it wasn’t exactly that I needed to know if—” but I didn’t have a chance to finish.
“Go on, Raphie, tell him how much this baby means and how much you love him, and how having his baby is so special, and how he’ll always be the father of your child and all that, and yeah, why don’t y’allf get married? I never got married ya know, never found the right guy. But hey, David here, he’s a good steady white boy.”
“A good steady white boy, huh?” said Raphaella.
Her mother nodded. “I mean I don’t know how he does in the rollin’ round hours, but he seems like a steady boy to me.”
“Sure Mom, he’s steady all day and all night, too. He’s a real champ.” She looked at me and took my hand. “I’m gonna steal him from you for a minute, Ma, you mind?”
“Not one bit. I just wanted you to know, air some things out now with the baby coming and all, you know, do some mothering at this motherly time. Air some things out for y’all.” Raphaella nodded and so did I. “You look so good together.”
Still holding my hand, she walked ahead of me so I looked like I was being led to the yellow-bus stop, or maybe the gallows. Oh boy, I thought, this isn’t going well. Idiot. Maybe next time I could just wear a sign, something that read:
IGNORE ME BECAUSE CHANCES ARE I WILL SAY SOMETHING VERY STUPID VERY SOON, AND I’M NOT SURE WHY, OTHER THAN A DEEP SEATED DESIRE TO HAVE OTHERS LISTEN TO ME, AND COMMENT ON HOW GREAT I AM, OR WILL BE, OR COULD BE, IF ONLY I WAS LOVED LIKE I NEEDED TO BE.
But that wouldn’t fit on one sign, I thought. And still she led me, closer and closer to the edge of the rooftop. I heard echoes wafting up from the alley far below.
She leaned against the edge and said, “When you were a kid, were you left alone a lot, maybe locked in a closet, because you’re freakin’ me out David. I mean, telling my mom? You really think that she’s gonna help you?”
“Yeah, well, I sort of messed that up.”
“Yeah, you sort of did.” She gazed out onto the horizon. There was silence. “She’s not like your mom, David. She’s not always trying to make things better. She’s not like that.”
I wiped my brow. “I guess I was just nervous, wondering about us and the future. My folks, you know, think this whole thing is a bad idea. They keep telling me we blew it when we had sex, and how we kept the baby, and how we won’t get married. And I just can’t shake the idea that maybe they are right.”
“All right Davey, what the hell is this all about? Let’s go. Get it out.”
“I want to get married. Look Raphaella, I know I don’t make much money and I can’t write for crap, not yet anyway, but still, I want to do something right. Something right, just once.”
A breeze blew a black, chocolate strand of hair across her face. I wanted dearly to remove it but didn’t dare, not now. She lifted her long brown hands and removed it with the back of her thumb. “David, look over there at those people.” Her nostrils flared slightly. “Look at them. Do you see one person standing over there who knows the first thing about doing something right?” I turned and did as she said, and the simple faces I’d become accustomed to slowed and waned and each became insipid somehow, each became trite, fleeting. “Now picture the faces of your friends, your parents even, your sister and her husband in their little suburban home with their pretty white boat. Do they know anything about doing something right, really right?” I did as she asked and all the faces I pictured came and went without a hint of sagacity, this even though I loved most of them dearly. It was the way she was saying right that made it hard to picture. “Well?” she said.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Picture me then. Look at me.” She took a step back, and with flair widened her feet and stiffened up, standing like a superhero. “Do I look like I have the first clue about what it means to do something right, something really, really right? Perfect? Do I?” I stared and thought, she is beautiful. But this was getting too intense, more than just a pretty moment. She stepped up to me, took my face in her hand, squeezed it puppy-style, and shook it. “Do I?”
“I don’t know, Raphie.”
“And neither do I,” she stopped and let go. “Neither do I.”
A pigeon coasted to a stop only a few feet away, sailing in like a fat, speckled snowflake. We stood still. I tried to say something like, “Yes, you do,” but she interrupted.
“So. There you have your answer, David. We can’t get married because you know nothing, and I know nothing. All together, we know nothing about doing something right. But you want to marry me anyway.”
Then through a sassy chortle she repeated it. “You want to marry me.” She laughed loudly. “Just looking at you right now tells me you can’t handle marriage, and especially not a marriage where you and I are involved. But that’s okay,” she turned aside, “why would you want to anyway?” She was talking to herself now, looking out again. “Wake up, stop trying so hard.”
“But, what is going on with you, Raphie, what’s wrong? I love you. I’ll help you.”
“Oh shit,” she laughed. “Why do you keep trying to love me?”
Almost in a whisper I said, “You used to know love, Raphie.”
Her eyes flashed. “I’ve never known it, David. I know something else, something fake. I know that sounds harsh but it’s true. It’s the closest thing to truth I know.” I looked at her profile and wondered what had crept so profoundly into her soul.
“Raphie,” I leaned nearer, “what’s wrong with you?” She didn’t move. “What the hell is it? Is it Mitkin? Are you in love with him or something?” I turned and looked out too. “Could it be Mitkin?”
“Maybe,” she said. “No,” she started, “not maybe. It’s not him I’m in love with, it’s his love that I love. Yeah,” she sighed, “watch him sometime. Look at the way he believes in everything he does, every minute—like it’s all fail-safe and true. He doubts nothing, even when he’s an idiot, even when he’s aware everyone is calling him an idiot. He just goes on. I love that about him, I love his faith in his world. I love it.”
“But you don’t even know it, this thing, with Mitkin.” I paused. “Or do you? Have you, Raphie? Have you been seeing him?” A primal pang fizzed in my stomach, I was afraid of her answer. “This is about more than just one or two random meetings isn’t it, isn’t it?”
“No, David, I don’t lie. We talked twice before today. But truth be told, that’s enough, isn’t it? When you see something that gives you a rush you don’t question it, do you? Haven’t you ever seen a photo and bam, just like that, you know the man in it, immediately. You’re a writer, David, doesn’t this make sense to you?” She faced me squarely with entreaty in her eyes.
“Of course it does,” I said. “But to be so into a kid, one you hardly know, uh, that’s not really sensible, Raphie. Can’t you see that?”
“Yeah, if I was saying all that. But you’re not listening. I am not attracted to him, it’s his thing, his gig.” She turned and leaned on the wall and looked down into the street and shrugged. A few little boys played stickball there and she watched them. “The boys are playing in the street,” she said.
I looked down and saw what I’d seen many times before. But this time I felt an original sadness, a sense of loss deeper than I’d ever known. My brow wrinkled. “What do you want, Raphaella?”
“I want what he has.” She turned and walked away.
***
I went home. Not conspicuously. I didn’t make a scene and ruin the party for Simon, though his mother and his cousins seemed well on their way. I went home, to my place downtown, far away from the Bronx and the little Harlem apartment on 103rd Street. Raphie told me she would get a ride with Simon in her mother’s car, or take the train, and that I wasn’t to worry. But I did.
It seemed to me that Mitchell Mitkin was stealing my girl and that he was doing it without wanting to, in fact, without even knowing it. Alone in my bedroom the feelings of rejection which began on the roof continued. I slammed the door and ransacked my little room. Fatigued, I stood ankle-deep in debris, ankle-deep in a flood of ruin. Then I entered that pit of childhood despair where a tender heart is soothed by pathetic, milk-warm tears for one’s own self. I cried these tears curled up on the couch. That she wasn’t really falling in love with someone else did not matter. It was inconsequential that she loved a hope and not a man. I told myself what I wanted to hear because doing that made the tears warmer and more medicinal and the whole thing more romantic and cinematic, easier to cry over.
The other part, the part about loving what he loves and his idealism made no sense, at least not then and there, on my ragged futon in the poorly lit room. Mitkin wasn’t in any way ideal. His crude boorishness wasn’t ideal, and neither was his bitter wit. It was true that I’d seen glimpses of a compelling character, but these weren’t the things of romance. Besides, her beauty would kill him. The whole thing was ridiculous. If it really was a crisis of meaning she was having then why didn’t she come to me for help, come to me lovingly with her head on my shoulder, asking about the finer questions of life? After all as a writer, that's what I did. Insight. Sure, I wasn’t published, or even writing on a regular basis, but that didn’t matter. One doesn’t need fame to enlighten others. What a terrible nightmare it all was.
I envisioned my parents with entirely justified scowls. I saw my mother waving her index finger; their warnings of doom were stupid and alarmist two years ago but now they were, well, right on the frickin’ money. They were right, and compared to the unruly Hurston family my folks became sages, insightful, prudent. I started to brood about my predicament. I began to hate everything uptown and everything New York. My little desktop light struggled against the blackness of the stodgy room and I felt that the night wanted to suffocate me, it being my current life and the bane of my existence. I bemoaned having ever run into Raphaella at the club. I worked backwards in my mind until I reached the stainless days before our relationship and I waned over them until they became like a mighty golden cruise ship whose journey knew no rain and whose nights knew no displeasure. Everything about singledom came back to me as idyllic, and everything after, disastrous. I kept seeing myself watching other women, enjoying the innocence in it, and reveling in the vision of myself before her. Back then I was free, accountable to no one, a slave to no soul.
I wanted to be without her. I would be without her, I thought. Then I thought again, and remembered I was already a father. A father. It was the thought of the baby that ended my freewheeling run through faux history. There was a new history swimming in her womb, a history that I could not change, and one I was responsible for. That sobered me. I returned to the one thought needful. I was a father and I had to work it out with my wife. Wife. How funny is that? I was so far from being a husband that the word wife made me laugh.
I rolled over onto my back and began in earnest to formulate a plan to win Raphaella back. The plan was simple. Do exactly what she says, all the time, exactly. No more, no less. Be her little slave. Yes, don’t ask for favors and don’t even volunteer them. Sleep over when she asks, and only make love when she says so (though I think this had always been the case). I would win her with my obedience; that would do it, utter and dispassionate vassalage. That was it. I wiped my drying eyes. Be a father to your child, this was my mantra.
I sat up straight in my bed, ready to kill the dissonance that infested our relationship. I would leave Mitchell Mitkin alone. I told myself this was the mature decision; he, after all, was not the active ingredient in all of this, it was us, and on this night I decided I would act to put the us, the ugly, broken us, back together. I got out of my crying bed energized and began an entry in my journal. I was writing again, and by the time I crawled back into bed, my head swam with hope, and the balled-up sweatshirt I used for a pillow felt no harder than the night before. I was in love again.
Again.