I answered the phone after it had been ringing for a very long time.
“Helah,” I said.
“Charles? Charles, are you awake?”
It was Monday morning and I was sprawled out on the floor in front of the couch in the living room. My pillow was a paper bag that held almost eight thousand dollars on top of a brand-new boom box that I’d picked up in East Hampton. Next to me was a half-empty bottle of Courvoisier. A cognac high is the smoothest thing in the world. Even the hangover is like being squeezed by a velvet vise.
“Ricky? Ricky, what time is it?”
“It’s afternoon, Charles. Afternoon.” As wild as Ricky thought he was, he was still a blue-collar man. The thought of sleeping during daylight hours was sinful to him.
“What you want, Ricky?”
“My mom got back home from her sister’s last night.”
“Yeah? Tell her hello for me,” I said. Ricky’s mother had always been kind to me.
“Yeah, okay. But listen. Bethany wanna come over tonight, you hear what I’m sayin’? She got a roommate and I got my moms.”
“Doesn’t she have a room?” When I sat up, a spasm went through my intestines. For a moment I thought I was going to vomit right there on my money.
“Yeah, man, but the kinda lovin’ she spoons out is too loud for a small apartment.” I could hear the greed in Ricky’s voice. “Let us stay with you tonight? You know—the same deal you used to make with Clarance.”
I saw a hawk through the window. She was stiff-winged and wheeling round.
A huntress, I thought, honing in on her prey.
The thought chilled me, and I forgot for a moment or two about Ricky on the other end of the line.
“You could keep the fifty you owe me,” he said.
“I got your fifty right here in my wallet, man.”
“Where you get that?”
I rose to my feet, holding the bag of money in my right hand.
“Yeah, you two could stay,” I said. “I’ll even make you dinner.”
I spent the day taking care of business. I went to the bank in Southampton and gave them four payments on the mortgage, in cash. I paid ahead on the rest of my utilities too. I bought groceries that would last a month or more. That included six quarts of cheap bourbon—I didn’t want to waste any more money on cognac. I also bought paint, paintbrushes, tools, and every kind of cleaning liquid, brush, and rag. I bought three pairs of jeans, a pair of Timberjack work boots, four checkered flannel shirts, and a new toothbrush. I renewed my subscription to the New York Times, partially because I thought Bennet would want to read it, and bought four CDs of Thelonious Sphere Monk, whose music was the only thing in the world that Brent and I both loved.
I went to the used bookstore in the Harbor and bought fifteen sci-fi hardbacks. Mostly Philip K. Dick and Brian Aldiss. I was digging in for the long haul. This was mainly due to the fear that I’d waste all the money Bennet gave me before I had taken care of business.
Brent used to say that money went through my fingers like water down the drain. He wasn’t wrong. The first thing I did when Bennet left was to go out and buy a pure gold ring that I had seen in an antique store in East Hampton. It was a slender thing with a pale green stone for a setting. It was from India, Mrs. Canelli said. It was a woman’s ring and too small for me, but I wanted it anyway. And once I had the money, I couldn’t help myself.
My mother gave me my allowance every Saturday morning, and I’d spend the rest of the day shopping for candy and gifts for her.
“Don’t spend everything, baby,” she’d tell me. But her eyes were alight whenever I’d bring out a bottle of perfume or some glass trinket.
By the time Ricky and Bethany arrived, I was making dinner. Hot and sweet Italian sausages fried with whole cloves of garlic and then simmered in red wine and tomato sauce. The water for the vermicelli had just come to a boil when Ricky and Bethany came in. She was a few inches taller and almost twice the size of Ricky, but Bethany wasn’t fat. She had a big chest and powerful legs, but the stomach was flat. Her face was wide and the color of dark amber. She had big teeth, an embarrassing laugh, and eyes that glittered when they saw you.
“Hey, Charles,” she called. They had let themselves in the front door. “That smells delicious. You got some for us?”
“I didn’t know if you guys had time to eat. From what Ricky said I thought you were real tired and had to go to bed.”
“Uh-uh,” she denied. “We came to see you and eat some sausages too.”
She put her arms around me and gave me a kiss that made me hug her back.
“Let’s eat!” Ricky declared. And for a while I had some company and no thoughts in my head.
Bethany loved eating and sex, as I have said before, but she also loved to talk about herself. We heard all about her plans of moving down to Atlanta and starting a braid-and-nail parlor. She loved children and had gone to some wild parties at crazy artists’ homes in Southampton. One well-known painter had asked her to model three times, but every time he was so moved by her ample beauty that he had to make love to her instead.
I could see that most of her stories were designed to excite her male audience. It worked. Ricky was almost swooning over her words. He had run into her at a shopping mall near Riverhead a week or so earlier, and she gave him hopes. Now he was only a sausage away.
“Hey, Bethy,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I wanna show you somethin’ upstairs.”
“What?” she asked.
“Somethin’.”
“You comin’, Charles?” Bethany pursed her lips and lowered her eyelids. If we were out in nature, I would have killed Ricky right then.
“In a few minutes,” I said.
Ricky sighed in relief.
“Okay,” she said, smiling. “But you come on up now.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Come on,” Ricky said, grabbing her by the arm.
“Ow! Don’t be so rough, Ricky. I’m comin’.”
I washed the dishes and looked out the window. I was thinking about Anniston Bennet and the bag of money that I had hidden in the foldout sofa bed in my father’s old library. A bagful of money was not a normal thing—that’s what I was thinking. No matter how much the little white man had acted like it was a simple business transaction, it was obvious that he wanted to hide what he was doing. It made me nervous, but I couldn’t see any way out of it. Twenty-five hundred dollars of the money was already gone.
But how bad could it be? He couldn’t hurt anybody in my basement. He was just little so I knew he couldn’t hurt me. Unless he had a gun. But I could lock the doors while he was down there. Of course a man with a gun could get through a door, or a window.
But why would he need to pay me money? Why not just shoot me in the breakfast nook?
“Ohhhh.”
I couldn’t believe that Bennet had any designs on my welfare. I decided to get drunk and stop worrying about things I couldn’t change.
“Ohhhhh.” It was only a whisper. But, I thought, it had to be a roar to make it all the way down into the kitchen from my parents’ room on the third floor. That was the deal I usually made with Clarance. He could come to my house with one of his girlfriends. They’d stay on the third floor and I’d sleep downstairs in my father’s den. But it was the first time that Ricky had asked for the deal.
I never imagined that Bethany, who spoke in a small high voice, could get the volume to disturb me downstairs.
That’s when I remembered being a child. Now and then my parents wanted to be alone, to talk, they said. They’d go into their room and tell me to go play. But all I wanted was to play with them and talk to them. After they sent me away from the door a few times, I’d wander down to the pantry with my toy soldiers and guns. I was happy then because there was a vent that let me hear my parents’ soft murmuring voices while I played soldier.
“That’s it, baby,” Bethany said. She might have been talking to me, her voice was so clear. “Right there. Right there. Right there.”
Ricky was saying something, and she replied with a whole drawerful of yeses.
I hadn’t masturbated in three days because of the alcohol. By the time I got around to that, I was too dizzy to do anything. Bethany was telling Ricky where to move and when he got it right she let go with a strained roar.
That was my first orgasm too.
I could hear the furniture rocking and Bethany’s squeals. She knew what she wanted and was very specific in her requests. To hear a woman ask for pleasure like that had me on my knees among the boxes of cereal and plastic containers of grape juice. After my third orgasm I had to leave the pantry for the living room. There I began to drink. It was necessary to slow down my beating heart.
From the sofa I could hear the occasional moan or gasping sob, but the whiskey dulled my urges and I fell half into a doze.
“Charles?” she said. “You awake?”
I was asleep on the couch in the living room. At least I think I was asleep. It seemed to me that I had been looking at Bethany in her tight satin slip for quite some time.
“Are you awake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Ricky’s asleep,” she said as if it was an important piece of information.
She sat down next to me and I got up, almost without thinking, and moved to the chair. That made Bethany smile.
“You scared of me, Charles Blakey?” she asked.
“You know a lot of those rich people come in here from New York, don’t you, Bethy?” I asked.
She was confused by my changing her subject but still answered, “Some.”
“They do some crazy things, right?”
“I guess,” she said. “I mean, they think they’re all crazy and wild. And they don’t have to get up and go to work in the morning. Really all the difference I can see is that they think that they’re smarter and better than people don’t make as much money as they do. And they want a lot more. You know, like that artist I used to go with. He wanted to be the best at everything. And he was so rich that everybody told him that he was the best. When he started playing trumpet, his friends said that he sounded like Miles Davis. It wasn’t like us. You know somebody set you straight in a minute around here.”
Bethany smiled and I wanted to kiss her, not because she was beautiful, even though she was, but because she wasn’t impressed by the lies rich people wore like clothes. She knew where her feet were planted. Right then I think she wanted to be standing a little closer to me.
She stood up and walked over to my chair. I stood to meet her.
She was about to lay her hand on my chest, but I took hold of her wrist and gently pushed her away.
“I want to see you, Bethy,” I said. “But not downstairs from Ricky after you made him all happy like that.”
“We could take a shower,” she suggested.
“It’s not that. You know Ricky can get low and dirty, but he’s the only friend I got right now. Believe me, this is not easy. But can I make you some tea?”
Bethany frowned for a few seconds, and then she shrugged and smiled. There was a sweater on the floor. She must have let it fall from her shoulders when she saw me slouching on the couch. Now she picked it up and covered all that youthful beauty.
Over Irish Breakfast (it was 4:30) we discussed the rich white people she’d known. Bethany liked the fine dinners and fancy houses, but rich people—even the black ones, she said—couldn’t satisfy her like people from our neighborhood.
“It’s just like my people know me better,” she said. “Like Ricky. You know for a while tonight I thought he might have a heart attack, he was so excited. And before he fell off asleep he was talking about Johnetta Johnston and Kirby. You know? Everyday stuff. Rich men always want to be teaching something, asking, Did you know? when they know you don’t know and don’t care neither.”
Ricky came down when the sun was just coming up. At first he looked suspicious, but when Bethany showed him her big teeth and said, “Mornin’, baby. Charles made me some tea,” he calmed down and kissed her face and neck.
After that they went back upstairs. I was so tired that I didn’t even listen. I went to sleep with my bag of money in my dead father’s foldout sofa and dreamed about Anniston Bennet. He was humongous and wedged tight in my cellar, sticking his head out of the trapdoor and begging to be let free.