CHAPTER
SEVEN

Check the appropriate box. How easy they make it sound. Nina has been staring at the page for twenty minutes now, hunched over a desk in a hotel in Saratoga, playing sick while the band performs and Marcus shoots alone. It is 1997; Nina is twenty-six and desperate, and college is the most plausible escape she can conceive. She’s learned something about herself in the last year: she’s not as strong as she once thought. Or, more accurately, she’s not as strong as Marcus. If she were, they wouldn’t still be sleeping together.

Nina tries to end it as often as Marcus once tried to get it going, and just as weakly. The standard scenario, most recently played out a month ago in Portland, goes like this: the postshow hang in Pipe Man’s room breaks up around two in the morning, and Marcus tiptoes down the hall to hers like a smug bandit, probably humming the Pink Panther theme song to himself. He knocks, and Nina, already asleep, hauls herself out of bed, cracks the portal, squints at him.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she says, leaning into the door as if afraid he’ll try to push his way inside. She ought to have the sentence printed on a goddamn T-shirt.

Marcus sighs, infinitely patient and impatient. “Nina…” is all he says. She relents and admits him, as if her name is a password, telling herself that it’s better to argue in private. They are still a secret, after all, if only a pretend one.

She shuts the door, already feeling like a hypocrite because she’s mouthed her shallow protests so many times before. Occasionally, they’ve led to her sleeping alone, for a night or two. A whole tour, once.

“I need to move on with my life,” she tells him.

Marcus has mastered the craft of pretending to be as emotionally bound to Nina as she is to him, and so he says, “You’re all I know, baby.”

Marcus is fifty-six and married, but what he means, and what she hears, is I’m all you know, baby. Which is correct.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he goes on, forcing Nina to consider just how terrifying the prospect of navigating the world alone has become. “We know each other so well….”

If she hasn’t folded by now, Marcus’s sudden hug will do it. She’ll feel herself enveloped by a comforting frankincense-tinged masculinity, and her breathing will slow as if she has been drugged. The childlike intensity of Marcus’s embrace will be a final illustration of her feelings, a last reminder of her weakness.

Marcus understands the kind of care she craves too well, and he metes it out cunningly. Nina’s on a subsistence diet, and even worse, she’s used to it. Trained. She knows to slip out of the room when Marcus’s wife calls, lest Nina hear something she can’t handle, like Marcus telling Carol that he loves her.

Nina’s threats have become tactical. She throws tantrums to cue Marcus’s five-days-of-sweetness routine, and they pretend they’ve turned some corner and the sun is shining and everything is real and honest and out in the open. Gradually, it fades, and Nina resumes cataloging her discontents, building up strength, scorning her own pathetic, forlorn, damn-near-unrecognizable self. Her first relationship has not just shredded her identity, it has confirmed her worst fear. Make yourself vulnerable, and you are fucked.

Thus, come September, Nina will retire from road life and reinvent herself as a college student. Applications to Columbia, NYU, Hunter, and the City College of New York are spread before her, and four copies of a recommendation from Devon are already en route to the admissions offices. After enormous wrangling, by Rayna and Devon’s homeboy at the State Department, the Czech government has supplied the documents she needs to apply for a student visa; with an admissions letter, she’ll finally be able to make herself legal. Her high school grades have been forwarded from Prague, and Nina has made up for the missing year of course work by acing the GED exam after a month of intense study, the octet quizzing her on chemistry formulas and historical dates as the bus carries them from coast to coast.

The page in front of her, though, Nina has put off until now. She presses her fingertips tight to the pen and checks off the box next to the words African/African-American/Creole. Her hand darts down the sheet, and she makes another mark, this one indicating her desire to be considered for something Hunter College calls the Howard H. Dawes Scholarship for Black Achievement in Photography.

There, done. And she feels mostly fine about it. After all, Nina has spent the last nine years living on a bus with a bunch of brothers who consider her a sister. Devon Marbury, who should know if anybody does, has peered deep into her genealogy and soul and declared her to be Creole three generations back. She has accepted that identity with pride, and lived up to it. What you are comes down to how you feel, and how others see you, and Nina is African/African-American/Creole on both those counts.

         

He should have just been RISK. No author photo, no mention of his M.F.A. from NYU on the bio page, no mention of his grandfather in the promo packet. Then the fifty-bucks-a-book prick losers at the trade magazines wouldn’t have had shit to say. They’d have assumed that Tris was black and just read the goddamn novel and written about it, instead of spending two-thirds of their little pussy-ass one-paragraph appraisals making snide references to his skin color, his education, the old man’s comeback novel, and suggesting that those things made Tris some kind of clubfooted tourist, or starry-eyed anthropologist, or silver-spoon legacy case.

How dare they? What the fuck do they know about hip-hop, or him? Tris grew up with this music, this culture, these ever-diffusing cosmic b-boy energy ripples—hip-hop raised him as much as anything or anybody, so of course he wrote about it. These anonymous bottom-rung critics are the same people who made fun of him for sitting at the black table in high school—soulless dorks who’d shit themselves if they had to outrun 5-0 in a subway layup. Who clowned Tris because it was easier than contemplating their own stare-back-from-the-mirror lameness. They’re the suck-ass hacks who graduated from M.F.A. programs five years ago with their own eager manuscripts clenched in their hands and got dissed by every publisher known to mankind, and now they drink their own stomach acid for dinner and rip books apart for spite. How the fuck can you review a novel about graffiti and not sign your goddamn name?

More to the point, how can you review two novels featuring graffiti artists, and like the one written by a septuagenarian better than the one penned by a true-school motherfucker who happens to be his grandson?

Tris’s debut, Contents Under Pressure, has been in bookstores for three months now, long enough to burn through its paid-for face time on the New Fiction display shelf and then be escorted out of there, like a broke drunk from a pub, and abandoned to the catacombs of the literature section, wedged where no one will ever find it unless they happen to be browsing the F section. His grandfather’s novel, meanwhile, Rage Against It All—a “sweeping, masterful panorama of late-century American malaise,” according to the New York Times Book Review blurb gracing the front of the later editions, and “long-awaited, electrifying…a triumphant return to top form” in the words of the Washington Post Book World quote splashed across the back—dropped five months before Contents, and it’s still sitting, thick and smug, right at the front of any bookstore Tris might fail to avert his eyes from as he walks by.

The old man’s lead character is one Billy Vance, aka Rage, a time-bitten aerosolist estranged from his fertility-clinic-doctor ex-wife (as if any graff cat ever married so well) and precocious young son. Rage fritters away the days meandering through midwestern freight yards, painting whimsical, ironic “tributes” to such concepts as Christian fundamentalism and the Death of Jazz. He pines, lengthily, for the vanished New York subway era (for Oh, does it not represent the Lost Innocence of All?) and nurtures a wild dream of organizing the long-scattered graff community to descend on the transit yards en masse and bomb every car in the system, thus effecting a fleeting, glorious final victory.

Parts of the book are undeniably great, and parts reveal—to Tris, at any rate, if not the book reviewers of America—a glancing familiarity with the subject matter that threatens to unravel the whole enterprise at a cellular level. Certainly, the book is sweeping, almost aggressively large, and graffiti is only a part of it—Rage Against It All could kill a man if dropped onto his head from a second-story window, whereas Tris’s novel would need six or seven stories to do any real damage—but whether it’s the great cultural synthesis the critics claim, Tris is not sure. What he does know is that writers of a certain stature tend to get this kind of “brilliant observer” accolade heaped on them when they are ambitious, whether the work merits it or not.

That goes double if, as with Tristan, the tome in question ends a personal drought of more than twenty years. There is talk that the old man might finally win a Pulitzer, and whether Rage Against It All is genius or dog shit, he fucking deserves it: the recognition, the sales, the renewed interest in his backlist, all of it. On Tris’s better days, he feels like part of his grandfather’s comeback: without RISK, there could be no Rage, no Brodsky renaissance. The book is dedicated to him; what more can Tris ask? The old man didn’t poach anything, not really, and it’s not his fault that nobody gives a shit about Contents Under Pressure—not even his fault that his book dropped first, which probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. He’s shouted his grandson out in interviews, including one on National Public Radio that probably sold more copies of Contents than anything else.

There are better people to be angry at, like the folks at Frontier Press whose jobs are to make people give a shit about Tris’s book, yet do not give a shit themselves. He has been assigned a twenty-two-year-old in-house publicist, salaried at about two-thirds of a living wage; she won’t return his calls and cannot seem to operate a map or calendar without great difficulty. He’s got a flustered, perpetually swamped young associate editor who returns his calls a week late, full of apologies, and has to appeal to some kind of mysterious, unsympathetic board of superiors for permission to do anything, from promotional postcards on up.

Tris’s agent, Marty Hammerman, the guy who should be putting foot to ass on his behalf, is such a complete douchebag that it’s actually comical. You’d think, to meet him, that Marty had hired a private acting coach to tutor him in the finer points of sounding, walking, even dressing like the kind of vulgar, all-about-the-money agent that some sour-smelling Marxist writer who disseminates his work by passing out poems on the subway and stapling short stories to telephone poles might conjure up to justify steering clear of The Industry. And as far as putting foot to ass, well, Marty does a lot of business with Frontier, and he’s not about to jeopardize his next million-dollar celebrity memoir deal by raising a ruckus on behalf of a client whose advance was only $35,000. “They’re doing a decent job for a thirty-five-grand book,” is the kind of thing Marty says.

Tris has plenty of people to blame, but only himself to live with. He’s carrying around an ugly, free-floating animosity that shoots out of his chest without warning and gloms onto strangers, relatives, friends. A girl he passed on the street last week in Union Square, so unbearably fine and stylish that she had to be a model, enraged him because he could not have her. He finds himself resenting Zone for going back to school to earn his M.B.A.—for knowing where his life is headed, standing on the verge of wealth. He tamps down bitterness toward Tristan on a daily basis, enumerates the reasons it’s unfounded until they come to him with the ease of mantras.

This morning, as usual, Tris wakes up later than he’d like to, at 10:00 instead of 8:30, a problem he could rectify by plugging his alarm clock in, but has not. Instead, Tris coordinates his sleep habits with the sexual peccadilloes of Biggie and Pac, his downstairs neighbor’s homosexual pit bulls, who never start humping and yelping in the garden apartment’s postage stamp–size yard much after 9:30.

On a good day—meaning any day, until five months ago, weekends included—Tris would be dressed and cutting diagonally across the street by nine, past Fort Greene Park (a six-block sprawl of green that Biggie and Pac know nothing about) and toward the corner bodega where he scores a daily coffee so potent, the locals call it liquid crack. Five minutes’ idle chatter with his boy Yuri, a gangly, perpetually unshaven Israeli realtor/actor/herb dealer, whose morning cigarette beneath the long awning of Realty on the Green coincides with Tris’s caffeine run, and then back at his desk by ten past nine. Turn on the computer, turn off the phone, take a piss, fall blissfully to work. No interruptions, save a few more liquid crack expellations, until his hands start shaking and he breaks for lunch at 2:00 or 3:00.

That was how Tris wrote his first book, half his second. It was going to be a tetralogy, one novel for each of the four elements of hip-hop, all the stories subtly overlapped and eventually to be published together in one exultant, obscenely expensive collector’s edition with cover art by some famous graffiti guy, FUTURA maybe.

That’s not going to happen now. Novel two has gone untouched since the first review of novel one came out. Those two hundred words flash-melted Tris’s jittery anticipation into a molten lump of dread, so heavy that he’s barely moved since. How to deal with reviews: just one more thing they never taught him in grad school. What he did learn, though, in two years of workshops—perhaps the only thing, besides which of his classmates were on heroin—is how to sift through a dozen sets of disparate, contradictory opinions and decide what to take to heart, what to ignore.

At first, he’d judged the comment by the person, trusted the professors he liked, the kids whose writing he respected. But good writers weren’t always good readers, and vice versa, and a better system soon imposed itself. The criticisms you had to pay attention to were those that made you feel as if you’d been kicked in the gut by a Budweiser Clydesdale. If it hurt, it was true. And when Tris opened the mailer from his agent and read the photocopied Publishing Preview review inside, the truth of it reached up and slapped him starry-eyed.

The pain was immediate, but just what had inflicted it proved harder to determine. There was the truth of this book is not going to conquer the world, the truth of no PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award for me, the truth of I have just been publicly dismissed, and casually at that. The truth of Grandpa will see this. And then there was the possible truth skulking just outside Tris’s peripheral vision: that all of the above was instant, brain-generated spin control, intended to distract him from the review itself, from an opinion he could not discount and still be honest with himself.

That discomfiting suspicion has yet to be fully unpacked. Tris has been busy. He’s given decently-to-sparsely attended readings in five East Coast cities and made sure to sign the store’s entire stock each time, thus rendering the copies unreturnable. He’s watched his Amazon.com sales rank level off in the mid six figures, meaning there is literally a warehouse full of titles that have outsold his. He’s read and reread his on-line reader reviews and waited in vain for somebody to post one besides Zone and his remaining grad-school buddy, Kat. Glowed for a whole day when a third review, complimentary, finally appeared, only to be sick to his stomach when a fourth, long and scathing, borderline vindictive, materialized out of cyberspace like an enemy battleship and neutralized the first three.

He’s done a handful of radio phoners from his apartment, over the carnal woofing of the pit bulls. The questions never quite focus on his book: How did Tris get into hip-hop? Was it difficult to write African-American characters? Did he introduce his grandfather to the world of graffiti he writes about so masterfully in Rage? A mellifluous-toned black guy from a talk station in Baltimore is the only one who seems to have read past Contents’ cover flaps and press kit.

The impotent fury of three months ago has dulled into a dreary, wounded stasis. In an effort to tap into the hard vein of comeback-kid resolve he can feel throbbing somewhere deep inside, Tris has decided a few things:

1. His book is not as good as he thought.

2. While it is far from perfect, the critical blows he’s taken have mostly been unfair, caustic, and lazy. He’s a victim of narrow-minded, complacent racists who think they’re liberal, and their bullshit identity politics.

3. This is a war, and it’s not over.

4. Writing three more books about hip-hop is not going to make him win—in fact, they may not even be published.

Marty Hammerman, when he punches up the sales figures, tells Tris as much. “It’s not a disaster,” he says in his dour, nasal voice. Marty’s squeezing a stress ball in one pudgy fist and sporting a phone headset with a wraparound microphone, as if he’s about to play Madison Square Garden and needs his hands free for the dance routines. This despite the fact that he told his latest almost-pretty blond assistant, as she ushered Tris into his office, to hold all calls. Perhaps he’ll wear the thing to his lunch date later on. Marty has never taken Tris to lunch.

“You’ve sold about five thousand; call it four when the returns come in. Figure the same for the paperback, knock on wood, and…” Marty removes an oversized calculator from his desk drawer and taps at the keys. “Well, you’re not gonna earn out.” He shrugs. “Look, it was never a very commercial book. The reviews coulda been better, but hey, at least you got some. Even a bad review can sell books. Gotta have thick skin about it. Besides, most of them say something positive—even that obnoxious fuckin’ Times short; there’s a sentence we can use for the paperback.”

Marty reclines in his ergonomic chair, crosses his little Tyrannosaurus rex arms behind his head. “So whatchu working on?”

“Well—”

“Ya gotta change direction. You know that.”

“Okay. You’re fired.”

“Funny. Maybe that’s it. You could do funny. You’re a funny guy. But—” Marty points a finger at him—“no more hip-hop. That’s dead in the water. Ya got burned, ya learned not to touch the stove. Right?”

“I could kill you right now,” Tris says. “I could pull you across this desk and strangle you with the phone cord before anybody stopped me.” The beauty of Marty, if any, is that you can say whatever you want to him. He doesn’t give a shit.

“But you won’t. Look, do something different. Take a risk. You’re good with dialogue. Do a crime thing. Do the big epic family novel. You’ve got the talent for it. I can get you money for that, if there’s enough sex.”

“How’s Scarsdale?”

Marty and his budding family have recently abandoned Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, in favor of a return to the suburb from whence he and his wife came. It’s like evolution in reverse. Tris imagines a prehistoric Marty Hammerman lizard turning around and slithering back into a sludgy ocean.

“You know what I did this weekend? Cleaned my gutters. Took both days. Home ownership’s a pain in the freakin’ ass, my friend.”

“At least your kids will grow up around other WASPs.”

The business part of the meeting is over, if it ever started. They will now insult each other for fifteen minutes, maybe talk some baseball. On the way out, Marty claps his client on the back and, unable to resist, tosses off his usual crass, half-assed come-on about Tris’s grandfather.

“So how’s the old man? He happy over there at Gromley? Thinking of moving at all? You tell him what a stand-up guy your agent is?”

“I tell my grandfather the truth.” Tris steps aboard the idling elevator.

“Go do some work,” Marty barks back as the doors close, aiming a little thumb-and-finger pistol at him. Tris nods, points one back. The doors close.

“Bang.” He blows smoke from the barrel, holsters his gun.

Back home, the answering machine’s message light is struggling to be seen through a thick blanket of dust. Speak of the devil: it’s Tristan. Tristan never calls.

Unlike most members of his generation, the old man has no problem talking to machines; they allow him to soliloquize in private. “I call to present you with an opportunity of a singular nature,” he says. “My old friend Albert needs some assistance this week, down at the Blue Note. I told him you might be available. His wife will call.” A pause. “I strongly advise you to accept. Just what the doctor ordered.”

Tris waits for more, but that’s it. Dead air, then a beep, and then a woman with a strong Japanese accent is speaking.

“Hello, Tristan. This Mariko Van Horn. Grandfather tell me you can work this week. Fantastic! We see you no later than seven-fifteen, okay? Blue Note. Corner Sixth Avenue and Third Street. I see you seven-fifteen. Thank you, Tristan. Good-bye.”

Tris sinks onto his bed. Well, there it is. Fait accompli. Seven-fifteen, yes ma’am. He’s got no control over anything anyway, so he might as well be useful to somebody.

Just what the doctor ordered, huh? For what ailment? Failure? Lack of talent? Acute internal bleeding, hoof-shaped abdominal bruises?

This taking-inspiration-from-the-raw-black-stuff-of-life bullshit might have been acceptable in 1930-whatever, might have opened up the old man’s eyes when he was some blank canvas of a kid, but that time is long gone. Screw Tristan and his Wise Negro Jazzman home remedies; why haven’t the media come at him with snide insinuations that he’s part of some tradition of awestruck voyeurism, savvy exploitation? Just thinking about that shit makes Tris want to rip out somebody’s vocal cords and strum them like a banjo.

It is he, though, who’s been rendered dumb. Kicking some self-justifying résumé, I been down since I was eight, hip-hop flows through my fuckin’ veins, I paid mad dues, would only bring the case against him into sharper focus. Tris could have been standing behind the turntables with DJ Kool Herc in the 1520 Sedgwick Avenue community center in 1973, and it wouldn’t matter. He’d still have to adorn his opinions with the same stupid disclaimer about how, sure, as a white boy there may be certain things he doesn’t understand, can’t understand, would never claim to understand. As soon as he says it, they’ve got him: he’s invalidated himself. They get him every time, even in the arguments that play out in his head.

It’s barely three o’clock, but there’s no point in haunting the two rooms of his apartment, so Tris hoofs it back down Fulton Street and grabs the train. Everyone on board is reading; none of them is reading his book. He imagines what he’ll do when it finally happens: sit down opposite the woman (it’s a woman) and wait until she glances up, sees him, furrows her brow, flips the book over to check his face against the brooding author photo, flushes with excitement, comes over. He’ll pretend it happens all the time. Whenever he rides the subway.

Jesus H. Christ, why is he even thinking this shit? Sometimes Tris wants to punch himself right in the fucking brain. How long is he going to pretend he hasn’t failed? More to the point, when is he going to get his act together and do something to change the fact?

By 5:30, the Village is bereft of diversions. He’s wandered in and out of record stores and head shops, avoided bookstores, copped a slice of pizza, lingered on the outskirts of the throng watching the basketball game through the chain-link fence around the court at Waverly. Thought too late of seeing a movie, walked by the theater anyway and confirmed that there is nothing he wants to see, just like there’s nothing he wants to read, eat, listen to, or buy.

Finally, bored and cold and tired-footed, Tris pushes open the smoked-glass door of the Blue Note and steps into the long, high-ceilinged room. A crew of eight young waitresses in black stretch pants is setting chunky cut-glass candleholders on the dark wood tables. Tris asks one of them for a coffee, then strolls importantly through the room, pretending to be Albert’s manager, passes the stage, and heads for the raised tier of tables in the rear. It seems like the best spot to set up shop: discreet but all-seeing, a perfect place to reinvent his career and ogle the staff. He pinpoints a four-top in the back corner, and makes for it.

Nobody’s there, but it is clear the table’s taken. Photographs and contact sheets are strewn about; a red wax pencil and a blue hardback borrowed from the Hunter College library perch atop the unintentional collage. Tris can’t resist a closer look. He bends to peer at a partially obscured black-and-white image of a trombone player standing before a wide bathroom mirror, then slides the print out from the pile and rotates it right side up.

The room’s geometry is elevated to perfection. The floor tiles, the gleaming fixtures of the sink, even the way the musician’s horn meets his lips—everything comes together with seamless, casual grace, makes Tris wonder if life is always this elegant and he just fails to notice.

“Hey girl, you want another tea?”

“Yeah, I’d love one. Thanks, Stace.”

Tris turns, to see a young woman climbing the stairs. He steps back from the table, but it’s obvious that he’s been poking through her shit; the look on her face says so. Whether she’s annoyed or amused is harder to determine.

“Just looking, or do you want to buy something?”

The glint in her eye gives him permission to smile. “Sorry.” Tris points at the trombonist. “I really like this one. Where was it taken?”

She’s definitely amused now. “Here. You don’t recognize the men’s room?”

“Oh yeah,” Tris says, unwilling to cop to his neophyte status. “No kidding. It’s never looked so beautiful.” The musician looks semifamiliar, enough so that Tris doesn’t want to ask who it is and sound ignorant again.

“Thank you.”

He can’t be certain, in this light, what color her eyes are. Only that they’re incredibly bright.

“You always hang around in men’s rooms?”

“Yes.”

A waitress appears at the top of the stairs. “One tea and one coffee.” She deposits the drinks on a neighboring clutter-free two-top.

The photographer slides onto the couch seat, sours her drink with lemon. Tris takes the chair and sweetens his with two fake sugars. Few situations make him as comfortable as hunching over a table before a coffee. The way he holds the cup between a braced thumb and a finger looped through the handle, the slight wrist flick he employs when he tips it to his mouth, even the motion with which he stirs: these things gratify him. They may be all he does with elegance.

This girl, on the other hand, could not care less for form. She squeezes the lemon slice, drops it in her cup, submerges it with a stab of her long index finger, changes her mind, retrieves it with the spoon, and finally drapes it over the side of the saucer like some small expired fish. It doesn’t matter, though. She’s fucking beautiful.

They introduce themselves, and then she says, “What do you play?”

“Nothing.” Tris switches to an overhand five-fingered grip on his cup and takes a quick sip, a technique he thinks of as diner-style. “I’m a novelist, actually.”

He used to say writer—preferable for its workingman modesty, and also for the fact that the inevitable follow-up question, “What do you write?” allowed him to shed that modesty in equally modest fashion, as if the spectacular truth was being dragged from him. But no more; it’s too much of a charade. Although novelist rings false, too, these days. More honest would be “I’m a guy who’s written one novel.”

“So, you’re here because…”

“I’m helping Albert Van Horn. He’s an old friend of my grandfather’s.”

“And your grandfather’s…”

“A novelist, too.”

“Huh. Literary family.”

Tris shrugs. “Something like that.”

“I guess it’s the same as jazz.” She gestures at the empty stage. “Everybody’s second generation. Or third.”

There’s a hint of loneliness in her voice, Tris thinks. “What about you? Third-generation photographer?”

“Nope. First.” The vulnerability he thought he heard is gone, if it was ever there. “So what are you doing for Albert?”

“I don’t know. Whatever they need.”

She nods. “Opening wine bottles and hanging out, probably. Mariko just likes to have someone on hand in case there’s an emergency.”

“You know them?”

“Only by reputation. But you’ve probably heard all that.”

“Yeah, some.” Tris takes a belt of coffee. “You shoot for the club?”

“I wish. A friend of mine is sitting in tonight. I’m trying to get some images of him and Albert.”

“Is jazz your main subject?”

“It’s what I get paid for.” She fiddles with her spoon. Something in the gesture seems petulant—coy, in a girlish guess-what’s-wrong kind of way, and so Tris takes a stab.

“It’s a pretty male-dominated world, huh? What’s that like?”

Her eyes dart up, a flash of green. “The whole world’s a pretty male-dominated world, in case you haven’t noticed.”

He awards her the kind of deferential side nod you might give the person who outbids you at an auction. “Fair enough. I guess I’m just curious whether you ever run into any issues in documenting the culture, being who you are.”

Nina stares at him over the lip of her teacup. “Being who I am.”

The words, partially muffled by the porcelain, are both inflectionless and charged, and Tris feels compelled to elaborate, to implicate himself. “It’s something I deal with all the time, personally. I write about hip-hop, so my race is always an issue. As it should be.” Jesus, he thinks, there I go. It’s become a damn reflex.

The cup clicks against the saucer, grinds as Nina gives it a quarter turn. “And who am I?” she asks, crossing her arms under her breasts and leaning forward until her elbows touch the table.

“You look like a nice Jewish girl to me.” Tris smiles. “As they say.”

She straightens so fast, it’s as though his words have blown her back against the chair. “Who says?”

“I don’t know, Jewish grandmothers, I guess. Although not mine.”

“How did you know I’m Jewish?”

Tris thinks of CLOUD 9, and points a finger at a passing waitress. “How do you know she’s black?”

“Nobody ever thinks I’m Jewish.”

“Really? What do they think you are?”

“Creole. West Indian. Black.”

“Get the fuck outta here. What do they say when you tell them?”

“I don’t. I wasn’t allowed to growing up, in Prague, and now, what’s the point? I’m more black than Jewish anyway.”

“What, in your soul?”

“Yeah,” she says, deadpan. Tris waits a second, expecting her to undercut her answer somehow, but she doesn’t.

“And nobody has a problem with that?”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Any of these jazz dudes you work for.”

“Why should they? It’s all about your conception, bruh. If you got a soulful type of vibe, you can understand the greatness and the sophistication of any tradition.”

Tris wonders whether she realizes how dramatically she’s just switched up her own vibe in the course of this pocket manifesto. “Maybe so,” he says, “but that shit doesn’t really fly in hip-hop. If I started talking about ‘feeling black,’ I’d get slayed. I’m barely allowed to be what I am in the first place.”

“Then maybe you need to leave hip-hop alone. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to diss it. But name me one hip-hop dude who’s dealin’ with it like Albert Van Horn is dealin’ with it. This is some profound historical shit, right here. This is it. And if motherfuckers can’t accept that you know your shit when you know your shit because they’re too caught up in trivial shit like how you look, then how could they be dealin’ with anything profound? Art is supposed to be universal, bruh. We gotta deal with that.”

Tris can’t help but be impressed by the force of her conviction. And it’s been a long time since anybody folded him into a we, especially a we like that. “Maybe I do need to leave hip-hop alone,” he says. “Find something no one can deny.” Even as he utters the words, Tris wonders whether he means something no one can deny matters, or something no one can deny is mine.

“Here you are.” She nudges his hands, knuckle-to-knuckle. “You doin’ it.”

Tris looks up from the dregs of his coffee. Nina is waiting for him to meet her eyes, and when he does, their gazes lock. A staring contest. Tris hasn’t had one of these since junior high.

“Here I am,” he says.

         

At 7:14 and forty-five seconds, Tris excuses himself, lopes up the stairs, and double-taps the larger dressing room’s door, wondering how he can dispense with whatever duties impend and get back to Nina. He’s never had fantasies quite like the ones she inspires. Already, after an hour’s conversation, he’s imagining not a night in bed, but a life with her: the two of them locking together like Voltron robots to form an Artistic Power Couple. Tandem-grappling up the cliff face of success and walking solemnly, hand in hand, deeper and deeper down the mine shaft of creative commitment. Gliding through art openings, literary readings, jazz clubs. Living poetic, living fly. Living Brooklyn. Having each other’s backs, viciously and without question. Buying a brownstone, filling it with art, books, music. Strapping huge cartoon-dynamite packs to the notion of race and blowing it sky-high, once and for all—producing work so searingly dope, so unassailably dealing with it, that nobody ever asks either one of them another dumb-ass identity question again.

“Open,” calls the voice from his answering machine. Tris wonders for a moment whether Mariko is using the word as an adjective or a verb, then turns the knob.

A man who must be Albert is sitting in the only chair, one leg resting on the lap of the tiny woman on the couch across from him. The supple fabric of his suit pants is bunched above his knee. A long white scar runs down the visible length of his calf, stark and rough against the smooth brown of his skin.

“Howdy,” he rumbles, punctuating the greeting by raising the drink in his hand. “Tristan number two. Last time I saw you, you were knee-high to a duck.” He sets the glass on the floor, lowers his leg, drops both hands to the armrests, and begins to lift himself out of the chair.

“Hornsy, don’t. You gotta rest.” Mariko steps in front of him, and Albert aborts his effort, sinks back down. “Good to see you, Tristan. You lifesaver.” Mariko’s skin is stretched taut over her face and hangs loose at the neck, like a rubber Halloween mask that’s been yanked on and off too many times. Her lipstick matches her ankle-length burgundy dress, marks the near-odorless cigarette burning in her hand. “Albert recovering from arterial bypass,” she explains, waving an arm at the appendage.

The saxophonist raises his eyebrows at Tris and grimaces. “Hard shit.”

Mariko nods, resumes. “They open up whole leg. Doctor tell me, ‘Your husband gotta stay in bed for three weeks, Mariko.’ I tell him, ‘That’s okay, we booked at Blue Note in ten days.’ He say, ‘You crazy! No way he can recover that fast.’ I tell him, ‘You don’t know my husband. He gotta play!’”

Tris grins, glances over at Albert to catch his reaction but finds none. His leg is crossed at the knee and he’s kneading the muscle with both hands.

“So, this what I need, young man. You gotta get five waters and five towels and put onstage: one for everybody. And un–cover up the drums. When show start, you gotta stand by me—we cannot sit, Blue Note sold out, everybody wanna see Albert!—and go tell soundman if we need to make a change. I tell you the rest once show start. For now, you can visit with grandfather. I gotta go downstairs and talk to Mike about dinner for me and Albert. And Albert gotta go over set list with band—right, Hornsy?”

“Right,” Albert grunts, dropping his leg. This time, Mariko lets him stand. He sets his weight down gingerly, limps to the door, and steps out.

“My grandfather? He’s here?”

No sooner does Tris ask than a great happy roar of recognition fills the hall. “Brodsky the bodyguard!” Van Horn bellows. Tris steps into the corridor and, to his delight, finds his grandfather dangling six inches above the ground, locked in the musician’s embrace, slapping Albert on the back. Tris looks at Mariko, waiting for the admonishment against overexertion he assumes will be forthcoming. Instead, he finds her gazing tenderly at them.

“I knew you’d bounce right back,” says Tristan, regaining his feet. Mariko slips into the hall, and the old man gives her a double hand squeeze and a peck on each cheek, then turns to his grandson. “I’m telling you—this man is a miracle of nature. Nothing can stop him.”

Albert stares at Tristan, eyes grown wide. “The old mutual-appreciation society,” he drawls, and then the two of them are laughing, harder and longer than Tris has ever seen his grandfather laugh before. And though the old man’s delight at seeing his friend is obvious, equally clear is how hard he’s straining to keep up his end of the moment. It’s the kind of thing Tris wishes he didn’t notice, and he turns away and lets himself remember Nina, sitting downstairs with her camera and her blazing eyes.

Albert departs into the second dressing room, where his musicians are; he opens the door to brotherly salutations, the thrum of an upright bass. Tris watches the band fold him into itself and feels a yen for the kind of creative fellowship writers never experience, then peeks at his grandfather and wonders if the old man is suffering the same pang. Mariko skitters down the stairs, and then the two of them are alone. They commandeer the dressing room, and Tristan takes the chair.

“Slip me a little of the grape, will you?” He indicates a bottle breaching the arctic surface of a bucket atop the minifridge.

“It’s not open,” Tris reports, lifting it.

“Change that.”

“It’s champagne.” The reverence with which he says it sounds stupid even to him.

“In that case, have it bronzed and mounted.”

Tris twists the metal wire and passes the old man a flute. “Will they mind if I have some? While I’m working, I mean?”

“I doubt it. Alcohol doesn’t rank as a drug with Mariko.” Tris pours himself a glass. They clink and drink.

“Nice suit.”

“The very best,” Tristan declares, pseudo-indignant. “Got it thanks to my old teacher, Peter Pendergast. I’m sure I’ve told you about him.”

“A little.” Pendergast’s an enigmatic figure in the Brodsky oral canon; sometimes he’s spoken of with derisive affection, sometimes outright contempt. All Tris knows for certain is that the professor kept his grandfather out of the war and helped him get published, and that there was a falling-out: unspecified, conclusive.

“Peter was one of these types with boundless energy. It was his undoing, in the end. Anyway, this exuberance was generally directed toward improving you. He liked to find some fault and then proceed to rectify it. Gave him satisfaction.

“Sometime in the late forties, he took me aside and let me know that he disapproved of my clothes. He told me that they didn’t fit, that they lacked style, and that I simply didn’t spend enough on them. ‘Just once,’ he said, ‘you should go to a first-rate tailor and see what a real first-class suit is all about.’

“I, of course, paid no attention. After a few months of this private nudging, Pendergast began to rib me in public—to my great annoyance. I told him to cut the crap and take me to his suit man, and the next day, at about six in the morning, Pendergast turns up in his fancy motorcar and transports me to an establishment known to him as the best in Manhattan. The proprietor and head tailor, I’ll never forget, was a man who was sort of an oily type but also managed to be very haughty. I disliked him immediately. Pendergast assured me that everyone disliked him immediately. So I leapt up on his box and let him take my measurements.

“The idea, I hasten to explain, was not to cut me a suit from whole cloth. That would have produced a cost equivalent to the gross national product of one of these small countries, say Bolivia. The idea was to take a suit off the rack and alter it. Which was not cheap either. So away we went, and three days later I returned, and the oily fellow gave me my suit.”

Tristan pauses.

“And?”

“It did not fit me. But really, I didn’t fit the suit. I’m of the lumpen proletariat. That’s it for me. Can’t blame the suit. I shoved it in the closet, and that was that. And then last fall I was poking around for something presentable to wear to your cousin Steven’s wedding, and there it was. And the goddamn thing fit fine. What do you make of that?”

“Dunno. I’d have to see your tax return.” Tris balances the glass atop his palm. “It’s nice to see you and Albert together. You’ve known him forever, huh?”

“He started as a drummer. I used to haul around his trap kit when I was younger than you are now. We’ve never seen very much of each other, but when we do, it means something.”

“So what is it I’m supposed to learn from him, exactly?”

“Whatever you can.”

“What’s he, like, your muse?” Tris says it just sharply enough to register, but not so sharply that he couldn’t play innocent if he had to.

“Don’t be a putz. You’ll never get anything done if you believe in muses.”

Tris decides he’d rather confide in the old man than take him half-assedly to task, and he flops onto the couch. “I’m not getting anything done anyway.”

“Welcome to the club. What’s your excuse?”

“General indifference of the world. I haven’t written shit since Contents came out.”

“That’s nothing—what, a few months? Look at me: more than twenty years since my last book. They had me dead and buried.” For an instant, the old man looks smug, or victorious, or something else Tris hasn’t seen in him before. The look passes, and Tristan adds, “I had me dead and buried.”

“But you already had a career, Grandpa. You could afford to take your time. Nobody’s waiting for my next book, except maybe to slam me again.”

Tristan waves off the complaint. “Fuck ’em. Everything moves in cycles. Do you know I just sold the movie rights to Manacles? Forty-six years later, people are finally ready for that book. Should have seen what I went through in ’51.”

“I don’t have forty-six years, Grandpa. I gotta come up with something strong, or else apply to law school.”

The old man levels a wine-hardened glare at him. “What do you want? A pep talk? How’s this: be a lawyer. If that strikes you as a possibility, then by all means quit fucking around with something you’re not serious about and do it.” Tristan breaks off, shakes his head, and guzzles his champagne.

“Okay. Jesus. It was just a figure of speech. I mean, fuck law school.” Tris stares into his glass, watches the bubbles hit the surface and explode.

The old man reaches over, and Tris feels his grandfather’s cool, dry hand encircle his wrist. “Listen. I like Contents. Your sentences are beautiful. But it’s too kind, Tris; there’s no fight in it. You’ve got to push yourself if you’re going to push anybody else. Whatever you love, you’ve got to stare it in the face until you find the dark part, the part you hate. And vice versa.” There is excitement in his voice, but Tristan’s face is grim. “It will take its toll,” he adds. “I don’t mean to make it sound romantic.”

Tris lifts the glass to his mouth, feeling less like a writer than ever. There is something curdled in his grandfather—something stunted in the way writing and only writing can break him and heal him—that Tris is just beginning to understand. Or find the courage to see.

“I’m not sure I want to do it that way,” he says, just louder than a whisper.

“You’d better decide.”

         

“I met somebody,” Nina says into the phone. She’s pacing before the Brooklyn studio’s one window, passing in and out of the harsh morning light.

One second of silence. Two. “Hello? You there?”

“Yeah,” Marcus grunts, and clears his throat. “Good for you, babe. You like him?”

“Yeah,” says Nina, bristling. She planned to do this gently, but if Marcus is going to play it cold and casual, dip into some kind of pimp routine, then she can be a motherfucker, too. “We talked until three in the morning. I think I’m in love.”

“I’m happy for you.” He sounds like he’s reading the cereal box in front of him. “You deserve it.”

Marcus can’t be letting go so easily. This must be some cocksure can’t-nobody-take-you-from-me bullshit.

“You meet him at school? He a college kid?”

“The Blue Note. He’s a novelist. Why are you acting so weird?”

“What? How am I supposed to act?”

“Like you give a shit, maybe?”

“Look. You turn down every gig I’m on. You make time to see me maybe once a month. What—”

“And we have sex every time.”

“If you like this guy, you should see him. I might be selfish, but I’m not that selfish.”

“You’re supposed to love me.”

“I do love you. That’s not gonna change.”

Nina sighs, and the phone dissects her breath into static. “I love you, too, Marcus.”

“But you can’t do this anymore. Right?”

Famous last words. Without even meaning to, he’s mocking her.

“Right.” And as the first familiar pang of longing hits her, Nina knows that Marcus is going to get into his car and drive across the bridge and appear on her—his—doorstep, and they’re going to make love on the thin mattress lying on the floor of the glorified darkroom she’s been living in for almost nine years now.

         

“Hey. It’s me.” Nina is back on the phone, watching Marcus sweep the bottom of his overcoat aside as he prepares to slip behind the wheel of his 1974 Jaguar. He lifts his head and waves. Nina waves back, with a weak smile he can’t see and she can’t feel.

“Hey,” Tris says brightly, on the other end of the line. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Good. Me, too.”

“Let’s meet. Did you have lunch yet?”

“Listen, I don’t want to sound crazy. I know we just met. But you know how I was telling you my apartment situation is kind of fucked-up?”

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“Well, I need to clear out of here. Like as soon as possible. It’s a long story. My landlord’s an asshole, basically.”

“Come stay with me,” he says immediately.

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. Want me to come and help you with your stuff?”

Nina looks around. Everything she has, aside from an armload of framed photos taken by her and by Marcus, fits in the two well-traveled suitcases Devon gave her as a first-year Christmas gift.

“That’s okay. I’ll call a car. Where are you, exactly?”

“Two oh nine Washington Park, corner of Dekalb. I’m on the parlor floor; it’s buzzer number two.”

“Okay. See you in a few. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Please. If I’d thought of it, I would have bribed homeboy to throw you out.”

She laughs. “I promise it’ll just be for a little while.”

“Not if I can help it.”

Tris tosses the phone onto the bed, crosses his arms over his chest, and stands in the middle of the room, grinning like an idiot, for a good five minutes. This feels completely right—brazen, crazy, and natural.

He snaps out of his reverie and appraises the shithole he calls home. Some guys spend weeks prepping the crib for their girlfriend’s move-in. It’s a standard rite of passage for the young bachelor, the kind of moment a beer commercial might immortalize. And here he is, half-assing it in an hour. Then again, Nina’s not really his girlfriend, is she? All they’ve done is kiss. Usually, post–industrial revolution, the normal thing would be to sleep together first, discuss cohabitation second. Oh well. This is…passionate. Or maybe, he thinks—and then shakes free of the thought—it’s…convenient.

Tris sweeps on a regular basis, because it’s easy, but his apartment hasn’t seen a mop in months. He doesn’t have enough belongings for true clutter, but due to his reliance on what his mother calls a “piling system,” the entire place looks as if it’s in the early stages of being unpacked. At least there’s no bad art of which to be embarrassed: no dorm-style posters of Tony Montana, no cheap Dalí prints. The walls are adorned only by a framed dust jacket of Contents Under Pressure—framed by Mom and Dad, naturally—and about thirty three-by-five notecards, indexing the various plot points of his now-abandoned second book. These are Scotch taped above his desk in long, uneven rows, and make his workspace look more writerly, to him and anybody who might chance to visit. Other than that, the cards are useless.

He snatches them down, shuffles them into a spiky stack, and shoves it in a drawer. His mop, nestled in the crevice between refrigerator and wall, is crusted with filth. He opens the front door and javelin-flings it straight into the trash can awaiting pickup at the curb, then soaks an old T-shirt in soapy water and slides it across the hardwood floor with his bare foot.

The buzzer sounds as Tris is staring into his lone closet, wondering how to clear some space and feeling increasingly as if he actually is a character in a beer commercial, the thought bubble above his head reading Duh, girls got a lotta stuff. He performs a last visual sweep as he jogs to the door: incense is burning, his one set of sheets is just back from the Laundromat, the stacks of books are clustered close enough to his desk to appear in use. Not bad. Besides, from what Nina told him last night, it’s not as though she’s been living in palatial splendor herself.

He swings open the door and they grin goofily and meet in a warm-chilly, indoors-meets-outdoors kiss right on the threshold. It’s their most prolonged contact to date, so comfortable and hungry that Tris contemplates scrapping the no-pressure I’ll-sleep-on-the-couch attitude he’s decided would be prudent and just carrying Nina straight to bed, leaving her suitcases right there on the top step to be pillaged by the neighborhood’s small nocturnal tribe of crack-rock enthusiasts.

That would be nice, in a way: to receive Nina baggage-free, with just the clothes on her back and the song in her heart, or whatever. Or maybe that’s a fucked-up thing even to think, and why shouldn’t her belongings mingle with his, her hair dryer befriend his bath towel, their CDs nuzzle together on cold Brooklyn nights?

“Come in, come in.” He bends at the knees to heft a suitcase in each hand. Nina follows him, carrying her purse and an armful of frames bound up with twine. Tris shoulders the door shut behind her, and Nina slides the bundle onto the countertop that separates the kitchen from the living room and has a look around. What’s she thinking? Tris wonders, following her gaze, trying to see the room through her eyes. Ten-foot windows, dirty on the outside and thus uncleanable, ceiling draped with spiderweb chandeliers, a low black leather couch that Tris has always loved but that suddenly seems as if maybe three minor characters from Shaft should be sitting on it, dudes in denim suits with black-fist Afro picks wedged in their hair. The blank walls shame him, and so it is with an instantly regretted zeal that he bounds over to Nina’s stack of photos—as if the only reason he invited her was to get his hands on some art for the crib.

“Wow, this is great. Can we put these up?” He’s looking through the twine at a picture taken from the orchestra pit of Detroit’s Symphony Hall: the bowed heads of eight musicians, shot in such a way that the drum set’s cymbals appear to hover over them like looming spaceships. The image conveys an odd mixture of humility and majesty. The servants of the music, bowing to it as the fans applaud.

Nina turns, and almost winces. It’s a great shot, one of her favorites. One of his. “Sure,” she hears herself say, and then wishes she hadn’t. Why let Marcus follow her here? Why let Tris hang the work of her lover in his apartment? Already, in some vague way, she feels as if she’s deceiving him, and it’s the last thing Nina wants to do. But now he’s rummaging for a hammer and a nail, and just like that, it’s too late.