It was back in those days. Claudius Van Clyde and I stood on the edge of the dancing crowd, each of us already three bottles into one brand of miracle brew, blasted by the music that throbbed from the speakers. But we weren’t listening to the songs. I’d been speaking into the open shell of his ear since we’d gotten to the party, shouting a bunch of mopey stuff about my father. Sometime around the witching hour, he stopped his perfunctory nodding and pointed toward the staircase of the house. “Check out these biddies,” he said. Past the heads of the dancers and would-be seducers I saw the two girls he meant. They kept reaching for each other’s waists and drawing their hands quickly away, as if testing the heat of a fire. After a minute of this game the girls laughed and walked off. We weaved through the crowd and followed them, away from the deejay’s setup in front of the night-slicked bay windows, and into the kitchen where we took stock of the situation. One of the girls was lanky and thin-armed, but notably rounded at the hips. She wore a white tank top, which gave her face and painted fingernails a sheen in the dimmed light. A neat ladylike Afro bloomed from her head, and she was a lighter shade of brown than her friend with the buzz cut, a thick snack of a girl whose shape made you work your jaws.
The party, thrown by a couple of Harvard grads, happened just weeks before the Day of Atonement, in late September of 1995. Claudius had overheard some seniors talking about it earlier that Saturday after the football game, as they all smoked next to the pale-blue lion statue up at Baker Field. Later he dragged me from my dorm room. We slipped out of the university’s gates and took the subway down to Brooklyn, determined to crash. The party had been described as an affair for singles, so when you arrived you had to fill out a sticker that read “Hi, my name is . . .” and affix it to your body. The taller girl in the tank top had placed hers on her upper arm, like a service stripe. Her friend wore the sticker on her rump, and this was both a convenience and a joke meant to shame us. Neither of their stickers bore a name.
“Dizzy chicks,” Claudius said to me, and we gave each other goofy grins. The main difference between a house party in Brooklyn and a college party uptown was that on campus you were just practicing. You could half-ass it or go extra hard at a campus party, either play the wall or go balls-out booty hound, and there would be no actual stakes, no real edge to the consequences. Nothing sharp to press your chest against, no precipice to leap from, nothing to brave. You might get dissed, or you might get some play. You would almost certainly get cheaply looped. But at the end of the night, no matter what, you would drift off to sleep in the narrows of a dorm bed surrounded by cinderblock walls, swaddled in twin extralong sheets purchased by someone’s mom.
We approached the girls, pointed to our stickers to introduce ourselves, and asked for their names. The tall one with the Afro said her name was Iris and did so with her nose, putting unusually strong emphasis on the I. True to this utterance, she seemed the more insistent and lunatic of the two. She vibrated. We asked where they were from. Most of Iris’s family came from Belize. Her friend with the buzz cut, Sybil, was Dominican. Claudius and I liked to know these kinds of things.
“You enjoying the party?” I asked. Iris didn’t respond. Her attention flew all over the place. The house we were in was old—you felt its floorboards giving, perceived its aches being drowned out by the music and conversations that swelled with everyone’s full-bellied bloats of laughter. In hushed moments, you heard the creaking of wood, followed by the tinkle of glass, the crunch of plastic, or the throaty rise of the hum. Iris seemed attuned to all of it, to every detail of the party house and its subtle geographies. She stared now through the glass doors leading to the backyard, where torches showed little groups of smokers breathing into the air.
I tapped her on the shoulder.
“Oh, hello again,” she said and then looked at her friend.
“Yep, they’re still here,” Sybil said.
“Enjoying the party?” I repeated.
“We’re bubbling,” Iris said. From the living room the deejay began to play a new song. “What is this?” she said. “I know this.”
“That new shit,” said a guy standing near us. He had a patchy beard and double-fisted red cups of foamy beer. Maybe he was a Harvard man. “Newest latest,” he said. “‘Brooklyn Zoo.’ Ol’ Dirty Bastard.”
Claudius and the girls nodded in recognition but to me it all sounded like code.
“Why’s he called that?” I asked.
The guy laughed. “Because there’s no father to his style.”
The girls turned to each other and began a kind of stomping dance. “Damn damn damn,” Iris said, “this song is so bubble!”
They seemed to understand the good life according to the image and logic of this word—simultaneously noun, verb, and adjective—its glistening surface wet with potential meaning. As they danced, their faces became masks of tension, nostrils and mouths flexed open. Iris kept her arms pinned to her sides while Sybil jabbed the air with her elbows. Claudius jerked his chin at Sybil and told me, “I call dibs.”
“Nah, man.”
“Already called it.”
We both preferred girls of a certain plumpness, with curves—in part, I think, because that’s what black guys are supposed to like, because liking it felt like a confirmation of possessing black blood, a way to stamp ourselves with authenticity—but he had made his claim. I was left to deal with Iris, the prophetess of the bubble. Fine, no big deal. Claudius could have his pick. This was all his idea anyway. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him. He knew I needed a good distraction.
A few weeks earlier, late one August morning in Philadelphia, shortly before the start of sophomore year, I sat with my father, Leo, at the kitchen table and got drunk with him for the first time. He told me to beware of crazy women, angry women, passionate women. He told me they would ruin me. “But they are also the best women,” he said, “the best lovers, with a jungle between their legs and such wildness in bed that every man should experience.” I knew the kinds of women he meant. I also knew he was talking about my mother, but I didn’t give a damn. She had left us, left him, a few years earlier, and recently she’d announced she was getting remarried. I saw how this news affected my father. He had stalked around our house all summer and appeared smaller and more frantic by the week. He searched as though the answer to the question of how his life had gone so wrong was hidden in one of the rooms. All but undone by this effort, my father regarded me that morning through his heavy eyelids and long Mediterranean lashes. He’d inherited bad teeth from his own father and before he turned sixty had had a bunch of them yanked out. He wore a dental partial but didn’t have it in as we drank. The bottom of his face was collapsed like a rotten piece of fruit. “The best,” he repeated. “And so.” His Italian accent deepened the more he drank. His tongue peeked out of his broken grin. “And so every man should experience this, Ben,” he said. “Once.” He held a chewed fingernail up by his high nose and then reached into his pocket for something. It was a condom, wrapped in silver foil. “Use this with the most delicious woman you can find, una pazza. Let her screw your brains out, once and never again. Then marry a nice, boring, fat girl with hands and thighs like old milk. Making a dull life is the only way to be happy.” He gave me the condom. It was an ill-timed ritual—I’d already gone out into the world—but he believed in it, just as he believed there was a way to be happy. Since I was his disciple, and quite drunk that morning, I believed in it too.
At the house party, Claudius and I slid in behind the girls and danced with them right there in the kitchen. Iris moved well but with aggression. She spun around, hooked her fingers into my belt loops, and slammed her pelvis into mine. She grinded herself against me for a while and then backed away to show her perfect teeth and claw the air between us. She was a kitten on its hind legs, fiercely swiping at a ball on a string.
I leaned in and asked if she’d gone to Harvard too. I tried to sound older, like I’d already graduated and was fully a man.
“We’re Hawks,” Iris said in her nasal voice, and then she spread her arms like wings. Claudius had a theory about girls with nasal voices that I now appreciated anew. The theory was that girls who spoke this way, cutting their voices off from their lungs and guts, did so as a kind of defense, a noisy insistence meant to distract men from the flesh.
“Hawks?”
“Hunter College, ’94. Hey, why don’t you get me and my girl some whiskey bubbles?”
“That’s whiskey and . . . ?”
“Magic.”
“Huh?
“Just whiskey,” she whined, with a disappointed shake of her head. “Be a good boy.”
Passing Claudius and Sybil as they danced, I nodded to let him know we were in. The sensation of Iris’s moving hips ghosted against me. Floating there in the face of the kitchen cabinet were her pretty smile and dark eyes, flecked with a color close to gold.
After making four healthy pours of Jack, I carried the cups back over. Sybil sniffed the whiskey and let her eyes cross with pleasure. Iris lifted her cup and with a dignified tone and expression said she was thankful for the universe and all of its moments.
“And for whiskey and music and madness and love,” she added.
“And for the sky,” Sybil said. “Have you seen the fucking sky tonight?”
The words were meaningless. It was a toast to nonsense.
“And for your tits,” Iris said. She reached out and squeezed Sybil’s right breast. “Doesn’t she have great tits?”
“She does,” Claudius said, staring at them. “She really does.”
Claudius had come to Columbia from West Oakland with certain notions regarding life in New York, that the city’s summer heat and dust, its soot-caked winter ice, were those of the cultural comet, which he ached to witness if not ride. Because of these notions, he manipulated gestures and disguises, pushed the very core of himself outward so that you could see in his face and in the flare of his broad nostrils the hard radiance of the soul-stuff that some people chatter on about. Though not quite handsome, he was appealing. He could convince you he was beautiful. For this trickery his implements included a collection of Eastern-style conical hats and retro four-finger rings. His choice for tonight: a fez, tilted forward on his head so that we, both of us, felt emboldened by the obscene probing swing of the tassel.
He and I knew what we were toasting: the next phase of life. At parties like this the crowd was older, college seniors who already had New York apartments, graduates who were starting to make their way, and folks who were far enough into their youth to start questioning it. The booze was better and the weed was sticky good. The girls were incredible, of course, especially here. You could taste a prevalent Caribbean flavor in the air, as if the parade through Brooklyn’s thoroughfares on Labor Day had never stopped and this had been its destination all along. If not Caribbean like Sybil, then the girls were something else distinct and of the globe. These girls each had her own atmosphere. We were convinced they wore better, tinier underwear than the girls we knew, convinced they were mad geniuses of their own bodies.
“So where’d you two escape from?” Iris asked, though her gaze drifted out to the backyard again.
“Uptown,” Claudius said. “Columbia.”
“Roar, Lion, Roar,” Sybil said, mocking us.
“We graduated in May,” I lied.
“Mazel tov,” Iris said.
Sybil shook her head.
Iris’s attention snapped all the way back now. “What? I can totally say that.”
Sybil made a popping sound with her mouth, and the two of them laughed.
Claudius and I laughed too, though neither of us knew what was funny. Before we could pick up the thread of the conversation, the girls left us without saying a word.
We slid up the stairs after them and wound past the partygoers perched there gossiping or flirting or losing themselves in the privacies of thought. On the second floor, a group of people stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway of one room, as though to block something illicit from view. Claudius and I pushed past them and found ourselves in an immense bathroom, where voices echoed off the tiles. Two girls stood fully clothed in a Jacuzzi painted a tacky shade of powder blue, their heads framed by a backlit square of stained glass over the tub, but they weren’t our girls. Back in the hallway, we caught Iris and Sybil coming out of a bedroom, trailed by the skunky sweet odor of marijuana. We pursued them downstairs.
Claudius took a step toward them and said, “So let’s play a game.”
For a moment the girls acted as though they had never seen us before, then Sybil’s eyes widened. “Wow,” she said.
Claudius announced that we should all trade confessions. “Shameful stories,” he said. “Secrets. The worse they are, the better.”
They seemed amused but unwilling.
He went on anyway. “Who wants to go first?” he said, and waited. But it was just a sham. Of course Claudius would be the one to start.
He and I knew exactly what we were aiming to achieve in these moments. It involved patience and strategic silences and then, when we did speak, a distinct lowering of our voices—even in loud places, so that we would have to lean in—and eye contact that was both firm and soft, not a stare, that broke occasionally to let our gazes trickle down the full lengths of their bodies. Less wolfish than a leer, more a sly undressing. The total effect would be a kind of hypnosis, a gradual giving of the self. As we developed it, this method had worked with the girls on campus, but we knew that this was nothing to be proud of. College is nothing if not four years of people throwing themselves wildly at each other.
In his affected murmur, Claudius told us a story I had heard before. The story may or may not have been true, but it shocked people, or aroused them, or made them feel vulnerable and sad. Claudius wasn’t what you would call a patient guy. He needed to know as soon as possible where people stood, especially girls. Here is the story: When he was in high school, he discovered that the old lady who lived alone next door was watching him from her window. He would exercise in his room, wearing only his briefs, every morning and night. He locked the door to keep his alcoholic mother out. Furiously blinking, Claudius continued: “Calf-raises, push-ups, chin-ups, and crunches till I dropped. And there she was, this old biddy, looking dead at me with her old biddy glasses like it was the most natural thing in the world, like I was putting on a show. So that’s just what I did. At first I stood at the window and stared right back at her, rubbing my chest and abs. Then, after a week or so of this, I started rubbing baby oil on myself. I took it up a notch by walking around naked, and when that didn’t faze her, I tried to get my girlfriend to put on a sex show with me. Well, she wasn’t having it. Too innocent, I guess, so get this: I masturbated instead, right in front of the window. The old biddy watched this too, but the next night she wasn’t there. Wasn’t there the next night either. That was the last night she watched me. I guess she got to see what she’d been waiting for all along.”
In unison the girls let out a shriek, which spilled into rapid chatter that was like another language. Even in the dim party lights, their darting eyes stood out, fine russet and amber stones. The flurry of motion seemed to release scent from them: ripe sweat and vanilla and almond. Iris’s body shook with laughter as she slapped her thigh and rocked her head back. Her perfect Afro eclipsed broad sections of the room in its orbit. Other girls had either been repulsed or aroused by the story, unambiguously so. None had ever reacted like this. And something else was off. Iris’s wild mouth and eyes moved independently of the rest of her face. She resembled a hard plastic doll.
“What the fuck?” Sybil said finally. “This one thinks he’s a freak,” she said and sent his tassel spinning with a flick of her finger.
“Shame is the name of the game,” Claudius said, with a flare of his nostrils. “Shame is the nonsense of every age.” He was speaking a little too grandly now, even for him. “Let’s get on with the nonsense of this age.”
The girls whispered to each other, blew soft gibberish onto each other’s necks.
“Well,” Claudius said, “who’s next?”
“Him,” Iris said. “What’s he got to say?”
All three of them stared at me, waiting. There were a million ways I could go, but every corridor of my mind led to the same place.
“My dad,” I began, saying the first and only words that came to me. I explained that he was a white man, born and raised in Italy. He would always call my mother his cioccolata. Whenever she was angry with him, yelling for one reason or another, he would laugh and pet her cheek. In those moments he would tell her she was agrodulce, always retaining some of her sweetness.
Claudius smiled when I said this. He liked when I used Italian words on girls.
I told them my father loved my mother and her family. He especially liked when her younger sisters would visit. This was when I was a boy. Before they arrived I would sit on the rim of the tub and run my finger along the edge of the shower curtain, watching as he beautified himself. He put on cologne and decided whether to leave one or two buttons open at the neck of his finest shirts. He would make sure his cheeks were perfectly stubbled. During the visits he charmed as he mixed drinks, kissed the backs of hands, and admired new hairstyles. He ladled praise over my pretty aunts in easy pours. And I always adored him.
Claudius had stopped smiling. I wasn’t telling a shameful story. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I kept on.
Things like this would frustrate my mother, I told them; she accused him of flirting, loudly complained about his lack of respect for her. One day, when I was twelve, something else really brought out her fury. She came home from work hours before I was expecting her, and found me at the kitchen table looking through my father’s collection of nudes. I had seen my father’s dirty magazines before, and had avoided detection previously by taking only quick peeks, but this time I discovered, or could no longer ignore, that my father had specific preferences. I was riveted by the curves of the women’s buttocks, their dark nipples, and the dense blackness displayed between their thighs. My mother picked through the pile—I hadn’t realized until then how many were there—and from time to time, between glances at me, she would touch a finger to the mute faces of the women in the pictures, strained into expressions of pleasure. Her deeply brown skin against the images of theirs. My mother’s silence unnerved me. I desperately wanted her to say something, anything at all, but she didn’t. She simply took the entire stack from the table and gestured for me to go to my room.
When my father got home, he and my mother argued in the living room. I crept out and watched from the hallway.
“Leo, he’s twelve,” she said to him. It was as if my father had sat me down to show me the magazines himself, or worse, as if he had taken me to a whorehouse. Why would she blame him for what I did? I couldn’t understand it.
“Benito’s curious, almost a grown boy,” my father replied. He thought it was no big deal, nothing to fuss about, and I agreed. “And isn’t it good that he learns such women are beautiful? That his mamma is beautiful?”
“That’s not what he’s learning!” my mother screamed, and in that moment she looked hideous to me. “Don’t you realize what you’re teaching him? Don’t you see what you’re doing?”
At this, he took her into his arms and kissed her on the neck. She struggled against him for a little while, infuriated even more by his words. But he kept kissing her neck, and biting it. He snuffed out her anger with his embrace, and between laughs he murmured his pet names for her: cioccolata, agrodulce. I raised myself a little, still observing them from the hallway, filled with a distinct feeling of pride.
I stopped the story there, unable to go on, unsure how. For a while no one said anything. Iris took a sip of her Jack. Sybil looked around, as though she’d left something in another room. The music blared on. Finally Claudius grabbed the back of my head and laughed.
“This dude’s a psychopathic thinker,” he said. “A sensitive soul, a killjoy. He wears his heart and his mind on his sleeve.”
The girls appeared unconvinced.
“OK, ladies,” Claudius said, “your turn now.”
“We haven’t had nearly enough to drink for all that, boys,” Iris said. “Not really feeling your game.”
Sybil nodded. “Plus, you know what they say. Women and their secrets.”
“And bubbles,” Iris added with a wink.
Then they turned away, and just like that sealed us off from them. I marveled for a moment at this female power. From the corner of his eye, Claudius watched Sybil’s ass, continuing to make a claim on her, the only one he could still make in this moment of rejection. “That’s a goddamn bubble,” he whispered to me. It was held up for scrutiny by the tightness of her jeans and the heels of her boots. He glanced at me and went on and on about the miracle of tight jeans—he recognized these as Brazilian, he said, nodding slowly as he uttered the word with reverence. Looking again at Sybil, the long and deep curve of her that communicated with something ancient in him, he moved his lips as if trying to remember the old language. But the girls were lost to us. Though Claudius didn’t say anything to me about it, I couldn’t help weighing our two stories in my mind. I was clearly the one to blame.
Claudius and I spent the next two hours or so chatting, smoking, and drinking out in the backyard, where the torches flattened everyone’s faces and made them gleam. Eventually we went in. I munched on cookies and a sopping square of rum cake in the kitchen, intent on some sweetness, despite my own troublesome teeth, as we approached the end of the night. Claudius had gathered himself again and was scrambling around the emptying party, looking to see if there were any other girls worthy of our attention.
I couldn’t stop thinking about my own shameful story. Not long after the incident with the magazines, my mother left us, and later she divorced my father. She claimed he loved her with his eyes instead of his heart. She said a woman couldn’t spend her whole life with a man like that. But she was wrong about my father’s feelings. Sure of this, arrogant in my knowledge, I ranted it to myself. My father worshipped my mother, every fact and feature of her. All he’d ever done was shower her with devotion. After she left, he complained to me one day that she wasn’t gone at all, that she was too wicked for such a mercy. She was still there, he said, her flavor stuck in him: a froth in the veins, a disease of the blood. That’s how I began to think of her too then, as a sickness, as a betrayal on the cellular level. My choice to stay with him became a badge of loyalty, and I brandished it in her face as often as I could, until she stopped trying to talk sense to me. She did write on my seventeenth birthday though, asking me to come to Newark to see her, to meet her new man and his kids. She also called my dorm room at the end of freshman year, right before final exams, to tell me about her engagement and to let me know how much it would mean to her to have me attend the wedding.
“What makes you think I would ever do that?” I asked.
She was quiet for a moment, and even this interval of thought enraged me, primed me to pounce on anything she said. I stared at the naked lamp on my desk and forced my gaze into the bulb’s hot center.
“What makes you think you wouldn’t?” she said. “At some point, baby, you have to give up the idea fixed in your head and say enough is enough.”
I cursed at her and hung up the phone, shaking, purblind with anger, completely closed to her. I was still convinced she was a coward, unable to withstand the force of my father’s affections, as if there were such a thing as too much love.
My father. The old version of him would have enjoyed this party. I walked into the living room smiling at this thought. There was a time when he would have hosted such an event, casting invitations far and wide to young, magnificent, colorful people, people he referred to as the essence of the earth. For these parties, he’d let me stay up, all night if I could manage it. So I could imagine him kissing the cheeks of the four girls who were now heading toward the door, whose brown feet were tantalizing in their heels and sandals, wearing jeans smoothed on like blue oil, and summer dresses like saintly robes. My father would hold their hands and beg them not to go yet. He’d tell them about a special bottle, some vintage he’d been saving for the right moment, and offer the promise of a home-cooked breakfast at the first peek of sunrise. He’d say almost anything he could think of to make them stay, to keep the party going as long as possible, to get a smile to flash across one of their faces.
But my father was wasting away in Philly, not here, the man he used to be long gone, and so the four girls were allowed to pass out of the house without ceremony. Many more guys than girls were left now, and most of them had these hangdog looks made more pathetic by the dreary music the deejay played at a lowered volume.
Iris and Sybil were standing by a makeshift bookcase, giving three lames the same treatment they had given me and Claudius. Now, drunk or high, maybe both, they lifted their feet and flailed their arms, swimming in a thick sea of hilarity. Then one of the lames clung to Sybil’s arm as he begged her to stay, to give him her phone number, to go home with him. The guy looked older—old, frankly—and he and his buddies had probably crashed the party, though not the way we had. They seemed to come from someplace else entirely, another time, another dimension, and the stink of it emanated from them. That was it: something I couldn’t name festered in their horniness, and it made their solicitations coarse, mean, and frightening. I could have interfered, played the gallant hero like my father would have, but Iris was able to drag her friend away and out of the house.
Claudius came into the room holding his fez upside down like a little bucket. He resembled certain homeless folks you’d see begging on the subway, crackling with foul energy, offended and beseeching. His hair was matted and kinked. He stormed ahead and almost walked through me.
“No luck?”
“Fucking sausage fest,” he called back.
I followed him outside. He put the fez back on and its tassel flopped in the breeze. I had seen him this way before, agitated. He was terrible at idleness, much worse than I was, and the map of his life had no significance or shape without some destination to plunge his way into. He could quickly lose his way. We stood together, surrounded by the high-pitched barking of a neighbor’s dog, the buzz of a faulty streetlight, a faint clinking of metal. I clapped him on the shoulder and said we should head back up to campus. He took out his pager. The greenish glow of its display told us it was just past three o’clock in the morning. Subway service would be awful.
Just then, on the sidewalk, Iris and Sybil teetered by on bicycles, their front wheels doing a spastic dance. They rode a little past us before Sybil swerved and crashed into the side of Iris’s bike. She caught herself, but Iris fell. We rushed through the house’s gate, and I helped Iris up. There were tears in her eyes, but she was making a noise that eventually revealed itself as a laugh. Sybil was laughing too.
“We’re messed up,” Iris admitted. Without apology she belched into her fist and then examined her arm. A wide cut ran from her elbow halfway to her wrist. It filled with blood and was rimmed with dirt. She dipped her finger into the thick line of blood. The way she did it made me want to dip my finger too.
As she stared at the reddened tip of her finger, I suggested we walk them home. I jumped back when she tried to mark me with the spot of blood.
“A couple of goddamned gentlemen,” she said. “Chivalry is undead.”
We walked with their bikes while the girls, holding hands, staggered ahead of us, their very movements synced in drunken exaggeration, suggesting a new rhythm to prolong the night. It was like the records my father would play in the wee hours of his parties, after the delicate guests had already gone home and the skeptics who remained sat and considered the hands of the clock. He had a selection of special vinyl, mostly bop, that made things jump into life again, nothing like the bleak music the deejay played back at the house. My father’s music persuaded you that nothing ever had to end. Claudius and I, feeling good again, stared at the girls. Iris’s calves and thighs were shapely for such a thin girl. Sybil’s ass was like two warm, fat jewels on garish display.
Eyeing it, I said, “That’s a goddamn onion.”
“Make a grown man cry,” Claudius answered to my call. But then he looked doubtfully at me. “You wouldn’t even know what to do with that though. I called dibs, remember?” He jutted his chin at Iris and said, “That’s more your speed, B. Two sticks make fire.”
With a laugh he picked up his pace so that he was walking next to Sybil, and I was back with Iris. Another gash split the skin near her wrist. Every once in a while, when the wound grew rich with blood, she sucked at it like an injured child.
We walked for a long time, deeper into Brooklyn, and it did feel as though we were actually sinking. Wooden boards slanted across the windows of the apartments above a corner store and lines of stiff weeds punched through cracks in the sidewalk. We passed a place called Salt, a bar that looked like it hadn’t been open for business in years. Around the corner was a series of names tagged on a brick wall. Each of the names had three letters—SER, EVE, RON, REL, MED—and the drips of paint made murky icicles of color. The ground became more densely littered with crushed paper bags, empty bottles of malt liquor, and other shapeless hunks of trash. I guided Iris’s bike around inexplicable puddles layered with scum. It hadn’t rained in weeks, and it wouldn’t tonight. Men sat on the edges of ramshackle stoops or stood in front of shuttered bodegas. They leered at us, but their looks were less threatening than mysterious.
Iris talked incessantly, invoking the bubble, picking her words with drunk deliberation. “It’s not about being all profound and shit,” she said, “it’s not even about that. It’s like, can you tiptoe over every surface? Can you go anywhere and be open to every little thing?”
Gazing at her, I was careful to appear interested in what she had to say. I wasn’t going to screw up our chances a second time. I softened my tone and asked, “What’s all this business with the bubble?”
Sybil’s laugh drifted ahead of us.
“It’s Japanese: mono no aware,” she said. “A sensitivity to things. An awareness. Everything lacks permanence. A way of understanding beauty. I studied world philosophies, in college, and did a year abroad.” To illustrate the idea, she started talking about sakura, the cherry blossom tree.
At first all this sounded like more pothead gibberish. Then the notion of abroad, and the mysterious worldliness it suggested, began to excite me as much as her hips did. Iris was black, Central American, maybe Jewish somehow, and who knew what else. She was even more exotic than I had thought.
She talked about a dream she’d had about the cherry blossoms, a vision: the pink buds flowering, paling, and drifting down in bunches, left there like soft skirts on the grass. “I asked my mom about it,” she said. “She can read dreams. She cried a tear from her left eye. Then she said life is exactly like that.”
Iris was holding something out to me, something real, but I couldn’t quite grasp whatever it was. “Here’s what I want to know,” I said, and then blurted, “Have you ever made love in the grass?”
She frowned and opened her mouth to reply. But before she could speak, a thin, straw-colored dog appeared from between two parked cars. Claudius, startled, let Sybil’s bike fall to the ground. When the dog began to growl and bark, we tried to get around it. It didn’t move very well, but managed to stay in front of us. It may have been rabid. Some of its pink skin showed through its patches of fur, and in the glow of the streetlight it looked like a mix of hyena and pig. Its rheumy eyes gleamed, the sound of its growling nearly subliminal. I kept my eyes fixed on it. Though the night air had cooled, waves of heat pounded my head. My teeth clenched, and my chest tightened.
The dog edged closer, ready, at any moment, to spring at us as we backed away. Claudius cradled the fez against his chest and cursed under his breath. He slipped behind the rest of us and used us as his shield. I lifted Iris’s bike, ready to throw it, but then Sybil rushed at the dog and kicked its snout. The dog listed for a moment, whined in a way that almost seemed grateful, and then fell over. Iris joined her and they gave several more solid kicks, aimed at the dog’s head and shriveled belly. The animal didn’t move and it wasn’t breathing. All of its wildness had been extinguished. I turned my back even though the violence was done, but odd little murmurs from the girls, disturbing sounds, still reached my ears. Someone’s arms wrapped around me—my own arms, I realized. Not far from where I stood, Claudius’s mouth gaped wider and wider.
The girls got quiet. Sybil walked her bike to us. She was breathing heavily through her nostrils, skin shining from her brief exertions. She went right up to Claudius, grabbed the back of his head, and pulled him down to her for a rough, hungry kiss. His fez crumpled in their embrace.
Unsteadily, I made my way to Iris. As she stood over the unmoving dog, her shoulders rose and fell. She turned to me and ran the palm of her hand down my forehead, smoothing it. “Stop being so . . . astonished all the time,” she said. “It makes you seem old.”
Just then, a man began to shout from behind the bars of a window across the street. “Goddamn!” he said. “Y’all bitches fucked that motherfucker up!”
We laughed, first the girls and then me along with them. Claudius, holding his ruined hat, didn’t join in. I laughed with the girls and all of a sudden it seemed OK—what the two of them had done and how they had done it, that they had been the ones who were brave. It wasn’t just OK; it was exciting, and more.
As we walked on, Iris stared ahead, in a dream state, and asked, “What was the dog offering us? What did its choice of death release into the world?”
I didn’t, couldn’t, reply. It wasn’t clear at all whether her question was even meant for me.
We approached a station for a subway line I’d never even taken before, and Claudius looked back at me. A question formed on his tired, wary face, and I knew what he meant. I shook my head, and he knew what I meant. When I nodded, that was understood too: wherever this night led, we were following it all the way.
The girls’ building was set back from the street and constructed in two moods, with clean brick on the first floor and gray vinyl siding on the second. A single window peeked out from the siding like a jaundiced eye. The girls skipped through the gate, up to the door, and stood in the threshold, waiting for us.
“Where are we?” Claudius muttered.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“We got them home safe. Like they even fucking needed it.”
“And now they want to thank us,” I said. “A couple of goddamned gentlemen.”
“Man, I don’t even know where the hell we are.”
I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Who cares? The whole world is ours tonight, baby.”
Iris asked if we were coming up or what, said to hurry up, she had to pee. I gave Claudius our habitual goofy grin. He stared at me. Finally, in a low voice, he said OK, but he didn’t grin back. We carried their bikes inside.
Other than two Elizabeth Catlett prints on the walls, the living room was barely decorated, as if the girls didn’t actually live here. Did anyone live here? The suggestion was thrilling, that the place was available to anyone in the know who wanted, or who was fated for, a crazy night.
The girls dropped some tablets into our palms—“love drugs,” they said—and I swallowed mine down with a swig of overproof rum. Claudius followed my lead. The girls told us to sit tight and went to take a bath, together. We sank into the softness of their couch and let their voices caress us through the slightly opened door. The girls talked solemnly in the tub, like two sages.
“Does it hurt?” Sybil was saying.
“It does,” Iris said.
I joked, knowing it was lame, that the girls must be taking a bubble bath. Claudius didn’t say a word. Sweat ran from under his warped hat into his eyes. As the girls’ voices floated on and time got fat and lazy, my heart pummeled my rib cage. Drunk and high and nervous, I was ready nevertheless.
They emerged at what felt like the edge of forever, at first wearing only the thinning steam from the bathroom, then essentially nothing, just some stray suds. Iris had strips of bandage on her arm. They stood in front of us and began to pose, slowly turning their bodies so we could admire them from every angle. Their wet feet stained the hardwood floor. I’d never seen such blatant female nudity in person before. Whenever I reached for them, eager to move things along, the girls took a step back. They wouldn’t let me touch them. “Just watch,” Iris said, and I did, we did, until Sybil went into one of the bedrooms and gestured for Claudius to follow.
In the other room Iris, still out of reach, told me to sit on the bed. As she approached, the door opened and Sybil burst into the room. Claudius, fully clothed, shuffled along behind her. “I got lonely,” Sybil said. “I missed you.” Iris said she missed her too. The girls kissed each other in skittish candlelight. I may have imagined it, but from time to time, Sybil’s darker breasts touched Iris’s. They kept smiling at each other until Sybil asked if we wanted in on the action. I said yes and they laughed at how quickly I said it. Sybil told us to take off our clothes. Quickly again, I began to undress but Claudius just stood there, gazing around the room. It seemed like he was trying to remember everything there—the large bed, the flickering light, the heavy curtains—as the setting he might use for an entirely different story. He was remembering everything, it appeared, except the people in it, ignoring us and therefore omitting us. Maybe he was even omitting himself.
While Sybil urged us on, saying she wanted to see what we were working with, Claudius forced his attention through the opening in the curtains, into the darkness outside, in denial of her voice. But then I called his name, scolding in my tone, and pulled his attention back into the room. What was it? The amount of booze we’d had, the drugs, the crazy talk, the vision of that animal dead in the streets, or just the girls themselves? All of it, in combination, made glorious sense to me. We had reached the proper destination of this night. Obviously Claudius and I had never been undressed in each other’s presence—but so what? The girls we’d wanted from the start were offering their fragrant brown flesh to us, and all we had to do was get naked too, together. Why should shyness, if that’s what it was, or fear, or a bit of further strangeness, a little kink in the first blush of day, stop us now? Why shouldn’t this, all of us collected in one room, be our path? I stared at Claudius until he understood I wanted him to do it. He could have said no, to the girls, to me, to that part of himself that also wanted to keep going, and for a second, when he opened his mouth, I expected him to say just that, to shout his refusal. All he did was stand there and tamely nod in assent.
He took off his clothes, as I did, watching the girls as they watched us. When Claudius and I were naked, they didn’t do anything. They weren’t satisfied yet.
“Well,” Sybil said, “look at him.”
I wondered for a second who she meant, but it was a command meant for both of us.
“You have to be fully present,” Iris said, her first words in a long time.
“Look at him.”
“He’s your friend.”
“Don’t pretend he’s not there.”
“There’s always more to what you want than what you wanted.” It was Iris again. “You have to take that too.”
I turned to Claudius, standing there with his hands clasped in front of his genitals. Sybil went to him and moved his hands aside. His calves were thin in comparison to his muscular thighs. He had a well-developed chest but a bulging stomach, which was bisected by a vertical stripe of fuzzy hair. His penis was half-erect. Sybil placed the crushed fez back on his head to complete the description of his nudity.
The girls told us to keep looking at one another, through the embarrassment and curiosity, all the way through the entire exposure. They wouldn’t let us pretend otherwise: four naked bodies on the verge of sex together in one room had to be exactly that. We did manage to arrive at sex, Iris with me and Sybil with Claudius, in that room as light began to slip through the gaps in the curtains. I didn’t get to enjoy Iris’s body, not really, because I was too concerned with keeping matters organized, under some semblance of control, fending off the orgiastic. I was much too aware of the other bodies in the room, much too aware of my own. I did, however, get to use my father’s condom. I’d intended to use it, had become fanatical about using it and finally did, just as Claudius—perhaps another true son of another confused father—got to use the condom he carried around in his pocket. We had found our so-called wild and crazy women, and they slept with us. But first they made us look, for a very long time.
In a way, I’m glad I lived such a night before my father died, or completed his long process of dying. On the day of his funeral, watching his rigid, almost smiling face, I was flanked by my mother and her new family. I had kept my distance over the past decade or so, estranging myself, and therefore hadn’t seen her in what felt like ages. At one point, she squeezed my arm and nodded. She didn’t force me to speak to her, and everything she had to say was expressed in those gestures. In her black blazer and dress, with her gray-streaked hair pinned under a slanted hat, she remained a striking woman. What struck me even more than the elegance and dignity with which she was growing older was the presence of her husband and his, their, adult children. They didn’t have to be there. Later, unable to settle my stomach or my mind, I stood alone, just as I had arrived, and my mother and her family talked together on the other side of the room. Other than me, I realized, they were the only black people in attendance. Together the four of them formed a portrait of calmness and grace that made me feel even more sick. I thought about the last public event my father and I attended together, a celebration of his long and successful career. There was desperation in the way he walked around with me, leading me by the arm from guest to guest. To anyone I didn’t already know, he said, “This is my boy. This is my boy.” He showed me off like a prize, as if to eliminate any doubt that I belonged to him. He’d done this kind of thing ever since I was a child. The day of his celebration was the very first time it didn’t make me proud.
What did he mean back on that August morning before I returned to college? Did he believe what he was telling me about happiness? Could he have meant it? Or was he just heartbroken, bitter, drunk? Maybe he knew he was talking to a young fool. Or maybe watching what I did with my life would be his way of figuring everything out. I don’t know, but I keep imagining what it would be like, to be a father to a boy who loves me and believes in me and, despite all our differences, wants nothing more than to be a man in my image. I see that spectral boy, my son, vividly, and feel frightened when he is with me. I have no idea what to say.
Sometimes I feel all I’d have to offer, other than questions, are my memories of that time in Brooklyn and that terrible apartment I had driven us to, obsessed. It sounds ridiculous, even to me, yet it’s true. Among the strangest touches I felt there was my friend’s hand gripping my shoulder, long after Iris and Sybil had left us alone in the room. I gasped when Claudius first touched me. I didn’t look back at him and I didn’t move his hand. I just lay there on my side with my eyes closed and tried not to be awake anymore. When I finally rose it was past noon. My head throbbed, and the faraway sound of the girls’ voices rang in my ears. Claudius was sitting up in the bed, staring at me. At once an acute ugliness shuddered into being, a face revealed within his face, and he must have seen it within mine too. It has been that way with people in my life, with people I have loved: a fine dispersal, a rupture as quiet as two lips parting, a change so sudden one morning, so slight, you wonder if they had ever been beautiful at all.