Heavy Water: And Other Stories (13 page)

“Give it up! What’s the fucking title?”

“Um,” said Rodney.

Pharsin he had first encountered in the southwest corner of Washington Square Park, that inverted parliament of chess, where the junkies were all Experts, the winos were all Grand Masters, and the pizza-bespattered babblers and bums were all ex–World Champions. Rodney, who for a year had played second board for the University of Suffolk, approached the marble table over which Pharsin showily presided. In half an hour he lost a hundred dollars.

Never in his dealings with the thirty-two pieces and the sixty-four squares had Rodney been so hilariously outclassed. He was a mere centurion, stupidly waiting, in his metal miniskirt, his short-sword at his side; whereas Pharsin was the career gladiator, hideously experienced with the weighted net and the bronze trident. After half a dozen moves Rodney could already feel the grip of the cords, the bite of the tines. In the third game Pharsin successfully dispensed with the services of his queen: things looked good until Black drove the first of his rooks into the groin of White’s defense.

They got talking as they loped together, serenaded by saxophones and sirens, past the bobbing dope dealers of the northwest corner and out on to Eighth Street.

“Do you, uh, ‘make a living’ at it?”

“Used to,” said Pharsin through the backbeat of nineteen different boom boxes and radios turned out on to the road. “Chess hustling is down with the economy. Forcing me to diversify.”

Rodney asked him what kind of thing.

“It’s like this: chess is an art. You can do one art, you can do them all.”

Rodney said how interesting, and toddled on after him. It seemed to Rodney that he could walk through Pharsin’s legs and out the other side. No, not enough room: muscles stood like heavies leaning against the tunnel walls. Pharsin’s head, perched up there on that body, could only look to be the shape and size of a car neckrest. Rodney experienced respect for Pharsin’s head. Whatever chess was (an art, a game, a fight), chess was certainly a mountain. Rodney strolled its foothills. Whereas the forward-leaning cliff face that closed out the sky had Pharsin halfway up it.

“You see this?”

Halting, Pharsin from inside his hoodie produced a fistful of scrolled paper: an essay, a polemic, entitled “The Co-Incidence of the Arts, Part I: The Indivisibility of Poetry, Photography, and Dance.” Rodney ran his eye down the opening sentence. It was the kind of sentence that spent a lot of time in reverse gear before crunching itself into first.

“Are you sure you mean ‘coincidence’? Not, uh, ‘correspondence’?”

“No. Co-incidence. The arts happen in the same part of the brain. That’s how come I hyphenate. Co-incidence.”

Rodney had a lot of time for coincidence. Everything he now had he owed to coincidence. It happened on a country lane half a mile from his grandmother’s house: a head-on collision between two Range Rovers, both of them crammed with patrilinear Peels. All else followed from this: title, nerve, Rock, America, sex, and the five thousand twenty-dollar bills underneath his studio floor. And talent too, he thought: maybe.

“You English?”

“Oh, very much so.”

“My wife is English also. The oppressiveness of the class system cause her to leave your shores.”

“I sympathize. It can be very wearing. Is she in the arts too, your wife?”

“Yeah. She does—”

But Pharsin’s monosyllable was quite canceled by city stridor—someone detonating a low-yield nuclear weapon or dropping a dumpster from a helicopter. “And yourself?” said Rodney.

“Sculptor. Mathematician. Choreographer. Percussionist. Essayist. Plus the art you and I engaged in some while ago.”

“Oh, I remember,” said Rodney humbly. “I’m a painter. With other interests.” And he said what he usually said to Americans, because it was virtually true, geographically (and what would
they
know?): “I studied literature at Cambridge.”

Pharsin gave a jolt and said, “This intrigues me. Because I’ve recently come to think of myself as primarily a novelist. Now, my friend. There’s something I’m going to ask you to do for me.”

He listened, and said yes. Why not? Rodney reckoned that Pharsin, after all, would be incredibly easy to avoid.

Pharsin said, “I’ll be in an excellent position to monitor your progress with it.”

Rodney waited.

“You don’t recognize me. I work the door of your building. Weekends.”

“Oh of course you do.” In fact, Rodney had yet to begin the task of differentiating the three or four black faces that scowled and glinted through the gloom of his lobby. “The coincidence,” he mused, “of the arts. Tell me, are you all a little family down there?”

“Why would we be? I don’t associate with those animals. Now. I’ll bring you my novel early tomorrow. Casting all false modesty aside, I don’t believe you’ll have a problem falling under its spell.”

“Um,” said Rodney.

“Three months you been sitting on it, and you don’t even know the fucking title?”

“Um,” he repeated. Like the novel itself, the title, Rodney recalled, was very
long
. Pharsin’s typescript ran to more than eleven hundred pages: single-spaced. Pharsin said it comprised exactly one million words—a claim (Rodney felt) that few would ever call him on. “It’s very
long.”
He looked up into Pharsin’s blood-spoked eyes and said, “ ‘The …’ ”

“The
what?”

“ ‘The Words of …’ ” Wait. “ ‘The Noise of the …’ ”

“ ‘Sound.’ ”

“ ‘The Noise of the Sound …’ ”

“Bullshit! The
Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words
, man.
The Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words.”

“Exactly.
The Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words.”

“Commit the fucking energy, man. I say this because I’m convinced that your effort will be rewarded. The structure you’ll particularly relish. And also the theme.”

After another forty column-inches of reproach, dissimulated threat, moral suasion, and literary criticism, Pharsin wrapped things up, adding, as an audible afterthought,

“Thirteen weeks. And he doesn’t even know its
name?”

“Forgive me. I’m stupefied by, uh, ‘amorous excess.’ ”

“That I can believe. You look totally fucked out. Man, take care: you’re going to blow away on the wind. My marriage has survived thus far, but woman action and woman trouble I know all about. What’s her name?”

Rodney murmured some feminine phoneme: Jan or Jen or June.

But the truth was he didn’t know
her
name either.

“We’ve slimed.”

“Good man. Tell all.”

This time Rod and Rock were to be found in some kind of
Irish
restaurant high up on Lexington Avenue. They occupied two places near the head of a table laid for eighteen. Their practice on such occasions was to meet an hour early, to chat and drink cocktails, before some Americans showed up and paid for it all. This night, in Rock’s comfortable company, Rodney belied his eight-and-a-half stone. Pared down to the absolute minimum (carrying just two or three extra grams in that buxom upper lip), he nevertheless seemed to share in his friend’s bland rotundity; they both wore the cummerbund of inner fatness conferred by their class. Black Velvet, quaffed from pewter tankards, was their tipple of the hour.

“What’s there to say?” said Rodney. “Frankly, I’m speechless. Words cannot …”

“Dear oh dear. Well describe her body at least.”

“Actually I’d rather not. I mean there’s nothing to say, is there, when things go so gloriously?”

“…  It’s Mrs. Peterson, isn’t it?” Rock paused unkindly. “No. Far too swarthy for you. You like the dairy-product type. Raised on curds and whey. They have to look like English roses. Or you get culture shock.”

“How very wrong you are,” said Rodney in a strained voice. “It may interest you to know that my inamorata happens to be … ‘bleck.’ ”

“Bleck?”

“Bleck,” said Rodney with emphasis. It sounded more like
blick
than
black
. A year or two ago they might have said
bluhck
. But having largely shed their class signatures, the two men were now recultivating them.

“Bleck?” repeated Rock. “You mean a proper …? What are they calling themselves these days. A proper American-African?”

“African-American.” As he continued, Rodney’s voice grew drowsy, and it was with a haggard sensuality—slow inhalations, feeding some inner fire—that he relished his nightly cigarette. “Well, African. I sense Africa in her. I taste Africa in her. One of the French bits, probably. Senegal, perhaps. Sierra Leone. Guinea-Bissau.”

Rock was looking at him.

“She moves like an empress. A Dahomey Amazon. Cleopatra was very dark, you know.”

“So she’s posh, too, is she? As well as bleck. Where does
she
say she’s from?”

Simultaneously ignoring this and rousing himself, Rodney said, “It’s what’s so wonderful about America. There
aren’t
any good bleck girls in London. All they’ve got there are those squeaky Cockneys. Magnificent creatures, some of them, but—quite impossible. Simply not on the cards, over there. But over here, in the great, uh, ‘melting pot’ …”

“The salad bowl.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Rodney, looking around for the salad bowl.

“They call it the salad bowl now. Not the melting pot.”

“Do they indeed.”

“In a way, you could say that English blecks are posher than their American cousins.”

“How so?”

“How
so?”

Here were two men living in a silent movie: when they were alone together, the millennium seemed about a century away. Rock was now about to speak of the historical past; but his urbanity faltered, and he suddenly sounded sober.

“Oh come on. We know a
little
bit about this, don’t we? The English contingent, they were shipped in after the war. To run the tubes and so on. And the buses. Contract labor. But not—but not like American blecks.”

“Same stock, though. One imagines.”

Rod and Rock: their family trees stood tall. Their family trees stood tall and proud. But what kind of trees were they—weeping willow, sallow, mahogany, ash? And something ailed or cankered them, shaping their branches all arthritic and aghast … The Peels had been among the beneficiaries when, on a single day in 1661, Charles II created thirteen baronetcies on the plantation island of Barbados. Rock’s lot, the Robvilles, rather disappointingly (rather puzzlingly, from Rodney’s point of view), didn’t go back quite so far. But the Peels and the Robvilles alike had flourished at a time when every English adult with cash or credit owned a piece of it: a piece of slavery. The place where Rock’s dad lived had been assembled by massive shipwright profits out of Liverpool, circa 1750. Intelligence of these provenances could never be openly acknowledged by either of the two men. Lifelong inhibition protected them: in their childhood it was like something terrible hiding under the bed. Still, Rock was a businessman. And he had never expected business to be pretty. He said,

“There’s not much in it, I suppose. But the English contingent were freed longer ago.”

“Yes, well,” pondered Rodney, “I suppose you can’t get much less posh than being a slave. But that’s to forget what they might have been originally.”

“Posh in Africa.”

“In a way. You know, Africa was quite advanced for a while. I mean, look at African art. Exquisite. Ancient, but immediate. Immediate. They had great civilizations there when England was just a sheep-dip. Ages ago.”

“What have you been reading?
The Amsterdam News?”

“No.
Ebony
. But it’s true! We’re just upstarts and counterjumpers compared to them. Scum, Rock. Anyway I have a hunch my one came direct from Africa. The Sudan, quite possibly. Timbuktu was apparently an incredible city. Crammed with princes and poets and amazing
houris
. Jezebel was of—”

“Did you say amazing hoorays? Sorry? Oh never
mind
. What sort of accent does she have? Your one.”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.”

Rock paused and said, “Pray describe this relationship. How did you meet? Or don’t you know that either?”

“We met in a bar. But it wasn’t like that.”

They met in a bar but it wasn’t like that.

It was like this.

Rodney had just asked for a Bullshot. Consisting of vodka and consomme, a Bullshot is arguably a bullshit drink; but Rodney, his eyes lurking and cowering behind his dark glasses, badly needed his Bullshot. What he really felt like was a Bloodshot. He wore a pinched seersucker suit and a grimy cravat. He had spent the morning in a sepulchral brownstone on East Sixty-fifth Street, doing what he could with the long upper lip and ridiculously interproximate eyebrows of a Mrs. Sheehan—wife to the chat-show king.

“Worcestershire sauce, if you please, and the juice of at least one lemon.”

“You know something? I could listen to your voice all day.”

It was not the first time Rodney had been paid this compliment. Sequestered in a deceptively mild cocaine hangover, he said, “How sweet of you to say so.”

“No. Really.”

“So kind.”

This waitress at some point or other might have wanted to be an actress. She might have had the odd prompting toward the stage. But not recently. And anyway Rodney was looking past her, Rodney was flinching past her …

So. She was up on a stool at the counter—and up on the turret of her swiveling haunches, rising in her seat whenever they crossed or uncrossed, uncrossed or crossed. Rodney stared. There she sat, drinking milky tea from a braced glass, being bawled at by some ball game on the perched TV, and exchanging vigorous but inaudible small talk with a hidden figure behind the bar. Unquestionably she was a person of color, and that color—or so it seemed to Rodney—was
american
. As in black, brown, american; then beige, white, pink … Beyond this room lay another room, where some kind of talent contest was being noisily disputed. Poetry readings. Monologues. Stand-up.