Ride Around Shining (6 page)

I'd expected the fireplace to be gas, but it held four pieces of quartered, fragrant birch. I knelt down in front of it, on a throw. I let my fingers sink into the weave and couldn't but think of them there, in front of the fire together at a long day's end. I saw one of the logs popping in the tentative southerner's fire he would've made, and the ash thrown up against the glass. He covers her, instinctively; the back of his young neck gleams in the golden light. Her startled toes curl into the rich fibers.

I felt the urge to lie down, and then from nowhere I heard a human voice meowing. It was a lithe, expressive sound—neither embarrassing nor embarrassed. I heard the stairs taking weight and crouched low against the couch. She meowed again, searchingly. The sound fell and then rose, just as if she were calling his name.

I heard her walk behind me into the hall. There she paused, and meowed again, twice. This time her meows seemed to have a serious, French sound. “Miau, miau,” they rang, assertive and frustrated. It wasn't cutesy; she was too fluent. She went down into the basement.

I rose in a rush and lightfooted it back to the kitchen. So that was the language that gave expression to her elusive heart. When left alone, looking up the river at the distant city lights, did she yowl? Did she purr when she felt her underwear being pulled down across the backs of her calves? Pulling out my pen, I began to wildly circle things in the classifieds.

After about five minutes, I heard them come back up the stairs. His voice lashed out deeply with a strong, playful sound, and in his pauses I could hear a murmured response.

She was first up the stairs. I thought I'd turned my face away, but somehow I saw her. She was wearing baby-blue pajamas, and there was a sheen of sweat on her face as though she'd been exercising. She seemed to take in my presence, lower her eyes, lift them back up again defiantly, and walk around the corner all in one unbroken motion. Calyph merely glanced at me, in skeletal exasperation, and one of his hands flashed up as he followed her out into the rest of the house. I couldn't tell if the flash was a
You think you supposed to look at this
, a
Now we got to have a lady problem
, or just a
Yeah, she meow
.

I heard her on the stairs again, and then Calyph's voice. “What? Just 'cause you—? Aw, he don't matter!”

Of course she didn't answer him, and I tried to picture the aggrieved expression on her face.

Then he was coming at me down the hall. His eyes were almost closed, so I could only see a glimmer between the lashes, and he had Antonia by the wrist as she slid along behind him. I waited, my heart beating up. I thought if my shirt stuck to me they'd see it beating.

“How you doin' with that?” Calyph demanded.

“Good,” I said. “Well.”

“You find anything for a compact yet? Civic or something?”

“I've got a couple. A nice Mazda. We'll have to run the VINs,” I said, straining for some kind of evenness in my voice.

“Good. Do that.” Calyph turned to her and released his grip. “See? He's doin' his work.”

“I'm sure,” she said huskily.

“So why can't we be? Why can't we be just as we please?”

She shook her head derisively at this naïveté, and his eyes bugged a little back at her in frustration.

“We can be natural when Mom's here,” he said. “When Leeb's here. So why not him? And don't give me that
they family
, 'cause you know you don't think so. I mean, what are we paying this man eight hundred a week for if we can't—”

But he couldn't finish. The look in her eyes routed him. It was that look of a woman asserting that a man is not seeing something obvious. Her sensitivity was greater than his, it said, and to keep on like this was only to risk more disdain for all in him that was lagging and blind.

Without breaking her gaze, Calyph tilted his head a little and said, “Hey Jess, you think you can give us a little meow?”

“What,” I said.

“I mean, if it don't offend you. I'm not tryin' to use you. I ain't tryin' to belittle. Just wondered if you might give us a little meow.”

I coughed back in my throat, and it seemed to echo in the taut quiet.

“Don't you,” she whispered. And I knew then that I'd have to. Otherwise it was the two of us opposing him, and I couldn't allow anything like that.

I knew I had to spin the sound somehow, or it'd come out like a pitiful, forced thing. I imagined a man sitting in the back room of a restaurant, his hands on a checked cloth, tilting back his chair, flushed with power and an acceptable meal and the respect of the street. He brushes the backs of his fingers over his chin, and—

“Meow,” I said, shrugging.

“Meow,” Calyph repeated, in a reasonable tone. His whole posture was bent to his wife in appeal. His hands were cupped together.

Now she looked really furious. Her whole face was flushed, the tips of her fingers bloodless where she gripped her thighs through the thin cotton.

I don't know what he saw in her that told him her anger was endangered. But suddenly he smiled at her very carefully. “Errbody meows,” he said wisely.

Her lips moved at him in silent fury.

“Don't everybody meow, Jess?”

“Everybody
I
know,” I said.

We watched the flush creep down her neck. “You are the fucking—”

She turned suddenly, lithe and alive and faking the fury now. Before she could avert her face I saw the severity straining to hold. With the cuss she'd forgiven us, and now she had to book it before she laughed and lost all face.

“You are the princes,” she said savagely, going away. We listened to her footsteps recede.

“Oh, where my kitty cat, where my kitty cat?” Calyph sang softly. It was the first moment of brotherhood I'd felt with him since the day he hired me. My nerves tingled, as with a flush of some golden liquor. I had to struggle not to grin like a boy. I felt my face slowly go still, and the self-mastery gave me a second flush of strange ecstasy—I felt my face glowing behind the mask.

It wasn't until that day
that I ever understood them together. While I kept my eyes down and pretended to work, I watched them at rest and at play. I got up to get a glass of water and sat back where I could get a good angle of them. Antonia was still wearing her pajamas, but I wasn't so concerned with watching her in them. She could have been asserting her rights, or daring me to find the line of her terry underwear, but I just wanted to be sure they couldn't go off and have some moment together behind a wall where I couldn't see.

Calyph got up and put a record on. I'd noticed the turntable before—it was one of the few items on the main floor of more than token quality, and I envied it, because back in the Midwest I'd had a much lesser version of the same. I knew his taste went beyond the blunt mainstream rap I assumed of most athletes—the stuff I used to hear swelling the glass on aptly named Suburbans in the parking lots of once-segregated fraternities. But when he put on Pavement on blue vinyl, that was a little past my expectations.

“Ice baby,” he sang. “I saw your girlfriend, and she blah blah lo-fi singer, why won't you let me hear?”

Antonia snorted.

“What? I put it on, didn't I?” He leaned out to catch my eye, his voice carrying easily through the rooms. “This was the first record she gave me in college. This was the music that was gonna bridge all our gaps.”

“You like it,” she said dismissively.

“Sure I like it. Remember back when making music on the cheap was a big art movement? The culture was like, shit yes, white people finally made some tinny sounds for us.”

“Did you get her something back?”

Calyph looked quickly away.

“
Fear of a Black Planet
,” he said at last.

“He wanted me to know who he
was
,” Antonia said, drawling.

I heard a noise on the stairs, and Antonia whistled and clapped her hands. The serval ran into view, chirping, and lay down at Calyph's feet. He rubbed it with rough affection, as if it were a dog. “How'd you get aloosed?”

The serval was interrogated about its day, and lay there wide-eyed, as if listening intently for some distant sound far beyond the trivial noises of its feeders. It had huge ears like lacrosse pockets, and its alertness made it seem a living mechanism for sensing far-off danger. Every few minutes some inaudible provocation would stir the creature, and it would go trotting swiftly out of the room. “Siren goin' off,” Calyph would call after it.

After it came back the first time, Antonia brought it over to me and reintroduced it as though to an old benefactor. Her manner showed no shadow of the previous night, and I was glad. I worried he would notice any change, and for the time being I was just glad to get a taste without upsetting anything. Siren was a savannah, technically, smaller than a true serval but about twice the size of an ordinary house cat, with limbs like a giraffe's. It butted at Calyph's knees while he stood to take a call, eighteen feet of legs between them.

Most any time somebody called Calyph on the phone, he seemed to step out of our polite, muted world and into somewhere far away. The phone made him street again, and he had the self-possession to go there, to make no concession to the fact that while he was talking twice as loud and half again as fast, and ending an impressive percentage of his sentences with freshly coined insults, he was still standing on plush carpet looking out through lace curtains at something people might yet want to call a greensward.

Meanwhile, Antonia, paying him no mind, went calmly on, cutting from a magazine with a pair of nail scissors.

It wasn't the first time I'd seen them so. I remembered standing by their door in the food-delivery days, the curry-smelling food bag at my feet. He was gone to get her card; she must have insisted on paying that night. We had some complicated system if you didn't pay cash—they gave the numbers over the phone and then we had to see the card again and take a rubbing on carbon. I always did it with the side of a pen with the name of my college on it, so they'd know I was a man of promise.

Antonia was tinkering with something on a laptop. She was deep into it, and he had to put a hand on her shoulder before she looked up. She brought up the card, a little annoyed at the interruption, but polite, trying not to lean her mood onto me, while he got a call. He walked back and forth, in and out of view into rooms I hadn't yet seen. You could tell he was talking to some old homeboy. His voice had changed, and the old hood slang was brought alive to enrapture the beige sofas with its complexity and sure cadence.

They seemed so separate there, each with their own incompatible histories, which their marriage had bound together. Her cool hands were clicking away, buying this, matching that shade to another shade, contributing to an election campaign, who knew what, and then she came forward, while he strode around, getting the updates. “That Nutella motherfucker?” he'd said incredulously. It was the same now, only she was cutting, and it was some other man he was dubious of, saying, “He think he could take who? That boy couldn't take a shit.” They were so completely distinguished and different, so entirely themselves, it warmed me to watch them—they almost stood a chance. They offered two complete worlds to the marriage, two worlds in opposition, the pressures of which the marriage would have to stand against and be made stronger. When two white people married, God help them. Unless they had some deep division of class to bless them, some irreconcilable political difference to light their way, what was there to toughen them, to strengthen their bond together, but their own selves? And when was that ever enough?

I felt so kind toward them that day. Calyph got off the phone and sat back down, and again the serval ran off, and Antonia went on snipping, snipping, and he picked up one of her cuttings and turned it like he didn't know where the up of it was, and then set it down again and sighed, and his head sank as though he were resuming the pace of this world. After a moment her hand came quietly out, and ran down his arm, and cupped the elbow. It was a privilege just to watch them, really. It filled me with a funny feeling, a healthy jealousy, so warm and peculiar it was like the beginnings of love itself. The strength of their smallest gestures filled me with hot liquid light. I didn't want to break them up at all—I just wanted to sit there and take notes. In that moment I really did want only the best for them.

And then he began to kiss her. He leaned down over her, their faces were obscured. And why should he not? Well and good, I told myself. Let him have her. I bent to my work, my hand firm on the paper.

“You know he's watching us,” she said.

It must have been the sudden noise in the quiet, but my hand jumped then. I'd been writing out the details of the best cars and in the midst of “tape deck” I made a deep slash across the paper. The page was ruined—I'd have to begin again.

“I'll go out back,” I said quickly, very nonchalant and businesslike, but even as I stood I could feel myself seethe. I'd not been watching them, or not when she said I had—and not ever in that way she meant. And all at once it was too much for me. I felt almost spat upon, like she'd walked over and called me a peeping little lackey. I felt the affectionate jealousy cool and harden into something other, and, whistling, telling myself I was brushing it off, that I still felt happy, I went out to the car. It was misting, and when I went in the glove box for the house flyer, with the Realtor's little handscrawled note in the corner—“Great to meet you, Antonia!”—I put the thing carefully in my pocket, so the ink would not get damp.

When I stepped back into the kitchen, the serval came running. “First alert,” I heard Calyph cry, and then the thing was circling my legs, chirping. I knelt down and knuckled it beneath its chin and along the sides of its face as the streaks of scent faintly wet my knuckles. I looked into its eyes to see if it saw trouble; it stared back at me blankly. I folded up the flyer and slipped it into one of his pricing guides, protruding like a fat bookmark.