The Decent Proposal (9 page)

“Here you go.” She handed him another coffee and bagel.

He sniffed the wax paper suspiciously. “This cream cheese?”

She nodded brightly.

“Hate cream cheese,” he said. “Tastes like ass.” He handed it back to her.

“Oh,” she said. “I guess I should've asked.”

“Huh.”

They stared at each other. Elizabeth wasn't sure how to begin.

“I know what you want,” he said.

“Excuse me?” she asked, an imaginary finger already poised over that eject button.

“You wanna hear my sob story.”

“Your what?”

“My sob story.” He smiled, displaying a set of teeth in surprisingly good shape, other than their yellow hue. They looked as if they'd been dipped in melted cheese, or wax, or gold. “Everyone out here's got one.”

“I'm not sure what you mean,” she said, even though she knew exactly what he meant, and knew he knew she knew.

“Com'on,” he said, “I've seen you out here plenny times.” (Elizabeth shifted, feeling through her jacket for the Mace.) “You must've overheard a few of 'em. Always bragging 'bout how bad they have it, trying to one-up each other.” He raised his voice, imbuing it with more of a lilt, a swagger: “Man oh man, you think
that's
bad? Wait'll you hear
this
!” When he returned to his regular volume, his accent was closer to hers than it had been before. “I don't tell my story to just anyone. But for you?” He smiled again. “For Lily Briscoe?”

Like Scheherazade, it took him much longer than a day to
tell his story. That first day, they didn't get much further than his name.

“Orpheus?” she repeated dubiously. Was he messing with her? “Why Orpheus?”

“You know the Orpheum? Downtown?”

She nodded. It was an old vaudeville theater, beautifully restored. It even had its own organ.

“Parents met there, back in, I don't know,
long
time ago. Some song 'n' dance show.” He took a sip of coffee. “They were so ignorant, they would've named me Orpheum. Huh. But a doctor got ahold of 'em, said Orpheus was more proper. Lucky me, I guess.”

He didn't ask her name, and she never told him. On the rare occasion he had to call her anything he called her Lily, and she never corrected him. She grew to love her new name.

She learned he'd grown up not too far from her—in Florence, another neighborhood inside South Central—but at a time when black families had only recently won the right to live there, or anywhere south of Slauson Avenue. This meant he must have grown up in the early fifties, she calculated, putting him in his late sixties now. Elizabeth knew all about racially restrictive covenants from her first-year property law class, but she'd never known anybody who'd actually lived in the shadow of one.

“What was it like?”

He told her about the firebombings—front lawns covered in flames, neighbors (mostly black, a few white) sprinting over with buckets of water, the fire department mysteriously unavailable. He described the “white flight” that within a few years had ceded the neighborhood to the black gangs who had no common enemy anymore, and began fighting among themselves. He explained how the urban decay set in and would not let up, an infectious rot that festered and
grew. Elizabeth knew from her own childhood experience a few blocks away, in Westmont, how the story went from there.

They established a pattern: he waited for her by the basketball courts and she brought him coffee and a buttered bagel. Each day he told her a little more, and slowly, like the blooming of a pale and watery flower, his sob story unfolded.

Orpheus was too smart to get caught up in the violence tearing apart his neighborhood. School was his domain, and he ruled it like a king. His first real trial happened when he was nine years old and won his school's spelling bee, beating out thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. He was preparing to compete in the L.A.-wide regional—the intermediate step before the national competition—when a rule that compelled each school district to contribute to a “spelling bee fund” or else face disqualification prevented him from competing. He wasn't crushed; he was furious. It was on this occasion that his mother first instructed him to defy the expectations of all those who didn't know him. To act on his anger was what those people expected. His duty, she told him, was to do the opposite.

He continued doing the opposite—through high school, college, and graduate school. He became an English professor specializing in the early modernists, Virginia Woolf included. Whenever anyone expressed surprise over his ignorance of Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison, Orpheus thought of his mother. (“No Toni Morrison, no Maya Angelou either. Never read a word of 'em.”) On the same principle by which he shunned black authors, he dated
only
black women, refusing to become one of
those
black men who abandoned their race after accruing the benefits of a higher education. And when his girlfriend Rhonda became pregnant he married her immediately, thereby avoiding the biggest stereotype of all: the black man
who couldn't commit, who left an unwed mother and fatherless children in his wake.

They had a son and a daughter, Scott and Sherry (“whitest names I could find”), and one summer, when Scott was thirteen and Sherry was ten, they took a family vacation to the Grand Canyon. On the way back they took the scenic route through Utah. It was late, and Scott and Sherry were asleep in the back, Rhonda out cold in the passenger seat. He had coffee and a good night's sleep to keep him up, and he drove straight through the night, wishing he could see the beautiful purple-gray mountains on either side of him. The plan was to get back to their faculty house in Westwood by dawn. The children had music lessons the next day. Traffic, at least, would be a breeze.

A little after 3 a.m., he saw a sea of red each time his car rose over a crest. It turned out to be brake lights: a line of cars at a standstill for what looked like miles. He took his place in that line, his family sound asleep beside him. At least
they
would be well rested. He sat there for a solid half hour reciting poetry from memory, a habit of his whenever he was forced into idleness and unable to read. But he only knew so many poems, and eventually he got out of his car, walking forward to investigate.

A minute later the second boulder of the evening rolled down from the beautiful purple-gray mountains. The first had been the cause of the snarled traffic. It hadn't hit anyone, merely blocked the road in both directions with rubble that took hours to clear away. Orpheus felt the crash behind him before he saw it. He twisted, the reverberation knocking him to his feet. Tiny pebbles showered his body, tearing his shirt, coating him in a film of dust. Suddenly he
knew
, and hobbled back to his family to be proven wrong.

The boulder had flattened half the car in front of his, which
thankfully for its driver had been empty in the back. His vehicle, of course, had been crushed flat. An investigation of the accident attributed no cause to the rolling rocks. There was no construction nearby, no evidence of foul play. There were signs posted all over the road, after all, warning of this specific danger. People drove at their own risk. It was just “one of those things.” He remembered a policeman on the scene shrugging his brawny shoulders when he thought Orpheus wasn't looking.
But what're you gonna do?
the shrug intimated weakly. The officer was the first in a long line of what Orpheus came to call the “shruggers”—policemen, state officials, lawyers, judges, grief counselors, psychiatrists, friends, family, God—all shruggers. Even if they didn't actually shrug, this was the import of all they said or left unspoken, all they did or failed to do. It was just one of those things.

He felt in his bones that the natural, the
right
course of events was for him to have never left his car, to have memorized just one more poem and whispered its final verse while reaching for his children, the shadow of the boulder closing in around them. He planned to kill himself. He took his time considering the best way to do it, and it was during this time that he discovered alcohol. He had been an occasional drinker before; he enjoyed a beer with friends, wine at dinner sometimes, the rare raucous binge, but he had never truly known the power of this wondrous substance till then. Vodka was his favorite, so potent and yet so smooth and tasteless once he got used to it: like magic water, which was how he came to drink it—all day, every day, from waking till sleeping. He put a handle on his bedside where others put a glass of water. He drank it whenever he felt thirsty, or anything else. It made him forget—a veritable nepenthe—and as long as he kept it up it was as though he'd been underneath that boulder after all. In an epiphany he realized that the
drunken oblivion of the here and now was a surer bet than suicide. He had no faith that death would either (1) stamp him out completely, or (2) reunite him with his loved ones, and anything in between was intolerable, an actual hell, no matter what anyone else called it.

Within six months he was fired from UCLA and had lost his housing. His friends tried to help him, but he shunned them, determined to fall and to fall alone. Six months later he was living out of his red rolling suitcase in Venice, among the bums he'd taught his children to pity instead of ridicule.

Had his mother been alive, surely she would have told him that becoming a homeless drunk in the wake of his tragedy was what many people would have expected—and not even particularly imaginative people at that. There was something inevitable, though, about his headlong plummet into obscurity and squalor, as if all along he'd been destined to end up here. Perhaps his mother had known; perhaps her advice to defy expectations had been an attempt to steer him away from the very destiny she thereby assured, like the hapless character in some Greek tragedy, setting him on the path that ended here, on the basketball courts, clutching half a buttered bagel and weeping openly to a wide-eyed woman at least thirty years his junior.

Elizabeth didn't believe him. His sob story was
too
sob-worthy, too awful—especially that boulder. Could boulders even
be
that big? But she shook her head when she was supposed to, and googled “Orpheus Utah accident boulder” the day he told her, not hoping for much. She didn't even know his last name. But there he was: a fatter, smoother-faced, crew-cut “Orpheus Washington” staring back at her from a blurb in the digitized archives of the
Los Angeles Times
, detailing his tragedy twenty-two years earlier.
Twenty-two years.
It was an unthinkable amount of time to spend on the
streets, a life sentence in a special kind of prison. It turned Elizabeth's “rough patch” into a bed of roses, except that it didn't, of course. But it was the beginning of a special bond between them. She would never say this to Orpheus because it would require laying herself bare (and perhaps the comparison would insult him), but she understood what it was like to be scarred—mangled even—by the past. She felt guilty she hadn't believed him, and what began as a curiosity grew into something bigger.

“I'M SORRY, LILY,
I'm sorry, Lily,” he kept muttering over and over, struggling drunkenly to sit up on the urine-stained couch. Eventually she couldn't take it anymore.

“I trusted you, Orpheus,” she said, switching to English. “I knew you saw where I kept my key, but I purposely didn't move it because I trusted you.” She crossed her arms, staring at him like a mother whose child has deeply disappointed her.

A few months into their routine—when the can of Mace had been returned to the bottom of her purse—Elizabeth had made a deal with him: he could either get drunk on Saturday nights or stay the night on her couch and eat takeout Chinese from Mao's Kitchen down the block. Most Saturdays he took her up on the offer. She'd reminded him twice that morning that she was going to be away that night (she didn't explain and he didn't ask), that there would be no Chinese food or sleepover.

“What the hell happened?” she asked him now.

Orpheus struggled for the words. How could he explain it to her? He saw her now as if from the bottom of a well he couldn't figure out how to climb up to reach her. He was, in fact, terrified that the bottom would fall out and he would plunge deeper into the muck. He didn't know what to do. He was lost.

What Lily couldn't understand was that all this time he'd been spending with her—Saturday night into Sunday morning, and sometimes even Sunday afternoon if he slept long enough—had disturbed the carefully calibrated equilibrium he'd been maintaining for the last however-many years. (L.A.'s steady weather, especially on the coast, lent itself to a timeless mode of living. It was sunny and in the 70s: was it April, August, or December? Who knew? Who cared?) The weekends were when he made most of his money begging for change, and all those bagels and potstickers combined with a meager booze fund had made it harder to maintain his habitual state of drunkenness. There had been no alcohol that night, and no friends willing to share (he'd been seeing less of them, too). He should have been angry with himself for turning his back on the reliable oblivion of the bottle, but it was easier to be angry with her. He convinced himself it was all Lily's fault: the loneliness, the absence of alcohol. He hadn't seen it at first, but she was just another shrugger. Fuck her. She'd done him wrong, and he'd make sure she fixed it. He'd seen her stow the spare key a dozen times underneath the potted bird-of-paradise next to her door.

“Took the spare,” he admitted now huskily.

He knew exactly where she kept her wine bottles, the only alcohol she had, a slow accumulation of holiday and incidental gifts from partners or clients after a job well done. He'd counted them: seven total, and not a single one opened. This had angered him too, as if she'd offended friends of his by failing to appreciate their charms.