crosswords (fiction)
Posted on May 5, 2007
Filed Under writings, fiction |
Cross Words
Fifteen across… Five letters for Capital of Nigeria… Lagos.
Except it was changed to Abuja in the early nineties. The whole puzzle’s unsolvable without this one kernel of knowledge.
I wonder if he even knows about Abuja. He could Google it, just as I have. He could Google himself. There are vague and mild accolades for theater productions and minor parts in bad sitcoms. He has his own entry on Wikipedia. I am tempted to add something biting and unkind. But then my son would find it one day while searching for his father.
“What kind of name is Cobblah,” my son asks.
“Nigerian for born on Tuesday,” I struggle with the sound and cadence of it. So much shameful drama in that name. Eventually I hope to grow accustomed to his repeating it, a lyrical sing-song chant. A child drifting to sleep each night, singing a name in the darkness.
After I’ve sent the boy to bed, Ross whispers, “Nigerian for born on Tuesday? Are you sure? Isn’t English the official language of Nigeria?”
“I don’t know, Ross. I don’t know anything but what I find on the internet. Ask me about the population, the GDP, something about demographics. That I can answer. ”
I do my best to patiently handle the boy’s curiosity, a ten year old version of the inquisition. Ross assures me it is natural. I have implicit faith in Ross as he is the kind of friend willing to do waiting room duty at an abortion clinic if that is what’s required. He is also the kind of friend willing to accept alternative decisions, willing to be a surrogate Dad to a boy with a disinterested father.
The following evening, after dinner, “But where is my father?”
“He’s a successful actor out in LA,” I say struggling with tense. Should I say is or was. Your father is. But never was much of a father.
Later Ross says, “Successful? That’s stretching it. Last time we saw him he was doing a commercial for pharmaceuticals. Rheumatoid arthritis wasn’t it? A sure sign that it’s the end of the road; I mean professionally speaking.” Ross is a producer for CNN now and thinks he knows a thing or two about television.
I have decided that some day my son should know the whole story, in all its dramatic brevity. After some false starts, I have put it down on paper. There’s something so alluring and powerful about secrets, so I’ve hung it all out there to share with him when he is older, when he has begun to see his own mother’s weaknesses and frailties clearly. I write…
Dearest Cody,
Just remember that for some people, most people, this is the thrust of it, all the poetry of their life caught up in a few sexual encounters. He charmed me when I met him. You can’t know how narrow my life had been until then. How few real adventures I’d had.
There was lead up and I missed it, failed to see your father’s arrogant swagger as foreshadowing. Now, like instant replay, I can call the foul clearly but couldn’t see it in the moment, the hum and chatter of a full restaurant in early autumn when the breeze is still warm and the sky achieves the blue of September, Billie Holiday’s gravelly crooning, “A trip to the moon on gossamer wings.”
Though we officially met the morning I speak of, a certain infamy preceded him. I remembered him distinctly from a campus play I’d attended my Senior year. Your Aunt Carly was playing opposite him in some forgettable production. She was in her Meryl Streep phase which preceded her Hillary Clinton phase which evolved into her softer and more current self deception; shades of Katie Couric does NOVA.
That Tuesday night performance stands out for his depiction of a savage, masculine thing that stomped about the stage exhaling snarling breaths and roaring occasionally. There was even an unfortunate costume that resembled a bear or a lion. The name of the play escapes me but I do recall commenting to Carly backstage, “Isn’t he yummy?” She’d been incapable of seeing past the felt costume and the tail. “I can’t think sex and Smoky the Bear at the same time,” she’d said.
It was after classes had ended and all graduates had embarked on uncertain futures. I had taken a newspaper job. I was also working the weekend shift in a popular restaurant, dishing out curried chicken salads and slices of cheesecakes with elaborate names like Chocolate Overload and Cinnamon Crush. Ross was working the weekend shift too. We found great comfort in each others’ company. College graduates serving brunch at O’Malley’s. We were collectively shameful.
Your conservative and very bourgeois grandparents had tried to warn me off an English major. They had said it was a waste of a good education. When that failed to deter me, they settled in to hyperbole, found comfort in telling their friends, over rounds of golf and Cobb salads, that I was considering law school. If I had chosen differently, maybe gone pre-med or taken up engineering, they might have offered financial assistance. My obstinate dedication to an impractical degree had cost me dearly. I was reduced to working for tips.
His first words to me were uninspired, something like, “You interested in coming to a party Saturday?” I tensed, ready to flash a withering look, meant to discourage dumpy, bald, over weight. Instead, there was Smoky the Bear in regular street clothes. I suffered a distinct disadvantage, sporting a costume of my own, a white apron already smudged with chocolate and coffee and pesto mayonnaise. Stepping out from behind the cake cooler, I wiped my hands on a dish rag and grabbed the scrap of paper he was holding out to me. He flashed his well honed actor’s smile and shouted over his shoulder in a voice that had been trained to reach the back of theaters, properly project, “Give me a call.”
Ross was impatiently waiting for his four top’s drink order. It was somebody’s birthday, they lingered over the moment; they shared stories about school age children and flawed husbands, exchanging contractors’ phone numbers; stretching the morning out until noon. Ross could not forgive them the restaurant atrocity they’d just committed by ordering four different dessert drinks. In addition to the cappuccino, there was a hot tea, an American coffee, and a decaf latte on their ticket.
“It’s been two and a half hours. I think they have ordered at least two glasses of water each. Separately. Twenty minutes apart. With lemon. And don’t bother with that guy. He’s bad news,” he said tapping the ticket hanging before me. I steamed and poured, struggling to prepare one coffee confection while the previous one grew cold.
“Do I sense some jealousy?”
“I am definitely disappointed that he prefers your gender to mine because there’s one thing for sure, that boy’s got a lock on the mental foreplay.”
“When can we start referring to ourselves and our sexual prospects as men, Ross?”
“I stand corrected, that’s a man for sure. A man who specializes in heartbreak and date rape. If I need to take you out next Saturday to keep you away from Cobblah, I’ll gladly cancel my waxing appointment.”
“You know his name, my clever queer friend?
“I’ve had years to obsess about him myself. He was on my freshman hall. I have become all too aware of his sexual preference…. straight. His track record…many, many girls, white girls only. Sorry, white women only. And, lately, like for the past two years, he’s been dating Rebecca Lamb. He’s perfected the art of cheating on her. She’s a Rhodes Scholar and finishing some smart person’s accomplishments in Scotland this year. Not too smart about her boyfriend though. The cat’s away, the mouse and all that.”
“If you go out with that black man and not this black man, I’m going to take it very personally,” yelled the persistent but sweet Maurice who was eavesdropping while Windexing the glass on the cake cooler.
“Finally, someone who will use the word ‘man’. Maurice, my refusal to date you has nothing to do with the color of your skin and everything to do with the fact that you still live with your mother.”
“My Mom needs me around. She’s a single, old lady.”
“Who is stuck doing your laundry,” I said.
“Back to the cappuccino please. I’ve got to get rid of this four-top,” Ross said.
****
And heeding Ross’s advice, I didn’t call your father that weekend. I ate sushi in bed, dripping soy sauce on the comforter. I used the scrap of paper with his number as a bookmark, to remind myself that a desperately boring evening, complete with spicy tuna rolls and twelve cigarettes had been my choice.
By the following Wednesday, I had almost forgotten about the date I had forgone. Nearly 300 words into the article on real estate due on my editor’s desk at 9 a.m., and the phone rang.
“Hey it’s me.”
“Me?”
“It’s Cobblah,” he sped through his name as if he were ashamed of its ethnicity, a whole heritage dismissed by terrible enunciation. “I made a burger with your name on it last weekend. Thought you were going to come by.”
“I don’t even know where you live. Didn’t even know your name until I asked around.” “And…” I delivered the final coup de grace, “I don’t eat meat.”
“So you’re a detective. What did you learn?”
“That I don’t want to waste my time with a guy who never uses his name in introduction.”
“Let me make it up to you, tomorrow, 7:30ish? I’ll wear a name tag.”
“No name tags necessary.”
I spent too long preparing for the following flop of an evening. Hair pulled back in a casual looking chignon that actually took an hour and a can of hairspray to tease into holding. A newly purchased pair of jeans that were too expensive but perfect with a string of pearls and a black silk top, sleeveless, to show off what I thought of as well sculpted arms.
When he rang the bell, I was ready to sweep out the door, pull it shut behind me, before he could catch a glimpse of the dingy efficiency I rented in the back of a converted Victorian. I didn’t like to share my home on the first date, especially one with the kitchen in the bedroom and indoor-outdoor carpeting.
“Can Matt use your bathroom before we head out?” He caught the door and pushed it open before I could close it behind me. “Tara - my roommate Matt.”
“Nice to meet you,” I lied, incredulous that, not only were we in my apartment, but his roommate was using my toilet, assessing the smattering of cosmetics I had left out on the edge of the sink, taking stock of my housekeeping skills while your father and I made small talk about the apartment I hadn’t wanted him to see.
“This is a great place. How long have you been here?”
“Not long really. I’m looking for bigger…. Are we dropping Matt off somewhere?”
“Nah, he hasn’t eaten. He thought he’d come along.” He said, as if this were some reality show that required group dating and drawn straws at the end of the evening. “I was thinking we’d go around the corner to Grub?”
Dinner was predictably awkward. I was embarrassingly overdressed for the cafeteria setting complete with fluorescent lighting, school lunch trays and a walk through buffet. Trying to be civil, I directed periodic dribbles of conversation towards his roommate. Despite my attempts towards inclusion, Matt remained mute for the entire meal, only nodding and shrugging at key moments, as if it had just dawned on him that accompanying his roommate on a first date was begging disaster.
“I was thinking of going out for a drink. After…” Cobblah said, oblivious to the way Matt was wielding his fork like a spear, stabbing at pieces of cold broccoli and crumbs of cornbread, too vicious a hostility for the dinner table.
“I think I’m over the group date thing. I’ll take a rain check.” I had already pushed in my chair and was one step closer to the door when I added, “Call me sometime when you don’t need a chaperon.”
The next weekend Ross got a lot of mileage out of the date en tandem.
“That’s a great story. Do you think they were hoping for a threesome?” Ross asked while we waited in the kitchen for his table’s order of Eggs Benedict.
“Isn’t it incredibly depressing? An apparently mature and beautiful man brings his friend on our date. They were like Ernie and Bert. It was truly pathetic.”
“That was going nowhere. I’m glad he fumbled it before you made the mistake of sleeping with him. Which you would have, if Bert hadn’t been there.”
“True,” I acquiesced. “We’ll see if he can redeem himself tonight.”
“He shows up in a 1988 Crown Victoria that has one working door. He brings his roommate and takes you to a dump with picnic benches and no liquor license and he gets a second chance? Christ, you women are easy targets.”
“He apologized for the group thing. I thought his explanation was kind of sweet. He said Matt’s depressed, chronically without dinner plans.”
“Now he’s Mother Theresa?”
“He’s promised to cook a dinner that will include shell fish and wine. He’s promised the creep show roommate will be out of town.”
“Stay tuned…train wreck ahead!” Ross shouted while heading for the table juggling three hot plates and a
mimosa.
****
That evening I followed the directions I’d jotted down the night before and wove my way through parts of suburban Atlanta that seemed so apart from downtown, so sprawled and scattered, it was hard to believe that they weren’t considered some alternative subopolis.
When I pulled up in front of the house, I was startled and sad for him. I had always hated split levels, such a bad moment in architecture, so linoleum in avocado.
Someone named Bill answered the bell. He was polite, awkwardly formal, leading me up the short flight of stairs to the kitchen where your father worked over the sink, chopping, rinsing, all preparation and purpose. “Glad you’ve met Bill,” he said over his shoulder. “And Sherry’s around here somewhere too.”
Bill chimed in quickly, “She and I are going to grab a bite. I’ll be watching the news while she gets ready.” Bill put on the TV, low volume, courteous and quiet, in the next room.
I stared at Cobblah with intent, brows knit together in silent query.
“Matt and I just rent out the basement,” he whispered. As if this were just what he wanted, to live in married couple’s basement with another man, having to ask permission to use the kitchen in order to entertain a date.
I laughed softly, thought of Ross and just how amusing he would find this, thinking this makes for great drama.
While he made dinner, I noted the domestic touches that I guessed were all Sherry. She had clearly struggled with period and landed somewhere close to mid-century modern; all chrome and brevity of design creating a stark and alien contrast between the fluorescent over-head lighting in the kitchen and the garish wall paper- large floral prints in gold and brown and day-glo orange. In the dining room there were Miro posters and sleek chairs with beige suede cushions. A papery chandelier in the shape of an artichoke hovered like hope above the dining room table.
Working attentively, shelling shrimp while pouring Chardonnay, Cobblah asked me about my day. Extracting olive pits from his mouth. Discarding them into a small bowl he placed beside the olive jar for just this reason.
When the pasta had been drained and rinsed and heaped on paper plates, we carried our dinner, the bottle of wine and loaf of bread still in its plastic sleeve, into the dining room and tried to expand into the evening, ignoring Bill and the news in the adjacent room. Trying for comfortable, skirting awkward.
Sherry popped her head in after awhile and surprised me with her age. She appeared to be old enough to be our mother, Bill’s mother even, her graying hair worn long and stringy about heavy shoulders. She had applied her eye shadow, sparkly blue, straight up to her brows that were sketchy and spare. She penciled over their absence and missed the natural arc, like she’d been working in the dark. Still, she managed to command her space somewhere between bossy and maternal.
She stretched out her hand to me and pumped my arm up and down enthusiastically with knowing. As if she smelled sex in the air and approved.
“You two have fun,” she said, practically winking and Bill followed her obediently out the front door.
“So that’s Sherry?” I said with exhalation. I’d been holding my breath.
“That’s Sherry and Sherry has great weed. When we finish up here let’s smoke a joint.”
Dinner seemed to roll on faster, the promise of recreational drugs made bread and wine and overcooked shrimp go down in great anticipatory gulps. We began working at the dishes, furiously scrubbing, whipping the dishtowel back and forth over Formica countertops stained with use and age. By the time your father had left the kitchen to rummage in Sherry’s jewelry box for her ounce of Krippy and some rolling papers, things had been righted and rinsed with the energy of atonement .
“I like to call it borrowing. Allows me to live with the guilt. I do stuff for her. I’ve painted porch furniture. She owes me,” he said, sticking his nose into the plastic bag and drawing in a deep breath of pungent, sticky weed as we climbed down the steep deck stairs and across the back lawn to the decaying tree house nailed up between two oaks. The boards that had once been ladder rungs up the trunk of the tree had long since decayed and fallen away. Cobblah heaved himself up to the platform, chest first, drawing his feet up behind him. He grabbed my hand and hauled me up after him. His comment, she owes me, resonating like a shriek, standing out like high beams on a dark road.
We sat there a long time in the shade of the oaks, watching the sun slip down behind similar split-level homes. The air became thick with our exhaling and I could tell by the way your father struggled to hold the acrid smoke, letting it go with great relief and a hacking cough, that he was not a frequent pot smoker. This was an offering for me. The knowledge of this effort he had made stood out like backdrop to a high that was intense and consuming.
As night slipped in between us and mosquitoes descended in ravenous drifts, we talked over one another, finishing each other’s sentences, filling in the silences and gaps with what we believed to be little glimmers of profundity. It was the pot talking. We spoke of conspiracy theories, his idea that there was an organized effort to suppress and destroy the successful black male. He threw out O.J. and Michael Jackson, tagged up with Magic Johnson…all in the same breath as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
“What about Spike Lee,” I said. It was all I could come up with in the moment.
“They haven’t gotten to him yet. Give them time.”
“Them? Really? I just can’t buy that there’s a group of white men in lab coats somewhere hatching schemes to destroy people,” I said. “Besides O.J and Michael are socio-paths.”
“That’s what they want you to believe. If a black male has any kind of influence with the white population, they’re set up, taken down.”
“You really believe this,” I asked.
“I do,” he said and let his finger rest on my bottom lip. He began to trace my mouth, allowing his finger to slip beneath my chin, drawing my face towards him, slowly. He worked his lips over mine as if savoring something sacred and sweet.
After what seemed like a stretch of hours, all touching tentative discovery, he whispered, “Let’s go inside.” And it was easier for me, the two futons side by side in a basement room with high rectangular windows. It mattered less, this odd and unorthodox living arrangement now that I was lusty and breathless. He is good at this, really good at this, I thought. His fingers languid and practiced, prying open places secret and soft, surprisingly responsive.
In the night to follow, post-coital, sleeping in the dark and mild room, I woke with a start, momentarily unsure of where I was, your father’s hand heavy across my thigh. I grew restless listening to the TV drone on in the bedroom upstairs, Sherry smoking joints, lighting one off the other, her insomnia persistent, pursuant.
Cobblah drew me up into the hollow of his body, enveloping my slight frame. I eventually found sleep there, though fitful, afraid to move my arm that tingled and throbbed with having fallen asleep beneath the weight of his shoulder.
In the morning he was late to wake, rolling over in the dim light of those stingy windows. “Morning, baby.” He moaned, stretched and rolled me over. No one had ever called me baby before, no one ever has since. And as he thrust his way to my heart, he recited Mercutio’s lines from Romeo and Juliet. Practiced, professional,
“O, then, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you,
She gallops night by night…..
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.”
“Yes, Yes,” I said, meeting him somewhere Shakespearean and elevated. Crying out in the morning basement of his life.
And that is how we began, explosive and breathless. It was beyond me, the thing between us. I made exceptions, bent my own rules, made reckless and ridiculous with the newness of it.
Initially he tried for thoughtful and attentive. When we slept at my place he would sneak out early and walk to the grocery, returning to my apartment with an armload of breakfast and an offering, something like a potted plant. The leaves were changing. He bought Chrysanthemums. He would stop in at work, waltzing across the newsroom with his motorcycle helmet beneath his arm, kissing me in front of 40 reporters, staking his claim.
Then he began to ask for things, to borrow my car, a ride to rehearsal, a loan of 50 dollars for lunch with friends he never named. He grew bawdy and bold, needing sex in public spaces, by the small and dirty pond in Piedmont Park, in the movie theater, in Carly’s bathroom on Thanksgiving, after the pumpkin pie had been served.
Occasionally we slept at his place. But only when Matt was with his parents, convalescing through another dark period that required near hospitalization; a mother’s vigil against wrist wounds and overdoses. I hated being there, the communal living. It reminded me of dorm life but with adults. And I would wake and wander, find Sherry in her kitchen drinking coffee at three a.m. She was always sociable and kind, have a seat, have a sip, take a hit off this joint I’ve sparked. One night she offered to read my palm and I didn’t have the energy to resist. She traced the life lines and the love lines. She sighed and said, “You really love him.”
When I descended the short flight back to his futon in the damp cellar, I’d resolved to tell him. Sherry thought it would go fine, having seen an intense and dramatic affair that had long life drawn out in one impressive wrinkle across my hand. He mumbled something semi-conscious when I returned to his bed. And I responded with quiet gravity, “I love you.” His back tensed. Too much said. Too little behind and beneath to sustain the weight of it there in the dark, those three words, heavy and falling between us, changing it somehow.
But it went on trying to be like it was before, neither of us mentioning the confession I’d made in the darkness. I convinced myself he hadn’t heard, found foolish relief thinking that my whisper had not been received.
“So what do you do for protection…in an elevator, in a public restroom?” Ross asked the Saturday I confessed Cobblah’s penchant for doing it in unorthodox places.
I admitted. “I’m not always prepared,” thinking I can’t mention spontaneity and diaphragm in the same sentence.
“Russian roulette,” Ross said. “I have one word for you…condoms. There are some pretty potent phallic concerns you could cite…pregnancy, disease.”
“Thanks for your thoughts, Mom,” I said, my sarcasm a thin veil for terror. I knew he was right. There were public health text books written about cases like me, head strong, heart strong, foolish girls. Whole campaigns about reasoned action and preventive behavior sailing by me with catchy phrases like, “You Never Know What You’re Going to Get.”
Ross’s admonitions rattled around with the holiday music piped in for O’Malley’s brunch customers, “Sleigh Bells Ring, Are You Listening?”
“Do you think that we should talk about a more reliable form of birth control?” I said one night, mid-December, as your father and I smoked a joint in my apartment, just cracking a window to the cold rain that has settled in for the evening.
He looked at me askance and proceeded to phone his mother. “It’s been a week since I’ve called. I just need to check in.” And the whole conversation seemed to be for my benefit.
“I’m at Tara’s….
She’s a friend…
A few months…
I know…
I will…
Got to run…” one-sided platitudes and appeasements.
“She warned me to be careful,” he said, pacing for confrontation.
“Careful of what?”
“You know, a black guy and a white female, can get tricky in this part of the world. She worries.”
“What difference does it make,” I said, smarting with the reverse racism of it. I was conveniently forgetting my own mother’s response. Something about seeking out the difficult. But I had defended him, defended us, came shrieking around the corner of my mother’s bigotry and met it head on. “Don’t be ugly, Mom,” I’d said and hung up.
After the argument had grown sour and stale, my wishing we had just spoken about something easy, like condoms and inappropriate places for sexual intercourse, he stormed out.
“Go ahead, be naïve about us, Tara. But don’t expect me to join you there,” he had said, gesticulating frustration. I could tell it was exaggerated. He could hardly find the energy to care. This was just his style, neat and final but with dramatic flair.
Ross spent several days trying to convince me that this ending was inevitable. While we married ketchup bottles and filled the salt, he supported it calmly.
“I’m going to say it, just this once, I told you so,” he said. “There, now that’s behind us…”
“Didn’t you tell me that he always dated white women?” I asked.
“Light dawns on Marblehead?” Ross said with a shrug. “Maybe it was just a convenient fight to pick. A put away. A sure thing.”
“He’d said this was honest and good for him. Talked about how much he really cared about ‘us’. I thought there was really something behind the way he said ‘us’.”
“That should have been your first warning. Too bad you’re not a Baptist, you have such unflappable faith. Some evangelical’s going to get his hands on you and then we’re really in trouble.”
‘What do you know about Baptists?”
“Only what I hear. I’ve been paying attention because God knows I’m a terrible failure as a Jew,” Ross said.
“He called Johannesburg on my BellSouth bill. It was a thirty two dollar phone call.”
“Mommy Dearest covers apartheid, has won awards writing for the New York Times about the urban poor. My guess is she feels some healthy guilt about becoming successful. Probably abandoned and neglected him as a child and now makes up for it by becoming overly involved in his sex life. It’s sick really, the way she’d stick him with a name like Cobblah. Left to defend himself against other children. Doesn’t she know that kids are like wolves,” Ross said.
And the brunch rush began, swamping us in Belgian waffles and home fries and loop after loop of Big Band does Christmas.
I worked Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, low man on the totem pole doing newsroom duty in case of any emergencies or breaking news. It was mostly taking a few calls about obituaries and shifting paper around my desk. I thought I was coming down with something, feeling weak and exhausted between trips to the ladies’ room where I hovered, pacing, waiting for vomit.
Ross came over Christmas night to give me a new sweater and a desk-top coffee mug warmer that he had wrapped up in Hanukkah paper. “Geez, you look terrible,” he said. I loved that Ross could curse like a trucker but still peppered his speech with words like Geez and Super and Rats. This ability came in handy when you were young and we had to curb our verbal enthusiasms.
“I can’t go anywhere. Not tonight. I’ll buy the Chinese next week,” I said, begging out of the evening we had planned. He was only there to cheer me. He felt nothing like ‘alone on Christmas.’
And then there was the scene at the OB/GYN a week later. She was a young and earnest doctor that brought me a box of Kleenex and the name of a clinic near Little Five points when she delivered the news. She gave me a hug around shaking shoulders, took a moment to console me, patting my back through the paper gown. “It’s a good clinic. They’re good people,” she had said before heading into the next examination where she would check for dilation and effacement. I backed into another car on my way out of the parking lot and didn’t leave my number or insurance information. My Karma was already doomed. I thought, What’s one more thing?
“You’re sure about this,” Ross asked. “Do you want the baby or the father?” Our shift was over and I’d asked him to walk me home along the damp streets that were littered with browned Christmas trees and card board boxes.
“When does one start paying the piper? I’m 24, you know?”
“I don’t know. Couldn’t begin to tell you,” he said.
“I’m not expecting anything from him.”
“Expect nothing. That’s good, that’s healthy. If only I could tell him what I expected before he got the first punch in,” Ross said and grabbed my hand for the walk home.
Ten Down…Six Letters for Fading Memories. That clue stumped me for days. Turns out it’s Embers.
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