And Sometimes I Wonder About You (4 page)

T
he Hotel Brown was nestled between two Middle Eastern consulates on East Sixty-seventh, not far from Fifth Avenue. It was an old hotel with an excellent security staff and high-ceilinged rooms that were well appointed and large. Not a cheap joint.

I stood across the street and called the hotel operator with the help of 411.

“Hotel Brown,” a woman said. “How may I direct your call?”

“Marella Herzog,” I said.

There was a hesitation and then, “Who may I say is calling?”

“Leonid McGill.”

The next thing I heard was a ringing phone.

“Hello, Leonid,” she said on answering the third ring. “I was wondering when you’d call.”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“I told the front desk only to allow calls from you. It was getting so late that I thought maybe I’d have to wait until tomorrow.”

It was 9:39 by my watch and tomorrow seemed very far away.

“Are you calling about your money?” she asked when I was silent.

“I guess that’s part of it.”

“What else?”

“I didn’t get my kiss on the cheek.”

“Where are you?”

“Across the street.”

“Come on up,” she said, “room eight twenty-five. I’ll tell the front desk to let you by.”

There was a time when black men were not allowed to visit fancy hotel rooms unless they wore a service uniform and were delivering flowers or dinner on a tray. There was a time when dark-skinned women would not be allowed to stay in those rooms. But those days are long over. There’s still racism of course. People of color still struggle mightily against misconceptions that are half a millennium old. But these days I can take the elevator up to a femme fatale’s room and no one would bar my way—or warn me off.

I knocked on her door and she answered—in the nude. The nude. She wore absolutely nothing. Her entire body was an even reddish brown, telling me that she spent a lot of time on unregulated beaches.

Walking across the threshold, I closed the door with my left hand, went to my knees, and pressed my mouth into the nexus of her legs.

“Oh,” she said.

Working my head and neck to separate her thighs maybe four inches midway between the pelvis and the knee, I jabbed softly with my tongue.

“Oh,” she said with a bit more feeling.

But it was when I got the left thigh on my shoulder and stood straight up that I believe she was more shocked than I was to be received by a russet-skinned beauty at a door on the eighth floor of a room which, not all that long ago, excluded our ancestors.

She grabbed onto my hairless head but she didn’t have to worry. I wouldn’t have let her fall. Between my shoulders, hands, and tongue she either had a powerful orgasm or did a very good job at pretending.

“Let me down,” she said when the shudders subsided.

I moved my shoulder and then my chest until I was holding her in the cradle of my arms.

“You’re very strong,” she said and then kissed me for the first time.

I rubbed my nose against her chin.

“Lucky I don’t have an engagement ring in my pocket,” I replied.

She hugged my head then with even more passion than she had shown before.

“Lie down with me,” she commanded.

And so there we lay: her completely naked and me fully dressed and fully erect.

She touched the urgent bulge in my trousers and said, “We’ll take care of that in just a bit.”

“We better,” I warned, “before it takes care of itself.”

Marella laughed out loud, actually guffawed and punched my arm. She was a solidly built woman; in her thirties, as I’ve already said, but with the pampered body of a woman ten years younger.

“Do you think you killed that guy?” she asked.

“Naw,” I said dismissively.

“How can you be so sure?”

“I went back in the station after you left.”

“You did? Wasn’t that rather reckless?”

“Nobody saw us,” I said.

I considered explaining my idea of the elevator-gladiator sport.

She unzipped my blue trousers.

“He saw us,” she said while fishing around for the flesh in my pants.

“Um…he was still out.”

“How do you know that?” She found what she was looking for. Her fingers were cold.

“Oh,” I said. “He passed maybe twelve feet away from me on a wheeled gurney pushed by two women.”

“Your turn,” she told me and we didn’t talk about anything for a while.

“I think I can safely say that I have never met a man like you,” Marella Herzog said at 1:51 by the lighted digital numerals on the clock next to her side of the bed. We were both naked by then, drinking honor-bar cognac. My pants, which were neatly folded on a plush red chair that sat against the wall, had an extra fifteen hundred dollars in them.

“I can say without a doubt,” I replied, “that I have met all the failed attempts that first the Hebraic and then the Christian God made trying to come up with a woman like you.”

“You’re good,” she said. “It’s a wonder that you haven’t been shot down by a town full of frightened citizens.”

It struck me that our conversation was like an aged wine rather than a freshly squeezed juice. If I believed in the gods I swore by, or maybe their Hindu counterparts, I would have said that we were old souls that had known each other at many other times, in other
reincarnations.

“So what do you plan to do about the man that wants his ring back?” I asked.

“How old are you?”

“Almost fifty-six.”

“And you laid that guy out and held me up on your shoulders like my daddy did when I was a little kid.”

“I hope not just like that.”

“No. The other way around.”

“You needed a man who wouldn’t mind the ride,” I said. “I guess I needed a woman like that too.”

She leaned over toward her end table and poured another miniature bottle into her near-empty glass. I realized, watching that supple and sinuous movement, that life was the only magic all humanity could agree upon.

“I don’t think I have anything to worry about, Mr. McGill. You nipped that problem in the bud.”

“Rich men sometimes have armies of guys like that one on the train,” I advised.

“I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” she countered. “I still have your card if something comes up in the next day or two, and after that I’ll be far, far away from here.”

Who was I to question the perfect Lilith, the precise Mary Magdalene?

“Can I sleep here with you tonight?” I asked.

“Only if you don’t mind if I wake you up once or twice.”

I
was back down near Penn Station at 5:17 the next morning, making my way up the stairs of a nondescript brick building just a few blocks away. When I’d woken up at 4:00 Marella was still asleep. After an ice-cold shower I threw on my blue suit, kissed her, and said good-bye. She sighed, smiled, and turned the other way.

I left the Hotel Brown certain that my business with Ms. Herzog was yet to be completed. I was wondering if this was a good thing as I pushed open the door to Gordo’s Gym on the fifth floor of the nameless, unremarkable building.

There were already a dozen boxers and half that many trainers hard at work. Two of four makeshift rings had opponents practicing how to dismantle their opposition. My usual heavy bag near a murky window was being used by a featherweight named Brian “Fat Fudge” Lowman. He was making that bag sway, which is no mean feat for a man that small.

“Hey, LT,” a gravelly voice hailed.

It was Gordo Tallman, the red-bronze surrogate father who had taught me that my best talent was absorbing pain and then giving it back with some interest. He had thought that I’d use that equation getting a light-heavy championship belt, but instead I plied it on the streets.

“Gordo,” I said. Standing face-to-face, we were the same height. He didn’t weigh much more than Fat Fudge but his will was unbreakable. “How you doin’?”

“I’m gettin’ married,” he said.

“You and Elsa set a date?” I asked.

“Me and her broke up.”

“Broke up? You just got engaged. What happened?”

“Sophie.” It was a one-word treatise on Gordo Tallman’s life.

Sophie Bernard was the little sister of Gordo’s third wife, Helen. Helen was from Houston, Texas, and after she and Gordo got married she brought a few members of her family up to New York. Sophie came to live with Gordo and Helen. She was a small woman with big eyes and rich with the empathy that hard men want but can never ask for.

After three months of living with the sisters, Gordo found that he talked more with Sophie than Helen. The marriage foundered sometime soon after that. After a year had passed, Gordo came to Sophie and asked her to marry him. She said that she wanted to but wouldn’t because it would break her sister’s heart. Sophie had promised Helen that she never did anything wrong with Gordo, so if they got married Helen would think that she’d lied.

“Sophie?” I said. “I didn’t even know that you still talked to her.”

“She called,” Gordo said, a little shy. “She called to tell me that Helen had died.”

Oh.

“I said I was sorry and me and Elsa went to the funeral over in New Brunswick, New Jersey. After the ceremony we sat with Soph at a pizza restaurant the family rented out. It was just a nice time, you know? But on the train ride home Elsa says to me, ‘You’re in love with that woman.’ I just laughed. I hadn’t seen Sophie in twenty years. I liked her. I liked her fine but the past was gone.

“At least that’s what I thought. But that night I couldn’t go to sleep. I sat up remembering what it was like those three months I saw Soph every morning over coffee. Elsa was my nurse, she saved my life. I love her but there was something in my heart for Sophie that I couldn’t shake.

“Maybe if Elsa didn’t say anything…But no. I would have been thinking about Soph after that.”

For a moment my old mentor was lost in thought.

Finally he said, “Two days later Elsa told me that she was going back to Germany.”

“What did you say?”

“I couldn’t say a word. I wanted to. I tried. But all I could manage was this miserable face. Elsa kissed me and a few days later she was gone.”

“And then you called Sophie and asked her to marry you again?”

“I’m eighty-three years old, LT. My time is nearly up. I should’a been dead from that cancer. I cain’t tell my heart what to do. Sophie asked me how was Elsa and I said she’d gone back home. Two minutes later I asked her to marry me and she said all right.”

I knew Elsa. I hired her when I thought Gordo would die from cancer. She was a good woman but I could hear the love in Gordo’s voice.

“Congratulations,”
I said. “How’s Helen’s family feel about this?”

“Most of ’em back down in Texas” was his answer. “I’m flyin’ up twelve of ’em to come to the ceremony.”

“That’s a mighty big nut, G. You sure you can do it?” I knew he could. Gordo was a rich man. He was a brilliant trainer but his genius was real estate.

“I gotta couple’a things I need from you, LT,” he said instead of taking the bait. I could tell from his tone that talk of love was over.

“What’s that?”

“I got this Chin’ee kid from Hong Kong can fight. Middleweight, you know. Fast as Sugar Ray Leonard with the bones of Marvin Hagler. Ain’t nevah lost a fight an’ been in the ring nineteen times.”

“What’s his name?”

“Chin Wa.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Never fought in the States or on TV. He think he the real deal but I believe that the competition was lacking.”

“And?”

“Fudge be on your bag all mornin’,” Gordo said. “Got him tryin’ to get some pop in them punches, so maybe you could do a couple’a rounds with Chin and see if he got the seven covered.”

“Where’s Iran?” I asked. Iran Shelfly, a heist man that went to prison, partly because of my hidden perfidy, now worked for Gordo.

“He down doin’ a undercard in Philly. I told him if he won I’d get him a real fight. Maybe with that Irish kid ev’rybody love so much.”

I went in a corner, shed my clothes, and donned trunks that Gordo kept in a drawer for me. The old man laced my gloves and I entered the center ring with no headgear.

“He gonna hit you,” Gordo warned. I heard him but Marella’s spell of
invulnerability
was on me again.

After a few minutes a young Asian Adonis came out of the locker room; only Gordo’s prospects, or “health club” customers, got lockers and dressing areas. The rest of us had to rely on the modesty provided by corners, and we took our showers at home.

Chin Wa didn’t have one ounce of fat on his 157-pound frame. He was lithe and smiling. When we faced each other in the middle of the ring I said, “No headgear?”

“You won’t hit my head,” he said. “But I sure hit you.”

And he did, too. I was trying to cover up, throwing uppercuts up top but he knew how to punch and he moved his head like a king cobra on speed. Maybe fifteen seconds into the first round he’d hit me as many times. After a minute or so my uppercut fell a bit and I caught him in the rib cage on the right side. One. I got two more in before Gordo hit the bell.

When the bell to the second round started I could see Chin Wa was angry that I was able to answer. He threw a flurry at me, landing every punch, and I connected once five inches below his diaphragm. Four. For the next minute or so his volume and velocity of punches slowed though he might not have realized it. I got in two right hooks on his left side before Gordo hit the bell again.

By this time we had an audience. It was my guess that most sparring partners that got in with Chin were daunted by his speed.

When the third round started I put my hands down, he smiled, hit me four times and then I let out with a straight right hand to his lower core. He looked at me with real surprise on his face. He tried to raise his arms as if to protect himself from the blows that might be coming but instead the movement twisted his gut muscles and he spun to the canvas like a corkscrew.

“Inside’a your lip bleedin’,” Gordo said as I put on my clothes in the corner.

He lifted the left side of my lip with two fingers and rubbed a crystal of pure alum against the cut. It stung for a moment and then came the tangy taste of the chemical. The intimacy of boxers and their trainers is something akin to love.

“Thanks, LT,” Gordo said. “It would’a taken Chin up to the middle ranks to learn that a heavy hitter can have a brain. You could’a been the best in the world at one time.”

“The way I take hits I would have most certainly been punch-drunk by now.”

Gordo looked down then. He knew the ravages of the sweet science like anybody else.

“Have you seen Twill around?” I asked my oldest friend.

“Not for ovah a week now. But Dimitri come in every night, him and that Mata Hari girl he been datin’.”

“Does Tatyana box?”

“Naw. She just stretches and do that yoga stuff while he in trainin’.”

“But no Twill?”

Gordo shook his head and shrugged.