Coq au Vin (6 page)

“About the only thing that makes me want to fight now is other people telling me who I am and what I ought to be doing and who I ought to be doing it with.”

“You mean you don't like having your blackness challenged?”

“My blackness is not open to challenge. My father was black, so that means I'm black. Period. I guess what I mean is, my people deserve to be honored by me, and I'm serious about doing that—but I deserve some honor too, right? Who doesn't?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Who doesn't? Are you all on your own now? No family?”

“No.”

“How long have you been in Paris?”

“Five months.”

“Made any friends yet?”

He shook his head. “Not really. Just some guys I met playing around town. The place I'm staying at belongs to one of my profs, but he isn't there now. I'm subletting from him.”

“What are you—”

He cut me off. “Just a minute! Hold up! Question after question after question. We're only talking about me. I want to know something about you and your stuff.”

“You will, you will,” I said. “Tell you what. Wait for me in the café downstairs while I get ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“We're going to get seriously drunk.”

“Are you joking?”

“Seriously, intentionally drunk.”

“It's only ten-thirty,” he said giddily. “In the morning.”

“I know. But I'm about to tell you my life story, right? That's not something you do sober, my brother. And you've got to show me your Paris before I show you mine.”

He picked up his violin and practically danced over to the door.

“It's good to be an international nigger, don't you find, Nan?”

“Yes,
mon frère
. It is kind of da bomb.”

Instead of waiting downstairs, he had run home to drop off his violin.

By late afternoon, we'd been walking and talking and drinking for hours.

I didn't figure on another excursion to the Right Bank so soon. But that was okay. Andre and I were wending our way all over the 8th while his nonstop Negro-in-Paris history rap unreeled like a guided tour cassette. The kid was amazing.

He had just given me the complete history of the concert hall called the Salle Pleyel, on the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, where every famous brown person who had ever set foot in Paris—from the players in the old la revue Negre to W.E.B. Du Bois to Herbie Hancock to Howlin Wolf—had drawn an audience.

We stopped briefly for another drink, exchanged more life story tidbits, and pressed on.

It was Andre who pointed out the American Embassy building to me, near the place de la Concorde. But more important to him was the spot a couple of buildings away where once had stood the deluxe club Les Ambassadeurs. I heard all about Florence Mills's success there in 1926 and how Richard Wright had brought Katherine Dunham's dance troupe there to perform in the forties.

As we swept up the Champs Elysées, he listed what Chester Himes and his wife had had for lunch at Fouquet's in 1959. All right, all right—slight exaggeration.

Sidney Bechet this, Henry Tanner that, Kenny Clarke this, Cyrus Colter that…Was I aware that
Art Blakey aux Champs-Elysées
was the only live jazz record that…Did I want to visit the site of Chez Josephine, la Baker's nightclub, before or after we saw the cabaret where Satie, Milhaud,
and
Ravel used to hang with her…In 1961, you know, both Bud and Dexter backed up Carmen McRae at the Paris Blue Note, but it wasn't called that anymore…

Who had told this child he wasn't black enough? Not to play amateur Freudian, but his encyclopedic knowledge of our people in Paris was way past the maybe-I'll-write-a-book stage. It was obviously at the level of obsession. Who was he trying to vindicate?

It was late and I was starving. “I'm buying,” I told Andre. “What do you suggest?”

“You shouldn't treat,” he said. “You've been buying all day.”

“It's okay. I'll write it off on my taxes under Educational Expenses.”

“You know, there is a place I want to try.”

“Name it.”

“Bricktop's. It's in the ninth.”

He was putting me on. “Oh sure,” I said, laughing. “Maybe we'll run into Mabel Mercer and her friend Cole Porter. Scott and Zelda, too.” Bricktop, the oh-so-sophisticated cabaret singer, and the club bearing her name were roaring twenties legends, I knew. He had to be putting me on.

“No, no. It's there. Really.”

I looked at him then, truly worried. “Jesus. You're really over the edge. I mean, you think we've been transported back to 1928, don't you? I understood that Bricktop's closed about sixty years ago.”

He grinned mischievously at me. “Yes, you're right. It did. But there's a place with the same name now. I'd like to see what it's like.”

“That's better,” I said. “I guess we won't have to get the net for you after all. Are we dressed for it?”

“I think we're cool. It's just a place with down-home food and a piano player.”

Back to funky Pigalle. I had crisscrossed most of these streets before, in my scattershot search for Vivian. Well, this time I wasn't sitting around in the lobbies of grunge hotels, searching for down-and-out bars or the Parisian equivalent to a soup kitchen. I was being escorted around the hallowed grounds of our ancestors, so to speak. The hotel where Bud Powell lived. The cabaret (at least the address where once there had been a cabaret) where one celebrated musician reportedly shot another to death. And, of course, the site of the original Bricktop's on the rue Fontaine.

I felt a flash of guilt about having taken the day off like this. That would be old Ernestine trying to shame me: Vivian's suffering! she was reminding me. Vivian's lost—broke—Vivian's dying! And here you are, drinking the day away
with some man
, chasing after some phantom of the glamorous black past.

Yes, ma'am, I answered meekly. I
am
having too much fun and he
is
too good-looking. Tomorrow I widen the search for Aunt Viv. I swear.

Cole Porter and Mabel Mercer were definitely not in residence. No ladies in bare-back evening gowns and diamonds. Not a tuxedo in sight. The new Bricktop's was African-American kitsch. Autographed photos of the namesake lady herself, of Louis Armstrong and Lady Day, Alberta Hunter and you name them. Stuffed piccaninny dolls. Posters for Oscar Micheaux movies. Laminated Bessie Smith records. Items on the menu named after this or that famous personage. The food wasn't half bad, though. We devoured hot cornbread and smothered chicken and collards while we goofed on the place. The generic old black gentleman at the baby grand played terrific stride.

They were doing a fairly brisk business in the place, too. Mostly older black people occupied the tables, but quite a few younger couples—black, white, black and white—were chowing down as well. Some musician types were drinking and bullshitting with the bartender up front.

A loquacious elderly gentleman we took to be the owner, because of the deference being paid him by what appeared to be the regulars, was holding court at a large round table near the back. The drinks were flowing back there and spirits were high. One woman at his table we recognized as an up-and-coming diva from the States—you know, in one meteoric arc she goes from the church choir in Stomach Ache, Mississippi, to rave reviews at the Met. When Andre kept glancing over there, I assumed it was Miss Thing that he was staring at.

But no, he said, he was looking at the old man. There was something about him—something vaguely familiar—that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

“He was probably Eubie Blake's butler or something—somebody only you would know,” I said mockingly.

He blushed. At least he had enough perspective to be embarrassed.

I called for the check.

What a day it had been. We began the long walk back to the 5th, still talking, confiding in each other the way you do in the early stages of a friendship. Occasionally I'd point out a café or a restaurant or a street corner where I'd dined with friends, met a lover, made a discovery of one sort or another.

Back at last at the hotel, we were reluctant to say good night. I invited Andre up for a glass of the brandy I'd been smart enough to purchase and lay away in the armoire.

We set our chairs in front of the open window and went on talking. It wasn't long before a weird kind of chill went up my back. I knew it wasn't from the night air. It was a bizarre sensation and I managed to push it away quickly enough, but I had become somewhat distracted.

“I think I got it!” Andre exclaimed, seemingly out of the blue.

It was as if his voice were coming at me from the bottom of a well. “What? What did you say?”

I had been staring, transfixed, over at the top of the bureau.

“You know that old man—the one who owns Bricktop's?”

“Yeah. What about him?”

“Didn't someone call him Mr. Melson—or Melons?”

“I may have heard somebody call him something like that. Why?”

“I think I know who he is.”

“Who?”

“Morris Melon. That's it. He was a teacher. Anthropology, wasn't it? Or sociology. Yes, right. He wrote a book—one of those pioneering studies about the black community in Chicago. Or am I thinking of
Black Metropolis?
It was something like that, anyway. Damn, what was the name of that book? Or was it the study of the Gullah Islands? I should interview him sometime. Find out his story.”

He went on chattering. I was only half listening. I got up and began to walk around the room slowly, a sense of fear rising steadily inside me.

Andre had pulled himself out of his compulsive trip down memory lane. “What's the matter, Nan? What are you doing?”

I began to open the bureau drawers then, checking, I'm not sure what for. I looked inside my sax case and all seemed well there. I could find nothing missing. But I knew that someone had been looking through my things. I just knew it: earrings placed at the right-hand corner of the bureau instead of the left; a tube of hand lotion set on its side rather than on end; pantyhose rolled up with the toes outside rather than in. But things disturbed so minutely that it was possible I was imagining the changes. I told Andre what I was thinking. Moreover, I said, I think it might have something to do with my aunt.

“What do you mean? It was probably just the maid.”

I shook my head. “No. No, something's…”

“What? What were you going to say?”

“Something's happening.”

“Like what? What's happening?”

I had to shrug my shoulders. I had no idea what I meant.

He smiled at me and got me settled down again, almost convinced me that it was my imagination. I sat back at the window with him and finished my drink, but that weird feeling never went completely away.

“I'd better go,” Andre said a while later, his voice low. “You need to get to bed.”

I nodded. “So do you, friend.”

He nodded, too.

A darkness moved across his face then. I didn't understand it. We stood for a minute in the doorway, saying a final good night, and then he left.

Seconds later, there was a knock at the door. He had come back.

“Forget something?” I asked.

“No. Look—uh…”

I waited in silence. The darkening in his face was full-blown midnight by now. Something was very wrong.

He dropped the bomb then:

“You think I'm a fag, don't you?”

“Of course not.” Oh yes, I did.

I hadn't known it before, but of course I did. What else could it mean for a handsome young man to be staying
chez
“one of my profs.”

“I'm not,” he said, threatening. He reached for my wrist but at the last moment pulled back. “I'm not gay.”

I caught my breath. I didn't speak. He was looking at me so intently that I lowered my gaze from his.

“I'll come over to have breakfast with you tomorrow—if that's okay,” he said finally. “We have to do something about your aunt.”

We
have to do something?

I nodded. “See you in the morning.”

Okay, so maybe he wasn't a closet case. But surely there was more to his life story than brilliantly gifted mixed-race kid fights his way out of the ghetto and becomes the toast of Gay Paree. It wasn't that I suspected what he had told me was untrue; there simply had to be some juicy bits that he'd left out.

We
.

When he was gone I locked the door and placed my grip in front of it.

CHAPTER 4

It Could Happen to You

I was showered and in street clothes when he arrived.

He was carrying a white box tied with string.

“Coffee's on the way up,” I said. “What's that?”

“Decent croissants,” he answered, “and sliced ham and some fresh fruit. I stopped at the market near my place.” He lifted the sack in his other hand. “And the morning paper.”

He laid out all the items on the bureau. “This is the kind of stuff even I can afford,” he said.

“Don't worry, boyfriend,” I said. “You're going to be rich and famous soon enough.”

Thank God, last night's heaviness seemed to have gone from his face, and from the air between us. The tray was delivered a minute later. He sat next to me on the bed and we breakfasted royally.

I felt good, happy, so much less alone.

Unfortunately, when I looked down at the headline under the fold of the morning paper, that warm and fuzzy feeling instantly went away.

AMERICAN WOMAN BRUTALLY MURDERED

My heart stopped beating for a moment.

Andre noticed the headline a second after I did. We began to read frantically, looking for the name of the victim.

Polk. Mary Polk. A white woman.

I could breathe again.