The Man in My Basement (8 page)

Brent used to say that money went through my fingers like water down the drain. He wasn’t wrong. The first thing I did when Bennet left was to go out and buy a pure gold ring that I had seen in an antique store in East Hampton. It was a slender thing with a pale green stone for a setting. It was from India, Mrs. Canelli said. It was a woman’s ring and too small for me, but I wanted it anyway. And once I had the money, I couldn’t help myself.

My mother gave me my allowance every Saturday morning, and I’d spend the rest of the day shopping for candy and gifts for her.

“Don’t spend everything, baby,” she’d tell me. But her eyes were alight whenever I’d bring out a bottle of perfume or some glass trinket.

By the time Ricky and Bethany arrived, I was making dinner. Hot and sweet Italian sausages fried with whole cloves of garlic and then simmered in red wine and tomato sauce. The water for the vermicelli had just come to a boil when Ricky and Bethany came in. She was a few inches taller and almost twice the size of Ricky, but Bethany wasn’t fat. She had a big chest and powerful legs, but the stomach was flat. Her face was wide and the color of dark amber. She had big teeth, an embarrassing laugh, and eyes that glittered when they saw you.

“Hey, Charles,” she called. They had let themselves in the front door. “That smells delicious. You got some for us?”

“I didn’t know if you guys had time to eat. From what Ricky said I thought you were real tired and had to go to bed.”

“Uh-uh,” she denied. “We came to see you and eat some sausages too.”

She put her arms around me and gave me a kiss that made me hug her back.

“Let’s eat!” Ricky declared. And for a while I had some company and no thoughts in my head.

Bethany loved eating and sex, as I have said before, but she also loved to talk about herself. We heard all about her plans of moving down to Atlanta and starting a braid-and-nail parlor. She loved children and had gone to some wild parties at crazy artists’ homes in Southampton. One well-known painter had asked her to model three times, but every time he was so moved by her ample beauty that he had to make love to her instead.

I could see that most of her stories were designed to excite her male audience. It worked. Ricky was almost swooning over her words. He had run into her at a shopping mall near Riverhead a week or so earlier, and she gave him hopes. Now he was only a sausage away.

“Hey, Bethy,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I wanna show you somethin’ upstairs.”

“What?” she asked.

“Somethin’.”

“You comin’, Charles?” Bethany pursed her lips and lowered her eyelids. If we were out in nature, I would have killed Ricky right then.

“In a few minutes,” I said.

Ricky sighed in relief.

“Okay,” she said, smiling. “But you come on up now.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Come on,” Ricky said, grabbing her by the arm.

“Ow! Don’t be so rough, Ricky. I’m comin’.”

I washed the dishes and looked out the window. I was thinking about Anniston Bennet and the bag of money that I had hidden in the foldout sofa bed in my father’s old library. A bagful of money was not a normal thing—that’s what I was thinking. No matter how much the little white man had acted like it was a simple business transaction, it was obvious that he wanted to hide what he was doing. It made me nervous, but I couldn’t see any way out of it. Twenty-five hundred dollars of the money was already gone.

But how bad could it be? He couldn’t hurt anybody in my basement. He was just little so I knew he couldn’t hurt me. Unless he had a gun. But I could lock the doors while he was down there. Of course a man with a gun could get through a door, or a window.

But why would he need to pay me money? Why not just shoot me in the breakfast nook?

“Ohhhh.”

I couldn’t believe that Bennet had any designs on my welfare. I decided to get drunk and stop worrying about things I couldn’t change.

“Ohhhhh.”
It was only a whisper. But, I thought, it had to be a roar to make it all the way down into the kitchen from my parents’ room on the third floor. That was the deal I usually made with Clarance. He could come to my house with one of his girlfriends. They’d stay on the third floor and I’d sleep downstairs in my father’s den. But it was the first time that Ricky had asked for the deal.

I never imagined that Bethany, who spoke in a small high voice, could get the volume to disturb me downstairs.

That’s when I remembered being a child. Now and then my parents wanted to be alone,
to talk,
they said. They’d go into their room and tell me to go play. But all I wanted was to play with them and talk to them. After they sent me away from the door a few times, I’d wander down to the pantry with my toy soldiers and guns. I was happy then because there was a vent that let me hear my parents’ soft murmuring voices while I played soldier.

“That’s it, baby,” Bethany said. She might have been talking to me, her voice was so clear. “Right there. Right there. Right there.”

Ricky was saying something, and she replied with a whole drawerful of yeses.

I hadn’t masturbated in three days because of the alcohol. By the time I got around to that, I was too dizzy to do anything. Bethany was telling Ricky where to move and when he got it right she let go with a strained roar.

That was my first orgasm too.

I could hear the furniture rocking and Bethany’s squeals. She knew what she wanted and was very specific in her requests. To hear a woman ask for pleasure like that had me on my knees among the boxes of cereal and plastic containers of grape juice. After my third orgasm I had to leave the pantry for the living room. There I began to drink. It was necessary to slow down my beating heart.

From the sofa I could hear the occasional moan or gasping sob, but the whiskey dulled my urges and I fell half into a doze.

“Charles?” she said. “You awake?”

I was asleep on the couch in the living room. At least I think I was asleep. It seemed to me that I had been looking at Bethany in her tight satin slip for quite some time.

“Are you awake?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ricky’s asleep,” she said as if it was an important piece of information.

She sat down next to me and I got up, almost without thinking, and moved to the chair. That made Bethany smile.

“You scared of me, Charles Blakey?” she asked.

“You know a lot of those rich people come in here from New York, don’t you, Bethy?” I asked.

She was confused by my changing her subject but still answered, “Some.”

“They do some crazy things, right?”

“I guess,” she said. “I mean, they think they’re all crazy and wild. And they don’t have to get up and go to work in the morning. Really all the difference I can see is that they think that they’re smarter and better than people don’t make as much money as they do. And they want a lot more. You know, like that artist I used to go with. He wanted to be the best at everything. And he was so rich that everybody told him that he was the best. When he started playing trumpet, his friends said that he sounded like Miles Davis. It wasn’t like us. You know somebody set you straight in a minute around here.”

Bethany smiled and I wanted to kiss her, not because she was beautiful, even though she was, but because she wasn’t impressed by the lies rich people wore like clothes. She knew where her feet were planted. Right then I think she wanted to be standing a little closer to me.

She stood up and walked over to my chair. I stood to meet her.

She was about to lay her hand on my chest, but I took hold of her wrist and gently pushed her away.

“I want to see you, Bethy,” I said. “But not downstairs from Ricky after you made him all happy like that.”

“We could take a shower,” she suggested.

“It’s not that. You know Ricky can get low and dirty, but he’s the only friend I got right now. Believe me, this is not easy. But can I make you some tea?”

Bethany frowned for a few seconds, and then she shrugged and smiled. There was a sweater on the floor. She must have let it fall from her shoulders when she saw me slouching on the couch. Now she picked it up and covered all that youthful beauty.

Over Irish Breakfast (it was 4:30) we discussed the rich white people she’d known. Bethany liked the fine dinners and fancy houses, but rich people—even the black ones, she said—couldn’t satisfy her like people from our neighborhood.

“It’s just like my people know me better,” she said. “Like Ricky. You know for a while tonight I thought he might have a heart attack, he was so excited. And before he fell off asleep he was talking about Johnetta Johnston and Kirby. You know? Everyday stuff. Rich men always want to be teaching something, asking,
Did you know?
when they know you don’t know and don’t care neither.”

Ricky came down when the sun was just coming up. At first he looked suspicious, but when Bethany showed him her big teeth and said, “Mornin’, baby. Charles made me some tea,” he calmed down and kissed her face and neck.

After that they went back upstairs. I was so tired that I didn’t even listen. I went to sleep with my bag of money in my dead father’s foldout sofa and dreamed about Anniston Bennet. He was humongous and wedged tight in my cellar, sticking his head out of the trapdoor and begging to be let free.

I
spent the next week working on the basement and reading the books I had bought. Late every afternoon Ricky would call to crow about his further conquests with Bethany. One night they did it on the beach. The next night in an almost-empty movie house. Late late every night Bethany would call me. She just wanted to talk, she’d say. Every conversation would end with her worrying that Ricky was too much in love with her. She liked him and he was sweet, but he wasn’t the kind of man who could ring that bell. Twice she wondered if she could come over in those wee hours, but every time I was strong.

“I’d like to see you,” I said. “I really would, but Ricky likes you and I can’t see it to break his heart.”

“What if we broke up?” she asked me one night. “Could I come over then?”

“I don’t know.”

“ ’Cause you know it seem like that if you didn’t wanna hurt Ricky you’d let me come over and just not tell ’im. That way nobody gets hurt.”

I told her that I would think about what she said.

I didn’t care about Bethany and Ricky right then. The next morning Narciss Gully was due to come over to take the photographs. I had spent the day cleaning again. Actually I just moved whatever mess had collected into the pantry. I didn’t drink for twenty-four hours previous to her arrival, and I took a long bath and shaved.

When the doorbell rang I wasn’t expecting the twenty-something copper-toned Dominican Adonis of assistants.

“Hola,” he said to me. “I am Geraldo. Miss Gully sent me to set up for the shoot.”

I’m tall but Geraldo had me beat. He was six four at least, wearing only cutoff jean shorts and a white T-shirt. His muscles were well defined but not grotesque, except for calves that bulged. His hair came in big golden-brown locks. His face was beautiful.

“Huh?” I said.

“Preparation,” he said slowly, taking time over the syllables. He indicated a pile of paraphernalia behind him. Lighting, screens, rugs, and big camera boxes. “See?”

“Oh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Why don’t you come in here in the living room?”

Geraldo lifted the great pile of materials into a rippling embrace and carried it in. I showed him where to set up, and he spent a long time with a light meter looking at windows in order to find the exact right position for his rugs and screens. He examined my heirlooms, holding them up to the light and using his meter.

“Are you taking the pictures?” I asked after a lot of watching.

The boyish smile and manly shaking of his head must have broken many hearts before. “No,” he said. “Miss Gully takes the pictures. I just set it up.”

“You work for her?”

“We are friends. She loves my work, my painting, and so she gives me jobs when she can. I live at the house of Harry Lake in East Hampton. He is my master in oils. A great master. He sent for me from New York after seeing my show at the Rhinoceros Gallery on Avenue A. Do you know it?”

“Know what?”

“The Rhinoceros Gallery. It is a very important place. Harry found me there, and he lets me use his garage as a studio and to sleep.”

“So how do you know Narciss?” I asked.

“I was walking down the street,” he said, tossing his locks for effect. “Just walking and I see the most beautiful quilts hanging in her window. The designs are like the ones that I paint and I had to see them, touch them…”

There was a passion building up in Geraldo, and I couldn’t help but wonder what all he was touching up in Narciss Gully’s store.

“I know,” I said for no reason, “she sells quilts.”

“Sells?” he sneered. “It’s not a hot-dog stand. This is art. She collects, she shares, she teaches. Sometimes someone might pay for learning something, to live with beauty. But she does not just sell quilts.”

I’ve never really gotten the knack of talking to artists. You can’t talk to them about how much it pays or about what you think you like. If I think a painting is ugly, somebody just tells me that I don’t understand. If I think a painting is good, they tell me the same thing. It’s like artists see a different place, a higher place, whereas I’m on the level of some stray dog who only knows how to hunt for pussy and food in a world that’s black and white.

Geraldo sneered at me again and turned to his work.

I considered kicking him out of my house but then thought better of it. I didn’t want trouble with Narciss Gully. Just the opposite—I had begun to have deep feelings for the antique dealer. Every night after talking to Bethany, I would have lascivious dreams about Narciss. In those dreams we always started at the dinner table, either in a restaurant or at someone’s house, maybe a barbecue or a picnic. No matter where we ended up, we always started out eating. I’d bring the wine and she was barely dressed. She was shy about her small breasts and slender thighs, but I would console her by stroking her body and rubbing my face against her magnificent skin. In these dreams my excitement grew and grew, but always before we could embrace, something happened to interrupt. The waiter would arrive with the check, a downpour fell on our picnic, someone would come to the door—her mother or Clarance wanting to apologize. No matter who it was I’d get so angry that I’d wake up with a powerful erection. Awake, I couldn’t recapture the ardor of my dreams. And without passion there was no desire for the consummation of my lust.