The Comedown Read online

“He dealt drugs. Isn’t it obvious from what they said in the papers?”

  She waited, eyebrows raised, for Momma to react. Silence, then the kind of ragged breathing that comes before a faint.

  “I thought it was a gunfight at the massage place and he got caught in it,” Momma said in a small voice.

  “Please, Momma.” Natasha was aware that her voice had a scolding lilt. “You know better than that.”

  The line went dead.

  She’d been without him almost a decade now but still reached across the bed for him. On this birthday, she’d taken her morning shift off from Hero Sandwiches and her afternoon shift at the grocery store. Nowadays she walked to work in a shower cap and housecoat, barely paid her bills on time, let her hands and face get ashy in the winter. She was no different from anyone else, and she’d been wrong to think she ever was.

  * * *

  Thinking about Daddy’s exceptionalism now made her sick with anger. She hated his fake judge’s bench and his stupid patrician face, the gold wire-framed bifocals he’d always cast his eyes over in search of her. Whenever he got bored and needed a devil’s advocate to banter with, an opponent to beat in chess, he’d stare over those bifocals and call out, “Where’s my little matryoshka doll?” Natasha couldn’t keep herself from remembering it. Here I am, Daddy, unwashed and dysfunctional. Happy now? Where had he come off thinking either of them were special? He could have spent a lifetime acting white and white people would still call him boy and give him their dinner order or suitcases to carry—she’d seen it happen too many times, seen him grit his teeth and correct them with politeness she knew even then they didn’t deserve.

  She’d awakened that morning with a Tabasco-furry, unclean taste in her mouth. Dust motes hovered around and above her, eddying in the warm current of her breath. In the room down the hall, one of her boys was spinning one of her records. It was faint-sounding because he was trying to sing over it without knowing the words. It had to be Aaron, because Caleb would never sing loud enough for anyone to hear. Her blood ran cold for a second: was it a school day? She sat up, turned to the wall calendar behind her bed (a gift apropos of nothing from Deborah, March’s picture a green-and-blue hummingbird dipping its needlelike beak in a giant, vulvic petunia). It was a Saturday. She collapsed in relief. Now that her body was awake, it was beginning to hurt again. The muscles in her lower back were constricted and tender to the touch, the ones on the left side so knotted that the pain shot all the way down her leg. She turned on her side, but it was no better there. She listened to Aaron singing. It was the Gap Band, “You Dropped a Bomb on Me.” He was trying to sing the background vocals, too—she could detect a little falsetto. If he sang like that in public, people would start saying the things about him they always said about boys who’d grown up without fathers. She kneaded the back of her thigh with her fist. At least it wasn’t Rick James.

  She stood and went to her dresser, found the pair of gold conical earrings Reggie had given her as a second anniversary present. Both her feet were prickling with nerve pain. If she could’ve afforded a visit to the doctor, she would’ve had him run every diagnostic test in the lab—she needed a full-body tune-up, an oil change. She stood for most of the day every day, and when she finally sat her back seized and spasmed, insufferably tight whether she was hunched or arched or somewhere in between. There were sores under her toes that wouldn’t heal, a hardness at the bottom of her stomach that kept her from fully digesting anything but greens cooked to a grayish paste. She was surprised whenever she confronted the mirror to see a young-looking face staring back. If she stood far enough away, she looked twenty-six still, or twenty-four. But a few steps closer and there were her weathered cheeks with their dilated pores, her glassy eyes, the tiny hairs at the base of her chin.

  She’d always known the outlines of her husband’s work, but for legal reasons had kept her distance from the specifics. She held nothing he’d done against him. She’d watched him get fired from the postal service way back when they’d first started seeing each other, had sat around with him for the year he couldn’t get a job. Not even Mr. Hafez at the corner store would hire him—not even the Chinese couple who ran the gas station in Glenville. Sunny was the first person who didn’t hate him, who paid him regularly and in full, who respected his talent and intelligence. Another thing Daddy would never understand was that it took talent to do what Reggie did. Talent and athleticism and some of the quickest thinking she’d ever seen. He was always one split decision away from a bullet to the chest. He kept his guns in a safe box under some loose tiles in the bathroom floor. She hated it at first, and she told him as much. They fought about it. He told her he’d been locked up three times as a teenager: possession with intent to distribute, stealing something he hadn’t stolen, and loitering. He’d tried following the law but the law just followed him until he felt like he was being hunted. There was no legal good life, so why not live an illegal good life now that they’d been given the chance? Natasha countered that maybe it was a good life, but the cost was too high. Better to live humbly and stay alive than live well and die. But she couldn’t change his mind, and nothing bad ever happened to them. There was a chance he’d been right. She loved him too much to leave him anyway.

  When the boys were a year old, she had heard him coming up the stairs to their University Circle apartment as she was putting them to bed. And before he saw her coming from their bedroom to greet him in the hallway, she saw the blood on his shoes, saw his coat flap open to reveal the butt of a pistol. He had walked carefully into the kitchen, expecting her to be asleep. She went back to their bedroom without saying anything. She never saw those shoes again.

  He was a good father. He was better than any of the fathers she’d known, her own included. He had cried for nights after the boys were born, guilty that he hadn’t been the one kneeling over her as she strained in the bathtub during their delivery. He’d slept on his side facing her, the boys in between them screaming instead of sleeping—whenever he could, he’d carry one of them in each arm to the living room and sit on the couch with them so she could sleep. For months, she’d shuffle into the kitchen around dawn and see his snoring profile, the cradle-soft heads of Caleb and Aaron pressed against either armpit. He noticed their personalities before she did: the way Caleb would laugh and point his fat index finger at birds and trees and houses, giggly and inquisitive; how Aaron observed the world from his stroller with his little arms folded over his stomach like a stoic Mafia don. He’d take them to the park on Mayfield where all the Italian kids played, and not even some craggy nonna with her yellow-white hair and golden rosary could help commenting that Caleb and Aaron should be in commercials on TV. It was something about Reggie’s smile, his confidence. Tasha knew he had enemies in Little Italy, but he played civilian so well nobody ever bothered him. She felt safe walking with him anywhere, even after Cookie had drunkenly told her one New Year’s that Reggie was Cleveland’s Most Wanted Man. She figured that was some kind of macho contest stuff—who can anger the most people and still manage to stay alive?—but it turned out Cookie was right.

  * * *

  I can’t go on. I must go on. She was at least smart enough not to be hypnotized by Beckett’s literary nonsense. She stood up and was confronted with a wave of exhaustion so strong she considered staying in bed for the day. She shook off the doubt and began dressing herself. Now her thoughts were proceeding in an awful circle—her mind was eating itself like an ouroboros, likely because she had nothing better to do. She thought that her brain in most any other body would surely be zippering an expensive skirt in a big house in the World of Consequence. Who, when being tailed by a security guard in a department store, thought of the space both she and the guard occupied as Cartesian, her place a coordinate on a graph and his a separate, encroaching coordinate? Who gulped down the poison in the water more enthusiastically than Tasha, named for a crazy white person in a novel?

  If she kept thinking and thinking and thinking like
that, she wouldn’t make it through the day. And she had plans that day, embarrassing plans with Leland that the boys couldn’t find out about. Year five of these plans (on and off, to be fair to herself), and she’d managed to do a decent job of keeping it from them both. She’d wait until they were older and just come forward with it, tell them bitterness can rot a person inside out, ask them to imagine her viscera turning blue-black and her tongue drying up inside her head. She’d say, “Sometimes seeking revenge against the world by whatever small means available is the only cure for the inner rot.” Leland was her revenge against the world, the last person over whom she held power, who could be made to feel a fraction of her own pain.

  The Gap Band LP was done and still spinning, making the dense, fuzzy noise of empty wax. She went into the living room and turned it off: Aaron was nowhere to be seen. She went to her desk, where two different Melville companions lay open on either side of her typewriter. The second companion was opened to an earmarked, scribbled-over essay by Ellyn Marmeloy, a professor of American literature at Dover College in Ontario. Ms. Marmeloy had made the definitive argument for “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” as the Freudian counterwish of the Rather Elderly Man who narrates it. Secundum Marmeloy, the Rather Elderly Man isn’t recounting the story of the eccentric scrivener formerly in his employ—he’s remembering a dream he himself once had, one in which his ego is divided between Bartleby and Bartleby’s worried third-person observer. Since he has always been of the mind that “the easiest way of life is the best,” the Rather Elderly Man is supremely (arguably even sexually) satisfied by Bartleby’s failure to function—his real desire isn’t for Wall Street success but for grand and transparent failure.

  It was an excellent essay, at least in Tasha’s opinion. The essay in the second companion was a rebuttal to “I’d Prefer (Not) To: An Ego-Splice in ‘Bartleby’” by an obscure scholar named James Hefnow, a man who’d made a career of arguing unsuccessfully against Marmeloy. Tasha hadn’t read his essay closely—he’d asserted something along the lines of “Marmeloy lacks a nuanced understanding of the concept of the counterwish”—but she had read Marmeloy’s ad hominem rebuttal, “A Very Modest Proposal,” in the Journal of Melville Studies. “Hefnow is an intelligent and accomplished man who nevertheless cannot recognize an error in his own logic,” she’d written. “He requires the victim of his attempted reductio to explain its absurdity to him.” Tasha had written her own rebuttal, one about how Bartleby was the Rather Elderly Man’s spiritual guide (Philemon to the boss’s Carl Jung) instead of some defective aspect of his ego. The essay also fleshed out what she recognized as Melville’s distaste for capitalism—in such a system everyone eventually loses sight of their humanity, becomes their work, etc.—and invoked Dickens’s Scrooge and his three cautionary spirits. It’d taken four months to write and she had felt something stir in her as she worked that she had thought was long since dead. She’d sent it to Marmeloy. No response, which of course she’d expected; probably better that way.

  The real question was whether Marmeloy had even read it. Or whether she’d given it to some student worker or department secretary to read. Daddy had always had all his mail forwarded to the history department secretary at Axel Renfroe, an acrylic-nailed woman named June who read and summarized for him the angsty queries of future students, the threats from irate parents, the tedious requests from far-flung colleagues. Was June still at Axel Renfroe, or would she have retired by now? And if she was still there, had Daddy told her to throw out all mail from someone named Natasha Marshall? June might have remembered the name—Daddy spoke rarely enough of his personal life that June probably thought Tasha was named Teesha or Tiana or something—and asked him if he was really serious. She could see him nodding solemnly: “Yes. A grave trespass has occurred against my family’s honor.”

  * * *

  “A!” she called. There was a noise like a shoe kicking the wall at the end of the hallway, then silence. “Aaron!” she called, not liking the reedy way her voice sounded. She lit a cigarette from the pack on the dinner tray in front of the TV. There were two fewer than had been in there yesterday, which she knew was probably Aaron’s fault, but for which she could hardly blame him. There emerged from the room at the end of the hall not Aaron but Caleb in his usual oversized shirt, smiling, his hands behind his back.

  “Momma,” he said.

  She arranged her face to look happy. “Hi, baby,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said, and sputtered out a little laugh.

  “What’re you laughing about?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s your birthday, so I got you this.” He produced from behind his back a long-legged frog body and she jumped away. He followed, wagging it in front of her until she realized it was a rubber toy. Then she remembered how small he was in comparison to his brother (they were both thirteen but Aaron seemed seventeen and Caleb eleven), how strangely he dressed, how often he came home from school bloodied by kids stronger than he was. The shameful facts of his situation formed a hot compress around her skull. She wanted to cry for him, for her, for their doomed future.

  “The fuck is that?” she said instead. “Why would I want this? You better grow up, Cee. After all I’ve done for you.”

  He stumbled back, shocked. “Momma, it was a joke.” He pulled something out of his pocket and put it in her hands: a digital watch.

  “It’s the Casio C-80 calculator watch,” he said, his voice buoyant again. “It’s all these articles about it in Popular Science, it’s the watch of the future. I thought you’d like it because it has a calendar in it, so you won’t have to use the paper one Aunt Deborah sent you.”

  She cried then. “Cee,” she tried, then hiccupped.

  He hugged her; he wasn’t yet as tall as she was. “Momma, you thought I’d get you a goddamn frog for your birthday?”

  “Cee, where’d you even get the money?”

  “I saved up some, and A gave me some, and he let me pick it out,” he said. “So it’s from both of us that way.”

  “How long you been saving up?”

  He shrugged.

  “Can you still take it back? Can you still get your money back?”

  He was already buckling the watch around her wrist. “Nah,” he said. “It looks good on you, though.”

  There was no way to express how sorry she was. She kissed his head, held him as though shielding him from shrapnel. He let her do it for a moment, then pushed away. “I gotta breathe, Momma, Jesus,” he said.

  “Where’s your brother?”

  “He went out with some of the guys. He said to tell you happy birthday and he wants to cook dinner.”

  The clock on the wall above his head read one twenty-seven. She didn’t want to say what she said next, but she did anyway: “Can you go out with him? I need to clean around here.”

  “On your birthday?”

  “Look at this place. It’s long overdue.”

  “I can help you clean. I can start on our room.”

  “No, baby. You already did more than enough.”

  Something strange passed between them, a ghost or the shadow of a ghost. The feeling left her cold.

  “All right,” he said. Then he got his coat from their room and left.

  Now she’d actually have to clean before they got home. The living room alone was a mess of yesterday’s dinner hardened on plastic plates, Aaron’s stained white T-shirt and Browns jersey, stabbed-out cigarette butts, a pyramid of Dixie cups Caleb had built for some reason while watching Knight Rider. She pulled the couch from the wall, her back spasming in the process. A single condom still in its wrapper, not the brand she used. A wiry ball of her own hair, crumbs from pizzas the boys had eaten. She picked up the hair ball and threw it out. There was a knock at the door and she opened it.

  He had dressed up: a checkered button-up, slacks, a leather tie, and a belt on its tightest notch. His skin was gray and he was shining with sweat, the hair at his embarrassing side part alre
ady damp. In one hand he held a silver tin, in the other a yellow suitcase. He looked like a villain in the comic books Deborah used to read. He leaned in to kiss her and she leaned away.

  “Did I do something wrong?” he asked, looking genuinely hurt.

  She pulled him in and closed the door, pointing to the tin. They sat at the kitchen table and did bumps—it was bad, and she could feel it all accumulating in a brain pocket just above her left ear, but she kept doing more because at least she was feeling better than she’d felt this morning. He explained to her, as he did every time he saw her, that he was more in love with her than he was with his wife and that there was nothing stopping him from leaving Melinda and being with her forever if she’d just admit that she loved him back.

  “The problem is I don’t.” She watched in semidisgust as he snorted up a two-inch line from the table’s surface.

  “But I think you do,” he offered. “The way we fuck, I really think you do.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said.

  They fucked. It was serviceable. It was better than serviceable, if she was being honest: it was redemptive, a convenient place to release her anger. She finished. As always, she looked away from him, closed her eyes tight, and tried her best to conjure Reggie’s face, and if not his face at the very least his eyes and forehead, or his beard and chin, any piece of him that her memory conceded to make available to her on short notice. He materialized briefly and she felt she’d held him—fucking Leland always did this to her—and she sighed with relief. She would take this wherever she could come by it. She knew how Leland felt, desperate for a dose.

  When they were done and sitting naked next to each other, he pulled the goddamn briefcase he’d been carrying onto the bed and told her that it contained almost a quarter of a million dollars, a present for her. She laughed, then felt bad for laughing. This was like the time he loped into her apartment claiming he could hear other people’s thoughts. Or the time he took both her hands in his and told her he was being wiretapped by God.