The Comedown Read online

  Remembering that Easter was a mistake: now he couldn’t stop thinking about it. He tried the doorknob again, harder than he had the first time. It was times like these that made him miss Judaism, the faith of his childhood. A religious man would be able to cross his arms over his chest and say, “The door will open for me when the time is right.” They actually believed shit like that, and it usually worked for them. Maybe the deal was God was only real if you believed in God, so you made Him and all the benefits of covenant-ing with Him real just by opting in. It was like a pyramid scheme if pyramid schemes worked: Leland would tell two friends about how great God was and they’d tell two friends and all of them would reap the many and various benefits of being religious Jews. That was more how Christians worked, though. Jews didn’t want you telling two friends, because those two friends may not be special enough to be Jews. Meanwhile some of the most heinous, snot-filled, vengeful motherfuckers he’d ever met were somehow special enough by birth. Amos Brecht, the Hebrew school teacher Mr. Chertoff who’d slapped him in the mouth, those stipple-skinned gangsters who blew people up with car bombs. Unnecessary violence would not be part of a world where everyone took their medicine, that was something Leland Sr. knew absolutely 100 percent to be true. It was both exhausting and infuriating how far ahead in time he could see and how incredibly slow people would always be in catching up. In his more generous moments, he could tell that the problem wasn’t even a lack of love or respect—Melinda, the boy, Mickey all listened to and cared about him, all would probably be torn apart if he turned up dead—it was a lack of understanding, a smallness of mind. Everyone he knew (except for maybe Reggie and a few other guys who hung out at the massage place) was living in a tiny, concrete-lined world of pleases and thank-yous, where sidewalks were for walking on and streets for driving on, where the most electrifying thing in their lives was TV. How could they be expected to listen to him, to treat him with the same patience and compassion with which he’d treated them? How many times had he sat awake listening to another one of Melinda’s nightmares about the girl who got shot at Kent State? How many times had he risen from bed to coddle the boy while he screamed his skull-rattling screams at three in the morning? How many times had he gone to the Ford plant to cut deals that edged out Mickey’s competitors? And how did they repay him? With niceties, with their pleases and thank-yous. Never by just listening to him.

  Desperate times, desperate measures. He dug in his pocket for his penknife, which had been a gift from his father on the night of his bar mitzvah. He couldn’t even remember the name of his Torah portion anymore. It’d had something to do with building an altar or binding a book. Probably Deuteronomy. His mother had cried the entire time. His father’s face had been hidden in a cloud of cigar smoke. The rabbi said something like “Young Leland surprised us all with his studiousness at the very last minute.” Mr. Chertoff was sitting in the second row, arms crossed, the wrinkle between his eyebrows forming the trunk of the tree and his forehead wrinkles its branches. He was daring Leland Sr. to fuck up, which Leland Sr. didn’t. Sometime after the service and before his party, his father took him aside and gave him the penknife. “Don’t let your mother see this,” he said. “She’ll sweat right through her blouse.” At that point Leland Sr. Sr. looked the way he’d look until Leland Sr. left the house for college: his leonine face jowly and fat, his nose infected with blackheads, his lips constantly cracked. Leland Sr. remembered looking into that face and finding it hard to believe he’d ever been frightened of it.

  He stuck the blade in the keyhole and torqued the lock (pin tumbler, typical) until he heard a click. Then he wedged the knife between the door and its frame and the front room was his. He turned on the Christmas lights and looked around the place. It was depressing without the girls. Why did they let places like this get so dirty? He thought he could hear bugs scratching across the linoleum behind the desk where the johns got their room tokens. But maybe that was just the sound of his ears trying to work: they were dry, as was his nose, as were his eyes. Your average person couldn’t hear bugs’ feet unless they were basically straw-sized. Leland Sr. could, though. But maybe not for much longer if his brain stayed dry. He looked in the boxes on the shelves: condoms, underwear, condoms. Some newspapers and magazines. On the floor: thong sandals. Under the massive leather-top table in front of the window: garbage bags, empty beer bottles, a belt with an extra notch close to the tip. Leland Sr. had been renotching his belts, but in the opposite direction. In the past two years he’d lost thirty pounds he couldn’t regain even if he’d wanted to. Next to Melinda in bed he found himself in a Jack Sprat–type situation, which he resented. He tried the door to the back room: locked. He was fishing for the penknife again when there was an urgent jamming of keys in the front door. He flipped the back wall switch and the room went dark again; he shrank until he was on the ground with his knees to his chest. In stumbled a silhouette who looked nearly bald against the orange light shining in through the curtains. A familiar-looking silhouette. Leland Sr. stood up, about to speak. Then the lights came on again.

  “Fucking Christ,” he heard Reggie say. He could only see the top of Reggie’s head because he was blocking Reggie’s face just then with his hands, suddenly ashamed that this was how they were seeing each other after three weeks. “How did you get in here?”

  But Leland Sr. didn’t need to explain, at least he didn’t remember needing to. He and Reggie had a cosmic understanding.

  “I thought you were dead! I haven’t seen you in a month.”

  Leland Sr. lowered his hands and saw Reggie was already busy looking through boxes. “Not dead, just working,” he said. He turned around and the lower half of his face was covered in dried blood, his bottom lip and nose busted. He had the post-fight glassy eyes, the ones Leland Sr. always used to get when he was trying hard to deny the amount of pain he was in. Insult to injury. Leland Sr. could feel his heart rate accelerating. He wanted to do for Reggie what Melinda did for the boy: clean his wounds and kiss him on the forehead.

  “Who did that to you?”

  Reggie looked at him like he was an alien and then kept on digging in the boxes. “It’s better if you don’t know,” he said.

  This was very wrong. This whole situation was very fucked up and wrong. “No, it’s better if I do.” Leland Sr. stood and went to Reggie’s side of the room. “Seriously, I’ll fuck that guy up for you.”

  He saw the muscles in Reggie’s shoulders relax. “You’ll fuck him up for me?”

  “Yeah, of course.” The pebbles under his skin were growing into stones.

  Reggie snorted. “You’re acting like a faggot,” he said softly, not without compassion. He turned around to face Leland Sr., who didn’t flinch. Insults weren’t a problem for him because they were typically made out of fear. Reggie’s face was in bad enough shape that being scared would make sense. He looked at Leland Sr. looking at him, then wiped his mouth off with the bottom of his shirt and said, “Just wait here, all right?”

  Time should’ve passed slowly then, but it whipped by. Reggie returned with much less than an eighth of medicine. Leland Sr. gave him a hundred dollars and told him to keep the change.

  “Are you sure?” Reggie asked.

  Leland Sr. nodded. “Happy birthday. You look like you need a little good luck.”

  Reggie pocketed the bill and tossed him the half eightball and told him to wait in the front room. He limped into the back room, switched the light on, and locked the door behind him.

  Leland Sr. had a snowcapped pinkie in his nose by the time the door clicked shut. He was thinking both that his brain’s wheels were greased and how unfair it was that guys like Reggie who were fundamentally good and caring got beaten up. That was another thing that would be different in a world where everyone took their medicine: the goodness of people wouldn’t be overlooked. Yes—he did another bump—yes, he’d thrown a plate in frustration when Melinda first proposed he go to the shrink. If pressed, he’d admit that it was wron
g of him, but then he’d been angry that she wanted him to spend money on a shrink, and even angrier that she’d accused him of having “delusions.” Ignoring the fact that he wasn’t delusional—that he was probably the least delusional person now walking the planet—how delusional did she have to be not to see his goodness? He saw hers! Through her tears, her nastiness, the mornings she stumbled back into bed covered in the boy’s puke and shit, he still saw the same ruddy-cheeked woman whose big heart busted open when she turned on, who could describe better than he could the hills and vistas of the human subconscious, and who could return from the mind’s farthest reaches refreshed instead of exhausted. If people took their medicine, they’d instantly see all the motivations for other people’s actions. There’d be no more misunderstandings, no more beatings, no more death.

  It was funny to him that maybe he’d come up with the idea for world peace sitting under a table in a whorehouse. Great minds don’t necessarily do their thinking in great places. Although—he was laughing hard now, squeaking in between gasps—this was a pretty damn great place. The less-than-an-eighth was vanishing in his hands. He could hear Reggie talking to someone in the back room. When had someone else come in? What was Melinda doing with the boy right now? Probably putting him to sleep.

  Leland Sr. stood to kill the lights and he heard something smack. He was still and tried to turn off his thoughts so he could hear the smack again. Nothing. He waited a long time and nothing. He got a little more medicine in his longest nail and held it to his nose. Then a gunshot and a second one right after.

  Ears buzzing, Leland Sr. dropped the non-eightball. Reggie was in that room. The door was locked. He threw his body against it, kicked it. His brain felt hot enough to turn water to instant steam. No talking coming from behind the door. He remembered the penknife: he took it out of his pocket. He opened the door: Reggie was on the floor, eyes closed, bleeding from the side of his head. Another guy was on the floor next to him, a little Peter Lorre–looking guy Leland Sr. had never seen before. The right side of Peter Lorre’s head was gory, bloody, open. He was holding a gun in his right hand, another in his left. Leland Sr. kicked the gun from his right hand. He started crying. He should’ve seen this coming. Then he glanced across the room and saw on the table ahead of him an open briefcase, and in that briefcase rows and rows of bills.

  NATASHA MARSHALL, NÉE HARRISON

  (1948–)

  1954–1965

  Cleveland

  She felt—perhaps wrongly, but then Daddy had inculcated in her a nasty rhetorical habit of hypothesis-testing and second-guessing—that she’d been marked from birth for something magnificent. Her earliest memory was of lying on her stomach, her legs in the air behind her, smelling of the dime-store baby powder Momma always seasoned her with, reading a Plain Dealer headline aloud: ALL FORCES TOIL TO CLEAR CITY; SOLDIERS CALLED IN. It was Thanksgiving and blizzarding and she’d been alive for what amounted to a fraction of a second in history’s grand scheme, she herself already a grand schemer as she sounded out the headline again and looked up at her awestruck momma, who rewarded her with a little knot of cookie dough and then asked Daddy if he knew Natasha could read. “She was born reading,” he said, and that became the truth.

  Natasha had an older sister, Deborah, who had a lanky body and a thick halo of hair that would, over the years, break two of her momma’s best combs. Natasha understood early on that she and Deborah were not meant to be friends. Deborah enjoyed television, roller-skating, and magazines, the sorts of things Natasha’s mind ran too fast to appreciate. A little sister usually sat on her big sister’s bed and looked on in wonder as the big sister applied makeup or filed her fingernails or danced to an LP, but Natasha was no such little sister. She stood skeptically in Deborah’s doorway and grilled her with questions about fractions, parts of speech, the presidents. She recorded Deborah’s insults and demurrals in an empty notebook to show Daddy, who encouraged her to persist no matter what kind of names her sister thought up to call her. “Get a good answer out of her, Tasha. Make sure she’s paying attention to that free education she’s getting.” Natasha mostly ignored her momma’s suggestions that she give her poor sister a rest.

  She woke up before sunrise every day and felt the great thing coming closer. She read about the girl who’d traveled to Russia to hike the Ural Mountains alone, the teenage millionaire with twenty patents, the sixteen-year-old concert pianist who’d played Carnegie Hall and published bestselling books of poetry. She read about the movie star who’d gotten her big break as the Farm Hills Girl in an oatmeal commercial. She listened to Quiz Kids whenever it came on the radio, acing the English, history, and mythology sections and embarrassing herself with her performance on the math section. She studied the lives of great men and noted their earliest achievements: Dr. King got his doctorate at age twenty-six (she teased Daddy about this because he’d gotten his at thirty-two), John F. Kennedy was twenty-seven when he got the Purple Heart, Chuck Berry was twenty-nine when “Maybellene” came out. In order to be great, she’d have to make her contribution before the age of thirty. Easily done. She sometimes wished the bar was set a little higher, just so she could justify the time she spent planning it all out.

  Every morning Daddy drove Natasha and Deborah to school and then proceeded to Axel Renfroe College, where he taught history and where Natasha planned to study after she graduated high school. While Deborah steamed up the window with her halitosis and then drew pictures in it, Natasha slyly tried to decipher from Daddy what he thought her contribution to the world would be. She did this by starting up a conversation about homework or current events. Once Natasha and Daddy fell into a rhythm private enough that Deborah resigned herself to silence, Natasha would start monitoring Daddy’s responses for clues:

  “Do you think it’s true what you read about the Alamo?”

  “Think carefully. You reach a conclusion almost as fast as you can read a page, Tasha.”

  “Answer’s in one of the books in your room.”

  “Not enough published on the topic, I’m afraid.”

  There was the chance, she acknowledged, that she was just hearing what she wanted to hear. But she liked to think that Daddy was dropping these hints intentionally, two steps ahead of her as always. She’d been born reading, so her contribution would have something to do with books.

  Their house was full of books, all Daddy’s. His study boasted the most in one place. His chair stood on four cinder blocks and so did his desk—he claimed the height helped his mind work. When he sat at the desk he looked like a judge presiding over his bench, the two cedar bookcases behind him forming a grim tribunal. The one on his left contained his history books on the topics of his interest: the Mexican-American and Civil Wars, the Adams presidencies, the evils of Manifest Destiny. The one to his right contained his literature collection: bound volumes of the transcendental poets, the thick tomes of the industrial-era realists, the heavy and slight experimentations of the high modernists. A quarter of one shelf was reserved for a collection of prose and poetry in Russian, which Daddy had learned to read in graduate school, and which included Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Humiliated, from which Daddy had gotten Natasha’s name. The rest was written in English, and the subject was America’s violent past.

  Natasha made no secret of her preference for Daddy’s right bookshelf. By the time she was a sophomore in high school, she’d torn through it. In the dustier volumes she wrote margin notes with a red pen, responses to Daddy’s undergraduate scribbles: Yes, but did you consider that she’d just had an abortion? and The meter is evidently not trochaic and Who died and made you king of the meatpacking industry? She knew he’d probably never see them. She didn’t know if she wanted him to. She had a favorite, Herman Melville, and she debated everything about him with Daddy at the dinner table. Deborah and Momma either picked at their plates in silence or had conversations of their own. The few times Deborah tried to interrupt them, Daddy told her to please wait until he was finish
ed. By the time he was, the dinner plates had typically been cleared and everyone was staring into their emptied pudding cups, thinking of all the things they still had to accomplish between dinner and bedtime. Finally, Daddy would turn to Deborah: “What was your question, Deb?”

  The time Natasha spent with Momma went slower than normal time. One afternoon could have diffused into several, the hours luxurious. Momma let Natasha and Deborah lick cookie batter from spoons while she wandered from one end of the kitchen to the other, checking on the chicken in the oven and the collard greens on the stove, describing to them her plan for a meal that wouldn’t materialize until hours or possibly days later. Her gentleness was at odds with the way the house usually worked. Deborah and Natasha stopped arguing and sat in reverent silence as Momma paced the kitchen preparing dinner; when they were very little, they’d waited patiently as she massaged extra-virgin olive oil into their scalps before bath time. Daddy gratefully scarfed down everything she cooked, praised her to everyone he knew, wondered aloud how the family would have gotten by without her. She was the daughter of Arkansas sharecroppers, late to reading and writing, practical minded. At nineteen she followed family friends to Cleveland, where she was hired to clean tables in the Axel Renfroe cafeteria. On the first day, a twenty-two-year-old Daddy looked up from the corned beef and hash sandwich he was eating and through the little window where the dirty trays were deposited for cleaning made brief eye contact with the pretty young cafeteria worker. He tried to make a habit of not prolonging his meals, finding eating to be a tedious distraction from worthier projects of the mind. But meeting Momma’s eyes made him feel a way he’d never felt before in his life, so he lingered over that lunch for her entire afternoon shift. Her version went like this: “I was washing dishes and I looked up and saw this boy in glasses looking at me, and I didn’t want to be rude, so I smiled at him.”