The Fugitivities Page 10

  He picked up on the “get away,” but it was taking him a moment to place the name. She had come up in their correspondence, but not as a main character; a friend she had gone to a karaoke night with, who was busy and ambitious and funny, spoke with a posh accent, and was involved with the Oxford African and Caribbean Society. And possibly she had said something about a talk they had attended together on gender and queer studies?

  “She sounds great. I hope I’ll get to meet her one of these days.”

  “Me too. Look at these.”

  She showed him a sequence of pictures taken at a house party (lads, glitter, Smirnoff) where Arna and Mariam appeared always together amid others, whom she pointed out and named. Arna appeared happy and flushed. In one picture she was smooshed against her friend’s face, the pair sticking their tongues out for the camera. Mariam was obviously fun and hot; she wore a stud in her nose, defiant punctuation on an almond-toned and -shaped face, South Asian, he guessed; more attractive than he had imagined.

  “She’s the best. I wish she didn’t have to spend so much time at her job. I know she hates it. But we’re both planning on doing these gigs for now to get started, you know, see where it takes us. Oh my god, look, I’m a mess in this one!”

  “You guys look great together—like you’re having so much fun.”

  Was she with Mariam? Arna wasn’t exactly saying one way or the other. Possibly she hadn’t decided, or maybe it wasn’t a thing one did decide, or, at least, broadcast like the result of an election or a soccer match. It wasn’t really any of his business. He wasn’t hurt at all, except insofar as he felt he should have known, and thought she would have been more explicit with him about her feelings. But even as he thought this, he realized how stupid it was, how many good reasons she might have for not wanting to tell him everything about whom she was sleeping with.

  The waiter came by to see about another round, but Arna, with the precise, almost sculptural language of gesture that Parisian women use, expressed her desire to pay for the drinks, explaining that she had to go see her parents while she was in town. Jonah thought about protesting but knew better than to insist. The entrance to the Métro was at the corner and they walked together to the steps. He went to kiss her on the cheek, but she pulled him to her intimately. She made him promise to keep writing to her. He promised he would. She looked at him, considering; she kissed him on the neck, once, just below the ear, then turned away and descended below ground.

  Whatever he had known up until that point now strengthened his new resolve. In a sense, it was simple. He had wasted too much time already.

  Jonah’s mother accompanied him to the airport. On the train they slid past the familiar panorama of the banlieues, the peri-urban sprawl, feeder roads swooping under a Samsung Electronics billboard, container shipping facilities, grim little roundabouts, a dingy café de la gare. A Gypsy player with a young boy came into the car and started playing a ballad. The young boy sang and walked up and down the car with his cap out. No one gave him any coins. A mute woman came by and placed a key chain with a little note on top of one of Jonah’s bags. He didn’t touch it, and eventually she came by and picked it up again. His mother noticed that he was quiet and asked how he was, if he had everything he needed. He said he was fine. She asked if he was still friends with Arna. He said they were still close, that they were staying in touch. She told him a story about when he was a boy, one they both knew and that she always retold whenever they were about to part. Her eyes were very clear and light. There were deep wrinkles between her eyebrows. He could feel the exact length and depth of those ridges because he frowned in exactly the same place. Suddenly she had a coughing fit, and he frantically got a water bottle from his backpack. Her lungs weren’t what they used to be. She’s growing old, he thought. He couldn’t sleep on his flight.

  8

  Laura Petrossian had not ruined Nathaniel Archimbald’s life, but she had come close. She had overthrown his sense of himself, given of herself to him and taken from him in ways he had not recognized, and then vanished, leaving behind a gap like a vacant lot. He never entirely believed that her intentions were bad, though to the end they remained inscrutable. Still, he had to concede that even the pain she had caused had been a kind of good fortune. She had helped him to see what was worth saving in the world and forced him to think seriously about what he could do about it.

  He had started thinking of Laura as Jonah described his relationship with Arna. Of their paradoxical combination of openness and elusiveness. Nathaniel thought of that openness now, of how happy it would have made Laura to know he had gotten this lost young man out of his fix. He thought of the face she would make if he told her the story. And it reminded him of her other face, the one she made when she was sleeping. The unvarying coolness of her voice when they were naked a long time in her bed. Of midafternoons in the little apartment on the rue des Cinq-Diamants.

  Nathaniel leaned back in his chair, stretching out the red and green of his tracksuit with his albatross wingspan. He regarded Jonah intently now, appealing to the grown man in him.

  “And you haven’t spoken to this woman since?”

  “We write to each other. She’s always traveling. I get letters and postcards from the cities she’s visiting on account of her government job, you know, collecting research about economic development, that kind of thing. We try to do mail the old-fashioned way, and it means that we have this slow-motion conversation over time. I think about her a lot, but then I’ll save the thought and write it down, and then when I have some time it turns into something more, it grows into a letter, and then I send it.”

  “Now hold on, that’s the word right there. This sending. Because I got to ask myself who sent you. See, I’ve been sitting here listening to you, and it’s like this weird thing I’ve been running in my mind. The way I make sense of it is, maybe I saved you. Maybe something even worse was about to happen to you last night and we’ll never know it. You don’t realize how lucky you are. Only reason I was even downtown was to support a buddy of mine who is trying to get clean and has this meeting he goes to in Chinatown. I heard some stuff in the meeting that was so hard, I had to walk it off and ended up way over off East Broadway. I come round a corner, find you lying on the ground, down for the count and still acting all belligerent, and I seen the cops rolling up, and well, shit, I just acted on it. And I don’t even know you. So why did I do that? Had to be a reason. And I been sitting here listening to you and I’m thinking I see what it was. I’ll be damned if you aren’t some kind of messenger. Universe trying to tell me something. You just might be a sign I got to revisit some shit I’ve been trying to put behind me for years.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I’ll bet you would never guess I was in a situation just like yours. Long time ago. My Paris days. Damn. You know, I haven’t been back since. Don’t plan to neither, to be honest. Feels like it was another life. It was another life, a whole other world. My first life was hoops. I guess you could say my second life was this love story that didn’t pan out. I figure I’m in my third now. At least I’m happy where I’m at. I thought I put that whole Paris thing behind me; now you show up, and it brings it all back. Man, she had me wide open. Had me learning my words all over again, and in French. What a crazy time that was. Brings back memories, man, even after all these years.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Laura.”

  Saying it aloud was like a conjuring. Nathaniel gave himself a few moments to recollect as he struggled to find the right words to describe her. There was the way she looked at a man. The defiantly brash eyeballing of a woman who had ceased to be a girl early in life. Like so many sisters he had known coming up. She had this toughness; she frowned more than she smiled, but when she did, she lit up the room.

  “Tell me about her,” Jonah said.

  “I will. I’m thinking on it now. I have to get in rhythm when
I’m storying. I’m not usually the talking type like you. But don’t be thinking that means I ain’t got a whole lot on my mind. Because I do,” Nathaniel said.

  * * *

  —

  There was a point in his life, Nathaniel said, when he noticed a shift happening around him. He could feel it happening, not just to him but to everyone. At first, he chalked it up to a frustration that he didn’t have the championship rings he had always dreamed of winning. The hard facts of age and injury had dimmed that prospect, even as he battled the pains that became more frequent and that he refused to acknowledge. But it wasn’t just his body. The game was changing. It was glossier, louder, bigger somehow. The splash of money was in your face, and it changed attitudes. On the court, in the locker room, but most of all in everyday life. Things that weren’t done in his day were becoming common, some of them rumored, but a lot of them showing up in the newspaper and sometimes on the six o’clock news. He felt cut out, as if the segment of history to which he belonged had been dropped from the big board. He spent more and more of their games watching from the bench. He saw a shadow in his future, a time beyond the game that only recently had been unthinkable to him. How would he fill it? He thought about going back to school. He had always felt he had to hide his love of school. He never talked about it. But the truth was that he regretted how little he actually read in college. He had barely gone to class. If he had more time, and eventually he would, he could read whatever he wanted. He always had so many questions that lurked in the back of his mind. But the game was everything, his career, his future, how he put food on the table. He had pushed those questions out of bounds.

  But he had always felt a deep desire to learn more about history. He knew his people were from the Carolinas. His grandfather had moved the family to New York in the migration. And he knew that his mother’s side had roots in Haiti. At least that was what they always said. In fact, his mother had even sung some Creole lullabies to him as a child. The little bird, ti zwazo, going where he’s not supposed to. When his mother sang it fired his imagination like the sun. It was all that kept him and his sister alive in those early years, the worst years, after his father left with no news until they learned he had been charged and locked up in another state.

  Nathaniel had been hotheaded from the beginning. What his father called “a knucklehead.” The Bronx streets never gave an inch. In the static there was no other way to be. He’d seen his first body when he was eleven. A Puerto Rican boy only a few years older than himself in Echo Park with a hole in him and no one coming to help. He had seen the pimps handling the streetwalkers, and the women lined up and fondled by the cops on Southern Boulevard. By the time he was fifteen he had scrambled in and out of hot rides, seen a kid lose one of his eyes to a brass knuckle, had a knife pulled on him by a man twice his age who pulled him into an alley and told him he was going to die that day. If it wasn’t for his sister, Naia, who knew how to talk sense into him, he almost certainly would have ended up dead or behind the wall like his old man. It was really only by chance—and the fact that his high school coach took a liking to him—that he started playing ball. Discovered that he was unguardable off the dribble; could shoot the lights out when he wanted to. They let him know if he wanted to keep playing, he had to get his grades right. He was never happy with schoolwork, though. The desk chairs gave him cramps. In class, the way people snickered and put eyes on him when he spoke made him feel stupid. But he loved to read the paper, something he could remember seeing his father doing when he was a little boy. Especially the sports section, where alongside the gray columns and score boxes were pictures of the greats immortalized in their action. The Big Dipper rising for a layup, skywalking like a graceful astronaut.

  He never had too many illusions about the business side of basketball. The trades, the scouts, the college reps, the coaches. He knew it all came down to the numbers: his stats, their cash flow, being docile, telling them what they wanted to hear, getting minutes. The only thing he cared about was getting a chance. He was good and he knew it. If he got the right opportunity, he could take over a game. They would see what he could really do and then it would be set. He would be able to provide for his mother. With his success he could give her the protection he had always dreamed of as a boy. He could move his mother out to Jersey. And not a day too soon. The block wasn’t just bad. By then, it had become apocalyptic.

  He got his break and pressed his advantage as best he could. The years in the league flew by in a blur of sweat, bright lights, adrenaline highs, and crushing blows. He would never have believed the rise and fall through the seasons could happen so fast. He could replay entire games, or parts of them, in his head. Feel the gruel of a walk to the locker room. Hear the ecstatic roar of big wins. He had played alongside and against heroes and legends, guys who had changed what the game could be. Dr. J in Philly, Magic on the Lakers, Earl the Pearl with the Knicks. He was proud just to have been there, to have been part of the generation that brought swagger and soul to the game. He had walked with giants. Fourteen seasons. All, in one way or another, good. Except the last one.

  The last year, his mother’s sickness meant, for the first time, she couldn’t come to his games. Then, shortly after an away game in LA, she died of heart failure. She was sixty-three. He was devastated. For all that Nathaniel had accomplished, he felt he hadn’t done enough to do right by her. To make good on the hardships of her life. Women never get the credit that’s due them, Nathaniel said. How little they get recognized. And by folks that’s closest to them, who really, truly know what it took to bring another generation through. The world is what it is. Women who make everything, who allow themselves to become life itself as it passes through to the future, have the harder road. And who could deny that more often than not, it’s a road paved by a man without the slightest notion of where he is trying to go. Losing his mother was a nightmare, Nathaniel said. The dreams of basketball, even if he had won a championship, could not compensate, not even come close. Nothing else had ever anchored his life. She had held his hand for days, refused to leave his bedside when he had to have knee surgery. Now he would have to continue alone.

  Staring into the future was like staring at a wall. He had made and saved enough money to not worry about bills. He could pay for the hospital, for the funeral. If need be, he could support Naia; she didn’t need him, though—she had graduated from nursing school and was living with a court translator in Montclair.

  He was thirty-six years old and in reasonable shape. Yes, he had started to feel his age when he played, but in his mind, in some ways he’d never felt younger. The passion for learning that he had buried for years returning like a tide, rising up to roll back feelings he had locked up in a single word: ignorant. Even the sound, the way some folk said it, made it seem like just a different word for that other one.

  His mother would have wanted him to go back to school. Basketball had been his world; looked at one way, that might seem like a good deal, and it was, especially for a black boy from the Bronx. But basketball was also a self-enclosed sphere of existence that could be suffocating. Besides, he could see that the sport was beginning a new chapter, one that Michael Jordan was going to make his own. The pages had already turned. He was a figure from the past, he never had a sneaker deal, didn’t know you could have one. Give it a few seasons and the kids would barely recognize him or his name. The machine was moving on, into an Olympic stratosphere of international celebrity and wealth he had never conceived. He still felt lucky. He’d had a good run. He had made the best of the gifts of his body. The question was: What could he do with the other thing? What about the mind?

  When he and Naia had gone through their mother’s things, they had found, besides a study Bible, only two books. One was The Bluest Eye. Naia wanted that one, and it seemed natural he should take the other. It was an anthology with a strange title that appealed to him. The Negro Caravan. Flipping through it he found only one marking,
beside a poem by Langston Hughes, where his mother had penciled in the words what I want to know next to the lines

  When love is gone, O,

  What can a young gal do?

  He had never thought of reading poetry, and he felt a flush of shame that he didn’t know it was important to his mother. Shame that he had never heard of most of the names in the Caravan, who had written all kinds of books, not just poetry, but stories, essays, theater, history. He resolved to get his learning, if he could.

  He found a night-school program at City College. At first, it was very hard. He hadn’t been in a classroom in so long and hadn’t liked it the first time around. He worried that he would stick out, possibly even be recognized and embarrassed by professors or the other students. But the students in the class and the professors at the chalkboard didn’t know who he was. They all knew he hooped. But that was on account of his height, not from having watched his games.

  History was captivating. Nathaniel learned in detail about slavery and the Civil War, events and epochs he’d only ever had the vaguest notions about. He discovered that there were black writers and thinkers who had studied these things. He was genuinely astonished, and angered, that he had never heard of them before. While he was preparing his final paper, he discovered a history book in the library called The Black Jacobins. Something about the image of the black general on the cover intrigued him. He quickly realized from the first few pages that there was too much he didn’t know for him to properly understand this Haitian hero, this clue, he thought, to his mother’s heritage. The void created by her passing still lived within him. He found himself up late at night, pacing his room. He would stop and stare at the color photograph of himself that he kept on the wall over the TV. In the image he was suspended in air, driving to the hoop, his clover-green jersey rippling, his knees and arms held almost as if in a flying prayer, small beads of sweat on his forehead, his face locked in an expectant grimace. He couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. He wanted to change everything, to be someone new. The Haitians had taken the French ideas and the French language and set themselves free. They had thrown the slave masters out and set about making a new world. He wanted to understand that, he wanted to get to the source of things. His stack of books grew, and his learning deepened. He enrolled in an intensive French language course at NYU and read history books as he rode the express trains up and down the length of Manhattan.