In my last post, I wrote about where I’ve written my stories, but I forgot one important place—the cellar in my house in Ouray. One January, I was running out of firewood, and I was about to write new stories. I didn’t want to carry my heavy Selectric II out and back from the shed every day, so I decided I’d work in the basement. Access to this cobwebbed space was through a trap door. I maneuvered a card table and chair down there. It was underground, but when it got to zero, it was cold, so I turned on the dryer above, which vented to the cellar. I spent two months down there—my phase of self-a-basement, and I wrote nine consecutive stories. I usually do a series of three and, with a little objectivity, go back an edit the first, but I’d done nine. Anyway, “Longing,” posted here, was the first of the nine. All of them were published.
A reminder: three new eBooks are available on Kindle, Nook, and BookBaby
LONGING
It was six-forty MDT in Denver, September thirtieth, not long before daylight savings ended. Tim Jackson was sitting on his girlfriend’s porch swing with a glass of Cabernet—half-full, half-empty, his second glass—and a novel half-read. Gwen wasn’t back yet from work. The corporate fraud case she’d been assigned had been scheduled for trial, finally, after four years, and her work load had been ramped up. Tim had known this two weeks before coming in from Wisconsin, but his vacation days had already been set aside. He was a water- systems manager in Madison. Because he’d let his employees have the summer days they wanted, he was left with now. It was still warm in Denver, though, even in the evenings—seventy, maybe. This was his fourth day.
He was comfortable with the ordinary meanderings on Cook Street—the neighborhood kids playing two houses down to the right, the couples who walked their dogs, the White woman, who, with her Siamese cat on a leash, sauntered past. He’d met the gay guys next door, north, who had matching Priuses, the woman one house over from Gwen’s, who drove a Dodge Ram diesel, and the Lithuanian couple on the other side, south, with two-year-old fraternal twins. By now, he knew the way the late sun pierced the high maple behind the house directly across, the flocks of pigeons and starlings that cruised the neighborhood, the way the gay guys’ Russian olive scratched on Gwen’s roof. He knew which people—not by name—grew what flowers. Flowers were big in Denver, and in Madison, too. People felt empowered growing something pretty—roses, hydrangeas, sunflowers, geraniums in window boxes, peonies, dusty miller and lobelia in hanging baskets lined with sphagnum moss.
Tim sipped his wine and opened his novel, The Street Without Numbers by Tara Jibouti, about Desai, a street thief in Khartoum, Sudan, who insinuated herself into crowds of locals and tourists in order to calculate the perfect moment when she might, by stealth and charm, make someone a victim. Gwen had recommended the book, and the story was good, but Tim objected to the author’s use of “would” to characterize actions in the past, and whoever Tara Jibouti was, she had no idea how irritating it was for a serious reader to encounter “just” and “that” when they weren’t needed. “When harried, Desai would go to the market and just lose herself...” Or, “If she saw that the stalls were closed, she would just search out Rajib. . . .” Tim closed the book, pushed the swing back and forth with his foot, and picked up his wine glass.
Some people attributed his criticism to being Black, but what did that have to do with anything? In his view, criticism was the highest form of caring. Others, though, like his ex-wife, saw it as evidence of trying to make up for his own deficiencies. But why shouldn’t he want people to improve themselves, to be better water engineers, writers, or lawyers?
Being Black in America wasn’t easy no matter how you looked at it. In every store, on every sidewalk, at every meeting, he was on trial, almost like a criminal. He had to deal with or ameliorate other people’s prejudices and fears, and, in so doing, lost something of himself—his spontaneity, maybe, or the vulnerability he felt but could not allow himself to show.
Gwen had been a dabbler on eHarmony, and he was separated from his wife but not ready to go public in Madison with the news. He’d responded to her profile because he liked her looks and her bio—dark hair, average body, good teeth, a lawyer. As a preference for race, she’d put down “any,” by which he understood to mean she was curious about how she’d react to anyone not White.
For a couple of months, they chatted back and forth—he explained about his impending divorce, his work, his paddling trips to the Boundary Waters. She hadn’t wanted to see a photograph, because, she said, she preferred to learn about a person’s style of expression, the things he liked and didn’t, and his vocabulary. When she’d determined a man was honest and his values were similar to hers, she might consider a meeting.
Finally, she’d asked him for a picture. He sent one taken by a paddling friend on Lac de Flambeau and another during an ascent of the Matterhorn. He awaited Gwen’s reply, which hadn’t come until three days later. “I’ve been swamped at work,” she emailed at last. “I’m intrigued. Let’s arrange something.”
Tim thought she’d ignored the real issue. “Swamped at work” was too easy. She’d waited three days to answer because he was Black.
They spent their first weekend together in separate rooms at a Mariott in Kansas City. She wanted to see a Royals game, and it happened they were playing the Twins. The game was rained out in the third inning. They drank margaritas at El Taquito, had dinner dutch at Steve and Kathie’s Famous Café, and walked along the river. On Sunday before checkout, they made love, which Tim understood was her experiment in tolerance and good will. Whether she consented because she liked him, or because she’d wanted a new experience, he didn’t know. They talked about the pleasure, but not the racial thrill.
“The best in years,” Gwen said, though he hadn’t liked the comparison or the suggestion of untold others. “Was your wife Black or White?”
“Does it matter?” he asked. “She was Korean.”
After that, because he could travel more easily, he’d come to Denver. They’d agreed long distance served their needs. Each of them had involving employment, and they liked email and talking on the phone, but they had the independence of having evenings free. “More relationships fail because of too much time together than from not enough,” was how Gwen put it, though she might have said she liked to keep her own secrets. He liked to keep his.
Across the street, a young Latina he hadn’t seen before came through her driveway-fence gate, paused on the sidewalk, and rummaged in her purse for her car keys. She was, Tim thought, stunning, though not beautiful—long black hair tied up loosely, her neck exposed above a rust-colored top, her face partially hidden. Her profile revealed a small nose and a nice chin, deepset eyes frustrated at not finding the keys. She had on shorts—good legs, Tim noticed, and nice breasts.
She found the keys and looked skyward—at what, Tim wondered, since there was no god. She circled behind the white Subaru Outback parked at the curb, opened the door, and threw her purse into the passenger seat. She got in, and, without looking, pulled into the street. An SUV, coming from behind her, braked and honked, but no harm, no foul. She speeded up and, without stopping at the sign, careened through the intersection.
Tim hadn’t noticed that house before. It was a nondescript beige and had a porch similar to the one he was sitting on, though hers had no swing, no hanging baskets, not even a chair. Above the porch was a slanting, shingled roof without fancy angles or dormers; a heat vent was below the roof peak. For curb appeal, some houses on the street had two-tone window shutters or flowers in sill-boxes, but this house had only one blank window, and from his vantage, no curtains.
On the north, obscured by a pine tree, was at least one window, but, as Tim imagined the floor plan, others were in the dining room and the kitchen. Along that side of the house, the driveway had been abandoned, though there was a break in the curb for a car to pull in and parallel brick patterns overgrown with grass. The fence was new, made of cheap pine slats, with no rust tears yet from nails or screws. It was six feet high and crossed from the corner of the house to the neighbor’s vine-covered wall.
Tim’s cellphone played “Eroica,” and he picked up. “Yo,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Stuck,” Gwen said.
“Is ‘stuck’ a place?”
“Bernard wants me to review the memos Gordon Rich made during his strategy sessions at Acrotech to see whether they show corporate motive.”
“Can a corporation have a motive?”
“According to the Supreme Court, a corporation is a person capable of giving money to campaigns. It must, therefore, be capable of intent. That’s our legal theory. What are you doing?”
“Drinking wine on the porch and reading your novel with all the ‘woulds’ in it.”
“I own the book,” Gwen said. “I didn’t write it.”
“I’d like to have the author’s advance,” Tim said, “and the prize money.”
“There’s leftover chicken in that plastic container, and you can make yourself pasta and a salad.”
“I am free, not-White, and over twenty-one.”
Gwen laughed. “I know you’ll make do. That’s one of the things I like about you. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
“Famous last words,” Tim said.
He clicked off and took a glug of wine. The yellow roses at the side of the house across the street were catching the last sun, and a kid shouted from somewhere in the next block. A silver Prius came around the corner, and Jeremy, the shorter, chubbier of the couple, parked at the curb, and labored out of the driver’s door. “Tim,” he said. “How they hanging?”
Tim lifted his wine glass in salute. “Tough day at the office.”
“People were taking money out of our bank as fast as they could,” Jeremy said. “You’d have thought the world was ending.”
“It’s in process,” Tim said, “but today the sky is blue.”
“At least you have someone to make you dinner.”
“Not so,” Tim said. “Gwen is slaving in her sweat shop.”
“You’re welcome to eat with us, but you’d be looking at pepperoni pizza.”
“I’d accept sushi,” Tim said. “Gwen will be home. At least I have enough wine.”
He got up from the swing, went inside and peed, and examined the salad fixings in the fridge—tomatoes, Romaine lettuce, and orange peppers, but he closed the door without deciding. He poured his wineglass full, went into the living room, and scanned Gwen’s bookcase. She was a big reader, which he admired in the same way he admired people who gave to charity. He pulled down novels by Coetzee and Oates, read the lavish praise on the dust jackets, and put them back. Blurbs were absurd, because how could a reader determine anything from indiscriminate praise? His own favorite blurbs were, “I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough,” and, “a novel set in central Kansas—what could be more exciting?”
Her paintings on the walls drew his attention, too. Gwen’s taste ran to plein air landscapes that looked as if they’d been painted on the moon. He’d have preferred jazzy abstracts, but he didn’t live full-time with her possessions. Of course, she hadn’t seen his place. She claimed she wanted to, but he was undecided. His place wasn’t meant for visitors. It was utilitarian, barren, almost, and lately his work had been enmeshed in developing potable water sources for villages in Third World countries—wells, distribution systems, irrigation projects, all five- and ten-year plans. Housing Initiative International had asked him to advise on a project on the Río Napo in Ecuador though he hadn’t mentioned that yet to Gwen, because he might be gone for several months.
He carried his wine back outside to the porch. The sun had gone behind the house directly across the street, and the world was dusklit, gray, though not yet dark, and the street lamps hadn’t come on yet. Several windows threw gold light into the air. The house where the Latina lived was still dark.
He opened The Street Without Numbers and for a couple of pages followed Desai though several chaotic street scenes. Khartoum was alive with acrid smells, shouts, car horns, radio music, and flies. Desai depended on the inattention of others, the moments of least vigilance—how else could she survive? She sneaked into a shanty in a quieter part of the city. . .
Tim looked up and wondered what it was like to sneak into someone else’s house. Like the one in from the corner. Did the Latina live there or had she been visiting someone? Why had she left so abruptly? Was she late? Was she fleeing? What evidence of her life was hidden inside? The wine inspired him, and so did Desai the street thief. He was curious. What could he discover in that house?
A stranger might go unnoticed in the neighborhood and have more freedom, but what about a Black stranger? It was a mixed neighborhood, though, and, unless he acted in a suspicious manner, would anyone say, “Hey, Black man, what are you doing here?” He’d once had a speeding ticket, and he jaywalked, but he was scrupulous about his hours at work, paid the taxes he owed, and didn’t cheat his mother, who’d entrusted him to invest her savings. In Madison, he was aware he was an example to other young Blacks. He’d never entertained stealing a car or a purse, had never sought revenge for slights, imagined or real. Blacks had enough problems without provoking people. But still, simply on seeing him, he knew people assumed he was a criminal.
He set his wineglass on the ledge beside Gwen’s planter of multi-colored pansies and descended the ten steps to the sidewalk. At the end of the block, someone was getting into a car, but otherwise, at the dinner hour, the street was empty. He walked to the corner of Tenth, where the blue neighborhood mailbox was, and crossed Cook. A half-block up was an alley, and two houses down, in back, was the same six-foot wooden fence. Tim peered between the slats but couldn’t see much—a back door with a plastic green awning over it, red brick instead of beige on the back of the house, a plastic chair set out on a motley strip of grass. There was a gate on the alley, beside which two trash cans were nested one inside the other. He tried the gate, but it was locked from the inside.
He yanked the trash cans apart and set one upside-down to stand on, but a woman two houses farther on came out with her garbage. She didn’t look at Tim, but she might as well have. He stepped back from the fence out of the woman’s line of sight, backtracked to Tenth, and crossed again to Gwen’s side of the street. When he returned to Gwen’s porch, his wine had a gnat in it, which he fished out with his finger.
The street lights came on at seven-thirty, when Tim was sitting on Gwen’s steps. A Saab passed along the street, then a Suburban, but not the Latina’s Subaru. The Chevy signaled and made a left. So what was in that house? Secrets—Tim knew that much—a woman’s letters, bills, photographs, stuffed animals on a bed. Or maybe the Latina was housesitting, feeding the fish and watering the plants. What was with the new fence, though? Maybe the house was a meth lab.
He finished his wine, set the glass on the step, and went inside. In his bag he found the fund-raising brochures for HII he hadn’t shown Gwen yet—the cover showed a young girl drinking a glass of water—and he took a few with him outside. Dark had sneaked in, and the street lamps threw shadows onto the pavement. He possessed a natural camouflage, especially when he had on a dark, short-sleeved shirt.
He descended the steps with the brochures and aimed for the Hispanic woman’s house. On the porch, he rang the bell twice and got no answer—he hadn’t expected one—then looked in the woman’s mailbox beside the door. No letters and not even ads that said “current resident,” nothing to supply him with a name. The door had only a peephole in it, so he ambled across, shaded his eyes, and looked in the front window. Nothing again. The window was covered on the inside with a dark cloth or a blanket.
He left a brochure in the mailbox and walked back down the steps, cut through the bushes, and checked the driveway gate. It was secured with a tumbler combination lock mounted above the latch. The fence adjoined the neighbors’ cement wall covered with vines— not passable—and he retreated along a brick tire path to the sidewalk. Under the street lamp he checked his watch. Gwen would call or appear, but not for a while yet. The Latina’s time frame was more significant. She’d had on shorts and carried a purse, but he hadn’t seen her put anything else into the car, which suggested that, within a limited time, she was coming back. She may have gone to the grocery store or for a massage or a haircut, or she could have been out for the evening. Whatever, if he were going to look inside, his opportunity was now.
What would the street thief Desai have come up with? Of course her objective was survival—money or food—while his motive was more complicated. He had no compelling reason to break into someone’s house. Was curiosity an excuse? Anyway, he was in motion. He jogged back to Gwen’s, and, from the backyard, fetched the folding stepladder with which, the day before, he’d picked plums from her tree. He carried the ladder back along the alley to Tenth, across the street, and up the half-block to the woman’s fence. In another minute, he was straddling the top. Escape was an issue, too, so he balanced himself on the two-by-four on the alley side of the fence, pulled the ladder up and over, and set it against the fence on the inside. He climbed down onto forbidden ground.
The back yard was nothing special—a lawn poorly kept, two cheap plastic chairs, but no table, no grill, no flowers, no vegetable garden. At the back of the lot, at the end of the brick tire tracks, was a garage with the door pulled down. He crossed to the back door, hoping that, with the locked gates, the back door would be open, but it wasn’t. Even the screen was locked. The window to the left of the door was locked, too—the laundry room. He saw the appliances inside. He continued around to the useless driveway, where there were two windows—dining room and kitchen, he guessed—but he couldn’t reach them. The house was impregnable, and, if security was such a concern, an alarm might be an extra precaution against intruders. Down the driveway, a neighbor’s light shone out over the fence.
The challenge made him more determined. He ran to the fence, picked up the ladder, carried it back over one shoulder, and unfolded it under what he assumed was the kitchen window. He climbed up. The window was a double-hung two-pane, and the swivel lock was unengaged, which meant a security system, if there were one, couldn’t operate. He pushed up on the middle of the window, and it gave.
In a few seconds, he’d pushed up the glass and slithered over the sill. The kitchen was a half level above the back door, and he descended the steps, unlocked the back door and the screen, and carried the ladder back to the fence. Even as he did this, though, he was aware he had to take the ladder with him, or it could be traced to Gwen’s house, and then to him. He returned to the house and entered.
The kitchen wasn’t much—stove and refrigerator, but no tables or chairs, no pans, no dishes. No food. At least the woman wouldn’t be back for supper. In the fridge was a lineup of microbrews, and he opened a Red Hawk bottle with the pry lying on the counter.
The vestibule had a laptop and bills collected in a box—Denver water, Xcel, Verizon, and a Mastercard statement for Rafaella Sanchez with a balance of $1,154.32. In small, sleek, intelligent handwriting, she’d written a check for two hundred dollars, which hadn’t yet been enclosed in the return envelope.
He paused and listened. The refrigerator whirred, a clock ticked in the other room, and he heard what he thought was the chirp of a bird. He pushed open the swinging door to the living room. At first glance, the room was dark, but his eyes adjusted quickly to the only sources of light, a nearby lava lamp—that was weird—and the eerie light from an aquarium, which also illuminated a bird cage hanging from the ceiling. The pendulum of a grandfather clock swung back and froth. The clock was off, though. It said four twenty. Tim took a long drink from the Red Hawk.
A car passed by outside and accelerated through the stop sign. Tim stepped farther into the room. Beyond the aquarium was a dark human form, and he recoiled at the realization someone else was in the room. But the person didn’t move. He edged forward and opened a curtain at the side window to let the neighbor’s porch light shine in. The human form was a statue of a naked woman, life-sized, long sculpted hair, deepset eyes, easy lips. The right hand was positioned at shoulder level, the left waist-high, a few inches away from the hip, as if she were dancing. Her weight was over her left leg, the right foot positioned in the air for balance. Tim put his own large hand against the woman’s open palm.
He went to the front window and pulled aside the black cloth. Several cars were parked along the curb, and more porch lights were on, though not Gwen’s. The street light glinted from his empty wine glass on the step.
The bird chirped again—a call, not a song. It was a miniature green parrot with a light-colored face he couldn’t see clearly in the wavery light. The lava lamp was a cylinder with red globs oozing up and down, while the aquarium was a cubist shape, not a mere rectangle, and in it blue fish swam in slow patterns around yellow-and-black striped ones. The neighbor’s light led him into a side room, unfurnished, then along the hall, past the bathroom, to a bedroom in back. The bedroom had in it a bureau and a mattress on the floor. A few women’s shirts and pants were hung on hangers in the closet, but these weren’t secrets. Tim couldn’t piece together a life. Had the woman moved in somewhere else with her boyfriend and taken her furniture? But why leave the fish and the bird and the clock? Were these the last to go? Or had this been her mother’s house, and, after her mother died, Rafaella was moving in? And what about the sculpture? And the new fence and the locked gates?
Tim went back to the living room and looked into the bird cage. “Do you talk?” he asked. “Do you say anything?”
The bird didn’t answer.
His cell phone rang. Gwen. “Yo,” he said, “are you about to arrive?”
“On my way,” Gwen said. “Did you eat?”
Tim went back over to the sculpture. “I’m sitting on your porch. You have less wine than there was before.”
“Should I pick up something? Does Chinese sound good?”
“I don’t do Chinese,” he said. “I’m Black.” He paused. “Or African-American. Or Cameroon-American. But I was born in Wisconsin.”
“What are you talking about? Are you all right?”
“Harold from my office called,” he said. “Nothing went as planned. The treatment system isn’t getting backflow, so I have to go back to Madison tomorrow.”
The bird squawked in its cage.
“What was that?”
“Boom box on a bicycle,” Tim said.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around more.”
“How long until you are?”
“Half an hour.”
“Chinese is fine,” Tim said. “I like sweet and sour chicken and moo goo gai pan.”
He signed off and felt lightheaded. In the last two centuries, the history of his race was being in places they weren’t meant to be, and that’s where he was now. At the same time, he felt as if he were understanding what others had been forced to experience—being the transgressor, the interloper, the evil twin, and his real self was in reaction to these.
Headlights flashed across the ceiling, and he went to the front window. A motorcycle slowed for the stop sign, then speeded up again, its single headlamp jerking over the potholes in the street. The sky was black now, and the low sky refracted lights from the city. He let the cloth fall back across the window.
He could get away unseen and at his leisure, climb the fence, return the ladder to Gwen’s yard so that, except in his memory, this incident would be without consequence. But he longed for more than an understanding of his own historical dialectic, more than being in the wrong place. He wished for what was beyond words, the greater human need to be acknowledged and, as well, to acknowledge beauty.
The sculpture fluttered nearby. He circled it, unbuttoned his shirt, kicked off his shoes, not with prurient intent, but with the anticipation of joy. He took off his trousers and underpants and was as dark as the room. He pressed his shoulder against the cool bronze of the woman’s back, moved his thigh against hers.
In the midst of this dance, a car door slammed directly in front of the house—so it sounded. Tim stepped into his pants, pulled his shirt over his head, thrust his underwear into his pocket. He carried his shoes and socks to the vestibule, where he picked up the Mastercard bill and Rafaella Sanchez’s check. The front door opened, keys jangled, the door closed.
In a second, he was outside and running. A motion-detector light came on, and he jammed the Mastercard bill into his pocket. Still barefoot, he sprinted across the yard, threw his shoes and socks over the fence, and pushed the ladder against the locked gate. He climbed up and, again, balanced himself on a two-by-four. He hoisted the ladder up and over the fence and let it fall into the alley. Lights came on in the house, and the silhouette of a woman with long hair moved past the laundry window toward the back door. Tim hesitated where he was, balanced on the narrow ledge, teetering, waiting for the woman to see him before he leapt down into the darkness of the alley.