“Zella Grisham. That girl need to learn how to smile.”
“You don’t like her?”
“She okay. We talked some, but wherever she’s from she ain’t left there yet.”
“I have a special interest in her. I want to make sure that she’s safe but I don’t want her knowin’ what I want.”
“Anything you say, Mr. McGill.” Iran thought he owed me. When he got out of prison I made sure he had a job, and whenever he found himself in trouble I showed him an exit sign.
Iran was grateful for my help, and I neglected to tell him that I was the one who got him incarcerated in the first place.
“Thanks, Eye. How’s the job?”
“I’m so tired every night that I’m asleep ’fore my head hits the pillow. But I always wake up with a smile on my face.”
The odds were against an ex-con making it in the straight life, but if he learned the trick, he was the happiest man on the street.
I smiled and went toward the back of the floor-sized room.
Gordo was sitting at his desk in his cubbyhole office, making checks on a long graph-like form. In some arcane way he used these forms to gauge the progress, or decline, of a boxer’s talents. Other than the names scrawled in the upper left-hand corner, I could never make sense of these charts.
“Mr. Tallman,” I said.
He looked up and then stood.
“LT,” he said over an extended hand.
Gordo was my height and red-bronze in color. He was a mixture of all the races America had to offer and was therefore referred to as a black man. He had more hair than I did and was somewhere between the ages of seventy-seven and ninety. He was looking younger though. Beating cancer and falling in love was a fountain of youth for him.
“Sit, sit,” the impish trainer said.
His visitor’s chair was a boxer’s corner stool, where you sat for sixty seconds between rounds, getting yelled at, before your opponent proceeded to beat on you again.
“What’s the news, G?” I asked.
Gordo’s brows furrowed, his eyes peered into mine. He could see the fever in me. Probably no one ever knows you as well as your trainer.
But I saw something too. There was a hint of sadness in Gordo’s gaze; something I’d not seen in a long time.
“What’s wrong with you, kid?” he asked.
“You first, old man.”
The trainer sagged back in his green-and-gray office chair. His shoulders slumped down and he shook his head slowly.
“I prob’ly shouldn’t have called you,” he said.
“But you did.”
“She might already be gone.”
“Who?”
“Elsa.”
“Gone? I thought you two were getting married?”
Elsa Koen was the private nurse that Katrina had hired for Gordo when he came to stay with us while being treated for stomach cancer. At the time we thought that he had come to us to die.
The German nurse had fallen in love with the old guy even though she thought he was nearly homeless.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I told her about my properties.”
“Plural?”
I had always thought that Gordo rented the fifth-floor gym. There was a property supervisor and everything. It turned out that he owned the entire building; fifteen stories in lower midtown Manhattan.
“Yeah,” he said. “I got two more buildings three blocks up.”
“Fully rented?”
“Yep. Skidmore manages them too.”
“Damn. So, so you told Elsa about that and she just said she was leavin’?”
“Uh-huh.”
“There had to be sumpin’ else. You want a prenup or somethin’?”
“No. I told her what’s mine is yours.”
“Damn.”
“Talk to her for me, will ya, LT? Elsa respects you.”
The full range of sadness showed on Gordo’s face. But it wasn’t the grief that moved me. Gordo never asked anybody for anything. He was a boxer that lived by the philosophy that you didn’t admit defeat — not ever. You might get knocked on your ass, but even then you used every ounce of strength you had to try and beat the count.
“Okay,” I said.
The stairway to Gordo’s illegal fifteenth-floor apartment had a small window at every landing. These looked west on Thirty-fourth Street toward the Hudson River. I took the steps two at a time to make up for the exercise I hadn’t done in the gym.
Gordo’s door was ajar.
I knocked anyway.
There was no answer so I went in.
“Hello?” I said. “Elsa?”
The rabbit warren apartment must have had eleven rooms but it took up less than twelve hundred square feet. The ceilings were low, and many rooms didn’t have windows.
I found Elsa in a tiny windowless chamber that contained a dirty cream-colored sofa and a portable TV. There were three pale blue suitcases sitting in front of her. She’d been crying.
“Elsa.”
She looked up at me, letting her head tilt to the side.
“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked.
She opened her mouth but words were temporarily unavailable.
The nurse had red hair and pale skin. She wasn’t beautiful but she was fair — in every way.
I sat down next to her and she hugged me.
“Tell me about it,” I prompted.
She let go and tried to find something to do with her hands.
“I don’t know,” she said at last, clasping her palms together tightly between her knees.
She was wearing a plaid skirt and a black T-shirt, no stockings or socks, and white nurse’s shoes.
Elsa hadn’t been in her forties for very long, and she looked younger still.
“Gordo told you about his property,” I said.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did he lie?”
“He didn’t.”
“He should have told me before we, we got together.”
“Maybe he should have but he couldn’t — that’s a fact.”
The words were said with such certainty that Elsa got suddenly intent.
“Why not?” she asked.
“When you moved away from your parents’ house it was already the nineties, right?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“When Gordo was born we were in the Great Depression,” I continued. “That was back when a black man never owned anything that a white man couldn’t take from him. Back when they could put up signs that said ‘White Only.’ ”
“So? It’s not like that anymore.”
“That’s true, things are different today. When young people like you look at the world you see trouble but not like the mess Gordo’s seen. He learned to cover up early on. I didn’t know about all of what he owned until a few minutes ago.”
“You? But you’re his best friend.”
“You can leave him, Elsa, but be sure about it. He’s a good man and he loves you. You are the only reason he survived that cancer. All three of us know that.”
22
I left Elsa pondering the pedestrian and impromptu history lesson.
One thing I know, Trot, my father once said. You can’t be in love with a woman and practice Revolution at the same time.
But don’t you love Mama? I asked fearfully.
I do, surely. But not when I’m doin’ Revolution.
I don’t understand, Daddy.
When I’m with your mother, he said, she’s the only thing in the world. There is no economic infrastructure or class struggle. When it’s just me and her it’s husband and wife — that’s all.
That was one of the many fragments of conversation that had clattered around in my head for decades. Walking down the stairs, I realized that what I learned from my father was not what he had meant. He wanted to make me a better soldier, but I, slowly and over time, came to believe that men were not only alienated from their labor, and therefore from one another, but they were also, in a similar way, alienated from themselves by the passions they felt pitted against the things they had to do.