Sexy Morgan, the poet, was in a window seat next to the ageless (but old) Sweet Lemon Charles. Between them sat a black-haired woman with pale skin and very beautiful eyes. I couldn’t make out their color but their size and shape said that when it came to aesthetic evolutionary perfection these eyes had topped the scales. Other than that, she was plain. The blouse was a flat blue. I’d’ve bet even money that the skirt underneath was knee-length and black.
Lemon saw me staring, stood up, and waved me in.
When I passed through the front door a woman wearing a bejeweled purple-and-red turban approached.
“Can I help you?” she asked. Her smile was practiced but not insincere.
“My friends are at that table over there.”
“Lt,” Lemon said. “Glad you could make it, brother. Here, sit, sit.”
He gestured at the chair he’d occupied. There was a lot of communication in that offer. He wanted me to sit next to Tourquois, of course, but also the only other chair had its back to the window. Lemon was telling me that he understood how vulnerable I’d feel in that position and also proving, in some symbolic way, that he had left that lifestyle behind. So he sat with his back to the street while I got to sit next to the woman with the lovely eyes.
“Morgan,” Lemon said. “This is the guy I was tellin’ you about — Leonid McGill.”
The sexpot cutie pursed her lips and held her hand out across the table.
“Stanford told me all about you, Mr. McGill,” she said with assumed knowledge in her brown eyes.
“Stanford?”
“That’s my real name,” Lemon said. “And this is the woman I was telling you about — Tourquois.”
A closer look explained why Stanford was particular about calling the teacher a woman. She was probably in her mid-forties, with pale crow’s-feet at the edge of her crystal gray eyes.
She smiled and I nodded my greeting.
“Thanks for letting me crash the party,” I said.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Lemon asked. “Brandy, right?”
“Cognac,” I said.
“Right.”
He went to the bar, merging with the mob of young Village hopefuls drinking and laughing all around.
Morgan still had her lips pursed and Tourquois was looking down at her long, delicate hands.
“Stanford told me that every policeman in New York knows your name and face,” Morgan said.
“He did?”
“Do they?”
“I’m recognized from time to time. But, in my defense, often my face is familiar but not recognized. Now and then somebody might arrest me but they always let me go.”
Tourquois looked up at me and for some reason I imagined her black hair going white.
“Stanford says that he’s out of that life,” Morgan said, her lips no longer puckered for kissing.
“That’s what I say too,” I replied lightly. “And I don’t just say it, I mean it. And I can promise you that I have no intention of pulling your man into anything but maybe that osso buco special they got on that blackboard menu.”
The kiss returned, along with a smile.
“Here you go,” Lemon said.
He was carrying four drinks in his big hands. I’d forgotten about the size of his hands. They were both dexterous and strong. It was said that Lemon’s fists were fearful things in his youth. I was reminded of the boxer’s axiom that if a man could hit hard, he always had a slugger’s chance.
“Champagne for my lady,” Lemon was saying, “dirty vodka martini for Ms. Wynn, VSOP for LT, and gin with a twist for Lenore Goodwoman’s favorite child.”
He placed the drinks professionally and gestured for the waiter; an older white man with a bald head and a smile that wanted to be a frown.
The meal came and talk arose, centering around poets, poetry, poetry readings, and reading in general.
“I believe that the most important book of the twentieth century is Four Quartets by Eliot,” Morgan said with certainty.
She wasn’t yet thirty but had a sharp mind and a focused intelligence.
“What do you think, Mr. McGill?” Lemon’s girlfriend asked.
“About what?”
“The most important book.”
The only way to explain my reaction is to say that I cast my gaze upon her. It’s a heavy stare replete with violence and the ability to absorb pain. For a fraction of a second Morgan wondered if she wanted an answer to her question.
“All the religions got their books,” I said. “They know for a fact that there’s only one thing written that makes any difference.”
“Are you religious, Mr. McGill?” Tourquois asked.
“No.”
“Then what book do you nominate for most important?” Morgan insisted.
“Not one book but four,” I said. “And even if they had a great impact on the twentieth century, just two of them were written in that time period.”
Before that little preamble Morgan had seen me as an uneducated criminal friend of the object of her affection, the fixer-upper named Stanford “Sweet Lemon” Charles. I think that she was more than a little surprised at this street thug’s pedestrian grasp of the can of worms her pronouncement opened.
“What books?” she said. It was a challenge.
“Capital,” I said, raising up my left thumb, “The Interpretation of Dreams, The Descent of Man, and the collected essays that explain the Theory of Relativity.”
“And why those books?” Tourquois asked, suddenly engaged.
“Because,” I said, “those books tell us why we don’t know what’s happening but that it happens, and continues to happen, in spite of our necessary ignorance.”
Morgan wanted to argue, to say something about poetry and the depth of its heart. But she was distracted by the possibilities that my suggestions glanced upon.
“That sounds like something Bill Williams would have said,” Tourquois said.
Bull’s-eye!
“Yeah,” I replied. “Lemon — I mean, Stanford here — said that you knew this Williams.”
“He took a class from me five years ago. I was impressed by his stories.”
“What was he like?”
“An older gentleman. He was probably in his early seventies. From the little he let drop I got the idea that he had led a very political life and had turned to literature when the Revolution didn’t pan out the way he expected it to.”
“He was writing a novel?”
“It’s said that Gogol had called his great unfinished work, Dead Souls, a poem. In the same way I believe that Bill’s work was a prose poem in development.”
“What was it about?”
“It was couched in the South American style of magical reality. The main character was a man born a slave who escaped his masters and traveled the country exhorting his brethren to either live as free men and women or to die trying to achieve it. This man, Plato Freeman, lived for many years and never aged. But, as time passed, who he was and what he knew were so roundly ignored that he became transparent to the modern world. In this ghost-like form he moved from place to place, following his descendants, primarily two great-great-grandsons that he could watch but they could not see him.”
I wasn’t dizzy but I doubt if I could have gotten to my feet just then.
“Why are you looking for him?” Tourquois asked.
“You know that book he was working on?”
“Yes?”
“I’m the Number One Great-Great-Son.”
34
I didn’t get home until a little after midnight.
The dinner with Lemon and his friends was unique, in my experience. I was trapped at that table like a fat and furry black fly on a sheet of old-fashioned flypaper. I wanted to bug out of there but the bait, as much as the glue, held me fast.