“There’s not much in it, I suppose. But the English contingent were freed longer ago.”
“Yes, well,” pondered Rodney, “I suppose you can’t get much less posh than being a slave. But that’s to forget what they might have been originally.”
“Posh in Africa.”
“In a way. You know, Africa was quite advanced for a while. I mean, look at African art. Exquisite. Ancient, but immediate. Immediate. They had great civilizations there when England was just a sheep-dip. Ages ago.”
“What have you been reading? The Amsterdam News?”
“No. Ebony. But it’s true! We’re just upstarts and counterjumpers compared to them. Scum, Rock. Anyway I have a hunch my one came direct from Africa. The Sudan, quite possibly. Timbuktu was apparently an incredible city. Crammed with princes and poets and amazing houris. Jezebel was of—”
“Did you say amazing hoorays? Sorry? Oh never mind. What sort of accent does she have? Your one.”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
Rock paused and said, “Pray describe this relationship. How did you meet? Or don’t you know that either?”
“We met in a bar. But it wasn’t like that.”
They met in a bar but it wasn’t like that.
It was like this.
Rodney had just asked for a Bullshot. Consisting of vodka and consomme, a Bullshot is arguably a bullshit drink; but Rodney, his eyes lurking and cowering behind his dark glasses, badly needed his Bullshot. What he really felt like was a Bloodshot. He wore a pinched seersucker suit and a grimy cravat. He had spent the morning in a sepulchral brownstone on East Sixty-fifth Street, doing what he could with the long upper lip and ridiculously interproximate eyebrows of a Mrs. Sheehan—wife to the chat-show king.
“Worcestershire sauce, if you please, and the juice of at least one lemon.”
“You know something? I could listen to your voice all day.”
It was not the first time Rodney had been paid this compliment. Sequestered in a deceptively mild cocaine hangover, he said, “How sweet of you to say so.”
“No. Really.”
“So kind.”
This waitress at some point or other might have wanted to be an actress. She might have had the odd prompting toward the stage. But not recently. And anyway Rodney was looking past her, Rodney was flinching past her…
So. She was up on a stool at the counter—and up on the turret of her swiveling haunches, rising in her seat whenever they crossed or uncrossed, uncrossed or crossed. Rodney stared. There she sat, drinking milky tea from a braced glass, being bawled at by some ball game on the perched TV, and exchanging vigorous but inaudible small talk with a hidden figure behind the bar. Unquestionably she was a person of color, and that color—or so it seemed to Rodney—was american. As in black, brown, american; then beige, white, pink… Beyond this room lay another room, where some kind of talent contest was being noisily disputed. Poetry readings. Monologues. Stand-up.
Rodney was staring at her with a pang of recognition, although he knew she was a stranger. He thought he had seen her before, in the neighborhood. But never fully seen her. Because she was the woman on the street whom you never see fully, sent here to elude you, always turning away or veering off, or exactly maintaining parallax with mailbox or tree bole, or vanishing forever behind the burning glass of a phone booth or under the black shadow of a truck. Indignant poems have been written about these women—about these desaparacidas. Even the douce Bloom grew petulant about them. Men mind, because for once they are demanding so little, no contact, just a free gaze at the moving form. And this was Rodney’s initial disposition. He didn’t want to date her. He wanted to paint her.
“There you go, sir.”
“Thank you most awfully.”
“That voice!”
Even now, at the bar, she always seemed to be occluded or eclipsed. In particular a pink lady, a Germanic middle-aged blonde with a whole reef of freckles and moles on her bared throat (how Rodney struggled, each day, with such imperfections in his sitters) kept masking her, kept hiding her and then revealing her. Suddenly the view cleared, and he absorbed the lavish power of her thighs—then her face, her glance, her unspecific smile. What she said to him was Talent. Not just her talent. His talent, too.
“Waitress! Waitress! Ah. Thank you. I wonder if you would very kindly lend me your pen there. For just a couple of minutes.”
“Certainly!”
“Thank you so much.”
He knew what to do. At his agent’s prompting, Rodney had had some cards printed up, headed: Sir Rodney Peel (Baronet): Portraitist. The flip side gave an example of the portraitist’s art: looking like non-identical twins, the wife and daughter of a burglar-alarm tycoon were pooling their repose on a pair of French armchairs. Rodney started writing. He still wasn’t entirely reconciled to that bracketed “Baronet.” At first he had argued for the more discreet and conventional abbreviation, “(Bt).” But he had eventually submitted to the arguments of his agent: according to Rock, Americans might think that Bt was short for Bought.
In the great wreaths and plumes of his embarrassing calligraphy Rodney said that he was an English painter, come to America; said how rare it was, even in this city, with its famed diversity, to encounter a face so paintable as her own; said he would, of course, remunerate her for her indulgence; said his rates were high. Rodney then used up a second card and most of a third with a fantastic array of apologies and protestations, of microscopic diffidencies—and then added a fourth, for her reply.
“Waitress? Excuse me! Excuse me!” Rodney’s voice was having to contend with the espresso machine and the robust applause coming from the back room, as well as with the gasps and hiccups of human communion, all around: like a schoolyard. But Rodney’s voice was bigger than he was. Trained by centuries of hollering across very large rooms.
“Ah. There you are.”
The waitress stood there as Rodney outlined her mission. And it seemed that her avowed preparedness to listen to Rodney’s voice all day came under immediate strain. Her face toughened, and she knocked a fist into her hip as her shoulders gave a single shrug or shudder. But Rodney just tapped his calling cards into alignment and contentedly added,
“Now, not the orange-haired one, do you see, with all the freckles. Behind her. The dark one.” Rodney had a witty notion. His interlocutor was a cocktail waitress: why not speak her language? “The Pink Lady: no. By no means. Rather, the Black Velvet. The Black Velvet.”
He tried to watch as the waitress delivered his note. Its recipient, again, seemed to glance and smile his way; but then a wall of new bards or jokesmiths, heading for the back room, interposed itself, and when the room cleared she was gone.
The shadow of the waitress dropped past him. He looked down at the tray she had placed on his table: the check, plus the fourth postcard, which said tersely and in neat small caps: “You talk too much.”
Triple-lipped, Rodney paid and added fifteen percent and took his leave.