“Are you going to call mom?” Cornelius asked. He’d been waiting for a moment when his father’s mood was open and happy.
Up until that evening no had been his unchanging reply, but on the night of his son’s forgotten birthday, he said, “As you will. Call her. Tell her that she should see the old man before he passes the mantle on to his son.”
Cornelius called his mother that night. When she answered he could hear Dean Martin singing Volare on the record player in the background.
“Hello?”
“Mama?”
“Hi, baby. How is he?”
“He wants to see you.”
“Now?” It was past midnight.
“No,” Cornelius said. “Tomorrow at four.”
When Lucia came into the Jones apartment she was wearing a low-cut, tight-fitting, short black dress without hose or jewelry. Recently having turned thirty-six she still had the beauty of youth. Cornelius was surprised to see the lack of rings and necklaces because Lucia’s new boyfriend, a man named Filo Manetti, had given her many expensive gifts and expected her to wear them. At least that’s what she told Cornelius at one of their afternoon meetings at Uno. Cornelius hadn’t met Manetti. His mother said this was because he was so busy, but Cornelius felt that she was afraid for her boyfriend to see she had a Negro son.
There was only a hint of makeup over her eyes and a touch of blush on her lips. CC’s heart went out to her. He hoped she and Herman would get together, that they would be a family again.
“How do I look, CC?” Lucia asked after kissing his cheek.
He reached out, touching her right biceps.
“You’re getting so tall,” she added.
Cornelius ushered his mother into his father’s small bedroom.
Herman was sitting up in bed against three big pillows. He had on a white dress shirt with a collar too large for his small neck. He didn’t wear pants because his legs were under a blanket.
“Welcome, Lucia. Have a seat.”
Herman nodded at a chair that Cornelius had placed at the foot of the bed. But instead of sitting Lucia went to his side, kissing him twice on the cheek.
“Please sit down,” he said, and her confidence drained away. She went to the chair clasping her small handbag.
“Herman—” she uttered.
“Why have you come here, Lucia?” Herman asked.
Cornelius stood by the door feeling that this question was like the first move in a game of chess.
“To see my husband,” Lucia replied.
“You have seen me. Now, is there anything else?”
“I’m sorry, Herman,” she began. “I know that I haven’t been a good wife. But things were never right between us, you know that.”
Herman gave a quick nod. His lips were protruding slightly. Cornelius had not seen that particular expression before.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Lucia?”
“I didn’t come here to talk about things like that.”
“So you just want me to sit here and listen until you are through? I am not only your cuckold but also your minion?”
Cornelius doubted if his mother knew the proper definition of the word minion but he was sure that she got the meaning of Herman’s words.
“No,” she said.
“Then may I not inquire about my wife’s fidelity?”
“We’ve been broken up ten years, Herman. I’m not even forty.”
“And I am a Methuselah?”
“No,” Lucia said, lowering her head.
Cornelius was witness to his parents’ pain. He could not speak. This was their meeting, their problem to solve.
“If I were with another woman would you want to know?” Herman asked. Lucia’s head hung down even farther than it had at Uno, when Cornelius’s unintended accusation cut so deep.
“I love you, Herman.”
“And who else do you love?”
This question hit Lucia like a slap. Herman’s strategy was picking up momentum.
“How dare you ask me that,” she spat.
“And why not? Here I am relegated to these four walls. The only reason I am not dead is that my son does my job for me. He pays the bills and takes me for a walk around the apartment every morning and night. He reads to me because my eyes are too weak and my hands are too feeble to hold a book. I am only fifty-one, Lucia, and I may not see my next birthday.”
“His name is Filo,” Lucia said, her voice devoid of feeling.
“And is he well endowed?”
“What?”
“Can he satisfy you?”
“Herman—”
“Do you do to him what you did to me on the projection room floor? Do you tell him to perform as you told me?”
On this last word Herman’s voice faltered, his eyes glistened.
“What do you want from me, Herman?” Lucia asked softly.
“I have not been able to have an erection in years,” he answered. “At first I lamented this loss. Then I realized that this was not diminishment but freedom.”
“Freedom from what?” Lucia asked, echoing Cornelius’s thought.
“From you,” Herman said. “Because, you see, I never really loved you, Lucia. It was just that no woman had ever given me such carnal pleasure. I was addicted to my erection inside you, trapped by those cunning kisses you placed on my neck. Those times that you would be gone from my bed then return telling me about how others made love to you. Every word you spoke ignited fire in me. I wanted to kill you but I needed your body more.
“Your whispers about how big they were, how they pressed you against the wall in closed offices at work. I was helpless against my own erection. I could not stop you. I could not stop myself.
“But now that is over. I want to hear about your new lover to see what effect it will have on me. Does he have a big one like that man Mike you bragged about? Does he have a brother as did your Harlem boyfriend? Did he make you eat dirt?”
“I’m sorry,” Lucia whispered.
Cornelius was sure that they had forgotten about him by then. Their pain was a semiopaque sphere surrounding them. It kept him out while drawing every scintilla of his attention.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“There is no need, Lucia,” Herman said, almost tenderly. “You are no more culpable than the poppy is for opium. You are the drug and I the addict. Now I am immune to your scent. Go on with your tart’s dress and your bare legs. Destroy some other man.”
After taking a deep breath Lucia stood up and walked from the room, her eyes on the floor. She passed her son without saying a word.
Cornelius stood at the threshold of his father’s room. When Herman realized he was there he said, “Go,” in a pained tone. At the same instant the front door slammed shut.
“I am alone,” CC said to himself, sitting at the kitchen table listening to his father’s sobbing and feeling his mother’s broken heart.
4
Three weeks later Cornelius was on the mattress in the projection room masturbating while the second reel of Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader played. He had found a magazine called Dirty Nymphs Crave Big Cocks in a trash can next to the side entrance of the Arbuckle. On the wadded cotton bedding he examined page after page of skinny young men with large erections in various positions of intercourse with equally skinny, large-breasted women. Cornelius writhed against the mattress imagining those women whispering about what the skinny young men had done. The pain was exquisite and his heart thundered.
He had ejaculated six times already and told himself that was enough. But there he was again, lying on the floor with his pants down around his knees, struggling against the thick softness of the single mattress.