“Hey, Tanya,” Sherman said.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “You two look exactly alike.”
I’d been told before that Sherman and I bore a strong resemblance. I couldn’t see it; I think that was because he was so powerful and brave and cool, and I was just barely normal.
“They do!” another girl said. This one was also under the category of our race, what people nowadays call African American. But where Tanya was slender of face and body, her friend was a curvaceous girl with skin just a touch darker.
They were Sherman’s age, maybe even a little older.
“Mona,” Tanya said, “this is Sherman and his cousin Stewart.”
“If we look just alike,” Sherman said, “then how you know I ain’t Stew?”
The skinny girl grinned, cocked her head to the side, and said, “Because I know what I like. Come on in. I got it all ready.”
Tanya took us through the living room into a yellow-and-red-tiled kitchen. Past the stove there was a little nook of a room with no door, in which sat a small, square, orange table-booth. There she had set out a crystal decanter filled with amber liquor and four bulbous drinking glasses.
“Cognac,” Tanya said. “Like I told you.”
Sherman and Tanya sat on one side of the table, her in and him out. I climbed into our side, and Mona pulled in close beside me.
Tanya explained to her friend and me that she met Sherman on the F train and that the first thing he said to her was to ask if she had ever had champagne.
“I asked him why,” she said. “And he told me that I looked like I was rich and so I must have had some.”
“What did you say?” Mona asked. At the same time she laid her left hand on my right.
“She said that there was something better than champagne,” Sherman answered.
“Cognac,” Tanya finished, gesturing at the contents of the tabletop.
She poured us each a generous dram and warned us to sip it because the cognac was strong.
When Mona let go of my hand to reach for her glass, I felt both bereft and relieved. She got my glass too, turned toward me on the small bench, and clinked hers to mine. She smiled at me with lips that I will always think a woman’s lips and smile should be.
“Cheers,” she whispered, and we all sipped.
“Damn!” Sherman said. “This feels warm all down in my chest.”
“That’s what it does,” Tanya said, a note of triumph in her voice.
“This how rich people feel all the time?” my cousin asked.
Tanya’s reply was to lean forward and kiss him.
Sherman already knew how to kiss. After a moment with her mouth, he moved to the side of her neck. This caress brought out a smile, and the next thing I knew Mona gave me a peck on the mouth. My tongue was ready, but her lips moved quickly to my ear.
“We should go in the other room and leave them alone,” she whispered.
Mona poured some more brandy into our glasses and then led me by the hand into the living room. There we drank and whispered and kissed — a lot. Toward the bottom of the snifters my trepidations evaporated. Mona showed me how and where to kiss and when to linger. In hushed tones she told me about her white boyfriend and how he would never let her guide him to her desire.
I was overexcited and so suffered two premature ejaculations, but Mona was more experienced and explained, between kisses, what was going on with me and how we could get back to where we wanted to be.
Somewhere in the night I looked up from the sofa and saw Sherman and Tanya, mostly naked, tiptoeing toward another part of the house.
“Kiss me, Stew,” Mona said, to bring my attention back to her.
The couch Mona and I staked out was long and deep, like the sleep we tumbled down into. It was slumber in an upholstered hole at the side of a road in some fairy tale my mother might have read aloud before my siblings and I fell to sleep...
My mother. I came awake suddenly, so deeply afraid that even the loss of my virginity failed to buoy me. I sat up quickly and felt a wave of pain go through my head. I gasped, looked around, and saw Sherman sitting in a stuffed chair set perpendicular to the foot of our sofa.
Mona groaned and shifted under a blanket I didn’t remember.
“I been waitin’ for you to wake up, cousin.”
“Does your head hurt this bad?” I asked.
“It’ll go away in the air outside,” Sherman explained.
“My parents are gonna kill me,” I predicted, through pain and some nausea.
“Uh-uh, man. I got that covered,” my cousin promised.
It was late May, and the sun was rising at around five that morning as Sherman and I made our way to the subway.
“What you mean you got it covered?” I asked Sherman for the sixth time as he handed me a subway token.
“While you was playin’ makin’ Mona moan I called Titi an’ asked her to call your parents and say you was sleepin’ ovah.”
No magician ever impressed me as much as Sherman did.
“And she did it?” I asked.
“Sure she did. I told her that you and me were on a double date. She understands what men need to do.”
For a week or so after the visit with Tanya and Mona, I avoided my cousin. I wanted to forget about cognac and sex and Manhattan too. I felt so guilty that I was even trying to do some homework one Wednesday evening in the bedroom I shared with my brother Floyd.
“Stew?” my mother, Mint Cardwell-Brownley, called from the hall.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Phone. It’s your cousin Sherman. If he wants you to come over, tell him you have to come back here to bed.”
“Hey, cousin,” he said, when I answered.
“Hi.” I didn’t want to be rude.
“Where you been, man?” he asked.
“Nowhere. Studyin’ for finals is all.”
“Well, come on ovah an’ I’ll help.”
There was no way that I was going to see Sherman and Nefertiti. My soul was on the line; that’s how it felt. I tried to think of some kind of reason that I had to stay and do my homework alone. Maybe it was some kind of spelling that I had to commit to memory, and Floyd was already testing me. That was a good excuse.
“What you thinkin’, Stew?” my cousin asked.
“Nuthin’.”
“So you comin’ or what?”
“OK.” And that was it. My soul was sold, and Sherman owned it.
That early evening we went down an alley past the back of a bodega. We stopped for a minute while Sherman looked around.
“You see that little window ovah the door?” he asked me.
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s what they call a transom, and Julio’s ain’t got no alarm.”
“So?”
“I’m ’a break into that bastard an’ steal one hundred dollars.”
“Why?” I was so scared that even the spiritual devastation of sex seemed tame.
“’Cause I can. ’Cause I wanna do everything. Don’t worry, Stew. I won’t bring you into it.”
The years passed, and Sherman and I were fast companions. Whenever he broke the law he did it alone, but later he’d tell me all about it — step-by-step. I spent lots of time with him and his mother, my aunt Titi, in their sixth-floor walk-up apartment. Titi was always nice, kissing me hello and goodbye.
My own mother rarely kissed me. I had never much thought about that until I became the beloved chattel of my aunt and cousin.
After high school Sherman was accepted to NYU on full scholarship, and then I, the next year, went to work on an early-morning paper-delivery crew for the New York Times.
Somewhere in that time our cousin Theodora decided to take the NYC civil service exam. She asked Sherman to help, and he did. I hung around because it felt better to be with him than my own parents and siblings.