Night and Day (4 page)

You’re staring at the dark sky when you hear the footsteps in the hall, going past your door: quick, but not running. Curious, you go to the door and open it and look out into the corridor, but all you see is a flash of dark cloth in the dim light of the wall sconce by the stairs. Dark brown, maybe, or purple; you’d bet purple because you have a suspicion of who it is, and he’s just the sort to wear a purple silk dressing gown. Not a robe. A dressing gown.

And it’s not quite a suspicion, but more of an instinct. Your body thrums like a sympathetic tuning fork when he’s near, just as it did with Bertie.

You let the door close quietly behind you and follow him, up the stairs instead of down, to a door that stands open against a sky still spattered with stars. Silently you creep up the stairs and stand looking out the door at him. He has his back to you, his face turned toward the paler sky in the east, his feet bare on the tarpaper of the flat roof. There is nothing else here, just the furnace chimney and the low, dingy brick walls that frame the roof. Just him and you and the dawn sky.

The first edge of sunlight creeps over the horizon, and he drops the dressing gown, letting it slither down his body to lay in a tumble at his feet. Your breath goes still in your chest.

He stretches his arms out as if he is basking in the watery light. His shoulders are taut with muscle, his arms long and strong, his lean back leading down into a dimpled, firm bottom and long, powerful thighs and legs. He is completely nude, standing with his arms spread like a king, like a sacrifice, his head thrown back. In the dark of the club, his hair looks black, but now you see that it’s brown and bronze, and the sunlight as it moves across the roof raises sparks of red and copper. And it’s long, down to his shoulder blades—it hadn’t been that long last night, certainly not. It fits him, somehow. Not Rick the club owner, lazy and laughing, but this creature, this king, this worshipper.

And then he begins to glow. First a soft, subtle gilding of his skin that makes no sense; he should be dark and silhouetted against the sun, but he is golden, glowing. Brighter and brighter he shines until the sun has cleared the city horizon, and by then he is incandescent. And finally, light explodes around him, white and painful and glorious.

When you open your eyes again, you are back in your bed, and it’s only the ceiling that you see, this time in the pale light of very early morning. You blink, confused, and then realize you must have dreamed going up on the roof, dreamed seeing Rick shining like an arc light, taking in the sun as if it were sustenance.

There’s a light knock on the door, and Rick himself sticks his head into the room. “You’re up,” he says in surprise. “Thought you’d still be asleep. You were dead on your feet when you came up last night.”

“I’m awake,” you acknowledge. “And I feel fine. Hungry.”

“Throw some clothes on, and I’ll meet you downstairs in ten minutes. Mario doesn’t come in until noon, but I know a place not too far away that makes an excellent breakfast. Coco’s still asleep; she loathes mornings, so I don’t often have company.” Then he’s gone, the door closing with a quiet click.

You get up and go to the closet to find that some kind brownie has cleaned and pressed your shabby clothes and hung them up on the rod beside a handful of Arrow shirts in your size, and fine wool trousers folded over pants hangers. There is a white linen suit hooked on the back of the closet door with a note pinned to the lapel that reads, “Wear Me.” It makes you laugh, but it would look stupid with your battered black lace-up shoes, so you reach instead for your second-best trousers, your first-best having been the wool ones you wore for three straight days and never want to wear again. But then you see a pair of white-and-cream shoes on the floor of the closet beside your brogans, and you crumble to the silent pressure of the Bellevues’ generosity and your own desperate need to look good for Rick. A five-minute shower and shave and a brush of your teeth with the new toothbrush in the glass, a quick process of dressing in new clothes from the skin out, and you’re only a minute late meeting Rick.

He’s waiting by the front door of the club, a straw fedora on his head and another in his hand. He tosses it to you and you put it on. “Ready?” he says.

“Yes. Thank you. For the clothes and things. And the bed. And….”

He laughs and opens the door. “Consider it—”

“An investment,” you finish for him. “Yes. But I’m still grateful.”

There’s a car waiting at the curb, a beautiful golden Lincoln Model K, with its low, sweeping lines. The interior is white leather, and it occurs to you that the Bellevues must have their fingers in more pots than just a little supper club that caters to oddball types. And the people you met last night were oddballs, all right, not just in their social or racial or physical characteristics, but something much deeper, much less clear. You’re not quite sure what it is, but you push it to the back of your skull to cogitate on later, when you have the inclination.

For now, you want to enjoy this moment, the ride in a sleek high-powered car beside a sleek high-powered man, on a cool, clear morning with empty streets. You shoot him a quick sidelong look and are oddly comforted to see that his hair, while definitely brown, is not electric with copper sparks and no longer than it was last night.

“It’s not far, and at this hour, before the traffic, it should only take about twenty minutes. If you’re desperate, there’s a Thermos flask full of coffee under the seat. I made it earlier. But that’s the extent of my cooking ability.”

“I can wait,” you say.

The car is open, so you both are quiet, silenced by the wind of your passing as he speeds through the city streets. It is only a matter of minutes before you have left the city behind and are tooling along rougher country roads. There aren’t any mountains within a hundred miles of the city, but the river cuts through bluffs to the west, so the road climbs in switchbacks up to the higher ground. You arrive at your destination, a small restaurant on top of the bluff, and Rick pulls into the gravel lot. The sign says Delphie’s. As you climb out of the car, the front door opens, and a small woman comes running out to leap into Rick’s arms. He laughs and hugs her. She plants a loud kiss on his cheek before dropping to her feet in the gravel and giving him a good, solid punch to the upper arm. “Four weeks!” she yells at him. “Four
weeks
!”

“I’ve been busy,” he says weakly. “She’s been good?”

“She’s fine,” the woman says, and then turns to you. “Hullo. I’m Delphie. You’re…?”

“Nate Petroff,” Rick says. “Our new headliner.”

She doesn’t say “Never heard of you,” but the phrase is loud in her skeptical look. But she shakes your hand anyway. “Meetcha,” she says, then to Rick, “Come on in. You can visit her while I’m fixin’ up your breakfast. Coffee’s ready, on the sideboard.”

The restaurant is tiny but clean, and the coffee is hot and black and perfect. Rick takes the cup you pour him and leads the way through a door at the back and up a short path to an even tinier cottage. He raps on the door once and then pushes it open.

The little living room is redolent with the sweet smoke of marijuana, but it’s not a jazz musician or flapper holding the joint. It’s a little old lady in a rocking chair, her eyes vague and filmy. “Hey, Auntie,” Rick says softly.

“Don’t you call me ‘Auntie,’ boy,” the woman says. “When you don’t hardly come to see me no more.”

“I’m sorry, Auntie. I brought you a present.” Rick reaches into his jacket pocket and takes out a brown-paper-wrapped package.

“Better be the weed,” “Auntie” says.

Rick laughs. “Of course.”

“I suppose you want me to look at him?”

“If you like.” Rick is noncommittal, but he glances at me.

The woman is crotchety, but little and frail. She doesn’t scare you until you sit on the hassock in front of her rocker and she leans forward. She smells of lavender, soft and powdery, and of pot, sickly sweet. Your empty stomach roils and you clench your coffee mug.

She says nothing, but stares at you a long moment. Then she turns to Rick and starts speaking very fast in a language that sounds Greek or Turkish or something Middle Eastern. He listens, going still, and then finally nods, slowly, as if unwilling to hear what she says. She winds down eventually and turns back to you. “It’s as well,” she says to you, as if you have a clue what she’s talking about, then sits back in her rocker and raises the joint to her lips again.

“Come on,” Rick says, and leads you back out of the smoky cottage.

“She has severe rheumatism.” His voice is apologetic as you walk back down the short path to the restaurant. “I bring her the marijuana because it eases the pain. She’s very old.”

“She’s very strange,” you counter. “What did she say? And what language was that?”

“It’s a Greek dialect. She’s from the same little village my family’s from. Of course, we’ve been in America for a long time.”

Delphie is waiting at the door with a big basket, which she hands to Rick. “Too nice a day to sit indoors. You go on up to the picnic spot.”

Rick gives her a buss on the cheek, and you follow him across the gravel lot to a stand of trees. Just past the trees is a wooden table and benches on a place near the edge of the bluff, overlooking the river. Rick sets the basket on the table, then turns to you. His face is serious, but the hand he reaches out to brush your jaw is gentle. “It wasn’t anything important. Just a crazy old woman’s ramblings. I shouldn’t have subjected you to that, but she has so few amusements. Ready for breakfast?”

There are rolls, and omelets in steaming bowls, and crisp bacon and spicy sausage. And more coffee, in a vacuum flask. And slices of melon in multiple colors. You and Rick eat silently, but when you’ve finished and set down your fork, he says, “What happened after the war?”

You blink. “After the war?”

“After you were discharged. What did you do?”

“I went home to Michigan for a while. I’d gotten a scholarship to the Detroit Conservatory, which they’d deferred for anyone who was fighting in the war, so when I left home, I went there.”

“They didn’t look at your war record?”

“Of course they did.” Your voice is sarcastic but you can’t help it. It hurts. “They asked me why I was dishonorably discharged.”

“What did you do?”

“What would you do? I
lied
. I told them that someone else had made advances to me, but that when I rebuffed them, he went to his officers and said I was the one. I had no proof, but neither did he, and so I told them that the officers chose to believe him.”

“Is that what you told your family?”

“No. I told them the truth. Which is why I left Detroit.” Your voice is shaking, so you take a moment to bite into a danish. The thick, sweet raspberry goo drips on your chin, and you wipe it off, licking your finger. When you look up, Rick is staring at your mouth.

Angrily, you say, “And then when I failed there, I went to New York and tried to get work there, and failed, and Philadelphia, and failed, and Boston, and failed, and took a job as a longshoreman, and then lost my job when the market crashed, and now I’ve come here, and you think I’m not going to fail again, and you’re
crazy
, you know that? I don’t know what you want of me, but I
suspect
, and I don’t like it. I’m not a charity case. I
won’t
be.” You drop the rest of the danish onto the plate and say, “So if that’s what it is, we can just say forget it. Drive me back to the club, and I’ll get my stuff, and get out of your hair.”

“You give up too easily,” Rick says, and eats a piece of bacon. It’s his turn to lick his fingers, and you stare just as helplessly at him as he did at you. “You think—”
slurp
“—that just because—”
slurp
“—I want you—”
slurp
“—that I don’t think you can sing? You saw the staff yesterday. You know you can sing, but you’re afraid, and I won’t tolerate fear of failure. Fear of
me
, that’s okay.” He wipes his fingers on his napkin and cocks his head at me. “Who’s Bertie?”

There’s only the sound of the breeze in the little clearing and the faraway rush of the river below. “He was my lover,” you say numbly. “In France.”

“Auntie says you left your heart on the battlefield, and what came back to the States was only your shell.”

And just like that, you’re back there, crawling over the mud and bodies and scraping your hands on stones and fallen barbed wire, the night sky exploding with lightning and rockets, the air red and misted. He is out there, wounded, not dead; you would know if he were dead, but they wouldn’t let you go until after night fell, not that night is any cover, any comfort, with the bright shells falling. But at last they send the corpsmen out with their wood-and-canvas stretchers, crawling over the ground like so many red-crossed ants, trying to find the merely wounded among the newly dead, and you go with them. For Bertie.

You find him, by luck or God’s grace or maybe by the humming recognition in your soul. He is torn and battered but alive, and you get him on a stretcher and, crouching, drag it like a travois back to the trench. It is hours, and you are terrified the whole time that he will die out there under the red and exploding sky. You don’t dare look back at him, just reaching behind you to touch his shoulder to make sure he’s still on the stretcher. You ignore the ache in your back and the ache in your thighs from half crawling. You ignore the rain and the rockets and the shriek of tracer bullets and the crunching thump of the guns.

One last stretch of barbed wire, and it tears your shirt—it will leave a scar on your back —but Bertie is in the hands of the British corpsmen, and they are carrying him back away from the lines. You can’t follow; you’re not hurt, much, and they shove your Winfield back into your hands and put you back on the line.

“He was injured. I brought him back to the trench.” You are quiet a moment, then say, “I met him again in New York. I was working as a waiter in a fancy restaurant. He came in with his wife. He didn’t know me.” The words are flat, meaningless.