SHE COULDN’T GO TO BED UNTIL HE GOT HOME; SHE HAD TO HEAR EVERYTHING about his first day at work. When she had called him around noon to find out how his day was going, he had hurriedly said it was going good, he couldn’t talk, but everything was good. So she’d had no choice but to wait, and now, at almost midnight, she could finally hear him at the door, panting after having climbed the five flights of stairs it took to get to their apartment.
“So?” she asked, grinning as he sat down on the threadbare living room sofa.
“I cannot complain,” he said, smiling. “It went well.”
She went into the kitchen and got him a glass of cold water, helped him take off his jacket and, after he’d rested on the sofa with his head thrown back for about a minute, brought out his dinner and pulled out a chair so he could make himself comfortable at the dinette set.
Then she began asking him questions: What exactly did he do for the family? Where did he drive them to? What did the Edwardses’ apartment look like? Was Mrs. Edwards a nice lady? Was their son well behaved? Was he going to be working this late every day?
He was tired, but she was persistent, scattering the questions all over him like confetti on a victorious warrior. She had to know how rich people lived. How they behaved. What they said. If they could hire someone to drive them around, then their lives must really be something, eh?
“Come on,” she said. “Tell me.”
So he told her everything he could in between mouthfuls of his dinner. The Edwardses’ apartment was big and beautiful, he said, millions of dollars more beautiful than their sunless one-bedroom apartment. One could see the whole city through the window in their living room—his mouth had dropped open when he saw it.
“Chai!” she said. “What would it be like to have a place like that? I’ll jump and touch the sky every day.”
The place looked like one of those rich-people apartments you see on television, he went on. Everything was white or silver, very clean, very shiny. He’d spent only a few minutes there while waiting to take Mighty to school after he returned from dropping Mr. Edwards at work. Mrs. Edwards had asked him to come upstairs because nine-year-old Mighty wanted to be properly introduced before being chauffeured to school. “A very nice child and a well-brought-up one, too, that Mighty,” he said.
“That’s good to hear,” she said. “A rich child who is well brought up.” She wanted to ask if Mighty was as well brought up as their Liomi, but she didn’t—she thought it best to follow the advice her mother had given her years ago about abstaining from comparing her child to another woman’s child. “They only have this one child?” she asked instead.
He shook his head. “Mighty told me he has a big brother. He lives uptown in another apartment they own and goes to Columbia University. The School of Law.”
“You’re going to be driving him around, too?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. If I have to drive him, too, it’s no problem, but from the way Mighty was talking it looks like the brother doesn’t come to visit them often, and Mrs. Edwards is not happy about it. I didn’t ask him any more questions.”
She filled up his half-empty glass of water and allowed him to eat in silence for a few minutes before resuming her questions. “And Mrs. Edwards,” she went on, “what does she look like?”
“Good-looking,” he replied. “Just like a woman with a rich husband should look. Winston said she’s one of those food people.”
“What food people?”
“The people who teach other people how to eat … so they can look one way or not look another way.” He picked up the can of Mountain Dew she’d set on the table, opened it, and took a long sip. “People in this country, always worrying about how to eat, they pay someone good money to tell them: Eat this, don’t eat that. If you don’t know how to eat, what else can you know how to do in this world?”
“So she must be slim and really good-looking.”
He nodded distractedly, sweat pouring down his face from the extra pepper she’d tossed into the chicken and tomato sauce. Ignoring the sweat, he picked up a drumstick, ripped the meat off the bone with his front teeth, and sucked the juice inside the bone.
“But what exactly does she look like?” she pressed on. “Ah, bébé, details, please.”
He sighed and said he couldn’t remember too much about what she looked like. The one thing he remembered, he said, was that when he first saw her, he thought she looked something like the wife in American Beauty—a movie they both loved and watched whenever they wanted to remind themselves that life in American suburbs could be very strange and maybe it was best to live in peaceful American cities, like New York City.
“What’s the real name of that woman again?” he asked with a full mouth, tomato sauce running down his fingers. “You’re the one who knows these things.”
“Annette Bening?”
“Yes, yes. That’s who she looks like.”
“With the same eyes and everything? She must be beautiful, eh?”
He said he could not remember if Cindy Edwards had Annette Bening’s eyes.
“It’s not like you can even know what her real eyes are like,” she said. “Some of them wear colored contacts; they can change their eyes whenever they feel like it. A woman like Mrs. Edwards, she was probably born into a rich family and started wearing colored contacts even as a child.”
“I don’t know …”
“Rich father, rich mother, rich husband. I’m sure her whole life she’s never known what it’s like to worry about money.”
Licking his lips, he picked up a piece of plantain from the plate, broke it with his fingers, dunked half of it into the tomato sauce bowl, and hurriedly pushed it into his mouth for processing.
She watched him, amused at the speed with which he was devouring his food. “And then what happened after you dropped Mighty off at school?” she asked.
He came back and picked up Mrs. Edwards, he said, took her to her office and then to an appointment in Battery Park City and to another appointment in SoHo, before taking her home and picking up Mighty from school and driving him and his nanny to a building on the Upper West Side where he got his piano lessons. He took Mighty and his nanny home after the lesson and then picked up Mr. Edwards from his office and drove him to a steak house on Long Island and back to the city around ten. He refilled the gas, parked the car in the garage, and took the crosstown bus from the east side to the west side. Then he caught the uptown 3 subway home.
“Weh!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that a lot of work for one person in one day?”
Sure, it might be, he told her. But for the kind of money he was being paid, wasn’t it to be expected? She shouldn’t forget, he said, that two weeks ago he was making only half of what Mr. Edwards was paying him, driving the livery cab twelve hours every day.
She nodded in agreement and said, “We can only thank God.”
He lifted his glass of water and took a sip.
“I calculated your thirty-five thousand salary, plus my ten thousand,” she said as she refilled his glass again. “After we pay your taxes and my school fees and rent and send money back home and everything else, we can still save like three or four hundred dollars a month.”
“Four hundred dollars a month!”
She nodded, smiling, amazed, too, at how so much can change in so little time. “We save like that, bébé,” she said, “we try really hard, we can save five thousand a year. Ten years, we could have enough money for down payment for a two-bedroom in Mount Vernon or Yonkers.” She moved her head closer to his. “Or even New Rochelle.”
He shook his head. “We’re going to start paying more for rent one day. How long do you think before the government finds out Mr. Charles is qualifying for cheap housing even though he drives a Hummer? They find out we’re paying him to live here, they kick us out—”