“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Because nobody told me. Judy, you didn’t even mention to me that Fern was coming to New York!”
Judy made a sound of impatience: “Look, it was something Aimee wanted me to handle. It had to do with accompanying Lamin over here, she didn’t want it out in the world . . . It was delicate, and I handled it.”
“Do you handle who I live with too now?”
“Oh, love, I’m sorry—are you paying rent?”
I managed to get her off the phone and called Fern. He was in a taxi somewhere on the West Side Highway. I could hear the foghorn of a cruise ship docking.
“Better I find somewhere else. Yes, it’s better. This afternoon I look at a place in . . .” I heard papers being sadly shuffled. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Midtown somewhere.”
“Fern, you don’t know this city—and you don’t want to pay rent here, believe me. Take the room. I’ll feel shitty about it if you don’t. I’ll be at Aimee’s day and night—she’s got that show in two weeks, we’ll be up to our ears. I promise you—you’ll hardly see me.”
He closed a window, the river winds stopped rushing in. The quiet was unhelpfully intimate.
“I like to see you.”
“Oh, Fern . . . Please just take the room!”
That evening the only sign of him was an empty coffee cup in the kitchen and a tall canvas rucksack—the kind a student packs for a year off—leaning in the doorframe of his empty room. As he’d climbed the steps of the ferry with this single bag on his back, Fern’s simplicity, his frugality, had seemed to have something noble in it, I’d aspired to it, but here in Greenwich Village the idea of a forty-five-year-old man with a single rucksack to his name struck me as merely sad and eccentric. I knew he’d crossed Liberia, alone and on foot, aged only twenty-four—it was some kind of homage to Graham Greene—but now all I could think was: Brother, this city will eat you alive. I wrote a pleasant and neutral note of welcome, tucked it under the straps of his bag and went to bed.
? ? ?
I was right about barely seeing him: I had to be at Aimee’s for eight each morning (she woke daily at five, to exercise for two hours in the basement followed by an hour of meditation) and Fern always slept in—or pretended that he did. In Aimee’s townhouse all was frantic planning, rehearsal, anxiety: the new show was in a mid-size venue, she’d be singing live, with a live band, things she hadn’t done in years. To keep out of the line of fire, the meltdowns, the arguments, I stayed as much as I could in the office and avoided rehearsals whenever possible. But I gathered some kind of West African theme was afoot. A set of atumpan drums were delivered to the house, and a long-necked kora, swathes of kente, and—one fine Tuesday morning—a twelve-person dance troupe, African-by-way-of-Brooklyn, who were taken to the basement studio and didn’t emerge till after dinner. They were young, mostly second-generation Senegalese, and Lamin was fascinated by them: he wanted to know their last names and the villages of their parents, chasing down any possible connection of family or location. And Aimee was glued to Lamin: you couldn’t talk to her alone any more, he was there at all times. But which Lamin was it? She thought it very provocative and funny to tell me he still prayed five times a day, in her walk-in closet, which apparently faced Mecca. Personally I wanted to believe in this continuity, in this part of him still beyond her reach, but there were days I barely recognized him. One afternoon I brought a tray of coconut waters down to the studio and found him, in his white shirt and white slacks, demonstrating a move I recognized from the kankurang, a combination of side-stamp, shuffle and dip. Aimee and the other girls watched him carefully and repeated the movements. They were sweating, dressed in crop tops and ripped unitards, and were pressed so closely to him and each other that each movement he made looked like a single wave passing through five bodies. But the truly unrecognizable gesture was the one that swept a bottle of coconut water from my tray, without a thank-you, without the vaguest acknowledgment—you’d have thought he’d been taking drinks from the wobbling trays of serving girls every day of his life. Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money. Though there were times when I saw a haunted quality in him, like he was being stalked by something. Wandering into the dining room toward the end of his visit, I found him still at the breakfast table, talking at Granger, who looked very weary, as if he’d been there a long time. I sat down with them. Lamin’s eyes were fixed somewhere between Granger’s shaved head and the opposite wall. He was whispering again, a perplexing, uninflected speech that ran on like an incantation: “. . . and right now, our women are sowing the onions in the right-hand beds and then the peas in the left-hand beds, and if the peas are not irrigated in the correct way then when they will come to rake the ground, about two weeks from now, they will have a problem, there will be an orange curl to the leaf, and if it has this curl, then it has the blight and then they will dig up what has been sown and re-sow the beds, making sure I hope to put a layer of this rich soil we get from upriver, you see, when the men go upriver, about a week from now, when we travel up there we get the rich soil . . .”
“Uh-huh,” Granger was saying, every other sentence. “Uh-huh, Uh-huh.”
? ? ?
Fern made sporadic appearances in our lives, at board meetings or when Aimee required his presence to deal with practical problems related to the school. He looked pained at all times—physically winced whenever we made eye contact—and advertised his misery wherever he went, like a man in a comic with a black cloud above his head. In front of Aimee and the rest of the board he gave a pessimistic update, focused on recent aggressive statements of the President’s, concerning foreign presence in the country. I’d never heard him talk like that before, so fatalistically, it was not really in his character, and I knew I was the true, oblique target of his critique.
That afternoon in the apartment, instead of hiding in my room as usual, I confronted him in the hall. He’d just come back from a run, sweating, bent over, with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, looking up at me from under thick brows. I was very reasonable. He didn’t speak but seemed to take it all in. Without his glasses his eyes looked enormous, like a cartoon baby’s. When I finished he straightened up and bent the other way, pushing the small of his back forward with both hands.
“Well, I apologize if I embarrassed you. You are right: it was unprofessional.”
“Fern—can’t we be friends?”
“Of course. But you also want me to say: ‘I am happy we are friends’?”
“I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
“But this is not one of your musicals. The truth is I am very sad. I wanted something—I wanted you—and I didn’t get at all what I wanted or hoped and now I am sad. I will get over it, I suppose, but for now I am sad. Is it OK for me to be sad? Yes? Well. Now I shower.”
It was very difficult for me, at the time, to understand a person who spoke like that. It was alien to me, as an idea—I hadn’t been raised that way. What response could such a man—the type who gives up all power—possibly expect from a woman like me?