PART SEVEN: Late Days
I didn’t set eyes on Tracey again for eight years. It was an unseasonably warm May evening, the night I went out with Daniel Kramer, a first date. He came to the city quarterly, and was one of Aimee’s favorites in the sense that he did not, by virtue of being handsome, meld entirely with all the other accountants and financial advisers and copyright lawyers she regularly consulted, and so in her mind had been granted things like a name, qualities like a “good aura” and a “New York sense of humor” and a few biographical details she had managed to recall. Originally from Queens. Attended Stuyvesant. Plays tennis. Trying to keep the arrangements as loose as possible, I had suggested to him that we go to Soho and “play it by ear,” but Aimee wanted us to come first to the house for a drink. It wasn’t common at all, this kind of casual, intimate invitation, but Kramer didn’t seem surprised or alarmed to receive it. The twenty minutes we were granted passed with no customer-like behavior. He admired the art — without overdoing it — listening politely as Aimee repeated all the things the dealer who sold the art to her had told her about the art when she bought it, and soon enough we were free, of Aimee, of the oppressive grandeur of that house, skipping down the back stairs, both a little giddy on good champagne, emerging on to the Brompton Road and into a warm, close night, muggy, threatening a storm. He wanted to take the long walk into town — we had vague plans to see what was on at the Curzon — but I was not a tourist and those were my salad days of impossible heels. I was about to look for a taxi when, for “fun,” he stepped off the curb and waved down a passing pedicab.
“She collects a lot of African art,” he said, as we climbed into the leopard-print seats — he was only making conversation, but primed against any hint of a customer, I cut him down: “Well, I don’t really know what you can mean by ‘African art.’”
He looked surprised by my tone but managed a neutral smile. He relied on Aimee’s business and I was an extension of Aimee.
“Most of what you saw,” I began in a tone better suited for a lecture hall, “is actually Augusta Savage. So Harlem. It’s where she lived when she first came to New York — I mean, Aimee. Of course, she’s a great supporter of the arts generally.”
Now Kramer looked bored. I was boring myself. We didn’t speak again until the bike stopped at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Greek Street. As we pulled up at the curb we were surprised by the existence of a Bangladeshi boy, whose independent reality we had, up to that point, entirely forgotten, but who had undeniably brought us this far, and now turned round on his bike seat, his face soaked with sweat, hardly able to explain, through gasps, how much this form of human toil cost per minute. There was nothing we wanted to see at the cinema. In a slightly tense mood, our clothes sticking to us in the heat, we wandered toward Piccadilly Circus, without knowing which bar we were heading for, or whether we should eat instead, both already considering the evening a failure, looking straight ahead and confronted, every few steps, with the giant playbills of the theaters. It was in front of one of these, a little way down, that I stopped dead. A performance of the musical Showboat, a shot of the “Negro chorus”: head-handkerchiefs, rolled-up trousers, aprons and work skirts, but all done tastefully, carefully, “authentically,” with no hint of Mammy or Uncle Ben about it. And the girl closest to the camera, her mouth open wide in song, with one arm stretched high above her head, clutching a broom — the very picture of kinetic joy — was Tracey. Kramer came up behind me to peer over my shoulder. I pointed a finger at Tracey’s upturned nose, as Tracey herself used to point at a dancer’s face as it passed across our TV screens.
“I know her!”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I know her really well.”
He tapped a cigarette out of a packet, lit it and looked the theater up and down.
“Well… you wanna go see it?”
“But you don’t like musicals, do you? Nobody serious does.”
He shrugged. “I’m in London, it’s a show. That’s what you’re meant to do in London, isn’t it? Go see a show?”
He passed me his cigarette, pushed open the heavy doors and headed to the box office. It all of a sudden seemed very romantic and coincidental and well timed and I had a ridiculous girlish narrative running in my head, of a future moment in which I would be explaining to Tracey — backstage somewhere in some sad regional theater, as she pulled on a pair of tired old fishnets — that the very moment I realized I’d met my love, the moment I came into my true happiness, was the same moment I happened to spot her, quite by chance, in that very small role she’d had, back in the day, in the chorus of Showboat, all those years and years ago…
Kramer came back out with two tickets, great seats in the second row. In lieu of dinner I bought myself a huge bag of chocolates, of the kind I rarely got to eat, Aimee considering such things not only nutritionally fatal but clear evidence of moral weakness. Kramer bought two large plastic tumblers of bad red wine and the program. I searched through it but couldn’t find Tracey. She wasn’t where she should be in the alphabetical list of the cast, and I started to worry that I was suffering from some kind of delusion, or had made an embarrassing error. I flicked the pages back and forth, sweat breaking out on my forehead — I must have looked crazy. “You OK?” asked Kramer. I was almost at the end of the program again when Kramer pressed a finger to a page to stop me turning it.
“But isn’t that your girl?”
I looked again: it was. She’d changed her common-sounding, barbarous last name — the name by which I’d always known her — to the Frenchified and, to me, absurd Le Roy. Her first name, too, had been adapted: now it was Tracee. And in the picture her hair was straight and glossy. I laughed out loud.