And now the audience — the real audience — understood. They saw that what they were watching was intended to be funny, ironic, that these were American dancers, not Africans — yes, finally they grasped that a trick had been played on them. These folks weren’t from Dahomey at all! They were just good old Negroes, after all, straight from Avenue A, in New York City itself! Kramer chuckled, the music turned to ragtime, and I felt my feet moving beneath me, trying to echo on the plush red carpet the complicated soft-shoe shuffle Tracey was performing right above me on the hard-wood stage. The steps were familiar to me — they would have been to any dancer — and I wished I was up there with her. I was stuck in London, in the year 2005, but Tracey was in Chicago in 1893, and Dahomey a hundred years before that, and anywhere and any time that people have moved their feet like that. I was so jealous I cried.
Show over, I came out of the long queue for the ladies and spotted Kramer before he saw me, he was standing in the lobby, bored and angry, holding my coat over his arm. Outside it had started to lash with rain.
“So, I’m gonna go,” he said, passing me my coat, barely able to look at me. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to go say hello to your ‘friend.’”
He turned his collar up and walked into that horrible evening, umbrella-less, still angry. Nothing offends a man so much as being ignored. But I was impressed: his dislike of me was so clearly stronger than any fear of my influence over his employer. Once he was out of sight I walked around to the side of the theater and found it was just as you always see it in the old movies: the door said “Stage Door” and there was a reasonable crowd of people waiting for the cast to emerge, despite the rain, clutching their little notepads and pens.
With no umbrella, I pressed against the side of the wall, facing out, just covered by a narrow awning. I didn’t know what I planned to say or how I was going to approach her, but I was just beginning to think about it when a car pulled up in the alleyway, driven by Tracey’s mother. She was hardly changed: through the rain-streaked windscreen I could see the same tin hoops in her ears, the triple chin, hair scraped back tight, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. I turned at once to the wall and, as she parked, made my escape. I ran down Shaftesbury Avenue, getting soaked, thinking about what I’d seen in the back of that car: two sleeping young children, strapped in their seats. I wondered whether this, and nothing else, was the true reason the story of Tracey’s life took so little time to read.
You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can’t cross. Lamin in that white suit in the Rainbow Room felt like an example of the opposite lesson. But in fact he didn’t have a visa, not yet. He had a new passport and a date of return. And when it was time to leave I would accompany him back to the village, along with Fern, staying on a week to complete the yearly report for the board of the foundation. After which Fern would remain, and I’d fly to London, to meet the children and supervise their quarterly visit to their fathers. So we were informed by Judy. Until then, a month together in New York.
For the past decade, whenever we were in the city, my base had been the maid’s room, on the ground floor off the kitchen, although occasionally a half-hearted discussion would take place about the possibility of a separate space — a hotel, a rental somewhere — which never led to anything and was soon forgotten. But this time an apartment had been rented for me before I even arrived, a two-bedroom on West 10th Street, high ceilings, fireplaces, the whole second floor of a beautiful brownstone. Emma Lazarus had once lived here: a blue plaque under my window memorialized her huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. My view was of a pink-blush dogwood in full bloom. I mistook all this for an upgrade. Then Lamin appeared and I understood I’d been moved out so he could move in.
“What exactly is going on with you?” Judy asked me, the morning after Jay’s birthday party. No preliminaries, just her strident yell coming at me through my phone as I tried to tell the bodega guy on Mercer to skip the apple in my green juice. “Have you had some kind of argument with Fernando? Because we just can’t have him in the house right now — there’s no room for him at the inn. We’ve got a full inn, as you probably noticed. Our lovebirds want their privacy. The plan was meant to be he’d stay with you for a few weeks, in the apartment, it was all settled — now suddenly he’s resistant.”
“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.