Six
On that well-remembered night nearly a month before, when the Summer heat had just begun its assault, when the noises of Corona were giving a hideous voice to his own anguish, Willie had taken a long bicycle ride to a quieter place. He had fled to a neighborhood where all the streets were dark, and steeped not in the sounds of Merengue blasting out of car radios, but in the soporific soughing of wealth in the trees. Here, the darkness did not seem to hide the workings of evil, but rather to enshroud in comfort and tranquility the mysterious beings who made their homes along the tree-lined streets. They are castles! he thought, as he marveled at facades of brick and stone, splendidly lit by multi-colored lights, that gave the Gardens of Forest Hills the feel of permanent Christmas.
As he pedaled, from time to time there was movement visible inside one of the houses. It seemed to Willie that each enormous home enclosed only the merest human presence. What few occupants there were, he reckoned, must be swathed in lavish excesses of space. What could they be doing in there? he wondered. But the question was subsumed under a general awe of the place, as Willie pedaled his bike more slowly, closing his eyes in quiet delight whenever he steered through a triangle of yellow effulgence that some un-curtained window let fall across his path.
Almost forgotten now, was the aching, sleepless life of Corona, with its nightly street-spill of noisy, fetid humanity. But beyond just the sights and sounds and smells of the place where Willie lived, Corona possessed a quality that could only be understood when one managed to get away from there, even for just a short while. It was like a suffocation, like a hand on the throat that you noticed only when it let go of you. And so, with some of the immediacy of his real life abated, Willie saw that he could indulge a fantasy. He imagined that one of those great, palatial doors would swing open just as he passed on his bicycle. For a brief moment it had seemed reasonable to Willie that a kindly, childless couple might emerge from within their utter sanctuary, and offer him the glowing embrace of that magical life – a life that now surrounded him, but ignored indifferently. Ignored utterly. The creaking from the rusted chain on his bike reduced him to a kinship with the crickets, anonymous, unwanted contributors to the quaint music of the night. Willie saddened and felt an inescapable suction back toward Corona.
So few cars passed Willie as he pedaled through the winding streets, that he could study each as intently as he did the homes. They too were capsules of mystery, glinting in the low light, moving with mellifluous ease over the smooth tar. A long, black car, pulled to the curb in front of a dark, tree-hidden house. Its left-rear door cracked open, and the wonder of the vehicle’s contents spilled brightly onto the street. Willie watched a bearded man emerge, and walk around the front of the limousine, his white slacks exploding brilliantly as he passed before the headlights. A second passenger took the bearded man’s extended hand, and rose out of the vehicle with a weird lightness in his body, as if he’d been gusted out by a warm breeze, as if unseen attentions served him. As Willie swerved his bike away instinctively to pass them in shadow (and this part had remained most glaringly alive in memory), he saw that none other than 99th Street’s own Cesar Manuel Abreu was the passenger at the center of the bearded man’s interest.
Pedaling as slowly as physics would allow, and fully trusting in the flawless texture of the road, Willie craned back his neck to keep his eyes on the two figures beside the black stretch limo. The bearded man’s smile was large and lost in the spell of some unknown intoxicant. He gestured for the attention of the driver, as if the presence of another set of eyes would somehow enhance the pleasure of the moment. He slipped a hand possessively under the long hair on Cesar’s nape . Then there was a moment of shift, tranquil and endless, when Willie’s perception adjusted itself around a new reality. Willie had by now skidded his bike to a stop and was watching intently as the bearded man snaked his tongue into Cesar’s receptive mouth. Making out! Cesar developed that odd loss of rigidity in his body again, and they moved together in that embrace for what seemed to Willie like a long, long time. So long that Willie had to adjust his perception once more, though now in a way that was streaked with pain. Then the two lovers walked up into shadow and the house beyond. Willie had been immobilized astride his bike. He only moved when the limousine slid darkly past him, slowing down in an almost predatory scrutiny. The driver smiled at him, and the smile was full of something that Willie had never before seen.