over after work to take a hot shower?” she said. “I can bring a towel, I’ve got piles of towels.”
“Our shower is dying to see you,” I said. “And Oliver will lend you his ducky.”
“Kiki Kiki Kiki Kiki Kiki!” Oliver yelled, when she came through the door. Maybe I’d worked him up too much in advance. We’d gotten the place very clean.
When my aunt came out of the bathroom, dressed again in her slacks and sweater and with a steamed-pink face under the turban of her towel, I handed her a glass of red wine. “A person without heat or water needs alcohol,” I said. And we sat down to meat loaf, which I was good at, and mashed potatoes, which Oliver had learned to eat with garlic.
“This is a feast,” she said. “Did you know the sultans had feasts that went on for two weeks?”
Oliver was impressed. “This one could go on longer,” I said. “You should stay over. Or come back tomorrow. I mean it.”
Tomorrow was what I needed—it was the visiting night for inmates with last names from M to Z.
“Maybe the power will be back by then,” Kiki said. “Maybe maybe.”
At Rikers, Boyd and the others had spent the hurricane under lockdown, no wandering off into the torrent. Rikers had its own generator, and the buildings were in the center of the island, too high to wash away. It was never meant to be a place you might swim from.
“You know I have this boyfriend, Boyd,” I said.
Kiki was looking at her plate while I gave her the situation, about the weekly visits, as much as I could tell in front of Oliver. “Oh, shit,” she said. She had to finish chewing to say, “Okay, sure, okay, I’ll come right from work.”
When I leaned over to embrace her, she seemed embarrassed. “Oh, please,” she said. “No big deal.”
What an interesting person Kiki was. What could I ever say to her that would throw her for a loop? Best not to push it, of course. No need to warn her not to tell my parents either. Not Kiki. And maybe she had a boyfriend of her own that I didn’t even know about. She wasn’t someone who told you everything. She wasn’t showering with him, wherever he was. Maybe he was married. A man that age. Oh, where was I going with this?
When Kiki turned up the next night, she was forty-five minutes later than she’d said, and I had given up on her several times over. She bustled through the door saying, “Don’t ask me how the subways are running. Go, go. Get out of here, go.”
She looked younger, all flushed like that. What a babe she must’ve once been. Or at least a hippie sweetheart. Oliver clambered all over her. “Will you hurry up and get out of here?” she said to me.
The subway (which had only started running that day) was indeed slow to arrive and very crowded, but the bus near Queens Plaza that went to Rikers was the same as ever. After the first few stops, all the white people emptied out except for me. I read People magazine while we inched our way toward the bridge to the island; love was making a mess of the lives of any number of celebrities. And look at that teenage girl across the aisle in the bus, combing her hair, checking it in a mirror, pulling the strands across her face to make it hang right. Girl, I wanted to say, he fucked up bad enough to get himself where he is, and you’re still worried he won’t like your hair?
Of course, I was all moussed and lipsticked myself. I had standards. But you couldn’t wear anything too revealing—no rips or see-through—they had rules. Visitors must wear undergarments.
Poor Boyd. After I stood in a line and put my coat and purse in a locker and showed my ID to the guards and got searched and stood in a line for one of Rikers’s own buses and got searched again, I sat in the room to wait for him. It was odd being there without Oliver. The wait went on too long. It wasn’t like you could bring a book to occupy you. And then I heard Boyd’s familiar name, read from the list.
Those jumpsuits didn’t flatter anyone. But when we hugged, he smelled of soap and Boyd, and I was sorry for myself to have him away so long. “Hey, there,” he said.
“Didn’t mean to get here so late,” I said.
Boyd wanted to hear about the hurricane and who got hit the worst. Aunt Kiki became my material. “Oh, she had her candles and her pots of water and her cans of soup and her bags of rice, she couldn’t see why everybody was so upset.”
“Can’t keep ’em down, old people like that,” he said. “Good for her. That’s the best thing I’ve heard all week.”
I went on about the gameness of Kiki. The way she’d taught me the right way to climb trees when I was young, when my mother was only worried I’d fall on my head.
“I didn’t know you were a climber. Have to tell Claude.”
His friend Claude, much more of an athlete than Boyd was, had recently discovered the climbing wall at some gym. Boyd himself was a couch potato, but a lean and lanky one. Was he getting puffy now? A little.
“Claude’s a monster on that wall. Got Lynnette doing it too.” Lynnette was Claude’s sister. And Boyd’s last girlfriend before me. “Girls can do that stuff fine, he says.”
“When did he say that?”
“They came by last week. The whole gang.”
What gang? Only three visitors allowed. “Lynnette was here?”
“And Maxwell. They came to show support. I appreciated it, you know?”
I’ll bet you did, I thought. I was trying not to leap to any conclusions. It wasn’t as if she could’ve crept into the corner with him for a quickie, though you heard rumors of such things. Urban myths.
“Does Claude still have that stringy haircut?”
“He does. Looks like a root vegetable. Man should go to my barber.” The Rikers barber had given Boyd an onion look, if you were citing vegetables.
“They’re coming again Saturday. You’re not coming Saturday, right?”
I never came on Saturdays. I cut him a look.
“Because if you are,” he said, “I’ll tell them not to come.”
You couldn’t blame a man who had nothing for wanting everything he could get his hands on. This was pretty much what I thought on the bus ride back to the subway. Oh, I could blame him. I was spending an hour and a half to get there every week and an hour and a half to get home, so he could entertain his ex? I was torn between being pissed off and my preference for not making trouble. But why had Boyd told me? The guy could keep his mouth shut when he needed to.
He didn’t think he needed to. Because I was a good sport. What surprised me even more was how painful this was starting to be. I could imagine Boyd greeting Lynnette, in his offhand, Mr. Cool way. “Can’t believe you dropped in.” Lynnette silky and tough, telling him it had been too long. But what was so great about Boyd that I should twist in torment from what I was seeing too clearly in my head?
I was sitting on the bus during this anguish. I wanted Boyd to comfort me. He had a talent for that. If you were insulted because some asshole at daycare said your kid’s shoes were unsuitable, if you splurged on a nice TV and then realized you’d overpaid, if you got fired from your job because you used up sick days and it wasn’t your fault, Boyd could make it seem hilarious. He could imitate people he’d never met. He could remind you it was part of the ever-expanding joke of human trouble. Not just you.
When I got back to the apartment, Oliver was actually asleep in his bed—had Kiki drugged him?—and Kiki was in the living room watching the Cooking Channel on TV. “You watch this crap?” I said.
“How was the visit?”
“Medium. Who’s winning on Chopped?”
“The wrong guy. But I have a thing for Marcus Samuelsson.” He was the judge who had a restaurant right here in Harlem, a chef