Free Three-Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell Page B

sighed.
    â€œOh, honestly, Eden . . . hipsters and Negroes! Don’t you
ever
want to get married?”

MILES
    9
    A few weeks prior to my graduation from Columbia, my mother surprised me by pressing a small nickel-chrome key into my palm and telling me a secret.
    This happened in our family apartment in Harlem, but I wasn’t living there at the time. At Columbia, I had worked out a way to stretch the scholarship money to afford a room in one of the dormitories, thinking—with that tragically flawed logic of mine—that not living on campus was all that stood between me and making friends. As it turned out, it was a pathetic room and I hated being in it. I was profoundly lonely and I had no roommates to speak of; no one in the housing office wanted to make any assumptions as to how another student might feel about sharing a room with a colored boy. They had resolved this predicament by giving me my own room. I was well aware they could have done much worse by me, and I felt guilty each time I looked at the cramped, windowless space and wondered if my room wasn’t really a broom closet they had converted at the very last minute in the hopes I wouldn’t notice—or, at the very least,that I wouldn’t be brave enough to raise a ruckus upon making such an observation.
    In any event, this rather sad broom closet of a room was where I was when the telephone in the hall rang and one of the young freshmen—I was the only upperclassman on my floor—began hollering for me. “Tillman!” he shouted. “It’s your ma on the horn!” I got up from my bed, grateful for the chance to leave my room, and thinking my mother was simply calling to check in on me.
    â€œMiles?” she said. “You gotta stop by the house this afternoon.”
    â€œWhat time?” I asked, knowing better than to ask the reason.
    â€œI got some errands to run right quick, but why don’t you c’mon over now. I be back real soon.”
    Her command that I come over was nothing unusual, but her urgency was. “Is anything wrong?”
    â€œNo, no, nothing’s wrong. But ever since I woke up, I been thinking about somethin’ and I needs to talk to you. Your brother’s out playing with the neighborhood boys, and be best to talk before Wendell get home.”
    â€œAll right,” I said. “I’ll see you in a bit.” I hung up and walked back to my broom closet to put some shoes on. The dormitory halls were full of that particular manic energy that occurs at the end of a school year, when half the students are whooping with hilarity over having already finished their exams and the other half are still studying like mad to pass them. It was the season when clothes and books are being boxed up and old hot plates are left abandoned near the trash chutes by virtue of some undergraduate’s careless thought that some custodian might want to adopt what he, the undergraduate, no longer wants to transport elsewhere.
    Walking from Columbia to Harlem was mostly a matter of descending the hill that separated the stony Gothic façades of Morningside Heights from the green streetlamps and brownstones of Harlem, and the most pleasant route to take was through Morningside Park along the easternside of campus. It was a warm day; little beads of sweat tickled my temples as I ambled down the sloped path. A hot day meant, of course, that Harlem would be busy with people sitting outside on their stoops, fanning themselves and gossiping. There would be greengrocers pouring buckets of ice over their produce, pushcarts selling ice cream, and children dancing spastically in front of gushing fire hydrants, cheering and laughing—and, of course, eventually booing in protest when the firemen came to shut the spouts down again. I had these sights and sounds memorized; together they made up my childhood.
    â€œHey, Miles,” a young woman called to me from her stoop, flirting