I need you.” Lily’s voice echoed in my ear as I got in my car.
I tried playing back what she had said, but I knew from her tone she must be in big trouble. I was still groggy with sleep, and all I had really heard was that she wanted me to hurry. I looked at the road. Saturday morning, early. No traffic.
I’d scribbled the address, in Harlem, on a scrap of yellow paper I put on the dashboard. 155th Street. I drove too fast, breaking the speed limits on the FDR.
Everything was gray, the tin-colored river where chunks of ice had formed, the buildings on the Queens side of the East River, everything except the red neon Pepsi sign. It was cold. I turned on the heater and put the radio on for the forecast. Snow. Fog. Cold. Sleet fell on my windshield.
I drove. I tried Lily on my cell over and over, but she didn’t answer. The only time I’d seen her in a year had been six weeks earlier, election night, the Sugar Hill Club in Harlem.
That night in November, when I see her, she looks wonderful. Her red hair sticking out from under a gold cardboard tiara, Obama’s name spelled out on it in glitter, Lily is wearing a white shirt, collar turned up in her jaunty way. She’s laughing. She doesn’t see me at first.
“Lily?”
“Hi, Artie,” she calls out to me, spotting me near the bar. “Hi,” she says, smiling, and then, for a moment, she’s swept away into the crowd.
This is why I’m here. This is why I drove uptown, why I had jammed my car into the tight spot on 152nd where I saw the silver ghost van.
I knew she’d been working on the Obama campaign, living uptown in a friend’s apartment. So when my pal Tolya Sverdloff had said, “Let’s go to Harlem election night,” I was OK with it. “I’ll meet you at the Sugar Hill Club,” I had said. I’d been here with Lily once or twice to listen to music. I figured she might show up.
In the club, the tension is electric, everybody waiting for the results. In the club I see white faces, black, Latino, Asian. People are yakking in Russian, Italian, French. Tonight everybody is a believer. Once Obama is elected, everything will change, people say. If it happens; when it happens. Soon.
The results are coming in, slowly at first. Inside the club, the TV hangs overhead like some ancient oracle, and with every win, the crowd turns to look.
Yes we can!
“Lily?”
Almost a year since I’ve seen her. It’s a year since we agreed to stay away from each other. No calls. No e-mails. I’ve kept tabs on her as best I can. We know some of the same people.
For a while I went to bars and coffee shops I knew she liked. Sometimes I went past her building on purpose and felt like an idiot standing on the corner of Tenth Street, watching out for her.
How long have I known her? Almost fifteen years, on and off.
The only thing I’d had from her all year was a handwritten note when Val died. Tolya’s daugther Valentina died and Lily wrote to me. Just that once. Only then.
Now, Saturday morning driving through the gray city dawn, sleet coming down on my windshield, Lily, her desperate phone call earlier, election night, were all rattling through my head. Like a maniac, I drove to Harlem, dialing her phone number over and over, hurrying to see her, to help her. Lily needed me.
“Artie? You knew I’d be here, didn’t you?” Lily says when she spots me at the club on election night. She’s close enough I can smell her perfume. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” She gestures at the TV. “I mean, if we win.”
“You’re superstitious?”
“Yeah. I’m not hatching any chickens before they’re cooked.” She laughs. “That’s not right, is it? Oh, God, I’m so happy. Hello, Tolya, darling,” she says, hugging him as he appears, diamond Obama button blazing on his black silk shirt, magnum of champagne in his hand, pouring it in her glass, in mine, in his. Lily gulps her drink.
“God, I wish they’d hurry the fuck up.” She glances at the TV screen. “So you guys thought I’d be here?”
“Luck,” I say. Lily smiles. Tolya laughs. He knows I’m lying, knows I picked this joint because I thought Lily might come. He keeps his mouth shut. We’ve been best friends a long, long time.
Suddenly, the noise in the club dies down. There’s a sudden hush. One more state. He’s almost in, somebody whispers.
The anxiety is so solid it forms a sort of invisible shelf everybody seems to lean on. We’re glued to the TV. Lily clutches my arm. I smell her perfume again. Joy. It’s perfume I gave her.
“What time is it?” somebody calls out. “Eleven,” somebody yells back. The bartender gets up on top of the bar so he can see better. In one hand is a red-and-white-checked dishcloth. In the other, a martini glass, as if he was in the middle of making a cocktail. He stands there, suspended, waiting.
As I drove uptown on my way to Lily that Saturday morning, the weather guy on 1010 WINS was reporting lousy weather-snow, cold, sleet, airports shutting down, flights cancelled.
Sudenly, I skidded. For a few seconds I was out of control. Like the silver van on election night.
I got through it, kept heading north, trying to get to Lily as fast as I could. Where was she again? 155th Street? I knew she was in big trouble. I had heard it in her voice. Call me, I yelled into the phone, even though I was alone in the car.
I was heading for a part of town I didn’t know at all. It made me edgy. If something went wrong-a crime, a death, an accident-I’d be a white cop in a black neighborhood at the other end of the city, where I didn’t know anybody, the Saturday before Christmas with a storm coming. Last time I’d been uptown was election night and that didn’t count, that had been a night out of real time when the whole city had dropped its tribal attitudes and celebrated together.
Maybe I should call somebody, make some kind of contact in case I needed help, I thought. But until I knew what was wrong, I didn’t want to involve other people. Maybe Lily was just unhappy. She wouldn’t call me for that. Would she?
I turned the radio up. The news was all bad. Financial shit, the system coming apart, Madoff’s arrest. The election, the blaze of optimism, the joy, already seemed a lifetime ago.
“We did it!”
Eleven o’clock. Eleven p.m. Somebody yells it out: “He’s in!” The club goes nuts. Somebody pounds out “Happy Days Are Here Again” on the piano. Up on the screen, I can see people going crazy, not just in New York, but in places like Iowa! Iowa!!
Everybody is hugging and kissing, we’re all drunk, the bartender pops corks on bottles of pink champagne, somebody hands me a huge glass of bourbon. A girl in a silky red dress jams an Obama hat on my head and kisses me on the mouth. She’s drinking flavored vodka; she tastes like pears. Outside, cars are honking, people singing. Inside, everybody is yelling, crying, hugging, singing, high-fiving.
Tolya, bottle in one hand, is dancing with a pretty woman almost as tall as him, in a silvery top, silk pants, high heels. A girl who looks like Beyonce-at least she does to me, drunk as I am-bumps into me, and apologizes and laughs, and Tolya pours her some wine, too, and she says, “It’s sweet, isn’t it? Tonight it is so sweet.”
“Where were you on election night 2008?” people will ask, the way they still ask each other about 9/11 or about the day JFK was shot. When I was a kid in Moscow, older people sometimes asked, Where were you when He died? and they meant Stalin. Where were you?
But this time, this night, we’ll remember it differently, this life-changing event. We did it!
On the TV, there are all the faces, people crying, older black people unable to stop crying. There’s Jesse Jackson in Chicago, face swamped with tears. Enough to break your heart.
“We want Obama,” a guy near me in the club shouts. He says something in Italian. In English he adds, “Fuck Berlusconi, we want an Obama.” An Irish guy is hanging all over me, moaning, “I love this place. I love you guys.”
“Now I can stay in America,” says Tolya. He’s never loved America the way I do, but tonight it’s different. He hugs me. “Now I can stay here.” In Russian, he adds, “Maybe I buy nice house in Harlem. Become black Russian.” He laughs and can’t stop.
I put my arms around Lily. I can smell her hair, feel her against me. I kiss her. She doesn’t seem to mind, maybe because everybody is kissing, and for a moment, she’s with me again, and I’m lost.
“ ‘Where were you that night?’ We’ll say that, won’t we?” she says, half to herself. “We’ll be able to say to each other, ‘Where were you that night?’ And we’ll be able to say, ‘I was there. I saw him elected.’ We did it.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
And then Lily is pulled away from me, dancing now with a good-looking black guy, a young guy.
They’re holding each other tight on the floor, and I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything, that tonight everybody’s dancing, everybody’s in love, it doesn’t mean anything at all. Does it?
For a second I lose sight of her, then she surfaces near the bar, her back to me.
I think to myself: If she turns in my direction in the next five minutes, I’ll go to her. If she turns around, I’ll go over, I’ll tell her how I feel.
But she doesn’t. She doesn’t turn around.
By the time I got off the Drive, the snow was coming down heavy, and I took a wrong turn. I found myself on the Harlem side street where I’d parked on election night, then turned the car around. For a second or two, I was lost. I felt uneasy. The streets were empty.
Finally, I pulled into Edgecombe Avenue. I found Lily’s building. Over the front door a plaque read T HE L OUIS A RMSTRONG A PARTMENTS. I looked up. The tall building was made of old brick. From a second floor overhang gargoyles-grotesque stone animals-leered down at me. The snow had settled onto the creepy figures.
I got out of my car, left it near the front door, and ran up the steps to the building, bumping into an elderly man in a tweed coat and cap, who muttered at me. A woman trying to get a little girl zipped into a pink jacket looked up at me and looked pissed off, maybe because I was parked in a delivery zone, or maybe she didn’t like my looks. Or my color. Dog walkers emerged from the building, one of them stopping, fussing with her hand to get the snow off her shoulders. Except for me, everybody was black.
I dialed Lily again. No answer. Anxiety, the kind that feels like a gust of icy wind on the back of your neck and along your spine, suddenly got to me. I stopped for a second, then I went inside.