Bronx Noir

Gussy sighed, just as their bald, husky waiter returned delivering shellfish on a Formica tray. (Kingston, as always, ordered the lobster, king crab legs, and Spanish yellow rice for two.) She tied the plastic bib around her neck thinking back to when she first suggested Kingston invest in property. The Creole cottage he bought five years ago in the French Quarter had become the getaway home he’d never have brainstormed on his own. Though Kingston wasn’t much for vacations, running numbers six days a week, Gussy planned ahead for whatever retirement might come with forethought he consistently lacked. A condo in North Carolina, near an old childhood friend of Kingston’s, was Gussy’s first choice. But Kingston overruled, choosing New Orleans instead, for its jazz history.

Gussy reconnected with Kingston after leaving the service as a tie to the civilian world and to continue what they had started during their twenties in the Middle Eastern desert. She considered love to be an active decision, a conscious choice. She gave her heart to Kingston because, from her viewpoint, he needed the direction it was her nature to provide, and becoming the main woman in his life gave her access to his ample savings. Marriage might never be on the horizon but Gussy always appreciated the cushy situation she long ago stepped into as his assistant and lover.

The attached row house at 1839 Bruner—passed down from Kingston’s parents—must be put on the market, Gussy thought, cracking a lobster leg. She’d be breaching her own lease at Fordham Hill. Their collective furniture would need to be packed and shipped south, sold, or given away. (The cottage was sparsely furnished and completely undecorated.) They’d require two tickets to Louisiana sooner than later. Hillside, Pookie, and Elliott would have to be informed fast—Gussy was sure they wouldn’t have seen this coming—and the Amsterdam lease would also be broken. This was all irreversible stuff. She hoped Kingston had measured everything carefully.

“Is it worth it?” she asked softly.

“It’s time for a change,” Kingston replied, his mouth full. He finished chewing, measuring his words. “Seem like ain’t nobody wanna end up like they parents nowadays, and I gotta count myself in that too. Daddy always promised my mother he’d give all this up and retire down to Florida someplace and never got the chance to do it before she passed. I worked right up beside him till the end and it was clear to me…” He paused. “I just know he’d a done things different if he coulda. Fuck Héctor and Eddie, it ain’t about them. The house been robbed before. I just don’t wanna do this no more.”

Kingston’s initiative took Gussy a bit by surprise. “Well, I’ll handle the details, just let me know what you intend on doing yourself and I can take care of everything else. I can leave enough for Hillside and the fellas to take care of themselves till next year.” She smiled. “I can’t believe we’re really going! I do love it down there.”

“It’s a new day, Gus. I done made ample money off a this, God bless Daddy. There got to be more to life than Baychester and Amsterdam Avenue. Y’know, New Orleans is a big jazz town.”

“Really?” Gussy knew this already.

“Hell yeah, the Marsalis family hails from down there and…”

Kingston Lee never wore an earring. Back when he was a teenager at Evander Childs High, putting a hole through your right ear branded you a fag. But the year his boys all pierced their lefties together at a jewelry store on White Plains Road, Kingston just couldn’t do it. He failed to understand why everybody now seemed to get tattooed at the drop of a hat. He’d always had an aversion to anything that could make him substantially different than he was when his personality gelled as a youngster. Gussy learned this about him early on, deciding it was how Kingston had reached forty-two without any children. Moving from New York City, leaving the only real profession he’d ever known, felt to Kingston like bungee jumping with a sometimey cord.

His father had started the business in the ’60s, from a nearly bare stationery store on 233rd Street. Waiting for Jiffy Lube to service his ride that humid, overcast Sunday—he intended to leave it to Wallace and call things even—Kingston walked from Boston Road and up Baychester to 233rd, taking rolls of mental photographs. Passing Spellman High’s football field he remembered fingering a cheerleader before a game underneath the bleachers; he was a mean running back, she favored actress Jayne Kennedy and knew it. Up the hill he passed the Carvel stand his mother crashed into when he was ten. (“Fasten your seat belt,” she had said dead calmly, realizing the Oldsmobile’s brakes were failing.) Comics & Comics was long gone, another memory now. And the Big Three Barbershop.