A Lucky Man: Stories by Jamel Brinkley

A Lucky Man: Stories by Jamel Brinkley

Author:Jamel Brinkley [Brinkley, Jamel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781555979959
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2018-04-30T16:00:00+00:00


A Lucky Man

Lincoln Murray sucked in his stomach on the crowded morning subway. He struggled to keep it from touching the young woman in front of him, whose throat was alive with perfume. Now in his mid-fifties, Lincoln withheld himself by habit. Only in the privacy of home did he allow his stomach to settle into its full hanging bulge. Until recently, his wife, Alexis, would tease him while reaching out in the same moment to soothe his paunch and his pride. Like his wife’s scent, the young woman’s perfume reminded him of bright citrus. A finger drawn lightly across her neck, an accident of that kind, and he’d have some trace of her to keep for a while.

The young woman’s face was smooth, dark, and glowing. She looked maybe a few years older than his daughter, Tameka. The white plastic buds in her ears emitted a loud, constant hum, and the wires connecting them to her phone were caught in two tangles. The young woman had eaten a healthy cereal with almond milk for breakfast, he guessed, or maybe she’d taken the time to pack spinach and cucumber and apple into a machine for fresh juice. And she drank it wearing whatever she had slept in, something pale yellow or some other color good for springtime, something that floated around her thighs. Maybe she had a lover and had stood this morning drinking the juice in one of his shirts.

As the train rocked, Lincoln leaned forward to figure out what the woman was listening to. His job at the Tilden School, even more than his relationship with his daughter, meant that he knew the music of young people. All he could tell was that the voice was female. He imagined one of those new soul singers with respectable clothing and a bloom of natural hair. Alexis watched them with pleasure on television. This thought prompted him to smile at the young woman, but she kept her lids narrowed, eyes dull crescents, and her attention lingered somewhere beyond him. The faulty cooling system in the car wheezed as it pumped in warm air. Sweat pearled a little on the woman’s nose and darkened her T-shirt at the chest.

They rode in the last car, which would let Lincoln out at the stairs closest to Ninety-third Street and Broadway, five blocks away from the school. The way the subway operator drove made the last car feel only loosely connected, as though dislodged from the rails. As it approached Penn Station, the train took turns he hadn’t felt on other mornings, turns that seemed to belong to another route, and which knocked the commuters in the last car against each other. Through it all, they avoided making eye contact, as people in the city tend to do.

When the doors opened, the crowd thinned out a little and the young woman took one of several seats that had opened nearby. Lincoln stood over her. He held on to a pole and took his phone from his left pocket.



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