As Lie Is to Grin by Simeon Marsalis

Author:Simeon Marsalis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

october 24, 2009

When I woke up next to Melody at 10:33, Rick was not home. We dressed quickly and walked up Central Park West, past the Trump International Tower at Sixtieth Street, to the entrance of the park. Melody directed me down the footpath, through a tunnel where she yelled “Hello!” just to hear her voice echo. We sat on the boulders south of the baseball fields and a patch of sand. It was 58 degrees outside. I read that on the digital box atop 1740 Broadway, right beneath the southern end of Central Park; it flashed the weather and time, one after the other, in five-second intervals. She was rolling a joint. Her fingers curled around the bleached piece of paper, and I wondered how many times she had done this before.

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

“No.”

“The cops don’t come up here.” She continued at her task, not stopping to look up or breathe, until she was licking the gum on the side of the paper, making the plant mixture into a cone.

“Does Rick talk to you about his father?”

“Oh God. Did he tell you about the gambling?”

“No. He said his father used to live in this neighborhood.”

“I don’t listen to him when he talks about his dad.”

“Why not?”

“His dad was a fake.”

“A fake?”

“His father was a complete phony.”

“How was he phony?”

“You can’t tell him I told you.”

“You know I’m not going to tell.”

“You can’t tell anybody.”

“What is it?”

“His father passed.”

“What do you mean passed?”

“He was black, and after college, he was white. He grew up here, went to school, stopped seeing his parents, then married my grandmother as Richard Murzynowics.” She chuckled while exhaling a cloud of smoke from the joint. “Rick tried to find his family, but his dad wouldn’t let him, so they had a falling-out. It’s the reason his art was any good.”

Her eyelids were low from the marijuana; when she turned to face me, the sense that she was involving me in some great deception became palpable. I did not let her know these thoughts, though. I lay on her stomach, and we stared up at the clouds for a while.

“I have to go.”

“Why don’t you come over tomorrow?”

“I have to help my mother with something.”

“Just come over at night before I go to sleep.”

“I wish I could.” She frowned, tried to light the joint again.

On the train ride to class, a homeless man pushed an elderly concertgoing couple out of the way. His socks had been ripped to tan shreds; pus came from the side of one shoe, ankles puffy, legs bent like each step was sending a knife through his shins.

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

His gray locks were interspersed with white tufts. As he passed, I noticed the back of his head was a dark brown—the hair sat against it like a halo. “Change! Change!” He stopped in front of a twenty-something Caucasian man—“Change! Change!” The glasses dipped down the man’s nose as he fumbled in the leather wallet for money—“Change!”

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