Ghost of a Flea Read Free Page B

Paris to live instead.
    I turned back from the window to find Deborah’s eyes bright. She’d been watching me.
    “You miss it.”
    “What?”
    “All of it. The books. What you used to do out on the streets, helping people. Teaching. LaVerne and Clare.”
    “A curious list.” I smiled. “And a long time ago.”
    “No. It wasn’t, Lew. Not long at all. That’s my point.”
    “It’s just …”
    “Just?”
    “I have a family now. You, David, Alouette and her crew. Maybe not exactly the kind of family Republicans are always going on about, but a family nonetheless. Things change.”
    “Things do, yes. I’m not sure people do.”
    I picked up our cups and took them to the sink. Stood there a moment looking out the window. Bat, Clare’s cat, now mine, jumped onto the windowsill outside and began rubbing shoulder and head against it.
    “I don’t think I can explain it, or even that I understand it myself. But it’s a little like when you’re crossing the lake.” The bridge over Lake Ponchartrain was twenty-five miles long. “You get halfway out there and you can’t see either bank. You just keep on going. It doesn’t much matter why you’re on the bridge in the first place.”
    I raised the window to let Bat in and fed him, probably for the third or fourth time today, but who was counting. Then I rinsed our cups. Deborah sat watching. Bat lifted his head from the bowl to assure himself that no one was likely to fly in under radar and get his food, then went back to eating. Deborah yawned.
    “Where I’m going is to bed. You?”
    “Maybe I’ll try getting some work done.”
    “Don’t stay up too late, love,” she said, reclaiming her legs and letting them take her upstairs to bed.
    When Deborah was gone, I took a bottle of Jamaican ginger beer from the refrigerator and went out to the slave quarters. I wasn’t writing books anymore, not for years, but habits hang around like ghosts or idiot children that won’t be got rid of, and sometimes late at night, still, I’d find myself sitting expectantly before the computer. Instead of writing books, I reviewed them. Every few weeks Daniels (last name only, on the official name tag) rang the bell and pulled from her bag a bulky padded envelope bearing the logo of the Times-Picayune, Washington Post, Boston Review.
    This one, a biography of Kenneth Fearing, had arrived a month or so back, so I must be close to deadline on it. Fearing, who had achieved celebrity as a leftist poet and mystery novelist in the Thirties and Forties, was now almost wholly forgotten, yet another victim of what he himself had called the magic eraser of silence. Fiercely antiestablishment, a man to whom literary acclaim could mean only the containment of any truly challenging writing, Fearing would have found publication of Floor of the Blue Night by an academic press (according to his mood of the moment) amusing, ironic or abhorrent. I opened again onto the book’s heavily indented pages, thickets of inset quotations and citations like broad stone stairs, like archways, and pulled out my notes, jotted on a typing sheet folded in half.
    Then I put the book down, turned off the light and sat  peering out. Bat had joined me, an indistinct, inert lump like a small gray haystack on the desk by the window. A family , I told Deborah, with no idea that, even as I said it, already my family had begun shrinking.
    In preparation for writing the review I’d looked up a half-remembered poem assembled by Fearing’s contemporary, Alfred Kreymborg, from headlines of the day.
    DOUBLE MURDER IN A HARLEM FLAT.
    CREW LOST WHEN LINER SINKS AT SEA.
    CHINAMAN BOILS RIVAL IN A VAT.
    COOLIDGE SURE OF MORE PROSPERITY.
    EARTHQUAKE SHAKES THE WHOLE PACIFIC COAST.
    MORE FOLK OWN FORD CARS THAN FOLK WHO CAN’T.
    KU KLUX KLAN WATCH ANOTHER NEGRO ROAST….
    It was in the Thirties, Fearing’s time, that America turned itself into an urban society. It was also, with the proliferation of mass media, when the