The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  Mary Ann got into bed; I sat in a slipper chair, very uncomfortable, digging my nails into the palm of my hand.

  “Come and get into the bed with me,” Mary Ann giggled.

  “I don’t want to get into bed,” I argued. “I don’t take naps anymore.”

  “You know this old house is full of ghosts,” Mary Ann said, sitting up in bed. “Remember my Aunt Sarah died in this very room. If you don’t get in bed with me why she just might come wandering in here. Honest, Sonny.”

  I did not really believe in ghosts. But I wasn’t going to take a chance. I jumped into Mary Ann’s bed and pulled the covers tight over my head.

  Mary Ann giggled, her nervous, long hands probing my body like cold snakes. And then it dawned on me why we were playing this game on a hot, summer afternoon. I let Mary Ann undress me, got on top of her, moved my body as she instructed, though I did feel a little foolish humping up and down like a dog. I was tense with fear, wondering what would happen if Mary Ann’s grandmother walked in. The climax came and I stiffened my body and put my arms around Mary Ann. It felt as if I could press farther, but the distance was too great. And though I was still a little skeptical of this new act, I was certainly going to try it again.

  Afterwards, there was a whole string of little girls and, of course, Mary Ann. She kept me supplied with contraceptives which I hid in my winter boots.

  One cloudy afternoon that summer, the middle-aged minister of our church invited me into his small study in back of the church.

  “Sonny, how old are you?”

  “Past thirteen, Sir.”

  “You are getting to be a little man,” the minister said. “I’ve watched you in Sunday school. Some day you’ll make a fine disciple for the Lord. You have got the qualities and you act very grown up. That’s what it takes. Now I don’t want you to think I’m trying to force you into becoming a man of God. But I want you to think about it. You’d make a fine one and you could do a lot for our people.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You are getting to be a little man,” the minister grinned. “Yes, sir, a little man, and I bet all the little girls are crazy about you.”

  He came and stood by my chair and patted my head, looking at me with a laughing expression in his eyes. “Yes, sir, you have all the little girls following you around. You must have a whopper.”

  As the summer evenings grew longer, more languid, Grandpa would constantly repeat, “This world is not my home.” He had stopped reading the local paper, the National Geographic, and the almanac. I was surprised and slightly embarrassed. But I did not mention this to Grandma. We were very close but kept our secrets locked in our hearts. At the time, the great Why of everything had not formed in my adolescent mind. I knew Grandpa was not the man of fishing, ice cream days. I was getting older, almost fourteen.

  Grandpa’s mind drifted as he felt that this world was not his home. People began to talk. They were very decent about it; everyone knew my grandparents. We were a quiet, respectable, church-going family.

  We used to sit on the big front porch during the Missouri summer evenings. One night Grandpa tried to fight with Grandma. In the past she had always been able to outwit him or at least calm him down. But that night she was powerless. Two neighbor men came over and put him to bed. The doctor arrived and was going to give him an injection. But sleep had overtaken him, sleep that turned into death by eight the following morning.

  Then Grandma and I were alone in the paint-peeling, white frame house during the long days and short nights of that fourteen-year-old summer. We became very close.

  I began to be aware of something at this time, something perhaps I had been born with, and which was never to leave me. Loneliness.

  And this consciousness is here with me now, in this small, dark room in New York. I get up and look out the window. It is still raining.

  I WALK THROUGH the early morning streets saddled with a numb, self-centered despair. The bars are closing, and a terrible, indefinable magic cuts the cool air. Early Sunday morning has that subtle, quiet quality in New York. Lonely people everywhere know that time of morning. Slow, uncertain footsteps, your own distorted reflection in darkened store windows. The shameful, envious, eyes-lowered glances at passing couples. You recognize other solitary fellow travelers. Both of you go separate ways, moving with the knowledge of Sunday papers, endless cigarettes, tap water, the hoarded half-pint, and the feeling of having missed out on Saturday night’s jackpot prize. You give up the Waterloo, mount the steps, unlock the door, turn on the light, undress. You pace the floor and finally try to sleep, comforted with nothing but the prospect of another sunrise.

  You pay for everything you get in this world. Glitter and polish, sophistication, the ejaculations delivered to a sterile country. Everything.

  You are alone now, buried in your own morality. I have got to leave New York. I am saving my nickels, dimes, dollars, and this winter I will go away.

  Now the Sunday sky is serene and pale blue. Toward the east a ballet of soft, white clouds. The rising sun breaks through shafts of gold. It was as if God had suddenly opened His powerful hand on the world. My heart bows its head in the presence of this force. I am suddenly at peace in this early morning. The sun comforts me; I am swaddled in the folds of those wonderful clouds. Let the rays of the sun touch your body and you will be made holy. Shirley used to say I was saintly, I had missed my calling, I should become a preacher. You’ve got the makings, boy. Why did you stray so far from home?

  FRIDAY. Faded blue sky. Ninety-three-degree noonday heat. Jammed traffic and the smooth grind of the crosstown bus.

  Maxine the pixie, honey-colored seven-year-old, bounces in. She lives on the second floor and has the mind of a twelve-year-old.

  “Did I scare you, Charles?” Maxine throws her arms around me. “I’ve got a present for you. One of my fantastic pictures. Look!”

  I look up slowly and smile. Maxine loves the word “fantastic.” Now she is studying me closely, taking in the red-yellow eyes and the fat bags under them and the two-day beard.

  Maxine has given up conventional children’s drawing. She is on an abstract kick. The lines are firm; the colors blend. I took her once to the Museum of Modern Art, but she was very hostile to the gods of Modern Art. She prefers her own abstractions.

  Maxine’s picture has squares, circles, crisscrossing lines of lime green, yellow, black, and brown.

  I try to show interest. I feel despondent. “What is it, cookie? I give up.”

  “Oh, goodness. You don’t know anything. It’s the Tip Top parking lot with the sun shining down on it.”

  “And it’s beautiful,” I say, taking another quick glance at the picture. “I’ll put it in the kitchen.”

  “No, Charles, here. You don’t have any light in the kitchen.”

  Evening arrives with the sudden press of a familiar inky stamp. I look out the window at the soot-caked, blank, brick wall of Tip Top parking and the grim, red-brick façade of the Elmwood Hotel. TV and mistily yellow lights glow in Elmwood windows. An unreal face appears at a gold-curtained window and withdraws, a shy ghost.

  I grow old in the terrible heart of America. I am dying the American-money death. “There’s plenty of money out there, Charlie,” Al, my messenger boss says, waving his expensive cigar. “You only have to figure out a way to get it.”

  Why doesn’t America let me die quietly? No. This country smiles on; the smile is a stationary sun. The sin is believing, hoping. But I am too tired, too afraid now to commit this sin.

  AFTER THE BIGGEST DROP since the Twenty-nine hari-kari, the stock market is rallying. Tuesday, May 30, 1962 at exactly a quarter of six in the evening.

  Three young and one gruff middle-aged brokers are quite publicly picking their noses. Nervousness? Relief from tension? Only one broker has the sanitary turn-of-mind to use his handkerchief. This is the Park Avenue branch office of a Wall Street firm. I am here waiting to take stocks and bonds downtown. But the ticker-tape hasn’
t closed yet. Everyone is tensely excited. All I want to do is deliver the stuff and go home. The sudden change of fortune has no effect on me.

  As the Italian elevator operator named Smitty says, “The big boys are fucking up but good. Somebody’s getting the gravy, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.” Another elevator operator has lost four hundred dollars in the drop. He has six children and three hundred and fifty dollars in a joint account. He lives in a five-room, Second Avenue walk-up. He is not getting on with his wife. The second daughter is eight and just had a serious operation. The drop isn’t helping things. He doesn’t want to visit his father’s grave tomorrow and he is debating if he should go to church Sunday, that is, if he doesn’t get on a rip-roaring drunk Saturday night. He is a moderate drinker. Thirty-three years old, slender, with the jerky movements of a backward child. He has the pallid looks of a man who spends eight hours a day in an automatic tomb with his thoughts, his eyes straight ahead.

  But here, fourteen stories above Park Avenue, the air is jubilant. If the voices, the laughter, are slightly on edge, the feeling nevertheless is that we’ve made the day. One of the brokers cracked: “Well I won’t have to go to the blood bank after all.” This is followed by lusty, breathtaking ha-ha’s.

  Now picture, if you will, a room about sixteen by twenty feet: ivory walls, deep gray wall-to-wall carpeting, reproductions of English antiques, steel filing cabinets painted pale green, Chinese-style lamp bases, and silk shades covered with clear plastic. The east wall has a large, plate-glass picture window. This is the operating room where the wheeling and dealing is done. There is God, or his earthly counterpart, the ticker tape. Phones ring. Brokers pick their noses and watch the vice-president as the ticker tape glides through his smooth, firm fingers. The brokers doodle with pencils, make notes. Now and then there’s slight disagreement. The voices become angry. Warriors after an uncertain truce.

  “I feel sorry for the girls downtown,” the vice-president says, “printing the stuff. They must be really boiled. Every now and then they print the wrong number.”

  The lights in the glass-enclosed room are fluorescent and under that naked glare, I discover that all of the younger brokers need a shave. The older brokers are clean shaven.

  The vice-president is the star, with ruddy good looks, a full flowing crop of white hair. He is wearing a black suit with matching vest and gold watch chain. He resembles a magnificent Irish actor. His black eyes are polished like marble and they are quick, too quick. His manner is friendly, even with me, the messenger. Perhaps that is why he is a vice-president. But there are moments when his nerves give and he overplays his role.

  “Jesus!” he says, “six o’clock, and it’s still coming in. Can you beat that! My wife and I, Jesus. Whiskey and soda all night long.”

  One young broker wants to cut out. I don’t like his looks. I doubt if I would have him working for me. He looks like an overgrown prep school boy who will soon have a prominent stomach. He has been fucking around, walking in and out of the glass astronomer’s cage. He wants to leave. Who will phone him on the outcome of the market? No one says anything. So he takes off his straw brimmer and starts fucking around again.

  Then there were the phone calls, as everything was ticking off nicely, as the market would soon close, as suicide left the air, as the brokers began to inhale the fickle scent of money again.

  And I know how upper-class men talk to their wives. It is very similar to that of middle-class, minor executives of oil and insurance companies.

  For example: a young man, thirtyish, medium build, thrush-brown hair thinning at the temples, very good nose and mouth, round horn-rimmed glasses, blue-and-white pin striped shirt (very wrinkled, sleeves rolled back), maroon tie loosened at the collar, and charcoal gray trousers.

  Here he is, talking happily, though he seems to be having trouble getting the words out, as if saliva was clogged in his throat.

  “Hello, Bunny.

  “Yes, no rush. I’ll shave here and then we’ll get a bite to eat. I’ll have to come back here. Yes, hon. We’ll go to the party from here. About eight. No rush. Come when you can. Be careful.”

  He laughs. Must be a private joke or, since everything is fine, he thinks his wife has a sense of humor. Perhaps she has. He signs off with a mouth-smacking “Bye-bye, Bunny.”

  The overgrown prep school boy passes again. To hell with it—he is cutting out this time. He casts an over-the-shoulder glance at the cage and then looks at me and drops his big, hazel cow eyes.

  I pick up a finance magazine and read the slogan: all the news of the hire of the dollar. The broker with the thrush-brown hair and the round horn-rimmed glasses smiles at me, shaking his head. “Hectic day,” he says.

  Another phone call. This broker is tall and blond, cold and sad. He has a long face and a longer neck which, with his hunched shoulders, distracts from the rich aura of the suntan, the navy silk suit, the sea-green eyes. He took first prize in the nose-picking contest. The phone is cradled on his neck and he is playing with his gold wedding band.

  “Hello, honey.” (Like a slow, painful breath.)

  “Yes, hon.

  “Well, you go ahead. Yes, hon.

  “No. Taxi. Yes. I’ll catch the 6:25 or the 6:48.”

  He hangs up without a good-bye and goes into the cage. Already he has the slow relaxed stride of an old man. I am certain he is around my age, twenty-nine.

  Then the vice-president steps smartly from the cage. He smiles, rubbing his hands together which I know are never cold.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, sonny. Do you know how to get down there? Fine. Take it to the seventh floor. They’re waiting on you. Thanks again, sonny.”

  I take the stocks and make it. And so that is how it was on May 30, 1962, at the Park Avenue branch office of one Wall Street firm. Earlier I had heard the vice-president exclaim, “We’re making history.” So in a very, very, vague way, I too helped bring this historic day to a close. And me, I don’t have a Goddamn dollar.

  ONE AFTERNOON, Al sent me to Esso Research in Florham Park, New Jersey. It’s a good three-mile hike after you get off the train.

  I started back to the station about five-thirty. The trains leave for New York on the hour.

  The sky was dark with the promise of rain. A middle-aged man and woman in a dusty, beat-up station wagon stopped and asked if I wanted a lift. I said yes and started to climb into the backseat. The man said to sit up front with him and the missus. So I did. The woman turned and smiled at me in a motherly way.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said, trying to make conversation.

  “Think nothing of it,” the man said. He held the steering wheel with one hand and bit into a plug of chewing tobacco. “Glad to oblige you.”

  “Pa and I always pick up hitchhikers,” the woman said. “We got a boy in the service. He wrote and told us how hard it was to get a ride, even in uniform.”

  “You in the army?” the man asked.

  “Out.” I smiled.

  We rode along in silence until I said, “It looks like we might have a storm.”

  “Yeah,” the man said, taking another chew of tobacco. “What are you, Puerto Rican or Filipino?”

  “Neither,” I said. “I’m colored.”

  “I see,” said the man thoughtfully. “Would you like a woman?”

  The woman started crying before I could answer.

  “Alfonzo,” she moaned.

  “Boy, I asked you if you wanted a woman.”

  “I don’t know,” I replied weakly.

  The man turned off the highway and went down a road lined with tall green trees. It was a dead end. There were the ruins of a decayed farm. The man left the motor running. It made a whining noise.

  The man put his arms around his wife. “Hold still, Elvira,” he said.

  “Oh! The things you do to me,” the woman cried, trying to escape from her husband’s grip. “The things I have to go through.”

  Then the woman turned toward me. I s
at rigid, listening to the raspy sound of the motor and feeling as if a ball of fire had dropped between the woman and myself.

  “What you do to me,” the woman wheezed mournfully, pressing her body against mine.

  She made a drooling noise like a baby who hasn’t learned to talk. I felt her soft, fleshy leg.

  “Let go of me, Alfonzo,” the woman said. “He’s got me. Take your hands off of me. Take’m off, Alfonzo.”

  The man released his wife and did not say anything. He did not look at his wife when she embraced me. He rested his head against the steering wheel. Toward the end, when his wife screamed joyfully, the man put his hands over his ears.

  I straightened up in the seat. “I have to go,” I said. “I have to catch a train.”

  “All right,” the man said.

  “No,” the woman said forcefully, grabbing the steering wheel.

  “Elvira, the boy has to go,” the man tried to explain.

  “You ruin everything for me,” the woman said.

  They let me off at the highway and I thanked them. I watched the car disappear into the darkness. It was drizzling now. I thought of the expression on the man’s face. It was like something terrible had happened to him once long ago that had destroyed his sense of being a man, but it didn’t matter much anymore. Whatever it was, resignation had settled in the creases of the pale, puffy face and under the tear-filled, forlorn eyes.

  I walked to the station under the black sky, smelling the fresh earth.

  I WAS IN Claudia’s pad today. Claudia, the Grand Duchess, is a fabulous Negro drag queen who lives down the street from me. He is my friend and is nothing much to speak of as a man, but he makes a swinging broad. Often, after getting dolled up in female attire, Claudia cruises the street, rides the subways and buses, getting picked up by straight men who, after the shock subsides, often accompany him home. He is forever asking policemen for directions. By the time Claudia has made up his face and gotten high, he has gone through a mental transformation as well: he is a woman.