“On the whole, I don’t like them very much. I like some of them. A very small minority.”
She nodded dreamily. After a while, in a changed, singing voice, Jinx said, “Simeon . . .”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Maria?”
“At acting school.”
“Nobody’s in your apartment?”
“No.”
“I’m thirsty. Do you have any . . . whisky in your apartment?”
“No.”
“Any cognac?”
“No.”
“Any rum or beer?”
“No.”
“Simeon, let’s go to your apartment and drink water.”
He laughed. “Jinx, I’ve got whisky, gin, cognac, rum, beer, calvados, Pernod, Cinzano, Martini, wine and saki in my apartment. But let’s not drink any.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not thirsty.”
She pouted a moment, but her gray eyes were amused. “Simeon. How come you don’t want to make love to me?”
“Because, A, I’m very happy with Maria. B, I try to avoid screwing married women. C, You sleep with everybody anyway, so one more or less won’t matter very much. And D, I don’t want to sleep with you.”
“Why?”
“Because I think you’re hysterical. I don’t think you enjoy it, anyway.”
She looked at him, startled. For a moment, she seemed lost for words. Finally, almost in a whisper, she said, “Those are the truest words you’ve ever spoken.”
For a long moment they sat in embarrassed silence. Then Jinx said in a flat, tired voice, “You know, I was married before, in the States. To a sergeant in the Marine Corps. A big, handsome man, a man women fell all over themselves for. Don Juan. I castrated that man. Sliced it off slick as a whisker. Psychologically, not physically. I was never satisfied, I was always tied in knots whenever he made love to me, so nothing happened. Nothing, nothing, I was going crazy. How many women are there like me?”
“A lot.”
“So I took it out on him. I told him he wasn’t a man, that all the others I’d ever known had made me feel something. I took lovers, and I was frozen with them, too, but I told him that they had been men. I castrated him. So help me God. He reached the point where he couldn’t do a thing. I ridiculed him. He hated me. So one night, when we were in bed, he tried to kill me. I was ridiculing him, and suddenly he put his hands around my neck and began strangling me. He was trying to kill me, no mistake, but I managed somehow to scream. The neighbors came charging in and dragged him off me. It was horrible. You should have seen the hatred on his face. So I left him. It was the best thing for both of us, especially for him; what else could we do? We got a divorce. Mental cruelty!” She laughed.
Then she shuddered slightly. “You know what’s horrible? I did the same thing to every man who was crazy enough to fall for me since. And I’ve done it to Clyde. He didn’t drink so much before, it’s me who drove him to it.”
Simeon whistled softly. “Poor guy. Poor Jinx, too.”
“It’s awful. I can’t help myself. What should I do?”
“I don’t know, Jinx. See a doctor.”
“I’ve seen doctors.”
“I don’t know. One day, just like that, the breakthrough will come. You know what I mean?”
“It’ll never come. It’s awful. Awful. I don’t know what to do. I’m going nuts.”
3
Poor Jinx, he thought, when they separated later. She walked slowly back toward the Tournon. Simeon shook his head. That girl had problems! But then Lulu Belle came back to him. The problems were worlds apart.
He ran across Clyde, who was hurrying along the street looking haggard and nervous. He had been drinking.
“Where’d you leave her?” he asked Simeon.
“Who?”
“Jinx. I saw her run up the street and join you.”
“She just went back to the Tournon.”
Clyde hesitated. He was unsteady on his feet and seemed close to tears.
“That wasn’t very nice of you, Simeon.”
“What?”
“Screwing my wife. I know she screws everybody. But I thought you were a friend.”
Simeon stared at him. “You need a cold shower, old man. What the hell are you talking about?”
“I saw her run off after you. I know how she is. But I thought you were my friend. I even invited you to come see me and my family, down South. A friend.”
“I’m not a friend,” Simeon said angrily. “For your information, I didn’t screw your wife. You stupid white bastards think a black man will jump into any pair of open white legs! Go to hell, you and your wife!”
Clyde was puzzled. “You got it all wrong, Simeon. I—” But Simeon turned and walked off without waiting for him to finish.
Simeon was angry throughout his dinner, and even later as he walked toward Babe’s place. He shouldn’t let that cracker get on his nerves. Felt a bit sorry for the poor bastard, too. But he shouldn’t waste his pity. He thought of Lulu Belle and the hideous white mob. Back home, Clyde might have been in that mob. Lulu Belle wasn’t looking for any pity.
The more he thought about the little girl with the upright head, the more disgusted he felt with himself. He was over here, comfortable in Paris, leaving the fighting to the little Lulu Belles! Would he have walked through that mob? Perhaps. But it was easy to say perhaps, way over here.
Babe was glad to see him.
“How come you’re alone?” Simeon asked.
Babe chuckled. “Even the best of men need a rest from the ladies from time to time. Settle your rear in that chair, there. How ’bout some whisky?”
Babe had a roaring fire going in the fireplace. Bad weather had now settled on Paris: a cold dampness. Babe had apparently been reading and drinking alone. It suddenly occurred to Simeon that he had rarely been alone with Babe, and that he had never imagined what went through Babe’s mind when he was by himself.
“Good stuff,” Babe said, holding his whisky glass up to the light. “I like that sometimes. Just sittin’ up here, all lazy and cozy-like, sippin’ a little whisky from time to time. Just quiet. No jokes, no people. Just from time to time. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“A man can’t joke all the time.”
“No.”
Babe chuckled, heaving his immense body around in the chair. “Joke some time, though. Laugh at troubles. White people don’t understand that like us. Constipated. A man’s gotta laugh.”
The fire roared. The room was cozy and warm. Babe took the bottle from the table in the center and poured more whisky into their glasses.
“Seen the papers?” Simeon asked.
“Yeah.” He looked thoughtfully into space. “It’s a bitch, man. The faces of them kids. Some contrast with the faces of them white people. That’s where you see the difference in souls.”
He sighed heavily. Simeon realized that it was probably because of the picture of the kids and the mob that Babe was alone.
“You ever think about maybe going back to the States, Babe?”
“Never!” Babe said vehemently.
“I feel kind of . . . guilty, sometimes. Like today seeing the picture of the kids in the newspaper. I get the feeling I ought to be there, too, fighting.”
“I know how you feel. But I ain’t goin back to the States. The States don’t say nothin’ to me. I been away from all this racism so long that I wouldn’t be able to adjust to it. Probably end up killing somebody or gettin’ killed. Naw, I ain’t goin back.”
“Everybody can’t get away.”
“First of all, everybody don’t want to get away. Most Negroes feel that’s their country much as the white man’s, and they want to stay there. That’s their business, more power to ’em. Then, some, a few, want to g
et away and can’t afford it. They’d leave if they could afford it. I hope the others that want to come will be able to afford it one day, too. . . . But don’t get no idealistic pictures. Most Negroes are as attached to their television sets and cars as the white people, and they wouldn’t like living here.”
“But the fight. Don’t you think we should be in the fight?”
“Depends what the fight is for. I’ma tellin’ you, if we was like the Algerians, and was fighting to free our country and drive the white folks out—just like in a colony—well, then, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be in that fight. But fight for what? For integration? Man, I don’t want to be integrated! I don’t want to be dissolved into that great big messed-up white society there. I feel like the Black Muslims on that score.”
“We don’t fight to dissolve. We fight for the same rights, voting, education, good jobs . . .”
“That’s the same thing. Integration, that’s the word, no matter how you put it. Look, I can’t do things out of my head, I got to do them out of my heart. Well, listen then: if I was in America, I wouldn’t do a thing. I’d curl up and die, like the Indians. That’s what I found happening to me before I left. I was an official of the NAACP. We was fighting for integration, integration. Get colored folks into schools, get ’em jobs, get ’em the vote. But I found something wasn’t ticking right in my emotions. I sat down and tried to figure out what it was. And I discovered it.
“The thing was that I didn’t like them white people, they was my enemies. Not all of them, but most. Look at them screaming white hyenas in that picture in the papers today. You want to integrate with that? They was my enemies, there was a fight on, a long war been going on since they took the first slave there, but what kinda war was that when your aim was to be integrated into the enemy! . . . Naw, man. In the NAACP, I had been goin’ around making speeches on brotherhood and all that, trying to force them people to respect us, to like us, to understand us. That’s what it amounted to. But how could I go on doin’ that when I don’t even respect or like them—though I understand them all right. Oh, yeah, I understand them. Naw, that fight wasn’t for me, and it ain’t for me now.”
“I still feel guilty.”
“Yeah. I feel guilty, too. Lots of folks feel guilty, but I know for me there ain’t nothin to do. Just got to live with it, the guilt.”
“You’ll stay here till you die?”
“Till I die or the French throw me out.”
“And if you were thrown out?”
“The world’s big, man. There’s Africa, Asia, Europe—lots of room. I’m layin some money aside, just in case; you never know. And then the world’s gonna see a new phenomenon, with me and some others over here. The Wandering Negro.”
Simeon did not sleep that night. He wandered from bar to bar, the face of Lulu Belle always with him. The talk with Babe had not helped. He noticed that the other faces from the picture were there before him, too, the zombie faces, the nightmare faces, leering cold-eyed over Lulu Belle’s head. There they were, behind the bottles on the shelf. There they were, in the liquid in the glass. Death masks. He shuddered. It seemed suddenly that he had not moved, that he had run and run in a delirious chase, and had fallen exhausted on the spot where he began. The dreams would come back now, he knew that. Faces. He felt an ache in the socket of his eye.
Jazz musicians at Birdland. “Seen the papers?” they asked. They, too, had heard the melody of the child ring clear as a bell against the cacophony of the red-eyed mob. At À la Romance, a softly lighted Spanish bar, Simeon found himself drinking one whisky after another. One of the waitresses slipped up beside him.
“Drowning your troubles, Simeon?”
“I haven’t got any troubles,” he said.
VIII
1
JOEY THE Drunk walked out of a bar and dropped dead in the street one night early in December.
Joey dead? It was not possible! It was not possible that anyone could die over here!
Simeon had never been very close to the old drunk, but the news came as a terrible shock. Joey dead? They would no longer see him at the bar of the Monaco, or staggering down the rue Monsieur le Prince?
The morning Joey’s body was placed on view Simeon decided to go pay his last respects to the old man. Maria brought him a letter from one of his brothers. Mundane things: family, neighbors, the brother’s personal life. Thinking of marriage. Working in various Negro organizations (CORE, NAACP). Progress made, obstacles encountered. Simeon put down the letter and lit a cigarette while Maria made coffee. It always made him uneasy to receive letters from home. People always asked: When are you coming back?
“Coffee and kisses,” Maria said, bringing a tray to the bed. She kissed him lightly. “I’m going to a cocktail party this afternoon. For the theater group. The movie director will be there, the one I told you about, who thinks I am a good actress. I know you don’t want to, but, today, you’ll come with me?”
“What time will it be?”
“Begins at four. I must be there a little earlier, help prepare.”
“I’m going over for the viewing of Joey’s body in the afternoon. I’ll come by later, all right?”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
Her face lighted. “Because, you know, I always have the impression you are not interested in the things I do. I want us to share things together. This is the way it should be.”
He looked into her weak eyes and kissed her on the cheek.
It was a cold sunny day, and throughout the morning Simeon worked at his easel beside the window while Maria lay in slacks across the bed studying a role. Simeon was not satisfied with his painting: technically it was not bad, but there was no inner drive or inspiration. He kept thinking of Joey.
They lunched alone, and afterward Simeon sat before his typewriter. The editors of He-Man had written: “We’re interested in an article on the history of chastity belts.” He had doubled up with laughter, wondering where on earth he could find information on such a subject; but at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Cluny Museum he had been surprised to find all the material he needed. He typed for italics the French proverb “A good name is worth more than a golden belt,” then began the article:
Ever since Eve gave her now-famous demonstration of how easily women could be led astray, the Adams of this world have been trying to find ways of keeping their wives—and girl friends—out of the arms of temptation.
It was no use, he could not concentrate. Joey kept barging back into his thoughts.
“I feel restless,” he told Maria. “Think I need a change of scene. You coming with me?”
“You go, Simeon,” she said, looking up from her script. “I stay, study a while, then must go prepare cocktail party. I see you there.”
He sat at the Tournon, drinking chocolate milk. African students at adjoining tables were discussing politics. They were furious at events in the Congo, and had harsh words for Moise Tshombe, the president of Katanga province. They debated the relative merits of Sekou Touré and Modeibo Keita. Some of them believed the Algerian war would bring about the collapse of democratic government in France.
Simeon listened, feeling isolated and futile. The future of these students lay clear before them. They were studying administration, engineering, mathematics. They would afterward go home to their respective countries, where they were desperately needed, and take up posts which were ready for them. They would aid their peoples. Their individual destinies and the destinies of their countries were one. Simeon envied them. He thought of his brother and thought of Babe. And then of Joey’s death.
Time to go. The funeral parlor was not far away. At the Boulevard Saint-Michel he saw crowds of people standing on the sidewalk and heard shouts from the street. Several hundred students were marching in a demonstration in favor of peace in Algeria. They carried banners: STOP THE DIRTY WAR, NEGOTI
ATE IN ALGERIA, JUSTICE FOR THE ALGERIAN PEOPLE. They chanted, over and over, one demand: Peace in Algeria! Peace in Algeria! Yes, there was a resistance in France to what was happening in Algeria—an active resistance which was relatively small, but which was there. The students were courageous, for demonstrations were banned, and there would be cracked skulls when they ran into the police lines farther up the street. Some people on the sidewalks applauded and cheered.
The demonstrators passed. Simeon arrived at the funeral parlor and found Babe, Benson, Lou, Jinx, and some other people from the quarter. Everybody was staring at the coffin in an embarrassed silence; Babe and Benson nodded furtively to Simeon.
Joey lay there. Skin ashen and dry, mustache and hair white, hands shriveled, the fingertips indented like deflated toy balloons. Lips compressed, the corners still turned down in the perpetual grimace. Eyes so definitively closed!
Back home in Philadelphia, there had been funerals. Many funerals, with all those relatives. Grandpa. He had been a member of the Elks, and when he died they gave him one of their elaborate funerals.
“I don’t wanta go,” he had told his mother.
“You gotta go, Simeon; what kind of way is that to be? Grandpa always loved you. You gotta go pay your last respects.”
For six hours, a child of ten, he had sat with the family on the front row of the viewing room of the funeral parlor, staring at the coffin in which Grandpa lay. Behind sat friends and members of the Elks and other spectators. Just sitting and watching a corpse. That used to be Grandpa. They were gonna put him in the ground. Simeon had shuddered in icy terror.
The Brother Ruler of the Elks stood up with a gong in his hand. Mamma had explained it to him: they rang the gong three times, each time calling Grandpa’s name, and if Grandpa didn’t answer by the third gong they pronounced him dead.
“Andrew!” The chilling gong sounded. People in the room began to sob. Mamma dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Andrew!” The gong tolled like death and the sobs grew louder. Simeon wanted to run and hide. His mother was crying now; everybody seemed to be crying, and in the rear of the room women began to moan as though they were going to break into a hymn. Simeon became conscious of the stifling odor of the flowers, the choking quality of that odor, and he was sure that he would never be able to bear smelling a flower again. He stared in horror at his grandfather, waiting breathless for the third gong, as though he expected the old once-brown man, now gray, to rise up out of the hideous slippery satin lining of the coffin and answer to his name. “Andrew!” The gong sounded for the third and final time, the sobs in the room melted into shrieks, and the Brother Ruler said, “I now pronounce you dead.”
The Stone Face Page 14