“What’s wrong?” Della asked, sadly, having felt his struggle, sensed his uncertain triumph, his unwillingness to push it faster than it could be consolidated.
“I—” he began, then, sagged into stillness.
“Keel?” She stroked him as though life, coming from her body, radiating down her shoulder and arm to her fingertips, could be inserted into his, to help him retain that indecisive triumph.
He whispered as though overcome by a great human feat, “What, baby?”
Then she began to sob, politely, quietly—apologetically.
In the same voice Keel said, “I think it’s almost over.”
She nodded and when the lump had begun to ease down her throat of its own painful accord she whispered as if to match his mood, “I know.”
“C’mon, girl, stop it.”
Della nodded into the pillow again. Peace began to come to her, and a scent of happiness, a taste, a flash of it. Now she wanted to spring up and fill the room with flowers while he fixed potent cocktails and put the records on. She wanted to comb her hair the way he liked it and do her face and wear his favorite dress; she wanted to ask: What may I give you to make you as happy as I? He would tell her and they’d rise like giants above the curve of the earth and she’d reach in among skyscrapers and people, over all the forest and oceans, and get what he wanted and hand it to him and watch the expression on his face. She knew what the expression would be, a look that made a verbal “thank you” foul, a look she felt she alone knew, when his eyes softened and the lines around his mouth relaxed gently. She would stare into his eyes which were so keen that he sometimes seemed to hear with them as well as see.
Keel lay in the reflective position of a lover who wonders, ponders, and finally muses thankfully over his mate. The long valley of gloom was beginning to billow like smoke in a sudden jet of wind. He too imagined himself a giant, with the moon at arm’s length, the stars fretful fireflies waiting to be caught, bottled and given to her to highlight her hair and to illuminate the dark flecks of blue which had come into her eyes, stuck there like pieces of basalt in shallow water.
“I feel so good,” she said with her ingenuous honesty; and he thought: not even the British have ever matched a lover’s understatement.
“And I,” he said, reaching for cigarettes.
Both cast themselves ahead to the time when it would be all right, when they would marry. Della said softly, “Now I’m ready to be disowned.”
“Stop,” he said, warm nonetheless because she had communicated her continuing “Yes” to him, which excluded her parents if it had to, as she suspected it would have to.
She continued talking, half into her pillow, half not, but totally to him, in a gentle manner. “I don’t feel alone anymore.”
Keel touched her reassuringly but briefly, marveling that those few moments they both had felt had opened on this wondrous, good feeling, which, after luxuriating in it, you turned outside yourself, concerned genuinely, for a time at least, with the affairs of others.
“I wonder how Prof is making out,” Keel said aloud, the hurt coming only after the thought, voiced in purest honesty, had gone past his lips. He sensed, as the words made their way into comprehension, that Della flew quickly from him, paused and returned and simulated normality.
“I wonder,” she said, clearing her throat, the way she did when she was nervous. “I guess all right.” Her manner told him she wanted to be done with any discussion of Hillary; her manner warned him by its absence of any emotion at all. Keel thought about them, imagined them, grew angry, understanding, and sad. Then all of these went and he was again the giant taking the world’s moon into his palm like a silver pearl and handing it to her, closing her hand upon it.
Talking down from this great height he said, “I hated Prof from the first minute I saw him. Then I got to like him, and afterward hated him again.” He waited for her to say something. She didn’t and he went on. “You can cope with guys like Crane because you understand from the start that they’ve always felt so inferior to people they’ve known in their pasts, that in order to feel whole they need people to feel superior to. It’s easy with all the Negroes in jazz.”
“Yes,” she said. His hand lay on her hip like the touch of a judge upon an adjudged toward whom he felt kindly.
“He needed us in the beginning, just for a little while, to make him feel better, but it didn’t work out. As soon as he started to feel better he began to revert; he thought too much and in the end might have rejected the idea of his racial superiority; it had to be man-to-man. Me against him—” Keel paused and Della felt his hand tighten imperceptibly. “—with you as the prize.” Keel removed his hand. Della searched for it, found it, replaced it on her hip, covered his hand with hers.
“I could never love him,” she said, and as she did, she sensed a slow rising of his chest and an expulsion of air.
“If he gets the job will he want you to go?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?” Keel asked, no longer a giant, but an impaired lover sensing that all of this must have been discussed, perhaps right here, on a night when he sulked or mended his impairment hastily, almost unwholesomely, elsewhere.
“Yes.”
They crushed out the cigarettes and lay in silence, spent with approaching honesty, exhausted with avoiding its hurt.
Some time had passed when Keel stretched and made the motions Della knew meant he was getting ready to go home. “Stay with me,” she whispered. “We’ll sleep; really sleep.” She felt his hesitation and saw, as he saw, the morning with the radio coming on, the brisk showering together, the coffee, his with everything, hers black, and the entrance upon the street, the final parting at the corner.
“No,” he said.
She blurted it before she thought. “Are you afraid?”
After a silence in which she killed herself ten times, he said, “Yes. I’m afraid it might not work again. And I don’t want it not to work.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Does this happen to everyone like us?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.”
She watched him get up. Silhouetted against the window, he straightened his tie. Peering down at the street, he said, “A nice night. If we both weren’t so tired, I’d take you for a walk.”
“At this hour?”
“At this hour.” He turned to her smiling, as she put the light on. “Even at this hour when the cops on the beats and in the cars might stop us on every block and ask a lot of silly questions.”
Della burrowed into her pillow.
“Tell me good-bye,” he said, slipping his jacket on. “Tell me good-bye and know that I wish I didn’t have to go.”
“Good-bye,” she said, adding quickly as if suddenly frightened by some obscure thought, “See you tomorrow?”
“Yes, dear. Of course,” he said, bewildered by her attitude. “All tomorrows,” he said, going out.
Hillary arrived in New York in a state of extreme depression. He sat in the 34th Street Station for an hour before he rose to catch a bus downtown. He knew the reason he’d returned was to make a full confession. To Della? Keel? Yes, oh, yes, but it was Eagle to whom he’d have to make his most complete confession. He took the bus automatically, transferred in a daze and debarked in a stupor, overwhelmingly grateful for darkness. He shuffled toward the shop. As he felt his way down the steps like an old man afraid to lose his balance, a movement in a car parked near the curb made Hillary spin around. A figure bent quickly down behind the door window. Slowly, Hillary let himself into the shop and locked the door behind him. He remained still in the darkness and watched the car outside. The odors of coffee and stale cigarette smoke hung in the air. He would have to air the place first thing in the morning.
No, he thought, he might not even be here in the morning; he didn’t have to be here. Why he might only sit in the shop an hour or two and all the answers would come to him, answers which would not require him to stand before Eagle, Della,
or Keel; then he would leave and they would never know he’d been here.
The figure in the car sat up. A match flared and Hillary saw a patch of face: the ear, the jaw, nothing more; darkness left only an outline. A cop? Hillary wondered. Would he want to come in? Could something be going on which would jeopardize the appointment?
Upstairs someone walked across the floor and seconds later there came the dull explosion of water flushing down a toilet, and while the drain hissed, the footsteps came back, ceased. I should be in bed too, Hillary thought.
But he wasn’t sleepy, he told himself, just impatient waiting for morning to come so he could tell someone and get the hell out of town. Dully, it occurred to him that, however much he wished to leave before morning, he planned to stay.
The motor of the car outside kicked over sharply and settled into a rich hum. The headlights came on and the car eased away from the curb and rushed quietly down the street; silence closed once again on the front of the shop. Hillary retreated to his room and put the light on. He emptied the drawers, placed everything on the top of the dresser, stripped to his underwear and got into bed.
The morning came clear, blue-white, rising suddenly in the east. Della woke early to the massed flutter of pigeons heading downward from the ledge of her roof to the streets. She did not have the feeling of early morning depression which had hung about her waking hours like the aftereffects of a sleeping pill for several months. Instead, she bounded out of bed and fixed herself a huge breakfast. This would be the beginning of a day, a series of days, she wanted to absorb completely. For the first time in many weeks now, she turned from the secular music of WNYC to the chatter-and music station, WRCA. She forgot that in the past she had found the same show dull: this morning she found it witty and the music good enough.
On her lunch hour, she thought, as she moved about, even making up the bed, she would look at furniture again. She paused, and found she was looking directly at the phone. She thought: Keel.
Southwest of Della, in the section which seems merely an appendage to the rest of Manhattan, Keel smoked in bed. He was not furious that he found himself awake so early. Traffic on the nearby highway was already heavy, and it sounded like the rush of water through a narrow channel. Downstairs, a block away, trains were already being hooked up and he heard the bang of the hard-forged iron couplings. The trains would sneak north along Manhattan’s Hudson shore, would burrow beneath Riverside Park and emerge far up in the Bronx, where they would be switched onto the main lines. Keel brought his mind away from the flight of the trains and thought of Della.
And cursed himself. He didn’t much like being out of the shell he’d built around himself. It was just a thought, without much conviction behind it. But now, he thought, again without much conviction, he was becoming vulnerable again.
He inhaled deeply and said aloud—he had a vision of himself making his declaration before a horde of people—“I love her.” Because it’s spring, he thought next. But shit—I do. I just left the broad and I can’t wait to see her again. Keel drifted off thinking of the feel of her, her movements anywhere, the sound of her voice and the lift of her eyes, the way she walked, padding in her bare feet to the bathroom and back, the sheets as they sighed up over her again.… A lifetime of this!
The other things, the painful things, didn’t enter his mind that morning, not even David Hillary’s being with her.
At the same hour, Hillary left the coffee shop. There was a little bar up the street from Sadik’s and he walked quickly there, hoping to find the bartender cleaning up. He was, but he was also belligerent about beginning work so early and told Hillary so; nevertheless, he wound up giving him two drinks. The place still smelled from the clientele of the evening before. Hillary swallowed his two drinks slowly and stared out into the street where shop doors were being opened and blinds raised against the sun. He returned to the shop and began to straighten up. He left the door open and imagined that at almost any moment Eagle would plunge down the two stairs into the shop and say, “How you makin’ it, mother?”
CHAPTER 14
The bus parked near the union office, and Eagle tromped heavily upstairs to see who was around. He did not understand himself why he was doing it. As he neared the top, he smiled up at Yards Brown, who was on his way down.
“Hello, mother,” Eagle said.
Yards frowned. It was all right for Eagle to call the other clowns this, but not him. There was an awkward silence. Yards always detected contempt when Eagle addressed him, but the truth lay deeper. Yards had never rid himself of his guilt for absorbing all Eagle had to give, then leaving him to make his haphazard way to some murky conception of success. Yards had it made. His words lay on or between the covers of nearly every issue of every jazz magazine. He played festivals at a tremendous price for one set; he played concerts contemptuously—if they were in the city—only because they also paid him well. And the club dates paid pretty nice bread: they had to if they wanted him. Yards not only knew how to make’a buck, he knew how to keep it as well. He had told Eagle (Yards was only twenty at the time): “You’ll die broke, man.”
“But happy.” It hadn’t been a lie when Eagle said it.
Now Eagle smiled. If there was nothing else there was Yards, like a son you love so much you can’t admit it for fear of embarrassing him. When Eagle smiled, Yards, neatly clothed as always, but this time in a handmade Continental, took a step towards Eagle. “Let’s have coffee, baby,” he said. Eagle shrugged and they started down the stairs, wordless.
“How’s the tour?”
Eagle shrugged again. “Glad it’s over.”
Yards held the door of his white Jaguar open for him, and Eagle, heaving his bulk in, stroked the leather upholstery. “Remember,” he said, “the white Caddie I had?”
“That was a bad short,” Yards said. Eagle had been very big then, like a comet blazing down the trail of a black sky swooping aside everything in its path. Yards had felt privileged to trail up and down Broadway with him, and could hardly contain his excitement when Eagle wanted him to join his combo. A million years ago.
They shot through the morning traffic in silence. Yards looked at Eagle once in a while. The older man sat watching the people move along on the walks, the cars drifting up and down the roads, his face expressionless. “I heard about the fuzz up there,” Yards said.
Eagle chuckled. “I heard about you in Oklahoma.”
Yards leaned back from the wheel and laughed. He had socked a cop a few weeks before.
“Seen Keel?”
“Naw,” Yards growled. Keel made him feel his guilt at deserting Eagle more keenly than anyone. “How’s he makin’ it with his paddy chick?”
“Aw right, I s’pose,” Eagle said. He was watching the streets again.
“You must have been raisin’ hell out on the road,” Yards said.
“Why you say that?”
“People lookin’ for you, man.”
“What people?” Eagle hadn’t bothered to turn. The movement of the life through which they sped had a fascination for him, but he could seldom capture it when he played these days. Tired all the time. And besides, who the hell knew except two or three people (Yards was one of them) if you had captured a big chunk of life?
“A cat, I hear.”
“What damned cat?”
“Dig, man, a pro.”
“Later.”
“Better listen to me, Eagle. You know I wouldn’t put you on.”
“What’s he want me for?”
“That broad out west.”
“Oh. That.” Eagle smiled. “Damn,” he said. “Sure was a nothing chick in bed too.”
“That figures,” Yards said.
“What the hell we goin’ all the way up here for, mother?”
They were in Harlem now. “I want some damned grits for breakfast,” Yards said.
“And sausage?” Eagle asked.
“And sausage,” Yards said with a grin. They parked beside a restaurant and
got out. “I’m springing,” Yards said.
“Of course you are,” Eagle countered.
“You never change, man.”
“Naw.” They started into the restaurant, but at the door Eagle placed his hand on Yard’s arm. “Seems like we should get together again, Yards. Gettin’ kind of late.”
“I dig that.”
“Y’ do?”
“Always did. Just got too far out to come back in.”
“But you been wailin’, baby.”
They shuffled around the table, took seats and ordered.
“Somethin’s missin’,” Yards said. “It ain’t like it used to be.”
“Nuthin’ is. Shit.”
“You got a gig goin’?”
“Not right off. You?”
Yards nodded. He didn’t have too much time off between jobs. Even if he had wanted to he wouldn’t have been able to play with Eagle for the next year and a half. “Yeah, I got a couple of things.”
“Cool.”
“How you fixed for bread?”
“You know how it is when you work for Demetriades; the bread is nice enough.”
“Can’t stand that cat.”
“Know what I’d like to do man, after breakfast?”
“Jam.”
“Sure would.”
“Seldom, Eagle, you know. Everybody’s so cool now, y’ dig?”
“Sure.” Eagle stared across the table at Yards. Handsome. No, cute, and still that did not really describe him. But he didn’t take any crap. The jazz writers called it arrogance, but Eagle knew. Whatever it was Yards did or said, he had his right to it.
“What’re you goin’ to do about them people?”
“What people?”
“The ones I told you about.”
“Hell,” Eagle said. “I’m goin’ to do just what I been doin’.”
“Yeah,” Yards said. “What else?” He glanced at the scar running along Eagle’s temple. The man was filled with scare—from needles, knuckles, police clubs. He had just started getting them when Yards first joined him years ago. Maybe, Yards thought, for he was (and he knew Eagle knew it) fundamentally empathetic, the scars were the deepest where no one could see them. Sometimes, when he had been on a drunk, you could see the scars in Eagle’s behavior. Now he was a tired-looking young man who had grown very old. So much had happened to him so often that Yards could not really believe Eagle was under forty. “You look tired. Let me run you back downtown,” Yards offered.
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