The day of departure arrived. I was at the small Bloomington Airport, a two-roomed shed, dressed in American summer wear of grey-and-white-striped seersucker suit, blue shirt, college tie of Calhoun College, and brown suede desert boots; and having packed short pants, bathing trunks, and sandals to contend with the Texas heat and humidity. And a hunger for a swimming pool and “coloured television” in which to drown myself for the two weeks of my invitation.
The private jet, a Lear jet, came into the Bloomington Airport like a breeze. I was sitting in the lounge, no larger, no more impressive than a room in a downtown bowling alley, than a room with a pool table; and then all of a sudden my name was called out; and I went to a telephone in the airport manager’s office, and Jean’s voice was on the intercom, and the voice of his wife, and he told me he could see the tiny airport, and that I should come on the runway and see the jet, coming in to land “like a breeze”; and before it did land, I was taken to the VIP waiting room, and everyone at the airport looked at me differently, and I pushed out my chest, and went on to the runway to meet the jet, and walk aboard up the steps, and I thought I heard applause. I had paid the taxicab the nominal rate, about five dollars from my apartment in the middle of the forest, and when I returned from Houston, witnessing the landing on the moon, the fare was doubled. I was a celebrity. I had travelled on a private jet. The taxicab man had to get his share in my new celebrity. And I paid him his inflated fare without a murmur of protest or emotion.
Houston, Texas! The land of bigness. Big houses, big Cadillacs, big steaks, big swimming pools, big portals in the Southern imitating Roman architecture, big lawns mowed to an evenness that matches artificial grass, and greener; big wages, big passions and tempers, big violence, big bigness. I saw myself driving from the airport in his white Cadillac. Perhaps, as a Frenchman, he had a Citroën. Or a Mercedes-Benz. And his mansion would have the white stately columns so characteristic of the antebellum South, lined with magnolia trees. And the swimming pool, though not shaped in the passion and romance of a heart, or some shape of the human body, would be large, as big as a football field, in which I would float on an inflated bed, with a gin and tonic floating beside me on another floating object. And at dinner, I would be dressed in my grey-and-white-striped seersucker suit; and at night after dinner and espresso and Armagnac, watch television on a screen as large as one in a movie house.
The plane landed at Houston. And it taxied to a shed. Beside the door to the shed were two Hertz rented station wagons, in the most ugly baby-blue colour. Jean got out and entered. Where was the Cadillac? Where was the Citroën? The Mercedes-Benz? The Lincoln-Continental, then? Jean was a phony. To come all this distance, and park a Lear jet, and enter a rented car? I knew then that I had made a mistake in accepting his invitation to watch the landing on the moon.
But we drove in silence, through the neighbourhood of wealth and silence, and I discovered then, in this winding drive where there was absolutely no noise, even though there were Mexicans, or Indian-looking men, short in stature, but tough in the limbs, especially in the waist, with pangas in their hands, bending over, almost in the shape of hairpins, attacking the luscious grass with an expertise that no powered lawn mower could match, in this visible exertion of energy and power, but no noise rising from the grass sprayed like confetti that is green … and in this silence, the rented awful baby-blue Hertz station wagon, with Jean and his wife and I and his private secretary inside, all silent, all wondering, all thinking that we were lost — except his wife who would have made this trip as many times as Jean — waiting for the proof of our deception that Jean was not what he said he was.
And then we enter River Oaks, and there is this silence again, nothing moving, nothing shaking, nothing blowing, for there is no breeze, and the station wagon turns into a driveway, and my heart sinks. There is no house immediately visible. Then after a few yards, the roof of a house emerges in the first sign of dusk, and the station wagon continues, and my disappointment increases with every yard it travels, and then we stop. There is no house. Only a roof is visible. The roof of a bungalow. Sunk into the ground. But we are moving to the front door, and then, as if in a miracle, the house emerges from the ground and is taking up all the space before us. When the front door is opened, there is a welcome that takes the breath away. I shall let Norman Mailer describe it, in the same book, Of a Fire on the Moon:
The mansion was modern, it had been one of the first modern homes in Houston and was designed by one of the more ascetic modern architects. With the best will, how could Aquarius like it? But the severity of the design was concealed by the variety of furniture, the intensity of the art, the presence of the sculpture and the happy design in fact of a portion of the house: the living room shared a wall with a glassed-in atrium of exotics in bloom. So the surgical intent of the architect was partially overcome by the wealth of the art and by the tropical pressure of the garden whose plants and interior trees, illumined with spotlights, possessed something of the same silence that comes over audience and cast when there is a moment of theater and everything ceases, everything depends on — one cannot say — it is just that no one thinks to cough.
There had been another such moment when he entered the house. In the foyer was a painting by Magritte, a startling image of a room, with an immense rock situated in the centre of the floor. The instant of time suggested by the canvas was comparable to the mood of a landscape in the instant just before something awful is about to happen, or just after, one could not tell. The silences of the canvas spoke of Apollo 11 still circling the moon: the painting could have been photographed for the front page — it hung from the wall like a severed head. As Aquarius met the other guests, gave greetings, took a drink, his thoughts were not free of the painting. He did not know when it had been done — he assumed it was finished many years ago — he was certain without even thinking about it that there has been no intention by the artist to talk of the moon or projects in space, no, Aquarius would assume the painter had awakened with a vision of the canvas and that vision he had delineated. Something in the acrid breath of the city he inhabited, some avidity emitted by a passing machine, some tar in the residue of a nightmare, some ash from the memory of a cremation had gone into the painting of that gray stone — it was as if Magritte had listened to the ending of one world with its comfortable chairs in the parlor, and heard the intrusion of a new world, silent as the windowless stone which grew in the room, and knowing not quite what he had painted, had painted his warning nevertheless. Now the world of the future was dead rock, and the rock was in the room.
At the dinner party to which Aquarius was invited, and Jean de Menil had asked me as his houseguest whether I approved of the invitation list, and of course, who was I to have scruples about the guests, who included Alberto Moravia, the famous Italian novelist; Dacia Moraini, Aquarius; another Italian journalist; and myself; with Mr. and Mrs. de Menil, our hosts. I realized how restricted my education was: I was the only person who could speak only one language. At dinner the conversation moved from English, to Italian, to French, with all the other guests taking part without a slip of syntax. Except Mailer and I. And it was so natural for them to speak in three languages, as the conversation moved to their seat at the table, without effort, making it more embarrassing for me, who knew only one language.
When the moon launching was about to begin, Mailer had by now gone back to the launching pad, I was surprised to find that there was no television in the main house, and that we had to go into the servants’ quarters to watch the takeoff. And we did that.
The next morning I wanted to take some photographs of my surroundings, of Houston, and I asked for directions to the nearest film shop; but Jean thought he should call ahead and tell the shop owner that I was coming. It was a polite and understated way of telling him that I was black, and that I was visiting the de Menils of Houston. I picked this up from the courteous manner of his dealing with me. I bought a Polaroid camera, which Jean paid for, and I
set out to take pictures of my environment, of the house, of the Magritte, of Norman Mailer, of Alberto Moravia, of everyone, including the maids in whose rooms we had watched the launching of the moon the previous night.
It was time to leave. To return to Bloomington’s humidity and to the nearness of the Klan, only nine miles away from the apartment in the middle of the forest; and when I got to my graduate seminar and was asked what happened in Houston, I said, “There was a dinner party, and this Italian writer, Alberto Moravia, and Norman Mailer, and Dacia Maraini — whom I learned later was the lover of Moravia, who had recommended her for one of Italy’s most prestigious prizes — were there.” They voiced their astonishment that I did not know that “Moravia is only Italy’s best novelist!” And they gave me as a going-away present three paperback copies of his work. It was on my return to Bloomington that the taxicab driver, the same man who had taken me to the airport two weeks earlier, charged me twice as much as he had charged on the way out, in the private Lear jet. I paid for my celebrity.
The next time I saw Mailer, who was no longer Aquarius, but was simply Mailer, was in Chapel Hill, at the University of North Carolina, and the next day, at Duke, to give a lecture and tell the same joke, which drew no laughter from the Chapel Hill students, but which was uproariously greeted on the Duke campus. I wondered why there was this difference in appreciation of dirty jokes, which was what Mailer had told, about his former wife, and her inefficiency in bed, in the sexual game. Not “game”: more like a battle. She turned the tables back on him when he speculated about her sexual dexterity, blaming him for any lack of appreciation and effectiveness on that score. It was during this visit that I made him my famous omelette of sardines and eggs, in the home of the chairman of Religious Studies, at Duke, Professor Clarke. No relation of course. This omelette is described in my book about cooking, Pig Tails ’n’ Breadfruit, later reissued under the title Love and Sweet Food. It was on this occasion that I knew that Norman Mailer and I were friends.
I would see Mailer some years later, in Toronto, when he came to give a lecture at the university, after the publication of his blockbuster novel Arabian Nights, at a late dinner party at my house on McGill Street, at which were Cynthia Good; Barry Callaghan, who picked a fight with Mailer; and Susan Walker, who did not pick a fight with Mailer.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Into my life came a man of intrigue, of danger, of drama, of fear, of experience with guns, a man who handled great sums of money, who had consorted with kings and dukes and lords, a man who knew about arms, and about overturning governments, a man not unknown to countries with low political esteem and lower financial dependability, governments tottering from corruptions of all kinds, a man not of the people, but a man to be reckoned with. He christened me, “Old Boy.” And I called him “Old Boy” in return. A man of dramatic intrigue, a man who wanted to be a duke in the British system of the peerage; and who was confident that he could convince someone, slightly less royal than the Queen, that it was his right, by birth, that as a Barbadian he had the right pedigree to be so anointed. And he promised me a dukedom, too. He decided that I would be called Lord Austin of Flagstaff. And he laughed, a full-bodied laugh that took all the surrealism out of the joke, and made it serious; and within reach; and it no longer seemed absurd and idealistic. Lord Austin of Flagstaff.
He had just emigrated from London, where he had spent many years, and returned to Barbados where his friend was now Prime Minister. He commanded an important presence with the Cabinet, spent money in large cash amounts like a sailor, but understood better than his benefici-
aries that it was an investment in his future and equally an investment in their personal destruction; as the story went — the story goes — for he had created myths around his persona, was larger than life in Barbados, called Little England, for its imitation of English culture and country life, was a Lord in the eyes of the avaricious politicians whom he fed cash to, and with the granting of the only government licence to open and operate a bank, he created another myth that he had buried gold bars in the country district of the Parish of St. John, in which he was born, and had wired them with electricity and dynamite and gun powder against predators, and politicians who were predators.
He booked himself into the Barbados Hilton, at the time the most prestigious hotel residence in the West Indies; and spun a web of carefully scripted behaviour that caused an accounts clerk to draw to the attention of the manager that the Old Boy had racked up a long-distance telephone bill of two thousand Barbados dollars within one week. The alarm went up, and out. And the manager, intimidated by the myth that surrounded the Old Boy, walked soft along the thick carpets of the special suites and tapped like a mouse on the door of the Old Boy’s room. And mentioned in equal timidity the small question of the telephone bill. It was, at that time, the largest telephone bill ever racked up in the Barbados Hilton records.
“Of course, Old Boy,” the Old Boy said, without batting an eyelid. And he went to his briefcase, strategically open so that the hotel manager could see the contents, and he counted off the required amount of money, in Barbados dollars, and paid the received manager.
“We are sorry to bother you, sir,” the manager said, with sincere regret that he had indeed bothered the Old Boy. And downstairs again, in the office, he scolded the worker for almost embarrassing him.
The Old Boy racked up hundreds of dollars in telephone calls to Britain and to his far-flung “empire”-making deals with armaments and weapons, and keeping millions of dollars and pounds in guarded protection, in trust, in the buried vault of his mercantile bank, safe from the clutches of succeeding dictators of the Middle East. Barbados was the safe haven of these gold bars that increased in number as the myth swelled like the bladder of a butchered hog.
When the Old Boy left Barbados, he left a long list of casualties who had accepted money in cheques with his name on them. He went back to a suburb in New York, where he lived with his “daughter.” And bided his time, calculating risks and more adventure; and then he called me, from the Toronto airport one cold day in November.
“Old Boy?” He wanted help in finding a place for his two dogs. They were with him, at the moment, in a motel near the airport, and were being fed and petted by the maids. I did not know that dogs were welcomed in motels and hotels in Toronto. “When you are a conservative, the system opens up to you! If you are a radical, the system closes down around you.” It was a lesson in politics that I have kept in mind since that cold November morning, when I went to collect him, in my Mercedes-Benz. He was at home in the Benz. In London, they said that he went about in a Rolls-Royce, and dressed in morning suit, complete with silk top hat. But no insignia with the Royal Seal, attesting to the fact that he now wanted to be made an earl of the realm. Some lord, indeed! He was without his “daughter,” whom he consistently addressed as “his daughter” and behaved toward her, in public, as if she was in fact, “his daughter” until once, twice, three times in one month of what my mother called “a slip of the tongue,” he forgot to mention that she was his daughter! The look in his eye, the glint of the previous night’s satisfaction, in bed or in the exchange of a thought, his passion for progeny had been struck.
We all who knew him, knew and hoped and loved the young woman. But numbered amongst “all of we,” were the women in our lives, sisters, aunts, and wives. These three groups of women, and as women they were wiser than all of us men put together; all these women saw the “rudeness” in his calling “his woman his daughter.”
“We smelled-that-out, long time ago, boy!”
But his magic and the truth in his word were founded in the “presence” of his clothes, suits cut to an English gentleman’s taste, and shined shoes, always bright and oiled like a dog’s stones. His loyalty to friends, men and women, was expressed not only in the size of “the little something” he gave to politicians, but as a mark of their confidence in his generosity, they took these “little somethings” in the form o
f cheques; and, with their names on these documents, the other paragraphs in their personal histories were thrown open for the Island-nation to hear and laugh at; but this is the world of West Indian politics and power, and the heavy humidity of sexual boredom, which propelled these desires into gatherings at the home of a foreigner, who saw the opportunity to brag about his political connections and raise his value in the eyes of other foreigners, his friends in Trinidad, who liked these sexual extravagances; so he wired his flat for film and audio, and then captured libelous sexual enjoyments of the Island’s aristocracy, and the destruction of their political careers; and sent the evidence captured on raw film and audiotape, by certified letter, to America, to Playboy magazine. Playboy spotted in this film, the faces of politicians and barristers-at-law, judges and businessmen; and understood the scandal that would erupt in the small Island-nation, and sought corroboration, and asked the Old Boy, safe up in England, to say who is who, and who was who, on the exposing film. The effect was instantaneous. And irrevocable. And men vanished. One in a large fishing boat, out to sea, at Gravesend Beach, tied they say at his ankles with bangles not of silver, as in the days of first slavery and transportation from Africa over the bilious waves of the Atlantic Ocean, but shackled by the material of concrete blocks custom-made to suit his delicate ankles and dropped deep into the concealing sea. “Never to be seen again.” And indeed, the promise made by those whose reputation was blemished by the images on the film, was kept, just as members of a secret society keep promises. Not even the three daily newspapers wasted an item of news to commemorate the historical event.
The negatives of the film were seen by the Old Boy, and the price of silence asked for them was paid in cash — not cheques this time! — in hard, cold English pounds, translated into Yankee dollars. The negatives were handed over to the Old Boy. I am told he made a barbecue of the evidence and dropped them one bright morning into the water below a bridge that spanned from Manhattan over to Brooklyn, just as he would have dropped the ash from a Trumpeter cigarette, back years before, into the silky, thick, high-smelling water of the Barbados Careenage.
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