The City Below

by James Carroll

  Anger, she felt it cleanly, at her, as if he'd tracked this strange route her emotions had just taken.

  He bolted away, circled the car, and got in on the driver's side, slamming the door. He pressed the ignition button so hard she saw his thumb go white.

  "Get in," he ordered.

  She did, but only after picking up the orchid plant.

  He said, "I'm going back to the apartment to pack some things. Then I want you to drive me to Logan. I'm going to D.C."

  "To see Bright?"

  "To see the senator."

  "Oh, Terry." She put the plant on the floor between her legs and leaned across the gearshift to him, an assertive move of the kind she'd once regularly made in that car. She put her mouth on his and kissed him. "Not tonight."

  "I have to go. I want him up here Monday. It's what you wanted, isn't it?"

  "But now I see how much more complicated—"

  "Fuck complicated, Joan. You were right the first time."

  She kissed him again, thinking: Not "fuck complicated," love; fuck me. It was a phrase she could not use with her good, straight husband, a man—yes—without curves. She felt wholly turned on, and refused to think why.

  "Hey," he said, coming up for air, "it's only Washington. I'll be back tomorrow. Monday at the latest."

  "I'll be waiting, sugar." It relieved her when he laughed and squeezed her hard. He began to pull away, but she held him. "What does he do—really?"

  "Nick? I don't ask. My brother has a lot of irons and a lot of fires."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I don't talk about this, okay?" He turned back to the wheel, and soon he had the motor roaring, the wind hard in their faces. Talk was impossible, and she was glad.

  She was glad, also, to have him behind the wheel for the ride back to Cambridge. She needed to think, to sort out what had just happened.

  Also, if Terry was driving, she could hold the fragile orchid carefully, out of the wind, away from her husband. This is so direct, she thought, so obvious. Yet Terry, poor Terry, hadn't a clue. She stared at the blooms all the way up the river, thinking that not even in Georgia O'Keeffe had a flower ever seemed so erotic. "Black milium," she said aloud, words lost in the wind. "Black milium."

  14

  EVEN BEFORE WAKING, Terry heard the unmistakable sounds, the frantic pulse of two breathers out of synch with each other, the rail of a bedstead thumping against the other side of the plasterboard wall at his head. The noise was a bank of rough clouds that floated into his dream, warning of a storm, filling him with fragmentary sensations: a knee touching his ribs, another knee pressing his opposite thigh, a hand pushing against his chest, then withdrawing, then down again on his heart; his own hand cupping a languorous breast, a nipple in the sweet spot of his palm; music, particular music, a driving rhythm, spurts of blood bubbling the sea between his legs. His thumbs were in the waistband of underwear. His grooved fingers were digging into some moist cavity of flesh...

  He opened his eyes.

  A curtain above him lifted in the warm morning breeze. He forced his mind first outside that window, toward the sounds of light traffic drifting in from Independence Avenue, the chirping of birds, branches and leaves rustling, the complacent noise of a September morning on Capitol Hill.

  "Oh ... oh ... Bright ... here!...here!...hon!...hon!"

  The woman's throaty whisper carried through the wall. Terry pictured her, the black sheen of her skin, her breasts swaying as she straddled Bright, her head bent above him, brushing his face with the soft wire of her Afro ...

  Not Afro. Not black. The woman Doyle had met last night was white. She was short, had brown hair, wore a loose-fitting summer dress, was pretty and happy looking, like a nurse or teacher. She had a dramatically crooked tooth, and when she smiled, Terry had found himself worried about her, what it had been like to grow up in a family that could not get those teeth fixed. Her name was Suzie. She was with Bright when he'd met Terry at the airport, and the three of them had gone for dinner to the '89 in Georgetown, and then to Mister Charlie's. She was a funny kid, and Terry liked her, but her presence had made it impossible to talk to Bright. They'd had a lot to drink, and carried on as a raucous trio, but when they had returned to the apartment, Terry had stepped aside like the knowing roommate he used to be.

  Now he was cold. He had slept in his underwear, beneath a yellowed sheet that was now twisted at his waist. He was wet with perspiration, and the breeze at the window was what chilled him. The sofa cushions had gapped beneath his spine. The arm cushion bunched under his head was damp.

  Sound contortions continued at his ear, the low male notes of a moan hammering a woman's whine; the bed sent its vibrations into the wall. "You!...you!...you!" Bright's voice seemed ignited and unfamiliar, though Terry had heard his friend in the throes of orgasm before. He knew that McKay always called his lovers "you" at such moments, to avoid the risk of a wrong name. He had recommended the method back in the days of Terry's initiation into the rituals of D.C.'s frenzied bison hunt, but Terry had never succeeded as a hunter. After his years in the seminary—"prick on ice," Bright had called it—Terry knew he had forever lost several steps to his friend. He was secretly in awe of the way Bright had reinvented himself in Washington. Bright had encouraged Terry to do the same, but McKay had seemed supremely detached from the effect of his smoldering personality. It was Bright who'd introduced Terry to raunchy French cigarettes; the defiant angle at which those stubby weeds rode on the perch of Bright's lips had been a vivid first lesson that some blatant affectations can succeed. How Terry had loved walking into Mister Charlie's or the Cellar Door with him, as if with Richard Wright or Jimmy Baldwin, a black man back from Paris. Terry was his Camus. In addition to his rakish eye patch and loose-limbed strut, Bright wore an aura of sexual readiness. His entrance charged the air of pubs and coffee joints. Girls lifted their heads, whites as often as blacks, and each boy knew at once that his plans for the evening were at risk.

  The girl with Bright was now letting out a restrained but shrill cry, seemingly of pain, animal sacrifice. Her discomfort, more than the sounds of ecstasy that had led up to it, made Terry feel like an eavesdropper. He closed his eyes and threw an arm over his exposed ear. He imagined he was in bed with Joan, and once more she was rolling away from him, disappointed. How long had it been since she had cried out like that?

  Instead of arousal, the physical sensation that dragged him out of the last wispy shadow of sleep was a poignant sadness in his chest, the familiar void of deflation with which he had begun most of the days of his life, and still did. Leaving the Church, moving to D.C., joining Kennedy, marrying Joan, moving back to Boston—nothing had altered the deep feeling of unconnectedness that he associated with this aftermath of waking. It was only worse now that mornings meant the naked woman at his side shared such a feeling.

  Miles Davis blowing "Someday My Prince Will Come" was Terry's notice that they were getting up. There were plumbing sounds and voices, but the music overrode most of it. Bright had become an extravagant man, and his sound system reflected it, with speakers in all four rooms of the apartment. The cassette deck and tuner were, of course, in the bedroom. Music from the footlocker-size speakers at each end of the couch jolted Terry, even though the trumpet elegy was plaintive and turned low.

  Terry threw the sheet aside and was pulling on his cord trousers as Suzie walked into the room wearing a bronze slip, which heightened the white of her skin, displaying her body more than covering it.

  "Knock, knock," she said.

  "Who's there?" Terry asked, though he knew she'd only been announcing herself.

  She smiled, and once more the sight of her crooked front tooth made him want to reassure her. The slip shimmered though, and, no doubt because he'd just heard her going over the top, she seemed far sexier than she had last night. He stood to buckle his pants, which seemed foolish suddenly, given the ease with which she presented her near-nakedness.

  "Marmalade," she a
nswered.

  "Marmalade who?"

  "Everyone but Daddy." With a grin and a pointed twitch of her ass, she went by Terry into the kitchen, saying, "Need that coffee."

  While she worked the coffeepot, Terry went to the bedroom door and stuck his head in. Bright, naked, was just coming out of the bathroom. It was a shock to see him without his eye patch. His left eyelid was shrunken into the socket, wrinkled like a walnut.

  "Good morning," Bright said. He smiled warmly. "I forgot you were here."

  "I thought you might have." Terry pointed toward the bathroom. "May I?"

  "Sure." Bright took a brown velour robe from a hook and put it on as Terry went by him into the bathroom. His shaving kit was not on the toilet tank shelf where he'd left it, and it took a moment to spot the black case on the narrow sill by the small window beyond the shower. As he stood before the toilet, urinating, his gaze went again to the white porcelain tank lid, only now he saw a remnant line of white powder separating a Gillette Blue Blade and a red plastic cocktail straw.

  Terry flushed the toilet and went back into the bedroom. Bright was sitting on the edge of the ruined bed, listening to Miles. His eye patch was on again.

  "You've gone uptown on me," Terry said.

  "Huh?"

  "Your nose candy." Terry glanced back toward the john. "Is that smart, buddy?"

  "Terence, Terence. What in the fucking world are you talking about?"

  "The cocaine, Bright."

  "Oh, the cloud walk." Bright grinned. "You want?"

  "No."

  "Hey, let the air out of the ball, what do you say? It's not my shit, man, it's Suzie's."

  "Hers? You're kidding."

  Bright raised his palms. "She seem too Wonder Bread for you? Too white?"

  "Too white? What does that have to do with it?"

  "Niggers are the cokeheads, isn't that why you immediately—?"

  "Bright, fuck you. It's your bathroom."

  "Time out!" McKay made a T with his hands. "Time out! Time out! Talk about controlled substance! You! Your control! Ease off, Terry, really. You're wound as tight as a watch, have been since the airport."

  "Since the airport, I've been wanting to talk to you. I'm not down here on vacation."

  "So talk."

  Doyle looked across at the door just as Suzie appeared in it, her hands closed around a steaming mug. She said, "Coffee's ready. You guys help yourselves while I do my thing in the potty." She leaned against the doorjamb, hooking her legs in a stagy but still seductive pose. She remained languidly in the threshold, a perfectly turned leg in the way, as the men passed her. Her toenails were painted a deep purplish red. Terry was unprepared for the directness of her look as he went by, sensing a challenge in it, or an invitation. The sharp aroma of the coffee alerted him also to the distinct scent of sex rising from her. She bowed as he stepped over her leg, a playful bit of courtliness, the main effect of which was to give him a staggering glimpse of her breasts.

  In the kitchen, next to a golden, uncurtained window, were a café table and two chairs. A bud vase held one exquisite silk rose. Bright poured their coffee. They lit up, each staring for a moment at his own goatshit Gauloise, each picking a flake of tobacco off his tongue.

  Miles Davis had moved even further into the realm of melancholy with a bluesy "When You Wish upon a Star."

  "Who'd have thunk it," Bright said. "Walt Disney, a soul brother."

  Terry's eyes drifted to the window, and out. Several blocks away, looking like the backdrop of a news broadcast, was the Capitol dome above a line of trees and rooftops, its whiteness stark against the blue sky. "What was that 'nigger' shit, Bright?"

  "Gut reaction. I thought you'd jumped the track."

  "Me?"

  "Hey, come on, Terry. You. You're exempt?"

  "With you, yes. Or so I thought. I was surprised at the coke—okay, I'm a stiff, And I assumed it was yours. But hell, what does that have to do with your being black? That wasn't in my mind. I can't believe we're talking about this."

  "Really? After what's happened this week?"

  "You mean in Boston?"

  "Of course I mean in Boston. Isn't that what's got you down here?"

  "Yes. But Boston is something apart You and me, we're..." Terry's voice sank into a swamp of grief and guilt as he thought, Bright knows. He knows about the lynched effigy.

  McKay sipped his coffee in silence.

  "It's bad," Terry said. "Worse than you think. Something awful is going to happen."

  "Something awful is happening, bro."

  Terry leaned across the small table, claiming full possession of his friend's good eye. "Black children are going to get killed in Boston."

  "Bureau reports say the police are doing the job."

  "Bright, listen to me. Every day two thousand white people surround the high school in Charlestown, and another two thousand do it in Southie, and every day they get a little bolder. The president has told them he agrees with them. The mayor sends them the same message, groaning about the court order. Their state reps and city councilors lead them in their jungle bunny chants. The cardinal hasn't been heard from, the priests lead the rosaries in the streets, and the cops whom the Bureau praises are the brothers of the Southie and Townie racists. The whites in the Town call themselves the Powderkeg."

  Bright surprised Terry by smiling. " There's the powder to worry about."

  The line threw Terry, for he recognized it as a stiff-arm, the kind of fending off he himself had been doing for weeks. They both knew where talk like this would lead. "Since everybody in charge is invisible, ambivalent, or on their side, the people in Charlestown and Southie are drawing the wrong conclusion. They think they can win this thing. They think if they're just a little nastier, a little louder, a little bit more physical—"

  "Terry, cool it. You're—"

  "I guarantee you, kids are going to the unless somebody has the balls to stand up and tell these people to stop, tell them that they're wrong, and that they're going to lose."

  "Somebody?"

  "The senator."

  Bright snuffed his cigarette, then immediately reached for another. "We've been through that."

  "I know, but that was weeks ago."

  "Staff meets every day on this thing. Are you kidding? We're on top of it, and you—"

  "I'm there. I was in Charlestown yesterday. I'm telling you something you don't know. Staff meetings? What about the senator? Who's briefing him on this?"

  "I am."

  "Why won't you listen?"

  "They fucking hate Ted already, that's why. They won't listen to him. They know his posidon on busing, not ambivalent at all, buddy. I've written the damn speeches."

  "And you wrote what he said when he blasted Ford."

  "You're damn right I did."

  "Very brave of both of you. The battle of Pennsylvania Avenue. As long as Ted Kennedy stays down here, the Irish in Boston, who are his first people, assume they're winning. Nobody gives a shit what you write for him to say if he's stuck in the Senate. He's ducking like everybody else, but in his case, he ducks just by not being there. I'm not asking you to get him to win the saps over at this point, but to stand with the black children, that's all. Nobody is standing with the children, Bright Your children. I can't believe I'm having to argue this with you."

  "Because I'm a black man."

  "Yes."

  "Shit, bro, listen to yourself." Bright held up his fist, turned it, eyed it. "That's the most important thing about me? What if they were one-eyed children instead of black children? Would you still assume my special burden? You know me since 1960, Terry. Fifteen fucking years. And what else have I been all this time? What else besides black and one-eyed?"

  "With Kennedy."

  "Right. You and I in a blizzard at Jack's inauguration. I fell in love with him, Terry. First Jack, then Bobby. Now Ted. The Kennedys is what I believe in. Why can't that be the main thing with me, the way it is with Ted's other staff? Why can't I look
you in one of your two good eyes and say, 'No fucking way Ted goes to Boston this week,' the way they would? No fucking way Ted stands up in front of those animals in Southie. You weren't in L.A., buddy. I was. I stopped being black when Bobby died at my feet. I became the color Kennedy, okay? The kitchen in the Ambassador. Dealey Plaza. That's enough. Some of us are left with one fucking simple idea—keep the man alive. Keep him away from the mad haters. Somebody's going to the? That's what your gut tells you? Okay. I hear you. But not Ted. You got it? Not Ted Kennedy."

  "Some child, then."

  Bright shook his head sadly.

  "Everything we love fails, Bright That's what I can't stand. I'm talking about my own people here. They've failed. My Church failed."

  "And now I did."

  "It's Ted I'm thinking of. I believe the Kennedy thing too. Boston needs him. That's what I came here to say. And if saying it to you is pointless, then I want to say it to him."

  Bright shook his head.

  Terry stared at his old friend, feeling anger mount in his throat He pressed his cigarette out in the white porcelain ashtray. Everything was white in this room. "You know something, Bright," Doyle said. "I think you're full of shit No more Dealey Plazas? Come off it You've decided busing is a loser. The staff thinks busing is a loser. No more losers for Ted, isn't that what you guys are really saying?"

  "That isn't it, no." Bright was cool. "This week belongs to the cops, Doyle. That's all."

  Doyle. That was Blight's boss-name for him, a little tickle to remind him who was in charge.

  "The cops? I saw a cop yesterday standing guard over a lynched effigy of Garrity. The sign on the dummy corpse said, This Fudge Loved Niggers. It looked like Mississippi, Bright."

  "At least it was an effigy."

  "That's what Squire said. The cop was an old friend of yours too."

  "How is Jackie?" Blight's hand went to his eye.

  "He's in it So is Squire."