O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

  That first night he barely made it: New Year’s streamers bolting across the room just as she’d managed to free it from his trousers. Trying again, that first time everything had gone wrong. They’d worked together like two machines laboring on opposing assembly lines, all the parts oiled and in good running order, but each with its own private function. “Slow down, honey,” Rose advised gently when it was over, wiping his clotted belly with a washcloth. “It’s better that way.” Going for it again, Micah imagined he was Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, all long strides. Now the opposite happened, the lovers reaching for each other across vast syrupy distances, speaking by way of semaphore. (The only thing worse than a quick, greedy lay being a long, lackluster one.) Rallying for a third attempt following a stamina-boosting peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, Micah hoped to impress with his knowledge of curious poses from worlds animal and Hindu. She finally made it, shuddering, a fish arcing out of water. “That’s all I got,” he said, exquisitely chafed and panting, attending to a pulled hamstring on his left leg. “That’s okay, honey,” she said, “we’ll try the rest another time.” (The rest?!)

  A work in progress, then, that first night. Though their bodies pressed together as close as muscle and bone sinew would allow, they hadn’t really slept together at all, had never really shared a charted course. Rather, each remained fixated on an idea of the other: Rose had made it with a movie director; Micah had just dipped into his first black berry. What had he expected? Did he think it would look different? Feel different? Smell different? Even during the act, he caught himself, as he was prone to do, recasting the incident in two-inch-tall movie-magazine type (A GRAND OLD TIME: DIRECTOR CONTRIBUTES TO COLORED CAUSE). Then, later, buttoning himself up in the half-light scumble, revising the late-edition headline to arrive closer to the truth (OCCASION RISEN TO: MOVIEMAKER LEARNS A THING, TWO).

  A world-class pussy bandit, Micah had experienced marriage as a seven-year montage of chorus singers and starlets, secretaries and schoolteachers, cigarette girls and cocktail waitresses, all of them happily hopping into his lap, a pinwheeling collage of legs waving from taxicab windows, lewd acts performed in commissary bathrooms and the back of darkened screening rooms, the entire apparatus of moviemaking at times seeming less about money and craftsmanship than a riot of unrestrained coupling. At one Hollywood dinner party Micah attended with Margaret, he excused himself between courses to bed each of the women at the table in turn, returning to his seat for palette-cleansing shots of sorbet. And this kind of ass-happy behavior wasn’t frowned upon either: Each year Marblestone threw a Christmas Eve orgy that would have made Caligula blush.

  “I noticed you the first time I saw you,” she told him just before he left that night.

  “Because I’m running the show?”

  “No, because you’re such a big boy.”

  “A big-boy?” he asked, investing the hyphenate with all its Mae West suggestiveness.

  “No,” she corrected him. “A big boy.”

  “So I’ve been found out.”

  “Sure have. You know what else? You fuck like a black man.”

  “Jeez, miss. And here I thought you were saving yourself for your wedding day.”

  “Well, you know what they say about black men …,” she said, gripping his shrinking, modest-size member.

  “Don’t—”

  “They don’t pay for anything.”

  When she laughed—selecting a snorting exhalation from her policeman’s lineup of chortles, giggles, chuckles, hiccups, belly laughs, and guffaws—he knew that the pleasure she took in finding him more overgrown child than movie big shot was meant as a supreme compliment. With the others, Micah had been aroused not by the specific girls themselves so much as by the intensity of their interest in him, but things felt different with Rose. It wasn’t the need for uptown adventure or the exoticism of her blackness, it was that they met together on this childlike plane. She appreciated his card tricks and magic acts, took a connoisseur’s interest in the water pistol and the whoopee cushion, delighted in the mysteries of yo-yo suspension and wall-shadow puppetry, could wind her way around a dirty limerick with the best of them. And she appreciated, too, that fucking, the very best of it, is child’s play.

  Then came the difficulty of what to do about the affair, how public to make it. Limit their time together to visits to Harlem, that second metropolis, or brazenly spirit the girl around town? Mainly they spent their time together hidden away in the little one-bedroom apartment Rose shared with her half brother, Early, on West 140th Street, the two of them holed up in the postage-stamp-size bedroom, her brother coming in late at night and depositing himself on the couch like a sack of coal.

  “I swear, that boy better watch out, land himself in some serious business,” Rose said with a sigh one night when they were woken by Early’s clattering around the living room at 3:00 A.M. Wanting to help but careful not to intervene with too strong a hand, Micah suggested hiring Early for odd jobs on the set: running errands, ferrying around extras, delivering cans of film to the lab, that sort of thing. Mainly he hoped to yoke Early to Billy Conklin, the sweet-faced, apple-bright go-getter and unofficial crew mascot, who might serve as a good influence. Anyway, it was no trouble throwing the kid a couple of bucks every once in a while, and he might learn a trade and make himself eligible for a union card in the process. Purplish black, Early was several shades darker than Rose, so they’d agreed to keep quiet their family relationship around the crew. That was fine by Early: Nobody needed to know he was taking handouts from the man giving the business end to his sister. This suited Rose, too. If she wasn’t making a conscious effort to pass for white, she was in no hurry to tell the world she was colored either.

  “It’s a book about passing,” Rose said of the copy of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand that Micah picked up from her bedside table.

  “Seems an awful lot of effort, pretending you’re something you’re not.”

  “What, like you’re doing right now? Besides, that first day in the projection room, didn’t you wonder if I was black?”

  “I wondered about a lot of things,” Micah said. “Thought I’d get you home, wonder about you some more.”

  The fact that with her hair carefully teased and plaited, the right makeup, and some consideration given to the color clothes she wore, under certain circumstances Rose could pass for white only complicated the relationship.

  “You poor dumb schmuck,” chastised Marblestone, who generally took pleasure in his star director’s tales of conquest. “You don’t take a mistress for the dream of nookie but the dream of freedom. That’s the only thing worth the running around for—the momentary spell of liberty that work and family and money and all the other terrible obligations can’t provide. Trust me, Micah, get in too deep with this schvartze of yours, you’ll never be free.”

  Marblestone had a point. It was one thing for Rose to lay the powder on a little thick and let people think what they would in the white world, another altogether to announce herself Caucasian in the black one. No, Rose never set foot in Harlem’s restricted clubs with Micah or anyone else, opting instead to work just a few blocks away as a coat checker and cigarette girl at the Honeypot, which favored a looser admission policy.

  Rose wasn’t devoid of politics, however. She held subscriptions to FIRE!!, Negro World, and Opportunity. She chose to patronize Foster Photoplay Company theaters rather than ascend segregated balconies to “nigger heaven.” She had attended a few Saturday-afternoon meetings of the Universal Negro Improvement Association at Liberty Hall on 138th Street. She even held buried deep in a dresser drawer worthless stock from Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line Steamship Corporation, two five-dollar mimeographed certificates with engravings of the three junkyard boats the activist promised would return American blacks to their native homeland.

  “You’ve got a lot of neat knickknacks around here,” Micah said, moving on to the next curiosity on her bookshelf, dresser, and night table with the lazy disinter
est of a schoolboy on a museum outing. She questioned daily whether she was like that to him: an exotic trinket, a travel souvenir, a toy on a shelf, an animal to pet at the zoo. She wondered if the feelings she had for the movie director could be described as good. Whether what they felt for each other could be labeled with that benevolent word or was instead something base and mean. If their fucking was good enough, emphatic enough, tough enough to provide cover and compensation for every other omission and deficiency. She wondered about his life with his wife and boys, what a world voided of exclusion, a daily existence of fluency and access, must be like. She tried imagining his wedding day, how he looked in top hat and tails, elegant as Duke Ellington, and whether he even acknowledged the theatrically deferential colored waiters who’d cleared the plates. She often hated him, and hated herself for wanting him.

  Leaving Rose to infant sleep, Micah rises from the damp bed, pulls on a pair of crumpled boxers, and heads into the next room. There, lying on the couch, splayed out like a piece of fish on a newspaper, is Early. Normally, with all the engines firing, Micah feels irresistible, but here, now, in the gelid light, he feels as ugly and vulnerable as a freshly plucked chicken, all pink and goose-pimpled, his torso vaguely pear-shaped, his chest carpeted in what most closely resembles red pencil-eraser shavings, his cheeks packed with remnants of baby fat. He admits to himself that the sleeping teenage boy—clothed in work boots and mud-crusted dungarees, a sleeveless white T-shirt exposing arms that are just beginning to suggest lineaments of adult musculature—is possessed of greater, more natural physical authority than he is.

  Micah had expected Early in Coney Island at noon to assist Billy with some grip work—hauling equipment, laying sandbags, and steadying the dolly during complicated tracking shots—but the boy didn’t show until after the shoot was done. His absence was no big loss—the two of them didn’t have any kind of formal arrangement—but Micah was disappointed that the kid hadn’t been there to see him in all his peacock glory with Babe Ruth instead of here, a fat, freckled, forlorn man standing half naked in his sister’s living room.

  “Hey, Mr. Grand.” Early yawns, outstretched limbs more alert than the sleepy face.

  “You and Billy drop the reels off okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” he answers, leaving Micah to determine whether or not he is being mocked. “Dailies will be ready on Thursday.”

  Receiving the news, Micah walks over to the closet door, reaches into a jacket pocket, removes his money clip, peels a bill from the stack, and hands it over. The moment is charged. The wad of paper seems to Micah somehow slimmer than when he arrived, and, looking at the boy, he wonders if it is tacitly permissible for Early to have skimmed a dollar or two.

  “How you doing, Early?” Rose, rubbing sleep from her eyes, in a bathrobe that exposes more cleavage than intended.

  “Fine.”

  “One word?” Not looking at him. “Is that all a girl gets from you these days? No, let’s try that again: How’re you doing, Early?”

  “Fine, just like I said.” Counting them off. “That’s five.”

  “Why don’t you talk to your sister, Early?”

  “Stay free of it, Em.”

  “Well, he could at least try being civil.”

  “Mr. Belly Button here with no shirt on is going to teach me lessons in civility? This ain’t no movie lot, Mr. Grand.”

  “Don’t talk to Em that way.” Working with metronomic precision a distressed fingernail, not making eye contact with her brother.

  “I’ll go get my shirt.” Exiting the room, freckles across his back like ice-cream-cone sprinkles.

  “Lookit, I appreciate what Mr. Grand is trying to do for me, I do, but it’d be nice to come home some nights and not feel like I’m living in a henhouse.”

  “Were that description true,” Rose says, flicking cracker crumbs off her thigh, “what would that make me?”

  “You said it, sis.”

  “Now, you listen here and listen good.” Turning on him with marble eyes and Medusa tendrils. “You don’t have to like what I do, and you don’t have to approve who I do it with, ’cause you’re not the one doing it.”

  “Why does it have to be him, though? That’s what I don’t get.”

  “Oh, honey.” Softening now, almost singing. “I don’t do things ’cause I have to,” she says, kissing her brother on the forehead. “What I do”—kissing his right cheek—“I do”—then the left—“because I like to.”

  Micah always felt better once his shirttails were tucked into his pants, his suspenders were strung tight, he had on a good pair of shoes, and all the accoutrements of his adult-impostor costume were in place. He emerged from Rose’s bedroom, that fifteen-by-twenty-foot paradise, respectably dressed once more, belly flab corseted, freckles covered, confidence restored. He was relieved to see that the kid had quit the flat and pleased, too, to recognize a song, Ma Rainey’s “Misery Blues,” lazily playing on the phonograph, filling the room with molasses, whiskey sours, and amber light:

  IIIIIIII’ve got the blues,

  Doooooown in my shoes.

  I’ve got thooooose

  Miiiiiiiiisery blues.

  Before Rose, Micah’s exposure to colored music had been limited mostly to coon songs, cakewalking, jubilees, and other forms of minstrelsy. She had deepened his appreciation of ragtime’s joyous syncopated rat-a-tat, and then, advancing his education, introduced him to the blues and jazz singers that were just beginning to gain airtime on the radio. Music whistling like a kettle, water and electricity spraying the air, with deeper bowel movements of bass rumbling below. Sure, he’d heard black chanteuses croon torch songs before, had enjoyed Cab Calloway performing “Minnie the Moocher” at the Cotton Club, encouraging white audiences to scat along in nonsensical call-and-response, but this was musical universes removed from the familiar: neither the fizzing fun stuff of Rodgers & Hart, Hammerstein & Kern, and the Gershwin brothers nor the pink-champagne puns of Cole Porter. This music was love and sex distilled as grain alcohol—a blinding, terrifying force that glued the universe together and could just as easily set it flying apart. The absoluteness of the songs, the actuality of them! This music, so rich in history and suffering and personhood, was the valve through which the steam heat of things despairing and profound and necessary was being safely passed into the culture.

  “Up on the roof having a cigarette,” Rose says, explaining her brother’s whereabouts, continuing to paint her toenails. “Probably setting off firecrackers.” Above them, muffled by ten or twelve stories of brick and wood and concrete, comes Early’s response: the whistle and pop of a bottle rocket.

  “What time do you have to be at the club?”

  “Ten.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Twenty to.”

  “Y’know, in movie time, twenty minutes is a veritable eternity.” Thinking how nice it would be to clean his clock and clear his head before heading to the late-night card game at Mr. Waldo’s Paradise Club, a backwater southern juke joint lifted whole and dropped like a penny onto an urban street.

  “This ain’t no movie, Mr. Grand,” Rose chides, pulling from her bathrobe the plastic water pistol, taking aim, and firing—bull’s-eye!—right at his crotch. There was time. Here, in the palace of melting clocks, the place where the plates stopped spinning, there’d be time enough. Here, uptown, there was always enough time.

  TWO

  When Izzy came buzzing off the final day of a successful shoot, tradition dictated that he meet for drinks with Howard Rubin Mansfield, a Broadway-theater publicist, Great White Way raconteur, and all-round New York muckety-muck. Perhaps four inches shorter and ten years older than Izzy, Howard was in possession of a bald white pate botanically wreathed with brown hair; a snow-upon-topiary effect that, combined with his wit and general good cheer, allowed the man to bring Christmas with him wherever he went. Rather than experiencing embarrassment over his sheared crown, Howard flaunted it, reiterating its gleaming ivory circle
in mother-of-pearl cuff links, Coke-bottle glasses, and bright polka-dot ties.

  Though they had early on dispensed with the detailed biographical stencil work, though they saw each other for drinks only three or four times a year, though their relationship therefore occupied a zone somewhere between acquaintanceship and close friendship, Izzy felt a deep affinity with Howard, whom he felt he knew better than most of the important figures in his life. The cameraman always left their encounters feeling buoyed, better, a smarter, livelier, more interesting person, and looked forward to their meetings like a boy anticipating the first winter snow.

  “I like the flicks just fine, Isidor, but for acting—real thespian work—one must look to the stage,” Howard says, slurping his martini, flower freckles alight. “Besides, the romance in your comedy pictures never really plays, have you ever noticed that? The women are never memorable. You saw The General?” Howard asks rhetorically of Keaton’s wonderwork of locomotives and the Civil War. “Buster was in love, all right, but with the train. Chaplin, Keaton, even your own Henry Till, they’re all great but solitary figures. Why do you think that is? Are laughs such an aphrodisiac killer?”

  “No, Howard, I disagree,” Izzy says, confirming to himself that if he is easily, inherently Izzy, Howard is no Howie. “There’s romance in the films, all right. It’s just not visible on the screen—it’s between them and the audience.”

  “Well, we disagree all the time, you and I.”

  “No we don’t.”

  “Yes we do. Take you, for example—don’t mind if I do, ha-ha—and the question of theater versus films. I know you can’t stand legitimate theater, that you consider it all hopelessly antiquated and dull compared to your brutish popular art.”