!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  “What you want to be and do.”

  We walked through a stretch of gravel.

  “But Glenn—” I finally said.

  “You can see him any time you want to, and of course one day he’ll be big enough to travel by himself.”

  We were back on pavement now. “Why are we so much nicer now?”

  She smiled in the dusk. “Because it’s over, and we’re both relieved. Never thought it would be this easy, did you?”

  “I didn’t want it.”

  “I think you did.”

  I wondered what my father would have said. He had stumbled through his time, filled, I felt, with remorse for having deserted us. Once while on leave from Camp Lejeune I met him in Washington between his convoys in the merchant marine. The last one had seen half the convoy destroyed by German submarines. He did not look too well—nervous, more gray than black of skin. He was doing it, he said, to make some money so I could get a start after the war; he’d never done anything for me before.

  “When you get married, son, make it work. It’s a lot of trouble, but it ain’t no good the other way.” We had a couple of drinks and he took me to meet his woman. I returned to camp and he returned to the convoys.

  My mother died while I was overseas and they wouldn’t let me go home. My father’s ship was torpedoed and he froze to death six hundred miles from Murmansk and sank in the Barents Sea. I was not surprised to find that he had left nothing for me after all. But now I wondered if he had felt, when he went away, the same low-moaning emptiness I was already beginning to feel.

  As soon as the baby sitter left, we undressed slowly, got into bed and made love half the night.

  And when summer came, they went. It hurt.

  Paul and Janice returned to New York, where he thought he might take some more writing courses. I worked at the agency and at home. I learned during that time that loners are people to be feared. They make good commandos and shit like that; also good wide receivers. They are small, often warped planets around whom the universe revolves. We admire them, but secretly we fear them. In a scheme where things are paired, night and day, man and woman, boy and girl, the two sides of the DNA ladder, where Yin and Yang and the double placing of the acupuncturist’s needles exist, who wants to be a loner? Until God made Eve, Adam in his incredible loneliness must have fornicated with anything and everything he could get a grip on, creating for later generations the heritage of bestiality.

  August was my deadline. To get out. To move to New York. To carry my recommendations, crisply enveloped, to the job markets of the Big Apple. Paul and Janice said nothing about the end of my marriage, but then we were the new breed; we did not waste words over such happenings. I had told them before they returned to New York.

  Two weeks before I was to leave, a note from Paul informed me that they were looking forward to my staying with them, even though things were a little rocky. My presence might help. I wondered what was going on.

  2

  I was struggling up the stairs of the brownstone to their flat on the top floor, more out of breath with the excitement of being finally and for good in New York than with the climb, when I heard quick, heavy and, I sensed, angry footsteps sounding above me. I looked up and moved aside just in time to avoid being body-blocked by a large man rushing past. He wore a yarmulka that threatened to fly off on its own, and as he glared at me he hissed something filled with ssss’s and zzzz’s. I would not know for years that the man was Paul’s father.

  Paul, moving slowly, as if through water, embraced me. His sadness was thick. “Ah,” he said. “You’ve come. Good. Beer?”

  He paused by the window, looked down, and looked again when he returned from the kitchen. The place seemed devoid of something, a vibrancy that had always been there. His clothes were strewn carelessly about; dirty socks were crumpled in scuffed desert boots.

  “Where,” I asked slowly, “is Janice?”

  He speared his own can and sat down heavily opposite me. “Janice. Well, Cate, it would seem that we, you and I, have something else in common. She’s gone. Flew the coop, such as it was. Said she didn’t want to be married to me anymore. There was no one else, thank God.”

  I didn’t ask how come he was so sure. Any moderately intelligent woman, knowing that ego is more dangerous to control than love, would never admit to there being anyone else unless she was mad herself. His gaze moved to the window. He got up and stood looking out of it. Silhouetted there in the late afternoon light, he seemed to shake momentarily; his head sank slowly down on his chest. I thought I heard, though I wasn’t sure, a sound like a sob screaming to emerge, and I thought to myself: He’s crying. The sonofabitch is crying!

  He spoke, his voice overly strong. “Let’s go get us some paint. Let’s paint Janice right out of this goddamn place.”

  “Brown paint,” he said to the clerk in the hardware store.

  “You should use white for these apartments,” I offered. “For more light.”

  “Brown. It’s the new thing. Flat, colored paint. It’s my place.”

  “It surely is.”

  We bought some more beer, bread, salami, cheeses and fruits, and returned. I had heard or read about binges—marathon fucking, killing, eating, walking, playing records. I had never heard of a painting binge; more important, I had never been in one. We slapped on the paint, ate, drank, sang. The temperature was around 90 degrees. How we sang—all the radical, revolutionary ditties that somehow don’t sound good any longer, not even in the throat of Pete Seeger.

  When we were not singing, Paul rattled on about his life.

  “My folks had great disdain for the American system of education; they didn’t believe it helped to produce the necessary revolutionaries. Where we lived, in the co-ops, you found nothing but socialists—no one would admit to being anything else; it was too dangerous. For blocks and blocks you found nothing but socialists: Jewish socialists, Italian socialists, Anglo-Saxon socialists, Irish socialists. It was incredible; one felt buoyed on a high sea, support everywhere, love, humanity, charity in its finest sense.

  “When the Depression began to wane there came a change. Education was important, even if it was deep within the capitalist framework. You went to City College, and yes, Harvard and Yale and Princeton, if they let you in—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘if they let you in’?”

  He seemed to catch at himself, rerun something he’d said in his mind.

  “Uh—oh, you know, if you had the right connections.”

  We moved from room to room, singing no more now, but painting from baseboard to ceiling. We were caught in the middle of a bowel movement. We quit at four in the morning. I did not sleep well. Back when we were most high, Paul, his face splattered, looking like an old man in whom the liver spots / melanin, stronger now, surges back in splotches, embraced me again, the way I would embrace a brother if I had one, and said, “Nigger, it sure is good to see you.”

  He’d never used the word before, and I certainly hadn’t. It shocked me softly, but I considered the fact that we were special friends, special enough to allow him to address me that way. And I supposed that would have been the end of it, except that he was studying me for some kind of reaction with much the same pensive stare of a boy who’s turned a turtle on its back.

  I woke up needing Paul.

  Like a plague sensed, the city closed in on me, surrounding me with cold, damp mists of apprehension. Where I had come from, nothing remained. The future was as slippery as, and the size of, an Indian nut. I could not know whether the interview I had for that day would become a job, despite my ad agency boss having already cut ground with the Philip Morris company. But I counted on it. The possibility that I would not be hired on, however, burrowed inside like a jungle worm, minutely destroying the tissues of my psyche. There was that.

  I heard Paul in his room coughing up and swallowing beery phlegm; the sound seemed fitting in all that brown. I tried not to t
hink, resting there, fighting back a horrendous beer hangover, of all the writers I’d heard about who had stalked the city, determined to devour it, but who had instead been eaten, silently, in shabby apartments and bars, in editorial offices, and whose names no one remembered, even though they had published. And there was that.

  So. This brown, small space, still drying, like a womb just emptied out, was the only home I had. I thought one of those moans, deep through private darknesses, and remembered when it had been better, not so long ago, with Catherine.

  Why is that nigger thinking like that? I asked myself. This is discovered country, the post-Catherine resurrection. I swung, heavy-headed, off the couch and for a bittersweet small block of time willed the sound of her voice, of Glenn’s voice, into the room. They came in and went with the whisking sounds of the cars going by down in the street.

  I got the job and came home—home?—happy, booze instead of beer in my arms, prancing up the stairs, hearing bop in my head.

  Paul reluctantly broke away from his typewriter, where he was trying to finish up some work before he began classes at the New School, and before he began a new job editing a legal magazine.

  “Well,” he said as we toasted. “I was prepared to have you here for a couple of years at least.”

  “Aw, no,” I said happily. For my first order of business now was to find an apartment of my own. We had not talked yesterday of how long I would stay; the invitation had been open-ended—perhaps without any end, with Janice gone. But I feared becoming dependent on him, maybe because I perceived that Paul wanted, even needed, to have me in that position.

  That night, my treat, I dragged him to the Royal Roost; he much preferred, I knew, Stuyvesant Casino, but I told him that George Shearing was on the bill with Bud Powell. He didn’t know Powell, but nearly everyone knew Shearing. So he came. At the bar we switched to beer, which in places like that was not too much cheaper, and, listening to Bud tearing up the piano, the beginning of a poem came to me:

  Assonance and dissonance converge

  An oblique tone; strange waves carry sheer

  I was into it—the music, the voices of the patrons—free, because of the job. I felt close to a secret that I could not describe in any of its suggested details; I simply knew that it was a secret, a mystery, and I allowed myself to move with its motion:

  Assonance and dissonance converge

  An oblique tone; strange waves carry sheer

  Bud finished to scattered applause. Paul said, as if he had been bored, “And now Shearing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I supposed he would have also liked Tony Scott and Lennie Tristano.

  Bud came to the bar, dark and disgruntled. The mostly white audience gave Shearing a big hand after every number. Bud, standing not far from us, glared down into his drink and shook his head.

  When Shearing finished, he was led to the bar, where, sightless, he stood waiting for a drink. There was the sudden sound of bodies moving quickly, of glasses being broken or knocked over, of voices pitched high in surprise and fright. I turned just in time to see Powell punching Shearing in the mouth. Shearing grabbed his face. People were tugging and pulling and shouting. Bud was screaming ten octaves above the tumult, “How come you get more applause than me? How come?” He was led away and a protective, sympathetic crowd closed around Shearing.

  Paul shook his head in disgust and frowned after Powell.

  That night in the brown womb parts of my first novel came to me.

  I moved from Paul’s a week after I took the job with Philip Morris. The job was not in copywriting. A Madison Avenue agency did that, utilizing Johnny—“Call for Philip Mor—riss.” P.M. was wrapped in brown and beige, and the cigarettes were not yet penis-sized. My territory, for that is what they called it, was Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. I journeyed to and from the local gathering places, usually community centers, demonstrating the P.M. inhaling test, designed to prove how smooth P.M.s were. First, you inhaled your own cigarette through your mouth; then you did the same with a P.M., which was smoother, because the first inhalation had already taken the edge off.

  When I had finished, I made my way back through town to my two-room apartment near Columbia, secured through a fluke: a drunken superintendent lost the rules in a bottle of Carstairs, and by the time the lease was signed it was too late to apply any kind of “gentlemen’s agreement.” The place had high ceilings, was dim except for about two hours during the day when the sun shone the brightest, and must have had at least a hundred coats of leaded paint on the walls. It was home.

  When I was there, dovening back and forth before my machine, ideas funneling, I realized that I had never been alone before. I had been home, then in the marines, then with Catherine, with Paul, and now, approaching thirty, I was alone.

  Paul had said, “Save your money. You can stay here a while longer.”

  Clearly, he did not want to be alone. None of us do. We fear it more than cancer. Perhaps it is because in loneliness we fear the resurgences of former lives or the coming of ghosts. We find in them childhoods not yet outgrown.

  The summer was passing amid the echoes of Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees wins and losses, and the parade of Big Fights. Paul was chafing, almost prepared for the class at the New School in which he would blow them all away and in the process be discovered by the teacher, who was also an editor of some repute. Paul and I met often, and when we did, he would have a friend, sometimes a woman, but more often a man, with him. When I had a date, he studied her as much as I studied his. Strange that we should have been still seeking clues to each other. When Paul had things going well with him, he could befriend almost anyone who looked or sounded intelligent. That was the way we had met. I think.

  These friends, together with some of his old ones who’d gone to Europe at the end of the war and were now drifting back because it was becoming too expensive, enlarged my circle of literary people. Some had heard of Neurotica. A smaller number had even read my story, and one of these was Jeremy Poode.

  He was called Poode, but he did not look the way anyone named Poode should look. Tall and lean, blond and well-tailored, he was a slightly stifling presence at our gatherings, which usually took place in the Village, where we believed our history was still being made. His smile even then was more a baring of yellow, longish teeth than anything else. He stifled because we didn’t know what to make of him; he was—his own words—“a junior editor on The American Notebook”—a publication that seemed to side with the Dixiecrats and Big Money. Furthermore, his woman, Selena, was black. Even without her, though, he would have given us pause, and sometimes did.

  She was as tall as he, quiet—close to being severe in manner—the way a court reporter is present but paid no attention to. She wore clothes of whisperingly expensive material; style would catch up to her in twenty years. In her presence, her lids concealing the flash of her eyes, I felt like one entering a darkened storefront where my future might be read. That there was complete physical woman within those yards of material she wore, I had no doubt; she suggested it with every move. Yet I knew that none of those gestures were for me.

  Poode and Selena had been captured along Eighth Street by Paul one night, as he swept along toward me for an evening of talk and beer-drinking.

  Bob Kass read poetry to jazz music. Bearded, and even when ravingly drunk, which he was quite regularly, he made me think of Santa Claus having a tantrum with the elves at the North Pole. Kass was against everything everyone else was for. “I feel safer that way,” he’d said one night, his eyes finally dulled, his beard soggy with beer. He had been too young to fight in the Lincoln or Washington Brigade in Spain, but he’d been the right age to fight for Israel in 1948. “I did my stint in the Negev,” he said more than once, especially when drunk, “fighting mirages that looked like great big Arabs.” This, while his elbows were gliding through spilled beer.

  But beer stains were nothing to him. Kass was as shabby in his surplus army clothes
as Poode was Brooks Brothers clean. “What’s that all about?” Kass would mutter, seeing Poode enter a joint dapper in one of the plum-blue suits he liked so much, following Selena, bullshittingly demure in her yards of fabric. “Oh!” Kass would say. “It’s them.” He was working when I first met him because the woman he had been living with left him. He was in the process of finding another who had a good job so he could continue to free-lance without worrying about the basics.

  Food and drink he invariably found in Mark Medowitz’s ratty apartment in the Village. We all stopped there on the way to or from somewhere else. Mark drank nothing but wine. Twice the size of Kass, he held his cigarettes between his thumb and forefinger, affecting a European air. Although Mark had been schooled at Harvard, he was not as obvious a Harvard man as Poode was a Yalie. Kass was more gentle with Medowitz for the same reason the rest of us were: Mark was the number two editor of—(I forget the name now, Snatch or Gash, something like that)—well, a magazine that had, we understood, nationwide distribution. Mark had already published stories by James T. Farrell and Nelson Algren. Knowing then no other editor who, mothlike, had flown near the brilliance of such giants, we loved Mark for the possibilities he represented. And he knew it. Mark, too, had lived in the co-ops.

  The fact that Mark’s magazine published no poetry left Leonard Blue-Sky somewhat bitter, I suppose. He had published in every little magazine there was, and he was, I thought, a poet. Really. He was, like me in those days, colored or Negro, but he preferred to emphasize the Indian portion of his genealogy, which was Mohawk. The sub-branch to which he laid claim never learned to climb the beams for skyscraper construction.

  Leonard and I didn’t talk, really talk, to each other because he considered himself better than I, an outsider, one of those who joined the group and, failing at setting down the word in the mysterious sequence necessary for success, got washed down the sewers like dogshit in a heavy rain. Nor did he talk with Selena.

  Leonard’s wife, Dorothea, a war bride from Alsace, tried to bridge the gap between the three of us. I believe this was so because—big-boned and quite plain, with her English not improving at all—she too was one of the outsiders Leonard secretly dismissed. I wish it had been different. But each time I suggested to him, out of the range of the others, that it would be great just talking to him, he said, “Yeah. Well, let’s do it sometime.”