Had I seen Richard Wright?
No.
What had he, Amos, been doing?
He’d just signed two first novels, and he wished I’d sign with him. I told him that I would consider that when I finished the next book.
“Seen your friend Paul?”
“No, not yet.” Amos was one of those people who spoke more forcefully with his eyes than with his voice, as if in some long-forgotten past he had learned that in silence lay the path to survival.
“I read a couple of his stories in some of those pussy magazines. You really think he can write, huh?”
I said, “I guess he’s as good at what he does as I am at what I do.”
We were in the bar now, and it was dark and cool and fittingly Spanish. We toasted the book. Amos said expansively, “Things are looking good for me right now, Cate. I can cut it in this white folks’ book business. Say, you know Selena Merritt? Used to hang with that white boy, Poode?”
“Yeah. I heard from her. Has she flipped?”
“Just about, but she’s doing better.” He glanced at his watch. “She writes some pretty good poetry, you know.” He stood up from the stool.
“After your dinner let’s meet at the Showplace and see Charlie Mingus and Yusef Lateef.”
“I’ll be tired,” I said. “Not to mention drunk.”
“Hell, you can sleep late. You don’t have to report for work.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You know what I mean. My wife, when she meets a writer, she wants to know where does he work, what does he do.”
I wondered if Catherine had thought that. I must, I told myself, call, now that I was settled.
“Okay,” I said to Amos, “I’ll meet you later.” We had a second drink and he laid atop the bar some bills as crisp and crackling as he was dressed. Dusk, diffused by silver, indicated a gathering of moisture in the air; I cabbed uptown to meet Alex. He greeted me expansively, and the maître d’ displayed what I assumed was the proper deference to one about to lay out fifty or sixty bucks for drinks and dinner.
Neat, perfectly formed beads eased down the sides of the martini glasses. We lifted them in toast to the novel. “So you saw Rupert today. He’s a good man. Best goddamn editor in town. He’ll be editor-in-chief before long and that certainly won’t hurt your career, Cate.”
We talked about the new book, Clarissa, now close to the end, and about the publicity and advertising for the one ready to come out.
“Don’t count on a lot of ads now. But you’re going to be the best Negro writer in history. Dick Wright’s out of the country; the glow will fade from Whittington; Huysmans, while not quite a flash in the pan, always says the same thing. Himes has vanished … what’s the matter?”
“You got to do better than that, Alex.” He had already designed the ball park I was to play in.
“What?”
Did he really not know? Was it all so automatic that no one thought about it? “Nothing,” I said. I was afraid to tell him he was a bigot. Ruin my career. Find another agent? Sure, but things were just beginning to click for me. Besides, how bad could it be, to be the best Negro writer in history? But the possibility of being—my wanting to be—far more kept me silent. At that moment, everything seemed gray and, in a sense I could not perceive, threatening—a chorus of cellos being bowed in the lower registers.
(Now, how often do I think of what he said? His words were symptomatic of the disease that afflicts my life and the lives of all to whom I belong. The words are no longer spoken, they being in obvious bad taste, the user too targetable, but the disease, in silence, has deepened and is now all the more malignant because of the absence of the words.)
Alex said, “Some change of mood. Seen Paul?”
“No,” I said. “Next week.”
“His book’s coming along, and he’s had a couple of near misses with Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah.” He nudged me. “How’s the lamb? Okay?”
“All right.” I felt out of place. I hated the way being there made me feel.
“When do I get to see the new book? I mean, we ought to start thinking of more money than the last time out. Right? The advance reviews have been great.”
“Amos Bookbinder said if the money isn’t going to be great, he’d make an offer.”
At the mention of Amos’ name, Alex turned quickly toward me. He opened his mouth, shut it quickly. Then his words, carefully formed, I thought, came out. “You don’t want to go over there, Cato.”
“Why not?” I said sharply.
He finished chewing and laid down his fork. He touched my forearm for emphasis. “Trust me. You pay me.” In a sudden low rage, he said, “Why not trust me? That’s not the house for you. Phaeton is not the house for you. Amos is new to the business. He doesn’t have a reputation. And the way he’s going, he won’t acquire one. Rupert is a fine editor and a fine person. He’ll do right by you.” He was chewing with the viciousness that made me think of Mr. Storto watching rats chew up the bodies of dead soldiers. He sighed over his sweetbreads. “Let’s have lunch next week and then we can compare notes on the reviews that should be out this week. Only five days until pub date, Cato.”
I was thinking. Amos bellowing at me; Alex disparaging even the discussion of a publishing liaison with Amos. The shape, the monstrous size and shape of this disease. And yet I lowered my eyelids and blinked it away.
By the time we had finished dinner, we had also finished one aspect of our relationship, which would be, for as long as it lasted, different. I refused his offer of a lift, and I walked to the Village, moving slowly, seeing the neighborhoods change. I expected the walk to still the something like panic that was tapping at its eggshell, trying to get out and, in the emergence, becoming quite something else.
In the Showplace, it seemed to me that there was as much madness in Mingus as there was cool in Lateef. Maybe it had to do with the instruments they played. Amos had his feet up on a chair. He flicked glances flecked in red at me and tried to order me a martini.
“Just beer,” I said. “That’s all I want.”
“C’mon, man. Get you a drink.”
“Beer, Amos, nothing else.”
He dismissed the argument with a wave of his hand.
“Anyway,” I said, “when did you start drinking so much? Jolene doesn’t like it, I bet.”
“You think it’s a lot? You think it’s a lot?” He spoke fast, his voice pitching itself higher and higher—for the second time that day.
“Shit.” I was staring at the three empty martini glasses on the table. “You’ve been drinking those bombs since this afternoon.”
“I can handle ’em, I can handle ’em.”
“You all shut up down there,” Mingus said. He scowled and shifted his bulk alongside his bass viol.
We shut up. It was strange, my anger seeming to home in on Amos, and his on me, and Mingus’ on both of us, and ours on him. Lateef blew his oboe, oblivious of everyone in the house, then switched to the argol, which called up visions of distant desert lands, Tauregs and Mehari camels.
(And now, like so many others, Mingus is gone, a fugitive from “classical music,” which did not believe he deserved a place with it, being as he was, and he turned to jazz music to preserve a semblance of sanity; to jazz music to avoid being consumed by bitterness converted to blasting rage. Amos and I had shut up because we recognized Mingus’ Abednego to our Shadrach and Meshach.)
One set was enough for me. I liked the music, but things were growing in my head, sour things, and I needed to let that night slip uncelebrated into eternity.
I did not sleep well. I slipped in and out of it like one going through a revolving door. I woke sluggish and evil. I moved about the apartment without purpose. I really looked at things. I touched them. I drank my coffee, which scoured my throat like hot bitumen. My head collected from somewhere and held the wan Billie Holiday tune, Good Morning Heartache. But I had so
ulache. I stared at one of the walls; they were pristine, white with new paint, unhung yet with shelves or pictures, and I thought of running at it full speed, head down, as if to gut Nagurski, Grange and Harmon in one, and split my dolichocephalic head in all its Negroid length right in its center, to leave trails and splatters of red blood and yellow-gray brains and pink bone and black skin and hair thereupon, a Pollock or a Middleton.
I sat at my machine and ripped out a page and replaced it with a fresh sheet and wrote to Catherine, asking if I could have our son for a couple of weeks. I did not write that I needed him, because I did not understand yet that keys were being tested in the lock of my sanity and that in the process of being his father there was palpable, selfless purpose, and, quite possibly, in nothing else. Instinct told me that I needed to begin readying him.
Then, like Mr. Storto, I went to bed, and this time I was released to sleep by the letter I’d written. The day noises of the city ceased, and a silence descended, and I felt that I was slipping into a death shaped like a long, quiet, secret corridor in the Great Pyramid. Set was pursuing me. My son, Horus, was pursuing him, and Isis pursued us all, pausing only to lift the covers of the Canopic jars in which she hoped to find my parts. We rushed on, three mobile collections of the motes of the universe, past sarcophagi and more Canopic jars, until a bright, cold light appeared at the end of the corridor. I rushed faster, the things growing on my feet whispering as I went, and then the shaft was no more and there was nothing under foot save space and a bigger, swelling brightness. Beating my arms like wings, I was swept upward toward the sun, whose heat was already beginning to sear me, and with the eyes of Horus, I beheld far, far below, a man all in white, who cried up at me without a change of expression, “Take care! Take care!”
6
I think I reached for the telephone on its last ring. It seemed to be very heavy, and I was panting when I spoke into it. Rupert was calling to make a lunch date for publication day.
On pub date a congratulatory telegram arrived from my publishing house. There were no reviews in the papers. “Tomorrow, they said at the Trib. Before the end of the week, they said at the Times,” Maxine Culp said at the pub date lunch with Rupert and me.
“And if not,” he said, “so what? It’s nothing. Happens all the time and not only with first novels.”
I was more concerned with my trip to pick up Glenn. Would he know me? Would he like me or the things we would be doing? There had been moments after Catherine said he could indeed visit me, if I came to get him and returned him, when I could not think of Glenn without thinking of Federico, and once I thought of Federico, I wondered whether he and his mother were hungry.
Rupert, for perhaps the fiftieth time since he signed me, raised his glass—not without a certain air of finality—in a toast:
“To Dissonances.”
“Dissonances,” Maxine said.
I said, “Yeah.”
Two days later, the afternoon waning, the cab pulled up before my building and deposited me and my son, Glenn, a few feet from Mr. Storto, already moving toward us on the shit-stained sidewalk.
“Mist’ Douglass, Mist’ Douglass, hello—”
“Hi, Mr. Storto.” He glanced at the huge suitcase Catherine had used to pack Glenn’s changes in. “Meet my son, Glenn.”
“I see, I see,” he said, his eyes switching from me to Glenn and back. “Glenn. A nice American name. You didn’t tell me. He’s a fine boy. Tomorrow, I’ll take him for an Italian ice, okay, Glenn?”
I no longer remember the specifics of that visit, the first. Of one thing I am sure, and it is that I tried too hard to be exactly what, I don’t know. With his eyes Glenn kept asking: Who are you? Why are we like this? Do you really like me? Then why aren’t we all together? Why don’t you like Mom? Why doesn’t Mom like you? What’s your picture doing on that book? Just who are you, anyway? Where do you work? Do you like being by yourself?
We did play catch in Central Park and row a boat; we went to two or three movies. I touched him often.
There were those lunches and dinners with friends who wished to be kind and wanted to see Cato the father, instead of the writer.
I studied my son’s face, the shape of his head, the length and breadth of his body while he slept, exhausted with the variety of cartoons he could watch on New York television. It was the same way I used to study Federico while he napped.
Sometimes, mysteriously bidden, I turned and caught him just shifting his eyes away from his study of me. Well. We had to begin somewhere, and that was the time, that summer, when Dissonances was published.
The time of Sandra Queensbury, she of the quick hands and quicker tongue.
“Do you suppose we might have lunch? I’d really love to talk to you about a project I have in mind.”
The voice was cool, sure of itself and sexually urgent in an uncommon way. Of course I could have lunch.
Sandra Queensbury, I was told, was discussed wherever and whenever writers gathered, drunk or sober. Her stable of writers read like Who’s Who in American letters. She had grown up with books and publishing in her father’s office, and had taken time out only to go to the best schools, foreign and domestic. When her father broke with Milton and Meade and began his own company, Ilium, Sandra fitted in nicely.
For a legend, she was surprisingly young, in her mid-fifties, and so neatly turned out that, for the first few seconds I saw her, I was back in childhood, believing that pretty teachers did not defecate.
I’d arrived before she did, so I watched the maître d’ hustle toward me when I was seated at “her” table. I rose, naturally, and we exchanged greetings. As she was sitting and asking after Rupert in the same breath, her martini arrived without her having ordered it, as far as I could tell.
“Your novel—well, I must tell you—do you know anything about dowsing?”
“No.” We were both having the smoked salmon.
“Usually people do it with maps, divining rods—” She laughed. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Uh—no.”
She patted me on the shoulder with fingers that seemed to measure. “With a manuscript or a book,” she said, “I begin reading. Then, perhaps I read a certain passage. Something makes me trace a finger over the lines of that passage, and if I feel heat, yes, a definite warmth, I know the writer is special. Your writing gives off such warmth, and flashes too.”
I said, “Really?”
“What I had in mind,” she said, briskly now, “was an anthology, which you would edit, an anthology whose theme would be race. Something like Locke’s The New Negro.”
Right away I wanted to do it. The money would come in handy, too.
“It’s time for an update.” She smiled so prettily that I didn’t notice her right shoulder had slumped. I didn’t believe it was her hand beneath the table tracing quickly and surely over the upper part of my thigh, and then, more sure of itself, stopping in my crotch. With gentle squeezes and strokes, she seemed to be measuring my member, not so much with any kind of subdued or secret passion, but with the dispassionate cool of a surveyor setting numbers for future construction. I was too startled and embarrassed to move; I looked at her the way a bird looks at the snake that is hypnotizing it. “That is what I call more than adequate,” she said, laughing softly, removing her hand gradually.
“You think so, really?” I was flustered.
“Ah, yes, yes.”
Another round of martinis was placed gently on the table.
“What do you think of the anthology idea?”
“It sounds good.”
“I understand that Alex Samuels is your agent, so I must talk with him. If you like, I can get you a better agent. People like Alex, well—”
“What?”
“It’s nothing. That’s the way things are now. Oh! I must talk to Rupert and explain that I’m not trying to steal you. He’s very jealous about his authors. But if you ever—”
“I’m happy.”
“Of
course you are. And Rupert’s a dear. Are you separated or divorced?”
She had done homework. “Divorced.”
“I’ve had four, and I may be working on my fifth. But back to business: How soon can you get started on the anthology?”
“Next month.”
“Why don’t we have dinner at my apartment and discuss this further? There are some things from the twenties and thirties that I’d like to show you. My father was very active in the Harlem Renaissance.”
“Uh—”
“Say this Friday. Seven-thirty.”
“Uh—”
We parted in front of the restaurant. I glanced up at the sign: Le Moustier. Wasn’t that a section of France where caves had been found in which there were artifacts going back twenty-five thousand years?
The anthology hastened the reunion with Paul.
“You know that story of yours, about the interracial couple?”
“Why you sonofabitch,” he said. But there was pleasure in his voice. “Where have you been? I knew you were back. Why’d you wait so long to get in touch? They wouldn’t give me your number at your publisher’s.”
“I was in the Albert until I found a place not too long ago. Then Glenn came—”
“Who’s Glenn?”
After a pause I said, “My kid.”
“Oh! Yeah, yeah!”
“Then I had to get this place straightened out, and the book—”
“I see they didn’t review you in the Times. Will they? If not, that’s bad, man, very bad.” He didn’t sound disturbed. “But you did all right everywhere else. Thanks for the copy. Sign it for me, and we’ll have to talk about it.”
Like hell we would, I thought, then said, “How’s Claire? I was a little surprised that you got married.”
“She’s okay. Still with the dancing. Europe okay?”
“Didn’t get around much. Mostly Spain. Thought you were coming.”
“We got married instead.” He laughed. “Cheaper.”
“The gang’s okay? I heard from Selena. You give her my address?”
Paul whistled. “Yeah. She’s flippin’ like crazy. Poode’s okay. He’ll survive. Kass seems to be doin’ all right in Hollywood. Can you believe it? What about the story?”
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