!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  “Hey,” I said. It was late and Daniel and his woman were downstairs with another couple. Allis and I were mellow with drink and food. I had been studying the flintlock with its pitted barrel and chipped stock that hung above the mantel, together with a darkly rusted huge-bladed knife with a bone handle, a blockwood plane and an aged two-headed ax. These were the tools of the ghosts of men who, in their greed and fear, sensed through the generations of their genes that here in these mountains and valleys of a newer Europe lay the last desperate hope of their kind. The hands that had held those tools and weapons shaped this land, and not enough of them had been Israel Potters.

  I knew what they would have thought of us.

  Allis, breaking from her own reverie, knowing what was coming, said, “Hmmmm?” Her eyes darkening with sleep, she smiled. She placed her face on my neck. “Hmmmm?”

  “Where do we go with this thing?”

  She sat up and stared at the fire. “You fancy something different, Cate?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “But?” I asked.

  “No real buts. When.”

  “There’s got to be a when.”

  “I know. I know.” She turned and studied me. “Are you as certain as you sound?”

  “Me? Yeah.”

  She rested her head on my shoulder. We stared at the fire lashing and humming in the fireplace as though an ultimatum had been seared in the firebricks behind it.

  From downstairs came the determined, wavering, Charlie Parker–like sound of Daniel playing, note for note, riff for riff, Bird’s solo from “All the Things You Are” off the Jazz at Massey Hall album. He was indeed, as he had said, a helluva lot better than Jimmy Dorsey.

  We returned to New York that Sunday night, rested, my head cleared, my lungs still tingling, I believed, with the frosty fresh Vermont air.

  “How you feel, Mr. Douglass?” Mr. Storto. He was just coming out of his apartment. He glanced at the darkening street behind me. He was up now for the evening; he would putter around the halls, picking up paper, plastering over little holes, and then he would go inside and watch television or take a stroll around the block.

  “Okay. How’re you, Mr. Storto?”

  “Ehh, you know, you get old what can you do? That friend of yours, he’s all right?” He pointed to his head.

  “Yeah, what happened?” The old apprehensions rushed back.

  “All the way down here, I hear him holler on the phone, and then he punch the walls. I guess it’s all right, though. He drink?”

  “He doesn’t get like that. He just broke up with his wife.”

  “So that was it.” He thought a long second, shrugged, mooched up his lips. “Who goes crazy over that? Another woman will fix him fine.” He turned to go, stopped and called after me, “Your lady, you know, the regular lady—” He smiled. “She’s nice. I like her. The others, Mr. Douglass—” And he walked away with a brief laugh.

  Paul’s clothes were all over the apartment—corduroy pants, Brooks Brothers’ shirts, McCreedy & Schreiber desert boots, underwear. Everything was in disarray. Cursing, I set my bag down in the only clear space left. My work on the typing table had been shoved and bent to one corner. My machine held one of his pages. I read the top lines:

  When a man is cold and hungry, food and clothing are the only goals, but a man can only eat so much food or wear so much clothing, and after that there has to be something else.

  Bullshit, I thought. I felt no urgency to continue. Wearily, feeling that Paul’s mess was a gesture of contempt for me, I began to clean it up. I wondered if he’d found a place or had a solid lead. It was true that I had lived with him, but this was the first time he’d lived with me, and I was unhappy, though committed. Well, I’d just have to spend more time at Allis’, because I doubted this fucking arrangement would work very well.

  I arrived back in the apartment midmorning the next day. I had spent the night with Allis, leaving her place after she’d gone to work. We had agreed on a plan that might hasten Paul’s departure, and would put it into effect that night.

  I found a note from Paul: “Sorry about the mess. See you after work.”

  I had finished putting food into the refrigerator and the cupboards when the phone rang.

  “Hi, babes.”

  Maxine Culp. “Hi,” I said.

  “You are scheduled for the Times this round,” she said, “and reviews are in from Chicago. They’re fantastic!”

  I warmed to the conversation; lunches were being scheduled, interviews and the like. “Finally,” she said, “two things. First, I’m leaving Smythe and Simkin to start my own literary agency.” She cleared her throat. “Everyone gets tired of Alex Samuels, you know. And second, your friend Ike Plunkett? Did you hear about it?”

  “No, what?” I could not imagine anything untoward happening to Ike; anybody else, but not Ike.

  “He was arrested Friday night for possession.”

  “Possession? Possession of what?”

  “Heroin.”

  After a moment I said, “You’re crazy.”

  She laughed. “Oh, no, I’m not. Check around. I’ll see you for lunch tomorrow and—oh, yes! Take a look at Brentano’s window!”

  “Really?”

  “A small stack, but a stack. See you.”

  I disconnected quickly and called Amos. I was lucky; he was in.

  “Oh, I know why you’re calling. Yeah, it’s true, the dumb sonofabitch.”

  If true, then, I supposed that Ike had seen the last of Ilium and Sandra Queensbury.

  “Dumb, man, dumb,” Amos was saying. “He thinks that because he’s a writer he can get away with shit like that. White folks can, but not niggers, especially not one named Ike. Shit. Mailer almost did in his ole lady and got nothing but a slap on the wrist, and here Ike is, doin’ it to himself and—”

  “You mean he pops?”

  “When he’s got bread, sure he pops. Pops like a motherfucker, but he’s running out of money, Cate. He signed for a book before he went over to Ilium, got most of the bread up front and has turned in zip. White writers do it all the time, but shit, that nigger was making me look bad. I had to tell him no. Walk. That’s how come he’s over there, I don’t care what he told you.”

  “Is he out on bail or what?”

  “Don’t know, can’t care, Cato.”

  “Well—”

  “You know anything about junkies don’t have no bread?”

  I confessed that I didn’t.

  “Leave it; he’ll work it out.”

  “But, Amos, look. He’s a writer, man, a Negro writer.”

  “Yeah, and a junkie, too. I got to go to lunch, man. Hope Clarissa sails.”

  Clarissa got up and somewhat off the ground, but it did not sail. It did better than Dissonances, though, gathering reviews, if somewhat cutting or bland in most New York papers, and as a result got more notices in the rest of the country. The novel was about an old black lady who owned an old white dog; both are headed for the grave. Clarissa has outlived three husbands and five children. The novel is a long flashback, told while the old dog peers lovingly and sadly up at her as she slowly locks up the house for yet another night, which they may not survive.

  I didn’t understand the drill then. But over the years it percolated down into my perception the way water trickles through sod and stone unseen into cold, dark, still subterranean pools. Much later, asking myself why, like a speleologist asking himself in the darkness of his damp travels, where, I came on the pools, calm and still and cold—answers as ancient as the formations that held them.

  There were other, more pressing things to discover that winter.

  10

  Allis’ presence in the apartment did not after all help to turn Paul out. He lingered on, typing desperately through the night, breaching our passion with the sound of his clattering machine and long, heavy sighs, which were interspersed with his loud suckings on his cigarettes. He lunged at the
ring of the phone, and if it was Claire, he lowered his voice. He allowed as how they were trying to reconcile their differences, so for a few weekends he packed up on Friday night to move back, but always on Sunday night, slamming through the door and pounding his bag down into a corner, returned, embarrassed. Finally, one Friday he left and did not return.

  Allis and I, half-naked over Sunday breakfasts when we read the pounds of papers, wondered if all was now well. It was not; Paul had simply moved somewhere else.

  Ike Plunkett, I heard, had made bail—and promptly vanished. The writers who’d put up the money were, strangely, I thought, not terribly upset. Ike’s act, I reasoned, confirmed for them something they’d secretly believed anyway and they seemed not unhappy to have paid for it.

  That winter, too, between Christmas and the New Year, Allis met Glenn. She did not force herself on him the way some women had done, assuring him that I did indeed love him very much, that I was a rather special kind of father, etc., etc., while, as nine-year-olds will do in those shadowed, instinctive corners of their minds, he wondered how often I was making love with her.

  It was well that Allis didn’t attempt to capture his attention. Glenn knew, the way kids know things adults forgot long ago, that she was a special person in my life and perhaps would be in his. He sulked but remained, on the whole, well-mannered, if bitchily tolerant. We didn’t discuss Allis when we were alone. I waited in vain for questions. Maybe I should have put them to him; I didn’t. I did know, though, that he was happier when we were alone, trudging through the city or going to museums.

  We did not return to the Museum of Natural History until he was seventeen. On that nine-year-old visit, in midday, we hiked up the stairs through a gently falling snow, past Teddy Roosevelt astride his horse, a black man on one side, a red man on the other. For years I’ve longed to add to that semicircle wherein are engraved his titles—statesman, soldier, etc.—one more: bigot. We passed his statue and entered. Upstairs where the dinosaurs are, I left him for a moment to get a drink, and as I was bending over the fountain I heard his voice. I charged into the room where he stood, screaming as hard as he could, his legs apart, his body trembling, a dwarf pitted on the blade of his fear of the million-year-old bones of the dinosaurs. I snatched him up and felt his body trying to flow into mine.

  “What’s the matter, what’s the matter?”

  “Take me away from here, I want to leave here,” and his body, sixty or seventy pounds, strained for the exit. “I’m scared.”

  I started walking. “Of what?”

  His eyes rolled over his shoulders to the twenty-foot skeleton of tyrannosaurus, and then I remembered how frightened I had been of Orson Welles’s voice when he said over the radio on Sunday: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows … I was Glenn’s age at the time, and the Shadow scared the shit out of me.

  He wanted to be the hell away from that place. I carried him all the way out, feeling his heart pounding through our coats. It took eight years for him to return, and when he did, he stood peering through the rib cages of the dinosaurs, smiling wanly. He glanced at me and I smiled and then we both laughed and went home to get a beer.

  That year when I took Glenn back home, Catherine and I, alone while I waited for a late plane to New York, sat and talked. Glenn slept. I don’t know what happened, really, but one moment we were at the kitchen table, and the next we were in her bed. It meant nothing, because I asked her if it should. “Nothing,” she said. “But it was nice.” Yet on the way home, I wondered what it would be like together again in New York. I called her when I got home.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said.

  “I wonder what.”

  “Really, Cat.”

  “Do you think I haven’t thought about it? Oh, I have and reached the point where you brought it up, like tonight, but I could never see myself saying yes. I’m all right now, and there’s a guy, and I’m going to be all right.”

  “It wasn’t just for you.”

  “Glenn adores you, Cato. He always talks about you, and whenever he’s been to visit you, for weeks he walks and moves and tries to talk like you. He’s all right.”

  “That’s because of you, Catherine.”

  “And you. A lot of fathers just keep on walking.”

  “So …?” I said.

  “You’ve got your career now, and I’m glad and, well, it’s all right, Cato, the way it is.”

  “Okay. Just thought I’d ask.”

  “Glad you did.”

  “We’ve got West German, Italian, Dutch, French and Spanish sales,” Rupert announced at lunch. We were in his favorite restaurant at his table.

  “Spanish?” I said. I had figured Clarissa would be one of the many books the Spanish authorities might ban.

  “That’s right. So you can see that we’re doing all right by you.”

  I nodded agreement. The paperback sale had gone well, but nothing like the deals that would be made later in the decade and into the 1970s. I had no real complaints about money. Now, Rupert was pushing another contract on Alex and me, since Clarissa had fulfilled the option clause in the initial one. What he was offering seemed to me to be less than what I thought I was worth. How does a writer measure his worth?

  The time invested, for one consideration, I suppose. Not only the time it takes to write a book, but the time, in all its evasive essences, that it took, the experiences, the deprivations (if such there were), that readied one to announce through his sheaves of papers that he was a writer. These were intangibles, having almost no weight on a publisher’s scale. This was before the computers.

  “How much do you need to live?” Rupert was asking. It was not all that unusual a question, but it was filled with traps. If, for example, one of Rupert’s big literary names could command an advance against royalties of a hundred thousand dollars, and it took that writer (as it has in more cases than will be admitted) twenty years to complete a book, then the writer has been living on five thousand dollars a year, excluding any subsidiary rights that may be obtained on completion of the work. A writer who takes a five-thousand-dollar advance for a book that took three years to write is obviously in love with his career—a fact editors are keenly aware of.

  I knew that Rupert had already calculated my needs, not my wants, over the years I’d been with him, but there would always be that discrepancy between what I needed and what I wanted. “I’m planning to get married,” I told him.

  He stopped eating and seemed to press a mental button that quickly recalculated my needs. “Oh, yes?”

  “Ummm,” I said.

  “Anyone I know?”

  “No.”

  “Nice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” he grumbled, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “We’re talking about art, not a piece of dry goods.”

  “Some writers manage to live well on their art, Rupert.”

  “I know, I know.”

  I wondered suddenly if Rupert had these kinds of conversations with white writers. “I’ll talk to Alex,” I said.

  I liked Rupert, but a chill had crept between us. It was money, upon which your career was built, fuck the writing, and I was beginning to sense now the way it all worked, and I silently cursed myself for not perceiving it worked the same way whatever the endeavor. “I’ll talk to Alex,” I repeated.

  “Sure, but remember that you’re only two books out, Cato. We’re for the distance, not the sprint.”

  Rupert did not count my anthology. We didn’t talk about the new contract anymore. Instead, our conversation moved to Europe, where Llewelyn Dodge Johnson had just died in Paris. “He must have some memoirs,” Rupert said. “I’d love to publish them.”

  The lunch was the worst we’d ever had, and it was our last. Not because Rupert and Alex obviously had agreed that what Rupert offered was adequate; not because I was pissed at both of them, sure that the old conspiracy that attends the creation of cheap labor was in force; and not because I wa
s considering a change of agent and publisher. It was because Rupert got killed.

  The sun had been bright and unusually warm on his favorite backslope near Verbier; he liked it because he had it pretty much to himself. Who expected an avalanche in February? It was small, as avalanches go. It merely detached itself from the slope with a kind of a sigh and hissed down upon Rupert, covering him and passing on. They would not find him until May.

  Like everyone else, I made the duty calls to his widow when she returned and then, again like everyone else, angled away.

  Another Smythe and Simkin editor, a colleague of Rupert’s, called and we lunched. I didn’t mention the meeting to Alex. Meanwhile, Amos called every day, offering lunch or dinner, the wine-and-dine treatment at which Amos put every other editor in New York to shame. I realized that the situation in publishing wasn’t any different from other American conditions, given the factor of race. How much clout did Amos really have? (One always tried, the advice went, to get a senior editor, one with muscle enough to beat down opposition and provide you with an obscenely huge advance.) Was it possible that Amos was more than Phaeton’s token Negro?

  If I signed with him, would that lift him into truly senior editorial ranks?

  Would the deal be mutually advantageous, the kind of relationship that would grow in size and strength, and would it, could it (bite your tongue, Cato!) prove to be the kind of togetherness we Negroes needed so badly, and would we then be counted as formidable as others in the ethnic editorial-publishing-literary battles already raging in the quiet, sleekly carpeted offices and reviewing factories?