“Come to Phaeton, man.”
There was a purring quality in his voice. I had used it to woo women, had used it to emotionalize issues when rationality did not work. I had heard preachers use that tone, and politicians and editors and students. We have learned, and very well, to bend the language any way the bending will benefit us; but the way we speak it, the tonal qualities inherent in any speech, reveal more than the words couched in them. Voice-print technology carries us back to beginnings, puts into machines what our generations already had programmed for us.
I said, “Amos, look at this situation like a bus. We don’t all want to crowd together in the front, back or middle. Let’s spread out, because as soon as we gather in one place, as we used to in the South during slavery, then, man, we’re vulnerable. I gotta think about it.”
“Yeah,” he said, not quite concealing the sneer in his voice, which said, You think you’re pretty goddamn special, Cate, but you ain’t shit, really. I heard him.
And then I began to wonder, not in long, but in brief flashes that pierced the dark of whatever I was then, whether it was true that if you peeled away all the layers, painstakingly and with enormous patience, you would find that editors really envied their writers and perhaps even hated them.
11
Spring. Sunlight slanted into the apartment at a different, brighter angle once again. There was a loosening of movement in the streets, like water in a stream freed at last from ice.
“I got a Goog! I got a Goog!” Paul was shouting into the phone. I had not seen nor talked to him in a couple of weeks. He was shouting in much the same way I had shouted to him when Alex sold Dissonances. I too had applied for a Guggenheim, but had been rejected. Paul had not told me of his application and I had not told him of mine. I assumed that I would be a shoo-in for it and had not wanted to upset him. I guessed that he had not mentioned his application in case he was rejected.
“Good,” I said, as heartily as I could.
“You can use me as a reference when you apply,” he said. His tone jarred and upset me, brought with it all those overtones, those little stitchings that become whole literary goods.
I waited a moment, then said, “I did.”
Now he paused. “You applied? And they turned you down?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” he said. “Shit.”
“Well—”
“Next time.”
“Oh, yeah, I ran into Leonard the other night coming from the Five Spot.” It was time to change the subject.
“God, Cate. What’s he up to?”
“Same thing, except worse. Walking up the middle of Third Avenue cursing, staggering. I got him to a shelter.”
He had been as light as a feather, pugnacious, yes, but his punches were like the flounderings of a baby. “Hey, man, let me get you home,” I said.
He smelled like fresh shit and looked even worse, and his face was marked with those scars and swellings drunks often have, as if they had tried to walk through walls. “Cato Douglass, man,” I kept saying to him over the music spraying off the stamped-tin ceiling of the nearby club.
“I don’t hang out with no niggers,” he said, the words dipping and diving like the flight of a swallow.
“Yeah, yeah.” I wondered if Allis had reached Dorothea.
“Writer. No. POet, moth’fuckin’ POet. Who you?”
“Cate. Cato Douglass.”
He tried to shake away. “Doan know no fuck–in CAto. Niggers got some strange names nowadays. CAto.” He giggled and I almost laughed myself.
“No answer,” Allis had said, circling us warily.
“Listen, honey, take a cab and go home—”
“You going to take him to your place?”
“No. But maybe I can get him into a shelter a couple of blocks down.”
“Take a cab,” she suggested, then said, “Oh.”
No cab would stop for Leonard and me, and if I’d been a cab driver, I wouldn’t have let Leonard within fifty feet of my car.
“Who you?” Leonard asked again.
“Shut the fuck up,” I said. We had had some plans for that evening, Allis and I. “CAto,” I shouted, “CAto. Go home, Allis.”
“I’ll be at your place,” she said.
I started walking with an arm around Leonard. God, did he stink; stank from every pore, every hair, every single part of his body; and I wondered, in my anger and misery, limping down the street with him, if the stink had begun in his mind.
“The tiger in the tiger pit,” he whispered, “Is not more irritable than I.”
“Hey, Leonard,” I said, stopping.
“Make black, bid sing,” he whispered, and he lifted his head, opened his mouth and tried to sound a note, a high note, which, dragged protestingly up from his being by the gallons of the cheap wine he’d been drinking, started, cracking to be sure, from his mouth only to turn into a tsunami of vomit whose wave I almost completely escaped by letting Leonard fall to the street and jumping away.
I dragged him to the shelter, knocked on the door and made my way home, smelling shit and puke every step of the way.
That was the last time I saw Leonard Blue-Sky.
“What can we do, Cate?”
“Dunno. Discovered they had moved, so it was a good thing I didn’t try to take him home.”
“Maybe Dorothea has given up,” Paul said.
“Looks like it.” I was wondering about that long, tight friendship Paul and Leonard had had.
“Want drinks and dinner tonight?”
“Tomorrow?” I countered.
“A deal.”
“See you.”
I hung up slowly, thinking about Paul’s Goog.
“So,” Allis said. “Paul got himself a Guggenheim. With one lousy book.” She sat curled on the couch, shoes off, her feet tucked beneath a cushion.
I sat down heavily beside her. “Yep.”
“But what you submitted, that novel you’re working on, The Hyksos Journals”—she sat up brightly—“number three! It’s better than the others. Your best, I think.”
I said, “I wonder if it would help Leonard if he got a Goog. He’s been turned down by everyone—Saxton, Whitney, Guggenheim—”
“It must help,” she said. She had a way of looking very carefully at me without seeming to. “But you didn’t need it, really need it.”
I agreed. It was but the trappings of recognition that you were being stitched into the proper literary framework, an imprimatur that you were okay for further processing. Some people just needed the money, too.
Allis jabbed me with her toes. I grabbed her foot and held it without looking at her. She slipped it out of my grasp and hugged me, and whispered between her kisses, “You don’t need it. You don’t need it at all, baby. Sometimes you become like them or try to, and you know you can’t. You can’t be like them at all; they won’t let you.” She said teasingly, “These little hungers of yours, that adolescent ego peeking through. That’s not really you. I should say, that’s not mostly you.”
“Are you going to charge me for this hour?”
She kissed me tenderly; I kissed her back with more heat than tenderness. “Ah, you, ah, want to pay out in trade, is that it?”
And later, in bed, listening to music, thinking about her leaving in the morning to go raise funds for Cumer, Slate and Finch, I said, “We really ought to make a decision, Allis.”
In the silence I heard Mr. Storto calling out to someone in the street.
“Yes,” she said. “We should.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Cate, you know I’m not brave, I’m not tough.”
“You think that’s what it’s gonna take?”
“Won’t it? And will Glenn like it?”
“He’d have to, wouldn’t he?”
I knew she was thinking of her father and those relatives—cousins, uncles, aunts—whom she visited on the holidays or weekends after they complained about how seldom they saw her. I envi
ed her that; in a world where everyone seemed to have family, save Glenn I had none. Yet as Glenn would have to get used to the idea of Allis as a stepmother, so too would her relatives have to get used to me as a son, cousin or nephew-in-law. Whether they did or not was of no consequence to me, but would be to Allis.
She lay face down beside me, her arm across my chest, her head turned away as if to deflect from my sensibilities the thoughts I knew she was having.
“I can’t,” she said, and then was silent.
“Okay.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean okay, but, holy shit!” She started to giggle. “I just had this image of all my Jewish family throwing up their hands in horror, rending their garments, howls, tears, curses, banishment—”
“So tell them I’m a Falasha, a black Jew!”
“Falasha! You think they want to know from Falashas?” She turned toward me and buried her face against my chest. Once again, before she fell asleep, she said, “Holy shit. I’m gonna do it.”
“Hey.” I nudged her back into wakefulness.
“Ummm?”
“Sorry about Bread Loaf?”
“Not for me. You?”
“Only sometimes. Not now.”
“G’night.”
“Night.”
“I’ve had it with New York,” Paul was saying. His fork screeched against the plate as he rolled his spaghetti around it. “I need a change, like you went to Europe.”
“Where would you go?”
“The Coast. San Francisco, and maybe even Chicago.”
“Man, you can’t do without New York. You’re a New York writer.”
“The hell you say.”
He chewed slowly, broke apart some bread and set it aside in favor of a sip of the wine. “Besides, the writing’s not going well.”
He looked right at me and smiled. He’d never admitted to having problems with his writing.
Paul said, “It’s not the job. It’s not even the writing. It’s the content. I mean, it doesn’t seem to matter, when I read it back, and I want it to because I think writing should matter.”
Now he ate the bread. “Even—especially the one I’m almost finished with, that got the Goog, work in progress; it’s shit.”
Most writers don’t mean it when they say that, and Paul certainly had never said it before, not to me. I knew what it was costing and tried to turn it aside.
“If you get to the Coast you’ll be able to see your father,” I said.
“Uh—yes, yes, of course,” he said, with a curious lack of warmth. “There is that.” He pushed back, holding his glass of wine, and studied me, as he had many times before. But this time he seemed to be deciding something; whatever it was crested to his eyes and then the moment was past.
“When?”
“Don’t know exactly. I guess when I finish the book.”
“I never thought of New York without you, Paul.”
“Listen, Cate. To be honest, I can’t tough it out. The competition, including you, is too much.” He laughed softly. “I need the distance.”
I drank my own wine and chewed on the bread. “You had a black-white thing before, Paul,” I said. “How’s it now?”
He rested his elbows on the table and bowed his head between his arms. “Not so hot.” His voice was muffled.
“The Goog helped, didn’t it?” I was fighting hard to keep the rage out of my voice.
“It should have, yes.”
“If it makes you feel better,” I said, “it did make me feel the way you’re supposed to feel when you don’t get one and a friend does. For a couple of hours.”
“Yeah, I imagined that.” He raised up. “You should have got one. You really should have.”
“Allis said I didn’t need it.”
Paul laughed again, that careful, circumspect, ill-at-ease laugh. “Neither did I.”
I poured some more wine.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly.
“For what?” I asked just as quickly.
“You kids gonna get married?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“When?”
“Dunno. Gotta make some plans. She’s gotta tell her father. I gotta tell Glenn.”
“Who’s—oh! Your kid, right.”
I leaned back against the booth and scanned the room. The usual Village crowd plagued by the flower lady who visited several restaurants, trying to catch unprepared young men out with romantic young women who considered gardenias and roses part of the perfect evening.
“I’m seeing Mark tomorrow,” I said.
I enjoyed the way I sliced him open and poured in the salt. “He wants to talk about some television stuff.”
“Oh, yeah?” Paul rocked forward on his elbows again. This time his head was up, like a retriever sniffing the wind.
“What’s he got in mind?”
“I’m writing a series about Negroes, here and in Africa. You know, with the civil rights movement and all going on.”
“Travel, too, huh?” he said.
“Yeah. Afraid so. Around the country. Maybe Africa.”
“Great for you, Cate. I hope it works out.”
Shit, it had to work out. I was the only nigger writer Mark knew. But I said, “Yeah, me too.”
Paul’s voice was stern. “Look, what’re we gonna do about Leonard?”
He’s your friend, I thought. You can feel for him as long as he stays in his shit-smelling shadow. God, don’t let him become famous.
12
Of course we had all wondered why Mark left Esquire and moved into television. We’d expected him to end up at one of the major publishing houses instead, where he one day would publish all of us with fanfare and flourishes. We waited for him to surface; we waited quite some time before he did, at Public Service Television, which was the only channel we all claimed to watch, except for an occasional Sid Caesar special or Jonathan Winters or Ernie Kovacs.
People who work in film often have an air of self-importance; they ride different vibrations from the rest of us, and, mostly, they are not modest. Mark had become like that.
“You can do so much more with pictures,” he proclaimed at lunch. “Television now is like Hollywood in the twenties—still growing, still overflowing with possibilities. Put together with good writing, nothing beats it. It’s a natural. From going out to the movies, we now go into the room where the set is.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I was almost drunk enough to agree even with Beelzebub.
“This project can be the most exciting thing on television. Commercial TV would never touch it. We can. A little Murrow, a little of the Mike Wallace interview, with lots of action between.”
He slammed his palm on the table and the breadsticks bounced. “How godlike pictures in motion can make us, man! We can die in one film and return full-blown to life in the next. Little Caesars in one and crusading editors of Big Town in another. I want to use it to catch what’s going on out there, all its ugliness, all its bravery and beauty …”
So the lunch proceeded. I’d arrived at one of those plateaus for a time. I would be in film! I would create the images that would appear. (The creation of images, visual images, not the kind each of us conjures up in the mind while reading a book, seemed then to be a kind of summit. For certainly people like me had had so little to do with that creation—perhaps because of the dangers inherent in it—that this opportunity smacked of an undreamed immensity.)
Barely sober, I danced home over spit-and-gum-stained sidewalks, happier with the chance than with the name and phone number of a sympathetic rabbi who would marry Allis and me. I waltzed and boogalooed homeward. I was gracious and did not jaywalk; I nodded encouragement to sweating, evil-eyed cops; I smiled at the whores and mumbled daring words of endearment to them that made them smile and gaze wonderingly at me.
Film! It was the shaper of our opinion. If it had twisted history out of shape, I would help to untwis
t it; ole C.C. would get it together.
I heard Mark’s voice, pitched high on Negronis: “We’ve got to do it now, Cate! The world’s watching this country. Negroes have taken their grievances to the streets! Martin Luther King is as famous as Jack Kennedy! Will civil rights work, or is this the setup for the Big Pogrom? We’ve got to get started in a month and I’ve got to have some kind of script in a couple of weeks. Okay, Cate?”
I danced on home to find in Mr. Storto’s small lobby an attractive woman, lightly painted and seductively dressed in murmuring chiffon.
She smiled. “You Cato Douglass?”
“Yes,” I said. Eagerly. “Yes, I am.”
“I’m Amy Polner.” She held out a hand, and I took it, wondering if I had met her somewhere before. “Can we talk in your place?”
Could we talk in my place? Was she kidding? “Sure we can.”
She started up the stairs, swaying like a willow in a summer’s breeze, hot and filled with exciting green smells.
Who was she? Perhaps she’d seen my photo somewhere, in a newspaper or a magazine, on a dust jacket? I was starting to have what they called A Name, so Alex Samuels took great pains to tell me. Was she a writers’ freak, a groupie? Did it, after all, matter? She was attractive, with all the proper possessions startlingly in the right places. Yes, I considered one more, final infidelity. This would be my bachelor party, my stag party, with the real thing, no movies. My penis began to swell and ease its way out of its appointed place, and I figured this certainly would be a most gracious way to spend what was left of the afternoon.
Still swaying upward, she said, “I’m Allis’ cousin.” She turned and smiled, as if sensors in the back of her head had communicated my shriveling disappointment.
“Oh” was all I could say. By the time we had reached my door I was both angry and sober. Inside, she stood inspecting the apartment. For Allis, I wondered? Did she imagine her prancing about, clothed only in streetlight, or sitting at my table, relaxed with sleep and loving, over a cup of coffee? Did she see her folded softly upon my bed or couch?
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