“Drink, Amy?”
“No, no thanks. You go ahead and have one.”
I sat down across from her instead. “You bring congratulations, right?”
She laughed. “Mine, yes. From her father, no.”
She pointed a cigarette at me and I lighted it. She said, “Why do you have to get married?” and blew out a cloud of smoke.
It was a rhetorical question. I waited.
“Can’t you just live together?”
“Umm. Then her father could truthfully say that his daughter didn’t marry that shvartzer.”
“I guess so. Yes. Look, he didn’t ask me to come, but I do know my uncle. Why do you need another marriage? And you have a kid …”
“I’m not ever going to ask your uncle—Allis’ father—for anything, not even the time of day; he doesn’t have to worry about that. Besides, the marriage is a kind of commitment we’ve decided to make. Everything that goes with it. You seem to be saying that her father would prefer her to live in shame than in the honesty of a marriage, yes?”
“In a nutshell.” She laughed softly, with some pretty embarrassment, and crossed her legs with a fine, soft sound. “Do you think Allis can take it?”
“Yeah.”
“And,” she said, “you?”
There was a knowing behind that pretty smile, pretty in the way that hunting arrows, with their precise barbs, can be pretty, and I remembered a photo story I’d seen years ago, in one of those pocket magazines that were all the rage, about a black man. A series of photos showed him surrounded by cops, backed up to the edge of the water on a beach. It was in California, where everyone is backed up to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. The guy had gone crazy, the copy read, under the pressure of being married to a white woman.
“Me?” I said. “I guess I can handle it. Pressure’s my middle name.”
Amy mashed out her cigarette. She folded her fingers through each other and looked down at the floor. “Allis knew I’d be coming,” she said.
“She didn’t mention it to me.”
“She said it would be a waste of time.”
“Then why did you come?”
“He did ask me to come, Cate. I didn’t want to, but—”
“Well, you see, you have wasted your time. And you’ve pissed me off—”
“Wait. Fifty thousand dollars. He’ll give it to you if you—”
She stopped and hunched her shoulders, waited.
Fifty thousand dollars. I got up, moved across the room and sat down again. Amy was averting her flushed face. What an awful lot of fear the money represented, or hate. Fifty thousand bucks in one lump sum. “Fifty thousand dollars?” I asked. There was a tremor in my voice.
Her voice was hopeful. “Fifty thousand.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Aren’t you tempted just a little, Cato?” More sure of herself now, her smile mocked me, mocked everything I was or ever would be; it perceived my vulnerability, my suspected price. In another time, another culture, Mr. Greenberg simply would have said no, and had I persisted, had me done in. Had he been bold enough, he could still have me done in.
“Listen, does Allis know this?”
“No, of course not.”
“What do you mean, ‘of course not’?”
“She wouldn’t think much of her father then, and that would hurt him.”
“But, shit, I’m going to tell her.”
“Do you think she’ll believe it?”
“You’re implying something you’d better not say, Amy. If I tell her, she’ll believe it. Why in the hell wouldn’t she?”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” I moved to another seat again. “What I should do is take his money and marry his daughter. But you consider me to be a man of more honor than that, don’t you? The Christian in the pit will not fight off the starving lion, just climb right on into its mouth, right?”
“Then you won’t—”
“No, I won’t. I want to tell you something; then you leave. I feel as though I’ve been walking through a dark place in which I’ve imagined all kinds of dangerous and disgusting things, Amy. But you’ve come to lead me out into the light, where everything is so much uglier, and frightening.”
She was still now and I sensed her sudden fear; I wanted her to feel it; I wished she were Mr. Greenberg.
“Look,” I said. “I’ve killed men I didn’t even know, men with whom I never exchanged the time of day, and I don’t remember how I felt before or after. But I know this: if your uncle walked into this room now, I would kill him and feel very, very good about it.
“You don’t understand the extent of the insult, do you? This is not a movie, girl, and it probably is a good thing that you are a girl, or I’d kick your ass, too.”
Stop, I said to myself. Stop now. I went quickly to the bathroom and closed and locked the door. I sat on the stool and started to count to myself. At fifty I heard the door to the apartment open and close. I counted on to one hundred and went out.
Amy Polner was gone.
I sat down on the couch, my heart pounding with the rolls and snaps of adrenalin. I could hear it in my ears, feel the echo in my eyes. I wanted to destroy, utterly, beyond recognition, and with all the sound I could summon—a billion volcanoes erupting simultaneously with a billion earthquakes. I wanted blood to flow, “even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs.” I could, at that moment, smell blood freshly let, and it seemed that I could also taste it.
I was overwhelmed by wrath.
And then I pulled my feet up, exhausted, the pounding subsiding, as though easing me off to death, and I slept.
Fair old men with kindly faces beckon me out of my hole. After moments of wondering, my suspicions obvious, I think, they extend their hands to help me out. There is a radiance about them and they do not fear my carbine, do not shy away from my fear-stink. Next, we are sitting in a circle. There is a collective wisdom about them; it makes me feel good.
“If we say this people exists and prospers through the man and this people is overwhelmed by still another people, nothing can remain of them, for perhaps they, too, are male-descended.
“But if we say this people exists and prospers through the woman and then this people is overwhelmed by still another people, everything remains of them, even if this second people is a male-descended people.”
They seem to be chiding me. I say to them, “I am an honorable man; what do such intricacies mean to me?”
They become Japanese soldiers. They pass me a Raleigh cigarette. I do not care for Raleighs. They taste and smell like dried cowshit. I prefer to spend the nickel for a pack of decent cigarettes; never mind the Red Cross freebees.
As I light up, they pounce on me; I roll free and dive for my hole, forgetting to fire the carbine.
Suddenly, it is night, and I hear them laughing at me as they crawl toward my hole along the cardinal points of the compass. I am surrounded. The Southern Cross blazes overhead. I scream for help.
I awoke to the quick-dying echoes of someone screaming. I sat up and peered down into the streetlights. It was night. I saw Mr. Storto leaning against a lamppost. There seemed to be nothing untoward going on. I touched my throat; I could not figure out why it ached so much, as though I’d been chain-smoking.
It could not have been myself I heard—could it? I stumbled toward the shower, wondering.
After the shower, with warm coffee on the stove, I cleared my writing area. Then I sat down to begin Mark’s script.
I worked into the day and through it and back into the night again before I stopped to eat a sandwich. The phone had rung several times. I had not answered it. The apartment reeked with the smell of stale cigarette smoke. On the third day I broke through the form, that curious combination of word-directed pictures, and I felt moving; I talked to the words and my fingers and my machine. Yeah! Do! Oooohooo! It was doing what I wished it to do. Yet I was becoming conscious of an abyss be
tween what I was saying with the script and what I knew to be Mark’s inability to understand it. I had to sit back, not to think of the pictures, the words and their structure, not to think of pacing, but of Mark’s reaction to all these as each, mortared together, made plain my individual philosophy. And I resented it. My fingers sought out the keys again. To hell with it. Mr. Johnson said that we should move them upward. Okay. Up we go.
On the fourth day, having slept a few hours during the night, I called Allis at work.
“Where in the hell have you been?” she asked. Her voice was cold.
“Working.”
“Working,” she echoed. “Working where?” she almost screamed.
“Here.”
“Where’s here? What’s this shit?”
“Home. I’m doing that script for Mark.”
There was a silence before she spoke. Her voice had changed. “Cate, what’s wrong?”
“You haven’t spoken to Amy?”
“C’mon. Is that what’s got you pissed? I haven’t seen her since I told her not to bother.”
“Okay, listen. Your father wants to give me fifty thousand not to marry you.”
There was silence at her end.
“Did you hear me? Fifty grand. I didn’t know your old man was so rich.” Still the silence. “I told Amy to forget it.”
“Can we talk about it, Cate? I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I’m ashamed. I’m pissed. I’m trying to understand, though, why you didn’t answer the phone or why you haven’t called me until today.”
I grunted.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with us, Cate; not with us. Do you want it to? Will you let it?”
“It refused to bounce off me, Allis.”
“I can understand that. Shall we talk about it tonight?”
“Okay. Okay.”
“And try to understand?”
“I don’t have to try; I understand, but I am tired of people asking me to understand. Shit, Allis, I want some understanding.”
“Sorry. That was badly put.”
“Sure was.”
“Are you all right? I mean—”
“I’ve just been working. I’m all right. You?”
“Better now.”
In her kitchen that night we talked as the ghosts of our histories, and those peculiar loyalties that come with them, lurked behind every word, gesture and glance.
She was sitting primly across from me, her knees together, her hands folded tightly in her lap.
“I apologize for my father. Deeply and sincerely.”
I waved it off. “I didn’t think this was going to be a cakewalk. But I didn’t expect this, either.”
“Neither did I. What is it you want me to do?”
“Do? Nothing.”
She raised her brows. “Nothing?”
“Not now. When I come back, maybe.”
She looked down at her knees, then studied my shoes. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Is that what you want?”
“Allis, I need a little time; it’s gotta bounce.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course. I see. Maybe we can both use the time. Makes sense.”
“Yeah.” My conviction rested only in my anger.
“How’s the script going?”
“I’ll have the first draft finished day after tomorrow.”
“And,” she asked, rubbing her face, her eyes not quite focused, “when will you leave?”
“In two weeks.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’ll be busy, finishing up, I guess. Meetings, rewrites—”
“I think so.”
“You’ll call, won’t you?”
“Yes, I’ll call.”
13
He fades and withers in the evening.
O teach us how to number our days,
That we may attain a heart of wisdom.
Why? keeps running through my thoughts. Why? Have I not touched on every reason? Did I not know this man—or the others?
I look at Dorothea Blue-Sky’s bulk, at Mark Medowitz’s bent, white head, which is resting against his splayed fingers as though it contains too much to be supported by his neck alone, and I wonder why. With Leonard, I think I knew why.
His voice gave out that winter night (I was later told), slicked on fortified wine, while he stumbled and skidded along Lower Broadway, flopping into snowbanks, his trousers stiff with urine gone to ice. But Leonard had no Hoyt Fuller to play to his Conrad Kent Rivers, no Frank Piskor to play to his Delmore Schwartz, and the last snowbank that clutched at him held him fast in a dirty white embrace. It loved him to his death, and the khaki-clad sanitation men, who daily find parts of bodies and other debris of our time on their jaundiced rounds, found him as the sun broke through a cloudy sky over Wall Street and blackened Trinity Church, and chopped him loose.
I look at Mark again and wonder, Why not him? Why not me? Why, Jolene?
Why had she not simply packed up the children and left Amos to his authors, his publishing company, his parties, his rages? No. She would show him!
While Amos was partying in New York, covering his wounds with martinis, scraping away the accumulation of that week’s dumpings from colleagues, bosses, agents and even writers, she, Jolene Bookbinder, on that weekend’s visit to relatives in East Orange, New Jersey, took their kids into the garage, closed the door, placed them in the car with her and gave them candy; and then she started the engine and carried them off with her, leaving behind a note of only three words:
FUCK YOU, AMOS.
Jolene Bookbinder never cursed.
I was moving through a world of the created insane, I think, and I was afraid.
The yarmulka on my head reminds me of bishops, cardinals and popes, of the doomed (sans electrodes) whose caps are made of metal.
I gaze at Betsy and I muse about her life with Paul. I am looking at her and hearing as she hears, the sound of heavy, quick-striding footsteps. Betsy turns. Her profile seems a close-up, her age very nearly revealed in the small valleys of pain and disappointments on her face, which reflects at that moment, however, nothing more than interest. (Who is that coming down the aisle with such a flutter?) The moving woman’s presence strikes on her senses, and Betsy’s eyes flash smoking anger as they key incredulously on the woman, and I, like a camera, truck with her glance until I see who it is Betsy has already noticed, and in alarm I cut back to Betsy at the moment her lips compress and release. Did she say “Bitch”?
We have seen Selena Merritt.
The years show on Selena’s body, which is heavier now, its height, once so majestic, leavened by the bulk that moves under the draped clothing. Yet her face is strangely gaunt, as if worn fleshless by too many false smiles. Selena is, one still reads, a Personage, the Great Twofer, black and woman, that these gray last days so vigorously demand. She slides prettily, though funereally, into a pew.
Bitch! Betsy says, almost loud enough this time for everyone but Rabbi Kaminsky to hear. We all look down or up or straight ahead. Selena sits quite at ease.
Allis and I exchange glances. Well, well! she whispers. I look at Mark, whose wink is long enough to tell me that what I had heard as rumor he had known as fact.
Now Allis glares at her. For Selena over the years has blithely pronounced, in article after article, that white women are stealing black men. That black men have no wills of their own; that they, not so deep down, either, despise and are disgusted by black women. There is no lack of platform for such pronouncements by Selena and two or three others who are like her but younger, thus indicating a continuity of the attack. The magazine and book publishers never seem to tire of these statements. They run as regularly as trains used to.
I understand it: supply the weapons for the attack, but remain distant from it; let them destroy each other. Confuse the issue, for the women will not be the shock troops; they will not throw the hand grenades, aim the M-16s—except for a few.
There are fewer black women than black men, they cry; this white fe
male theft must stop, they say, not understanding that it is we who are expendable, not they; that as long as they can perform coitus, we remain a people. (I seem to remember this from a dream.)
Allis glares as one who insists on remaining knowledgeable in the face of ignorance; she glares because Selena is far less honest than people presume; she glares because Selena begs to be used and because, given her relationships, her words are consummate bullshit.
Mark the innocent, Rabbi Kaminsky says. (Who among this group, I ask myself, is innocent?) Look upon the upright.
For there is a future for the man of peace.
Surely God will free me from the grave,
He will receive me indeed.
My flesh and heart fail,
Yet God is my strength forever.
The dust returns to the earth as it was,
But the spirit returns to God who gave it.
The Lord is my shepherd; I am not in want …
It is over. We will not go to the cemetery. We drift to the hallway, where Mark is waiting. We smile. He opens his arms and I open mine. We embrace. We have moved closer to Paul, through his life to the other side. We both study the detritus of the war littered over our faces and bodies—the eyes that will not stay met, the smiles that are not really smiles, and the clothes and the cut of them, of course. It is all there to be seen and digested, clucked over or wondered at later, in solitude.
Cay-toe!
It is Selena, of course, brushing through people, all teeth and withered dimples, pushing before her the scent of musk.
Christ, Allis mutters and manages to melt into the crowd of mourners, leaving me in Selena’s clutch, her generous embrace complete with kiss and breasts mashed against my chest.
Her eyes, framing out Mark, say: Don’t be a nigger in front of these folks—kiss me back.
Her eyes also say: I guess I ripped this little party pretty good, didn’t I, Cate?
She says, How have you been?
She basks in the recognition, the turned heads, the sweeping glances. That’s Selena Merritt, the playwright and poet!
Ah! Selena Merritt! What’s she doing here?
!Click Song Page 14