“Is it for us?” Señora Jones asked.
“Yes, certainly,” I said.
Señor Jones sat back and removed his glasses. His wife took the book from his hand. “Was there something important about wanting to see my daughter?”
He was thinking of marriage.
“She was very kind to me,” I said, “and so I thought I’d try to find her again. This is really just a short visit.”
“Are you—married, Mr. Douglass?” Señora Jones asked.
“No, I’m not.”
They exchanged glances. I checked my watch, then fished out a pad and wrote my name and address on it. “If you see her,” I said, “please ask her to write to me.”
I walked. I went to the dance hall where I’d met Monica, but it was early. I asked after the Cubans, but they no longer worked there. No one had heard of her. It was hard to know if they were telling the truth. Who was I? A stranger. They owed me nothing.
Plaza de Cataluña, encircled by neon signs from the tops of buildings around it, was almost empty. I moved, eyeing every female figure that vaguely resembled Monica down the Ramblas to Calle Cañuda and the Plaza Villa Madrid.
The publisher was waiting for me and grandly escorted me to a table. We were the attraction; I was the attraction in that Catalan intellectual gathering place, and I rather enjoyed it.
Had he found the right family? I told him that he had, but my friend was not there. He was sorry, very sorry. What would I do now?
Paris and then home.
18
I think that we were both relieved when I checked into the Danube to meet Allis without a child in tow. Of course, we walked a lot and found the spots where American writers of another generation had eaten, had hung out, had, ultimately, come to despise and envy each other. We usually spent an hour or two at the Café Tournon, which was where Richard Wright had held court. Mainly, then, I was trying to understand this country that had invited Wright to live in it in the first place, and then turned its back on him when his work encompassed its hypocrisy. Encompassed? Struck at the heart of it.
And what of that woman who held hands with me as we shuffled through Paris, confident that we would not be lynched, but not so sure that we would not be spat upon? She surrounded my thinking, as one pads a precious object, with love, an endless patience with the elements of chance and circumstance that had brought us together. We did not talk of her father, and I had no parents to talk about; we were as the eggs of a creature of time, abandoned, left to our own devices, sucking for nourishment on experiences our forebears, not we, had suffered. Those things remembered, but unknown.
Paris was neutral territory and in it we discovered that we still liked each other enough to talk of love; in it we gathered strength, leveled out our mutual weaknesses, raised our mutual strengths, and then we turned westward, like birds readying for the rising of the wind, and we went home to be married.
It was by then spring in New York, which moved us infinitely more than it had in Paris, and the sap from a thousand notes, written in longhand and stored in the head, began running together, wanting urgently to become a novel.
There was, happily, a ton of mail to wallow in, from Paul, from Amos, from publishers and editors, from Glenn, from distant places and people I’d never met but who had met me through my work. And then we had to find a judge who would marry us in his chambers, and I had to visit Glenn, and we had to move Allis’ things to my place, which was, but not much, bigger. Besides, it was in the Village, where we presumed there existed a tolerance for people like us or, if not, at least a check on obvious acts of intolerance. Rick and Mark wanted me present at the screenings of the dailies and for part of the editing, and Alex Samuels had lined up three articles for me to write.
Much of the mail consisted of books publishers wanted me to read and praise so that they could lift quotes and use them in advertising, on book jackets or both. All but one of the books were written by black authors, a fact I noted quickly, but without rancor, accepting with a certain graciousness what appeared to be a growing literary status. That I would be sent the works of more white authors I was certain. Since Amos had sent two of the books, I called him, thanked him for his letter and asked how he was doing. He sounded depressed and distracted and only mildly surprised that I was getting married. Would I be interested in doing a book on Africa? I told him I didn’t think so, because I hadn’t sorted everything out yet.
“You just don’t want to be published with me, do you?”
And God, yes, I did, I did, but we were both “debased” workers; he thought he was a producer. I produced. He was a cog in the long, capitalist chain. We were powerless. Never mind that he had been made to look as one with power; petits rois were a part of the landscape. And Amos still consumed more than I did, though it was not his money. That was entrapment, for he had once felt that he had to live personally as well as he lived on the job. Whole cultures had thus been encoded into the system. Had Amos not had to answer to bosses, had he even said, “I have no power. Maybe together we can get some,” I would have signed in a minute. But he continued to believe that he was what they never would let him be.
Welcome home.
However, all I told Amos was that there were experiences in my trip that I didn’t want to reveal to anyone, much less in print, just yet, until I’d had time to place them in context. He didn’t believe me. Nevertheless, resigned, he offered me a lunch within a few days and I accepted.
Paul had been to the Coast, where he’d seen his father, and was now settled in Chicago, near the university. His description of his neighborhood smacked of a test run, a draft; what they call, in feature articles, color; what they call, in novels, description. I think I was supposed to respond with a comment on how much it affected me. Instead, I thought, He is still lying! Lying! Why does he go on and on about this fucker who’s supposed to be his father when no one’s ever heard about him, as though some information would not wash over me, as though I had not yet learned that too many bad guys point to the days when, briefly, they were good and left and concerned with injustice, as though I did not now know that his father had given him his points?
As I pushed aside the mail in a heat, together with soiled clothes, I knew it all had to do with me, not him. I wanted him to be different, to believe and be a believer in the shit (as we all wanted to, but at someone else’s energies), and he felt this pressure increasingly in ways not spoken. I wanted him to confess, renounce, deny by his acts that his heritage could be based only on my disinheritance.
I wrote feverishly, telling him about my visit to the ILWU, about Mark and the co-ops, about the energy he had used up prolonging his liberal fairy tale. I told him that I now understood the deception. Yet, truly, I did not, could not, would not. For I needed to believe that he was real and solid just as much as he needed to believe that I needed men such as he had pretended to be.
(I did not get an answer from Paul until much later and it was not in a letter, but in a copy of his manuscript, The Burnt Offering.)
Glenn. Jesus. You lie around with a woman and juices start popping and running and meeting up with other juices and before you know it there’s a creature standing before you with a voice gone almost to bass, bigger than you; you can almost hear his juices washing around inside him and feel the electricity crackling from exploding hormones. Jesus. I touched him a lot. We studied each other a great deal and we talked about basketball and track, which he was into also. Looking at him, watching him pretend to be Oscar Robertson, Elgin Baylor or Rafer Johnson, I saw his boyhood sliding by. I wondered just how ready he was. He reminded me of the child in Spain.
“Hey,” I said to him.
He stopped bouncing the basketball and looked up, surprised, though with a smile. “What?”
“I love you.” I knew it would be perhaps the last time I could say it.
“Aw,” he snorted and, head down, smiling still, he went back to dribbling the ball in his mother’s backyard.
Catherine wish
ed me luck.
Back in New York, I was shocked once again to see myself on film. I marveled at how well I’d absorbed the mannerisms of the television journalists: a nod here for emphasis, a twist there, the straight-at-the-camera look, the slightly pressed lips to underline the cut from me to the action. Scene after scene of The Negro rolled smoothly on; the illusion was of one massive telling, slick, superficial and palatable, with, here and there, my statement coming through, slipping quickly, like a spitball over the corner of the plate. The show was but half-edited; there would be more. I did not know why I felt both pleased and disappointed.
But the day was coming.
She was contemplating me when I opened my eyes that morning. She smiled. “This is the day. Are you ready?”
I eased my knee between her legs. “Ah,” she said softly. I grasped her hips, rounded and warm, and turned her on her back; her legs slid upward and apart. “Oooo.”
Two hours later Allis stood, her arm through mine, the light in the judge’s chambers reflecting off her dark blond hair, her hip resting against mine. Her lace ecru dress, subtly cut, was swelled with the gentle protuberances of her body. She was studying the judge with amusement. For, his golf bag sitting in a corner, he was marrying us in something just short of a rush. The words said, he kissed Allis and took my hand. His hand opened as if expecting, as if in search, while his eyes clouded for an instant. I quickly gave him the bucks in my other hand. How quickly and brightly then came his smile! How firmly did he shake my hand!
Then Allis and I took a cab back up to the Village. For a luncheon party.
Mr. Storto. Amos with a striking peroxide blonde, Mark, Dolph, Vernon, young people who worked with Allis at Cumer, Slate and Finch.
One of those hovered near us. She thought we were terribly in love, awfully courageous, and the parents of the new world the sixties were creating; we were to her Izanagi and Izanami, Adam and Eve, Qaholom and E Alom, but most of all, she thought we were Kaundinya and Soma of the proto-ancient Khmers: The men … are black … but many women are white. We drank champagne, stuffed ourselves with blini with sour cream and caviar and Polish vodka thick as syrup.
God, you two look well, Mark is saying.
Allis makes a face. Lately she complains of lines in her face, the bigness of her hips, the bulge of her stomach. But I insist that the body knows how to care for itself. Besides, she looks sexy and I love the feel of her, the slopes and mounds, the curves of her.
You look okay, too, Mark, I say. What else is one to say—that you look like death taking a shit?
He makes a depreciatory gesture, smiles.
How’re your kids? He’d married then divorced another production assistant on the David Susskind show. Maybe there was another wife. I didn’t ask. What does it matter?
Okay. Fine. This Glenn Douglass, that your kid? The Jumper book?
Yeah. My son.
Incredible, he murmurs. I smile. It seems that writers who hang around the movies or television or who are journalists all want to write novels. They want to do up the King, believing secretly that they will not really be writers until they publish a novel. (I have sometimes wondered if they are not right.) Earning a million bucks doing scripts or articles, nonfiction books, is not enough; by God, they must do that novel.
Mark sighs. I’m working on a novel.
I want to tell him about the other writer in my family, Alejo Cato Donoso, but I do not, since he is quiet about his own kids. Did they disappoint him? Do they dislike him?
And you two have a kid. Boy? Girl?
Boy, Allis says.
Did you see Leonard’s kid? Mark asks.
Good-looking boy.
Dorothea’s eee-normous, he says. In the little silence that follows I wonder if he, too, feels a sting of guilt for not taking the time to speak to her. She is in some demand now; she speaks to literary groups, college groups, about Leonard and his brief lifetime. And she published a book about him some years back.
Well, Mark says briskly, as if getting down to business, why did he do it?
I say, I thought you might know. We were out of touch. You saw him from time to time.
Yeah, I did, but I don’t know any more than you do. I mean, after such a slow start and then zooming right on up, marrying Betsy, the kids, the acclaim—shit, I don’t know.
Betsy says he wasn’t sick or anything.
But maybe she didn’t really know. After all, he says, they weren’t together.
Mark drums his fingertips softly on the table; Allis sips her coffee.
It’s frightening, she says. Even now there are days at a time when we don’t exchange more than ten or twenty words, right, darling? And I try to imagine what you’re thinking, how the work’s going, and I try to make conversation and it always falls flat. She is talking to me, but looking at Mark, as if in some way pleading a case.
And then all that tension melts away—suddenly vanishes. What’s frightening about it is being alone. I’d hate being a writer who’s physically alone nearly all the time.
I hug her. She will never lay claim to being a poet and never sees herself bent over the kitchen table, writing, while Mack and I slide through the apartment.
I think it was something else, Mark says.
Like what? I feel a growing chill. In my mind I see myself again rushing along Fifth Avenue to his home. What cause had I to run? Why such haste to get to his death? What is the prevision of people who take their lives that the rest of us do not see?
Mark answers, Like what? Hell, I don’t know. He may have been tormented being a WASP when he was really a Jew. When he declared, he seemed content. Maybe he wasn’t.
Mark was gesticulating, his eyes watering, as if in fear of something distantly perceived. Maybe, shit, he just discovered that it was all crap, that none of it was really worth the sweat. Paul could be like that, you know. Just pull up stakes and move out.
Allis looks a little frightened. What?
Mark says, I dunno, dunno why he did it.
I think, What was it that climbed into Paul’s foxhole? What? I notice Allis’ profile, her lashes extending from her suddenly downcast eyes, and I realize she is thinking about me, about my nightmares, and wondering (though knowing) why they have returned.
We are all quiet. I am remembering.
There were times when the distinct smell of burned wiring hung inside my nostrils for days. At first I used to examine the apartment, checking the plugs and wires, but then, even outside, I could smell the burning. I reached a cunning conclusion: there was some connection inside me that was overheating, preparing to short out. Then it passed, that and the running. The running: there had been times when I awoke at godless hours of the morning sitting straight up in bed, Allis crying and hanging tenaciously to my shoulders or my legs.
“Cate! Cate!”
Of course, her voice would eventually penetrate and still those kaleidoscoping horrors in my head.
“My God! You were screaming and crying and kicking—”
“Uh!”
“Cate!”
“Ohhh.”
“I never heard such sounds before. Are you all right?” She clutched me tight and stroked my back as if I were a baby and, exhausted, I rested upon her.
The burn smells and the running stopped for a while, but now they are back.
Mark smiles at us in the silence.
It is all crap, you know, Mark says. He shrugs. I knew it back then, when I moved from one side of the desk to the other to be an editor. It was always money. He shrugs again. Money. I knew I’d always get a paycheck while you guys on the other side wondered how come editors didn’t love you enough to publish you. Television was even better. He leans forward. I’m writing a novel about all of it.
If it’s all crap, Allis says with surprising bitterness, why do you want to write a novel? Besides, you just mentioned it.
Mark smiles. Well, why not? Perhaps he chose not to hear Allis.
Yeah, I say. Why not? Everyon
e’s got one good book in him. The problem’s getting it out.
Mark laughs. Hey, man. I’m in TV. That’s no problem.
Yes, Allis says, that is a problem.
Ha, ha, Mark says. Weakly.
I make getting-up motions.
Let’s stay in touch this time around, Cate, Mark says, passing me his card.
Yeah.
Ready, dear? Allis is standing.
I think of something, but decide not to bring it up. It really is time to go.
Outside, walking arm in arm up Columbus Avenue through the old Irish neighborhood that contains a brave mix of just about everybody, pleased that people still look at us, look at her, their glances lingering on her face and then, of course, her body, Allis smiles and says, I really am tired of people who announce, just announce, that they’re writing a novel. Goddamn it, if writing one’s all that important … She shakes her head of curls dark blond and gray.
We ought to walk more often, she says.
Next thing, it’ll be jogging.
I’d like to jog.
S’long.
Wouldn’t it be fun jogging with Mack?
You’re kidding. No. Not with anyone. Miss him?
She thinks, then says, Ye-ss. I thought the time would never come for him to go anywhere alone, and now he’s at camp, I miss him. A little.
After a while I say, He looked like shit, didn’t he? Mark.
She laughs. Hard.
On the other hand, I say, I probably looked like shit to him.
No. Never.
Not never. Not yet. I stop. Let’s get lunch and a drink.
She stops. Really? Honey, what I said back there—
It’s okay. You’re right. It’s a lousy way to make a living, to live. And teaching. I’m sorry.
It used to be exciting. Or is that my imagination? Maybe we’re just getting old.
Naw. Prime of life. Prime time. The time’s prime. Listen. Let’s go home and make love and drink and eat there.
Wanna?
I wanna.
When you are very young you cannot imagine two people past fifty, a man and a woman, lying around nude in a sun-filled, air-conditioned bedroom during a summer afternoon, alternatingly drinking wine and making love.
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