But when you are fifty or over, it seems quite right, better even than when you were twenty-five.
19
We have to get up and get to doing things. I am pulling together some notes for a new book. And I have to straighten out the house. Company is coming, company of a sort. And Allis has to do some quick shopping for dinner. Nothing special, because the company is not all that special. The company is Maureen Gullian, and I’m not happy with her or Twentieth Century Forum Publishers, so the situation is tit for tat. Even before I addressed the sales meeting, they had expressed a distinct lack of enthusiasm for my work. That atmosphere seemed to have surrounded the work of nearly all black writers, though of course no editor or publisher would admit it. They want to score, bag a book that’ll make beaucoup bread. But the times are tough. Even white writers are screaming with the pinch of things.
It is now recognized that the big change in the business has arrived, and it is that art comes after moneymaking, which is to say that art exists only as commodity. We learn from our literature mainly how to entertain, be entertained and to escape the terrible truths that have slyly informed our lives.
Maureen Gullian is too young to understand. Maybe, though, she is young enough to understand it precisely.
Goddamn. As soon’s she comes through the door carrying the almost obligatory bottle of wine, the vibrations go bad; something becomes altered in the apartment. If Mack were here, Gullian would be overly attentive. As it is, she is more solicitous of Allis than she has ever been. Gullian is, she says, distraught that she was the bearer of the bad news of Paul’s death. She seems unable to look me in the eye.
They don’t want it, I think, and I near shit when she takes the manuscript out of her shoulder bag and sets it on a table. No, they don’t want it. Most writers reach that point in a relationship. The experience is not novel. The word must’ve come down to Maureen the day before I went to Denver. The publishing committee meetings. I look at her. She is uneasy. Her legs and thighs are pressed tightly together, as though she needs badly to take a piss. We have done four books together. Maybe it is time to move on. To hell with the problems, like taking another leave from the branch of the university. Shit, there’s money enough. And maybe I myself was thinking about making a change, if one could be effected these days. I have become too patronizing about Gullian’s lack of knowledge of important things, which, naturally, should find expression in books. Yes, I was looking for another rather hefty advance on Graves. I long ago gave up counting on royalties. Nearly everyone thinks that writers live very well on them and that they never stop coming.
The royalties that do come—$3.54 or $17.83 or $31.11 or $6.93—will not support us; indeed, they will not keep a squirrel in acorns. However, I am glad to get these piddling sums, because I appreciate publishers with style enough to calculate, to add, subtract, divide or multiply and finally send them on to their writers. Other publishers accumulate these minute sums owing to several writers over several years and forget, I suppose, to send them on. In the secret dark of publishers’ accounting divisions, and also in bank offices, I am sure that nimble-fingered and quick-brained minions manage to lose $6.93 about every second of the working day, not to mention in overtime.
Anyway, fuck returning to the branch of the university this fall. My last leave was forced. By circumstances.
It follows that dinner is a disaster. We do not talk of business until it’s over and Allis begins to clean up.
I watch Maureen light up one of those long, lean little cigars she likes to smoke. Maureen has decided to lay it all on the table. Most times I like that quality in people. This is not one of them.
The new book, she says, as though it had no title. It’s been around the house. She grimaces.
I say, Yeah?
She studies her cigar. Her legs are still pressed together. Ten grand advance, she says.
I really pissed them off at that sales conference, didn’t I?
Maureen is trying hard not to say more. She does have a lingering sense of order and justice. How could one have been taught by nuns and not possess, in however small degree, however religiously perverted, the urgency that wishes the precision of the square, the closing of circles, sunrises followed in due course by sunsets, and satisfied writers?
Ten grand, I say. That certainly will not do.
After four books and almost ten years, I think, watching her puffing on that goddamn 150-millimeter cigar.
They won’t give me any more, she says, plaintively. The numbers tell us no.
What numbers?
The computer. BOOK.
That thing in what Jock calls the War Room?
She nods, and a silence of sorts, gray and heavy, billows through the room. They know there is no way I can accept this advance when I have been munching (not gorging) much higher on the hog. Free enterprise moves on. I am, then, a free agent, a Curt Flood, an Oscar Robertson, a John Mackey. Hell. I am now a member in good standing of the Llewellyn Dodge Johnson Club.
I was just thinking, I say to Gullian, of that clause I had inserted into my contract: that should you leave TCFP, I’d leave, too. Ha, ha.
I—
I wave her into silence. Fuck the words. Who needs them? She is making faces. I almost feel sorry for her. She mashes out her cigar and strokes out another and lights it.
Allis is returning to the room.
What’s this about a contract? Allis says. She has coffee.
I say, Oh, Maureen’s offered me ten grand for Unmarked Graves.
Allis is cool. She sets down the tray, looks from me to Maureen. We watch her pour. She hands Maureen her cup and says, Cate said this would happen, Maureen.
Maureen almost chokes on her fresh cigar.
It’s not even strange that she offers no apologies, not even a bit more of a defense for herself. She simply sits, smoking and sipping and crossing and recrossing her legs. Finally, in a tight voice she says, Would you want to do a biography of Paul Cummings? I could get—
She sees my look, then says, May I use your bathroom?
Allis points the way. Maureen goes. I look at Allis. She looks at me. It’s only money, she says. Her tone is flat and hard because she knows of course that it’s only money, but that it is nevertheless the instrument of measurement.
There are, I say, other publishers.
Yes.
But we both knew that this was coming, that things would reach their crest, as they always do in America, and slide over into shadow. I am not a fad; I’m not invisible, a commodity, an invention, and therefore had no right to expect a contemplative old age, a purchased parcel of this place. My delusion was short; the war has no end, and we will be at it until we either disappear into each other or destroy each other.
Oh, fuck Maureen, I say.
Have you?
Christ.
Allis is smiling. C’mon, have you?
I wonder why she is asking now, after all these years of working with women in publishing, knowing that they cover the industry (as they’re starting to call it now, like Hollywood) the way grass covers Central Park.
No, hell no.
We hear the toilet flush. Seconds later Maureen is in the room, gathering up her bag. Now she says, I’m sorry, Cate. It’s the computer.
For some time there has been talk that TCFP was tracking sales with a computer. Top Secret.
But now it’s the computer’s fault. No longer the secretary’s, the mailroom people, the switchboard operators; no warm bodies to seize on, only the latest techno-gadget (not so new, 1936, approximately), a goddamn updated Turing machine, a Turing-Church machine, artificially intelligent. For example, such machines regularly fuck up subscriptions, grades, the movement of things, including missiles. They are lightning-fast with numbers and words—information—when not malfunctioning; they tell you how people will vote and for whom, how folks “feel” about things. So beloved are these “instrumental reasoning” devices that they are baptized with names: HAL, ELIZA,
DOCTOR, NOVA, etc., and people are known to have tried to converse with them.
Yeah, I say. The computer.
Maureen’s at the door. I do not kiss her. Allis does not kiss her. The bullshit is over. The fucks stop here.
When she has gone, we walk to the window. I hope she gets mugged, I say.’
Double-mugged, Allis says.
20
In August of the year we married, free of some article assignments and well paid for them, and also buoyed by a good advance on the novel I called The Hyksos Journals, which was now sweeping along almost under its own power, we joined the March on Washington.
There seemed to be a collective indignation in the air, even though people were more trusting then than now of government. They had been, however, outraged by fire hoses and police dogs that had been loosed on the King-Shuttlesworth forces in Birmingham. Even I was hopeful, for that midnight shoot-out had faded somewhat with the passage of the months.
In Washington on that fine, warm day we sat, feet dangling in the Reflecting Pool. The speakers spoke. The enormous brooding statue of Lincoln peered down at the thousands upon thousands of marchers. Everywhere the television cameras, manned by their crews, were aimed at us, waiting for the routinely predicted eruptions of violence that never came.
Later in the afternoon, the speeches over, the mighty cheers for them no longer even an echo, we drifted through the crowds to find our rented car. We passed a group of George Lincoln Rockwell’s Nazis standing in formation and we drew aside to study them.
“Why am I afraid to spit on them?” Allis whispered.
Farther on we saw a group carrying placards. Children were with them, marching with embarrassed, fixed smiles on their faces. The placards read: BLACK AND WHITE—WE’RE ALL RIGHT. And they chanted this slogan belligerently. We stopped to watch the mixed group of men and women, black and white and, we supposed, their children.
“Why are they doing that?” Allis was nervous.
“I don’t know.”
“The kids look so frightened,” she said.
The parents reminded me of couples I sometimes saw in the Village bars, screaming at each other or waiting to be insulted. They want sympathy for marrying each other, I thought.
“Let’s go,” Allis said. “Those poor kids. I can’t bear it.”
The day’s ambience had been sullied. I despised that group for letting the world mess them up like that. Had they thought their marriages were some kind of game, some sort of showpiece? Was it possible that they really loved their salt-and-pepper misery? Whatever, they were not going to be a mirror for us.
In November, Abraham Zapruder was taking pictures with an eight-millimeter camera near a grass-covered mound in Dealy Plaza, Dallas, when John F. Kennedy’s head was all but blown off by gunfire. Zapruder’s film, and stills from it, laid down the fresh spoor of a blood-and-power conspiracy some 344 years old, the kills commencing not on November 22, 1963, but on April 14, 1865. In the days following November 22, I perceived an ageless Thing rushing gleefully out of history, laying waste to goals and dreams, and damming and diverting our less than inexorable shuffle toward the execution of the possible. The death camp-like ennui, almost as visible as those Pacific island sheets of humidity, which grew moss on shoes, tents and clothes, lay tightly on the nation, despite the quick formation of commissions, despite the pomp of the Death March in Washington with short-striding Selassie and long-striding De Gaulle—the beginning and the end, so to speak. Words packaged as information about the event rained down upon us like the droppings of a flock of pigeons with congenital diarrhea, and smelled just as bad.
During those days Allis and I talked of leaving the country. We talked of the bigotry, the unending parade of mediocre politicians who assumed center stage instead of the statesmen we needed so badly. We talked of the right atmosphere in which to raise our children, free of the American taint. We talked through complete nights, drifting off to sleep only when the sky seemed to shiver and then begin to brighten. Always we arrived at the point where we had to ask, Where would we go to preserve ourselves and our generations? She never mentioned Israel and I never mentioned Africa, or if we did (I do not remember now), it was only in passing. We talked, and that was all we did. When we, with mild regret, concluded that nearly every place on earth was becoming like the United States we turned our concerns to living within the confines allotted to us.
We, Allis and I, seemed to have known each other before, somewhere else, in some other life. Now we were a combination of those occurrences—good friends, lovers, and now, as the times and we ourselves seemed to demand, husband and wife, wife and husband. In ways we never bothered to try to understand, our thoughts, even the words we were about to speak, overlapped, without common reason for why they should have. We acknowledged its strangeness at first, and then came to take it for granted even when foul moods precluded the possibility of that commonality of thought. Then, we could never understand how it was that I or she didn’t understand precisely what was being communicated. Perhaps it was better that way; it kept us more human than might otherwise have been possible.
Those were the days not only of the husky martini, but the gimlet and Gibson; we exchanged cocktail and dinner parties and sometimes Allis joined me from her midtown office to have long, wet lunches with editors. At various times we saw Poode, Selena, Amos, Maxine Culp, Sandra Queensbury and Roye Yearing at the parties that were held.
From time to time we journeyed to Harlem for dinner, to a little restaurant on St. Nicholas Avenue, not far from the old Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity house.
On weekends we slept late, and then cleaned and waited for the Village to come awake. When it did, we browsed or visited, usually briefly, as if performing a ritual, after which I rushed back home to work, leaving Allis to shop luxuriously in the Italian markets. Sunday mornings we lingered over breakfast with the Times and the Herald Tribune reading the book reviews written by or about writers we knew, I watchful of the signs Sandra Queensbury had warned me about. Now and again the reviews of the books by black writers would appear, lumped gracelessly together, as if by theme, but really by race, which meant, of course, that the editor had a problem. Sandra notwithstanding, only a fool could not have seen what was going down. Was up? (The Main Metaphors are always sexual.)
Whittington and Huysmans remained our standard bearers. Their work seemed to have been programmed into the SATs on one level, and devoured whole by the Academy on another, and had thus become standards, like Back Home in Indiana. I had not met Huysmans, but had heard that he called himself a Negro, not a black man. I had read his novel and his collection of verse. In his lectures, which were judiciously spaced, and in his articles, of which there were few, Huysmans in beautifully turned-out language suggested that writers who were black too often used race as an excuse not to write as exquisitely as he had. He deplored “sociological” novels, with their unending burden of race. Yet at the heart of his own assemblage of metaphors was jazz music (of his youth) and this, of course! had not been born through ignorance of bigotry nor through a tenderly forged racial experience. How cunning! To utilize precisely what one condemned, believing no one was watching the pea being switched! But of course they knew—and loved it! And some of them even wrote cunningly about it.
Whittington embraced his Negroness, hammered out with breathless, raging emotion what being Negro had always meant in America. He slashed through his readers’ consciousness, slitting neurons with a scalpel, and when he was finished he wrote that even so he forgave white America and truly did love his oppressors. (“Love them that hate ye.”) And they loved him back and came to believe that he was, when you got to know him, genuinely very sweet. In their collective essence he was to them quite harmless, would titillate, not terminate.
It was all like watching a giant black-and-white film in slow motion that had been directed with a very heavy hand.
When Allis and I finished with the papers, we often strolled out for brunch or to see
a movie. Ours was a quiet, gentle, work-filled life. But the world impinged on it, daily, with the ready insults of the eyes and mouths, the careless challenges (all of which then came from whites alone; that would change) of the people who offered them, believing they would be accepted.
Allis used her poetic alliteration to great effect, I thought, when rising to some of the challenges thrown by women: “You silly, slovenly, stupid, bigoted, broken-down bitch,” said with a cold precision I’d never before observed. Or to cab drivers who had last words as she left a cab I’d put her into: “You poor, Protestant [it didn’t really matter that they might have been Jewish, Catholic or Muslim], prickless piece of puss”—again delivered like hot ice. Of course, they didn’t understand—but they were always unprepared for a response.
Coming out of a mobile hospital once to find my outfit already gone north to the next island, I’d had to fret a couple of days in an all-white Out Going Unit camp. God, how they glared or laughed and nudged each other and pointed at me when I got on the chowline. On the second day, I reached across the serving table, grabbed a guy with each hand and pulled myself up on the table, promising to kick their asses if they didn’t stop smiling. The whole chow hall quieted. (It was a small camp.) They stopped smiling. The routine was good. So I used it when Allis and I were out. It worked, except for one night when they didn’t come by tens, only threes, and beat the living shit out of me on the corner of Sixteenth Street and the Avenue of the Americas, while guys picked their teeth as they watched from a white saloon on the corner. Nineteen years after, the “bad nigger marine” routine ran out of steam. But I had the answer for that, too.
They all seemed to want to make us feel guilty for being happy, for fucking up the sad and dreary continuums of their desperate histories. They wished to be like us, I think, as foolish as us, or as wise, as willing as we were to toss their ridiculous rules like chaff to the winds; they envied us and yet I could never be sure that they ever saw our faces, really; they saw instead our bodies only from our knees to our waists.
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