“Did you,” Allis asked, “give Paul his medal?”
I didn’t answer; I was still going over the conversation with him.
“Well, then, how is Paul?”
“Okay. He’s going to get married.”
I thought she muttered, “Again?” but I wasn’t sure.
She lowered her book and rested it on her breasts; waited until I was settled in bed. “Anyone we know?”
“Not from the way it sounded. That is, he didn’t say so.”
“Nice Jewish girl, I presume?”
“No, not Jewish.”
She turned on her side toward me. I kissed one of her breasts. I supposed that as soon as our kid was old enough to start walking around, we’d have to wear bedclothes. I’d miss the being nude. Allis propped her head against her hand; her elbow dug into the bed beside me. “Hold it. Wait a minute. She’s not Jewish? I thought—his first wife wasn’t and Claire wasn’t, then he went into this big thing and now his third wife won’t be.”
“He’s confident she’ll convert—”
“All the nice Jewish girls around here, like Amy, why should he find a shiksa and then convert her—you know something, your friend Paul—”
“Yeah, what?”
“Maybe it’s a smart thing to be a Jewish writer these days, darling. Just maybe it is.”
“C’mon, Allis.”
“I’m sorry, honey, but every day I’m finding things that’re not nice about so many people we know. By the way, do we have to go to Amos’ this weekend?”
“Yeah, let’s do it. Paul wants us to meet Betsy next week, too. Dinner.”
“Betsy? Ross?” Allis laughed and ducked under the sheet. “I want to meet her.”
“Listen, Paul always gets attractive women, you know that.”
“Hell, you didn’t do so badly yourself, or do you find me unattractive now that I’m pregnant?”
“Looking at you makes me think of that kid in Spain, honey.”
She was silent, examining my mood. Then she said, “Cate, darling, I really don’t know what we can do now. You’ve been in touch with Monica’s father—”
“I know. Forget it.”
“I think you should, too.”
“I do try to forget.”
Allis sighed.
“Stopped by Mr. Storto’s.”
She leaped at the chance to change the subject. “When’s he coming to see us?”
“I dunno. He always promises.”
“A young couple moved into the building today. Already this place seems less a geriatrics ward than before.”
“Did you talk to them?”
“No, but they look interesting.” Allis put her book on the night stand and turned out her light. “Amy called tonight. My father wants to see me.”
I said, “Uh-huh,” and turned out my light.
2
Amos had bought an old house on a mountaintop in the Catskills. I supposed that he drove there to get the demons out of his system, the ones that lurked in his office, the bars and restaurants in midtown Manhattan, the ones that ran across his soul in cleated shoes and the ones that would tie him for the rest of his life to that garage in East Orange, New Jersey. We had visited once before; it was a distinct change from the extended literary loop of Manhattan, the Hamptons and the Cape. No self-respecting writer or editor who wished to be seen would ever isolate himself on that mountaintop, where the nearest neighbor lived a half-mile away.
The trip up was different this time. The angers exploding around the nation were reaching a crescendo. People were being hauled from cars and shot and / or beaten because they were black (and sometimes because they were white). People were being shot in their cars waiting for traffic lights to change. Police were Bogarting people just because they could.
As we were leaving the apartment to go pick up the car, I said to Allis, “Put this in your bag.”
She glanced at it once and glanced at me and opened her bag to accommodate the .32 I’d bought from Vernon. We did not discuss it, for there was nothing left to say; it’d all been said for us. Allis, yes, opened her bag and I placed it in and she closed it and we went.
(There must have been several million black people equally prepared, equally ready to react when pushed past some line already drawn and designated as the place to make the last stand. However, not being forced back beyond it, we must live now with relief riding one shoulder and guilt for feeling it upon the other. Perhaps we had drawn the line too far beyond the center of action.)
We arrived at Amos’ without incident, and when I got out of the car after the three-hour drive, I breathed deeply. The air, nourished by vast stands of sugar maples, beeches, white birches and red firs (reminding me suddenly of the innkeeper Daniel) was neat, fine.
“God, smell that air.” She laughed. “I’m glad we came.”
Later, after a walk in the woods and some desultory fishing in his lake, we fixed dinner, then sat with drinks on the porch, where we could see all the way down a fifteen-mile-long valley from whose bottom was rising a slow, silvery mist. The night was coming down.
“Ike is in very bad shape,” Amos was saying, “but he’s working. I’ll be damned if I know how he’s living, though. Then, you know, man, nobody wants to touch him. Hey! The word’s going around on your boy Paul’s book. The fix is in; they’re gonna make it a big one.”
“Well, it is a good book,” I said.
“Shit. I read an advance copy. It ain’t raisin’ no hell, Cate. What do you think, Allis?”
We both knew what Amos was driving at: a Jewish point of view.
“It is a good book,” she said. “But I’ve read far better ones. There’s the gimmick in it, I guess: the confession. It’s an invitation for people to read what the system made Paul do; deny what he is. And people enjoy being reminded of how powerful the system is.”
“Black writers do some of that,” Amos said.
“Exactly,” Allis said, and went back to her knitting.
Amos said, “It’s time to ease John Greenleaf and Elliot Huysmans a bit to the side, man. This shit goin’ on out in the street can’t last forever.”
“I hope at least until it does some good,” Allis said.
“It’ll look like it’s done some good,” Amos said. “But they got all the systems in place. We can’t win, you can’t win, I can’t win, because the rules haven’t been changed.” He glanced at Allis. “It’s not just black writers; it’s all writers. I mean, Jesus, if writers would only try to understand that by virtue of the contracts they sign they actually subsidize the publishing industry in the same damn way a cat on the assembly line subsidizes the auto industry by agreeing to a contract that views his labor only as a cog in the profit system.”
“Ah, shit,” I said. “We all know that art is commodity.”
Amos chuckled. “Yeah, baby, but do you have any idea how big that game is? No. Of course not. How the fuck could you?”
“So tell us,” Allis said.
“I’m gonna.” He fixed himself another drink. He seemed to be slipping into a quiet rage.
“You hand in a partly finished manuscript, Cate, right? The advance is ten, twenty, thirty grand, whatever—”
“More, more,” Allis stage-whispered over her knitting.
“They’ll give you maybe twenty-five percent when you sign. But they got all of the advance blocked out, and the other seventy-five percent they put in the bank. It draws interest. It’s your money. You don’t get any share of the interest.
“Then you take that six-month royalty-period shit. It don’t take no six months these days for publishers to count sales and deduct for books returned. Booksellers can’t afford to hold on to books for longer than three, four weeks; they gotta make room for the others. Man, they could balance the books in a day, because they’re all getting computers installed. It’s business, you know; it’s money. They just use your money during that six-month period to do anything they want to do.
“That clau
se—it’s an option maybe good for taxes—that says you agree to take down no more than twenty-five thou a year if your book hits big? Suppose you break a leg and make a million or two—”
“Break a leg, honey,” Allis said.
“Let’s just take a mill,” Amos said, waving his arms frantically in the air. “If a publisher insisted on the letter of the contract, goddamn it, it would take you forty years to get it. Forty. Man, they could use your money up a storm—”
He broke off and looked at us almost in surprise. “Aw, shit, forget it. I mean, you writers are daydreaming; ain’t no fuckin’ art; all there is is money. Money! Money!”
We sat embarrassed and I found that I was angry, too. “What else, man?” I asked.
“Don’t matter. You writers ain’t never gonna get your shit together long enough to change nothin’. Each of you is a fuckin’ king! A fuckin’ queen! Goddamn bell-bottomed philanthropists. Man, all you cats is where Noonan’s painters were, just what they was: suckahs! Suckahs!
And suddenly he was shouting at the top of his voice out into the night. Allis jerked away. I stood. Tears gushed down Amos’ cheeks. He bounced on taut buttocks, his legs held stiffly out before him.
“An ain’t nothin’ worse than a”—and here he gathered himself—“a niggah suckah—nig-gah suck-ah!”
Just as suddenly he stopped. The echo of his voice, diminishing as it sped, rolled round and came back: NIGGAH SUCKAH—NIG-GAH SUCK-AH! A chorus of peepers slid in together with the sound of trees hissing at the stroking of a cool, night breeze. It was as if, so great was Amos’ anguish, the earth and its essences had to respond.
“Go on up, honey,” I said to Allis. “I’ll sit with Amos a while.”
“G’night, Allis.” Amos’ voice was pleasant and calm in a stiff, theatrical way.
Allis went to him, kissed him and with her forefinger wiped away some of the tears. When she was gone I said, “I didn’t know you cared about the writing.”
“Shit,” he said in a mournful voice, “I always cared about the writing. I thought I could play the game and then pick up the ball and start a new one. The game was very expensive, Cate.”
I hauled out of the closet some bolts of Nigerian cloth I’d bought on the trip through Africa, and Allis made me a dashiki. Everyone was wearing them by now, of course. Some were made of silk with imitation stones set in them; some had zippered pockets; some had intricate designs woven into them. Afro cuts put many black barbers out of business. Conks went quickly out of fashion. Even whites had their hair frizzed up and cut into Afro style.
I wore my dashiki the night we met Paul and Betsy Rawson for dinner. She was the way apple pie is said to be, very American—tall, slender, blond and very good-looking in an irregular way. That European “human debris anxious for any adventures” never could have imagined that the centuries would produce out of their collective, mean existences anything like Betsy, but there she was, murmuring about her Scotch-Irish, French-German, Italian-Austrian roots. “A mongrel,” she said, giggling, “soon to be a Kaminsky.”
“Was that it?” I asked Paul.
“That is it,” he said. “But I’ll continue to use Cummings in the writing.”
When the meal was about half over, the conversations veered; Paul and Allis talked to each other while Betsy leaned forward to talk to me. (After all, did not bums beat their way through crowds to get to me for their handouts? Didn’t strangers in town somehow fix on me to ask for directions?)
“I’m really so pleased to meet you at last. Paul’s so often talked about you. I feel that I know you and Allis already!” She looked wistfully at Allis. “How pretty she is.”
Paul and Betsy had met in Chicago at a party for Saul Bellow. “It’s good to be settling in New York,” she said. “Chicago is like Sparta; New York is Athens.” Betsy kept gripping my hand, squeezing it in frenzied displays of instant friendship. Paul smiled tolerantly at us; Allis, through her thin smiles, studied her.
“It must be rough for you two,” Betsy said.
Allis had overheard. “Why do you say that?”
“Interracial marriages are not very popular these days, isn’t that right?”
“Oh,” said Allis. “That.”
“Well, you and Paul will be something of a mix yourselves,” I said.
“Oh, hell, it won’t be the same,” Betsy said scornfully.
I’d given her the chance to be a martyr. Some of our acquaintances made much of such religious distinctions in their marriages, though very often neither husband nor wife practiced anything. Perhaps they were only trying to move closer to Allis and me, or perhaps we seemed to give to them the shared sense of danger they assumed we felt twenty-four hours a day. I recalled some of the parties or places we’d gone to where the black women had cut Allis dead or had given me endless grimaces designed to reflect their contempt for me. For us. Whites, on the other hand, considered anyone black to be militant, or believed the books we were writing to be nothing more than militant political statements. They wondered how come, then, we were married; how come we were going to have a child?
I said to Betsy, “Actually, we do all right. Pretty much just like everyone else.”
“I’m glad,” she said, gripping my hands again.
“She’s got the hots for your old hands,” Allis sang to the tune of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” She was creaming her face in the bathroom. “I’ll say this: she is very direct. I think I like her. She’s probably too good for Paul.”
“No. She may be just what he needs.”
A couple of days later I called Alex Samuels. He came on the line with a rush. “Cate, listen. I’m in the middle of something big for Paul. I’ll call you this—”
“Don’t.” I was suddenly so angry that I felt it possible to squeeze the phone into fragments.
“What?”
“You’re fired, Alex. Shit. I call you and you can’t talk to me because you’re busy doing something for my friend, something more than you ever did for me, right?”
“Okay, Cate, if that’s the way you want it.” He did not seem to be distressed. Rather, he sounded relieved.
I dialed again. “Maxine? You’ve got yourself another client.”
“Really, Cato? Great! But what did you do with Alex?”
“We’re finished.”
“Wanna have lunch?”
“Sure. Soon.” And it was done.
The phone rang as soon as I’d slammed it back into the cradle. Ike Plunkett wanted to talk to me. He was on the way over.
“It’s the Big Payback Time, man. The Big Payback.”
Ike was high and it was noon. Allis would be keeping a date with her father just about now. Ike and I sat over tuna fish salad and cold cuts and drinks. But he wasn’t eating; he was drinking and gazing around the apartment with perpetually startled eyes.
“Yeah, I heard you’d married a chick from Bread Loaf. Yeah, I heard that. Yeah. Big Payback. Them brothers in the street ain’t kiddin’.” He hummed something tuneless.
“How’s the writing going?”
“It’s going all right. I’m the problem.” He hummed again. “Say, Cate, let me hold fifty until next week. I ain’t got no food at home, man.”
“I can let you have twenty-five, Ike. I ain’t got fifty.”
“That’s cool, man.”
“Why don’t you eat somethin’, man?”
“Eat? Oh. Uh, I don’t like tuna fish.”
“It’s food, you turkey.”
But he had started to nod. I gripped his shoulders and shook him. “Ike. Hey, Ike.”
He came awake, trying hard to focus on my face.
“How’s your kid, man?”
“I got to go,” he said. He shivered. He moved on buckling legs to the door.
“The money,” I said, holding it to him.
“Money?” He had stopped. “The money.”
“You wanted—”
“Yeah, yeah.” His nose was starting to run. He
took the money, brought it close to his face to look at it and went out.
I closed the door and quickly checked the chair he’d sat in, pulling up the cushions and feeling very carefully in the crevices. Nothing. I felt no shame, simply an emptiness, an exhaustion. There had been no bag of heroin, no needle, no syringe. Cops would not be rushing down the hall at this very moment to batter in my door and carry me away for possession and use.
Ike’s desperation was well known. And this led to the quite natural suspicion that he would do anything to make sure he continued to get the dope he needed to satisfy his jones. So I looked under the chair cushions.
Like nearly everyone else those days I was not immune to the idea that because I was a black writer there were forces naturally aligned against me. We all felt that. We all knew that at least one major publication had published an interview with Richard Wright before his death that in fact had never taken place. This was done with the specific aim of discrediting him. We knew that the authorities were harassing the Black Muslims, the Black Panthers and black people generally.
Some writers therefore turned up at readings, conferences and festivals with bodyguards. And I for one certainly felt better with my revolver than without it. We floated on turbulent seas filled with swift currents of rumor: the FBI, the Tactical Police Unit; government agents carrying HEW identification cards; the blacks were going to blow up New York this weekend; the Puerto Ricans would do it next weekend; the Weathermen were going to do it today; everyone complained of strange sounds on their telephones. Those white women giving up leg to black men were really agents, so zipper up yo dick. People wondered just whose list they were on, the Feds’, the local’s, the state’s; no one believed that he or she was not on a list.
Yeah. Big Payback Time, all right.
These thoughts stayed with me through the afternoon. The sounds of schoolchildren down in the street, the elevator clattering up and down at a more rapid rate—these signaled as precisely as my watch that Allis would soon be home and that, whether I’d worked well or not, we’d talk as usual over a drink before she started dinner.
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