Maude Tozer bustled behind me in the kitchenette, fixing drinks. A “small” dinner was almost finished cooking in the microwave oven. A bottle of wine sat in ice in the wine bucket. The small table was set and a languid fire burned in the fireplace. Behind me Maude was saying, “During the day we have people to serve, but at this hour, which I prefer myself, they’ve gone for the day. I like to do these things. The idea of servants still upsets me.”
She approached, smiling, holding the drinks. I had tried to have her do this earlier in the day. It’s really no good conducting literary business, especially with a woman, so late in the day. It’s all right if you’re single.
The drink was strong, like the ones I used to fix for my dates. Hummm. “Do you do all your interviews up here?”
She laughed. “Let’s sit down.” When we were seated across from each other in front of the fireplace, she said, “No. It depends. Some people don’t like to come into the city at all. Others, I feel, don’t deserve or don’t rate the Passages red carpet treatment. Sometimes the apartments have been booked solid for weeks.”
I wondered if she booked and then found someone to interview.
“What’s that you have with you?”
I held it up. “A tape recorder. I figured you wouldn’t mind if I taped your interview.”
Her smile was brighter. Her teeth seemed to gleam.
“Ha, ha,” she said. “Clever.”
Passages was notorious for the slant of its quotes, the viciousness of its writers, the venality of its editors. But it was one of those publications writers believed they needed to be reviewed in or interviewed in. It looked good, but it had the clap. You wouldn’t know that until later, though, when it hurt.
Maude was up fixing more drinks. She liked the sauce, people said. “I hear,” she said from behind me, “that you and Sandra Queensbury used to be quite good friends.”
“She edited an anthology I did for her.”
“Well, yes, of course. Everyone who was friendly with her did something for her—a book, novel or nonfiction, a collection.” She was back now, handing me the drink. I glanced at her pad and pen beside her chair.
“Do you have to get home?”
“In good time,” I said.
“That’s good, because I don’t like to rush.”
I said no, no rush and then, “How many black people do you have working at this outfit?”
“What?”
“You had one black editor, I think that was his title, ten years ago.”
“Oh. Who was that?”
Maude had a nice voice; pity that was all. I mentioned the name.
“I wasn’t here then. We do have one editorial assistant who came when I did.”
“He’s still an editorial assistant?”
“She.” Maude rose. “One more and I’ll serve the dinner, okay?”
“One more?”
“Just a little one,” she said.
“I want to save room for the wine,” I said.
But she was refilling the glasses. “Do you,” she said from behind me, “fool around?”
I turned. “Fool around?”
She came back with the drinks. Her fingers rested on my hand. “Come on, Cato.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.” She looked hard at me to determine if I was fooling. I wanted her to think that perhaps I had not heard the term; that there did exist that great cultural difference between us, as many white people believed. “Really,” I said.
She sipped her drink as the sound of the buzzer on the stove echoed through the room. Her look was vaguely troubled. “I mean,” she said loudly, enunciating every word, “do you fool around with women the way you did with Sandra?”
“Oh,” I said. “That. You mean, would I fuck you, right?” I glanced around in mock bewilderment. “I thought you were doing an interview. [And I had until I walked into this penthouse.] But you really want me to fuck you, huh, Maude?”
“Has that thing been on?”
“The tape recorder? No. That was for the interview.”
“Are you sure?”
“Take it. Play it.”
She almost snatched it out of my hand. She jammed buttons, then placed it to her ear, turning up the volume when she heard nothing. She pressed the buttons again, watching me closely. When she was satisfied, she handed it back to me. I noticed that it was running. I said nothing as I placed it beside me.
“Well,” she demanded.
“Well what, Maude? If I say it, will you repeat it after me?”
She waved a hand. “This is getting silly. You’re not a hick. You know what this is all about—”
Sure. The exercise of power. The power to fuck whom you wanted or kill whom you wanted, when you wanted to, or to withhold whatever you wished to when you wanted to; it was about racism, which as Maude defined it, meant that, though you looked and smelled like a cross between Grendel and Quasimodo and you were a white woman, a black man would want to fuck you.
I rubbed my hand across my forehead. It was the intellectual way of scratching the head. She got it. Her smile was warming.
“Let me get this together. No fuck, no interview?”
“If you want to put it that way, okay.”
“Yeah. But what would really turn me on, Maude, would be you saying, ‘Cato, fuck me. I want you to fuck me.’”
“Aw, c’mon. Really?”
“Yeah.”
She slid off her chair after a hesitation and came to me on her knees, flushed with the booze. “Okay, Cato. Fuck me. I want you to fuck me.”
“And I’ll give you the greatest interview that’s ever appeared in Passages,” I coached.
“And I’ll give you the greatest interview that’s ever appeared in Passages. “She laughed. “Maybe two or three fucks.”
I sipped my drink.
“I know I’m not attractive,” she said. “In this business looks are almost as important as in Hollywood. But I can make love, Cato. You won’t be sorry.” There was a sad bitterness in her voice.
“Do you do this with a lot of authors, Maude?”
I considered her an unattractive woman with secretly large appetites. In a society drunk on beauty, youth and sweet breath, she was way out of the running. What morning had the reality sunk in when she stood before her mirror; what night had truth come when a polite suitor fled as she quickly opened her apartment door to let him in? I felt a disturbing pity for her. But she was exercising what power she had. The wind was pounding softly against the windows. The heat seemed to be oozing out of the place. The bottle of wine slipped in the bucket. “Cato,” she whispered, “let’s do make love.” She rolled her great (thyroidal, I thought) eyes up at me. “Please.”
I touched her hair. “Why don’t you go start dinner. I’ve got to go to the bathroom. We’ve got all night, Maude.”
She sat back on her haunches. “Really? You do have time?”
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
She staggered up and went to the oven. I went toward the bathroom, carrying the recorder, but slipped open the closet next to it and tried to get my coat. The hanger fell clattering to the floor and I looked across the room toward Maude, who, dumfounded, was staring at me, my coat half on, the tape recorder in my hand.
“You, you,” she started as I opened the door, thrusting the recorder in her direction. “You nigger!”
And I was out and in the small, benched elevator that would take me down to the lower floors and oblivion as far as Passages and Maude Tozer were concerned.
“Everything all right, Mr. Douglass?”
“Julio, lemme ask you somethin’—would you fuck any old woman, any woman?”
“No, sir, Mr. Douglass. Then you are not a man, you run around boom-boom, poom-poom; you are an animal, entiende?”
“Claro, hombre, claro.”
“Tiene una buena mujer y dos guapo hijos. Dig it, I know you’re not gonna fuck up.”
“No. G’night. Thanks.”
“’
Dios.”
Allis would be pleasantly surprised that I was home so early. I let myself in, clicked the dead bolt, locking out the world, and leaned against the door, breathing in the familiar scents of the apartment. Sometimes when I had appointments with women editors, publicity people, agents and reviewers, there was a questioning in her eyes, but rarely an asking put vocally. I was thinking of this before I heard the whispering voices, the intimate little laughs, coming from the bedroom. I stiffened, my mind filling with the most insidious possibilities. I was being betrayed; I was being cuckolded. My breath left me and, as it returned after a second that seemed far longer, Allis called out, “Is that you, darling?”
“Yeah,” I growled. “Who’s with you?”
“Pop.”
They tiptoed out of the bedroom. He was carrying Mack, whose eyes fluttered on the edge of sleep. Mr. Greenberg looked older than his age. “I was in the neighborhood,” he explained. “So I dropped up. It’s time we met.”
Allis kissed me. “Got away quickly, eh? I was going to give you another two hours. I know how those interviews and meetings run.”
“Sit down, Mr. Greenberg.” I whipped off my coat in an ecstasy of relief and embarrassment. I said to Allis, “We got through in a hurry. We didn’t like each other.”
“But will the interview run?”
“I’m pretty sure it won’t.” She was disappointed.
“What did you get on the tape?”
I shrugged as I set it on a table. “It was all so lousy that I erased it in the subway on the way home.”
“Well,” she said, “who needs Passages anyway?” She turned to her father. “Want me to take him, Pop?”
He didn’t answer right away. She said to me, “Pop said he looks Sephardic.”
“Hey,” I said. “It’s really good to be home. Out there, it’s a jungle.”
She didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to me. “Oh.” She was moving closer to her father. “You got a special delivery, honey. A teaching job. Name your load and twenty-five grand to start.”
I didn’t see the letter. I was waiting for her to get it. But she was saying to her father, “Your son-in-law, the writer; your son-in-law, the teacher.” There was a challenge in the tilt of her head; her voice had the sound of pride in it.
Mr. Greenberg with a sudden thrust handed the baby to her and stood, turning first this way and then that. He pounced on his coat and hat. Mack started to bawl.
“Pop,” Allis said. “Pop, what is it?”
I think she knew. She didn’t move toward him, just stood frowning, with Mack against her shoulder, patting his back. She was mashing her lips together and I realized, though I had never seen her this way before, that she was angry; that if the sun had bumped against her in those moments, glaciers would have formed upon its surface. He backed across the room to the door, holding his hat. Tears streamed down his face. He kept opening his arms and letting them fall against his coat with soft, helpless sounds.
“I can’t,” he sobbed. “I just can’t.” He opened the door and closed it gently after him.
Allis was draining of color. I took the baby. She ran to the door, snatched at the handle, leaned out to shout something, but couldn’t; she slammed the door, left it shivering for seconds on its hinges. Somewhere within the walls, the regiments of roaches must have started and wondered; down the hall, people must have wondered. Allis ran screaming past me into the bedroom.
I put Mack in his crib and went to her. She lay twisting on the bed in an awful sucking silence. Her lips were blue. Carefully I bent over her, afraid of her anger and where she might send it spewing. “Allis? Baby?”
A humming sound oozed out between her clenched teeth. “Hey,” I said. “Allis.”
I wrapped my arms around her and drew her to me. “It’s okay, baby. We can handle it.” I squeezed her until she couldn’t twist, until the humming sound stopped, until the stiffness left her body and she slumped, crying quietly, in my arms.
Mack, ignored, cried himself to sleep in little sobs. Allis took a deep breath, slid out of my arms and went to sleep.
I slipped Mack out of his soaking diaper, oiled his bottom, powdered it and pulled up his cover. I went into the other bedroom, still mine for the while, and quickly answered the letter from the university. Yes, I was interested. Could I have more details?
Maybe it was time for a change of pace in our lives.
8
I did not want to have lunch with Ike. I was immersed in my own life. The word was that Ike was now clean and working hard and had a new contract with a Boston house. Still, his rehabilitation was not something I was terribly concerned with. Not now.
Allis was still moving about the apartment like a shadow, light and filled with silences. When she spoke it was with a heaviness. Her smiles were wan; her touches, absent-minded flutters. I stumbled on her solitudes: staring at Mack, staring at nothing, staring out the window, staring at me.
“We have a baby to care for,” I said, and she nodded and bared her breast, having forgotten that she had only moments ago nursed him.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “We’ve got our lives to do things with,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
But she grieved through the week, and my anger grew with her inability to grip the realities. And I smoldered.
And told Ike okay.
I was angry with Mr. Greenberg and pissed because I wouldn’t let Allis see, feel or hear it. And I was pissed that she didn’t respond to my silences—which were also an expression of anger. I went to lunch angry, sizzling at Mr. Greenberg, scorched because there I was once more, hung up between things, love for my old lady and hatred for my father-in-law—neutralized by both. I seethed in the righteousness of my anger, wrapped it in my generations on these shores as contrasted to my father-in-law’s relatively late arrival. Who was he, with the grime of Ellis Island embedded still in the creases of his being, to jar my life, to fuck up the head and heart of my wife, who had been his daughter?
“I hear,” Ike was saying against the background of chattering glass, china and silverware, against the hum of voices and the soft movements of the waiters, “I hear that a group of Ivy League nigguh professors have come up with ‘real’ black writing, better than our ‘protest’ shit.”
“Yes,” I said. “I heard about them. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
He reared slowly back in his chair and set his knife and fork down carefully. “I hear you’ve been talking about me.”
I looked up from my shad roe, wondering. Rumor is like a disease in this business. Nothing is ever set right.
“What is it I’m supposed to have said about you, Ike?”
“Humph!” he snorted. “Now you don’t know, huh?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man!” The words were coming out like steam. “Hey, I don’t even think about you, let alone talk about you. What the fuck could I say about you?”
“That I couldn’t write. That, like a lotta cats out here, I’m just riding the black wave, jiving editors.”
He was leaning toward me now.
“Who told you that?”
“Never mind. I believe him.”
“Never mind, my ass. You drop some shit like that on me and tell me to never mind?”
He didn’t blink. “Yeah. I believed it then and I believe it now.”
He moved closer with a crash. Heads turned and turned away again. I straightened up against the wall.
“You think you’re hot shit, doncha, Cato? Got a big contract, good press, white chick for a wife—you doin’ all right, aincha, nigguh, right up there with Whittington and Huysmans, stompin’ on our fingers—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ike.” I dropped my right hand to my lap.
But nothing was going to stop him. He leaned across the table some more, his voice rising. “Yeah, nigguh! I believe
it! They don’t give people the kinda contract you got unless you’re a Tom, unless you agree to do the brothers in—”
I spoke softly, hoping he would lower his voice, but the steam was still in mine. “You motherfucker, you never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or anything else, since you wanna rap that way. Don’t pull that Tom shit on me, you junkie motherfucker—”
He seized my left wrist. His eyes gave off glazed yellow flashes. He was, I realized, crazy, crazier than the junk had ever made him, jealous crazy on rumor and the fear we all had that we were vulnerable to flushing away at any moment.
“Man, let go,” I said.
He sneered. “I ought to kick your ass right here. Now, nigguh. Now.”
The gin on his breath stank, mixed as it was with scampi. He rose partway and leaned farther over the table. The waiters melted into pairs, watching us. People close to our table were looking the other way and eating rapidly. (Where did those niggers come from, anyway?)
“If you don’t sit down and let go my wrist,” I whispered, “I’ll blow you against the wall across the room.” I tapped his kneecap with the gun; tapped it again, realizing as I did that I wanted him to keep coming, that I wanted to hurt someone badly. Who? Didn’t make no never mind to me. “Just keep on comin’, motherfucker,” I whispered, his eyes now locked with mine. I tapped him again. He loosened his grip and slid back down.
“That’s real?” he asked hoarsely.
“Touch me again,” I said.
He made a smile. “You wouldn’t.”
“Wanna bet?”
He whispered, “Are you crazy?”
I shook my head and signaled for the check. The waiters and patrons would be happy for us to leave. “You’re crazy,” I said as I signed. The waiter whisked the card and check and walked rapidly away. “You believe whatever the hell you want to, man, hear? But you just stay the hell away from me.”
He was following me to the checkroom. “You wouldn’t have, would you, Cato?”
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