“Fantastic,” I whispered. What else was I to say—that she was too frantic, that she was inept, that she had shattered my concept of how young, very pretty women made love? Seeking a distraction, I reached over and took the diaphragm case. I opened it. There was a diaphragm in it. I went limp and cold and then angry.
“What’s this shit?” I held the case toward her.
She laughed. And laughed. And laughed again. “Don’t worry,” she said when she’d caught her breath. “It’s all right; a safe time of month.” She laughed me out of her flat.
Two weeks passed, and I was starting to feel relieved that I had not seen her, that she hadn’t called. It was over, I told myself. It’d been a brief excursion into the unknown; a skip through the snakepit; material that Ken Kesey would have come back from his cow farm for. A student was finishing up her conference hour—it’d been a bit longer than an hour—when the phone rang.
Raffy said, “No conference hour should last that long.”
An avalanche crashed into my head, and foolishly I found myself explaining: “Oh, she just wanted to talk about some things—”
“Are you sure, Cate? That’s all? I know that Melanie.”
She’d never called me Cate before. I was afraid; I was pissed. “What did you think we were doing?”
“You know.” Her answer had come after a sly pause.
Bits of things ran suddenly together. I put the phone down and went to my door and opened it. I glanced down the corridor to the phone booth. Raffy was there, the phone still to her mouth, but facing me, a storm so violent on her face that it destroyed any vestige of the Indian goddess of poetry and music. With angry motions, I signaled her. She hung up the phone and swept toward me, past me, into the office. I closed the door and hung up the phone. I didn’t dare believe what was happening. “What was that all about, Raffy?”
“I see the way you look at the women around here!” She whipped back and forth.
“Hey, you’re imagining things. I wasn’t doing anything with Melanie.” She paced around my office. “You aren’t jealous, are you, Raffy?”
She stopped suddenly and smiled. “I’m not jealous, just crazy.”
“No. Mixed up, Raffy. Let’s straighten it out: it was tremendous, being with you, making love with you, but it was eminently transitory—it couldn’t be otherwise—and I do value the memory.”
“Memory, my ass,” she said. “Suppose I get pregnant?”
“Oh, come on.”
“It’s not over, Cate. I won’t let it be over.”
“It’s over, Raffy. Over.” She thinks, I realized, we had a solid thing going. My God! As traditional as ever! She pretended she wasn’t! Could I expect to find her around the corner of every campus building, or behind every tree now greening with the soft April rain? (April, that was her mother’s name.) Would she be at the terminal end of every flight of every Frisbee that sailed over my head? All on the basis of one lousy fuck? “You’d better go, Raffy. Yes, I think it’s better that way. When you’re in a better mood let’s talk—”
She stopped as though she’d run into a wall.
“You’re putting me out?”
“I’m not putting you out. I just want you to go now.”
The ease, I groaned as she went past me like a shot, screaming, “Nigger, you’re gonna be sorry you ever touched me!” She went down the hall like a squad of storm troopers and broke the glass in the door when she slammed it. I hoped that my colleagues who shared the floor with me were out, to lunch, to diddle coeds, to drink, even to class.
I remained still and listened. There was no minor hubbub of people sneaking into each other’s offices to:
“Did you hear that! What that Joplin girl said to Douglass! She all but said they’d slept together!”
None of that.
I pried open my lunch—a tuna fish salad sandwich on whole wheat bread, peach yogurt, an apple—which Allis had packed for me. I’d realized that if I brought lunch, I could work and eat; in the cafeteria it was just eating and talking—and the prices of truly mediocre food climbed every week.
But I didn’t work. I ate and thought, ate and worried. Which linked events had produced such a fashion-model beauty with such a fucked-up head? Was this a part of the cost for Ralph Joplin’s success, such as it was? Had he ever, as a writer seeking his “due,” been involved in such a situation? What was wrong with me that I hadn’t been able to foresee this godawful consequence?
If, if Raffy called Allis during the flux of her madness, how would Allis take it? God! Had Allis ever been presented with what appeared to be such a golden chance? Had she climbed the mountain because it was there the way I had? Would she?
Madness should wear a sign or carry a bell, as lepers used to. That was God’s curse—that the mad shall look and behave just like anyone else until they behave insanely. Ah, Lord!
Maybe—No. No, you couldn’t take her by the hand and lead her to a shrink; you couldn’t send a little unsigned note to her father or mother. A talk with the dean? No, no, for the question would most certainly arise: How is it that you know?
Who then would save this maiden, remove her gently from the abyss where tradition and change whirl about in deceptive downdraft? Those, obviously, who know, who know. But where were the others whose presences were implied by the case and what it contained? And, after all, I asked the lengthening shadows in my office, am I my sister’s keeper?
A letter!
All my instincts surged at the thought of a letter, comforting in tone, cunning in concept, that would allow her to let me carry her to a shrink. But then—then it would be in writing!
No.
The tuna fish, the yogurt, the apple congealed into lead in my belly, and I remembered the surgeons talking about the autopsies they’d performed at slow moments during the war, and how they’d found whole dinners of boiled beans or K or C rations, completely undigested, in the stomachs of men killed in combat. Whole dinners.
Three days passed. I sat at my machine in the corner of our bedroom. Nothing came. The paper filled with words, but they meant nothing. I destroyed them and thought of Raffy.
Allis and I went to a dinner party on the evening of the third day, and when we returned, I took Mrs. Lee downstairs to a cab. When I got back, undressed for bed and started to slip in, Allis, who’d been in the posture of sleep, flung back the sheets.
“Surprise!” She was nude. (I had said in passing only the week before that some of the fire seemed to have slipped away from our sex life.) “C’mon, bay-bee. Fire away.”
We laughed and made love and realized that the fire was a slow, long-burning one, and afterward slept in each other’s arms, where we remained until, at some soft, darkly quiet hour, the phone rang, and Allis said, still in sleep, “Uh, uh, uh,” and I suddenly had the instrument in my hand, saying, “Uh, uh, hello,” and was listening to the breathing on the other end, not so much heavy as defeated, while Allis was saying, still sleepy, “Who’sit, honey, who’sit?” and Raffy, as if in a tomb, was saying, “I’m dying, Cate, pills, I don’t wanna die, pills, save me, help me,” and I was saying in fear and fright, “Who is this?” with the proper amount of indignation, aware now that Allis was close to being awake and peering at the luminous dials on the clock as I said, “But why are you calling at this hour?” while she continued, “Help me, please help—”
“Who the hell’s that?”
And then the phone went dead. “A student,” I said.
There came, just that swiftly, with the whirring of the clock, an anticline in our lives, but I was dialing the operator. “Operator. Emergency. The police in Slick Falls.”
“What’s the matter?” The tone was that of a teacher trying to bestir a sluggish class.
The operator was saying, in one of those ethnic voices that zips through the wires of the eastern seaboard these days, “Dial 555–1212–923.”
“Who was that? Look what time it is.”
“A student,” I said, dialing.
“She’s taken some pills—operator? Emergency. Give me the police. A student at the university’s taken some sleeping pills—”
“Do you know her? Was she one of yours?”
“Two-two-two Elm Street. Right across from the campus.” I was out of bed, reaching for my clothes.
“Where’re you going?” Allis asked. She was sitting up in bed, her breasts with their neat round pink nipples hanging over the sheet.
“I’d better go.”
“Who is she, Cate?”
“Just one of the students on campus. I know her father. He’s out of the country, mother’s out of town—”
“But I don’t understand,” she said, which was what she always said when she understood perfectly, and just as I was about to leave her as I’d never, ever left before, “Why did she call you?”
I feigned a mixture of exasperation and irritation. “Oh, they bring their goddamn problems to me.”
I was at the bedroom door. Because the light was behind her now, I could not see her face, only her silhouette, the spray of her hair that was like a small corona.
“I see,” she said.
I hesitated. I did not ask what it was she saw. “I’ll be back as soon’s I can,” I said.
By the time I arrived at Raffy’s flat she had been carried to the hospital. She would be all right, a cop told me. It was spring, and every spring something like this happened at the university. You could count on it. The dean arrived and when she saw me, she sighed. “Cato, why are you here? Don’t tell me. I can’t imagine what you told your wife.” She was a woman my age. She wore a merry widow corset even at that hour of the morning, and was made up. She said, “You know, they’re wise old women disguising themselves as babies. Sometimes they confuse the roles. I don’t know why it is that intelligent men can’t understand that.” She sat down wearily on Raffy’s still-rumpled bed. “Theirs is a different world. Go home to your wife, Cato. I’ll send a letter or something to make it all right. Go back to your books. Be happy you have them both.”
Back in the car and driving into the city beneath a lifting gray morning sky, my stomach twisted like the knots of a hangman’s rope, I slid into jagged disphoria induced by the events of the night now being punctuated by the click, click, click, click of the wheels as they passed over the lines in the concrete roadbed slabs. My heel touched the gun on the floor under the seat, and I thought, Who needs that to wound or kill.
“Is she,” Allis asked at breakfast, which I’d fixed because I was already up, “is she going to be all right?”
Her face—it had angles and sometimes sharpnesses—was composed into harder lines than I ever could have imagined.
“Yeah. She’ll be okay.”
She busied herself with Mack; bright little cooings as she enticed him to eat. “Who was she—I mean, her name?”
“Raphaella Joplin.”
She became motionless. “The playwright’s daughter?”
“Yeah.” I was surprised that she remembered we’d seen a couple of Ralph Joplin’s plays.
She tilted her head back and seemed to squint into the sunlight now coming through the window. “She couldn’t be more than twenty or twenty-one.”
I said nothing, but I saw it coming, like the leveling of a rifle barrel. Her eyes, more green than gray in the morning, sort of flipped slowly over to fix on mine.
“Cate, were you involved with her?”
“Not in the way you’re implying.”
She seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “How then?”
“Her writing. She wanted me to look at it and make some comments. We talked about it. That’s all.”
“Is she any good as a writer?”
“No,” I said.
“She have a boyfriend?”
“I assume so, honey.”
Then she said, “Are you all right?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“You know,” she said, “the reason strangers always seem to pick you out to ask directions of, and the reason bums all gravitate toward you, is that you look at them. You make eye contact, and you can’t do that with people, honey, because when you do, something goes click! and they have you and then you feel shitty when you try to be gruff and shoo them off.”
“But how can you not look at people, Allis?”
“I don’t know. But when you do, something goes wrong.”
“Yeah. Maybe. Were you worried?”
“Me?” she said. “No. I wasn’t worried at all.”
We had never been so married as at that moment.
13
We were squeezing in visits to an ailing Mr. Storto, who had never been able to bring himself to travel north of Fourteenth Street and whose apartment now always smelled of Ben-Gay or Minit-Rub; to Paul and Betsy, back from the Beverly Hills Hilton, where, I gathered, his attempt at screen-writing had been a near-disaster (“Those people out there are not to be believed, man!”). He was working well on another novel, Isaiah’s Odyssey. We had dinners with Maxine Culp and Maureen Gullian and various editors of literary publications, all of whom seemed to be cranking up for the fall publication of Circles Round Saturn, which would have my name above the title, and there were the usual meetings with the publicity people and the art department folk.
Raffy, although she had not returned to classes, would be graduated in June. At this section of the university they took care of such details. I’d heard that she would spend the summer with her mother before beginning graduate school.
A lightness returned to Allis; her humor was vibrant as she regaled me with tales of her fund-raising activities, the idiocy, the greed, the cunning always displayed. She looked forward to the trip, even with an active eighteen-month-old child and an erring husband. We hoped The Hyksos Journals would do better after our swing through Europe and, though it would be jive, it was the kind of jive that writers love. It would be, too, a holiday, and the distance it would place between the university and me was more than a blessing. Furthermore, while Paul had had Hollywood, he had not yet been invited to do the European Grand Literary Tour.
Now when I look back on that season in my life, it seems to be not quite a blur, but a series of images speeded up as though there were details the projectionist did not wish me to see too clearly.
It—that season—begins with our departure, and it is framed by the smells of taxis and cars and airports and jet fuel and the smells of hotels. The Cumberland in London, the Anglais in Stockholm, the Raphael in Paris, the Palace in Berlin, the Majestic in Barcelona, the Amstel in Amsterdam, smelling, yes, of imitation Aubussons and kippers and kidney pies and butter-rich foods and sausages and cassoulet, paella, hassenpfeffer, and the gas-fume smell of the cities, the river and ocean smell of those cities, the colognes and perfumes, the wines, the bathrooms, the sun-scorched gardens withering in their formality.
There are close-ups of the Europeans staring at us, some amused, some genuinely amazed, some merely interested in this zebraic couple with the “hybrid” child, a generally European uncoolness that even their dark “guest workers”—present-day serfs—have not dented. But the publishers and editors are always polite, always shallowly obsequious (“This is an American Artist”), and there is in all their offices, not much changed from the dark, paneled caverns of the nineteenth century, a dubious gentility of Old World quality, not anything like the chrome gleamings of both folk and furnishings in American publishing offices.
We go to small press conferences with editors serving as translators, where necessary, and to the parties where we meet other writers and translators, the Fulbright Scholars, the embassy or consular staff, and where there are displays of the novel, together with huge photos of me looking antiartistic, calling to mind some of the late-eighteenth-century steel engravings of African savages by John I. Senex.
There are always the questions:
Do you know Elliot Huysmans?
Do you know John Greenleaf Whittington?
Did you know Richard Wright?
&nb
sp; Why is there so much violence in the United States?
Do you consider the civil rights movement to be successful?
Do you anticipate more race riots?
All of this, of course, against the recent past, when Nixon, wearing a white hat and riding a white horse, masked, but not for the same reasons as the Lone Ranger, had galloped through the campfires of the natives of Newark, Detroit and a hundred other reservations—or promised to.
And:
Are interracial marriages popular in America?
What are you working on now?
Do you know James Meredith?
Do you know Stokely Carmichael or H. Rap Brown?
Do you like
England
France
Sweden
Germany
Holland
Spain?
When do you think the U.S. will have a Negro President?
Do you consider yourself to be an example for other American Negroes to emulate?
There are many Negro soldiers in Vietnam. What will happen when they return home?
Wherever we are, the questions are the same. My responses depend on how much I’ve had to drink, how tired I am and the degree of superciliousness of the questioner. Europeans possess conveniently short memories, concerning what they do not only to each other, but to everyone else in the world as well.
But we manage. By the time we are in Barcelona, it occurs to me that we have not mentioned my past there. Given what had just taken place back home, it is perhaps the wisest thing to do. This arrangement goes well until the day we are leaving for our final stop, Amsterdam; we are now as eager to leave as we were to come.
I sit downstairs in the lobby. The lobby looks out on the Paseo de Gracia, but now its grand promenade in the center of the street is filled with parked cars. I am finishing up some notes for The War Has Already Begun. Allis is upstairs doing a last-minute thing with Mack, who has taken the trip, even with the succession of strange nurses, far better than we have. Our bags are sitting on the floor beside me.
The hotel manager rushes over and, with that excess of courtesy that used to be the mark of gracious Spanish hotels, congratulates me on the articles that have been appearing in the papers during our stay. He hands me a manila envelope. I assume that it has come from my publisher and contains clippings of articles. I thank him and open it.
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