!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  Glenn, as if weary of working on Jumper, exploded through the final draft, battling his editor every paragraph of the way, collected the rest of his advance and was readying to ship out one-way on an Exxon tanker bound for the Persian Gulf. He would cook for ten men. (“On tankers they save all the room for the oil.”) From the Gulf he would rendezvous in Cairo with Maija.

  Maija. She had moved into his apartment that summer. She looked something like Angela Davis and was as statuesque as Miss Peggy Lee. I am quite sure they were not constructing young women so wonderfully when I myself was young. She was a painter (a terrible one, I might add), and, enamored of Mack and Allis, she had given them painting after painting until we had to suggest, gently, that she hold on to similar gifts until we got a larger place. I suppose she had caught me looking wolfishly at her too many times to have been enamored of me. Maija had a loft studio a few blocks farther south in SoHo. I could understand why Glenn had not brought her to the country that time; she was a great distraction.

  From Cairo they planned to travel down to Luxor (where she wanted to sleep in a temple) and then across North Africa to Tangier and into Spain and up to Barcelona and Alejo. They would give him my letter. It pleased me that Glenn was going in the season I had, and that he would not be alone. They would see Gibraltar rearing mightily up out of the mists. I could almost envision the way they would see it, and I could nearly smell Barcelona, cooling down after the humid summer, and I pictured all four of them strolling through town or eating and drinking in the sidewalk cafés.

  And there was Mack, an unrelenting presence in the apartment; he asked a thousand questions a minute about words and people and things. His curiosity exhausted me; his stamina made me worry. He wondered briefly why it was that I was black and Allis was white; he had wondered that before, out of mere passing interest. Maybe he would become an anthropologist?

  Mack brought home snippets and gouts of his world, idioms and mannerisms and tales of shoplifting classmates, of kids rubbing dicks together in the boys’ room, of little girls who wanted to “go with” him. He had guests and he was a guest for sleepovers and parties and flurries of outings. Suddenly he knew every Yankee’s batting average, every NFL quarterback, every basketball player in the NBA. God! He went through sneakers like a hurricane through Galveston. Brand names of hundreds of items echoed through the apartment halls. Merchants and advertising people, faceless, distant, were our constant adversaries in battles we so often lost. Up to that point in his life, Mack had agreed to wear a tie with jacket and slacks but once—and then with sneakers. Andy Warhol saw us walking along Central Park West one day, that day Mack was dressed up, and immediately pounced on my kid’s style.

  A couple of times, rather weakly, as though halfheartedly performing a wearisome duty, Allis had suggested that he be bar mitzvahed when he reached thirteen. But he had already made up his mind: “Mom, please. I just want to be me, okay? I know I’m part black and part white, part Jewish and part Gentile, but I really don’t want to be part, I just wanna be a whole me, okay?”

  He was, then, aware and was dealing with that awareness. The revelation, though I am sure there had been others less succinctly uttered, gave me much pride.

  And so did Allis. She was enthralled with her writing of poetry, the act of it, the process. Song and idea, idea and song, she constructed, word by word, line by line, until she could say: “I think I’ve finished. See what you think.”

  There were moments when, her back turned to me, I studied her body (for the millionth time); I thought I knew it well, thought I could detect intelligences rising from her slopes and curves, even the sound of her voice or the pauses in it. But there are things you can never see, only know and not be able to describe how it is that you do know. So I watched her and knew nothing, read her poetry and only then began to know nearly everything.

  My contentment was luxurious, tending toward a benevolent concern for others less fortunate. It was true that I had detected in Glenn a fleeting envy of his younger brother’s Spanish success, but it had motivated him to finish his own book regardless of the many editorial obstacles that had little if anything to do with his writing or subject.

  I thought often of the Cummingses’ breakup. Had they been the latest victims of the success syndrome? Or had it to do with religion? Would he be marrying again? Would she? I felt smugly superior to Paul, clearly and without the encumbrances of envy. For what mattered all the acclaim and attendant fringe benefits if you couldn’t keep your personal act together? I wondered if Paul would be calling, or she, for solace from a familiar place. I was not sure I wanted that. And in any case, given the circumstances, I would be perhaps the last person he’d think of for comfort now.

  On the eve of his departure for Norfolk, where he would catch his tanker, Glenn gave a party. We took a cab down, passing Mr. Storto’s old building. We had not written and we had not heard from him. We carried into Glenn’s a wisp of sadness that was completely disintegrated by five million decibels of disco music and snapping, wriggling young bodies, moving like the proverbial can of worms in that small apartment. Strobe lights pounded us as we sat subdued yet strangely excited by the noise and movement in a corner to which Glenn kept bringing people and shouting above the din: “Dad, this is So-and-so. So-and-so, this is my father and my stepmother …”

  We watched Mack dancing with Maija, licking his little chops; watched him searching out other young women who thought he was so cute, and the slick little bastard was pushing that hype for all it was worth. Then he took his mother onto the floor, and then I took her and we jiggled and moved and swayed and, noticing that no one was paying any attention to us, abandoned our conservative motions and grunted and bopped and snapped our fingers and rolled our asses just like everyone else, and loved it.

  The affair was, also, a book party; not the publishing of one, but the completion, and I wondered, as I watched my eldest son move about, if Jed would always be with him. That he would write again I had no doubt. We all work at our own paces. We fill our cups at different taverns and beat our drums for different marchers. He was my son. He would write again. And again.

  I had foolishly offered to drive Glenn to Penn Station in the morning and, having reached the limit of my capacity to hold white wine, red wine and rosé wine, we left and took a taxi back uptown, where I slept restlessly (I had never had a son go off the way Glenn was going) and in the morning strolled with banging head to the garage and got the car, recognizing all the while the woman in me that had to see him to his eunoto.

  Is there anything as forlorn as the remnants of a party? How different his apartment looked in the gray light sifting through the Village alleys. The detritus of the party lay all about, chicken bones ground into the floor, sparerib bones in ash trays, empty Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes greasy and crumpled, Astor Place gallon wine jugs half-empty with their poisons. All this Maija would clean up.

  They both looked exhausted, but not quite out, the way young people do. They looked as though they’d wallowed in each other for what was left of the evening after we left. In the rearview mirror I could see Maija at his ear, his neck, nibbling, nibbling, and all I could think of was this shtunk whose ass I’d wiped, whose absence I sometimes cried over, whose hurts I’d kissed. And there he was back there, a man so sure of himself that he would be cooking for an assortment of Asians, Neapolitans and Texas honkies. Like one of the Maasi men: so bad they red-ochred themselves and wore beads. I glanced in the mirror and thought to him: I love you.

  I waited in the car. Maija returned and sat beside me. She was quiet. I was quiet. I drove her back to his apartment and when she got out I told her to call and come by; that we would compare letters from Glenn until she left to join him.

  Jesus, I thought, driving home. Ole C.C. is just about a father-in-law.

  8

  I remember that autumn vividly.

  One day while we were still waiting for the first letter from Glenn to arrive from some exot
ic African city (some, I know, would think this a contradiction)—Dakar, Luanda, Dar-es-Salaam, Mombasa—I took the sign Allis and I had worked on together, with some of the cards I’d ordered, and strolled down to the Museum of Natural History. I jogged up the steps past Teddy and his Indian and African companions, white man’s burdens, and headed for the Man in Africa and Mexican wings. They are practically around the corner from each other, so it is like sailing a current of ocean (as was probably done) to move from Africa to Mexico.

  What was this sign; what were these cards? They were attempts to make people believe what they saw in museums, not what they read. The idea had come to me one morning as I was emptying my bladder. Strike back! Deposit the sign or the cards where the evidence of cultural theft and Western Doublespeak displayed themselves like flashers at the Metropolitan Opera. Allis approved; indeed, she was eager to see me involved in a venture that excited me. There was some risk, yes.

  The Man in Africa Wing was unusually hushed; the light was filtered through discreet floodlights and the three-dimensional displays of people, instruments of work and play, and weapons. Teachers led clusters of children through—“Now, children”—in strong voices that would brook no questions.

  Here and there men and women sifted through the dim, casting glances at each other and pausing now and again to appreciate the displays and to read the accompanying legends.

  Most of the guards were black, just as at other museums in the city. There seemed to have been a subtle shift from hard-jawed white to black, Hispanic, and long-haired white in these positions.

  I stopped before the display of the Hausa people. The spear never failed to attract me. It stood in a corner, simple, straightforward and splendid. Of course, there had been made much more hullabaloo over the Maasi spear, but there’s really no comparison. The Hausa spear is all metal—iron and brass. The spearhead has no aerodynamic equal anywhere; its symmetry is superb. The shaft of the spear comes apart in two lengths with a twist.

  The Maasi spear is broad-bladed, almost three times heavier than the Hausa, and the spearhead itself comes down almost a third of the length of the shaft, where it is fitted into various lengths of heavy ebony wood. The bottom part of the spear, which fits into the opposite end of the wood, is a four-sided shaft of iron ending in a point. Very heavy. Good for killing lions. I was glad I wasn’t born a Maasi and that for my bar mitzvah I didn’t have to go out and kill Simba.

  They say that the Maasi spearhead is like the ancient Roman broadsword. They never say that the broadsword is like the Maasi spear. Iron was used in Africa before the Assyrians arrived there.

  The spear had copper and brass circlets beaten into the shaft, which also was decorated with subtle X-marks and lines. I stood studying, and for some reason thought of John Updike standing in the garden gallery of Paa Ya Paa in Kenya. I became aware suddenly of a small man to the side and rear of me in the reflection of the display case. He appeared to be studying the spear, too. Or me; I couldn’t quite tell. He was Oriental. The Hausa-Maasi and the Samurai. In Teddy’s museum. Now our eyes met through the reflection of the simulated tropical light. I imagined him younger and in a real jungle, a 7.65 sniper’s rifle at his shoulder. I smelled, quite sharply, something burning and I closed my eyes tight and thought: Goddamn that war. It had been the beginning and might yet be the end of me. It plagued like a disease whose onset was unpredictable, whose remissions were all out of sync. Then, it had been so easy, so right, so laudatory to kill strangers you’d been taught to hate. Slowly I opened my eyes and my heart burbled against my chest. For the man had disappeared and a guard was smothering a small burning piece of paper with the sand of the cigarette can.

  I left the wing and went around the corner into the Mexican Wing, which was not as crowded and was vast, dark and brooding. I slid onto the bench beside the replica of the gigantic Olmec head of La Venta. I loved looking at that face. All of Africa was in it, all of black America. Constance Irwin and others had characterized such heads (there were others) as being sculptures of slaves. This was, of course, because of the Negroid features by which every anthropologist and KKK member swears. But who ever took the time to make so huge a resemblance of a slave? And, mind you, not one, but several, each approaching twenty tons. Who ever carved a slave looking so imperious, so anger-threatening, so monstrously sure of himself (and then made a cunning tunnel for a speaking tube up through the mouth to address the rabble of other Africans, Semites, North Europeans and Orientals, whose images of stone lay scattered from one end of Mexico to the other)? The face looked like Joe Louis’, with the flattening nose, heavy brow and superbly full lips. And this guy, whoever he was, was not playing! His expression says, I don’t want no shit from you jive-ass turkeys!

  I slipped the waxed paper off the stickum pads. I pretended to write on the pad while I studied the hall, the few people who were studying the calendar, the position of the single guard.

  I read the legend near the head and smirked: THE NEGROID APPEARANCE OF THE FEATURES MAY BE A STYLIZATION OF CERTAIN INDIAN FACES OF THE REGION THAT TEND IN THIS DIRECTION.

  Lord! Anything, anybody, but a black man! For history tells us that Columbus found only Indians, but didn’t Columbus himself say, “There are Negroes over there?”

  Now everyone in the hall seemed motionless. I slipped off the bench, whipping out my sign, and attached it to the legend. I had returned, grinning, back to the bench when even in that dim place a shadow fell beside me. Startled, I looked up. A second black guard, now signaling the first, stood beside me. The first guard came striding down the hall like a panther out of the high valleys of Popocatapetl. The second guard planted himself beside me. I thought: Give a nigger a uniform and—shit! Would they arrest me? Think me a nut? Could I give them the “brother” routine the way my black students ran it, or tried to, on me? The first guard arrived, his face as expressionless as the second’s. He had a tough, square face and a thick neck that reminded me of a lineman. Together they stepped to the legend and read it. They looked at each other, then stepped back to me and stared down like the Olmec himself. The second guard had a guardsman’s mustache. It began to crinkle up into his face in a smile. He winked. The first guard made a soft noise with palate and throat that sounded like !Kung.

  “We’ve read your books, Mr. Douglass,” said guard number two. “Do it at the Met in the Egyptian Wing and get one ready for the African Wing when it opens. Tutankhamen is coming.”

  His voice was soft, not quite a whisper and not quite normal tone. I was surprised. “No shit?”

  “No shit,” they said together and then melted away.

  I got up to leave. I felt good, better than when finishing a book, certainly better than hitting the numbers, almost better than making love and far, far better than getting high. I left a few cards on the bench. They bore the same words as the sign.

  “A landsman. Two of them,” Allis said when I reported my encounter. “I guess you have to do something to make them pop out of the woods. Otherwise, you’ll never find them.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I wonder if the sign’s still there.”

  “If only for an hour, that’s something.”

  We were in bed, she propped up, writing in longhand. I glanced over. Her poetry. “How’s it going?”

  Her smile was great; her eyes danced. “Okay.” She burrowed deeper into the sheets. “For the first time I like it, really love it, because I don’t have to have them published. I mean, I don’t feel the slightest compulsion to rush them to an editor, you know.”

  “C’mon, now. Really. Of course you’re going to submit them.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not.”

  Her voice had gone hard. She sat up again and pretended to concentrate on the pad.

  “And why not?”

  “Because I don’t want people I don’t even know pissing all over me, that’s why. You can take it, and maybe you want to take on the world. You do, you know. But I don’t.”

  Some of my students som
etimes smugly announced that they were not the least bit interested in writing for an audience; they wrote for themselves and no one else. I never believed them and told them so. Now here was my wife telling me the very same thing. She had not, then, recovered from the wounding at Bread Loaf; Bread Loaf and sharing my own experiences.

  “You know that getting your butt out there’s what writing’s really all about, baby.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  For a moment she sounded like a gang girl of old from Brownsville.

  “Well,” she went on, “if I die before you, you can have them published; not before, my dearest, not before.”

  “And you do,” I said without looking at her, “take on the world with me.” I knew, however, that in many unspoken ways she had always insisted on not publishing, had always rejected vehemently the idea that I let various poetry editors I knew look at the work she was producing. “And if you don’t, babe, if you don’t hang your wash out, what’s it all about?”

  Sullenly she said, “For me. For my own very personal pleasure. The way some people work crossword puzzles.” She bounced around to face me. “God, after all this time don’t you think I know what it’s like out there? A pigeonhole for young poets and old poets; one for men, one for women; for the quote traditional unquote, for the quote experimental unquote; one for the Latin poets, one for the African, European, the Commonwealth, the former colonies, the revolutionary, the passive; and then there are the poets who always win all the grants and those who don’t win any. I read somewhere recently that Sterling Brown was a black poet. He’s been around a thousand years, long enough so people use him as if he were a subway—train or station—it doesn’t matter. Can you imagine? Being wiped out by a lousy, stinking, one-letter indefinite article. Dismissed. And poor, poor Osip Yemilyevich—they were only two years apart in age, you know—poor Mandelstam—not bad for a dead Jewish poet. Darling, do you think I want to get into all that, at my age? And dealing with those swishy guys who don’t like women, and with women who are into one kind of feminism and wouldn’t like my work because I’m married, and then there’s the jive-left women who’d like my work only because I was married to you—you know—the people who don’t even know me at a party until we stand or sit together. Then it’s OH! No thanks. But, yes thanks, Bread Loaf, and you, honey, for taking me away from all that idiocy, all the men and women I’d have had to fuck—don’t look at me that way; it’s true. You said it. Art is cock. And, darling, I really do suspect that you’re where you are because you haven’t been fucking around too much.”