“The way they aren’t throwing around copies of your book makes me think that the print order wasn’t so great,” Amos said. He and I seemed to be the only people drinking liquor; everybody else was into wine.
“It ain’t,” I said.
Maxine drifted by, smiling brightly, clutching one of those chicken wing “drumsticks” they were serving everywhere now, and whispered, “This is some turkey.”
“But we knew it, right?”
“Rriiight,” she said and moved on.
I glanced over at Glenn.
His publisher had arranged no party, had scheduled no ads and no promotion. Glenn concealed his shock well. I couldn’t say to him, I tried to tell you, and I couldn’t / wouldn’t abandon him. I had to do whatever I could to save him from that sense of worthlessness all these calculated affronts were making him feel. (He would feel immensely better when Jumper was reviewed three weeks after pub date.) However, at the moment, he didn’t understand what was going on. He didn’t know that it was just a party, that nothing special was to happen, that no one special was to be there; he didn’t know that the affair was designed to be written off, was designed to provide TCFP with the excuse that they had done something for my book. I knew that Glenn was remembering Alejo and all the exquisite Spanish courtesies that had been offered up to his younger brother, and thinking that I was having a party, and wondering: WHERE’S MINE? I’VE WRITTEN A NOVEL!
Aw, shit.
One talks to sons and it is perhaps this relationship, the talking, that makes them even tolerate fathers, for after all the sons have smelled the shit-stink in the bathroom after you’ve left it, or the odor of your cologne, or your breath, whiskey-laden or just plain bad; they have seen you draw on your pants one leg at a time and perhaps even caught you doing it to their mothers. No difference made here that you’ve tried to slice open the world for them, the way geodes are cut open to reveal color and form; sons must learn it all themselves, though fathering is about saving them that terrible trouble. Concreteness, practicality, were gone. If I was only to show him how to choose hardwood for arrows or ash wood for bows, or the cool spots in streams where trout lurk, the bends where bass bite best, or how the most innocent stone contains heat long past the setting of the sun and can therefore nurture seed. Nothing is that simple anymore.
Then I saw him hovering, he and Maija, close to Allis, like bodyguards, protecting her from those malevolent or nonseeing glances, and from the bumps that passed as accidental brushings, the general vibrations and vapors from the bitches’ brew directed by the black women against her whiteness. He winked at me. The expression on his face had changed; he was digging in on the beach, for the ocean was lapping at his back and the tide was fast rising. He was remembering, then, all those talks, those throwaway lines, the words that should have been where none were spoken.
I say he was reviewed three weeks after his pub date, which was not bad, considering the number of books that came rushing down the belts from the mills every day, like butchered logs.
“… Jumper reeks with the promise of great writing to come …” “… Glenn Douglass may well become another Wright, another Whittington, another Huysmans …”
He contained his ecstasy, not so much because I’d warned him of the comparison of such reviews to leaky old ships, but because of something else.
Paul Cummings made a considerable number of front pages in both book review sections and magazines. There were many ads, most of them full page. There were, the ads advised, one hundred thousand copies of Man on the Point in print. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was to be a major motion picture. (This had been said about some of his other books, but the pictures were never made, though I am sure Paul was well paid for them.)
Glenn absorbed all this and realized that The Pushkin Papers was not reviewed anywhere.
“Missed ole Poode and Selena,” Amos was musing. “But I wouldn’t have had too much to say to them, even if they had been at your party.”
We were at one of those Columbus Avenue outdoor watering holes. Glenn sat with us.
“Did you notice,” Amos said, turning to him, “that they didn’t even mention your father when they wrote about you?”
“Yeah.” Glenn flashed an apologetic look in my direction.
“Wasn’t your fault,” I said.
“I know,” he said, “but—”
“Another drink,” Amos said.
We drank and floated ourselves up to laughter between the abysses of bitterness.
“Let’s hope they have a new bunch of salesmen by the time Graves is ready,” I said. Then I told Amos about the note one of them had sent me: I’ve always liked your writing, Cato. It’s powerful and real and the things you say need to be said, but I wish you’d write white, use white characters instead of black ones. It’s really true, you know. We can’t sell black books.
I had framed the letter and placed it above my desk.
“Somebody really wrote that?” Amos said.
The question possessed a remembered echo. “Hey, people are saying and writing things they were scared to say and write fifteen years ago. For them, it’s back to the good old days.”
Glenn looked morose.
“Cheer up. You’ll get your turn at all this.”
He laughed. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“What’re you workin’ on now, Glenn? Lemme see it, okay?”
“Sure. It’s another novel. Not really into it yet. But I’m gonna hit the road again. I’ll be workin’ on it—”
“He figures,” I said, “that if he keeps movin’ they won’t be able to hit him.”
We laughed again.
“Keep this nigger running, huh?” Amos said.
Glenn put his arm around my shoulder. “No, no. That’s only what it looks like. Sucker ’em into a rope-a-dope; let ’em swing away, and when they get tired, bam-a-lam!”
We laughed again and drank more and the spring night was warm, filled with traffic and people strolling by. We said little. Glenn left to go home to Maija. I recognized that itch that came with being at the right stage of high, when you truly believed you could make love all night long. “See ya, son.”
We ordered some more drinks.
“Why do you and Allis stay here?” Amos asked.
“Why do you? Why does anybody?”
“Humph!” he said.
“Whatsat supposed to mean?”
“Dunno. Shoulda left a long time ago,” he said.
“Aw, man, hush.”
“You think I shouldn’t have?”
“Shit. You didn’t, did you?”
He was looking at a fine young thing, his eyelids drooping suggestively over eyes that were trying to widen like an old goat’s. “Same thing anywhere else,” he finally said.
I said, “C’mon, Amos. We’ve gone over this shit before. Let’s just get drunk. What the fuck.”
“You quittin’?”
“Quittin’ what?”
“Writing.”
I stared at him. “Me? No. Why should I? You crazy or somethin’? I’m gonna write, man. I’m a writer. Fuck these people—”
“Looks to me like they’re doin’ a good job of fuckin’ you.”
“No they ain’t. Premature ejaculation, that’s all. You wanna another drink? I’m gonna have one. Why you ask me a dumb fuckin’ question like that, Amos?”
He chuckled. “I guess ’cause I ain’t too bright, Cate.”
I closed my eyes and listened to the buzz that was growing in my head, and I thought about another spring night a long time ago, a night of dinner with Alex Samuels and drinking with Amos at the Show-place, a night filled with the sharp spikes of anger. I shook my head, remembering.
“What?” Amos said.
“I was just thinkin’ how long we been cookin’, man, on the front burner over high heat.”
“Shit, now, Cate, I don’t know about front burner.” He abruptly lapsed into silence. Then he stirred and said, �
�Yeah, but I been burned, I mean burned. Bad.”
I remembered. “Yeah,” I said. “I wasn’t burned that bad, but you know, man, for a while there I was playing eight ball with God, and Japanese soldiers were shooting all kinds of shit at me, and I was ready to hold conversations with Big Foot—you ever hear Big Foot when you had the place in the country? And man, I went to the University of the Wind—”
He had leaned close to me. “No shit?” He was almost whispering.
“Runnin’ down hallways with death snappin’ at my ass—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What the fuck for? It was my party! And Allis split—”
“What!”
“—but came right back. Aw, man things were diddlin’ inside her head, too. But it worked itself out.”
“Gawdamn. Big Foot.” He giggled. “You were way out there, huh?”
“Listen, man. If you ride this train, there’re some trips you gotta take. I learned.”
“What? That Big Foot got twelve toes?” He broke up, folded over the table with laughter.
I held up a finger and recited: “Ecce signum—Cadit quaestio. Magna est veritas et praevalebit!”
“What the fuck’s that mean?”
“It’s what I learned. Check it out when Tut gets here. Time for another drink!”
“Did you get to a shrink, Cate?”
“Shrink? Are you kiddin’! Ain’t nuthin’ a shrink can do about this shit out here! Not this diarrhea we’re in! Hey, though, hey: Whaddya think of that Glenn, huh?”
“He’s pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down, ain’t he, Cate? Ha-boy!”
Amos fell silent again and it took several seconds of meandering through my buzz before I realized that his kids would’ve been almost Glenn’s age; closer to Alejo’s. I squeezed his shoulder. “I got to go after this taste, champ.”
He peered at me through unfocused eyes and groped around the table for his drink. “Yeah? I thought we was gonna hustle up some pussy out here. No, huh?”
“Naw. I ain’t got the stamina for these chicks they puttin’ out today! I don’t want no heart attack.”
“Whoooo!” Amos laughed. He fastened on his drink and guided it to his mouth with both hands. “Man, I am drunk!”
“Feels good in the spring, though, don’t it, boy?”
Amos shook his head too vigorously, laughing in great spasms, and spilled some of his drink.
“You know anything about clickin’?” I was looking around for the waiter.
He said, “What?”
“Amos, can you click?”
“Whatsat you’re sayin’?”
“Never mind.” I reached for the bill that the waiter had flown down to our table. “Spring, yeah. But, you know, Amos, it’s a lousy fuckin’ spring.”
“Yeah. Sure is, man.”
He was moving backward and forward in his chair.
“You ain’t got no brothers and sisters, huh, Cate?”
“No. You? You never talked about any. What the fuck. It’s a lousy goddamn spring.”
“I got—got—three sisters,” he said. “They stopped s—s—speakin’ to me when I married Jolene. We got married in the spring. She was darker than us. Jolene was too black for them. They stopped speakin’ to us.” He straightened and wiggled his head around on his neck. Defiantly. “Good black!”
“It’s a lousy fuckin’ spring,” I said, peering at the bill.
“You right there, man. Spring stinks. No—spring sucks! Hawwwwwwwhaaa.”
Laboriously we counted up our shares, haggled over the amount of tip to leave the sullen cocksucker who’d waited on us, decided to leave nothing, and then changed our minds because he was bigger than us and sober, which we, perhaps too loudly, laughingly admitted.
We thought we were strolling to the corner, in a cool manner, to get a cab, but we were staggering, each trying to hold the other up.
“Anyway,” Amos said, doing a good Dean Martin trying to light a cigarette when drunk, “we’re alive.” The traffic had thinned out by now, and there were fewer strollers. “Plenty people,” he went on, “ain’t.”
“It’s a lousy spring,” I said. “Can’t remember a lousier one.”
A gypsy cab came and we climbed into the debris in back. I got out first, a few blocks away, rejecting Amos’ plea for just one more, and he continued on home, his speech as I left him becoming, like the driver’s, inflected with a West Indian accent.
The apartment was quiet. I checked for notes on the kitchen table. There were none. I poured myself a final drink and sat listening to the silence. Then I smelled something burning. I rushed to the stove. Nothing. I opened the oven. It was almost as cold as death. And as empty. I tiptoed through the apartment, the stench of something burning deep in my nose. I paused, wondering, and as I stood there, weaving, I realized just what it was, again.
12
I didn’t go with Glenn and Maija to the airport to meet Alejo. There had been worked out elaborate, almost diplomatic, protocols:
He was coming to the United States for the first time. It would be overwhelming. Maybe.
It might be unsettling for me to be at the airport: crowds, customs, the long, hot ride into the city, and he would want to see things.
Therefore, like Glenn and Maija in Spain, a stake-out on neutral territory would perhaps be best.
Glenn reserved a room for him at a small Village hotel, one that had survived the demise of both the Albert and the Fifth Avenue. It was within walking distance of the loft. We thought Alejo might wish time to himself to reflect on things. We had also scheduled visits to Harlem for dinner at the Red Rooster (on a night when the band was not playing) and the Schomburg Collection, to Sugar Hill, where Guillén must have stopped. And there would be dinners at the Sevilla and the Spanish Pavillion and of course at our place and at Glenn’s and Maija’s. East Hampton would not quite resemble Cadaques, but might do for an overnight. I still spoke to enough poets to make a gathering, and there would of course be days in the country. And if we had not exhausted him, he could tour the eastern seaboard with Glenn and Maija.
In between these goings and comings there would be time for us to get to know each other. But first I had to tell Mack about the visit.
“Can we talk about Alejo?”
“Sure. When’s he coming, next week?”
He was practicing a batting stance. One week it was Dave Parker, the next Mike Schmidt, the next Reggie Jackson or Pete Rose.
“Whuumph!” he said as he stroked, all pretty, as though there was a battery of photographers with two-hundred-millimeter lenses aimed at him. “Whuumph!”
“Yeah. Next week he’ll be here.”
Mack stopped swinging. “I saw all the pictures. He’s a poet, huh?”
He planted his feet again and stuck his ass way out, swung, missed and twirled the imaginary bat. “Who was that, Dad?”
“Mickey Rivers.”
“Right,” he said. He sounded surprised. He lowered the bat that wasn’t there.
“Yeah, he’s a writer, a poet.”
“A poet? Like Robert Louis Stevenson?”
“No, better.”
Mack went back into a stance and then stopped and dropped his arms. “You said he was a relative. Is he my brother, too? Have you been married three times?”
He sidled close to me, waving three fingers in my face. I pushed him off.
“I’ve only been married twice, but I’ve been with women I—loved—three times.”
“So he’s my brother?”
He went back into a stance, but I couldn’t tell whose it was. He was swinging more slowly now.
“Yes.”
“He looks like you? And a little like me?”
“Yeah, Mack, he does.”
“He’s been in Spain all this time?” He drew himself up and glared at me.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Well—did his mother like it that you weren’t there?”
“I g
uess she didn’t.”
“Did Alejo?”
“I guess not.”
“And you weren’t married to his mother?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
He was pacing around now like a groundskeeper checking out a troublesome spot in the infield.
“Didn’t you worry about him?”
“Yeah, I worried about him a lot.”
“But—if you’d married his mother—then you wouldn’t have married Mom and I wouldn’t be here, right?”
“I think that’s the way it would have worked. But, listen. I didn’t know she was going to have him until it was time for me to leave Spain, and when I knew, I looked for her, but she’d gone away and I couldn’t find her.”
“But why?”
“Aw, Mack—”
“Why did she go away?”
I think I liked it better when he was batting. I said, “I guess she didn’t want to be a burden. She knew I was just getting started with my writing.” That sounded better than saying she understood that a deal was a deal but there had been a little accident. Sorry. Bye-bye.
Mack stared at the floor. He looked like an umpire about to make a late call.
“Are things like that a burden—if you’re a writer?”
His voice was very level, as if balanced perfectly on home plate.
“They don’t have to be. Some things are more important than writing, even to writers.”
He was now too old and too wise to have to ask: Like me? He said instead, “Is Alejo mad at you?”
“Would you be?”
“I would. Is he?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.”
“Want me to talk to him for you?”
“Thanks, but—well, let’s see how it works out, okay?”
“Is he nice, Dad?”
“Glenn and Maija say he is. We trust them, don’t we?”
He came close to me again. “Does Mom know everything?”
I grabbed him. “Yes! And she forgives me!” He came softly into my arms, but I felt the lengthening and hardening muscles of his arms and legs and knew he soon would be gone.
“It was,” I said, “something I’d never do on purpose.”
“Glad you didn’t do that with me,” he said loosening himself. He picked up the bat, which had slipped out of his hands, and took up another stance. I didn’t know whose it was. Munson? Mack began his stroke, sweeping his eyes across the plate and on up to the pitcher out there chewing tobacco. They eyed each other. Mack said, “Was his mother pretty?”
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