He had put on his new Oxford-blue flannel suit, bought the week before at a pawnshop on Columbus Avenue that offered factory rejects and slightly shopworn dummy models at half price. It was a beautiful suit of soft imported fabric, and with it he wore plain black English-made shoes from Wannamaker’s Spring shoe sale, a buttoned-down white Oxford-cloth shirt and a heavy silk grey and white tie of abstract design, both of which had come from Gimbel’s bargain basement.
“All you need now is an umbrella, a bowler hat, a mutton chop, a glass of claret, lank hair and a white skin, and you’d be on your way to civilize the world, son,” he told himself disparagingly, then added, half-amused, “You’ve got the right inclination anyway.”
He glanced outside at the weather. A slight drizzle was falling. He put on his hat and a faded trench coat that Kriss had admired seven years ago when it was new and they were new to each other, tucked a bottle of bourbon under his arm, wondering suddenly what it was he wanted downtown that wasn’t uptown in abundance.
He found her name, Mrs Kristine W. Cummings, beneath the letter slot in the vestibule and pressed the bell beside it. After a moment Kriss pressed the button beside the house phone in her back hallway, releasing the lock on the outside door. He entered quickly and hastened down the tiled corridor, grateful to find it empty, and at the back turned left to the door of her apartment.
She opened the door before he rang again, and for an imperceptible moment they stared at one another, their smiles of greeting frozen in slight shock. Clad in a simple sleeveless black cocktail dress with a low square-cut neck, ornamented by a heavy silver necklace and a pair of magnificent silver bracelets, she was a very handsome woman. But she wasn’t the woman he remembered; he found no hint of the daredevil girl whom he’d once liked; instead he saw what appeared in flash judgement to be an assured, humourless, slightly dull woman wrapped in an impregnable respectability.
For her part she saw in him nothing of the irresponsible woman hunter with the ready grin and brilliant eyes with whom she had spent those three exquisite days, both nude every minute, taking him on the couch, on the bearskin rug before the fire, standing beneath the shower, while eating in the kitchen, candidly discussing lovers each had known and had sworn to never know again, his frantic sexuality like an aphrodisiac flame; nor anything of the repulsive drunk who had so infuriated her four years later, who at least had possessed a certain bitter effervescence that had made him interesting. This man before her, in the old trench coat she recognized immediately, was dead; hurt had settled so deep inside of him it had become a part of his metabolism. Not that he had changed so greatly in outward appearance—not nearly as much as she had hoped. Outwardly he looked much the same, the youthful contours of his face, the athletic figure, thinner perhaps, although his head seemed much smaller with his hair cut so short and thinning too, like an onion head—she liked men with hair, lots of hair, even though it was woolly. It was inside of him the light had gone out.
But both recovered instantaneously.
“I’m fat,” she greeted, grinning tentatively, and he noticed about her bright blue eyes a faint border of red, as if she had been crying recently.
“I’m thin,” he said, returning her grin. And now somewhat lamely, since she no longer seemed the type who would appreciate it, he added, “I brought bourbon instead of flowers.”
For the first time she grinned a little like old times. “We’ll drink our flowers.”
He went into the sitting-room while she mixed the drinks, Scotch for herself and bourbon for him, and when she brought them in he said with genuine admiration, “You have a beautiful place, Kriss. It’s really lovely.” And then added, looking her over frankly, “You know, you’re beautiful too.”
She sat on her favourite three-legged chair, pleased for the moment by his flattery. “My assistant, Anne, helped with the decor. She’s studying interior decorating and the store give her a discount.”
“Are you still at the same job?”
“I’m still with the Institute.” Then, her voice filling with pride, “But I’m a big girl now, I’m an assistant director.” There was vindictiveness in it too, and he wondered vaguely what had happened to her.
“Do you ever see Maud?”
“I saw her during the Christmas season at a party at Ed Jones’s. She tried to ignore me at first but when she saw how nice Ed and everyone else were to me she came over and started gushing, trying to make as if she hadn’t seen me. She’d heard I had something to do with sending the personnel to India and she wants to use me again. I was cold as ice….”
“How is Ed?” he asked politely. “Not that I give a goddamn,” he thought. Ed Jones was a very successful black artist who ran a private art school.
“Fine. I love Julia, she’s so sweet and real.”
“She’s a nice girl,” he said, although he’d never met her, but he felt it necessary to be agreeable.
“I was frightened to death when I walked into that party,” Kriss confessed. “It was the first time in years I’d been to a party full of blacks and I didn’t know what sort of stories Maud had put out about me. But Ed was very nice and I knew most of the people there. Then Dinky Bloom said, ‘Oh, Kriss is one of us anyway. She’s been around niggers so long she’s rubbed off enough black to be half nigger herself.’” She smiled her secret sensuous smile, thinking of the implications of the statement.
He was thinking the same thing, half-amused, but didn’t pursue it. “What happened between you and Maud? I haven’t seen them since we had that falling out.”
“God, that woman hurt me!” the hurt coming through in her voice. “I lived with them when I first came to New York.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I practically paid their rent and liquor bill. I had that little sitting-room where you stayed, and when they entertained—which was practically every night, serving my liquor—I couldn’t go to bed until all the guests left, although Joe would go into his room and go to bed and leave his company sitting up. And I had to get up before any of them. Then when I broke off with Ted, Maud practically threw me out. And we’d been just like sisters for years.”
“I know,” he said, thinking, “Lovers, baby, not sisters. Maud never liked anybody she couldn’t sleep with—man or woman—I know the bitch.” After a moment he asked, “Why should she care? It was none of her business, was it?”
“Oh, she wanted me to marry Ted so she could sleep with him when Joe and I were at work.”
He picked up his empty glass and when she went to the kitchen to make fresh drinks, he followed her, wondering whether he should kiss her then or wait. She didn’t appear to be in a kissing mood so he said, “This is a nice kitchen, everything’s arranged so well.” And when they went back to the sitting room he said, “I really like your place.” This time she didn’t respond and he looked at her thinking, “The hell of it is, son, you don’t remember a damn thing about that weekend; you were blotto all the time and afterwards never remembered a thing past the moment when you first kissed her.”
But aloud he asked, “What happened to you and Ted? The last time—in fact the only time—I ever saw you two together was at a party in Brooklyn. I think that was the only time I ever saw Ted—the only time I remember. He was a good-looking boy though, as I remember.”
“He was good in bed, too,” she said, smiling reminiscently, and he felt suddenly inadequate.
“Well,” he said, “What more do you want?”
“I practically supported the son of a bitch,” she said with sudden venom. “He was always running after cheap white people, thinking they were going to make him rich. He thought I didn’t know anything and I was supporting him.”
“What’s he doing now?”
“I hope he’s dead.”
“You probably wish I was dead too,” he thought. In the silence that followed, realizing their need of each other, both now ostracized from the only exciting life they had ever known, both starved for sexual fulfilment, los
t and lonely, outcasts drifting together long after the passion had passed, faced with a night of sleeping together which at that moment neither desired, they hated each other.
She glanced at her watch and said, hurtingly, “Shall we go now, or do we drink our dinner.”
He bit back the impulse to say, “Go to hell,” telling himself, “I’m going to have you, whether you like it or not.” Then managed a thin smile, saying instead, “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“If you intend to get drunk you can get out right now,” she said viciously.
“I intend to take you to dinner,” he said evenly.
“The last time I saw you, you were nasty drunk. Filthy! God, you were nasty. And I wanted you so.”
He gave her a bewildered look. “What did I do? The last I remember is vomiting all over Don’s white davenport.”
“God, Ralph was mad. If you hadn’t been so drunk he would have beaten you.”
He felt acutely embarrassed. “I don’t blame him.”
“And I would have helped him.”
“But what did I do to you?”
“Jesse! If you ever…”
He had taken Roy by that afternoon for Don to see some of his etchings. That had been the summer following his visit to the big deluxe artists’ colony called Skiddoo, and he’d been sick —sick in the head. That place had made him sick like nothing else in all his life—or perhaps he’d been sick when he went up there. Perhaps it was the book that had made him sick—that second book—and perhaps all Skiddoo did was bring it out. Some day he’d have to sit down and discover why he had hated Skiddoo and all the artists there. But Roy had been the exception; he’d liked Roy and had hoped Don would buy some of his war etchings to put him on his feet. Instead of buying the etchings, Don had taken their visit as an excuse to throw a party. By six o’clock a dozen or so persons were grouped about the big circular cocktail table in the sitting-room and Don was serving one pitcher after another of a strong gin drink he called a Gimlet. The last thing Jesse remembered before throwing up all over the sofa was baiting a woman named Muriel Slater whom he despised. On entering she had dismissed Roy’s etchings and, seating herself in the centre of the floor, had taken off her shoes and launched into a loud discussion about a big black actor with whom she’d been sleeping off and on for years. She was one of those hard, brassy, over-ripened blondes, always loud-and-wrong. During the last Roosevelt campaign, when the communists and blacks had been working together again for Roosevelt’s election, she’d been employed as a party-giver by the Central Committee of the Communist Party; and after the publication of Jesse’s anti-communistic book she, as had all of his communist acquaintances and most of his Negro friends, quit speaking to him. He remembered saying to her, “Muriel baby, I know you have a beautiful, clean mind and a pure, unsullied soul, but your feet are dirty. Look at them. Really dirty, and not nearly so beautiful as your mind. Don’t you feel embarrassed on climbing into bed with some strange man with your dirty feet?” He remembered her fury, and although he couldn’t remember when Kriss had arrived, he remembered winking at her then taking another drink, and the next thing he remembered was vomiting on the sofa….
“What did I say to you?”
“Jesse! If you ever—”
“Just tell me what I said.”
“You wanted me to go to bed with you in one of Don’s rooms.” He didn’t remember that at all. “I told you I couldn’t do that. I never took anyone to bed when I roomed there, and I’d had my own apartment on 10th Street for over a month. But when I asked you to come to my apartment you got nasty. God, you were nasty!”
“What did I say to you?”
“I won’t repeat what you said. I’ve never had anyone in all my life say the nasty things to me that you did. If I’d been a man I would have hit you in the face.” He shook his head. “I was sick. That summer I was really sick.” And to himself, “Sicker than you thought, son.”
“I don’t want to ever see you like that again.”
“I’ve gotten over it. I’ve made a separate peace. I mean it.”
She stood up. “We’d better go; it’s getting late.”
“Do you have any place in mind?”
“Oh, anywhere we can get served quickly. I don’t feel up to a lot of bother.”
“How about Nick’s?”
“That’s all right. We can have steaks.”
They were tense and silent in the taxi as it skirted the quiet darkness of Gramercy Park, past the old stone mansions with their brass knockers and foot-scrapers and shining carriage lamps, and turned south on Irving Place. He glanced in passing at the front of the picturesque bar where it was said O. Henry spent many brooding hours, and he thought, “Son, you and me both.” And a moment later, as they came into 14th Street facing Luchow’s, his thoughts went back to the moronic editor.
“Should have told him: ‘And had I known any Apemen, bub, they would have been the progeny of Apemen and not of English peers, me being the type of ungrateful, unpatriotic, bitter-minded, sordid-souled, pessimistic son of a bitch who can only think of Apemen as half ape and half men.’ Which will never do at all, son…never do at all!” he said the last aloud without realizing it, and Kriss gave him an irritated look.
“What?”
He looked at her perplexed. “What what?”
“You said, ‘never do at all!’ What will never do at all?”
“Oh!” He threw her a look and told the first lie that came to mind, “I was thinking of the way you said I acted at Don’s. I must have been really sick.”
“Jesse! If you ever get that drunk again I’ll never speak to you as long as I live,” she threatened in a tight furious voice. “I swear it!”
She was in a blind rage with herself for seeing him again even now, for her sexual need of him. If she could sleep with him and immediately afterward have him beheaded, then she could enjoy his company. But now he would sleep with her and go away feeling good because he had slept with a white woman, and she might not see him again until he wanted another one. “Niggers! Niggers! Niggers!” she thought in her blind rage.
“Don’t worry, baby, I won’t,” he muttered, impotently furious at being forced to repeat a vow he’d already made out of genuine shame.
She noticed a woman walking a poodle along Union Square. “At least they’re better than dogs,” she thought with such an overwhelming surge of venomous glee that her rage abated and she turned toward him, smiling maliciously, wishing he could read her mind.
But he didn’t notice. Now as the taxi turned south on Seventh Avenue, from delayed reaction, he suddenly thought of Luchow’s. “That’s where I should have taken her.” And he wondered why he had chosen Nick’s. “Association of ideas, no doubt,” he thought, and then, “Damn son, what goes on in your brain!”
His last visit to Nick’s had been tragic. That had also been in that period following his visit to Skiddoo. He’d taken his wife to a dinner at Paul’s—one of the other writers who’d been to Skiddoo—one hot July Sunday afternoon; or rather to a dinner in the Greenwich Village flat of the little tramp, Kathy, whom Paul had lived with—and off, too—that summer.
Roy had come too, bringing a very dignified and respectable looking woman whom he had introduced as Estelle. She had looked as out of place as Becky in that dirty two-room flat.
Paul had been well along the way when they arrived, receiving them dressed in a spotty tee-shirt that looked as if it might have served duty as a cleaning rag, and incredibly filthy white duck pants, the seat of which was absolutely black. And Kathy wore a soiled and rumpled sun-back playsuit that appeared to have made several tours of Coney Island since its previous laundering: the both of them giving the impression by their unkempt hair and red-smeared lips of having just arisen from bed.
The dinner, sent up from the corner delicatessen, had consisted of greenish-tinted slices of hard-boiled eggs, curled and fragrant slices of bologna sausage, withered slices of tomatoes dressed with dabs of yello
w paste, and watery cabbage slaw; and had been served on an egg-and-wine-stained, repulsively filthy paper table covering. However, Paul had provided eight quarts of domestic ale and a gallon of California sherry, and since Roy’s ladyfriend drank only a very little sherry, and Kathy no more than a quart of ale, there had been plenty left for the three escapees from Skiddoo, wine and ale being a combination they’d found to be satisfactorily potent during their sojourn there.
Becky had drunk against despair.
When the sherry was finished, Paul and Kathy had begun slobbering over each other in a manner that presaged violent passionate action at any moment. Fearful of this action taking place right there on the floor, which would have been nothing new for Greenwich Village, and having no curiosity about the sex habits of psychotic writers, Estelle had quietly departed. And an hour later, never having remembered what took place in the interim, Jesse had found himself standing at the bar in Nick’s with Becky between himself and Roy, ordering three bottles of ale, and the bartender had charged him seventy cents for each. He had thought nothing of it until the woman at his left asked, “How much did he charge you for your ale?”
He looked at her, trying to get her face into focus. “Seventy cents. Why?”
“We had ale just before you came in and he only charged us thirty-five cents,” she informed him.
He didn’t remember what happened immediately following. The next thing he remembered he was shouting at the top of his voice, “What the hell kind of goddamned shit is this! You’re not in Georgia, goddamit, this is New York City!” And the headwaiter and another waiter were standing beside him and the bartender across from him, and all of them were trying to explain at once that after eleven o’clock, when the orchestra played, all prices were doubled. But he didn’t hear their explanations. Deep inside of his muddled thoughts he felt he’d been victimized because he was black, and he was asserting his rights. “I’m not sitting at a goddamned table!” he kept shouting, letting them know he knew the score. “We’re standing at this goddamned bar, and you charged everybody else here thirty-five cents—”
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