“I can’t stand it!” Becky had screamed suddenly, and had run outside, crying hysterically. “I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t! I can’t!”
Caught first in bewilderment, like finding oneself naked in Times Square, there followed a sudden hurt that went down through his body like the shock of death. “Becky baby! Becky! Wait, baby!” he had called thickly, his brain instantly sober, but his body still drunk as he had run staggering after her. “What’s the matter, baby? Wait, baby!”
Turning quickly to escape him, she had run out into the middle of Seventh Avenue before an on-coming car, hoping to be killed.
The squealing of the suddenly applied brakes and her sudden action threw him into panic. On catching her, he had clutched her about the waist, and had tried to drag her back to safety. But at his touch she’d gone crazy, fighting him in hysterical frenzy. In the struggle they had fallen to the street, rolling and threshing on the brick pavement as two persons fighting desperately. Not realizing what had happened, Roy had run after them and tried to separate them. Nick’s and the nearby bars had emptied their patrons into the street to watch the nigger fighting his woman, and there had been several hundred persons crowded along the curbs while he and Becky had threshed in the street.
Finally a policeman had come and yanked him to his feet.
“I don’t want her to get hurt!” he had shouted at the cop and had tried to push him away.
The cop had twisted his arm behind his back and Roy had helped Becky to her feet. Because of the gaping crowd and Becky’s hysteria, the policeman had let them take a taxi to the station.
Roy had been released but he and Becky had spent the night in jail.
That had been the most awful thing that had ever happened to Roy, and the day after the hearing he had revealed himself to Jesse as a homosexual, making a grand slam of all the white men Jesse had met that summer, which he always thought of afterward as the Summer of the Da-Da-Dee, a nameless tune, he had shouted through the nights at Skiddoo, coming back to the estate from the cheap bars in the early hours of morning, weary and bedraggled and blotto. Its basic theme was the melody of a popular song on the jukebox in his favourite downtown bar, sung by Ella Fitzgerald, with words that went, I’ll get by as long as I have you…but he had never known this. It was just a sound that had kept him going the four miles down the dark and sleeping elm-lined highway back to the quiet splendour of Skiddoo when he had felt more like just lying in the gutter and never getting up….
And why, after that, he chose to come back to Nick’s with Kriss—“Customary!” he thought grimly, as they alighted from the taxi. “They always return to the scene—what kind of detective stories have you been reading, you don’t know that?”
They were taken to a booth along the wall up front, to one side of the Dixieland Band. The place looked completely different from his memory of it, and now he could not conceive of why he had caused such a row. Everything seemed perfectly normal.
He thought of a boy he knew in Harlem who said he smoked marijuana because it made him feel so normal. “You know one thing, Jess, only time I ever feel normal is when I’m high.”
She had been thinking, “God damn Dave to hell!” The last time she’d been there, he had taken her, and she had felt the envy of the other women. Now she felt their indifference, bringing a sense of shame, and in a roundabout way she was enraged with Jesse by hating Dave. If Jesse were big and black like Charlie Thompson, the union official with whom she’d spent a weekend in Cleveland, clinging possessively to his arm as they walked down Euclid, she could have felt a daredevil defiance. Or, if he were gorgeous like Ted, she wouldn’t even have to look to see how they were taking it; she could just relax and feel hated. All of them had wanted Ted, his thick black curly hair and smooth moustache; he’d even slept with Lady—what was her name?—Lady—anyway, some relation of the Duke’s—all during the war when he was stationed in London with the Red Cross. They’d often talked about it, and he’d often said to flatter her, “She was a Lady but you’re a woman, sugar.”
Silently she watched Jesse give their order….
“No, both rare.”
“…to drink, sir?”
“…for me, Scotch for the lady. With soda.”
Their voices drifted in and out of her consciousness. She wondered what she’d ever seen in him that had once attracted her.
“You look sad, Kriss baby,” he observed.
For the first time she thawed a little, pleased that he had noticed it.
“Wan, really,” he continued, “But it gives you an interesting look. Are you grieving for your love?”
She grinned suddenly. “When I first went to the university I used to pray to become sick so I’d get thin and pale and interesting looking. I was disgustingly healthy and North Dakota stuck out all over me. I used to dream of having tuberculosis and looking like Camille.”
He smiled. “Transparent.” It was a term blacks applied to blondes which she had learned while at the Foundation, and when he added, “You’re transparent anyway, baby,” she gave him her sensual bedroom smile.
Through the comer of her eye she noticed the blonde he’d been staring at giving him a long appraising look and she began to feel a spread of warmth displacing her lethargy. He could be cute, she thought.
Seeing the change in her, he continued in the same vein, trying to get her in the mood, “Like gossamer. If it wasn’t for the table I’d kiss you.” Letting his desire flood from beneath lowered lashes into her bright blue staring eyes. “Like pink champagne.”
But the waiter served their steaks and broke it off. He ordered more drinks and asked curiously, “Do you ever hear from Ronny, Kriss?” and her melting mood froze again.
“He writes me every month. He’s in Austria—with the State Department.”
“I know. I heard he was married again.”
“He has a son now.”
“He has?” To himself he thought, “He must have given birth to it.”
A slow blush mounted to her face. “He’s cured now.”
“Really? What’s his wife like? Do you know her?”
“I’ve never seen her, but Arty knew her in Chicago. He tells everyone she’s a cheap edition of me.”
“I think I saw her at a party once at Harold’s,” he said, his interest straying. “He’d brought her. If she’s the same girl.” While talking, his gaze had wandered toward the blonde at the other table and locked for a moment with hers.
Noticing, Kriss said, “Let’s go!” in a way that sounded like a curse.
They rode in silence to her apartment, and when she’d unlocked her door, she turned on him in fury, her eyes wide and icy with repressed rage, and said brutally, “Jesse! I don’t want you to come in unless you’re really free of your wife. I am sick and tired of having you niggers’ wives hating me.” She was paying him for looking at the blonde.
But he didn’t realize it. Accepting her statement at face value, he said flatly, “I am really free of her,” adding to himself, “There’s a limit—even a nigger limit, bitch!”
“If you’re lying to me I’ll kill you,” she said gratingly.
Relaxing, he said, half-amused, “You’d have to bury me, baby, I’m not insured.”
She relaxed too, and, entering her front hall, permitted him to enter too. After hanging up their coats they went into the kitchen and he stood by silently while she missed highballs with four fingers of whiskey in each. To get the mood rolling, one way or another, he said, “I’ve always wanted you, Kriss baby, even when I couldn’t have you—but if you want me to go—”
She turned suddenly and embraced him, kissing him hard, her body feeling big and unwieldly in his arms. Their eyes locked for a moment, and then she thought with a sudden icy chill of how she had once felt about him and broke from his embrace.
Glancing at her watch, she said brusquely, “It’s time for Barry Gray,” and hurried to the sitting room, while he followed with the drinks. A thin, good-looking,
aquiline-featured man came on the screen and the voice began saying something about Negroes.
She sat in her three-legged chair, listening as if to God, and he sat on the sofa and gulped his highball silently. “Big Talk, Small Do—Indians,” he thought and stood up to get another drink. Kriss gave him her glass too.
He made them stronger than before, kissing her hair as he placed hers on her coaster. Resuming his seat he stared at her profile, ignoring the television, and for the first time noticed the seams in her fleshy neck. The next thing he noticed his glass was empty and a film was showing. He got up to mix more drinks for them both and found both bottles nearly empty. “I must be getting drunk,” he thought, as he bumped against the wall when returning to the sitting room, then, half-amused, “Power of suggestion.”
He did not remember reaching the sitting room. His next conscious action was of walking nude from the living room to the bedroom and finding her nude body inert on the faded blue sheet, eyes closed. He stood looking down at it until vague wisps of desire were transmitted from his brain, then he heard his voice saying with a slightly shocked note, “Damn, you’re white!”
She opened her eyes and looked at him with the last flicker of sensual pleasure. “I am about as white as one can be,” she said distinctly.
For a long time their senses were dulled almost to insensibility with drunkenness. Her first reaction was memory:
He had come into her office in Chicago shortly before noon, wearing the same trench coat, new then and somehow dashing, and a double-breasted business suit with hand-stitched lapels. His hair was long and heavily greased with an interesting kinkiness, and she had noticed instantly his long girlish eyelashes and beautiful eyes. He didn’t look at all like the type of young black writer who’d been given fellowships, neither hungry nor scholarly nor intellectual nor “called.” More like a good lover with that air of frantic sexuality scarcely contained beneath his respectful manner. So she had taken him to the executives’ luncheon to meet the president and other officials, and afterwards she’d had him wait in her office while she finished some reports. He had sat in one of the straight-backed uncomfortable chairs, looking at her all the while with restrained and polite desire until she couldn’t stand the warmth. She’d suggested that he go and do whatever he had to do and come to her apartment at six for dinner. Ronny had been in the army then—overseas at that. He had brought bourbon, like this time, and she’d made her special goulash. Afterwards they’d sat on the sofa in her pleasant sitting-room, drinking slowly, and he had told her all about himself; she refusing to answer the intermittent ringing of the telephone. All that time sitting at opposite ends of the sofa, turned toward each other, her legs tucked beneath her and one of his beneath himself. Then he had said, “I think I’m going to kiss you,” and her face took on a melting look as she offered him her mouth and he had moved close to her and that first kiss had been almost as penetrating as the moment of conception. He had undressed first and was in bed and—of all things—covered up when she had come naked from the bathroom, and she had seen in that first look he had of her nakedness all she’d ever wanted from a man. On the very first time they finished in a dead heat, making the night too precious for sleep. Later sitting on the sofa again, the bed now consecrated and their nakedness as natural as the night, she had read aloud the whole of This Is My Beloved, then afterwards on the white bearskin rug before the hearth, and in the sunrise through the French doors to the terrace they had read to each other laughingly the early love twists of John Donne.
Once they had gone together to a chicken shack in the black belt, hot fried chicken-in-the-basket. She adored every instant with his beautiful eyes only for her, and that night, with bottles from the friendly liquor store, it had been a dream of heaven. She had loved him then, and even more when next morning in the kitchen he had said, “God, I’d like to marry you.” And that third morning, after he’d dressed and packed to continue on the journey to California and his wife, he had begged her humbly, “May I have you just once more,” and she’d undressed him and taken him and he’d made a solemn vow to divorce his wife and come back and marry her, and she’d believed and hoped that it would be forever. “I would have married him then,” she thought. And now thinking about it again, having kept it from her thoughts for many years, she closed her eyes and let unconsciousness take her.
And the next moment he was asleep, grinding his teeth like a rat gnawing wood, threshing about and striking out in unconscious fury.
Chapter 6
The gold-plated Swiss clock on the nightstand whirred softly, curdling the silence of the small dark room. A woman stirred tentatively on the three-quarter size bed, flung a heavy bare arm searchingly across the faded blue sheet. It encountered a nude human body, and the panic that had begun to well up inside of her abruptly subsided. Dave? she wondered, and cracked a bleary eye. On the adjacent pillow a fuzzy round object, like a frizzled coconut, black in the dim light, showed faintly in her thin scope of vision. Jesse! she remembered. She closed her eyes and, recalling his abject acceptance of her atrocious behaviour, felt pleased. “FU make him eat roots,” she resolved and silently kneed him in the back.
“Uh!” he grunted, coming awake as furiously as he’d gone to sleep. His startled gaze searched the dim, cell-like room and, finding everything strange, he felt a shattering of emotion. He was on the verge of leaping up and searching for the light of reason when his hand encountered a nude body beside him in the bed. Peering from bloodshot eyes, he recognized the matted head of Kriss. “Ready to light out and run, eh, son?” he thought, laughing at himself with self-disparagement.
She appeared to be asleep. He moved towards her. “Maybe she won’t awaken,” he thought hopefully. Half laughing, he recalled a burlesque skit of a guy in a hotel room eavesdropping on a honeymoon couple in the next room who were trying, unknown to him, to close an overstuffed suitcase. “No, not that way,” he said as she tried to close it with her hands, “I’ll put it on the floor and you get on top.” The eavesdropper’s ears perked up. But it still wouldn’t close, so she said, “Oh shucks, it won’t fit, you get on top.” The eavesdropper’s ears wagged in a frenzy. But still it wouldn’t close, so he said, “Let’s both get on top.” That’s where the eavesdropper broke down the adjoining door. “This I gotta see!” he cried…
But Kriss pushed him viciously and said in a cold dictatorial voice, “Jesse, I’ve got to go to work,” adding viciously, “You don’t have anything to do but hang around some Harlem bar and you can sleep all day.”
“Fine,” he said, and turned over as if to go back to sleep.
“You can’t sleep here!” she said, trying to push him from the bed. “My maid’s coming this morning to clean up,” she lied, then, to infuriate him, she added, “Go back to your wife then, she’ll let you sleep all day. She always has.”
He found the switch for the hall light and went into the bathroom without replying. She had a glimpse of his body before he closed the door, smooth sepia skin, strong back and broad shoulders, his well-formed legs and smooth calves, almost hairless, that could have been a woman’s; and she thought of other women who’d seen him naked in the morning and resented his body bitterly. “He’s five years older than I am,” she thought, indulging in the complicated reasoning of attributing his youthful appearance to the fact that white people, like herself, supported him so he could write a book every four or five years. “If they had to work as hard as I do, they’d all die,” she concluded.
He looked at his greasy reflection in the mirror and thought, “You don’t look a damn bit different, son.” There were five toothbrushes on the rack; to one side on a wall-shelf of glass a box of talcum powder, comb and brush, colognes and perfumes; beside the tub one gray and white bath towel. Inside the medicine cabinet he found two safety razors, a container of blades, many bottles labelled with a doctor’s prescription, a septic pencil and a man’s comb, after-shaving lotion, and the bottle of blue tablets which had the shape of dexe
drine but not the colour. “Man, woman and doctor,” he thought, immediately amending it to, “Statue of modern woman standing atop a drugstore, right hand lifting nude male to prophylactic couch, left hand behind back beckoning to hovering figure of doctor in background with two middle fingers crossed.”
When he came from the bathroom she said, as though to a servant, “Jesse! Put on some water for coffee and make some toast.” He went into the sitting room without replying and found his shorts among his other clothes heaped in a pile on the floor. She giggled luxuriously at his silent resentment. “Get the paper from outside the door and turn on the television to Gloucester,” she directed.
“I’ve had it now, little sister, for what it was worth,” he thought, disdaining to reply. After donning underwear, socks, pants and shoes, he went to the kitchen, poured the remnants of the Scotch and bourbon into a water tumbler, ran it full of water from the tap and drank it down without stopping. On a high shelf beside the stove he noticed an unopened bottle of imported sherry and a half-filled bottle of vermouth. Looking through the refrigerator he found a remnant of grilled steak, a barbecued chicken leg, and two fried crab cakes, all of which he ate greedily without bread.
The liquor took immediate effect and he began to feel good, bubbly with laughter inside, but slightly dazed as if everything, both mental and material, were just a wee bit out of line. “What I prescribe for the world is continuous drunkenness,” he thought, amusedly, as he broke two raw eggs into his highball glass, filled it with milk and drank it down, breaking the egg yolks in his mouth by the pressure of his tongue. “Nothing like a good diet,” he thought—“Man eats seed of chicken to replenish own seed to give to chick—Robinson.”
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