When he had finished eating, he washed the dishes, cleaned the stove, scoured the grill and wiped up the floor while she made her bed, straightened the sitting room, ran the carpet sweeper and emptied the garbage into the incinerator in the hall. Then he put on his trousers and shirt and she dressed in her red silk Chinese Mandarin robe and Turkish-toed slippers and they sat in their respective seats, he on the sofa and she in her three-legged chair, tall iced civilized highballs in silver coasters within reach, to watch a television program called “Zoo Parade.” At that moment they formed a picture of Manhattan domestic tranquillity on a Sunday afternoon, painted by some idiot who has never been east of the Hudson River. The charming director of Chicago’s Lincoln Zoo, who conducted the performances of the animals on the show, had just reached a climatic scene, handling a couple of poisonous snakes, when the telephone rang. “Oh shit!” Kriss exclaimed. Snakes fascinated her, the more poisonous the greater the fascination, in addition to which the director had twice been snake-bitten on the show before, and she wouldn’t want to miss seeing him bitten again for the world. Her first impulse was to ignore the telephone, but after letting it ring to within one split-second of the end of any male caller’s patience, she dashed in to answer it. Over the sound of the television Jesse heard her gushing incoherently with a warmth she never showed toward man or woman and thought dreamily, “Take a card, any card.” With his fourth drink he had entered a blurred, half-heard world of complete indifference to which he could give vague attention or even choose another. He only pretended interest in the television programs to please Kriss, now he closed his eyes and began to play with words:
I bit a tit
to twit a chit
but the chit had the grit
to sit on her split and would not submit
though I smit and she fit and I hit and she spit and I grit
I must admit I could not outwit the sprit and had to quit…
“That was Don,” Kriss said, and he opened his eyes. “He’s coming over. You like Don, don’t you, baby?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, thinking, “I like de big gut, do you like de big gut…”
“He’s on the wagon, drinking nothing but cola.” She was all excited as if her closest girlfriend were calling, and when she added, “I love Don, he’s so sweet when he’s sober,” her face took on a look of melting sympathy.
“Can’t be a successful fag without being sweet sometime,” he said, and she became suddenly cross. “Jesse, if you’re going to be nasty—”
“—baby, baby, I love—”
“Don’s been an angel to me and—”
“Let’s not argue any more, baby.”
She relented. “Make us drinks, dear, while I order Coca-Cola. Mine Scotch this time.” Calling to him in the kitchen, “Make some ice, dear.”
“Make some ice, dear…make some drinks, dear…wash the dishes, dear…scrub the floor, dear…climb a tree, dear…fuck yourself, dear…“he muttered to himself as he melted the ice from the trays, but the back of his mind was still playing with the rhyme:
but if you will permit
I most humbly remit
I desire only to transmit
what would most befit
nay, benefit
any slit
oh, definite!
to whit:
I would emit
so exquisite a pit
as to acquit—
“Jesse!” He gave such a start the ice tray flew birdlike from his hand and clattered in the sink. Kriss stood in the doorway, grinning, “What are you thinking about, dear?”
He’d been absently running water over the ice cubes in the sink, melting them. “Abwout Twitty, bwaby,” he said lispingly on recovering.
“Well, think about the ice now, dear, Don will be here in a minute.”
He began putting the cubes into the glass tray. “Yes, baby.
I’ll think about the ice cubes, baby. Anything else you want me to think about, baby?”
A scholarly-looking, dark-haired Harvard-type young man who turned out to be the delivery boy from the delicatessen brought twelve bottles of Coca-Cola, four bottles of sparkling water, tins of cheese-bits and assorted nuts, and to show how broadminded he was, he gave Jesse a confidential wink. “Ain’t what you think, bub,” Jesse thought. “I’ve been sleeping on the sofa.”
Then Don came with six bottles of Pepsi-Cola for himself and a bottle of Scotch for Kriss and she flung her arms about him like a proud mother-bear and kissed him. They came into the kitchen, talking incoherently:
“—look much better, baby—”
“—not had a drop in ten days, and—”
“—so worried about your health, baby, when—”
“—eating like a horse—”
Hearing the word horse Jesse was reminded of a joke going about in psychiatric circles:
Psychiatrist (interviewing young man charged with murdering his mother): Do you care for girls?
Young Man: That’s the trouble, I don’t.
Psychiatrist: Do you care for boys?
Young Man: No.
Psychiatrist: What do you care for?
Young Man: Horses are the only thing that make me feel passionate.
Psychiatrist: Mares or stallions?
Young Man (horrified): Do you take me to be a fairy, doctor?
Kriss was grinning idiotically. “—so happy, baby—”
And Don was drooling spitty words between gasps of embarrassed laughter as if he’d been running for the past hour and was now chewing on a stone. “Jesse ha ha…son of a bitch ha ha…puking on my sofa…”
“—are you, Don. Sorry about—”
“—didn’t mind about the sofa myself ha ha but Ralph had to clean it up ha ha. Been knocked on the head since I saw you last ha ha. Did I tell you, Kriss?”
“I was still living there, baby.”
She gave him a tall glass of iced Cola and he gulped greedily, laughing even while drinking, and looking at Jesse with a bright-eyed inclusiveness as if to say, “AH us turds here together.” He was a tall well-built Anglo Saxon, with the unhealthy flush of alcoholism, and his strongboned handsome face was corroded by constant dissipation and incredibly distorted by deliberate subjection to sexual perversion. In addition to which he hadn’t shaved. On this dismal rainy day he’d gone bareheaded and his wet brown crewcut hair was plastered to his head. He wore a pea-green cashmere sport jacket over a pink shirt open at the throat, old soiled bagged Oxford-gray flannel trousers, and rope-soled canvas-top sneakers that had once been white, over bare feet that had also once been white. Had it not been for the spitty incontrollable laughter that indicated a definite deterioration of the brain, he might have been considered human. Anatomically he was male. He had attended Harvard for three years until, at the beginning of his senior year, he was secretly jailed for a year on a homosexual charge—the secrecy costing his family twenty thousand dollars.
Considering these facts Jesse thought, “Adds up. Harvard man all right. No two ways about it.”
Being the descendant of a very old and very wealthy Bostonian family of the highest social prominence, obviously he couldn’t stay in Boston. Don’s family, rather than run the risk of his prison record becoming duck-soup gossip for the columnists by applying for a passport, had exiled him to New York City in lieu of some hot Mediterranean island where he might drink himself to death on the cheap potent brandies along with other Bostonian exiles, hoping he might find the native bourbons just as lethal. However the boy had a better constitution than they had any reason to suspect.
On arriving in New York with Ralph, his black companion, he had established himself in a penthouse on Riverside Drive and had become a patron of the blacks. This had come about by Maud’s discovering him. Naturally she had discovered him immediately. She could smell white homosexuals with money within a radius of one hundred miles. With her assistance he had endowed various black benefits and had established scholarship funds in several black col
leges for promising black art students. He felt he’d found his life’s mission in the black cause. His interracial black-benefit parties had become so celebrated and successful he’d bought a big old house in the Gramercy Park district to accommodate more black benefitters and do more benefit. The first time Jesse had attended one of Don’s penthouse parties, he’d arrived uninvited at eleven o’clock to find everyone roaring drunk, and a handsome young man in a white silk shirt laughing boyishly had put a huge heavy dark-green expensively cut crystal tumbler, containing a pint of Myer’s rum chilled with cracked ice, into his hand. He had drunk it politely and had begun dancing closely with a convenient woman, and the next thing he remembered he was sitting in the kitchen opening one tin after another of anchovies, eating them with his fingers and throwing the cans into the comer, watching the dull gray Hudson River flow sluggishly through a rainy day. Now, looking at this pink-shirted derelict, two hops from idiocy, he thought, half-amused, “Ain’t nobody here that ain’t been here before, boss.”
They took their drinks to the sitting room, Don stopping on the way to “wee-wee”—“most awful stuff imaginable; weakens your bladder something awfully ha ha,” afterwards remarking, “—feel like a baby ha ha—” To prove which he brought a wooden stool from the hall table to sit on like a baby. Then he began telling breathlessly of how in his favourite Harlem bar—“I’ve been going to Bucky’s for years; everybody knows me—” sitting in his customary seat; he merely asked the man next to him to have a drink—“I didn’t know him from Adam, dear—” and a woman he had not even seen—“assumed I was trying to make her man ha ha—but I assure you dear ha ha nothing was farther—”
“—your trouble, baby, you were always buying those hungry niggers drinks and—”
“—Bucky will tell you, dear, I never—”
“—just liked you for your money. All that money on those niggers’ drinks—”
“Must have bought a lot of drinks to get rid of a quarter million dollars in six years,” Jesse thought.
“—but never attempted to take any bitches man ha ha. All I ever had to do was whistle—”
“—hope you’ve learned your lesson, baby—”
Jesse thinking: “I’d have bought me three grown niggers and three pickaninnies to raise and saved the rest of my money.”
This woman he hadn’t even seen hit him over the head with a whiskey bottle and knocked him unconscious—“Jesse ha ha I bled like a stuck pig ha ha. I don’t know how I got home ha ha. Bucky must have—”
“—sent in a taxi, baby. You had a towel about your head and some black guy—”
“—took care of me like a baby ha ha. I had oodles of friends everybody—”
“—and Ralph was so mad he went back with his pistol—”
“—just so afraid they might beat up the bitch ha ha and I couldn’t have borne—”
This incoherent account being interrupted every two minutes by: first, his going to the kitchen for a fresh drink of cola; and secondly, his going to the John.
“The pause that refreshes,” Jesse thought.
“—through your kidneys like needles ha ha. I drink six dozen bottles a day ha ha and it has the most terrible—”
“No wonder the son of a bitch makes like old Faithbue,” Jesse thought.
“—but you must drink something ha ha—”
“—but you look so well, baby—”
Kriss just loved that man—one, rather, one of those, like the joke about the men counting off in the army: one-two-three-four…one…“Oh, I’m one too”—just loved that one because he was just like a sister and they could tell each other all about their affairs and discuss. Oh so candidly, the anatomy of last night’s lover. Besides which he was a Harvard Bostonian socialite, which made everything right, and once he’d taken her on a visit to his ancestral mansion—when all of the family were away of course—and they’d had a glorious time hopping about the Boston night clubs in search of men; so different from that son of a bitch Ronny, who sneaked off with the lowest kind of bums. But that was the difference between Boston and Mississippi; Bostonians were cultured.
When he next came from the John, Kriss said, “Why don’t you eat some nuts, baby, maybe they’d help stop—”
“Don’t look at me!” Jesse thought, pointing toward the bowl on the cocktail table. Then suddenly his mind went off, shutting out the sounds of voices, and he began again to play with words:
be there a knight
without affright
to blight the white
and smite the spite
that men call right—
or even once a night
will be quite
alright
especially if one is tight—
And when his mind came back he heard Kriss saying, “How is it with you and Garner, baby?” and Don began telling the sad tale of the slow death of his glorious romance with a handsome dark-skinned curly-haired black army officer, which romance had reached its peak three years before when they sailed on a cruise to Martha’s Vineyard and were so delighted with the blind tolerance and idyllic isolation of that New England Eden they decided to stay there in ecstatic inebriation for the remainder of their lives. Don bought and furnished a huge old-fashioned house and bought a station wagon to drive back and forth to town, but that first winter they did not get to town very often and did not have a single unpleasant moment of sobriety. But the following summer Garner’s brother Jack, a Philadelphia lawyer, and his wife Geraldine, a very brainy newspaper columnist, along with their young son and heir, a lad of twelve, came to visit the honeymooners and liked it so well they stayed. And Don was so delighted he deeded the house to them jointly, thinking they would all live there pleasantly as two married couples for life. But Geraldine was a prominent socialite and her house guests, who were all quite distinguished blacks, found the arrangement puzzling and the presence of a drunken unshaven young white man clad only in an old bathrobe wandering about the premises at all hours somewhat disconcerting, even though he was a Harvard-Bostonian socialite, so Geraldine soon stopped introducing him to her distinguished guests and began devising ways and means to get him out of her house.
“—and she even went so far ha ha well, she was driving the station wagon to town to pick up some of her guests at the ferry station and I asked to go along to do some shopping because ha ha I’d never learned to drive the thing myself and daddy was sleeping and I heard her whisper to her guests ha ha that I was the gardener ha ha. I cared nothing about that but she took my television set down to the living room for her own guests—”
“—you didn’t let her do that, baby? Your own—”
“—she’s such an awful bitch ha ha and I positively could not hear in the condition I was in ha ha to make a scene involving—”
It finally reached the place where they lived in the house as strangers, each with their own set of guests, eating at different hours, sitting on opposite sides of the living room to carry on separate conversations, passing each other in the house without speaking, each set acting as if the other were invisible.
“—so I told daddy if he would not take my part I would positively leave him. Now he is—”
“Jesse!” Kriss shouted suddenly. He gave such a violent start the cheese-bits he was eating flew into the air like buckshot. She giggled. “Make some drinks, dear. And you might join us if you have no—”
“I’m listening to every word. Fascinating. Beats Rimbaud’s Season in Hell. Beats Macbeth—”
“You know Garner, Jesse?”
“Oh, sure, met him at your house—”
“Get the drinks first, dear.”
“Yes, dear.”
When Jesse went to the kitchen to make the drinks, Don went to the John and when Jesse returned Kriss was reading a letter Garner had written to Don.
“He wants you back, baby.”
“He will drink himself to death ha ha but I positively do not care ha ha.”
“But your hous
e, baby! You’re not going—”
“They can have it ha ha. I positively can not be bothered—”
Gulping down great swallows of nausea, Jesse struggled to his feet. He tried to fix his vision on what appeared to be a great number of dismembered square fish-eyes bobbing on the surface of a sea of dark congealing blood, but the nauseous putrefactive taste-smell of whiskey-rotted guts came up from his stomach faster than he could swallow it back, and cramps of lightning-fast diarrhoea struck down through his bowels with the gut-stretched, panic-stricken, anus-ache of enema. He felt on the verge of suddenly erupting filth from both ends into the dead-eyed sea of blood. Labouring under great difficulty, he said politely, pronouncing each word separately in a slow thick voice, “If—you—dears—will—excuse—me—I will—go—vomit—and—shit—” and staggered toward the bathroom, striking heavily against the corner of the arch. Don leaped up and took him by the arm. He remembered getting down his pants in the nick of time and sitting on the stool, and the presence of a vague shape-sound hovering above, and the knowledge of another vaguer shape-sound hovering in the hall, and of feeling half-amused by the really staggering stink of foul putrescence he was giving them to smell, and of trying to put into words what he was thinking, “Just tit for tat ha ha.”
Chapter 11
It was seven-fifteen when he came to, and he was in bed naked and half-uncovered. Through the partly opened window he could see it was a dismal night outside. He felt cold, sober, and dangerously depressed. Thoughts pounded in rational sequence: Book…rejection…Becky…blankets…Kriss…white woman…white man’s world, son…
naught is a naught
and five is a figure
five for the white man
and naught for the nigger
“You hired out for the job, son, nobody made you,” he thought, and then, “What I really ought to have told the son of a bitch—” His mind hit a wall. “What son?” he asked aloud.
He got from the bed, thinking with bitter amusement, “And, dear ha ha I was knocked speechless!”
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