The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

  “Are you always so to the point?”

  “Usually, yes. It comes with age.”

  “Just how old are you?”

  “Forty-three. You?”

  “Almost thirty.”

  So, he hadn’t been so far off. “Well?”

  Margrit played with her hands again. What does he want with me? She liked the look of him and she liked what he had written. Roger had made a big point of insisting, when he first came to Amsterdam a few months ago, that everyone read his buddy’s books. He lent them out and a few days later reclaimed them to pass them on to still another person. Margrit had read them at the home of her girlfriend. Roger liked to talk about how he was friends with people who were doing things. Margrit had liked what he seemed to be concerned with, this man who was waiting for her answer. “All right,” she said. “Only there’s not much to do in Amsterdam this time of year.” She said the last to his back for he had risen and gone away. She was puzzled until he returned with two glasses of Genever. He gave her one. “To our proposition,” he said. Margrit raised her glass to his, wondering what she was letting herself in for.

  Later, when he had brought her home and she had given the waiting cabdriver Roger’s address, he said at her door, “Een kus?”

  Margrit laughed softly. Who had he asked to tell him that phrase? Did this mean he was going to be like the others? He had adjusted from his African journey very quickly. But she had thought that he would ask or simply take her in his arms, and she had planned to let him. Now, she said, “Ja,” and held up her lips and closed her eyes. He kissed her on the forehead. Margrit was surprised when she opened her eyes, still (she admitted to herself soon after) waiting. He was smiling now and suddenly he looked very tired. How was it that he hadn’t slept for two days? Why such an innocent kiss? Why such gratitude in it and for what? She asked herself these questions before her mirror, where she always asked them. He was gone now, but he would be back tomorrow. Strange man. Nice man.

  Shivering in the cab, Max felt pleasantly tired. Margrit looked so much like Lillian. True, a bleached Lillian. Strange after all these years. Have I been looking for Lillian all this time? Has she been transmigrated back into the human race? Unbelievable that their faces and smiles are so familiar. Margrit was a bit heavier, but this was Holland, after all, where the packages come on the large side. Margrit Westoever. Lookit here! He glanced through the window. The city had become lovely; why hadn’t it looked so good earlier?

  “Has that little girl opened your nose?” Roger asked one afternoon. Roger peered up from his typewriter to watch Max dressing to meet Margrit. Max grinned. Maybe. Maybe Margrit had got to him. There had been three days of museums, shops and Amsterdam history; there had been long walks that had brought bright red spots to Margrit’s cheeks and washed the blue of her eyes; there had been lunches and dinners and watching skaters on the canals. Once, briefly, along the Amstel, they had thrown snowballs at each other.

  “Max, has she?”

  “She’s good company. I didn’t want to take you away from your work,” Max said. Roger threw him a sharp look. Was he being funny?

  “Yeah, man, sure,” Roger finally said. He turned back to his typewriter. Lots of cats had been shooting at Margrit Westoever, simply because she wasn’t like the other Dutch chicks. They dug spooks; they were racists in reverse, but you took them as they came, knowing all that. And here came old Max, and tied up Margrit, seems like. Cat sure is lucky.

  “See you,” Max said and walked down the steep stairs into the street. He was having dinner with Margrit at her home tonight. Whistling, he walked briskly along the canal and crossed over a bridge. He passed a cafe where a group of provokateurs, provos, sat peering into the darkening street through their sunglasses.

  Margrit was waiting for him. He kissed her as he entered, the first kiss since the night he met her. This time he kissed her on the lips. He was surprised at the naturalness of his kiss and her response to it. It left them, for a short time, staring wonderingly into each other’s eyes; then it was past. The cats crept about Max’s feet as he sat down. He looked at the paintings on the walls. Margrit brought the bottle of old Genever and placed it on the table along with glasses. She looked different, Max noticed. Her smile was different, too. It was not precise any more. He thought he could see into it. Now Margrit raised her glass to his and smiled. Inwardly, he smiled, too. The stories had it that only Negroes had such nice white, even teeth. “How have I been as your girl for three days, all right?”

  “Perfect,” Max said.

  “Ah, yes?”

  “Yes, almost perfect.”

  She looked at him and walked briskly toward the kitchen, saying, “Four days to go.” In the kitchen she thought to herself, Four days more. Then he goes back to New York and I stay in Amsterdam, just as I always have, nearly, working and waiting for what? Godverdomme! She had married at nineteen and that had lasted exactly one year. She hadn’t known what she was doing, getting tied down to a young Dutch burgher whose entire life was business. Lots of girls did it and were happy. After that she had known a couple of provos—a natural reaction after a year of stuffy, circumscribed existence. But they had not been interested in anything save smoking marijuana, drinking, fighting, listening to jazz records and going to jazz concerts. One even wore his dark glasses to bed. She supposed that was the reason she didn’t like a great deal of jazz; it attracted to it very strange people whose world was, in its own way, just as narrow as her husband’s had been. Time sped by. Now, she was almost thirty. In Europe that made you an old maid or a lesbian. Or a whore. Managing an art gallery hadn’t helped. She had gone through a couple of painters, or more correctly, they had gone through her. That had not been pleasant either. So! Four days more, then life as usual. Of course, what more?

  Max stared at the gas fireplace. The cats now were curled up before it. Snow lay thickly on the windowsill. He sipped the Genever and wondered why Margrit was so quiet in the kitchen. Once again he looked at the paintings on the wall, then he rose and walked softly to the kichen and saw her staring thoughtfully into a pot on the stove. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  She turned and smiled brightly. “Nothing. What could be the matter?”

  He shrugged. “You were so quiet.”

  “Cooking and thinking.”

  “You look very lovely, Maggie.”

  She gave a mock curtsey. “Thank you, my boyfriend.” She watched him come close, then he was against her, holding her more gently than she’d ever been held in her life and, as he started to draw her away from the stove, she quickly turned out the gas jets. They did not eat until very late and Max did not go back to Roger’s flat. The next evening, he moved his bag to Margrit’s flat. There were three days more to go.

  Margrit cut her hours at the gallery. Max walked her to work in the morning when the chill hung in the air, thick and bone-touching. In this manner, they managed to steal a few hours more from time. Live it up, get on the plane and forget it. It’ll be a nice memory, this playing at real involvement, at love, if you will.

  He had never been touched physically quite so often. They walked arm in arm and hand and hand, and only frequently did it occur to him that Dutchmen, very much like Americans, might be thinking of climbing out of the walls and whipping him good, touching a white woman like that or being touched by one like that. When Margrit embraced him on the street, Max said, chidingly, “We mustn’t behave like kids, Margrit.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, Mox.”

  But she always forgot and he remembered that he hadn’t minded when Lillian did it. Why should he mind now? Oh, oh, he would tell himself, what a colorless rationalization that was. But he felt comforted when she touched him if she had been away only a few moments, as if to reassure herself that he was still there. But when she was away, Max drifted through daydreams, analyzing each barrier that stood between them, but he would slide past one barrier and arrive at the next. When it would come to him how his thoughts were going, h
e would wonder why he had never thought like this about the other white women he knew.

  The night before he left, the dinner was special: candlelight, wine, a particular Dutch roast. “How’s that?” she said, sitting down at last.

  “Like you,” he said, “superb. That means extraordinary.”

  Were her eyes swimming or was it reflected candlelight? She threw him a kiss between the candles and said, “Ik hou van je.”

  “What does that mean?” She had said it quickly as if embarrassed.

  “Aha! I thought you were studying Dutch. And you don’t know what that means. Pity.”

  “Tell me in English.”

  “No.”

  “French.”

  “No.”

  “Spanish.”

  “No.”

  “Is it something I should know?”

  “I think you know it.”

  “If it’s important, don’t you think I should hear it from you, to avoid confusion?”

  “Con-con- ah! Confusion! Well. It’s not important. Why should it be? Tomorrow you will leave. We have had a good seven days, no? Perhaps when you think of me, you’ll write me a letter?”

  “Of course.” After a pause, he said, “The dinner is good.” He wanted to say many things to her, but thought it better not to.

  Later, in bed, the snow on the roofs outside throwing a ghostly light into the room where they lay, he said, “Now, tell me what it was you said at dinner.”

  “No.”

  “Are you always so stubborn?”

  “That is a Dutch trait, Mox. We are careful, punctual and stubborn.”

  Midway over the Atlantic, at twenty-five thousand feet, he pulled out his handkerchief to blow his nose. Margrit had washed and ironed it for him. A square piece of paper fell out and Max picked it up. It had writing on it: “Ik hou van je.”

  “What does this mean?” he asked one of the KLM hostesses. She leaned over and took the paper and giggled. “It means, I love you,” she said.

  23

  NEW YORK

  Bernard Zutkin sat in his office. It was the same one, on the East Side, that he had been sitting in the day Max Reddick’s girl was buried, years ago. The same kind of weather, too, Zutkin reflected. Time goes so swiftly, yet it always seems to stand still. One death, some suffering for Max, and fifteen years. In the scheme of time and the millions of people to choose from, that wasn’t a bad price to pay for what Max was going to have handed to him. For some people the chance never came, not even to their succeeding generations. Max was ready now, like good, tough wood that had been seasoned in all kinds of weather. Time was a mystery; it prepared in so many dark, separate corners a variety of situations, but it always produced the right kind of people to meet them at precisely the right time.

  Zutkin was glad that this new situation with its new people had come before it was too late for him to become involved. Only last week Granville Bryant had died. You really started to think about your advanced age (Zutkin was now in his sixties) when the people you had known in Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Madrid and Greenwich Village, when it was the Village, during the Twenties and Thirties, started dropping dead around you. Then it was time to start getting your business in order. Well, there wasn’t much business to straighten out, only this last thing.

  He had married a British girl during the Twenties and they had lived on the Left Bank. That had lasted only two years and then she took her short skirts, bobbed hair and flat-chested look to Italy—with a bad poet who never understood why Dante was celebrated and he wasn’t. Now, she was in Mombasa, and he thought of her as being old and stylish in big houses covered with the skins of lions and leopards. Sometimes, when he thought of her, Hemingway’s description of the wife in “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” came to him. Nearly everyone had been in Paris in those days, the big, lost generation names, and the hundreds of little, nameless people, like Bryant and Bolton Warren—and himself. He remembered an argument he’d had with the great one about bullfighting one spring when they’d gone with a group to Pamplona. The great one insisted that bullfighting was the epitome of bravery. Zutkin (he stroked his paunch now; he’d been slim then, with a full head of hair, and had spent a few moments wondering whether or not he was Robert Cohn in the g.o.’s novel) had agreed that it was brave, but brave faggotry, for there was only one man in that bullring and it was not the matador. Howled down, that argument had done a lot to make Zutkin a critic. As he saw it, a critic’s job was to keep honest whoever happened to be the Pied Piper at the time, keep him from leading the unsuspecting over the brink. The Pied Pipers were coming in triplicate now, and often piped the same tune. And it was no longer a rare thing to see critics and reviewers whip out their own pipes and play in time to the music and even lead the marchers.

  So he was almost done with it all. Once a month he turned out a piece for the magazine, otherwise he played with his pencils, read, had long lunches and carried the title Editor, but he no longer made policy decisions; he didn’t even care to. And he had stopped teaching at Columbia. He had one spell of three years without a promising student and he knew then it was time to quit.

  He wiped his thick-lensed glasses with a handkerchief and picked up the phone. “Get Max Reddick, will you?” he asked his secretary in the outer office. He had tried to call Max last week, but they’d told him at Pace that he was out of the country until this week. That was all right, Zutkin had thought then; the hurry was relative now, after all these years.

  “Max, Max, is that you? Well, how are you? Yes, fine. You’ve become a world traveler. What were you doing in Africa? You don’t say?” Zutkin paused to ponder this development; what he had to offer was still better. “I’d like to see you about something, Max. It’s very important. As soon as you can. Lunch tomorrow? All right? Algonquin? That’s fine, Max, just fine. Yes, wasn’t it too bad about Granville? What’s that saying? ‘When the wagon comes, every swinging goes’?” Zutkin hung up, smiling.

  The next day Zutkin watched Max enter the dining room. There was a very good look about him. The lines in his face had settled; in fact, they were his face now, and the beguilingly soft eyes. What they must have done to the women, Zutkin thought. Max had spotted him and Zutkin waved from his corner. He moved around the tables gracefully. What was he, Zutkin wondered, forty now? Forty-two or forty-three? He moves like a youngster, or someone in love. That lightness came only with youth or love and Max certainly was no youth, not anymore. They shook hands heartily and slapped each other on the back, and Zutkin could tell that something good was happening to Max. What?

  “Now tell me this business about Africa? I’m dying to hear it,” Zutkin said, signaling for drinks. An African desk could be mighty attractive. Take a man like Max away, place him in a position to experience an entire new set of stimuli to which he’d have to give new responses, and you’ve got an exciting challenge. That could be worked out, though, for sure. Zutkin called for the second drinks as Max finished telling him about Lagos. Zutkin heaved himself up and settled down to talk. He grasped Max by the wrist. “What I have to say is important. I’m a little nervous.”

  “Man,” Max said with a smile, “what have you got to be nervous about? You’re white,” and Max punched him playfully on the arm. Zutkin could not ever recall such levity about the man. It pleased him.

  “Max, would you consider working with the President’s speech-writers? The chance is yours. You’re not a second or third choice. The President wants your help.”

  “Who did it?”

  “For a starter you can thank Julian Berg. Max, Max! What about it?” Zutkin could see that Max was stunned. He ordered the third round of drinks and they selected lunch.

  “What do I do about my job?”

  “Take a leave. Africa isn’t going to vanish.”

  “For how long?”

  “A few months, at least. It’s important that the President get your answer and your talent as soon as possible. Max, what do you say? You know what
all this means.”

  “What kind of speeches?”

  “Civil rights. You know his platform. This way you may be able to nail in solidly what’s there and squeeze in some suggestions for others.”

  Max nodded, slowly. “Will Dempsey give me the leave, do you think? You know, any President’s only guaranteed four years, and I want that desk badly.”

  “I have no doubt that he’ll give you the leave and keep the desk for you. I don’t think you should worry on that score. These things work very smoothly and to everyone’s advantage once they’ve been agreed on.”

  “You bastards,” Max said. “You wring a man out. A guy can starve for ten years and then, suddenly, you want to give him everything. What’s the matter with you people? Some guys die while they wait, don’t you know that, Bernard?”

  “I know, I know,” Zutkin said. “I didn’t make the rules; I only try to change the bad ones. I’m sure the President wants to do this too. He needs your help. How much time will you need?”

  “Three days, and I want to talk to Dempsey myself.”

  “I can guarantee the leave and your Africa desk. See Dempsey tomorrow morning by eleven. He’ll have a call an hour later. Can you see him at eleven?”

  “Yes, but goddamn it, Bernard, I’ll still have two days more to think about it. Don’t rush me.”

  “I’m not rushing. Today’s the first day, tomorrow’s the second and day after tomorrow’s the last day.”

  “Also, Bernard, I don’t like the way you white folks have started to count these days.”

  Zutkin reached across the table in a kind of desperation and grasped Max tighter by the wrist. “Max, maybe now, now we can start to change this—” Zutkin groped for a strong enough word. “—mothafucking country for the better. What are you laughing at?”

  Max had leaned back in his chair. He roared. People at other tables looked at him. Zutkin stared at him. “Didn’t I say it right?”