He glanced at Margrit. She had spent every available moment in the sun as if, by tanning, she could minimize the difference between them. These white people and the sun, he thought with a smile. Minister Q had told him once that the time to take over America was during the summer, beach by beach when all the white folks were laying out in the sun getting blisters trying to look like black people. Margrit was very dark except for her very white ass and the lower parts of her breasts which looked like two lost half moons in search of some sky.
Finished with the letter and the cable Margrit searched her husband’s face. “So it will be America then.”
“Yes.”
“Are you pleased? No.” They had talked about Africa a great deal, about the house in Ikoyi, Johnson, Charity, the Marina at night, Tarkwa Bay. Now Africa was out. But there was America. How glad she was that she had been taught English!
The generations would begin anew in New York, in America. Friesland would be far away, even farther away than Amsterdam. Only the old gravekeeper in the north would watch over her parents’ final resting place now. She would not be able to drive up and weed and set fresh flowers anymore. Perhaps they wouldn’t mind too much now because they would have liked Max. They would have said, “A gentleman. One can tell. It is so obvious.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Max was saying. “We’re together.”
Margrit saw to the final things while Max continued his treatments and retrieved his New York apartment from his tenants and discharged Charity, Johnson and Jimmy.
During those days, the sky grayed quickly and heavy cold winds buffeted the city and the smell of snow wafted through the air. Roger Wilkinson was a frequent visitor. He sat drinking coffee or Genever while Max and Margrit packed and labeled. “Tell my father,” Roger said one night, “as discreetly as you can, that I would appreciate a little bread whenever he can send it, dig?”
“Nothing goes over your father’s head,” Max said. “He’s going to kick discretion out of the window. He’ll send it to you.” Max liked Roger’s father. He was a small, light-skinned man who lived on 158th Street. He liked reliving the old days when he had been in the rackets and liked nothing better than to sit in Frank’s Restaurant with an old cronie and talk about the days when even Negroes were banned from colored joints in Harlem to make the white downtown trade feel more comfortable. Once Mr. Wilkinson had said to Max, “Whenever I think of Roger, I think of a trick he pulled on me once. That thing never leaves me. A bunch of boys had ambushed him down around 140th Street and he came home crying. I sent him back out to get even. He came home the second time grinning. ‘What happened?’ I asked him. ‘I got ’em all. I beat ’em good. They won’t be no more trouble.’ Years later we were over in Brooklyn watching ol’ Newk work a good game and he told me that when he went back out, he hid for a long time, then came home and told me a lie. Never forgot that. Never.”
The round of goodbye parties for Max and Margrit ended and the day came when Max awoke in the morning, his vitals heavy with dread, and he knew that that afternoon he and Margrit would be leaving for New York.
Part Four
27
AMSTERDAM
Margrit looked once more at the clock. It was two. She had left the gallery at noon, sure that Max would be calling her shortly after she got home. What was so important in Leiden that she could not have gone with him this morning? She knew he was very ill. It was in the way he talked, biting every word, and in the way he held his body, as if to ward off pain. At one-thirty Margrit made herself go downstairs, leaving the silent telephone. She went down step by step, slowly, holding the handful of dried bread crumbs which she threw into the canal for the ducks. Then, just as slowly, she ascended the stairs, listening intently for the ringing of the phone which never came. She called Roger, but he wasn’t home or was not answering his phone. And she called Max’s hotel. Now it was two o’clock and the time weighed heavily upon her, like the taste of brass lingering in the mouth.
For the third time she went to her bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She wanted to look good for Max, show him what he was missing. Who could tell what might happen? The hips, to her disgust, were extending to a wide curve, hips he once had dug his fingers into to draw her all the way to him, belly to belly. Her legs were getting heavier and the varicose veins in them more pronounced. Deep lines sat at the corners of her eyes and only folded neatly into the skin when she smiled. How could that be when she hadn’t smiled for such a long time, it seemed? She returned to the front room and gazed blankly out at the canal. She had not got used to it after all, as she had thought she would when she returned from New York.
Almost three years. What did it matter if it were two or three months less? Three years with Max, New York, America, and now she was back, still tied to Max in a way she could not explain. Maybe he had more to tell her than he had so far. Some explanation for the breakup. She knew that he knew sorry was not enough; there had to be more and she was going to find out what it was.
The three years had passed so quickly and in such a flurry of people and places, that she hadn’t yet recovered. She awoke sometimes at night thinking she could hear the Seventh Avenue subway train racing beneath the building, drowning out Max’s snoring; and sometime she thought she could hear the high-pitched, desperate, forlorn calls of the faggots to each other as they emerged from the Riker’s diner to go home alone. But awake there were only the soft night sounds of Amsterdam, nothing else, and those made her think of Camus’s Le Chute and the meetings on Amsterdam’s bridges.
What had happened? She had been so sure.
A child might have helped, a tan child, but there had been no children. Every month the menses came in spite of the furious, exhausting orgies almost every night, for he had got over the bilharzia, and he saved strength from the job and the book—his last he had said—for her, like a dessert.
After a few months spring came with its pitiful little green shoots to hide some of the dirt of the city, and she started to work in a gallery not far from their apartment. All the paintings had been bad, very bad, but it had been something to do.
Her memory wound around the people they had known: Harry and Charlotte (and Michelle whom she’d seen twice in Paris after her return); Zutkin, an old, lumpy dumpling, a perfect dinner guest who liked to tune up his French on her; Shea, at whom Max smiled secretly when he observed Shea staring at her; Minister Q, whom she knew Max liked and admired; Ted Dallas—handsome man—always held at arm’s length by Max … so many others to welcome her, to like and love her because they liked or loved her husband.
Late one fine spring night, when they could clearly smell the rivers for the first time and she was feeling settled and very much a part of his life, she kissed him suddenly on a corner where many people were milling around a newsstand for their papers. He (she felt it keenly, like a rebuke) submitted, and they walked on in silence until he said, “Maggie, for Christ’s sake, I don’t like to be kissed on the street.”
“I forgot, Mox.”
“Well, try to remember, will you?”
“Why does it make you angry when I kiss you on the street?”
“Never mind. Just don’t do it.”
Something had drained out of her then and had been replaced by a furtive guilt. She had started to take his arm, but changed her mind.
The weekends they had spent in the woods near Brattleboro or East Hampton, walking and fishing. And taking target practice with a .22 rifle.
“But Mox, you know I don’t like guns.”
“Learn to shoot it. One day you may be glad you did.”
There had been a look in his eyes that urged her to find the answer in her own soul, so he would not have to soil the air with the words. The rifle was in her hands, walnut and steel, and his hands gently set her arms and legs.
“Now, squeeze, squeeeeze …”
“Bam!”
“Again.”
“Bam!”
“Once more.”
> “Bam!”
The noise startling the still woods, Max down at the target, smiling. Had he been trying to tell her that one day her life might depend on whether or not she could shoot a gun?
“Squeeeeze, Maggie.”
The lessons had been conducted calmly, even a little sadly. “It’s a question of dignity, Margrit.” That statement when he had finally taken the gun from her, after each lesson, to clean it.
Summer came and with it the trips to St. Thomas, Puerto Rico and Mexico.
St. Thomas with its jungle smell, its iodic odor of the bright, blue sea, bluer than the Mediterranean, the long swims in it, his kissing her in public, feeling her up under the water, a stroking hand pausing lightly on her poesje, a flat, gentle hand pressed against her breasts, a mock horselike mounting in ten feet of water … and dinner that same night, candlelights dancing in the heavy, humid breeze, the steel drum band playing softly, the air filled with the scents of a hundred jungle flowers, and her not noticing anything until he had tipped the table getting up quickly, breaking the top of his glass and wheeling on a group of American sailors with it in a single, frightening motion, a group of sailors who were fanning out around him, sailors there to pick up the women who came alone, wanting to be picked up … and she, with her drink wet and sticky in her lap, heard the band straggling on, and she did not know, did not understand what had created this ominous, ugly tableau which dissolved finally with the presence of still more sailors with a yellow SP on their sleeves.
“What happened, Mox, what were they doing?”
And his eyes: accusing, his eyes incredulous that she had not seen or heard or understood.
The next morning they did not play in the water together. He swam alone a long distance out and back and then went to the bar for a martini. It was not even ten in the morning, Margrit remembered.
Puerto Rico with its brave gloss and terrible slums below the cliff, facing out to sea, between the forts. They went to the old city for dinner and stopped at the bar of their hotel for a nightcap, St. Thomas almost a memory. The bar was filled with people; the music was cha-cha-cha and behind them the dancers whirled and posed on the floor. Puerto Rican Spanish was rising and falling around them. “Arriba, ’rriba,” and she heard Max say to her quite calmly, “Move your stool back just a little, Maggie.” And she had followed his gaze to the drunk American who was gesturing angrily with his thumb toward them, noticing too that the bartender was frowning at the drunk, then smiling at them. “It’s waxed.” Max again, sliding his foot on the floor, and she just started to understand that Max was watching the American, waiting for him to make a move, say a word; waiting, Max was, like an executioner who knows the job must be done; she remembered the fright she felt and how she started to pluck at Max’s elbow. “Stop that.” He was going to place it all in jeopardy—what he was, Max Reddick, what it meant to be Max Reddick—because of a drunk white American.
“He’s drunk, Mox.”
“Not too drunk to open his big mouth: move over a little.”
Her eyes were drawn to his eyes and she did not know them. Desperate, she stood, threaded her way a few feet through the dancers and stopped, obviously waiting. There was one agonizingly long instant when their eyes met, and she had put her mind to leaving the room alone, defeated, when he slid off the stool and came after her.
“Mox, you would have fought him.”
“Maggie, I would have killed him.”
The hall had tile floors and their heels sounded loud upon them. She felt sick, like vomiting. “I am going to be sick, Mox.”
They rushed up in the elevator to their room, in time. I must try harder to understand this thing, she told herself in the bathroom.
She knew if they did not make love that night, the morning would be unpleasant, and somehow he knew it too, and came softly at her, removing the gown, and she embraced him hard and lovingly with her whiteness, opening all of herself, for she wanted him to know in the fullest way that white could love black and did, and they both sensed that the drunk American downstairs had to be erased with love, and they went from one bed to the other without a pause, a mass of black and white, with arms and legs twisted, their breath coming short above the music from downstairs and Margrit remembered crying silently, her tears mixing unnoticed with the perspiration of their bodies and how, when they left the beds, they drifted across the room to the sun parlor where the full moon leaned patiently against the windows while the sea rushed headlong against the seawall a few hundred yards away downstairs, exploding into billions of phosphorescent bubbles; they put out their cigarettes and began to make love again in a sun parlor chair, lap-love, and the moonlight stroked their restless, jerking bodies, him in her, her around him, moving in that good rhythm until the little cries came again and the pimples rose on their flesh and the nipples of her breasts shot hard and trembling beneath his kneading hands; the exhausted bodies unhinged; they heard the sea withdraw from the wall; the swollen lips parted and Margrit felt a hot, electric quivering down there, a reaction, as she slid from his lap.
And the morning was quite all right.
Cuernavaca was a better memory with its beamed-ceiling seventeenth-century house hidden from a shabby street. There was a swimming pool set in the center of an acre of well-tended grass, and around the fringes were clusters of roses and mimosa, honeysuckle, bougainvillea and the nameless Mexican flowers that breathe a sweetness through day and night. In Cuernavaca the smiles came again, and the work went well, and their lovemaking, on the eight beds in the giant house, was without desperation. The house was on a hill, and through the vines on the fence they could look down on the city from three sides, see the ragged buses droning up the other steep hills, hear the soldiers in the barracks across the way singing and shouting. Everyone in the town talked of a writer named Malcolm Lowry and Max smiled and said: “I’ll bet that cat didn’t know half these people who say they knew him. Poor bastard; he could have used some knowing.” Max hated to leave the place. On the plane the tension started to come once more, his quiet, angry tension that frightened her so, but she could see him fighting it off and she was content.
Near their first anniversary Max bought a new rifle; he already had four guns. This did not disturb her as much as his matter-of-fact manner. That puzzled and upset her, but she could not bring herself to speak of the weapons which, granted, he used when he went hunting. At the same time, nightly, she witnessed on television the humiliations of the black Americans throughout the country; acid was thrown into the swimming places they tried to integrate; electric cattle prods were put to their bodies when they sat at lunch counters and participated in other demonstrations. It seemed to Margrit that what was happening provided the connection to what Max was doing. She wondered if other black men were silently going about as he was, hunting regularly (“Brushing up the old eye, baby”), buying guns. In Holland it had been very easy to urge that violence be met with violence. But, being in America, it was somehow different …
A few months later, plagued by his increasing sensitivity to the way people looked at them when they were together, his purchases of boxes of ammunition he could never use up in three seasons of hunting, let alone one, she timidly asked: “Mox, what is it all about?”
“What, Maggie?”
“The guns, your touchiness, the target shooting.”
“I’m simply trying to keep my head, but these bastards are trying to make me lose it.”
“Your mind is closed to me. I feel so distant from you sometimes, as if I were one of them. I feel left out and that something terrible is about to happen. Let us return to Holland, Mox. I’m afraid.”
He took a long time answering.
“Dear Margrit. I had hoped you’d understand by now. There’s us and there’s them. Us means me because I’m black, and it means you because I love you, and it means all the people who want to feel as we do about each other, and all the people who’ve never had a chance to feel anything. Things are changing so fast. Thi
ngs are getting very nasty and things happen more quickly and viciously and everyone says they couldn’t see them coming. I won’t lie; I see them coming. You remember St. Thomas and Puerto Rico. Those are the small things you are involved in every day if you’re a black man and your wife is white. They just put it to you that way; all they really want to do is to beat your ass good, but they don’t know that when they want that, they want your life, because things have changed and nothing is going to stop with an ass-beating anymore; it’s the whole thing or nothing—”
“Mox—”
“Let me finish, darling. I want to finish. I am sorry. I don’t mean for these people to do this to us; I won’t let them and this is the only way I know. Nothing else has worked. There seems to be no turning back from this need to apply force. They are at you and they understand nothing about the position they’ve put you in.
“The law in this country, just like in most countries, is for the privileged and if you’re white in America, you are privileged. We hope for the law to protect us, but it doesn’t. I’ve seen the White House break laws, and I am not about to console myself that if brought before the court for being in a street fight, I can count on a fair dispensation of justice. The other side has guns, Maggie, and power, everything serious killers should have to do their jobs. Without law on my side, I become the law; my guns are the law, and the only law people in any nation live by is the law of force or the threat of force. Love don’t do what a good ass-kickin’ can.
“I’ve worked too long and too hard and seen too much and know too much to go quietly if and when they come for me. I’m not Dutch, baby, I’m an American. What business do I have in Holland with Negroes who won’t face up to what’s really happening here? When you first started to learn to shoot, I hoped there was something in your European existence that would help you understand how necessary it is to learn to defend one’s self. Nine million people were murdered because they did not defend themselves, more people than in the armies and civilian forces that killed them. Now, that doesn’t make any kind of sense, does it?
The Man Who Cried I Am Page 38