Another Country, Page 2

  She looked at him, a little startled. Then, “I don’t know. I just wanted to see Harlem and so I went up there tonight to look around. And I just happened to pass that club and I heard the music and I went in and I stayed. I liked the music.” She gave him a mocking look. “Is that all right?”

  He laughed and said nothing.

  She turned from him as they heard the sound of the closing elevator door reverberate down the shaft. Then they heard the drone of the cables as the elevator began to descend. She watched the closed doors as though her life depended on it.

  “This your first time in New York?”

  Yes, it was, she told him, but she had been dreaming about it all her life— half-facing him again, with a little smile. There was something halting in her manner which he found very moving. She was like a wild animal who didn’t know whether to come to the outstretched hand or to flee and kept making startled little rushes, first in one direction and then in the other.

  “I was born here,” he said, watching her.

  “I know,” she said, “so it can’t seem as wonderful to you as it does to me.”

  He laughed again. He remembered, suddenly, his days in boot camp in the South and felt again the shoe of a white officer against his mouth. He was in his white uniform, on the ground, against the red, dusty clay. Some of his colored buddies were holding him, were shouting in his ear, helping him to rise. The white officer, with a curse, had vanished, had gone forever beyond the reach of vengeance. His face was full of clay and tears and blood; he spat red blood into the red dust.

  The elevator came and the doors opened. He took her arm as they entered and held it close against his chest. “I think you’re a real sweet girl.”

  “You’re nice, too,” she said. In the closed, rising elevator her voice had a strange trembling in it and her body was also trembling— very faintly, as though it were being handled by the soft spring wind outside.

  He tightened his pressure on her arm. “Didn’t they warn you down home about the darkies you’d find up North?”

  She caught her breath. “They didn’t never worry me none. People’s just people as far as I’m concerned.”

  And pussy’s just pussy as far as I’m concerned, he thought— but was grateful, just the same, for her tone. It gave him an instant to locate himself. For he, too, was trembling slightly.

  “What made you come North?” he asked.

  He wondered if he should proposition her or wait for her to proposition him. He couldn’t beg. But perhaps she could. The hairs of his groin began to itch slightly. The terrible muscle at the base of his belly began to grow hot and hard.

  The elevator came to a halt, the doors opened, and they walked a long corridor toward a half-open door.

  She said, “I guess I just couldn’t take it down there any more. I was married but then I broke up with my husband and they took away my kid— they wouldn’t even let me see him— and I got to thinking that rather than sit down there and go crazy, I’d try to make a new life for myself up here.”

  Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble. But he shook the suggestion off. He wouldn’t be around long enough to be bugged by her story. He just wanted her for tonight.

  He knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. Straight ahead of them, in the large living room which ended in open French doors and a balcony, more than a hundred people milled about, some in evening dress, some in slacks and sweaters. High above their heads hung an enormous silver ball which reflected unexpected parts of the room and managed its own unloving comment on the people in it. The room was so active with coming and going, so bright with jewelry and glasses and cigarettes, that the heavy ball seemed almost to be alive.

  His host— whom he did not really know very well— was nowhere in sight. To the right of them were three rooms, the first of which was piled high with wraps and overcoats.

  The horn of Charlie Parker, coming over the hi-fi, dominated all the voices in the room.

  “Put your coat down,” he told Leona, “and I’ll try to find out if I know anybody in this joint.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I’m sure you know them all.”

  “Go on, now,” he said, smiling, and pushing her gently into the room, “do like I tell you.”

  While she was putting away her coat— and powdering her nose, probably— he remembered that he had promised to call Vivaldo. He wandered through the house, looking for a relatively isolated telephone, and found one in the kitchen.

  He dialed Vivaldo’s number.

  “Hello, baby. How’re you?”

  “Oh, all right, I guess. What’s happening? I thought you were going to call me sooner. I’d just about given you up.”

  “Well, I only just made it up here.” He dropped his voice, for a couple had entered the kitchen, a blonde girl with a disarrayed Dutch bob and a tall Negro. The girl leaned against the sink, the boy stood before her, rubbing his hands slowly along the outside of her thighs. They barely glanced at Rufus. “A whole lot of elegant squares around, you dig?”

  “Yeah,” said Vivaldo. There was a pause. “You think it’s worthwhile making it up there?”

  “Well, hell, I don’t know. If you got something better to do—”

  “Jane’s here,” Vivaldo said, quickly. Rufus realized that Jane was probably lying on the bed, listening.

  “Oh, you got your grandmother with you, you don’t need nothing up here then.” He did not like Jane, who was somewhat older than Vivaldo, with prematurely gray hair. “Ain’t nothing up here old enough for you.”

  “That’s enough, you bastard.” He heard Jane’s voice and Vivaldo’s, murmuring; he could not make out what was being said. Then Vivaldo’s voice was at his ear again. “I think I’ll skip it.”

  “I guess you better. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Maybe I’ll come by your pad—?”

  “Okay. Don’t let grandma wear you out now; they tell me women get real ferocious when they get as old as she is.”

  “They can’t get too ferocious for me, dad!”

  Rufus laughed. “You better quit trying to compete with me. You ain’t never going to make it. So long.”

  “So long.”

  He hung up, smiling, and went to find Leona. She stood helplessly in the foyer, watching the host and hostess saying good night to several people.

  “Think I’d deserted you?”

  “No. I knew you wouldn’t do that.”

  He smiled at her and touched her on the chin with his fist. The host turned away from the door and came over to them.

  “You kids go on inside and get yourselves a drink,” he said. “Go on in and get with it.” He was a big, handsome, expansive man, older and more ruthless than he looked, who had fought his way to the top in show business via several of the rougher professions, including boxing and pimping. He owed his present eminence more to his vitality and his looks than he did to his voice, and he knew it. He was not the kind of man who fooled himself and Rufus liked him because he was rough and good-natured and generous. But Rufus was also a little afraid of him; there was that about him, in spite of his charm, which did not encourage intimacy. He was a great success with women, whom he treated with a large, affectionate contempt, and he was now on his fourth wife.

  He took Leona and Rufus by the arm and walked them to the edge of the party. “We might have us some real doings if these squares ever get out of here,” he said. “Stick around.”

  “How does it feel to be respectable?” Rufus grinned.

  “Shit. I been respectable all my life. It’s these respectable motherfuckers been doing all the dirt. They been stealing the colored folks blind, man. And niggers helping them do it.” He laughed. “You know, every time they give me one of them great big checks I think to myself, they just giving me back a little bit of what they been stealing all these years, you know what I mean?” He clapped Rufus on the back.
“See that Little Eva has a good time.”

  The crowd was already thinning, most of the squares were beginning to drift away. Once they were gone, the party would change character and become very pleasant and quiet and private. The lights would go down, the music become softer, the talk more sporadic and more sincere. Somebody might sing or play the piano. They might swap stories of the laughs they’d had, gigs they’d played, riffs they remembered, or the trouble they’d seen. Somebody might break out with some pot and pass it slowly around, like the pipe of peace. Somebody, curled on a rug in a far corner of the room, would begin to snore. Whoever danced would dance more languorously, holding tight. The shadows of the room would be alive. Toward the very end, as morning and the brutal sounds of the city began their invasion through the wide French doors, somebody would go into the kitchen and break out with some coffee. Then they would raid the icebox and go home. The host and hostess would finally make it between their sheets and stay in bed all day.

  From time to time Rufus found himself glancing upward at the silver ball in the ceiling, always just failing to find himself and Leona reflected there.

  “Let’s go out to the balcony,” he said to her.

  She held out her glass. “Freshen my drink first?” Her eyes were now very bright and mischievous and she looked like a little girl.

  He walked to the table and poured two very powerful drinks. He went back to her. “Ready?”

  She took her glass and they stepped through the French doors.

  “Don’t let Little Eva catch cold!” the host called.

  He called back. “She may burn, baby, but she sure won’t freeze!”

  Directly before and beneath them stretched the lights of the Jersey shore. He seemed, from where he stood, to hear a faint murmur coming from the water.

  When a child he had lived on the eastern edge of Harlem, a block from the Harlem River. He and other children had waded into the water from the garbage-heavy bank or dived from occasional rotting promontories. One summer a boy had drowned there. From the stoop of his house Rufus had watched as a small group of people crossed Park Avenue, beneath the heavy shadow of the railroad tracks, and come into the sun, one man in the middle, the boy’s father, carrying the boy’s unbelievably heavy, covered weight. He had never forgotten the bend of the man’s shoulders or the stunned angle of his head. A great screaming began from the other end of the block and the boy’s mother, her head tied up, wearing her bathrobe, stumbling like a drunken woman, began running toward the silent people.

  He threw back his shoulders, as though he were casting off a burden, and walked to the edge of the balcony where Leona stood. She was staring up the river, toward the George Washington Bridge.

  “It’s real beautiful,” she said, “it’s just so beautiful.”

  “You seem to like New York,” he said.

  She turned and looked at him and sipped her drink. “Oh, I do. Can I trouble you for a cigarette now?”

  He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her, then lit one for himself. “How’re you making it up here?”

  “Oh, I’m doing just fine,” she said. “I’m waiting tables in a restaurant way downtown, near Wall Street, that’s a real pretty part of town, and I’m rooming with two other girls”— they couldn’t go to her place, anyway!— “and, oh, I’m doing just fine.” And she looked up at him with her sad-sweet, poor-white smile.

  Again something warned him to stop, to leave this poor little girl alone; and at the same time the fact that he thought of her as a poor little girl caused him to smile with real affection, and he said, “You’ve got a lot of guts, Leona.”

  “Got to, the way I look at it,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’ll just give up. But— how do you give up?”

  She looked so lost and comical that he laughed out loud and, after a moment, she laughed too.

  “If my husband could see me now,” and she giggled, “my, my, my!”

  “Why, what would your husband say?” he asked her.

  “Why— I don’t know.” But her laugh didn’t come this time. She looked at him as though she were slowly coming out of a dream. “Say— do you think I could have another drink?”

  “Sure, Leona,” and he took her glass and their hands and their bodies touched for a moment. She dropped her eyes. “Be right back,” he said, and dropped back into the room, in which the lights now were dim. Someone was playing the piano.

  “Say, man, how you coming with Eva?” the host asked.

  “Fine, fine, we lushing it up.”

  “That ain’t nowhere. Blast Little Eva with some pot. Let her get her kicks.”

  “I’ll see to it that she gets her kicks,” he said.

  “Old Rufus left her out there digging the Empire State building, man,” said the young saxophonist, and laughed.

  “Give me some of that,” Rufus said, and somebody handed him a stick and he took a few drags.

  “Keep it, man. It’s choice.”

  He made a couple of drinks and stood in the room for a moment, finishing the pot and digging the piano. He felt fine, clean, on top of everything, and he had a mild buzz on when he got back to the balcony.

  “Is everybody gone home?” she asked, anxiously. “It’s so quiet in there.”

  “No,” he said, “they just sitting around.” She seemed prettier suddenly, and softer, and the river lights fell behind her like a curtain. This curtain seemed to move as she moved, heavy and priceless and dazzling. “I didn’t know,” he said, “that you were a princess.”

  He gave her her drink and their hands touched again. “I know you must he drunk,” she said, happily, and now, over her drink, her eyes unmistakably called him.

  He waited. Everything seemed very simple now. He played with her fingers. “You seen anything you want since you been in New York?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I want it all!”

  “You see anything you want right now?”

  Her fingers stiffened slightly but he held on. “Go ahead. Tell me. You ain’t got to be afraid.” These words then echoed in his head. He had said this before, years ago, to someone else. The wind grew cold for an instant, blowing around his body and ruffling her hair. Then it died down.

  “Do you?” she asked faintly.

  “Do I what?”

  “See anything you want?”

  He realized that he was high from the way his fingers seemed hung up in hers and from the way he was staring at her throat. He wanted to put his mouth there and nibble it slowly, leaving it black and blue. At the same time he realized how far they were above the city and the lights below seemed to be calling him. He walked to the balcony’s edge and looked over. Looking straight down, he seemed to be standing on a cliff in the wilderness, seeing a kingdom and a river which had not been seen before. He could make it his, every inch of the territory which stretched beneath and around him now, and, unconsciously, he began whistling a tune and his foot moved to find the pedal of his drum. He put his drink down carefully on the balcony floor and beat a riff with his fingers on the stone parapet.

  “You never answered my question.”

  “What?”

  He turned to face Leona, who held her drink cupped in both her hands and whose brow was quizzically lifted over her despairing eyes and her sweet smile.

  “You never answered mine.”

  “Yes, I did.” She sounded more plaintive than ever. “I said I wanted it all.”

  He took her drink from her and drank half of it, then gave the glass back, moving into the darkest part of the balcony.

  “Well, then,” he whispered, “come and get it.”

  She came toward him, holding her glass against her breasts. At the very last moment, standing directly before him, she whispered in bafflement and rage, “What are you trying to do to me?”

  “Honey,” he answered, “I’m doing it,” and he pulled her to him as roughly as he could. He had expected her to resist and she did, holding the glass between them and frantically trying to pull her
body away from his body’s touch. He knocked the glass out of her hand and it fell dully to the balcony floor, rolling away from them. Go ahead, he thought humorously; if I was to let you go now you’d be so hung up you’d go flying over this balcony, most likely. He whispered, “Go ahead, fight. I like it. Is this the way they do down home?”

  “Oh God,” she murmured, and began to cry. At the same time, she ceased struggling. Her hands came up and touched his face as though she were blind. Then she put her arms around his neck and clung to him, still shaking. His lips and his teeth touched her ears and her neck and he told her. “Honey, you ain’t got nothing to cry about yet.”

  Yes, he was high; every thing he did he watched himself doing, and he began to feel a tenderness for Leona which he had not expected to feel. He tried, with himself, to make amends for what he was doing— for what he was doing to her. Everything seemed to take a very long time. He got hung up on her breasts, standing out like mounds of yellow cream, and the tough, brown, tasty nipples, playing and nuzzling and nibbling while she moaned and whimpered and her knees sagged. He gently lowered them to the floor, pulling her on top of him. He held her tightly at the hip and the shoulder. Part of him was worried about the host and hostess and the other people in the room but another part of him could not stop the crazy thing which had begun. Her fingers opened his shirt to the navel, her tongue burned his neck and his chest; and his hands pushed up her skirt and caressed the inside of her thighs. Then, after a long, high time, while he shook beneath every accelerating tremor of her body, he forced her beneath him and he entered her. For a moment he thought she was going to scream, she was so tight and caught her breath so sharply, and stiffened so. But then she moaned, she moved beneath him. Then, from the center of his rising storm, very slowly and deliberately, he began the slow ride home.

  And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep. They murmured and sobbed on this journey, he softly, insistently cursed. Each labored to reach a harbor: there could be no rest until this motion became unbearably accelerated by the power that was rising in them both. Rufus opened his eyes for a moment and watched her face, which was transfigured with agony and gleamed in the darkness like alabaster. Tears hung in the corners of her eyes and the hair at her brow was wet. Her breath came with moaning and short cries, with words he couldn’t understand, and in spite of himself he began moving faster and thrusting deeper. He wanted her to remember him the longest day she lived. And, shortly, nothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs. She began to cry. I told you, he moaned, I’d give you something to cry about, and, at once, he felt himself strangling, about to explode or die. A moan and a curse tore through him while he beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies.