“Well, you can’t. So please start trying to forget it.”
Rufus thought, But it’s not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can’t forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It’s not possible to forget anybody you’ve destroyed.
He took a great swallow of his bourbon, holding it in his mouth, then allowing it to trickle down his throat. He would never be able to forget Leona’s pale, startled eyes, her sweet smile, her plaintive drawl, her thin, insatiable body.
He choked slightly, put down his drink, and ground out his cigarette in the spilling ashtray.
“I bet you won’t believe this,” he said, “but I loved Leona. I did.”
“Oh,” said Vivaldo, “believe you! Of course I believe you. That’s what all the bleeding was about.”
He got up and turned the record over. Then there was silence, except for the voice of Bessie Smith.
When my bed get empty, make me feel awful mean and blue,
“Oh, sing it, Bessie,” Vivaldo muttered.
My springs is getting rusty, sleeping single like I do.
Rufus picked up his drink and finished it.
“Did you ever have the feeling,” he asked, “that a woman was eating you up? I mean— no matter what she was like or what else she was doing— that that’s what she was really doing?”
“Yes,” said Vivaldo.
Rufus stood. He walked up and down.
“She can’t help it. And you can’t help it. And there you are.” He paused. “Of course, with Leona and me— there was lots of other things, too—”
Then there was a long silence. They listened to Bessie.
“Have you ever wished you were queer?” Rufus asked, suddenly.
Vivaldo smiled, looking into his glass. “I used to think maybe I was. Hell, I think I even wished I was.” He laughed. “But I’m not. So I’m stuck.”
Rufus walked to Vivaldo’s window. “So you been all up and down that street, too,” he said.
“We’ve all been up the same streets. There aren’t a hell of a lot of streets. Only, we’ve been taught to lie so much, about so many things, that we hardly ever know where we are.”
Rufus said nothing. He walked up and down.
Vivaldo said, “Maybe you should stay here, Rufus, for a couple of days, until you decide what you want to do.”
“I don’t want to bug you, Vivaldo.”
Vivaldo picked up Rufus’ empty glass and paused in the archway which led into his kitchen. “You can lie here in the mornings and look at my ceiling. It’s full of cracks, it makes all kinds of pictures. Maybe it’ll tell you things it hasn’t told me. I’ll fix us another drink.”
Again he felt that he was smothering. “Thanks, Vivaldo.”
Vivaldo dragged his ice out and poured two drinks. He came back into the room. “Here. To all the things we don’t know.”
They drank.
“You had me worried,” said Vivaldo. “I’m glad you’re back.”
“I’m glad to see you,” said Rufus.
“Your sister left me a phone number to call in case I saw you. It’s the lady who lives next door to you. I guess maybe I should call her now.”
“No,” said Rufus, after a moment, “it’s too late. I’ll go on up there in the morning.” And this thought, the thought of seeing his parents and his sister in the morning, checked and chilled him. He sat down again in the easy chair and leaned back with his hands over his eyes.
“Rufus,” Leona had said— time and again— “ain’t nothing wrong in being colored.”
Sometimes, when she said this, he simply looked at her coldly, from a great distance, as though he wondered what on earth she was trying to say. His look seemed to accuse her of ignorance and indifference. And, as she watched his face, her eyes became more despairing than ever but at the same time filled with some immense sexual secret which tormented her.
He had put off going back to work until he began to be afraid to go to work.
Sometimes, when she said that there was nothing wrong in being colored, he answered,
“Not if you a hard-up white lady.”
The first time he said this, she winced and said nothing. The second time she slapped him. And he slapped her. They fought all the time. They fought each other with their hands and their voices and then with their bodies: and the one storm was like the other. Many times— and now Rufus sat very still, pressing darkness against his eyes, listening to the music— he had, suddenly, without knowing that he was going to, thrown the whimpering, terrified Leona onto the bed, the floor, pinned her against a table or a wall; she beat at him, weakly, moaning, unutterably abject; he twisted his fingers in her long pale hair and used her in whatever way he felt would humiliate her most. It was not love he felt during these acts of love: drained and shaking, utterly unsatisfied, he fled from the raped white woman into the bars. In these bars no one applauded his triumph or condemned his guilt. He began to pick fights with white men. He was thrown out of bars. The eyes of his friends told him that he was falling. His own heart told him so. But the air through which he rushed was his prison and he could not even summon the breath to call for help.
Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can’t fall any farther. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.
“I don’t want to die,” he heard himself say, and he began to cry.
The music went on, far from him, terribly loud. The lights were very bright and hot. He was sweating and he itched, he stank. Vivaldo was close to him, stroking his head; the stuff of Vivaldo’s sweater stifled him. He wanted to stop crying, stand up, breathe, but he could only sit there with his face in his hands. Vivaldo murmured, “Go ahead, baby, let it out, let it all out.” He wanted to stand up, breathe, and at the same time he wanted to lie flat on the floor and to be swallowed into whatever would stop this pain.
Yet, he was aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, that nothing would stop it, nothing: this was himself. Rufus was aware of every inch of Rufus. He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within this body had driven him into such a desolate place. The most impenetrable of mysteries moved in this darkness for less than a second, hinting of reconciliation. And still the music continued, Bessie was saying that she wouldn’t mind being in jail but she had to stay there so long.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and raised his head.
Vivaldo gave him a handkerchief and he dried his eyes and blew his nose.
“Don’t be sorry,” said Vivaldo. “Be glad.” He stood over Rufus for yet another moment, then he said, “I’m going to take you out and buy you a pizza. You hungry, child, that’s why you carrying on like that.” He went into the kitchen and began to wash his face. Rufus smiled, watching him, bent over the sink, under the hideous light.
It was like the kitchen in St. James Slip. He and Leona had ended their life together there, on the very edge of the island. When Rufus had ceased working and when all his money was gone, and there was nothing left to pawn, they were wholly dependent on the money Leona brought home from the restaurant. Then she lost this job. Their domestic life, which involved a hideous amount of drinking, made it difficult for her to get there on time and also caused her to look more and more disreputable. One evening, half-drunk, Rufus had gone to the restaurant to pick her up. The next day she was fired. She never held a steady job again.
One evening Vivaldo came to visit them in their last apartment. They heard the whistles of tugboats all day and all night long. Vivaldo found Leona sitting on the bathroom floor, her hair in her eyes, her face swollen and dirty with weeping. Rufus had been beating her. He sat silently on the bed.
“Why?” cried Vivaldo.
“I don’t know,” Leona sob
bed, “it can’t be for nothing I did. He’s always beating me, for nothing, for nothing!” She gasped for breath, opening her mouth like an infant, and in that instant Vivaldo really hated Rufus and Rufus knew it. “He says I’m sleeping with other colored boys behind his back and it’s not true, God knows it’s not true!”
“Rufus knows it isn’t true,” Vivaldo said. He looked over at Rufus, who said nothing. He turned back to Leona. “Get up, Leona. Stand up. Wash your face.”
He went into the bathroom and helped her to her feet and turned the water on. “Come on, Leona. Pull yourself together, like a good girl.”
She tried to stop sobbing, and splashed water on her face. Vivaldo patted her on the shoulder, astonished all over again to realize how frail she was. He walked into the bedroom.
Rufus looked up at him. “This is my house,” he said, “and that’s my girl. You ain’t got nothing to do with this. Get your ass out of here.”
“You could be killed for this,” said Vivaldo. “All she has to do is yell. All I have to do is walk down to the corner and get a cop.”
“You trying to scare me? Go get a cop.”
“You must be out of your mind. They’d take one look at this situation and put you under the jailhouse.” He walked to the bathroom door. “Come on, Leona. Get your coat. I’m taking you out of here.”
“I’m not out of my mind,” Rufus said, “but you are. Where you think you taking Leona?”
“I got no place to go,” Leona muttered.
“Well, you can stay at my place until you find some place to go. I’m not leaving you here.”
Rufus threw back his head and laughed. Vivaldo and Leona both turned to watch him. Rufus cried to the ceiling, “He’s going to come to my house and walk out with my girl and he thinks this poor nigger’s just going to sit and let him do it. Ain’t this a bitch?”
He fell over on his side, still laughing.
Vivaldo shouted, “For Christ’s sake, Rufus! Rufus!”
Rufus stopped laughing and sat straight up. “What? Who the hell do you think you’re kidding? I know you only got one bed in your place!”
“Oh, Rufus,” Leona wailed, “Vivaldo’s only trying to help.”
“You shut up,” he said instantly, and looked at her.
“Everybody ain’t a animal,” she muttered.
“You mean, like me?”
She said nothing. Vivaldo watched them both.
“You mean, like me, bitch? Or you mean, like you?”
“If I’m a animal,” she flared— perhaps she was emboldened by the presence of Vivaldo— “I’d like you to tell me who made me one. Just tell me that?”
“Why, your husband did, you bitch. You told me yourself he had a thing on him like a horse. You told me yourself how he did you— he kept telling you how he had the biggest thing in Dixie, black or white. And you said you couldn’t stand it. Ha-ha. That’s one of the funniest things I ever heard.”
“I guess,” she said, wearily, after a silence, “I told you a lot of things I shouldn’t have.”
Rufus snorted. “I guess you did.” He said— to Vivaldo, the room, the river— “it was her husband ruined this bitch. Your husband and all them funky niggers screwed you in the Georgia bushes. That’s why your husband threw you out. Why don’t you tell the truth? I wouldn’t have to beat you if you’d tell the truth.” He grinned at Vivaldo. “Man, this chick can’t get enough”— and he broke off, staring at Leona.
“Rufus,” said Vivaldo, trying to be calm, “I don’t know what you’re putting down. I think you must be crazy. You got a great chick, who’d go all the way for you— and you know it— and you keep coming on with this Gone with the Wind crap. What’s the matter with your head, baby?” He tried to smile. “Baby, please don’t do this. Please?”
Rufus said nothing. He sat down on the bed, in the position in which he had been sitting when Vivaldo arrived.
“Come on, Leona,” said Vivaldo at last and Rufus stood up, looking at them both with a little smile, with hatred.
“I’m just going to take her away for a few days, so you can both cool down. There’s no point in going on like this.”
“Sir Walter Raleigh— with a hard on,” Rufus sneered.
“Look,” said Vivaldo, “if you don’t trust me, man, I’ll get a room at the Y. I’ll come back here. Goddammit,” he shouted, “I’m not trying to steal your girl. You know me better than that.”
Rufus said, with an astonishing and a menacing humility, “I guess you don’t think she’s good enough for you.”
“Oh, shit. You don’t think she’s good enough for you.”
“No,” said Leona, and both men turned to watch her, “ain’t neither one of you got it right. Rufus don’t think he’s good enough for me.”
She and Rufus stared at each other. A tugboat whistled, far away. Rufus smiled.
“You see? You bring it up all the time. You the one who brings it up. Now, how you expect me to make it with a bitch like you?”
“It’s the way you was raised,” she said, “and I guess you just can’t help it.”
Again, there was a silence. Leona pressed her lips together and her eyes filled with tears. She seemed to wish to call the words back, to call time back, and begin everything over again. But she could not think of anything to say and the silence stretched. Rufus pursed his lips.
“Go on, you slut,” he said, “go on and make it with your wop lover. He ain’t going to be able to do you no good. Not now. You be back. You can’t do without me now.” And he lay face downward on the bed. “Me, I’ll get me a good night’s sleep for a change.”
Vivaldo pushed Leona to the door, backing out of the room, watching Rufus.
“I’ll be back,” he said.
“No, you won’t,” said Rufus. “I’ll kill you if you come back.”
Leona looked at him quickly, bidding him to be silent, and Vivaldo closed the door behind them.
“Leona,” he asked, when they were in the streets, “how long have things been like this? Why do you take it?”
“Why,” asked Leona, wearily, “do people take anything? Because they can’t help it, I guess. Well, that’s me. Before God, I don’t know what to do.” She began to cry again. The streets were very dark and empty. “I know he’s sick and I keep hoping he’ll get well and I can’t make him see a doctor. He knows I’m not doing none of those things he says, he knows it!”
“But you can’t go on like this, Leona. He can get both of you killed.”
“He says it’s me trying to get us killed.” She tried to laugh. “He had a fight last week with some guy in the subway, some real, ignorant, unhappy man just didn’t like the idea of our being together, you know? and, well, you know, he blamed that fight on me. He said I was encouraging the man. Why, Viv, I didn’t even see the man until he opened his mouth. But, Rufus, he’s all the time looking for it, he sees it where it ain’t, he don’t see nothing else no more. He says I ruined his life. Well, he sure ain’t done mine much good.”
She tried to dry her eyes. Vivaldo gave her his handkerchief and put one arm around her shoulders.
“You know, the world is hard enough and people is evil enough without all the time looking for it and stirring it up and making it worse. I keep telling him, I know a lot of people don’t like what I’m doing. But I don’t care, let them go their way, I’ll go mine.”
A policeman passed them, giving them a look. Vivaldo felt a chill go through Leona’s body. Then a chill went through his own. He had never been afraid of policemen before; he had merely despised them. But now he felt the impersonality of the uniform, the emptiness of the streets. He felt what the policeman might say and do if he had been Rufus, walking here with his arm around Leona.
He said, nevertheless, after a moment, “You ought to leave him. You ought to leave town.”
“I tell you, Viv, I keep hoping— it’ll all come all right somehow. He wasn’t like this when I met him, he’s not really like this at all. I know he
’s not. Something’s got all twisted up in his mind and he can’t help it.”
They were standing under a street lamp. Her face was hideous, was unutterably beautiful with grief. Tears rolled down her thin cheeks and she made doomed, sporadic efforts to control the trembling of her little-girl’s mouth.
“I love him,” she said, helplessly, “I love him, I can’t help it. No matter what he does to me. He’s just lost and he beats me because he can’t find nothing else to hit.”
He pulled her against him while she wept, a thin, tired girl, unwitting heiress of generations of bitterness. He could think of nothing to say. A light was slowly turning on inside him, a dreadful light. He saw— dimly— dangers, mysteries, chasms which he had never dreamed existed.
“Here comes a taxi,” he said.
She straightened and tried to dry her eyes again.
“I’ll come with you,” he said, “and come right back?”
“No,” she said, “just give me the keys. I’ll be all right. You go on back to Rufus.”
“Rufus said he’d kill me,” he said, half-smiling.
The taxi stopped beside them. He gave her his keys.
She opened the door, keeping her face away from the driver.
“Rufus ain’t going to kill nobody but himself,” she said, “if he don’t find a friend to help him.” She paused, half-in, half-out of the cab. “You the only friend he’s got in the world, Vivaldo.”
He gave her some money for the fare, looking at her with something, after all these months, explicit at last between them. They both loved Rufus. And they were both white. Now that it stared them so hideously in the face, each could see how desperately the other had been trying to avoid this confrontation.
“You’ll go there now?” he asked. “You’ll go to my place?”
“Yes. I’ll go. You go on back to Rufus. Maybe you can help him. He needs somebody to help him.”
Vivaldo gave the driver his address and watched the taxi roll away. He turned and started back the way they had come.
The way seemed longer, now that he was alone, and darker. His awareness of the policeman, prowling somewhere in the darkness near him, made the silence ominous. He felt threatened. He felt totally estranged from the city in which he had been born; this city for which he sometimes felt a kind of stony affection because it was all he knew of home. Yet he had no home here— the hovel on Bank Street was not a home. He had always supposed that he would, one day, make a home here for himself. Now he began to wonder if anyone could ever put down roots in this rock; or, rather, he began to be aware of the shapes acquired by those who had. He began to wonder about his own shape.
Another Country Page 6
