The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  Today, when I entered, he was on the phone, in semi-drag. That is to say he had made up his great doe eyes, and Joan Crawford had nothing on him. He had on a simple, red lace hostess gown, a string of pearls. But he wasn’t wearing his “piece,” an expensive wig which originally belonged to a Hollywood studio. Without the wig, he looks like a very feminine dyke.

  Claudia was off on a blasting high, laughing madly into the jeweled, white phone. I poured a glass of grappa (a gift from an Italian sailor), and sat down. He might talk for an hour.

  Claudia patted his pomaded curls lovingly and bared his bold, white teeth. “Oh honey. Let me tell you. I brought this number home, and . . . Miss Thing! I had to put him through, put him through in the name. What? Oh please, Miss Thing. Built. Great, Greek muscles. Muscles, just gushing. Oh honey, quite facial. We had one old ball. I was so unlovely when I woke up. Not a curl in my head. Miss Bobby tried to get him and couldn’t. Greedy bitch. Miss Thing, I gotta hang up. Charlie. Yeah. Miss Thing, I’ve gotta hang up, child. Press, honey. Get something to grace my bed. Okay, child. Good-bye.”

  “Oh, honey,” Claudia sighed, banging down the receiver. He trotted over and sat down at his concert-size electric organ. There was also a large gold harp in front of the bay window.

  “Let’s sing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’,” Claudia said with great dignity.

  “Baby, what turned you on?” I asked.

  Claudia threw back his head and displayed the evil giveaway, his prominent Adam’s apple. “Child, your mother is stoned. The Queen’s head is tore up. But I must pray for those poor bastards.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Didn’t you read the paper? Didn’t you read about those children at the UN?”

  Claudia gave me a stick of pot. I lit up, taking a deep drag, and held it in my head. “Oh, yeah. You mean those Africans at the UN. I did glance at the headlines.”

  “Child. Those were no Africans. Those were BM’s from uptown. Harlem, child.”

  “You kidding?”

  The Grand Duchess struck a heavy trembling chord, blinking his great eyes. The bold, red mouth bordered on a big laugh. The jeweled hands waltzed over the keys. “Nearer my God to Thee. . . . Amen.”

  “Carry on, girl,” I said.

  “Jesus!” Claudia shouted. “I caught the BM’s on the eleven o’clock news. They were fighting like crazy. It took two guards to handle one child.”

  Claudia paused and shook his head, banging down on the organ. “I hope they show those damn fools on the Late Late Show. Jesus. Give me a drag. I’ve got more in the vault.”

  “What did the NAACP have to say?”

  “Child, those were Muslims or something. They’re not connected with the NAACP.”

  “That’s right,” I said, reaching for the pot. “Those NAACP bastards are too busy sucking ass in Washington. I wonder who’s blowing who in the Capitol?”

  “Oh, honey,” Claudia said with great drama, “I’d love to trip through the Pentagon in heavy drag and get myself a lovely general!”

  “That would be a test of real democracy.”

  Claudia and I turned on again and I left.

  Back to my own place, to my white-walled, dark room.

  TO SCORE ON THE SMART EASTSIDE without good connections, you have to know the right bartenders in the right bars who will set Johns up for a cut. But male and female hustlers are always telling me in sad voices, “Gee, kid, you should have been around during World War II. Or even the early fifties. Things jumped then. All you had to do was just walk down Third Avenue. You could even afford to be grand. Turn down tricks.”

  Now the scene has changed. Big new office and apartment buildings, bright new street lights, the cops clamping down like the great purge. Johns are also not as easy to come by. This is an age of elegance, stupidity, and fakery. Fags giving off an aura of wealth are often nothing more than glorified office boys, struggling like hell for the privilege of living in a walk-up on the East side. And those Harvard tones give under three martinis.

  Still, Third Avenue has a little seedy, fashionable charm and sometimes I wander over, step through all that rich dog shit which peppers the sidewalk like a mosaic and peer into antique shops, knowing that some freaklina will accost me. I’ll be picked up for ten-plus-drinks, or by a Vassar-type of girl who will want to discuss jazz.

  But that evening I had been walking around about an hour, and nothing was happening. I was getting fed up with freaklinas baiting me like a bitch in heat. I was certain two bulls had spotted me. They were in a blue-convertible at First Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. I saw them again at Third and Fifty-fourth. Two well-built young men, trying to strike the cool pose of the athlete, newspaper reporter, or gangster flunkie. They couldn’t make up their minds which was the more successful pose.

  I made it into a dimly lit Third Avenue bar, an expensive reproduction of an Irish saloon, pungent with the smell of advertising, tweeds, poodles, fashion-magazine women. The ratty denizens of that special small world: the overdeveloped cage of smart New Yorkers.

  I went to the bar and sat down next to a handsome woman with silver-blue hair, ordered a double scotch on the rocks. I would nurse this one and leave if nothing turned up.

  The woman and I were the only people alone. I sensed she knew this too, for shortly she turned her elegant face toward me. She had eyes like a half-closed rose. The simple black dress, the single strand of pearls, and the tired, bored expression on her face interested me. She looked swinging and damn sure of herself; most important, she seemed to be herself.

  Presently a white-haired old queen with a lined, sunlamp face minced up and boldly stated that I was the cutest little thing and could he buy me a drink? I shook my head, though I was damn careful to be charming.

  After the plucked queen left, the woman turned toward me again with the same, noncommital smile. Then she ordered another daiquiri, fumbled for a light. This was my cue.

  “Thank you,” she said after I had lit her cigarette. She returned to her private reserve of chilled rum and lime juice.

  Later the woman asked if I cared to go for a spin.

  The bar closed and we left together. The woman steered her big Chrysler like a man, making all the stoplights, going across the Queensboro bridge, going on until we were on Long Island. Far out. There was a chill in the air. I could smell the sea.

  Niki—that was the name she used on the fifth drink; on the second she had said: Mrs. Sally Overton Wythe—Niki lived in a stone ranch house as elegantly turned out as herself. As we entered a marble foyer, I thought how out of place I appeared in the Venetian gilt mirror above a Chinese console. I needed a haircut and was wearing a soiled, button-down shirt, and rumpled khaki trousers.

  We made small talk for an hour amid the cool tones of a harpsichord playing on an old Atwater Kent phonograph. Niki had expertly sidestepped my flirtations. The only thing she had done was caress my face in the foyer. Her soft hands sought out my face like a blind man groping for his favorite chair.

  “How smooth your skin is. Like baked bread. You remind me of my son, Robin. He was killed at prep school.”

  That had been all and finally I came on with, “It’s getting late. Let’s turn in.”

  Niki sat primly in her black Empire chair with both hands fingering a scotch. She closed her eyes like a woman who has never seen the dawn or the early morning light of peace. Perhaps she didn’t want to see.

  I couldn’t stand the silence. I took off my shirt, walked drunkenly bare chested and stood in front of Niki. I tilted her head back with my hand. She turned angrily. She cringed. I felt her body stiffen.

  “Don’t be so ladylike,” I taunted.

  I leaned over and put my hand on her shoulder. She held her breath, let it out in deep, spasmodic gasps.

  “Say the word, baby. It’s getting late.”

  Then I jerked her up from her chair and held her in my arms. With the hate people vomit up in moments of weakness I said, “Look a
t me, white woman. Look at what you want and what you don’t want. I know you’d pass me like the plague on the street. I know my looks got me through that front door. Otherwise back door, Boy! So, just say the word.”

  “Please,” Niki moaned, “please try to understand. . . .” She broke off. Her lips grazed my neck. Her tears ran down my bare chest.

  We went into her bedroom. A beautiful, cold, gray and white room. She was crying softly as we got into bed. I tried to comfort her grief and tears. I held her gently in my arms and stroked her silver hair until she went to sleep. If I knew or understood nothing else, I knew and understood loss and loneliness. It’s like having all your breath sucked up in a balloon or like when you are in a dark room alone and you are certain your heart is beating for the last time and it doesn’t matter. Anything is better than being aware of your own breathing.

  IT IS FIVE O’CLOCK. I look out my window at a Tiepolo sky above the towering buildings, solid, and unreal as death. Tiepolo’s mauve, pearl-white and soft blue clouds do not belong here in New York. Here where a pleasant breeze arrives and leaves as suddenly as if it had breathed on the wrong, maimed city. Even the policeman’s coffee-colored horse’s tail is stiff as a hairbrush.

  And there they go, there they go, those quick-stepping, laughing goons, the office workers. They have found their niche in this world and they are going to make damned sure that you know it and that you will not attempt anything foolish that threatens to destroy their world. Bourgeois right down to their underwear and there go my people too, like dark dots in a white field, black and white, shrill and coarse voices like mad hungry children. Clogged traffic groans from the city’s nausea. No, no, I do not belong down there.

  One of the monkeys from Tip Top parking is staring over at me. They all wear ill-fitting green uniforms. Why do you persist in staring? Is your life that empty?

  The diners at the Steak de Paris have a wonderful vignette: a gypsy baby standing on the elegant rear of a Cadillac, stark naked, eating an orange. The baby’s mother does a little hop and skipping dance, laughing, her huge, cat-shaped eyes zero in on an approaching sailor. The sailor in stiff white passes, placing his right hand over his crotch.

  There is no air. I watch the paralysis of mummified Americans waiting for their cars to take them back to suburbia.

  Now the sky is an evaporating pearl gray with watery mauve patterns. Evening is here like a heavy, hot, dusty, velvet curtain. The Grand Duchess, Claudia, is leaving with Lady P, his tiny Egyptian dog.

  Later, Shirley called and we quarreled as usual. “Sometimes I feel so close to you,” she once said. “And then at other times, I don’t feel anything. You’re here. I can see you. Oh, I just don’t know.”

  And then I heard the super call me. I did not answer. An oppressive stillness which I cannot break.

  I DO A LOT of messenger work for the theatrical world. It is very pleasant to hear the famous, husky voice of Tallulah Bankhead chiding her dogs. Irene Manning looks as lovely with pincurls in her hair as she does over footlights, and she certainly brews a fine cup of coffee. Julie Harris is understanding about the long walk crosstown on a bitter, snowy night. Eli Wallach and his wife, Anne Jackson, are always excited upon receiving scripts. But not all theatrical deliveries are to the famous. Sometimes the delivery will be to a young actor or actress on the way up.

  Such a delivery was my job the other afternoon to a young actor on the lower east side, on a side street in the bargain capital of Delancey and Orchard.

  It was a tenement. Plaster peeped through the dirty crayon, butterscotch-colored hallways. It was a sunny day but it was like dusk in this hall. I had to strike a match to read the names on the mailboxes. The actor’s name was not listed, or the name of the super. I would have to ask the tenants.

  I knocked on several doors and, getting no answer, walked up a flight of shaky stairs. A door was half-open and I heard a strange, painful noise.

  I knocked on the tin-covered door and stuck my head in. “Excuse me,” I said. A PR woman sat on the edge of a pink-covered bed. She looked up at me and then bowed her head as if in prayer. The painful noise was coming from her.

  There were two other PR women in the room in black dresses and black cotton stockings. They had fine mustaches and carefully braided white hair. They eyed me curiously.

  “Yes?” the woman on the bed asked. She folded her hands and bit her lips. “Police?”

  I couldn’t make head or tail of what had happened. The room smelled as if a thousand people had lived and died in it, although the window was open and the room was cheerful with starched, white curtains and green plants growing on the window ledge.

  “Media, media,” one of the old women said.

  I turned and saw that she was pointing at a small bundle lying in a corner of the room near an unpainted chest of drawers. The bundle lay on the glossy blue linoleum floor as if waiting to be picked up and taken away.

  I went over and examined the bundle. Inside lay a dead P.R. baby about a month old. He was naked and his head was turned on his left side. A circle of blood had dried and was caked around his mouth, and his little chubby hands were high above his head. There was a blue-black mark on his right cheek, as if he had fallen against something or had been hit or kicked.

  I re-covered the bundle and looked over at the woman sitting on the bed. Her whole body shook but she had stopped making that strange noise. She rubbed her hands together and looked at the two old women but she did not look at me.

  I held out a pack of cigarettes to her. She took one but her hand was shaking badly and I had to put the cigarette in her mouth. It fell from her lips. She put her hands over her mouth, trying to hold in that strange noise. I put my arms around her. She fell against my chest like a dead weight.

  One of the old women went into the kitchen and the other came over and stood and looked at me. Then the old woman returned from the kitchen with a cup of milk-coffee. I forced myself to drink it because it seemed the thing to do.

  Gradually the noise ceased and the woman asked for a cigarette. This time she could hold it. She took long, deep drags and said that her husband had come in drunk, demanding money. She would not give him money and so he beat her. In a final show of revenge, he had picked up the sleeping baby and had thrown him clear across the room.

  That had been last night. After he had left, the woman had called her two aunts who lived down the street. They had been sitting silently ever since, unable to move. It was funny, the woman said, sniffing, staring at the smoke billowing up toward the low ceiling, that no one had come to see her. Neighbors were always dropping in for coffee. But not today.

  I said I would go and call the police. The woman thanked me. The two old women followed me to the door, smiling. Later, I learned that the young actor had left the building ten days before for Brattleboro, Vermont.

  IT IS ONLY June and I am drunk with dreams of leaving New York, of going to Europe, going any place. I have always been a traveler. I remember the first time I left home. I was eight years old and Grandma had just bought me a pair of brown and white shoes. That summer afternoon I squeezed a couple of peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches into the shoe box and started out walking to my great-grandmother’s house. She lived in another town, thirty miles away. I had gotten three miles when a family friend spotted me on the highway.

  At fourteen I hitchhiked to Kansas City and St. Louis every weekend. It alarmed Grandma, but I had to move. What would a fourteen-year-old boy do alone in a city? Well, I walked and walked, met all types of people. I went to movies, museums, the library. I remember a little old lady in a Queen Mary hat who went around the library in Kansas City giving notes to young boys.

  “Are you lonely? Very well then. Come with me. I will feed you and cheer you up,” was scrawled on pink, scented stationery.

  I followed her one hot Saturday afternoon to a cluttered walk-up above a secondhand book store at Twelfth and Vine. Miss Sally lived with two dozen white pigeons which flew around the ta
upe-colored room. The roller piano tinkled merrily with barrel house music and Miss Sally danced around the room, a hop and skip, cooing like a drunken scarecrow. I refused to take off my shirt and refused the cup of hot chocolate, and later at the library, Miss Sally cut me dead, waltzed past my table humming “Little Black Sambo.”

  I remember arriving in Kansas City at four in the morning. I went to the bus station and parked out on a bench and had intended to go to sleep. A man came up and started a conversation. “Would I like to go to his place and sleep after a good breakfast?” I followed him home and, as I emerged from the shower, he put his arms around me and said, “Son, your eyes are closing. Get into bed.” I was too shy to ask what had happened to the heavy breakfast. I fell asleep and then, in the half-world of sleep and consciousness, I discovered something was happening to the lower part of my body. I was too afraid to scream, but I twisted and turned on that large bed, a Hollywood bed with an imitation ivory-and-leather headboard and with brass nails. I felt as though I were dying. Silently I prayed to God to let whatever was happening end. And then it was over. The man said, “Here, kid, take this two dollars and get the hell out of here. My wife will be home soon.”

  By the time I met Mr. X, as I named him, I was no neophyte. It was a rainy Saturday night and I was sitting in front of Jones’ Department Store. Mr. X sauntered up like an elegant giant in his pin-striped suit. His gold cufflinks gleamed in the darkness. He looked down at me, took the carnation from his lapel, threw it at my feet, and shot an explosion of French at me. He took my hand and we walked off in the rain, and this mad madman talked and talked. I wanted to leave. But he was more than six feet tall and I was a beanpole fifteen-year-old. We went to his beautiful, small pied à terre, as he called it. There were many paintings and books. Mr. X talked and talked and never once did he touch me. I remember that he said he was at the “menopause” of his life. I have often wondered if Mr. X killed himself.