The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  “Wouldn’t you like something stronger?” Jim asked.

  Laura reflects on this. “All right. All right, Jim boy,” she said slowly.

  Jim went over to the sofa and took a fifth of whiskey from his beach bag. He placed it on the table with the air of a man planning an experiment. I was glad he was not a loud drunk, despite his problems.

  “The glasses, Charles,” Laura said, giving me a hard stare.

  “You know where they are, love juice.”

  “All right, you kook. But get the ice. You haven’t defrosted that thing in a year.”

  Laura followed me into the kitchen. “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Nothing, dear,” Laura whispered. “Jim’s a little mixed up. I thought perhaps you’d talk to him. That’s all.”

  “Are you two making it?”

  “Not so loud,” Laura warned.

  We went back to the living room. Jim was opening another can of beer and looked up, frowning, as if we had invaded his privacy. It made me uncomfortable, but Laura smiled gaily. “Oh, we’re going to have a wonderful party, aren’t we, Charles?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, because in my world the word ‘party’ takes on many meanings.

  “I’ll have mine straight,” Jim said. “With the beer. That’s the way my fucking old man drinks. Bald-headed old lush.”

  Baby, I told myself, this isn’t going to be a very cool afternoon. I’m sick of these emotional jerks. If Junior gets out of hand, we’ll rumble.

  “Charles, see if you can get a little decent jazz on the radio,” Laura said.

  “I like jazz,” Jim said quickly. “Jazz is my speed.”

  I turned on the old, dependable, Zenith AM-FM just in time to catch Lady Day with “Fine and Mellow.”

  “This is a groove,” I said happily. “Quick girl! Give me a shot of that man-killer.” I’ve discovered that drinking and jazz go hand in hand. A wonderful tranquilizer. Problems do not get less, but I can see them more clearly, or think I can. I was thinking about this when Jim said, “Laura, why don’t you and Charles dance?”

  “I’m not much of a dancer,” I threw in quickly.

  “I’d much rather dance with you, Jim,” Laura said smiling. “Charles is a wonderful audience.”

  “I like a slow dance,” I said.

  “That’s a slow number,” Jim said.

  “I’ll sit this one out.”

  “Shall we dance, Jim?” Laura said sweetly, offering her quick, vibrating hand.

  Jim got up and took her hand carefully, diffidently, like a young man aware of the eyes of a chaperone. His dancing was nothing to write home about, but it was intense. I watched them dance without really moving across the floor.

  The afternoon waned: three o’clock, a darkened sky, a faint warm breeze. The radio music is smooth now, sentimental, semiclassic in the popular vein. Music for those poignant American Saturday nights, for those quiet American Sunday afternoons, music something like a golden bell, promising that tomorrow will be better. Jazz, good jazz, tells no such lies.

  These thoughts cross my mind as I put the whiskey down. Laura and Jim have gone into the bedroom. The whiskey will be of no use to them, so I pour myself another. If I have to be bothered with the tangled lives of others . . . well, let the bastards pay me for it.

  “Charles,” Laura calls. Her voice sounds tired. “Charles, come here.” For some reason I freeze and call out nervously, “What do you want? Cigarettes?”

  They are lying on the sturdy narrow bed, naked. Jim is nestled in the curve of Laura’s arm, staring up at the ceiling: His eyes are glazed, reflecting, perhaps, his world of dreams. It is not a happy world, judging from his taut face. Laura looks up, sighing, a pleading expression on her face. “Light me a cigarette, will you, Charles?” she said in a polite voice.

  I lit the cigarette and gave it to her and stood against the wall with my arms folded, waiting to see what would develop. But, to tell the truth, I’m bored with sex scenes.

  “I should be punished,” Jim said quietly.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Jim’s voice bordered on a cry. “I can’t make it with Laura, I can’t make it with anyone, because I think it’s dirty! I have all these feelings of guilt. I can’t sleep at night.”

  “In that case, you shouldn’t do these things,” I said. “Then you could sleep.”

  Jim got up slowly and began to put on his clothes. “You make it with her,” he said and went into the living room and closed the door.

  I lay down fully clothed beside Laura and took the cigarette from her trembling hand and put it in the ashtray on the bedside table. Then I put my arms around her. She began to cry. There seemed nothing to say or do, so I just held her and let her cry. I could hear Jim typing in the living room.

  Finally Laura went to sleep and I went into the living room. Jim had gone. There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter and I went over and read it.

  “This is for Charles,” it started out, and went on in a drunken, mucked-up way, obscene and pitiful, for a dozen ill-typed lines or so, and ended with a string of X’s savagely punched almost through the paper.

  I don’t know why, but that series of X’s made me want to cry. Something rose and fell in me like a dead weight. What did I know or care about Jim, a lanky, twenty-two-year-old IBM tab operator who liked good books, wanted to save the world, was fond of jazz, no longer believed in God, but couldn’t make the scene. He’s not your problem, I told myself. Nor is Laura, or Mitch, or Jelly, or Lena. None of them. Not a fucking one of them. You are your own problem, I said.

  And if that wasn’t enough, just then the super came barging in and said that I would definitely have to move. The Housing people meant business. There wouldn’t be a stay of execution this time. I would have to give up my plantation, this priceless midtown pad.

  IT IS MORNING. I’m on the second cigarette and the first cup of coffee. It is a time of stocktaking, and what is there to see? A fairly young man with a tired boyish face, saddled with the knowledge of years and nothing gained, lacking a bird dog’s sense of direction most of the time, without point or goal. “I am the future,” I once wrote in a passionate schoolboy essay. Now, at twenty-nine, I am not expecting much from this world. Fitzgerald and his green light! I remember his rich, mad dream: “Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.” But where will this black boy run? To whom shall he stretch out his arms?

  At the moment, I need not think of tomorrow. I’ve come to a decision. I am getting my possessions in order. Tonight there will be an auction in my pad. Everything will be sold, got rid of. And then I’ll go away.

  THEY’VE COME ABOARD the lifeboat, dragged themselves up to me, up the five flights of stairs, to say good-bye. The room is crowded and gray with smoke, and I begin to wonder if the liquor will hold out. The noise is terrific, and no one, including me, cares. I have a bus ticket in my pocket which will take me all the way to Mexico, and this morning I went to three pawnshops until I found a good leather bag cheap.

  Claudia, the Grand Duchess, stoned to the gills, wearing skintight, pale blue slacks, belly dances to the strains of Ella Fitzgerald’s “Smooth Sailing.”

  “Big Daddy,” the Grand Duchess yells, “look what you get if you are lucky!”

  Big Daddy smiles at him but makes no move. He is having a serious talk with Mrs. Lee, who has arrived poodle-less. Is she thinking of changing horses, I wondered. But Big Daddy is not Mrs. Lee’s type. On the other hand, he is having hell supporting his habit. I know because yesterday he asked me if I wanted to buy some “hot” jazz albums.

  “Charles, pet,” Mrs. Lee crooned imploringly, and held up her empty champagne glass.

  I gave her a warm smile and refilled it. She looked, I thought, rather like a withered toad in her white piqué and Byzantine costume jewelry.

  “Darling, it’s a shame you have to give up this wonderful studio. There’s a most charming little atelier near Beekman Place. . . .”

  I w
alked away without a word. Where the hell did she think I’d get the money? Unless . . . Oh no, not that. I touch the bus ticket in my pocket. No Mrs. Lee for me.

  Troy and Susan were leaving for an intellectual gathering in the Village. They can’t quite forgive me because their child once called me “Nigger,” and to conceal the fact have been especially warm and friendly ever since.

  Susan flings her arms around me. “Everything will turn out fine, Charles. I know it will. You are not to worry!”

  Troy squeezes my arm hard. “You could always move in with us. You know we’d like to have you.”

  I nod and try not to look sad, and see them to the door. They mean well, but they fawn on me too much. There’s such a thing as being too Goddamn sincere. I have a double scotch to counteract the champagne and to wash away the dust of Troy and Susan’s leaving.

  I wondered where Shirley was; she said she’d be over, and then I thought about the other times she’d come here and of how we had quarreled, and of the day—when? a few weeks ago?—we’d gone to Coney Island. And I remembered the time Lena had said, “Why don’t you kids get married?” And why not? I asked myself, but I knew we never would.

  I was brought out of my reverie by Lady P, trotting by me into the bedroom. At the same moment, Claudia screamed at Laura: “Miss One! That mirror belongs to me! And so do the couch and chair. Charlie gave them to me.”

  Laura stared at Claudia coldly for a moment and then marched over to me. “I thought you said you had sold the couch and chair;” she said. “Charles, you are a lying son-of-a-bitch. You gave them to that faggot. And you know I wanted the mirror.”

  “You should have asked sooner,” I said weakly.

  “How was I to know you’d lie to me?” Laura shot back. “It’s such a lovely little mirror and I wanted it. I remember when you bought it at the Salvation Army store.”

  “Oh shit, Miss One,” Claudia said, suddenly bored as only Claudia can be, “you can have it.”

  Just then Big Daddy came in from the bathroom singing, “I dreamed I had a reefer nine feet long,” and he made for Mrs. Lee, still singing, “I could smoke it from the bedroom clear out into the hall.”

  “Marvelous, oh you are marvelous!” Mrs. Lee crooned.

  Sometime later, I saw Mrs. Lee leave with Big Daddy, and at the same time Bruce came in with the super. They were both drunk. Ivy League and Caliban.

  “Charlie,” Bruce said, “look what I dug up. A good old son-of-a-bitch.” Evidently Bruce was off his Episcopalian kick, at least for the evening.

  The super put his arms around me and sprayed saliva on my neck. “You don’t ever have to pay any rent here, Charlie. Fuck the Housing. Stay as long as you want. We’re one big happy family. Gimme a drink.”

  “Sure,” I grinned, trying to break away.

  “Charlie,” the super said, but his words were cut off in a rising tide and suddenly he vomited all over the floor.

  Claudia, who had made no time with Big Daddy and had just finished tricking with Mitch in the bedroom, came out just in time to scream, “Oh Jesus!”

  “I’m sorry,” the super said, tears rolling from his red eyes. “Really I am.”

  “I’ll clean it up,” Bruce said, feeling guilty. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Forget it,” I said. I went over to the window, got a breath of air, and looked at the sky. The pale, morning light was coming fast. Where was Shirley? The aroma of coffee drifted from Chris’s delicatessen down the street. There was a touch of autumn in the air; summer was almost over and this country boy was ready to run. I turned from the window and glanced at my friends, looked out the window again. All day I had been drinking: wine, beer, gin, scotch, champagne. I ticked them off in my mind, maybe to prove to myself I was still sober. I had taken six bennies to ward off a high and smoked a little pot. It had done absolutely nothing for my head. I just was not with it. There was horror in the knowledge that nothing was going to happen to me, that I was stoned on that frightening, cold level where everything is crystal clear. It was like looking at yourself too closely in a magnifying mirror.

  I heard the buzzer and bolted from the room and ran down the five flights of stairs. It was Shirley.

  She kissed me warmly, but she seemed nervous.

  “Guess what’s in this box?” she said. “Your books. All the books you’ve lent me. I knew you’d want them. I took a taxi up here.”

  “What happened to you?” I said. “You were supposed to be here hours ago. Now almost everyone has gone.”

  “I know.”

  “Well?”

  “Please, Charles,” Shirley said softly, taking my hand.

  “Fuck it,” I said, jerking my hand away.

  “I’m not going to marry that doctor,” Shirley announced quietly. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  I didn’t say anything. Suddenly I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I knew I wouldn’t sleep just yet. Tomorrow I’ll sleep on the bus, but now Shirley and I will climb the stairs together, back to my drunken friends upstairs. The party had turned into a free-for-all; I could hear their voices wild above the music, searching for that crazy kick that would still the fears, confusion, and the pain of being alive on this early August morning.

  “What’s wrong?” Shirley asked. “Charles, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing.”

  We started up the stairs and then I heard Claudia’s voice, as clear as day, scream, “C———!”

  The Wig

  A MIRROR IMAGE

  For Charles Trabue Robb and in memory of Lowney Turner Handy

  1

  * * *

  “Every phenomenon has its natural causes . . .”

  —JAMES JOYCE

  One

  I WAS A DESPERATE MAN. Quarterly, I got that crawly feeling in my wafer-thin stomach. During these fasting days, I had the temper of a Greek mountain dog. It was hard to maintain a smile; everyone seemed to jet toward the goal of The Great Society, while I remained in the outhouse, penniless, without “connections.” Pretty girls, credit cards, charge accounts, Hart Schaffner & Marx suits, fine shoes, Dobbs hats, XK-E Jaguars, and more pretty girls cluttered my butterscotch-colored dreams. Lord—I’d work like a slave, but how to acquire an acquisitional gimmick? Mercy—something had to fall from the tree of fortune! Tom-toms were signaling to my frustrated brain; the message: I had to make it.

  As a consequence, I was seized with a near epileptic fit early one Thursday morning. I stood in the center of my shabby though genteel furnished room, shivering and applauding vigorously. Sweet Jesus!—my King James-shaped head vaulted toward the fungus-covered ceiling pipes where cockroach acrobatics had already begun. The cockroaches seemed extraordinarily lively, as if they too were taking part in the earthshaking revelation. Even the late March sun was soft and sweet as moonlight, and the beautiful streets of Harlem were strangely quiet.

  Smiling ecstatically, tears gushing from my Dutch-almond eyes, I recalled what the man in the drugstore had said: “With this, you may become whatever you desire.”

  Indeed, I did have a Mongolian chance, perhaps even a brilliant future; the black clouds would soon recede. I had tried so hard. Masqueraded as a silent Arab waiter in an authentic North African coffeehouse in Greenwich Village. I’d been quite successful too. Tempting dreamers of Gide, Ivy League derelicts, and hungry pseudo-virgins. Barefoot, marijuana-eyed, fezzed, wearing nothing under my candy-striped djellaba, I was finally unmasked by two old-maid sisters, one club-footed, both with mushroom-colored mustaches, who had lived for a decade in Morocco. The sisters swooned at the deception, left a two-dollar tip and their hashish-scented calling card. Those sisters turned me on, and that night I had a mild attack of Napoleon fever and began insulting the customers. The Zen Buddhist owner was going to New Zealand anyway.

  What happened after that? More of the crawly worms in the stomach. Misery. I tap-danced in front of the Empire State Building for a week and collected only
one dollar and twenty-seven cents. I was refused unemployment insurance, maybe because I looked foreign and spoke almost perfect English. Naturally, I could have got on welfare, but who has the guts to stand on the stoop, hands in pockets, chewing on a toothpick ten hours a day, watching little kids pass by, their big eyes staring up at you like the eyes of extras in some war movie? There are some things a man can’t do.

  No, a man tries another gimmick. But what? For me a Spanish façade would be simple, but very uncool. Filipino? American Indian? I wondered. Eurasian might provide a fetish glamour. Was I capable of bringing off a Jewish exterior? I wondered. Becoming a nice little white Protestant was clearly impossible. Born with a vermeil question mark in my mouth, twenty-one years ago, I have been called the son of the Devil; my social-security card is silent on the point of whether or not I’m human. I suppose that’s why I’m slightly schizophrenic.

  Hump psyche reports! I was going to attack my future.

  I rushed to the bathroom, the meeting place of exactly seventy-five Negroes of various racial origins. Standing rigidly, religiously, in the white-tiled room, my heart exploded in my eyes like the sea. My brain whirled.

  Do not the auburn-haired gain a new sense of freedom as a blonde (see Miss Clairol)? Who can deny the madness of a redesigned nose (see Miami Beach)? The first conference of Juvenile Delinquents met in Riis Park and there was absolutely no violence: a resolution was passed to send Seconal, zip guns, airplane glue, and contraceptives to the Red Chinese (see The Daily News). The American Medical Association announced indignantly that U. S. abortion and syphilis quotas are far below the world average (see Channel 2). Modern gas stations have coin-operated air pumps in the ladies’ room so the under-blessed may inflate their skimpy boobs (see Dorothy Kilgallen). Undercover homosexuals sneak into the local drugstores and receive plastic though workable instruments plus bonus Daisy trade stamps (see Compliments of a newfound friend). Schizo wisdom? Remember, I said to myself, you are living in the greatest age mankind has known. Whereupon, I went to the washbasin, picked up the Giant Economy jar of long-lasting Silky Smooth Hair Relaxer, with the Built-in Sweat-proof Base (trademark registered). Carefully, I read the directions. The red, white, and gold label guarantees that the user can go deep-sea diving, emerge from the water, and shake his head triumphantly like any white boy. This miracle with the scent of wild roses looks like vanilla ice cream and is capable of softening in sufficiently Negroid hands.