by Sarah Blake
When he turned around with the beers in his hand, Pres Bancroft was talking to them, his jacket sliding open on the beginnings of a paunch. He was a banker at Milton Higginson who fancied himself a writer because he’d published a novel right out of Yale. His second novel was in copyedits at Houghton Mifflin, where apparently Reg Pauling also worked. Moss never invited him to his parties, but he always seemed to appear.
“You look like hell, Levy,” Bancroft was saying. “Getting too much hump?”
“Sure I am,” Len said evenly, taking the beer Moss offered him.
“Lucky dog.” Bancroft drank.
“I’d have sworn you weren’t raised in a barn, Bancroft,” Len remarked.
“I was raised right.” Bancroft smiled. “Right here.”
“According to whom?”
“Whom?” Pres turned his attention to Reg. “Very nice, Pauling. You’re good at that.”
“I’m good at a lot of things,” Reg answered smoothly, drinking.
“Get a load of this guy,” Pres said to Len familiarly. Len stared back at him, wordless.
Bancroft raised his eyebrows affably, as if to say All right, no harm done, and ambled away.
The three of them watched as he made his way through the crowd.
“That guy,” Len pronounced, “is a phony.”
“He plays the phony,” Reg said.
“Does that make him more or less of one?” Len retorted. “Cheers.”
“That makes him dangerous,” Reg said.
“He’s not dangerous.” Moss shook his head. “He’s a jackass.”
“No?” Reg tapped the side of his bottle. “What do you make of the fact that he introduced me the other day as a ‘damn good copy editor who just happens to be a Negro’?”
What was dangerous about that? Moss eyed Reg. Wasn’t that the truth?
“You can’t peg him,” Reg went on.
“To hell with him,” said Len, turning away from them, his eyes roving the crowd. “Who else is here?”
“Can you peg anyone?” Moss asked Reg.
“I have to.” Reg gave Moss a watery smile that seemed to spill over even as Reg tried to hold it back. It drew Moss to him at once.
“A black man has to know to whom he is speaking,” Reg continued.
The word flicked again like a serpent’s tongue across Moss’s attention. He couldn’t deny that in the beginning he had had the same response as Pres Bancroft to Reg’s perfect grammar.
“More than anyone else has to know?” he asked roughly.
Reg considered him. “Yes.”
Moss looked back, folding his arms to his chest. “Why?”
Len pulled on his cigarette, looking at Reg.
Something indefinable crossed between them.
Reg leaned forward and tapped Moss on the arm. “Now I know.”
Moss went still. “Know what?”
“You ask the questions that get the talk on the table.”
“I’m interested,” Moss shot back, relieved. “I have an interest. That’s all.”
“Not a lot of men in your shoes ask the questions.”
“Which shoes are those?” Moss frowned.
“The shoes of Ogden Moss Milton Junior,” Len pronounced.
“That’s only a name,” Moss protested.
“Yes, it is.” Len finished dryly. “And so is Len Levy.”
“Okay.” Moss nodded, reaching for his cigarettes. “Fair enough.”
“The only way for a Negro to survive this country is to flush as much toxin up onto the surface as he can,” said Reg. “All the time.”
“That sounds dangerous.” Moss offered his cigarettes.
Reg shook his head. “Mistaking a white man for his manners is deadly.”
“I’d guess that that would be true in the South,” Moss allowed.
The expression on Reg’s face didn’t change, but he went still, and Moss felt he had stumbled into the crowded room in Reg’s head, into a debate going on at full tilt, and whatever Moss had said made all conversation stop, and all eyes turn on him, considering.
“Everywhere is the South, and the dream of the North, a dream.”
Moss looked at him thoughtfully. “You really believe that?”
Reg considered him and took a long swallow of beer.
“It’s the truth,” he answered.
With a grunt, Len crossed his arms and toed an empty bottle a few inches down the wood floor. “But do you think the truth has set him free?”
Moss raised his eyes.
“Of course not,” Len answered himself, “because it’s a load of crap. Truth doesn’t set anything free. Money sets you free in this country. And the law.”
“By all accounts, then, I should feel freest of all—” Moss said.
Len looked at him. “And you don’t.”
Moss shook his head.
“You’re a misguided soul, Moss Milton,” Len teased. “But we’ll drink with you anyway.”
A quick shadow crossed Moss’s face and disappeared.
“To me, then,” he said, and raised his glass and drank the whole thing down.
“Listen,” Len said, “I’m trying to get your father on board with that idea of mine you heard the other day in his office.”
“And what’s stopping him? He clearly likes you.”
“How do you know?”
“He asked you if you sailed.”
Len nodded.
Moss folded his arms. “Do you want to sail?”
Len looked at him. “If it’s the thing to do to—”
Reg snorted.
“Don’t be a son of a bitch, Reg,” Len tossed at him. “I’m good on the water. And I hate golf.”
“It’s a good sign if Dad asked you,” Moss admitted.
“How’s that?”
“He thinks in terms of boats. Of men and boats,” Moss corrected. “And those are the principles he goes by—set sights on your goal, chart your course, and stick to it. There are lines laid out. There are oughts. I, for one, ought never to have wasted these last six years scratching musical notes onto a page.”
“Why’s that?”
“Nothing’s come of it. I’ve had three or four of my pieces taken up and played down here in the Village, and there’s a guy out in Chicago who wants a song of mine, but—”
“What about the music?” Reg asked.
“Yes.” Moss looked at him and smiled. “Music has come of it. And the beginning of a name for myself. But none of that looks like anything to my father. And I’m running out of time.”
“So, no ‘to thine own self be true’?”
“Polonius,” Moss observed dryly, “was a Dane.”
Reg chuckled.
“Where I’m from, thine own self be damned,” Moss went on. “It’s family first, then country, and then, at the very last, thine own self. I was raised to do something, be someone. Not for me, you understand, for the good of the world. Any less, and I’m a failure, a grape shriveled on the vine, a white-shoe screwball.” He paused, relishing the list.
“Your father’s given me a fair shake,” said Len.
Moss nodded. “He is a fair man. He believes in the best man winning. Believes it to the core.”
“What’s the catch?” Reg asked.
“To my father? No catch.” Moss looked at Reg, bemused. “It’s how he was raised—it’s what he believes. Honor. Valor. Dignity. Truth.”
“Sounds like bells,” Reg reflected.
Moss looked at him, startled. Bells. Yes. Bells.
That’s it, he thought just as two hands covered his eyes from behind and someone poked him. He pulled the hands off and turned around.
“Why, hello, Jean.” He grinned at a slight, crop-haired girl and her silent companion, who had just appeared at his side.
“I brought gin,” said Jean, holding a bottle. “Have you got tonic?”
“That I do,” he cried. “Reg, Len, meet Jean. I’ll be back in a jiff.” And he was immediately sw
allowed by the crowd.
“He’ll never make it,” mused Jean.
He didn’t. But the silent companion, who, it turned out, was Bulgarian, went back down the stairs to get some, and then a couple of men Len hadn’t seen in a while pulled him off, and Reg found himself in the middle of a conversation with Jean about Ginsberg and the Beats and all that wailing—Jean rolled her eyes—and beating their big-man chests, their poetry going right off the rails.
“You like the rails,” Reg observed.
“You’ve got to have rails,” she admonished him archly, “or you can’t get anywhere.”
He raised his brow. “Whatever that means.”
“You’ve got to use the rails to ride your own trip. You can’t just blow up a building, for instance,” she said, growing serious. “You’ve got to show the building—its walls, the ceilings, the floors—and then show how you are walking straight out of it, how you’re—”
“What is it you do?” he broke in, a slight smile playing over his lips.
“I’m a secretary,” she answered. “By day.”
“And by night?”
“By night I fuck a Bulgarian and write poems.”
“About buildings?”
“About the view,” she replied, and moved away.
The party opened and closed, a great mouth exclaiming into the heat of the night. The two friends were separated, drawn into conversations, drinks, different rooms. And toward the end of the night, Reg wandered out into the garden in search of Len, whom he saw standing at the very end surrounded by men he didn’t recognize, and turned back around into the party. He leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, watching Moss Milton put a record on the phonograph, turn it up, and then move around the room again with the bottle, as the Memphis Jug Band bolted into the room, the banjo and the plucked jugs and the slapping hands, singing, Tear it down, slats and all, tear it down, hear the baby squall. There had been countless like him at Harvard, well-born, easy, imagining they could stare down the world with a smile. Yet despite the crooked, ingratiating smile, the frank blue eyes set in a long, angular face that could shift and dance quick and easy, Reg could see that Moss was not fooling. He was all lightness in person, all play. But he wasn’t playing at all. Everyone in that room belonged in the room. He was one of the few men Reg had ever met whose face did not alter or shift even slightly when he turned it toward a black man, as he was now, turned to him, a bottle raised.
Drink? He raised the bottle.
Reg shook his head.
Tear it down, the song belled high, ow ow ow.
“Hear that?” Moss called to him across the room.
Come on out of my folding bed, ’cause the devil want to tear it down.
Reg nodded. “Yeah.”
Moss nodded back at him through the party and made his way over. “Tear it all down,” he said, exhilarated. “All of it. The whole thing.”
“What whole thing?” Reg glanced up at him, smiling but skeptical. “The bed, the house?”
Moss tipped his head toward the music. “That’s a man ready to tear down and start again.”
Reg looked at him and shook his head. “You hear the rest of that song? ‘Big black nigger lying in my bed.’ It’s about a white man coming home and finding his wife in bed with a black man.”
“It’s bigger than that,” said Moss. “It’s more than that.”
There is no bigger than that, thought Reg, and didn’t answer.
But later, after most of the partygoers had already slid out and back onto the street, when Reg and Len turned at the bottom of the stairs and waved goodbye to Moss, sitting in the window, his knees up, his back against the frame, Reg raised his hand.
“See you again,” he said.
“Tear it all down.” Moss smiled back at him and waved.
“What the hell does he have to tear down?” Len asked as the two of them walked away.
The hot whine of an ambulance raced up the night street. The two men kept walking through the sound into the following quiet.
Two girls passed them, their sharp heels clicking on the pavement, paying no attention to the men. The streetlight up above caught the sheen of the blond one’s hair and the white of her skirt. When Reg didn’t answer, Len glanced over, but he couldn’t read his friend’s face in the dark.
“I’d guess he doesn’t want what he has,” Reg answered finally.
Len nodded and flicked away his cigarette.
“These people, Reg.”
“What people?”
“They have everything they need. They should be raking it in.”
Reg raised his eyebrow.
“But they hang back. I’ve seen it again and again over there.”
Reg patted his shirt pocket and brought out a pack of Kents, shaking one to Len and one for himself. “They could make a killing.”
Reg lit his cigarette and held the lighter up to Len’s. “Why don’t they?”
“I don’t know.” Len exhaled with a kind of amazed laugh. “Because they won’t. One doesn’t.”
“Why not?” Reg asked again.
“It’s as though they are all waiting to go through a door—there’s the door, they seem to say—You first. No you. This decorum.” Len shook his head. “It just slows them down.”
“Maybe they like it slowed—”
“They don’t. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe they even realize just how slow they are.” He went on, bemused. “Only buy from certain people. Only lunch with him. Not with him. Never with her. May I make some money? Please do. And there’s a drunk or two on every board.”
“Sounds gracious as hell.”
“Gracious, my ass. They are going to grace themselves right out of the race.”
Reg chuckled.
But the thing niggling at Len since that day in Mr. Milton’s office, the thing that had burrowed in and lodged ever since Mr. Higginson’s barely veiled condescension, now pushed itself harder through his gut.
“Not me,” Len vowed.
“No.” Reg’s smile was in his voice. “I know that.”
“And to be fair, not the old man either. Ogden Milton is one in a million.” He exhaled. “I’d like to show him.”
“Show him what?”
“How to take the whole damn train and yank it off its tracks,” Len vowed.
Reg glanced over. “Listen to the boy from Chicago.”
“That’s me.”
They stopped on the corner of Bleecker and Seventh Avenue, waiting for the light.
“Still, I wouldn’t underestimate Moss Milton,” Reg said. “He is dead serious.”
And that was his draw. Moss Milton clearly believed it was possible for every man to walk through any door; he believed it, and back there with him, Reg wanted to believe it as well. As if the door he held open were a real door, and he a real gatekeeper. The thought of walking through it, arm and arm with a man like Moss, was seductive.
Though it would be walking into a dream, Reg thought, stepping off the curb.
Seventeen
WHEN EVIE WOKE the following morning, Paul was standing in front of the open closet, his back to her. She watched as he chose a shirt. Once, she would have pushed the sheets aside, crossed the floor, and pressed her body up against the long familiar line of his. He pulled on boxers. She lay there trying to decide if she was going to pick the fight.
“Hey,” she said quietly.
“Hey,” he answered.
There was a plate of glass as thin as a breath between them, risen up from last night’s dinner.
“Ready for coffee?” he said into the mirror.
“Yeah,” she answered. “Thanks.”
He closed the closet door and stood there.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She looked at him. “I hadn’t seen you in a month, and that’s what you did?”
“I got ahead of myself. I didn’t mean to show you that last night.”
He came and sat beside her on the bed and
took her hand.
“I’m sorry.” He was softer than he had been before.
My life doesn’t seem mine anymore, she wanted to say, her eyes on him. My life has slipped its sprockets.
“You remember that feeling—that feeling when we were teenagers and a song would come on in the car and you’d be driving and the song would blast and the wind blew and you could have gone anywhere, couldn’t you—anywhere.”
“Yeah.” He smiled.
“That was happiness,” she said. “Open windows, Paul.”
He was quiet.
“Where is that feeling? That’s what I’m missing.”
“That was childhood,” he said softly.
She nodded, rueful. “The phrase that keeps running through my head is from the anchoress’s rule book—‘My dear sisters, love your windows as little as you can.’”
He waited.
And so she just started in. She told him about the pink room and the dark and her mother standing there, in her Keds. She told him about the sleeping house, and the door at the bottom of the stairs—and her mother, Joan, insisting and leading her out of the house and to the graveyard. She told him about the old woman crossing the street and about Seth turning on the library steps and watching her go. She told him about life in all its pieces. Going on while he’d been gone. Paul listened, his eyes on hers, and it was this quiet she’d waited for, this that she had missed.
She took his hand and put it on her cheek. After a while she made to get up.
“Stay.” His arms tightened around her, gathering her in.
* * *
WHEN SHE WOKE again, the bed was empty and she could hear him in the kitchen down the hall.
“Did you hear Seth getting up?” he said as she came down the hall.
“It’s Saturday.”
“Oh, right.”
