The Angry Ones

by Williams, John A. ;

  We finished dinner and walked through the Village. It was beginning to snow lightly. Lois showed me the place where she baked her ceramics. Passing through Washington Square she said, “What shall I get you for Christmas?”

  “Scotch.”

  “No, you need gloves.” She took one of my hands and rubbed it against her cheek.

  “Cold,” she said. “And I know it won’t come off.”

  We cracked up laughing.

  We saw a man sitting on a bench in the light snowfall. The way he sat, he might have been sunning himself in Miami.

  “There he is,” I said. “There can’t be anyone quite that cool in the world.”

  We cracked up again. I mean, we were high.

  “Oh!” she said, “I’m so high!” Her eyes were lustrous and very big in the dark. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m high.”

  “You don’t look it—you don’t act it.”

  “I am high. Gloriously, magnificently.” I kissed her and lifted her in the air. “See?”

  She was satisfied. We took the bus uptown and because we were high we didn’t care about the people who looked as we held hands. And we went to the party.

  If Lint and Bobbie were surprised to see Lois after having seen Grace the night before, they didn’t show it. Lint, seeing Lois for the first time, was taken with her resemblance to his wife. Bobbie was high. She took Lois and showed her around, laughingly introducing her as her sister because they looked so much alike. Lint and I went to the kitchen to get drinks and he said, “That Lois—” and he shook his fingers as if they’d touched something hot. “And Grace?”

  Later, after I had shrugged off his question about Grace, he said, “You know, for an ugly guy, you do pretty well.”

  And he was damned glad of it, I bet, because that meant less time for me to spend “pursuing his wife.”

  We rejoined the mob of people there. Lois mixed easily, as she always did, not showing any signs of hesitation or awkwardness; she was perfectly composed. The party wolves were on the make for her—they could not conceive that she’d come with me—but she was always looking for me.

  “Steve?”

  “Here, baby.”

  “Dear, why don’t you stay in one place?”

  I laughed and placed an arm around her. The party grew wild. Lint and Bart got into a mock knife duel and Bart got cut on the wrist. Bobbie didn’t like the way Lint was fondling women, so while he was sitting on the couch, she hurled a dart at him. It stuck in the cushion just outside his shirtsleeve. Lint didn’t move. It was almost as though he expected or wished to get a dart in the heart.

  Aiming another, Bobbie said, “You don’t have to be so goddam obvious about it.” The second dart also barely missed him.

  “You want me to be like you, you sneaky bitch?” he asked, and just before Bobbie threw the third one I whirled her away in a Calypso. The party hadn’t come to a halt at all—everyone was doing just what they’d been doing before. And this, I thought, was the middle-class society I wanted to belong to. This is it! Nothing.

  “I want to go home,” Lois said. “These people frighten me.”

  We went out then and sat on the stairs a few minutes, listening to a couple of homosexual actors argue. I cupped Lois’ face in my hands and kissed her.

  “We’ve got to stop!” she said, squeezing my hand. “I still wait for you to call and when you don’t I get angry. And that woman yesterday …” she said, then stopped.

  Finally we got up and started walking home, walking away from the party, the middle-class livers, the artists who knew it all, did it all and had all the inside poop on every damned thing.

  “Come upstairs,” I said as we paused by my place.

  “No.”

  I didn’t insist and I walked her down to her building. “Let me shop with you tomorrow,” I said. She was going to pick up some things for Christmas.

  “Will you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  After work the next afternoon I met her at Bloomingdale’s, where I loped around behind her. For some reason she kept thinking she’d lost me and was always stopping to look for me. Once I remarked, “Well, let’s get the kids’ shopping done for Christmas,” and people around us became startled and shot quick looks at us, first her, then me. Cool New York. Yeah!

  Lois laughed and said, “Idiot.”

  When we finished shopping, we found a quiet bar on Third Avenue and had a drink.

  “I don’t think,” she said, “we’d better see each other again.”

  “All right.”

  “We can’t let it go any further.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you are.”

  About an hour later we walked down the block where we lived. I stopped in front of my place. “Come on up, baby,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Baby …”

  She started to come. She walked, head lowered, halfway up the steps. Then she whirled suddenly and rushed down again, saying breathlessly, “Oh, Steve!”

  I watched her as she walked quickly toward her building and I knew she was terribly confused and flushed. I think I was smiling a little to myself as I went inside.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I guess the season was upon me. Anyway, I decided to do something constructive and I spent a few frantic days searching for Obie, but I couldn’t find him. I received, by mail, the gloves from Lois with a little note saying she was going to the Island so she wouldn’t fall prey to the holidays and weaken. I smiled when I read that.

  I’ve always loved Christmas. We always managed to have nice ones when we were young, even if the Christmas dinner was neck-bones and rice with a few scrawny yams on the side. Christmas was the only time I consciously wished every man only the best of luck in his sorrowful little rat race.

  Feeling this way, I couldn’t help but make the trip to Albany. There was snow all the way up, soft, clean snow; white snow as yet untouched by dust and filth. Once on the train, I knew I was going to enjoy being with Grace and the kids. I hoped Lois, too, was having a good time.

  There was ice on the river. Ducks swam gingerly between the gray floes and I noticed that there was not a single duck alone, bobbing on the current; there were always two. Always. And that made me think of Obie and Gloria, and I wished them a good time. I wished the best of the seasons also to Hadrian Crispus, who had threatened to come to New York and find out for himself what was going on. Rollie hadn’t answered his letters and it got to the point that when a letter from him began to arrive every day, Sarah would laugh harshly and announce, “Another one from the farmer.”

  I forgot about all of them when Grace and the boys met me at the station. Frankie and Teddy were so thickly padded with clothes that they looked as though they’d bounce back up if they fell down, like rolypolies. We took a taxi home and it was like all the Christmases I remembered as a child—the big wreaths all over the windows, the tree weighted down with decorations, and underneath, presents. The house was filled with the odors of cooking—turkey, mince, onions, spices. I met Mrs. Moody, a widow who lived alone next door. She was helping Grace with the next day’s dinner, and sharing Christmas with her and the boys. Mrs. Moody reminded me of my mother. Maybe it was because it was Christmas, or perhaps because I was a little high again.

  That was why I took the kids out to bellywhop—I was high. While we were out there, Teddy, with that big, wise smile kids have, said, “Is our mother going to marry you, Uncle Steve?” He started to slide, then stopped and came back to me. “Can we call you just Steve then, without the ‘uncle’?”

  “Sure, I don’t care. Hey, listen, Teddy.”

  “Huh?” He hoisted his sled impatiently.

  “Let me slide.”

  “I want to slide first,” he said. “Besides, you might break it.”

  He dashed off then, swinging his sled back and forth in that clumsy manner kids have, and slid
down the slope to join his brother. Once he looked back at me as if to figure me out and, maybe because he was feeling sorry for not having let me slide, he smiled and tried to wave and fell off the sled. I wanted to run to him, but something made me stop. Teddy got up and brushed himself off and trudged back to the top of the hill, where I was standing. He didn’t say anything. He started running again and, puffing with each little stride, he was down the hill again. This time he waved and stayed on the sled. I waved back to him. A good, gutty kid. I liked that.

  Both of them were making it up the hill again, puffing. Sometimes when I was with them there were moments when I seemed not even seconds older than they; then we had a lot of fun. But there were also those moments when they suddenly became aware that I was an adult. I’d always liked kids. When they are without the cunning they sometimes learn so quickly for survival, their presence here really seems providential.

  Teddy and Frankie were precocious. Frankie attended a special school for painting and Teddy was in an advanced class in the same school. In them, it seemed, all the generations of our family had put forward their best—from Grace’s family and mine. Watching them bang down the slope again, it occurred to me that it was they who would finally gain the fulfillment I had sought in my life, as my father had in his and his father before him. They seemed equipped to accept that fulfillment, to take it in stride. I suddenly wanted with all my heart to be with them or be a part of them when that happened. I also knew, as they began potting me with snowballs, that I had to prepare, as best I could, the way for them. My father had done that for me; now I could do it for them only because he gave me the opportunity to derive more from life than he had himself.

  Later, we watched all the Christmas shows on television. I held Frankie in my lap and it was wonderful to feel his little body, his lean little thighs which would soon grow strong and long, and his big head warm against me. I felt very good; it was as if I had been swimming alone in the middle of an ocean for a long time and had suddenly found land. I got the boys ready for bed. They insisted that we sing carols because the day after next, Christmas would be gone and you had to stop singing carols then until just before next Christmas.

  “You bitch,” I said to Grace when the house was all settled down for the night. She had given me a big, wonderful dose of what it would be like to be with her. She smiled like a master swordsman who has just wounded you, and with your dying breath you’re complimenting him, gallantly, on his skill. She only smiled.

  “Fix the couch for me, will you?” I said.

  “No.”

  “Grace, please fix it.”

  “If I do, will you come in later?”

  “No,” I said. I had decided that earlier, when I was on the hill with the kids.

  “Why not?”

  “Damn it, you know why not.”

  “They’ll be asleep.”

  “I don’t care.” I know too many people who are still a little twisted from discovering “uncles” in their mother’s beds.

  “Then I’ll come to you.”

  “No, Grace. Listen, they might get up and then what? I wouldn’t want that to happen, so, please, good night and don’t stand there tormenting me. I really don’t want to do anything foolish and neither do you.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “you can be so good you make me sick. Good night!”

  The next day, Christmas, went quickly. There were more shows on television and good food; there was the playing with toys; and the bright day began to darken as Grace and I exchanged glances more and more often. But I didn’t try to settle anything with her. I had to get the job thing licked first. I had to get something good, something I could and wanted to do.

  Back in New York again, I got set for New Year’s. Where, I wondered, had the year gone? Crispus’ mail was coming in just as steadily as ever, but his letters were beginning to seem incoherent. I showed them to Rollie, who laughed them off. The holiday had been hectic for him too. His eyes were red all the time and he looked bushed. Once I couldn’t resist asking him in a low voice if he’d been making out okay. As soon as I said it, I knew it was the wrong thing to say for a guy who wanted to keep his job a little longer. Rollie didn’t answer. That period, I didn’t bother him for my raise and he didn’t bother me; we were a little like boxers, each waiting for an opening.

  I was glad to see Obie again. He’d called the office and, over the phone, I talked him into going to a couple of parties with me. He looked very haggard when he showed up. His first words were curt: “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

  He hadn’t found anything.

  But we talked and drank and got a slight glow on. We were going to forget the hard times—his and the ones I saw coming for me. We went shopping for a good-luck dinner—black-eyed peas and pig’s feet. We cooked the stuff, more or less, and began drinking again.

  Later we went to a party in the Village where everyone was talking art and the handling of problems. Someone had dug up an old Tampa Red side, “It’s Tight Like That,” and we played it until we couldn’t get anything but scratches from it. There were Bessie Smith blues too. When everyone got high, the party was good. Obie, standing a little aside, as though he felt he had no right to be there with his problems, said to me, “They all seem so—happy.”

  I looked at him. I didn’t know what to say. I went back to the drinks. I didn’t want to think of Grace and the kids, or of Lois or Rollie or the future. I just wanted to get a headful. And yes, dammit, I wanted to forget about Obie a little, too, because I wanted to be happy for a bit and Obie was too much a part of me for happiness to come if I thought about him. Lights began to hurt my eyes. Nothing seemed important except having a feverishly good time. I danced without a letup; something in me wanted to keep moving, moving, all the time moving. Once I saw Obie standing thin and austere beneath a light as the dancers parted for an instant, and I grew angry with him.

  When we left the place to make the uptown party, I didn’t have too much to say to him. On the way up, the horns, chimes and sirens sounded.

  “Happy New Year,” I said to Obie and the cabbie.

  “Happy New Year, fellas,” the cabbie said.

  “Yeah,” Obie grunted.

  The second apartment was also filled with noise and people, but here they were all one color—colored. Big Joe Williams sang loudly. There was more music, women, dancing. Swift, darting repartee. Food. And still more music. There were suddenly harsh lights, people in bedrooms, paper cups filled with drinks, other drinks spilled. A quick red glow of a cigarette in a darkened bathroom and the smell of potiguaya. Smile, goddamit, Obie—just one smile, man!

  Cha-cha-cha, sensuous, arrogant, elbow-moving, belly-moving, ass-moving. Do it, baby! One more time and after that, one more again.

  “I love you, baby, I’ve always loved you. What’s your name?”

  “That’s pretty. It’s lovely. What is it again?”

  “Your what? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  Every day I have the blues …

  “Aw, sing it, Joe!”

  “Big Joe, Big Joe, do it, my man!”

  “Baby, I can sing.”

  “Then sing, sugar.”

  “… pussy that won’t quit.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’ll never find out, sugar. Aw, sing it, Big Joe, sing it!”

  And somewhere Bird began playing and somebody said, “Stop breathing, bitch, so I can hear the record.”

  A whirligig.

  I resolved not to drink so much after New Year’s; I drank at least five toasts to that. When dawn came slanting through Central Park, the party was still going and Obie was still in his corner, his clothes loose upon him and his face long and dry. I left him. I don’t know how I got home, but I remember walking in from the street and saying to the chill air, “Hello, New Year. Please, baby, be good to me, please.”

  Sometime in the next few hours I woke up to go to the bathroom. The walls were covered with roaches. I reached u
p and dragged my hand through the midst of them, expecting to see a clean swath when my hand came away. Nothing happened. The roaches were still there, twisting and squirming, their ugly backs brown and bright. I raised my hand to the wall and again nothing happened. I blinked my eyes and the roaches were gone. I returned to bed shaking and terribly cold.

  The holidays were over.

  That same week, determined to begin the New Year right, I went looking for another apartment. If I found one that was not too expensive, but had room enough, I’d make Obie move in with me for a while.

  There was a routine I used when looking for an apartment. I didn’t wear slacks and sport jacket but a suit, and shined my shoes. If you wear a suit and tie, people sometimes hesitate before refusing you; you could be anyone from anyplace, even if you were Negro. But they could refuse you, as the landlord of a place around the corner did.

  At another place I threatened to take the landlord’s name, and when I did, he let me see the apartment off Central Park West, which was no improvement over mine. I was refused at still another place and I took down the building code number and reported it to the State Commission Against Discrimination, which had moved into some phases of housing.

  A week later, in response to their letter, I was in the SCAD office; they were unable to touch the landlord because he hadn’t used either state or federal funds for his building.

  “But let us know any time you run into this,” I was told.

  “I’d be writing or calling every day,” I said.

  “We’re doing the best we can,” the man said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and going out I thought, the best is never good enough anymore; it hasn’t been for a long, long time.

  So the New Year got off to a bad start. Obie came around again, a much different Obie Robertson from the one I had met the summer before. His mustache was ragged; he didn’t seem to care about his clothes fitting or matching up. There were long silences in our conversations. After three quarts of beer, he opened up quietly.

  “Steve, I’m a little afraid.”