“Why not?” he would have asked.
“It’s too bitter. People are fed up with this kind of protest.”
“What is protest but satire?”
“Satire? Satire must be witty, ironic, sarcastic; it must appeal to the intelligent. This crap is pornography.”
“Depends on where you think a man’s brains are.”
“What does?” a falsetto voice squeaked at his side.
For the first time he noticed the gay. He was big, blond and well-dressed, had a pleasant face but greedy blue eyes.
Jesse turned and walked on without replying. In front of him two painted showgirls flanking a tall, woozy westerner, came from the Hotel Dixie and crossed toward a waiting taxi. He caught a whiff of Lanvin’s My Sin and found himself looking at their slender nyloned legs, long-eyed and woman-hungry. For an instant he stopped and considered turning back to 8th Avenue and heading uptown. There were always cruising whores in that section from 42nd Street through Jacob’s Beach, even this early in the morning. But he put it from his mind. He’d always been afraid of disease, syphilis in particular. Not so much for his own sake, but he’d been afraid of infecting his wife. “Wouldn’t believe that about a nigger, would you?” he thought. Although once he’d taken on all comers who were thought to be healthy.
For a moment his thoughts went back to that time in 1944, when all the liberals were trying desperately to elect Roosevelt for a fourth term against strong fascist opposition and the CIO’s Political Action Committee had been all rage—“Clear it with Sidney”—Sidney Hillman and the boys. He always thought of that time at least once a day. Not so much with regret as with wonder. Greatest time in the history of the Republic for interracial lovemaking. “Nothing like politics for getting white ass. Black ass either, for that matter. Better than Spanish fly. Although the black ass don’t need a crusade” he amended. “Just some good white boy who wants it.” And after a moment he said aloud, “Old Jimmy. Wonder if he ever got enough.” Jimmy had been a lieutenant in the navy then, handsome chap in his whites. Hollywood scenario writer now; he’d seen a first run. Class A picture a few weeks ago Jimmy had done the scenario for. Cleo, the wife of a black newspaper editor, had been nuts about him. “This is Cleo, Jimmy, she’ll screw hanging from a chandelier,” had been the way Maud had introduced them. For a moment his thoughts lingered pleasantly on Maud.
“What a bitch!” he thought. “A great woman, really. Greater than anybody’ll ever know!” Many times he’d considered writing a novel about her. But he’d never been able to get the handle to the story. “Great whore! Madame, actually. Worked with her tools. That whore did everything. Besides which she was a cheat, liar, thief, master of intrigue, without conscience or scruples, and respectable too. That was the lick—the respectability.” He felt a cynical amusement. “Son, that’s the trick. Here’s a whore who’s friend of the mighty, lunches with the Mayor’s wife, entertains the rich, the very rich, the Rockefellers, on all kinds of interracial committees, a great Negro social leader. While you, you son of a bitch, with your so-called integrity, are just a pest and a nuisance.”
Suddenly he was at the curb of Seventh Avenue. Opposite was the Times building; across 42nd a restaurant with tables out of doors. Uptown to his left was another small theatre that specialized in weird off-trail films, displaying a huge poster of a leopard-skinned wild man bearing off a half-clad blonde. “That’s what you should be, son,” he told himself. “Then you could just grab a piece of ass and run and all they’d do would just be to make a film of it.” Beyond was the glittering front of the Astor Hotel, looking onto the chasm of Times Square; the bottom of the V where the canteen had been, now a recruiting centre; and on the other side the old stone profile of Hotel Claridge which had once housed the Hall of Science on the second floor behind the Camel Cigarette sign where he had worked as a porter. He thought of the narrow marble stairway he’d had to scrub five times a day. “I wonder who’s scrubbing you now,” he thought to the tune of the popular song. But the Hall of Science was gone, defunct, no more, and the Great White Way looked cheap and naked and repulsive in the bright morning sunlight, like a striptease on awakening, fumbling about a small dingy hotel room in a soiled kimona, fixing her morning needle.
He now felt only a deep welling loneliness. “You dood it yourself, son,” he said, “You thought you were being noble,” and turned in at the first theatre without looking to see what was showing. An automatic middle-aged blonde stopped tallying her change long enough to push an automatic key for his automatic ticket and he went through a long narrow mirrored foyer garnished with scenes from coming attractions into the dim musty interior. He turned to the right and climbed the dusty worn carpeted stairs which smelled strongly of stale urine to the balcony which smelled strongly of stale people. He went down the perilous stairs to the front row and took a seat between a young white man in a sweater and a sleeping black, one seat removed from each. Suddenly he felt exhausted.
“You think too much, son,” he told himself. “Your heads for knots, not thoughts.” And then, “Besides which, it’s un-American.”
Kriss remained at her desk until six o’clock to finish the report on the Reverend John Saxton project for an Indian Protestant school, then took the Madison Avenue bus home. As a rule she enjoyed this ride down the gray-stone, gleaming-glass canyon, past the window-lighted chain of women’s shops, the shiny bustling entrance to the C.B.S. building, the brittle pyramids of the ad writers, the gloomy old mansion of Random House, turning at 42nd through the tide of day’s end traffic over to Grand Central, down lower Park Avenue until it changed its name to Fourth, and over to Lexington at 24th Street. It ran a crooked line through the city’s heart, from the high brass notes of the hucksters to the low muted scale of Gramercy Park, and on nights when she’d known Dave was coming she could hear the heart beat. She loved the city and all who inhabited it, but never when alone; in aloneness it was a prison. Now the tired faces against the city lights were like mirrors of her mind. She dreaded her empty apartment almost to fear.
At 23rd Street she walked over to Third Avenue and down, stopping at her favourite delicatessen and greengrocers to buy a small barbecued chicken, frozen peas, whipped potatoes and a salad. When she turned the key in her lock she felt ready to expire. Her mind felt dead, her body dry as straw, a desert waste. She went straight to the kitchen, deposited her purse and purchases on the sideboard, melted loose two ice cubes, and mixed a stiff Scotch and soda. Only after she’d taken a long cool soothing swallow did she feel slightly human again. She hung up her coat and took the drink on a silver coaster to the sitting room, eased her tired bottom into the straight-backed three-legged chair which rested her, and opened last week’s New Yorker magazine.
It was always at this time, the fag-end of a hard day, that thoughts of Ronny invaded her mind, and the New Yorker lay neglected on her lap. Now, before the drink began taking hold, she recalled the happy things, nights talking until daylight before an open fire, their drunken wit, picking their friends to pieces…“If Hal could lift his brains three feet, get them back into his head, he’d be a great man.” And her secret sensual smile, that cream-fed look of unfaithful woman that no painter on earth has ever caught—because she knew more about Hal’s brains than he…“If you ever married again, Kriss, I’ll give you a reference; I can say I was never bored.” Now smiling at the memory of the compliment, not secretly, but lost beyond the moment in time and place.
It was after her second drink she thought, “You son of a bitch, you ruined me!” Which in great part was true, if you care to think of this thirty-seven year old, six thousand dollar a year, junior executive, brilliant, healthy, handsome-as-four-peacocks, sexy and highly respectable woman as ruined. She couldn’t bear children. But that might have been all for the good. Besides which, Ronny was not the cause of that.
What she meant at such times was that he had ruined her chances for happiness. Being a homosexual, he had always slept with her in a panic of gui
lt, and knowing he gave her no satisfaction intensified his guilt which, when fed with drink, caused him to run to anyone who would have him. Then, afterwards, he felt impelled to tearfully confess all his infidelities. On their honeymoon to Georgia he slept with the southern belle whose virginity he had revered until she’d jilted him to marry a less reverent policeman; and with his mother’s mulatto cook and her octoroon daughter in Mississippi; and with Kriss’s maiden aunt in North Dakota; and with every tramp that came along when they had returned to Chicago, tearfully confessing all these indiscretions as soon as they had happened. She often wondered at the Divine compensation that made this man so intelligent and scholarly, really brilliant, on the one hand, and such a louse on the other.
Her first infidelities had been a shield against the pity of their friends. Then when she’d learned he was a homosexual too, her promiscuity became a social amenity…She smiled maliciously, remembering how she’d picked them out before his eyes. She had a blues record she would play. It’s Waiting For You Baby, and she would dance to it with the object of her desire. At that time she had thought, the thought giving her as much pleasure as the act, that she was deceiving him. But now in melancholy retrospect she realized that he’d not only known but had condoned….
“It’s a queer existence, being married to a homosexual,” she thought. One had to be sister and mother and father confessor, nursemaid and housekeeper, and on drunken occasions, whore, too; but never wife.
It was after the third drink she thought it might have been pleasant being a lesbian. “So many of them are,” she thought, suddenly recalling the little Spanish girl who’d been her secretary in Chicago for a short time. She’d been a nuisance at the time, more like a lady’s maid, fluffing her hair, straightening her dress, eternally finding some excuse to touch her. A year later she’d run into her in Washington D.C. and had invited her to the hotel for a drink for old times sake. She was a beautiful girl, small, dark and velvet-eyed. After the second drink it had just sort of happened. Now the memory of it brought that secret, sensual smile again, but lit with a candle of real humour. If you don’t know what to do in such cases, you just do what comes natural. Being the larger of the two, she felt she should assume the masculine role even though she lacked the equipment. But it had come off. “Something those b.d. niggers ought to learn about a woman’s body,” she thought maliciously. And it had been rather pleasant, a painful, straining ecstasy, like forcing oneself to swoon, which even now came up in the vagrant thoughts that varied and seasoned her sex acts.
While she was sipping her fourth drink the telephone rang. She went into the bedroom to answer it. “Mrs Cummings speaking.”
There was a little catch on the other end, not quite a laugh, nor a sigh; a sort of blowing from the mouth and nostrils all the vanities behind which we hide ourselves. And she knew, with suddenly diffused emotions, even before she heard the soft slurred voice with its faint, almost indistinguishable lisp, that it would say, “Hello, Kriss-baby, this is Jesse.” In the following instant it all came back: Chicago and Maud and that divine weekend that Fern had later destroyed with all those lies about herself and Jesse in New York. She’d come closest to loving him of any of them since Willard—except Ted, of course. “I really loved Ted,” she told herself. But it had gone into contempt, and he had married some Negro woman in Los Angeles. She had never felt contempt for Jesse, although she didn’t know why. He was a contemptible son of a bitch if there ever was one, and she wished she felt it now as she said with cold venom, “Have you murdered your wife?” He laughed and his tension relaxed.
Jesse had been waiting in his room since three o’clock to call her. The idea had come upon him in the movie that morning but he’d decided against calling her in her office. It had been over three years since he had seen her and he didn’t know what kind of reception to expect. The last time he’d seen her had been disastrous. On his way home he’d picked up a bottle of gin, and had forced himself to wait until six-thirty. Then he’d decided to go downstairs and use the public telephone because the two extensions in the apartment were in the bedrooms of Leroy and Mr Ward, and he didn’t want to be overheard. Kriss was unpredictable, she might say, “Go to hell!” and hang up, and he didn’t want to be seen with his mouth hanging open holding a dead receiver.
There was an old-fashioned pay phone on the whitewashed wall of the basement hallway, where he put in his call, and while he was waiting for an answer two pretty school-age girls came from the green door of the super’s flat, and looked him over as they passed. He whistled a bar of If I Had You and they went into the elevator giggling, and he experienced the sudden blind panic of being lost in a world he no longer understood, a feeling which had been seizing him of late.
“You damned fool, what are you doing this for?” he asked himself, the whole tide of all his disappointments and frustrations washing up and over him; and when he heard her voice his heart caught. He knew then he didn’t feel a thing for her; he just wanted to sleep with a white woman again. But after he had laughed it was all right. “I love you, Kriss, baby,” he murmured. “You say the nicest things.”
She didn’t answer but he could hear her purring on the other end, and he knew she was wearing that secret, sensual look she always wore when her men came back to her.
“I’ve sold a book,” he said. “I’d like to take you out to dinner.”
“Are you living in the city now?”
“I just came back a week ago. I have a room up on Convent.”
There was a pause and she asked, “Is your wife with you?”
The thought occurred to him suddenly that he’d never heard her call Becky’s name. “We’re separated,” he said. “I haven’t seen her now in almost a year.”
She was silent for a moment, then asked, “When’s your book to be published?”
“Well, it’s not exactly sold, really. Hobson just took an option on it. They want to cut it.”
“What’s the title?”
“I Was Looking For A Street.”
“I hope it’s nothing like that last thing you wrote,” she said viciously. “I’m tired of listening to you blacks whining. I’ve got enough worries of my own.”
He laughed deprecatingly. “This has no protest, baby. I’ve made a separate peace.”
Although she didn’t answer immediately, he knew by her silence she considered that a special concession to herself. “I have engagements for tonight and tomorrow night, but I have Thursday night free.”
He tried to keep the disappointment from his voice. “What time shall I call for you?”
“Seven-thirty. You have my address?”
“I have the one in the directory.”
“All right, I’ll expect you at seven-thirty.” She sounded brusque.
“Until then, Kriss baby. Do nothing I wouldn’t do.”
“That’s practically nothing,” she said viciously and hung up.
Slowly he walked toward the elevator. “Son, eat your crow and like it,” he said, and after a moment added, “Crow eat crow—kismet.” At that instant the elevator door opened and the super emerged, lugging a short step-ladder. He looked about and seeing no one besides Jesse appeared startled. “I thought I heard you talking.”
Jesse grinned, unaware that he had spoken aloud. “They got you hearing things,” he said.
“Else got you talking to yourself.”
“Won’t be long.”
“Don’t make it too long,” the super said with an insinuating air.
Jesse closed the elevator door. “This world,” he said. “What would man do without sin?”
Kriss went into the kitchen, mixed her fifth highball, and took it back to the living room. Then she switched on the television to catch The Goldberg Family that came on at seven, but the programme was just coming to the end. “Damn Jesse to hell!” she muttered in a sudden rage. “Son of a bitch!” The Goldberg Family was her favourite program. Furiously she wished that he’d grown old and ugly. “Hungry nigg
ers!” But unconsciously she amended it: “Hungry for some you-know-what.” Suddenly she giggled. For an instant she regretted not having him come straight down. But Dot would be hurt and sullen.
There was nothing on the television she wanted to see, so she went to the kitchen with the intention of unwrapping the frozen whipped potatoes to thaw. But on noticing, with mild surprise, that her glass, which she carried in her hand, was empty, she forgot the potatoes and was mixing her sixth highball when the doorbell rang. She went quickly to the door and opened it, not staggering but walking differently, like balancing on her pelvic arch in a way that made her girdle feel tight.
“Come in, Dot baby,” she said, giggling guiltily. “I’m a little tight.”
Chapter 5
Jesse was dressed by six o’clock to give himself time to stop by the Chinese bar for a few gin-and-beers to get himself relaxed and in the mood. Kriss couldn’t abide a tense and silent escort; she wanted her black men to be entertaining, ardent, even frantic.
“What the hell else would she want a nigger for?” he thought, half-amused. “Not for his family tree—just one limb of it.” And there were occasions when in the company of white women he was assailed by the futility of his position and plunged in a mood of black despair, during which he couldn’t say a word, couldn’t smile, lost his desire, and withdrew in sullen silence. Should that happen, Kriss would be furious, he knew; probably kick him out of her house.
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