The End of a Primitive

by Chester Himes

  Kriss giggled, recalling the great glee that had reigned in the sophisticated circles of the Black Belt when this letter had made the rounds.

  When the telephone rang again, she felt certain it was Jesse, but she picked up the receiver and said in her office voice: “Mrs Cummings speaking.”

  “Hello, Kriss baby, did you have a good time?”

  “I don’t understand you, dear.”

  “It’s understandable enough. You had your receiver off the hook. Has he gone?”

  She smiled to herself but made her voice sound sharp and angry, “It’s five o’clock, Jesse, and I’m hungry—”

  “Five o’clock!” he echoed in amazement.

  “Where have you been, dear?”

  “I’ve been calling you since noon; the time slipped up on me,” he said defensively.

  “I must have jarred the receiver when I went to bed,” she said, smiling maliciously at the knowledge he didn’t believe it. “You should have come down and rung my bell.”

  “I intended to.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I had a good sleep.”

  “I’ll bet,” she heard him mutter, and prodded his jealousy further by saying, “I am very hungry, dear,” deriving a delicious sexual sensation from it.

  “No wonder,” she heard him mutter, and continued to prod sadistically, “A good sleep always makes me so hungry.”

  “I’ve had enough of that shit,” he thought angrily, but said aloud, “You’re stealing my lines, baby.”

  She giggled but made her voice sound matter-of-fact. “Bring a steak with you, dear. My butcher is closed by now.”

  “Right. Anything else?”

  “Whatever you’d like for tomorrow.”

  “Fine. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Hurry, baby, I’m lonely.”

  When she went to the bathroom she saw the sleeping pills scattered about the floor, and memory of Dave’s visit the night before brought futile despair. “Oh shit!” she exclaimed, half in chagrin and half in regret. But she had no memory of either her call to Jesse’s house, her telephone conversation with Harold, or her subsequent attempt to kill herself. She thought she had spilled the sleeping pills accidentally when taking her accustomed dose. Her chagrin came from memory of Dave’s angry and abrupt departure, and her regret was for letting him see her such a drunken bitch. She had often raved at him but had never before made such a disgusting spectacle of herself. And after once having been so near to marrying him, she profoundly regretted giving him such a real cause for relief in having escaped. She felt her first need for a drink, but on her way to the kitchen saw his check on the sitting-room storage cabinet and his keys on the hall table, and even two drinks didn’t help. After she’d picked up the pills, brushed her teeth, rinsed her mouth, showered, shaved her armpits, emptied and washed the highball glasses and ashtrays, placed the check beneath the keys on a vase on the hall table so Jesse could see it, having decided with sardonic malice to keep it; thereby ridding both her person and environment of all signs of last night’s debacle, her sense of defeat was dispelled and her self-confidence restored. She dressed in lemon-yellow terry-cloth rompers and gilt mules, combed her hair, painted her lips and nails, applied blue shadow to her upper lids, and surveyed herself in the full-length mirror on the hall closet door. Her yellow-and-white reflection with its blue-eyed, china-white, mongoloid face, seen against the backdrop of the deep maroon drapes in the sitting-room, affected her like a painting of a sex dream by a twentieth-century Rubens with the colours of Van Gogh. She loved her legs with such ecstasy that for several minutes she stood voluptuously caressing them, then, with brisk efficiency, more like a business woman than housewife, she telephoned her liquor store for two bottles of Scotch and one each of gin, vermouth and sherry; then telephoned her favourite delicatessen on Third Avenue for frozen peas, broccoli, whipped potatoes, a pound of butter, a jar of Hollandaise sauce, a carton of uncooked Pepperidge Farm club rolls, one pound of ripe tomatoes, green salad, and six bottles of Canada Dry sparkling water, proving the adage that whiskey drinkers never eat dessert. After which she mixed a sturdy highball with the last of her Scotch and took it to the sitting-room. While leafing through the pages of the current New Yorker, she savoured its flavour. Her first drink was always the best. She thought smilingly of that classic bit of dialogue by Hemingway:

  “What are you thinking, darling?”

  “About whiskey.”

  “What about whiskey?”

  “About how nice it is.”

  The first time the bell tolled it was the boy with the liquor. She wrote a check for twenty-five dollars and he gave her three dollars and thirty-five cents in change. She tipped him the thirty-five cents and he gave her a nice smile.

  The next bell was Jesse. In his damp trench coat, dark snap brim hat, dark green goggles, greasy tan face, arms filled with parcels, he looked like a gangster on the lam from Florida. Kriss grinned with genuine amusement. “No one recognized you, I hope?”

  “I couldn’t get the damn things off with my hands so full.”

  He unloaded on the kitchen table, hung up his coat and hat, pocketed his goggles, and came back and kissed her. She was opening the bags with a pleased expression; she liked to be given things, for men to spend on her. She found a porterhouse steak, a ham steak, a pound of veal kidneys, two pounds of Pennsylvania pork sausage, two bottles of Scotch, one each of Bourbon, gin and vermouth.

  “At least you don’t intend to waste away,” she said, giggling.

  “You said you were hungry, baby,” he said, looking at her mouth, breasts and legs. “You know the Harlem Trinity.” She felt her smile going sensuous beneath his lustful stare. “Eat, drink and fuck,” he said, and they kissed.

  “That’s what I ought to write about,” he mumbled against her mouth as his fingertips caressed her legs.

  “What?” she asked inside his mouth, feeling him.

  “Fucking. There are sixty-nine ways to fuck. I could write a chapter on each way.”

  “Do you know all of them, dear?”

  “No, but those I don’t know you can tell me.”

  She smiled sensuously.

  The doorbell broke it up. A man came with the groceries and while Kriss was paying him Jesse busied himself emptying the ice cubes into the glass tray and refilling the ice pans. Suddenly she recalled telephoning him the night before, and when the grocery man left she turned on him and said viciously, “Jesse! If you slept with another woman last night I want you to go home right now.”

  He didn’t feel at all surprised by this sudden outburst. “I haven’t slept with anyone, baby,” he said as he opened a bottle of her Scotch and made himself a drink.

  “Make me one too,” she said as she went to the bathroom to repair her lip paint. “My glass is in here.”

  He returned hers to the coaster on the storage cabinet and placed his on a coaster on the glass-top cocktail table, seating himself on the sofa. Coming from the bathroom she paused for a moment before the mirror to worship her legs, then stood in the arch so he could admire them also.

  “I called you at two o’clock this morning,” she lied, “and you weren’t at home.”

  He had no idea when he’d returned to his room and couldn’t dispute her. “I got a rejection on my book and went on a binge.”

  She grinned delightedly although she didn’t know why she felt so pleased by his ill-fortune. “I like your slack suit,” she said, tucking up her rompers to reveal more of her thighs so he would return the compliment.

  He did. “I like your legs,” he said. “You’ve got gorgeous legs, baby.”

  She melted with sensual ecstasy and her blue eyes swam glassily with passion. “Ronny used to say I missed my calling; that I should have been a chorus girl.”

  “I thought you were going to say call-girl,” he said, then impulsively knelt before her on the carpet and kissed each of her legs. Tenderly she massaged his kinky hair. Then savagely she pushed him off and threatened furiously,
“If you ever sleep with your wife again, Jesse, I’ll kill you.”

  She took her seat, shaking with repressed fury, and they began drinking as if it were their night’s work and they were being paid by the drink.

  “I’ve had enough of Negro women accusing me of stealing their husbands,” she continued to rave.

  “After all, baby, you can’t blame them. You slept with their husbands enough.”

  “I didn’t care a damn for a single one.”

  “You got your kicks.”

  She grinned malevolently. “If I told them what I thought of them in bed it would kill them.”

  “Why did you do it then?”

  She emptied her glass and held it out to him. “Fix us a drink, baby.”

  He emptied his and made two more.

  “I just wanted to know them,” she said, smiling secretly. “I wanted to know what they were like inside.”

  “Ditto,” he said. “After all, what better place to study origins than in the egg.”

  “When I was studying anthropology at the university, the kids used to say it was the study of man embracing woman.”

  “Race relations is the science of black man embracing white woman,” he paraphrased.

  She giggled. “I learned more about Negroes in one night than Uncle Whitney knew from twenty years of association.” Uncle Whitney had been the President of the Foundation.

  He blew laughter through his nose and finished his highball as if it were a drink of water. “Damn right! What was that French novel about the woman masquerading as a man, the one where she wears a squirrel’s tail?”

  “A squirrel’s tail? Ambitious, wasn’t she?”

  “May as well be shot for a lion than eaten as a lamb? Mademoiselle de Maupin! He stood up to get another drink and she finished hers and gave him her glass.

  “She could have taken half of Lacy’s and there’d been plenty left for both.” Her voice had the indistinct blur of one who’s suffered a brain haemorrhage. She hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before and the whiskey affected her brain.

  Jesse felt a flicker of disgust, then was suddenly amused. “That reminds me of a joke one of my landladies used to tell—” he began but she interrupted rudely, “Are you going to make the drinks, Jesse?” He gave her a quick look, seeing her double, and thought, “I’ll take the one who can’t talk.” On the way to the kitchen he staggered slightly and the abstract painting danced on the walls like an orgy of skinned cats. Mad genius, he thought, vastly amused by his blurred perspective. While mixing the drinks he called, “Shall I start dinner, baby?” and heard her reply something about “whipped potatoes.” He found the package in the carton of groceries and placed it on the stove atop the pilot jet to thaw.

  When serving her drink he said, “You came too late, Kriss baby. If you’d lived in the eighteenth century you’d have been a famous courtesan and would have made history, instead of sociology like now.”

  For reward she pulled him down and kissed him. “Why didn’t you marry me in Chicago, Jesse? I would have married you in Chicago.”

  He resumed his seat and gulped half his drink, suddenly feeling old. “To tell you the truth, baby—” he began, intending to tell her he didn’t remember a damn thing about their weekend in Chicago, that he’d been blotto all the time and it hadn’t meant a damn thing to him, but she didn’t hear him, so moved was she by her own maudlin memory.

  “I loved you that weekend, Jesse. Why did you do it?”

  “Fern is crazy,” he said. “I’d never so much as touched her. The time we had our weekend I hardly knew her. All I—”

  “She told it all over town that she was going to divorce Mose and you were going to divorce your wife—”

  “I don’t see how in the hell—”

  “I heard her telling Alice and that group at a party. I was so hurt. Why did you tell her that? And she’s so ugly too. Even Mose couldn’t sleep with her, he just kept her—”

  “And you told me you were going to divorce your wife and marry me.” She turned on him in a flurry of rage. “Jesse, if you ever sleep with your wife while you’re sleeping with me—”

  “That I’d like to see,” he thought, but when she persisted, “I’m not going to have some black bitch after me with a knife,” he also flew into such a violent rage the room turned white hot in his vision. “This bitch wants me to kill her,” he thought, gripping the sofa for control. “Even Maud thought I was after Joe. They crucified me. Nigger bitches!” He started up to slap her when the telephone rang, and he lowered himself to his seat, the room dancing crazily in his eyes.

  She staggered heavily as she went to answer it, and he finished his drink and sucked the ice to cool his head. He heard her saying in what no sober person on earth would take for a sober voice, “Miss-sess Cummings speaking,” and he thought, half-amused, “What price we pay for respectability.” Then her natural voice in drunken enthusiasm, “Oh, baby, come on over, Jesse’s here and we’re…Why do you drink that awful stuff, baby? You earn enough to buy decent…You make more than I do, you son of a bitch…(giggling) You’ve got to ration it…And bring your own whiskey, the last time you were here you drank up…I’ll let you in, baby…Of course we’re sober, we just got started…Take a taxi…”

  “Harold’s coming over,” she announced from the hall. “I hope he’s sober and doesn’t fall out on my floor.”

  “I haven’t seen Harold in years,” he said as she took the glasses to make drinks. “Not since he came to New York. I saw Bebe once and she said he was living with you.”

  “That lying bitch.” She put the glasses down, sloshing them over and flopped into her chair. “She used to call up here all the time and ask to speak to Harold and I hadn’t seen—”

  “When I was in Chicago in ‘48 he gave a party for me and Bebe—”

  “—in five years and he came in here one day with the dt’s and fell out in the middle of my floor and asked me to telephone his psychiatrist in Chicago—”

  “—he was sick then and she wanted me to have her. He was taking morphine—”

  “—It was the Saturday and she wasn’t in her office—”

  “—The same one? Nancy what’s her—”

  “—Rothchild…And he didn’t know her home number, it’s not listed. She was Ronny’s analyst too and I called the restaurant where she always—”

  “—All these people getting cured of something—”

  “—and when I told him I couldn’t get her he just turned over on his face and gave up. I had to call Nat—my own doctor—and—”

  “—Why didn’t you just let him sleep it off. He’d have—”

  “—That son of a bitch wet my carpet and trembled so I thought he was dying. I called Nat and had him sent to my own hospital. I had to sign him in and it cost me twenty-four dollars a day. Nat wanted to have him sent to Bellevue—”

  “—Why didn’t you let him? Hell—”

  “—Oh, I couldn’t bear it. Bellevue sounded like the end of the world—all those skid-row drunks—and Harold was a great man once. Nat said I was a fool. He wanted me to call the police and tell them he had no means of support—”

  “—Where was Bebe? She had a little money from—”

  “—Divorced the year before—”

  “—I’d have let him go to Bellevue. They’re used to handling dt patients—”

  “—Went himself…two days checked out my hospital and went back to his flat—had a cold water flat on Houston—called the police and told them he was sick and destitute—”

  “—time is it, baby?”

  She glanced at her watch and leaped from her chair, staggered across the floor to her television set as if gone berserk. “Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Mix drinks dear while I dial—” The screen lit up and showed the flashing of jagged lines. “Oh shit!” he heard her cry as he staggered toward the kitchen bearing the empty glasses like a man dying of thirst staggering his last mile across a burning hot desert in a blinding snow storm
, and when he got back to the sitting-room with the refills he thought of Donavan staggering into his apartment where they were having the last WPA party—the time they were let off for two days shortly before the end—his dirty white shirt flapping open, suspenders hanging down and his pants about to fall from his long lean frame, blue eyes glazed, red hair flagging across his bloodless forehead, ugly bony face set in grim determination, a bottle of Paul Jones whiskey in each hand, looking about triumphantly at all his goggle-eyed coworkers, and saying, “I made it,” before falling on his face.

  She took her drink from his hand and gave him a quick friendly kiss, then sat on the sofa beside him. “I just love Imogene Coca, don’t you?”

  He peered at the blurred pygmies on the screen, trying to focus his vision, and the next thing he knew Harold was stepping down into the room, hand extended, saying in his jubilant tenor voice, “Jesse, what you say, old man?”

  Jesse jumped to his feet and they shook hands warmly. “Damn, Harold, I’m glad to see you!” he exclaimed with drunken emotion. “Really glad to see you. Goddamn folks are getting me down again.”

  “It’s a bitch, man, it’s a bitch. I’ve been thinking of wearing a turban and posing as an Indian like that Sam preacher who went all through the South. Stayed in all the best hotels and—”