Of course, this job was more than just the job of a lifetime. It was a loaded gun and it kept everyone off me, no matter how they nagged. One false move about this, the terrible look in my eye said, and there will be NO WEDDING. My mother knew it, and Johnny knew it. For the first time in my life I had some leverage.
It didn’t take much to make me happy. I discovered a singer called Mrs. Verlie Waters, about whom little was known. She made three records, six sides in all: “Big Thumb Blues,” “Empty Head Blues,” “Bad Weather Blues,” “Low Down Dirty Dog,” “Under the Bed Blues” and “No One Can Sing It But Me.” Her voice was sweeter than Bessie Smith’s, but not as rich. For a blues singer it was almost girlish. I sat at my console listening to “No One Can Sing It But Me.”
I looked her up in the library. She turned up in a discography which revealed that she had been one of the first female singers to write her own material. In a book entitled Mama Do No Wrong: Black Lady Singers of the Twenties and Thirties by Liam L. P. Hunt, I found a paragraph about her. Her parents had been teachers. She had graduated from a colored music academy and then ran off to New Orleans. Her career lasted six years and she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. As the song said, Life sure is rough, it sure is tough, but of that sweet sound I never get enough. No one can sing it but me.
15
It turned out that unlike my fun-loving and gregarious lover, I was rather antisocial. I felt like a person who had been living on another planet, and who did not quite get how human beings connected in a social setting.
Johnny would come bounding over to my apartment and say, “Wash the blackface off, kiddo. We’re invited to a dinner party.”
“You go,” I would invariably reply. “Tell them I have a disease.”
“Come, come, my good woman,” said Johnny. “We can’t have this.”
“Please, Johnny. I’m not good out.”
In social situations I was hostile, defensive and shy, not a winning combination. If I was asked what I did, I would morosely answer that I was an ethno-musicologist. Or Johnny would say, “Geraldine used to dance with Vernon and Ruby Shakely.”
“How neat! Are they classical or modern?” some nice host or hostess would politely ask.
“They used to be modern but now they’re classical,” I would respond.
Out on the street Johnny always pleaded, “Can’t you make a little effort? These are nice people.”
“I just don’t get them.”
“You don’t have to get them. Just be nice to them.”
Every invitation, of which there seemed to be hundreds, felt like a death threat. I looked at Johnny with envy. He was like a jigsaw piece that had found its happy little place and fit right in. His colleagues adored him. The senior partners adored him. Their wives doted on him. So why couldn’t I sit by his side thinking my own thoughts and ruminating on my dinner like a cow?
These people were sharp. They knew their way around, and they all knew each other. Their fathers were partners or their mothers were cousins or had gone to school together, or were intermarried with people who had gone to school together. They wore snappy clothes and owned small European cars. They worked hard and took interesting vacations in wilderness areas. They were healthy and hale and red-cheeked and they had never spent a minute of their lives worried about the essentials. The essentials had all been taken care of. Instead they had worried about grades, getting into college, law school. They worried when their cars didn’t work and when cholera broke out in some part of the world they had an impulse to go touring in. Later they had children and worried about early childhood development, what schools to send their children to. When they got together they talked about cooking equipment, and skiing, and gossiped about mutual friends. I was a total misfit.
The older set, the senior partners, lived not in one-bedroom apartments but in large spaces overlooking the park, or in brownstones and duplexes. These people had grown children, all full of accomplishment, and gave large multigenerational dinner parties. At these dinners the great issues of the day were debated. A successful dinner party to this group was one in which spirited discussion took place.
“If I hear one more conversation about social justice, as the colored maid serves me my leg of lamb, I’m going to faint,” I said after one such event.
“How very noble you are,” said Johnny.
“These people just feel they can say anything they want.”
“Vernon Shakely said anything he wanted,” Johnny pointed out. “It’s all very well to talk about the white honky devil when your accountant is a white honky devil from the Wharton School of Business.”
“Yes, but Vernon meant what he said,” I countered.
“Well, so do these people,” Johnny said. “And they treat you nicer.”
“They don’t treat me nicer. They’re like my mother. They only like me because I’m appended to you.”
“You don’t give them a chance,” Johnny sighed. “You’ve had an amazing career. You have lots of interesting things to say.”
“I don’t feel that these people are on my side.”
“You’re hopeless,” Johnny said. “Life is not about who’s on whose side.”
I was incredulous. Could anybody actually believe that life was not about who was on whose side? I hung my head. How nice it would be, I thought, to withdraw from reality and spend the rest of my life dancing in front of the stereo in the privacy of my own warm home.
Not only was I shy, I could not cook. The only thing I could fix was red beans and cabbage salad, and neither Johnny nor I felt that this was appropriate for a dinner party.
“Gee,” he said one day. “We can’t feed Alice and Simon Crain red beans.”
“I thought Simon used to work in the slums,” I said. “Didn’t Alice do some kind of field work in the Caribbean? Why can’t we give them red beans?”
“We don’t say ‘slums,’ “Johnny said. “We say ‘inner city.’”
“We can order out,” I said. “Besides, your kitchen isn’t what I would call well equipped.”
“We’ll have to do something about this,” Johnny said.
When Johnny said, “We’ll have to do something about this,” he wasn’t kidding around. The next evening I ambled over to his apartment and found his kitchen full of important-looking boxes, inside of which was a battery of orange enamel French cooking ware: a soup pot, a frying pan, a family of saucepans and a flat pan with little ears.
“It’s a gratin,” Johnny said, reading the fancy brochure.
“Oh, yeah?”
“It’s to make gratin in.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Well, yes. Look, here’s a picture. It says here you scallop the potatoes and cook them in cream and cheese. Sounds swell.”
I peered over his shoulder. “It says here you scallop the potatoes and cook them in cheese and cream.”
“We both have to learn,” he said.
I curled my eyebrow at him.
“Hey!” Johnny said. “We’re supposed to be a team. Let’s have a little cooperative spirit.”
“Oh, take it to work,” I said. “Walk the dog till you feel better.”
“Don’t be intractable. Eventually we’re going to get married.”
“I don’t want to get married. I want things to be the way they are.”
“Come over here.” He put his arms around me. “You wanted to stay a Shakette. Now you want us to live like two graduate students going out on dates and living together on the weekends. Things change. You have to roll with the times.”
“I don’t want to roll with the times.” Tears spurted out of my eyes. “Life is nice now. Can’t we just groove with the now? Besides, why do you want to marry me? I can’t cook. I’m not a social asset. I’m a drag at dinner parties.”
“You’re my soul and my inspiration,” Johnny said.
“I never liked that song,” I said.
“But it’s true,” Johnny said. “‘Without you, baby
, what good am I?’”
16
Because I loved him, I tried to get nicer. I read the newspaper every day and tried to figure out what my opinions were. Unfortunately, my opinions were almost identical to Vernon Shakely’s, which was not much use if you happened to be a white middle-class person whose boyfriend was a lawyer.
Most intimidating to me was an invitation to the home of Bill and Betty Lister. Bill, a serene, gray-haired man, was Johnny’s mentor at the firm. Betty was the administrator at a small foundation that gave away tons of money to worthy causes. They had two children: Penny, a filmmaker who had documented the plight of migrant workers and rural midwives, and Bill Jr., a journalist whose beat was city politics. They lived in a big, somewhat shabby house—after all, it was not material things that mattered—and their walls were decorated with the pickings from their extensive travels: Haitian folk quilts (sewn with tiny stuffed people riding on tiny stuffed buses pursued by trapunto alligators), a !Hmong wall hanging, a watercolor done by a sharecropper at a Freedom School in Mississippi. Their silverware, I noticed, was extremely heavy and old. I mentioned this to Johnny, who had spent a good deal of time telling me how much above such things Bill Lister was.
“Oh, come on,” said Johnny. “People have things like that. They don’t buy them.”
Betty Lister did not cook but, as Johnny pointed out, this had never stood in her way.
“She has servants to cook for her while she’s out doing good deeds,” I said.
“She knows that you can always hire people to help you.”
“How very upright of her,” was all that I could say.
Friday night Betty Lister, who believed that a good hostess drew out her shy guests, decided to focus on me. She was a tall, wide-eyed woman, with the wondering gaze of a child. She wore long velvet skirts and what looked like an evening shirt tailored for a woman.
She sat next to me on a love seat in front of the wood-burning fireplace. We had been served our leg of lamb and were having coffee in the Listers’ enormous living room.
“Now,” she said, “Johnny tells me you work for a foundation. I do too! Which one do you work for?”
I said I worked for the Race Music Foundation.
“Really,” Betty said. “I’ve never heard of it. Who does it give money to?”
“It takes money from,” I said. “It isn’t a foundation in your sense. It’s an archive for the preservation of black music.”
“How marvelous!” Betty said. This was the sort of thing her foundation funded. “And what is the guiding principle of the Race Music Foundation?”
“The Race Music Foundation believes that the white man is trying to eradicate black music from the face of the earth with incessant remakes by white performers.”
Johnny gave me a look of pain.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean,” Betty said.
Bill emerged from the kitchen and put a tray of demitasse cups in front of us. Betty sipped at her coffee. Her hair was a kind of coppery color with streaks of gray. She wore it cut to her shoulders with a tortoiseshell clip on one side.
“Co-option is death,” I said. “It’s all in Dr. Willhall’s pamphlet Here’s What I Believe.”
“That sounds rather paranoid,” Betty said. “I’m afraid I have trouble with organizations that seek to tear apart the fabric of our country rather than to mend it. Now our Crocket-Parker project, for instance, takes gifted children from the inner city and mainstreams them into some of our good private schools.”
“How about if some of the gifted students from our good private schools were mainstreamed into the inner city?” I said. This was debate! Now I had the hang of it! Social life was a snap. I turned to beam at Johnny but I saw from his face that I had gotten it all wrong, so I drank my coffee and shut up.
Betty turned from me and to the company at large. They were on to a different topic: Nazis. Do neo-Nazis have the right to exist in a free and just society? On this subject everyone had a lengthy opinion.
17
At home I played a desultory round of a game I had invented called Who Likes Negroes Most? It had, at one time, amused my sweetheart endlessly.
“Who likes Negroes most?” I said. “Why, Bill Lister likes Negroes most. If a Negro were drowning in a lake of burning lighter fluid, Bill would take an ice cube from his own drink and float it out to the Negro so he could have an ice cube for his drink.”
“We say ‘black people,’” Johnny said.
“Vernon and Ruby found that demeaning,” I said, and continued. “Who else likes Negroes most? Betty Lister does, because her foundation once gave fifty thousand dollars to a blond man from Yale who said he was a Negro.”
“What makes you feel superior to these people?” Johnny said.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “I mean, I just used to live with black people. I worked for them. I sat and ate at the same table with them. During that big snowstorm in St. Paul two years ago, I actually slept in the same bed with one.”
“Really?” said Johnny. “Which one?”
“The hotels were overbooked. It was a freak blizzard. Everybody doubled up. I slept with Grace, and Ivy slept with Ruby.”
“What about old Vern?”
“He slept in a chair.”
“And what about Doo-Wah?”
“He slept on the floor. These guys don’t share beds with guys under any circumstances. It probably comes from not having gone to expensive sleep-over camps when they were little.”
Johnny, who had gone to an expensive sleep-over camp when he was little, darkened. He looked at me glumly.
“Listen,” he said. “Betty’s foundation wrote the script for about a dozen of those inner-city schools for gifted children. There are hundreds of kids in Ivy League colleges now because of her. Bill oversees all the pro bono work at the firm. He is responsible for an immense amount of good. So what’s your problem—that they don’t regularly eat lunch with darkies?”
“I think they are morally bankrupt and out to lunch,” I said. “They’re like those debutantes who used to go into the slums and tell poor women how to raise their children. What makes you think it’s so swell for some kid from the inner city to go to Yale and be surrounded by people who spend more on a pair of shoes than his mama does on food for a month and who have no idea where he’s coming from?”
“I love you,” said Johnny. “You’re definitely right, and you’re also wrong. You can be morally bankrupt and out to lunch and still do really good things for people. You don’t see how well-meaning they are. You think they’re full of shit because the only black people they know are servants.”
That about wrapped it up.
“I can see both sides,” Johnny said. “They’re right, and you’re right.”
I merely looked at him. I felt a little as if I were drowning in a lake of burning lighter fluid.
“Speak,” Johnny said.
“You’ll get like them,” I said. “Their values will cover you like slime. They’ll get under your skin like chiggers and pour their attitudes into your blood. They’ll invade your brain like tropical parasites and take you over.”
“Aren’t you lurid!”
“I’m so unhappy.”
“Don’t be,” Johnny said. “You can go to a dinner party and not lose your essential self. You can be true to your school and still make normal conversation. You can act like a regular person and still boogie in your soul.”
I listened earnestly but I felt that none of these things were true.
On the other hand, Johnny was my golden mean. He did boogie in his soul and I was deficient because I was too truculent to find any place for myself in what most people would call “the real world.” Who else would ever have been so perfect for me? Johnny was a translator and I was a foreign language. Without him I would have been lost somewhere in outer space. Without me he would have adapted himself out of existence. We were made for each other. I told him so.
“I’m glad yo
u feel that way,” he said, kissing my ear. “Because next month the Listers are having a really big dinner party with caterers and everything, so start practicing now.”
I did not look forward to this event but, on the other hand, fair was fair. Johnny came with me to the Newark Armory to catch a show of James Brown and the Famous Flames. He told me that, before he met me, he had gone to a dinner party at the Listers’ and a large, drunken sportswriter named Adrien McWirter had slid a cornichon down the back of the wife of the dean of the law school. How I wished I had been there!
“Gee, does that guy get invited anymore?” I said, hopefully.
“Well, he made a lot of trouble. He stood up in the middle of a dinner party one night and said, ‘Oh, how I adore neo-Nazi bikers. Those attractive leather uniforms and all.’ And then he passed out on the couch.”
He sounded like a man after my own heart, but Johnny told me that McWirter had been abandoned by all his friends, who could no longer stand to be around him. I sighed.
The week of the party I suggested to Johnny that I wear one of my old dance dresses since I could not go to a black-tie dinner in either of my two uniforms: blue jeans and turtleneck for home wear, black skirt and turtleneck for office. Johnny suggested that I go buy a dress and, on second thought, he’d go with me.
He sat in a chair like an elderly husband or sugar daddy and watched me try on things, and he made me buy a plain black dress which he said would look good with pearls. I said I had no pearls and two days later my enterprising swain was back with a string of pearls in a blue leather case. The enclosed card read: “For forays into the adult world.”
I looked at the pearls. “Why don’t you fuck off?” I suggested.
Johnny did not take this seriously. “See here, my good woman,” he said. “I buy you a string of extremely good pearls and you tell me to fuck off. How about throwing your arms around me and saying thank you.”
I threw my arms around him and said thank you. Then I said, “Why don’t you marry Carol Adams?”
Carol Adams had been my predecessor.
Goodbye Without Leaving Page 5
