by Caryl Rivers
“Go? Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“But Harry —”
“He couldn’t do anything about it. Maybe he wouldn’t try to fight the divorce; once we were in New York, he’d know you really mean it.”
“I could do that. I could. There’s nothing in the separation agreement that says I can’t leave the state.”
“Sure you could do it.”
“Do you think I could get a job? I haven’t got a college degree.”
“You’ve got great clips. You’ve covered the White House. Charlie would give you a good recommendation. And you could freelance for a while until something opened up on the magazine.”
“We could just go. Like Gypsies. I’ve been so careful, all my life. It would be an adventure! New York!”
“I’ll take Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten,” he sang, off key.
She laughed, excitedly. “Manhattan. Even the word sounds sophisticated. Oh, Jay, I won’t be a hick anymore!”
He smiled. “City slickers, that’s us.”
“Harry, it’s been a long time, sweetie.”
“Sure, Dotty, long time.” His speech was slurred, even though he’d had only one Scotch. Why were his words sliding together?
“Too long. We had fun, didn’t we?”
“Sure,” he said. “Fun.”
She ran her fingers across his lips. “You can come upstairs with me if you want. You remember the way.”
He went up the stairs with her to the small room. It was familiar; he had been there before.
Dotty wasted no time. She took off her bra and cupped her breasts. “You always liked these, Harry. Love me up, sweetie.”
He touched her breasts, and the desire flamed in him, as it always did. But there was something else too, that had always been there, the self-loathing that he had to buy a woman, because his own woman didn’t want him. He looked at her, and she seemed lewd and dirty, standing there flaunting her body at him. “Come on, sweetie.”
He took hold of her nipple and squeezed it, hard.
“Easy, baby, you’re hurting me.”
“Whore,” he said, and he slapped her face.
“Harry, what are you doing?”
“Dirty whore,” he said. He grabbed her wrists.
“Sugar, what’s the matter? Are you drunk?”
“Not drunk. That’s why I see what you are.”
“You were never like this, Harry. You never hurt me. That’s why I liked you. Love me, baby, don’t hurt me.”
He put his hands on her throat. “Dirty,” he said. “All women are like you. Dirty whore.”
“Don’t hurt me. I’ll do anything you want.”
“Get on your knees.”
Gasping, she sank to her knees, and then she started to cry, the tears rolling silently down her cheeks. The sight of her tears sliced through the haze in his head. Why was he doing this?
He lifted her to her feet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”
“Are you all right, baby?”
“Yes, I’m all right.”
“Let me love you.”
He let her lead him to the bed, and she undressed him and touched him expertly, in ways that aroused him. But the room seemed to be moving around. He lay still and let her touch him, and then he said, “Mary?”
“Close your eyes. I’ll be Mary, if you want. I’ll be anybody.”
“Touch me, Mary.”
“Yes, it’s Mary, and I’m touching you. Close your eyes. I’m Mary.”
“I’ll always love you, Mary.”
“And I’ll love you. I always will.”
He felt the tears, warm on his face. “I couldn’t ask her to do anything dirty. She’s my wife.”
“It’s all right, I’m here.”
“Fuck me, Mary. Please fuck me.”
“Yes, I will.”
She moved her body on his, and he closed his eyes. He saw her dark hair and her beautiful, high breasts and her eyes, the color, he thought, of chocolate, and they were smiling at him. He felt himself drowning in her.
“I love you, Mary!” he cried out, and the room was whirling like a carousel, and he laughed as he went around and around and around and her dark hair was whirling too.
Then the carousel stopped, and he opened his eyes to see her better, but the woman lying on top of him had blond hair and smelled like a cheap flower and her eyes were not like chocolate. The scent of Scotch whiskey filled his mouth and nostrils, and he thought he was going to vomit.
The tears were still warm against his face.
Journal: Donald A. Johnson
Loretta told me she had a special surprise for me for my birthday and she’d give it to me when I came to her apartment. I love surprises, so I hurried over. I was surprised, all right!
She opened the door, and there she was, in a harem costume, a silver bralike thing, cut down as far as it could go and still be technically on, displaying her gorgeous pomegranates, and silver panties with gauzy, see-through pantaloons attached and a silver veil. Strapped to her thigh was a golden dagger.
She smiled at me and said, “Sahib, I await you.”
“Holy shit, you’ve been reading Frank Yerby!” I said.
Her face fell. “You don’t like it?”
“Oh, God, I love it!”
“Let me take you to paradise, sahib.”
She did. Or about as close as I am ever going to get. Frank was right: bodice ripping is a lot of fun; and Loretta did some interesting things with the dagger that Frank probably thought about but couldn’t put in his books, he being resolutely soft core.
Even Frank’s execrable dialogue, in Loretta’s soft, throaty voice, sounded classy. She reminded me that Chaucer was the Frank Yerby of his day, as far as soft core was concerned, albeit a lot less flowery. The Wife of Bath’s Tale was pretty raunchy. In those days, life was short and brutal, so you grabbed what pleasure you could, and told tales about it.
Loretta said that my birthday present could last all year, since the oeuvre of Frank Yerby was considerable and there were a number of characters we had yet to explore — Arab princesses, South Sea beauties, Viking queens. I wondered if she could manage to do Fancy (of Goodbye, My Fancy), a cut-rate Scarlett who made a habit of pulling her ball gowns down around her waist whenever her lover, Gaylord, came around.
“Honeychile, I can do that white trash southern slut a lot easier than you can do Gaylord.” She sneered.
“I can do white,” I said. “I used to be Claude Jarman, Jr.”
“Who?”
I have to educate the woman. She may know Chaucer, but she has a lot to learn about movies. She doesn’t even know Lash LaRue. It will be an even trade, I’ll get Chaucer and Shakespeare, and she’ll get Lash and Claude and Ricky Nelson.
Which brings me to the question of where, exactly, I fit on the spectrum between Frank Yerby and Shakespeare. I know there are going to be people who will be unhappy with my book: my father, for one. I write about a lot of things that middle-class colored folks all know about: our obsession with skin color, how lighter is better; our need to have white people approve of us, how even the strongest and fiercest of us, like Rafe, can’t help feeling that whites have some magic that we don’t have, how we are perpetually reacting to what they think and what they say. It’s OK to say these things among ourselves, but to hang out the dirty laundry, as it were, where white people can see it, might well be considered treason.
I understand the reaction. We have enough trouble as it is; they have so many things to use against us, why give them more ammunition?
But I am not writing for whites — or for Negroes either. I am writing for me and, perhaps, for the future. One day, some people —maybe my own grandchildren — will want to know what it was like, being who I am, coming of age when I did. Being a writer, I have found, gives you a certain amount of power. You create a world and make people see it thr
ough your eyes. I don’t want to abuse that power. There are some things I know about my family that I would not write, because it would cause them too much pain. But I must be honest in what I do write about.
Sometimes I ask if I am glorifying myself, exaggerating my own role in this life. Probably. But there is a certain arrogance in writing that is inescapable. You create — like God does. (Speaking of arrogance.) It’s an act of assertion that is primal, you can’t escape it. Once you pick up a pen and make a scratch on paper, you’re into it.
But there are rules, and one of those is to be true to the truth. You must write of things as you see them and know them, and you must not create a self that is other than that truth. You may emerge, on the page, as a fool or a bully or a whiner or an asshole, but that’s the price you pay for the power you appropriate. You may fail. You may be ridiculed. You may be attacked. Or all of the above.
I used to think writing was safe. It was, when I was the only one who saw it. Now, I’m going to throw my words out there so everyone can look at them. Can look at me.
I have fantasies about the worst that can happen — including having Roy Wilkins say that the whole NAACP plans to boycott the book, which is a disgrace to the entire race, and having my classmates at G. W. getting together in a bar and remembering what a total asshole I was. I can imagine their dialogue, quote for quote. It scares the living daylights out of me.
But I am going to be an author. I’ve just put the check for my advance in the bank. There is no turning back, now. All I can do is hang on and hope I’ll survive the ride.
When she walked into the Oval Office, he was sitting on the edge of his desk, lost in thought. He looked up, saw her and asked her a question about the subject that had obviously been on his mind.
“Tell me, do the people in Belvedere think much about the bomb? Do they really believe we’re all going to go up in a puff of smoke one of these days?”
“We recently had a man-in-the-street poll on that subject,” she said. “It’s funny, people don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow, they’re not all out building bomb shelters in their basements. But it’s there. It’s like this low hum; you don’t always realize you’re hearing it, but it’s there.”
He nodded. “What about you? You’re —what, twenty-four, twenty-five?”
“Twenty-five,” she said.
He shook his head again and smiled. “God, I remember being that young. Twenty-five.”
Then he seemed to recall the subject at hand. “So, do you think about it?”
“I have a little girl — she’s five. Sometimes I wonder if the world will even be around for her to live to an old age. I think it will, but —” She shrugged.
“Yes,” he said, “I think it will too. For my daughter. My son. But…” His voice trailed off; he seemed pensive. “Did you ever read much about World War I? ”
“You mean how people really didn’t want to go to war, but they did anyhow?”
He stood up and walked to the window, looking out at the garden. “I’ve been reading about it again. That’s one of the places I’d want to go, if I had a time machine: Europe before the Great War.”
She thought it odd that here he was, the most important man in the world, and he had daydreams like ordinary people. About having a time machine and going off to the places in the past that intrigued him.
“It was a glittering world,” he said. “They waltzed to Strauss in the palaces in Vienna, and they traveled in private railway cars, and they sat in the cafés in Paris and rode in their carriages in London, and they didn’t know they were doomed. They had peace and prosperity and science, and they turned it all into a desert. Even after they saw it coming, they couldn’t stop it. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ They lost a whole generation of young men. Because of a series of stupid accidents. All by accident.”
It seemed he had forgotten she was there and was musing to the air. It was not lost on her that he knew he was the man who could do it. Not far away was the officer who kept the briefcase with the codes that held the keys to the powers of hell. That briefcase could turn the whole planet into a desert.
He turned back to her again, as if he could sense what she was thinking, and said, “You know, people think a president can do anything, that he has so much power. But I’ve learned by being here” — he waved his hand to indicate the Oval Office — that there are many things you can’t do. So much that’s beyond your control.”
“So many accidents?”
“Yes. But what you can do is set things up so accidents might not happen. Improve the odds.”
“I used to have nightmares about the bomb,” she said. “After we had to duck and cover in school.”
“What were they like?” he asked. She had noticed that he was always interested in small details about people’s lives, facts you’d never think a powerful man would be at all interested in. He was immensely curious; he probably stored all that information away and used it all, somehow.
“I dreamed I was standing on a hill and I saw the big cloud, and then everything was flying and tumbling around, like they did in the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, except everything was burning, including people. Flying through the air and burning.”
He nodded, looking thoughtful again. She wondered how he was storing that image, and what he would do with it. Flying through the air, and burning.
He looked at her. “How will people take it if I propose some new limits on nuclear weapons? Are they scared enough, out in Belvedere, so they’ll support it? Or will they listen to the people who say I’m getting soft on communism?”
“I think they’ll support it,” she said. “I think the Cuban missile crisis really sobered people up. I mean, suddenly it almost happened. It wasn’t just science fiction anymore.”
“Good. That’s what other people are telling me. It’s time. The timing is right.”
“History is about timing,” she said.
He looked at her, and that quick grin flashed across his face. “You’re learning, Belvedere Blade. Nice to see that in the press. It’s rare.”
When she left the Oval Office she drove back to Belvedere, to the Reverend Johnson’s house. The president had asked her about the status of the housing battle — he’d remembered that too — and she had told him she hoped the negotiations would succeed. But when she walked into the minister’s living room, she saw Don pacing. Something, clearly, had happened.
“We’re going,” he said. “The negotiations have fallen apart. We hit the streets on Tuesday.”
She frowned. He seemed elated. Not that he was eager for confrontation, but the enforced idleness of the past weeks had taken a toll. He had been tense, restless, because of the inaction. Now, at least, he knew what had to be done.
“What do you think you can get?” Mary asked.
“The council’s deadlocked. The mayor can vote in case of a tie. We had him, but now he’s got cold feet because of what’s happened.”
“Yeah, people don’t want to believe it. Nice kids, good families.”
“What if it had been the other way around? If a white woman and her baby had been burned to death by three black men. Do you think they’d be talking about a prank?”
“No. They’d go to the electric chair.”
“If they weren’t dragged out and strung up on a tree. We have to put enough pressure on the mayor so he can’t chicken out.”
“The national media will be around. We’re a big story already.”
“The locals may be upset because they know those kids, but people outside of Belvedere don’t have any sympathy for them.”
“Some of the businessmen I talked to want this to go away. They don’t want Belvedere to seem like Birmingham.”
“We’re counting on that. The fastest way to cool things down would be to pass the new plan. Belvedere looks progressive, and we call off our troops. No more demonstrations
.”
“Can you get the mayor without them?”
He shook his head. “No, we just have to scare him more than the other side does.”
“Mayor Swarman is not exactly Winston Churchill.”
“He’s not even George Wallace.”
She laughed, and he poured her a cup of coffee.
She took a sip and asked him, “Don, when this is over, have you decided what you’re going to do?”
He nodded. “I’m going to get my master’s at Georgetown. And finish the book.”
“It’s going to be wonderful. You have to promise me an autographed copy.”
“You’ll get the first one off the presses. You’ve been a lot of help, you know. You were really the one who convinced me it’s worthwhile. That it isn’t trivial.”
“I think you made the right decision. It’s not like this will all be over in the next year. There’s going to be plenty of time for you get involved in civil rights again. Maybe go into politics, the book will help. Look what it did for Kennedy.”
“I don’t think I’ll get the Pulitzer Prize.”
“Who knows? I’ll vote for you. The Blade has a lot of power in these things.”
He laughed. “Hey, I hope you and Jay are coming to the wedding. It’s going to be a big party. With all my relatives and all Loretta’s, we’re going to have to have a tent.”
“We wouldn’t miss it. We might be in New York, on that magazine I told you about, but we’ll come back for it.”
They chatted for a while longer, and as she looked at him she thought that his conviction, his passion, was the same as that which impelled a handful of men to dress up as Indians and dump tea in Boston Harbor. How odd, that a country born of a revolutionary act should be so frightened of this new revolution. She wondered if, years from now, men like Martin Luther King and Don Johnson would be calcified into marble and trite, patriotic sentences in history books. She realized that all the history she had been taught was a sham. It was dehydrated, bled of passion, ego, courage, hate. She sipped her coffee and watched him as he talked. He was history, and so, in a small way, was she. And they were both young, a little scared, unsure of what life might hold for them, but knowing there was work to be done.
