by M. J. Bosse
“What’s that mean?”
“You were there.”
“Half asleep.”
“Well, a professor who lives in the city took all the remaining pipes.”
“How do you know?”
“David told me, after an hour of Barth and Vonnegut. He forced the professor to take the remaining half dozen, just to get rid of them.”
“So the job’s done when we see this professor.”
“If he still has them all.”
“You’re groovy, Virgil. You impressed David intellectually, so he cooperated.”
“Does that bother you?” Virgil asked with a smile.
“No. I dig adaptability. I mean, look how you were. Authoritarian with the gardener. Too coquettish for comfort with Paco. Humble with that Salisbury prick. Patient and, you might say, extremely corny with dear Ginny Vaccaro. And quite aesthetic with David. And each time you found out exactly what you wanted to know. Anyway, I liked David best of all.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew something, really knew it. He knew books. Didn’t he impress you?”
“He was impressive, yes.”
“You don’t sound enthusiastic.”
“No.”
“He was intelligent,” I argued.
“Very intelligent.”
“And he was courteous and well, like, pleasant.”
“Yes, he was.”
“Then why do you hate him?”
“Did I say I hate him?”
“But you don’t like him.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Just because apparently he digs boys more than girls?”
Virgil gave me a scornful glance.
“Then why?” I persisted.
Virgil took a deep breath and increased his speed just a little. “Judy, when a black man sees a white man who has intelligence and does nothing with it, who sits around on the patios of rich ladies in the sun, the black man doesn’t care whether the white man likes boys or girls or goats. The black man cares about one thing: commitment. He dislikes complacency. What turns a black man off today is complacency, his own or the white man’s. He is particularly sensitive to the white man’s. Nothing gets to a black man more than a white man’s complacency. That’s the red flag waved in front of the bull.”
“Dig,” I said, but I really didn’t. There are sudden deep gaps between lovers like Virgil and me. I mean, this black-man-and-white-man thing. I was cool enough to understand it, but it didn’t hang in my gut. We had hardly been together two months, and what I really knew about Virgil was his intellectual skill, his ability to charm people, and his tenderness in bed. These were enough to make me usually forget he was “a black man.” What I didn’t relate to was Virgil’s blackness. That meant a lot of him was hidden from me, just as a lot of me, my whiteness, was probably hidden from him.
As we hummed down the highway through the brilliant sunlight, I suddenly blurted out, “Do you love me? Virgil? Do you?”
For an answer, Virgil reached over and covered my hand with his own. And then we entered the city together.
*
Because of heavy traffic, we didn’t get to Martin’s apartment until late afternoon. Virgil stopped at a liquor store and bought a fifth of vodka as a gift for Martin. It isn’t everyone who will lend you his only possession, and that beat-up Renault was about all that Martin had in this world.
We climbed the five flights to his apartment, and Virgil knocked gently on the door. Gently, because a good healthy blow might cave it in. What a contrast to the great gold gargoyle of yesterday! As usual, Martin was glad to see us—awkward, but glad, like a lonely person. He was growing a bushy moustache, one of those handlebar jobs, and was already twirling the bright red ends.
Soon we all had vodka and tonics. Bach was playing through the tinny speakers of an old stereo. The heat was stifling in that cubicle. From where I sat on a rickety chair I could see cockroaches slipping into and out of a pile of unwashed dishes in the sink. If ever there was a bachelor, full-blown and confirmed, it was Martin, with his booze and his incipient belly and his peculiar comforts. Most of the wall space was covered by Playmates jammed into the plaster with bare little nails. The bed on which he sat was unmade, and if I were a girl he brought up there, I wouldn’t let Martin touch my little finger until he changed the sheets.
I asked how Braless in Gaza was coming along. Martin was sure it would sell; whenever he discussed his writing it was always in terms of salability. It’s funny how people are. Martin gives the impression of someone living in abject poverty. It sometimes seems as if he can’t make it through the next day. On the other hand, Virgil never complains about lack of money, although I doubt if his fellowship and my earnings really equaled what Martin was making then. From hints Martin has dropped, he was raised in a well-to-do family, whereas Virgil has never had anything. Maybe that’s why I can live gracefully with Virgil on what makes Martin absolutely impoverished.
Martin brought out Braless in Gaza. In this book the heroine, constantly besieged and abused by all sorts of sexual weirdos, is named Miss Cunny Lingus, her boyfriend Randy drives a Vulva, and the chief villain runs a factory called Dildoe Incorporated. In the latest installment, which Martin read to us, Cunny Lingus is seduced by an old man with a huge wen on his nose. It was a pretty sick and disagreeable scene, believe me, but all I said was I wondered if it sounded like the hunchback bit in Candy.
Maybe I should have said nothing, because my criticism seemed to depress Martin. He leaned forward on his rumpled bed and absently twirled the growing tips of his red moustache. Soon he was into a self-pitying bag. He declared his intention to give up Tai Chi Chuan classes for lack of funds. It was an old story, his need for sacrifice.
“How can you afford to miss Tai Chi all the time” he sullenly asked Virgil. Then he complained that everyone could afford to miss classes except him. Henry hadn’t been in class either last night. “I think Henry is angry at me. Ever since that return trip from the Hamptons—you know, when I was dead drunk and he had to drive me home and carry me upstairs—ever since then he’s been strange.”
“Henry wouldn’t be angry over a thing like that. He just has a lot on his mind.” Virgil always defended Henry, whose younger brother had died of an overdose of horse and whose older brother, a Panther, had disappeared into a ghetto three years before and hadn’t been heard of since.
“Henry used to come up for a drink now and then,” Martin said gloomily, “but he doesn’t anymore.”
“He’s busy with a great new chick,” I put in. “I saw them together at Eros.”
“No, Henry has dropped me,” Martin said, and he looked at each of us. “Next it’ll be you.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said.
“And as for Henry,” Virgil said, “he has his thesis on his mind.”
Martin’s boozy eyes stared into space.
“What you need,” I said brusquely, “is a live one to go with them”—and I swept my arm around at the Playmates.
“I’m saving myself for you,” Martin replied with a wan little smile. He got up with his glass and poured himself another healthy slug of vodka. After about half of that drink, Martin’s mood changed. He began smiling a kind of sly, unpleasant smile as he looked from Virgil to me. “What have you two been doing out in the Hamptons?”
“I thought I told you,” Virgil said immediately—perhaps to forestall my reply. “We wanted to go through David’s effects for possible clues to the murder.”
“We’re detectives, you know,” I had to add.
“And did you find any?” Martin asked with his sly smile.
Virgil shook his head and sighed.
“You didn’t find it, then?”
“Find it? Find what?”
“Don’t play the fool with me,” Martin said with surprising harshness. “I know more than you think I do.”
“What could you know?” Virgil said blandly.
“A lot.” Martin drank some
vodka. “A lot more than you think.”
“Well then, tell us!” I demanded, not liking his odd little smile of triumph.
“For example,” Martin said, “I know about the package.”
Virgil, who was smoking, didn’t miss a puff.
Martin added, “And I figure it’s worth plenty of money.”
“You say there’s a package that’s worth money.”
“Don’t rephrase what I say. I’ve been in analysis, you know. I don’t like that.”
“I’m sorry, Martin. I’m just trying to understand.”
“Remember asking me what happened the last time I saw Don Stuart? I said we had drinks at the Cedar Bar? Well, Don was celebrating that night. He kept saying he was going to make it big.”
“I remember,” Virgil said. “But what’s important is what Don meant by making it big.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Well, let me ask you this. Assuming there was a package—”
“Oh, there was.”
“—why would it be worth a lot of money?”
Martin laughed ruefully. “Come on now, old buddy.”
“I’m asking you, why?”
“You were in Alpha; you ought to know.”
“Why don’t you tell me?” Virgil persisted.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it, what the package contained?”
“You tell me.”
“All right—evidence that could hang somebody. I was in the Army long enough to know how sensitive a man can get about certain things—My Lai, for example. Dong Nai evidence would be worth plenty.”
“Are you saying Don Stuart was using evidence to blackmail someone?” I asked hotly.
Martin turned to me. “You aren’t old enough yet to know what a man will do for money.” And to Virgil he said, “It is logical, you can’t deny that. Don Stuart was at Dong Nai. Men from that company have already been court-martialed. Don Stuart receives a package from the Orient. Soon afterward he tells me he will make it big, which in my world means money. Then he’s murdered.”
“Martin,” I said, “you’re really some kind of bastard.”
“I’m still curious.” Virgil said, knocking ashes from his pipe. “It’s an academic point, perhaps, but I wonder how you learned about the package. Did Don tell you?”
“No. But that isn’t important. What hurts me,” Martin said in a really hurt tone of voice, “is the fact that you haven’t confided in me. We’ve been friends, and here you go sleuthing around and leave me out. What have I done? Why won’t you confide in me?”
Virgil rose, motioning for me to get up too. “We will in time. But to put your mind at ease, we are not out to make money.”
“Well, I didn’t mean—” And then Martin became terribly apologetic. It was sort of demeaning for him, and I felt sorry for Martin, half drunk in that roach-infested apartment, counting unrealistically on his crude imitation of Candy. When we left, Martin looked reproachfully from me to Virgil and back to me. “I should know by now not to count on people,” he muttered, and he told us to go.
On the subway home, I shouted above the noise to Virgil that I shouldn’t have criticized Braless in Gaza, because that was what had bothered Martin. Virgil, who until then had been silent and brooding about something—probably about Martin’s mysterious knowledge of the package—turned toward me and arched his eyebrows in amusement and called over the rattling of the subway car, “Judy, don’t you realize he’s in love with you?”
*
The next day I went to the library with the microfilm taken from Paco’s Prince, the only pipe besides the Poker that had contained any. I wore a discreet blue skirt and white blouse and my hornrims saved from university days, and I had tied my hair back appropriately with a black ribbon. I mean, when I sat down at the microviewer, I belonged there.
The first thing that came into focus was an introduction written by Don Stuart. It was typed, full of corrections and additions, obviously his initial attempt. It did mean, of course, that we now had the beginning of the manuscript in our possession. Don began this way:
The Occidental penetration into Asian mysteries is vividly symbolized by Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1852–54. This was a decisive episode in American foreign policy and in the confrontation of Japan’s extraordinary energies with those of the outside world.
Not bad, I thought. And for some reason, “extraordinary energies” made me think of Ikuko, but then, my mind frequently takes a sexual turn. I thought of the sergeant introducing her to Don. I thought of her stripping to put into play her “extraordinary energies.” There is something about prostitution that fascinates me, and there I am, forty, broke, standing on a street corner, waiting for the fat brutal men.
The fleet which touched Hong Kong, Singapore, Formosa, and the Bonins, and which temporarily occupied Okinawa, completed two voyages to Japan. The first trip into Tokyo Bay was short and fraught with the danger of reprisals by the Japanese, who proved unprepared to repel foreign invaders. The second voyage, which included a visit to the northern island of Hokkaido, was a triumph of evangelical aggressiveness on the part of the Americans, who left only after securing a treaty with the Japanese which opened that country to widespread trade with the powers of Europe.
Don quoted from the First Article of that treaty, which Perry had drafted:
“There shall be a perfect, permanent, and universal peace, and a sincere and cordial amity, between the United States of America, on the one part, and the Empire of Japan on the other, and between their people, respectively, without exception of persons and places.”
So Matt Perry had forced the Japanese into “a perfect, permanent, and universal peace”? When my father fought in the Second World War, I wasn’t even a gleam in his eye. What happens to people? I mean, the dreadful things they do to each other, often without knowing why? Once I went on an antiwar march in Washington. It began in hope, with a wonderful bunch of kids together, all of us confident that we knew where we were at. Then in front of one of those Government buildings, I forget which one, there was a sudden flurry from the center of the crowd, a kind of surging around and then screaming and a cry of “Mace! Mace!” and this kid, younger than me, came lurching past with blood streaming from his mouth, and I didn’t know what the hell was happening, and neither did my friends, and all the way home in the bus we sat there kind of stunned, wondering what in the hell had happened. I mean, where did Matt Perry get off demanding “a perfect, permanent and universal peace”?
Don was a pretty good writer, because I think he got from me exactly the kind of response he was looking for. Then he made a pitch for the importance of the expedition, calling it an instrument of nineteenth-century economic expansion, missionary zeal, and scientific curiosity. Accounts of the expedition had until then been sketchy, however, and inaccurate. Don claimed that the journal which he was now presenting was the only extant document that truthfully described the racial incident at Naha or even mentioned the secret meeting of Perry and the Russians.
Racial incident at Naha? Secret meeting with the Russians?
Don was a good writer. He claimed that the identity of the diarist was unknown; probably because of fear of censorship regulations aboard the ships, the diarist had kept his name out of the pages. From internal evidence, however, he obviously was a Bostonian, whose knowledge of Dutch, the only European language familiar to the Japanese of that day, had enabled him to find a position with the expedition as translator.
Then Don explained his ownership of the manuscript. During a recent visit to Japan he had persuaded a family that had lived in Shimoda for generations to permit him to edit the work for American publication. It all sounded so formal, dignified, and scholarly. But I had this picture of Ikuko, desperate for money to get herself out of the dance hall, accepting Don’s proposition and journeying home to persuade her family to give up the diary, which must have been a kind of family treasure, cherished like a broken teacup or a split fan. And if
they had refused, I could imagine her stealing it. That’s what I would have done.
Once through the introduction, I began the hard work of transcribing the Bostonian’s crabbed handwriting. I got the fleet out of Shanghai through “inclement weather,” and on to Okinawa, where Old Matt threatened the Regent of Naha into holding “peace conferences.” Then came the first visit to Japan, entry into Tokyo Bay, though not so far as the squadron would go during the second visit. There were initial diplomatic maneuverings, posturings of military power on both sides, and finally a grand conference at Kurihama, with Perry presenting to Japanese officials a friendly letter from President Fillmore. Our Bostonian was very precise about all this; I mean, he described what the men wore and what “side arms” they carried, and how bright the day was when the two forces stood face to face ashore. The whole thing was like a novel, and I got so absorbed that when I finally looked at my watch I discovered to my absolute disbelief that I’d been grooving in the library for six hours. Would anybody believe it back in Omaha?
*
I stopped at a nearby coffee shop for a rest. I hadn’t been sitting in the booth for a minute before I saw Henry coming toward me. I called for him to join me, and to my mild surprise, he did. In the sunlight streaming through the window, his face took on the rich hue of burnished wood. Even though only a year separated us, Henry had always seemed much older than me. I think the impression of age was in his eyes, dark and unwavering. He asked me what I was doing, and I jived that I was working on my term paper.
“Think you’ll get your degree?” he asked—I thought, sarcastically.
“If Virgil keeps me at it.”
“Yes, that man is something else again,” Henry said with real feeling.
“He thinks a lot of you too.”
“But he’s the scholar. I’m not. Ever since I can remember, when I was this high”—Henry reached out of the booth and leveled his hand a couple of feet from the floor—”I saw him with a book. You don’t always see a thing like that in Harlem.”
“Why was he like that, Henry?”
