Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

by James Baldwin

  I watched him. He wasn’t smiling now. I sat down on the sofa. Christopher came clattering in, carrying a bottle of milk in one hand, and balancing a cup and saucer in the other. He set them both down on the table before me, and said, standing over me, “Now, let’s see what you think is a whole lot of milk—I put in two sugars, but I didn’t stir.”

  Since the coffee cup held a little less than half a cup of coffee, my only possible option was to fill the cup. I stirred it a little, and I tasted it. Christopher watched me. “Very good,” I said gravely, “thank you.”

  He watched me with his deep and wry distrust. He sat down on the sofa, and put one hand on my knee. “What’s happening in this town?” he asked Pete.

  “Oh,” said Pete, “a whole lot’s happening in this town, from broads to pot to civil rights to urban renewal. Which scene do you want to dig first?”

  “How do you tell them apart?” I asked.

  Christopher punched my knee. “The broads and the pot smokers tend to talk less,” he said, “now, you’d remember that if you hadn’t been so sick.” He turned back to Pete. “Well, we can’t have Big Daddy here making them scenes, so you can just kind of cool me and I’ll make it on my own.”

  “This town’s not exactly as nice as it looks,” I said.

  “You trying to scare me?” Christopher asked. “You tried that once before. Remember?” He smiled and forced me to smile. “I thought you’d learned your lesson. Ah. I might have to remind you again, bye and bye.”

  I watched him as he talked to Pete, watched his big teeth, his big hands, listened to his laugh. He sounded so free; a way I’d never sounded: a way I’d never been.

  A double-minded man is never much of a match for a single-minded boy. When Christopher first met me, he decided that he needed me: that was that. He needed human arms to hold him, he could see very well, no matter what I said, that mine were empty, and that was that. If I was afraid of society’s judgment, he was not: “Fuck these sick people. I do what I like.” Or, laughing: “You afraid that people will call you a dirty old man? Well, you are a dirty old man. You’re my dirty old man, right? I dig dirty old men.” And, in another tone: “I just do not want to be out here, all hungry and cold and alone. Let’s not sweat it, baby. Love me. Let’s just be nice.”

  I first met Christopher at a party, briefly, when I had been in rehearsal, and didn’t see him anymore until after the play had opened. When we had settled into our run, his face leaped out at me again, the way a hungry dog in the cellar leaps when you open the door.

  We saw each other at another party, very late at night, uptown, where I didn’t live anymore. I very nearly didn’t get there. I was dead, because I had had a class in the morning, then the matinée, then the evening show. Then I had drinks in my dressing room with my agent, who wanted to talk to me about a guest appearance on a pretty lousy TV serial—he said that it might be a breakthrough. I finally fell into a taxi and realized, once it began to move, that I had absolutely no money on me. I asked the driver to take me to a bar near my apartment, where I could cash a check. Then the idea, tired as I was, and so close to home, of traveling to the party, seemed intolerable. I went into the bar, cashed the check, paid the driver, went back into the bar for a drink. The bar was absolutely hideous with gray, lightless people. I went into the phone booth to call up my host and ask him not to expect me.

  But this was a friend from the evil days. He had been nice to me, and he was a Negro, and his life wasn’t going too well. I sighed to myself as I heard the tone of his voice: “We’re all waiting for you. Of course, it’s not too late, are you kidding? There are people here who want to meet you, they’ve been waiting all night. Get in a cab and come on, you can pass out here.”

  Christopher told me later that he had been about to leave when the phone rang; and it was me; and he waited. They all waited but from the moment I walked into the room I had eyes only for him. I was introduced to the people, who looked at me with the kind of wary respect with which I imagine they would greet a baboon or a lion who was free of his cage for the evening. Some people had seen me in the play, and they congratulated me on my performance. I was flattered, as always, chilled, as always. Someone remembered the small part I had done in that movie more than ten years before. I had been very young then, but this caused me to remember that I was not young anymore. And I was watching the boy, who was watching me.

  People who achieve any eminence whatever are driven to do so; and there is always something terribly vulnerable about such people. They very soon discover that their eminence makes of them an incitement and a target—it does not cause them to be loved. They are trapped on their hill. They cannot come down. They cannot bear obscurity as some organisms cannot bear light—death is what awaits them when they come down from the hill.

  “I met you before,” said Christopher, “do you remember?” The hand with which he grasped my own was very large and dry; something in the nervous alertness of his stance, and the wary hopefulness in his eyes made him seem poised to run. The candor of his panic made me smile. I envied him.

  “Of course,” I said, “how’ve you been?”

  “Oh,” he said, with great cheerfulness, “I’ve been all right.” He had a slight Southern accent. I had not noticed it before. “Oh! Congratulations. Your play’s a big hit. Everybody’s talking about it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It looks like we may run for awhile.” I wanted to ask him if he had seen the play, or if he wanted to, but for some reason I didn’t.

  “So,” he said, after a moment, “I guess that’s all you’ve been doing? Making it to the theater, and making it on home?”

  “And crashing an occasional party.”

  He laughed, but looked at me quickly, speculatively. “You must be tired. Don’t you have anybody to fight off the world for you, to protect you from jokers like this”—he indicated the room—“and jokers like me—don’t you have anybody to make sure you come home nights?”

  “No,” I said sorrowfully, “not a soul,” and we both laughed again.

  “Shame on you. You shouldn’t be wandering around alone, you’re too valuable—I’m not joking, I mean it. This town is full of all kinds of sick people.”

  “Well, I think I’ve met most of them by now. So I’m safe.”

  “If you think that,” he said, with a peculiarly aggressive distinctness, “you really are crazy.” And then he added, almost as an afterthought, it seemed, and to himself, “You really do need somebody to take care of you—why don’t you hire me as your bodyguard, man? That way, the future of the American theater will be a whole lot brighter.” He said it with a smile, but also with a shrewd, calculating, coquettish look, as though he were saying, That’s right, mother. I’m bucking for the job.

  I was still impressed by his candor, but he was beginning to frighten me. We moved to the window. It was a high window, it was a blue-black night, we looked out on the cruel half-moon and the patient stars and fires of Manhattan.

  “Look at that,” he said, and put one great hand under my elbow, “look at that. Isn’t that a gas? From so high up, it almost looks like a place where a human being could live.” Then he looked down. He dropped my elbow. “But from down there, sweetheart, on that cold cement, you know you could howl and scream forever and not a living soul would hear you.” Then he smiled. “But you don’t know nothing about that, do you? You don’t walk these streets, you just ride through them. You only see cats like me through glass.”

  “I come from the streets. It’s true I ride now, but I used to walk. Don’t pull rank on me. I might outrank you.”

  “Okay. Don’t get mad. I was only putting you on. I can’t help it. I always do that if I like somebody.”

  I knew what he was saying, I heard him; it was as though he had just smuggled a note to me; and he knew that I would not read it until I was alone. But he also knew that I would certainly read it. He did not look at me now, but stared out of the window. And, to bring us back from where we
were, and also to carry us further, he now said (while I began to be aware that the rest of the party was watching us, and said to myself, I’ve got to circulate around this room once, and get out of here): “Someone once told me that if it wasn’t for the lights from the earth reflected in the sky, nobody would ever be able to look into the sky. It would be too frightening. I’ve often thought about that. I wonder if it’s true.”

  “I guess we’ll never know,” I said. “When all the lights on earth go out, we’ll be gone, too.”

  “Well,” he said, and laughed, “I certainly hope so. I sure don’t want to be left alone down here, in the dark.”

  There was a note deliberately plaintive in that last statement, and I did not want to pursue it. “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Well, actually, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up in New York—I grew up in Harlem.”

  “Where in Harlem? That’s my hometown.”

  But I knew that his Harlem was not my Harlem.

  “We used to live on 134th Street.”

  “We lived on 136th.”

  “Well, shit, you’re one of the neighborhood boys, then—I wonder if I ever saw you—”

  “No. You would have been a snot-nosed kid then.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and looked at me quizzically, “I guess so. We wouldn’t have had an awful lot in common—I was always in trouble.” He gestured toward the room. “That’s how I met Frank.” Frank was our host, a social worker. “He knew my probation officer. He helped me out a lot.”

  I did not want to ask him why he had been on probation, both because I did not want to know and because I was certain that one day he would tell me.

  “If you were born in New Jersey,” I said, “and you were brought up in New York, how did you get that Southern accent?”

  He grinned. “I haven’t got a real accent.” He looked at me. “I went to reform school in the South. And then, later on, I used to go with this broad from Miami and I sort of put it on, you know, for her—she went for it—and I guess it kind of stuck.” He seemed a little embarrassed. He tapped on the glass with one astonishingly manicured fingernail. “Kid stuff,” he said.

  I laughed. “Maybe you should have been an actor.”

  “Not me,” he said. “I don’t have the nerves. Or the patience.” He paused. “I’m fascinated,” he said, “by space.”

  He was referring to those planets which were simply points of light to our eyes. They contained possibilities for him; and perhaps they really did, why not? The planet on which we stood was not extremely promising. But it had proved to be enough, and more than enough, for me.

  “The only space which means anything to me,” I said, “is the space between myself and other people. May it never diminish.”

  He looked as though I had hurt his feelings. “Ah,” he said, with a really disarming and disconcerting gentleness, “you don’t mean that.” And when he said this everything about him seemed to shine, as though a light had been turned on from within. “Don’t say things like that, it doesn’t become you—and, anyway, I’ll never believe you.”

  I was shocked—bewildered—by his vehement sincerity, and discomfited because he had caught me in a lie. Of course I had not meant what I had said; I had only, and far more cunningly than he would have been able to do for himself, wrenched his full attention around to me again. I had been putting him on.

  “I guess what I mean,” I said, then, guilty about having upstaged him and now, helplessly, feeding him his lines, “is the space between myself and most people.”

  He was a quick study. “But not all of them?” And, after a moment, with a smile, “Not all of us?”

  “No”—losing ground now every instant, and knowing it—“by no means all. I know some very nice people.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” he said, with tranquillity, “you’re a very nice person yourself.”

  I felt a terrible fatigue. I watched his profile. He was looking with wonder into the sky. I watched his hands, pressed flat against the windowpane, like the hands of the orphan in the fable, the orphan trapped outside of warmth and light and love, hoping to be received, to be rescued from the night. His mouth was a little open, like the mouths of waifs and orphans. Not so very long ago, I had stood as he now stood and had hoped as he now hoped. What had my hope come to? It had led me to this moment, here. I heard his cry because it was my own. He did not know this—did not know, that is, that his cry was my own—but he knew that his cry had been heard. Therefore, he hummed a little and tapped with his fingers on the glass. He sensed that he had found the path that led home. But I was afraid. What, after all, could I do with him? except, perhaps, set him on his path, the path that would lead him away from me. My honor, my intelligence, and my experience all informed me that freedom, not happiness, was the precious stone. One could not cling to happiness—happiness, simply, submitted to no clinging; and it is criminal to use the unspoken and unrealized needs of another as a means of escorting him, elaborately, into the prison of those needs, and sealing him there. But, on the other hand, the stone I hoped to offer was, nevertheless, a stone: its edges drew blood, and its weight was tremendous.

  Still, there he was, before me. And my fatigue increased.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

  “I know you do,” said Christopher. “I wish you didn’t. We’re all going to have to go soon. But I know you must be tired.”

  “I guess I better circulate just a little bit, anyway,” I said, “then I’ll split.”

  “I’ve kind of monopolized you, haven’t I? Well, crazy. I’m not going to say I’m sorry because I’m not. I’m a real selfish monster.”

  “I outrank you again,” I said. “I’m the monster here.”

  “You? You’ll have to prove it to me.”

  “You’ll just have to take my word,” I said.

  And I moved a little away from him. He followed me. We stood at the bar together, and he filled my drink. “I was born in the streets, baby, and I take nobody’s word for nothing.” He touched my glass. “You know I’m not going to take your word.”

  “You’d better.”

  “You trying to scare me?”

  “Shit. I’m probably trying to make you.”

  He threw back his head, and laughed. “Tremendous!” Then, “Do you like me? I like you, I think you’re crazy.”

  Something rose in me, stronger than intelligence or experience. “Sure, I like you. I like you very much. You know that.”

  He gave me a smile of pure pleasure, and it cannot be denied that such a smile is rare. He touched my glass again. “Tremendous,” he said. “We’re going to get on just fine.” He looked very grave. Then, irrepressibly, like a very small child, “You know something I was going to tell you before, but didn’t have the nerve? You got your name written all over me. That’s right. I got my name on you, too.”

  I smiled. “Okay. We’ll see.”

  We walked back to the window. Everyone was leaving us alone, and yet everyone was watching us, too, waiting for their opportunity. An English girl sat on the sofa, talking to our host, but her eyes were on Christopher and me. Two drama students, both male, were loudly disputing some point about the Stanislavski method, concerning which, as far as I could tell, neither of them knew anything. They hoped that I would overhear and genially interrupt and even, perhaps, find one of them attractive. Not that either of them was “gay”—to use the incomprehensible vernacular; anybody mad enough to make such a suggestion would have been beaten within an inch of his life. But they were on the make, and what else, after all, did they have to give? Also, they were lonely.

  “When can I come to see your play?” Christopher now murmured. “I don’t think I’ve seen more than two plays in my whole life, and I didn’t like them much. But I’d like to see you—”

  “Anytime,” I said. The English girl had screwed up her courage, and was approaching. One of the drama students had disappeared into the john. His friend, not knowing
how to conquer the field, simply waited.

  It was getting late.

  “Well,” said Christopher, with a curious, muffled urgency in his voice that I was to come to know, “as soon as possible, don’t give me this anytime crap. Is it hard to get the tickets?—I mean, you know, I can scrape up the bread to pay.”

  “Don’t be silly.” We agreed on a night. “You can pick me up in my dressing room after the show and we can have a few drinks, maybe something to eat. Do you want to bring anyone with you?”

  “No,” he said.

  During all these years, Barbara and I had seen each other with many people, always slightly envying and slightly pitying whoever was with the other. We had achieved our difficult equanimity, were reconciled to the way our cookie had crumbled, and very often, indeed, alone or together, made of these crumbs a rare and delicate feast. One can live a long time without living: and we were both to discover this now.

  Pacing my dressing room some evenings before the curtain rose, glimpsing myself in the mirror, listening to the sounds, the voices, the life in the corridors, I found myself resisting, and wrestling with the fact that something had happened to me. I say something because I was reluctant indeed to use the word love—the word splashed over me like cold water, and made me catch my breath and shake myself. It certainly had not occurred to me that love would have had the effrontery to arrive in such a black, unwieldy, and dangerous package. Anyway, love was not exactly what it felt like. I don’t know what it felt like. When something does happen to a person, it is somewhat chilling to observe how the memory, so authoritative till then, cops out, retreats, stammers out only the most garbled and treacherous of messages. One couldn’t act on them, even if one was able to make any sense of them. What floated up to me, like the sounds of some infernal party on the dark ground floor of some dark house, were echoes, images, moments—memories? But they were too swift for memories. They came unreadably into the light, and vanished. Was it memory, or was it a dream? I could not know. My life was whispering something to me. Was it my life, or was it the whirring of the wings of madness? I could not know. I could not even take refuge in any fear of what the world might call me. The world had already called me too many names, and while I knew that my indifference was not as great or as deep as Christopher’s—was not the same quantity at all—the world would never be able to intimidate me in that way anymore. The world was not my problem. I was my problem. Something had happened to me. I was forced to suspect with what relentless cunning I had always protected myself against this. I was forced to suspect in myself some mighty prohibition, of which sex might be the symbol, but wasn’t the key.