Going to Meet the Man Read online

  I wondered what he would think of his Uncle Norman, older and much blacker than I, who lives near the Alabama town in which we were born. Norman will meet us at the boat.

  Now Harriet repeats, “Nightmares, nightmares. Nothing ever turns out as badly as you think it will—in fact,” she adds laughing, “I am happy to say that that would scarcely be possible.”

  Her eyes seek mine in the mirror—dark-blue eyes, pale skin, black hair. I had always thought of Sweden as being populated entirely by blondes, and I thought that Harriet was abnormally dark for a Swedish girl. But when we visited Sweden, I found out differently. “It is all a great racial salad, Europe, that is why I am sure that I will never understand your country,” Harriet said. That was in the days when we never imagined that we would be going to it.

  I wonder what she is really thinking. Still, she is right, in two days we will be on a boat, and there is simply no point in carrying around my load of apprehension. I sit down on the bed, watching her fix her face. I realize that I am going to miss this old-fashioned bedroom. For years, we’ve talked about throwing out the old junk which came with the apartment and replacing it with less massive, modern furniture. But we never have.

  “Oh, everything will probably work out,” I say. “I’ve been in a bad mood all day long. I just can’t sing any more.” We both laugh. She reaches for a wad of tissues and begins wiping off the cream. “I wonder how Paul will like it, if he’ll make friends—that’s all.”

  “Paul will like any place where you are, where we are. Don’t worry about Paul.”

  Paul has never been called any names, so far. Only, once he asked us what the word métis meant and Harriet explained to him that it meant mixed blood, adding that the blood of just about everybody in the world was mixed by now. Mme. Dumont contributed bawdy and detailed corroboration from her own family tree, the roots of which were somewhere in Corsica; the moral of the story, as she told it, was that women were weak, men incorrigible, and le bon Dieu appallingly clever. Mme. Dumont’s version is the version I prefer, but it may not be, for Paul, the most utilitarian.

  Harriet rises from the dressing table and comes over to sit in my lap. I fall back with her on the bed, and she smiles down into my face.

  “Now, don’t worry,” she tells me, “please try not to worry. Whatever is coming, we will manage it all very well, you will see. We have each other and we have our son and we know what we want. So, we are luckier than most people.”

  I kiss her on the chin. “I’m luckier than most men.”

  “I’m a very lucky woman, too.”

  And for a moment we are silent, alone in our room, which we have shared so long. The slight rise and fall of Harriet’s breathing creates an intermittent pressure against my chest, and I think how, if I had never left America, I would never have met her and would never have established a life of my own, would never have entered my own life. For everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies; races, churches, armies menace, and have taken, many lives. If Harriet had been born in America, it would have taken her a long time, perhaps forever, to look on me as a man like other men; if I had met her in America, I would never have been able to look on her as a woman like all other women. The habits of public rage and power would also have been our private compulsions, and would have blinded our eyes. We would never have been able to love each other. And Paul would never have been born.

  Perhaps, if I had stayed in America, I would have found another woman and had another son. But that other woman, that other son are in the limbo of vanished possibilities. I might also have become something else, instead of an actor-singer, perhaps a lawyer, like my brother, or a teacher, like my sister. But no, I am what I have become and this woman beside me is my wife, and I love her. All the sons I might have had mean nothing, since I have a son, I named him, Paul, for my father, and I love him.

  I think of all the things I have seen destroyed in America, all the things that I have lost there, all the threats it holds for me and mine.

  I grin up at Harriet. “Do you love me?”

  “Of course not. I simply have been madly plotting to get to America all these years.”

  “What a patient wench you are.”

  “The Swedes are very patient.”

  She kisses me again and stands up. Louisa comes in, also in a dressing gown.

  “I hope you two aren’t sitting in here yakking about the subject.” She looks at me. “My, you are the sorriest-looking celebrity I’ve ever seen. I’ve always wondered why people like you hired press agents. Now I know.” She goes to Harriet’s dressing table. “Honey, do you mind if I borrow some of that mad nail polish?”

  Harriet goes over to the dressing table. “I’m not sure I know which mad nail polish you mean.”

  Harriet and Louisa, somewhat to my surprise, get on very well. Each seems to find the other full of the weirdest and most delightful surprises. Harriet has been teaching Louisa French and Swedish expressions, and Louisa has been teaching Harriet some of the saltier expressions of the black South. Whenever one of them is not playing straight man to the other’s accent, they become involved in long speculations as to how a language reveals the history and the attitudes of a people. They discovered that all the European languages contain a phrase equivalent to “to work like a nigger.” (“Of course,” says Louisa, “they’ve had black men working for them for a long time.”) “Language is experience and language is power,” says Louisa, after regretting that she does not know any of the African dialects. “That’s what I keep trying to tell those dicty bastards down South. They get their own experience into the language, we’ll have a great language. But, no, they all want to talk like white folks.” Then she leans forward, grasping Harriet by the knee. “I tell them, honey, white folks ain’t saying nothing. Not a thing are they saying—and some of them know it, they need what you got, the whole world needs it.” Then she leans back, in disgust. “You think they listen to me? Indeed they do not. They just go right on, trying to talk like white folks.” She leans forward again, in tremendous indignation. “You know some of them folks are ashamed of Mahalia Jackson? Ashamed of her, one of the greatest singers alive! They think she’s common.” Then she looks about the room as though she held a bottle in her hand and were looking for a skull to crack.

  I think it is because Louisa has never been able to talk like this to any white person before. All the white people she has ever met needed, in one way or another, to be reassured, consoled, to have their consciences pricked but not blasted; could not, could not afford to hear a truth which would shatter, irrevocably, their image of themselves. It is astonishing the lengths to which a person, or a people, will go in order to avoid a truthful mirror. But Harriet’s necessity is precisely the opposite: it is of the utmost importance that she learn everything that Louisa can tell her, and then learn more, much more. Harriet is really trying to learn from Louisa how best to protect her husband and her son. This is why they are going out alone tonight. They will have, tonight, as it were, a final council of war. I may be moody, but they, thank God, are practical.

  Now Louisa turns to me while Harriet rummages about on the dressing table. “What time is Vidal coming for you?”

  “Oh, around seven-thirty, eight o’clock. He says he’s reserved tables for us in some very chic place, but he won’t say where.” Louisa wriggles her shoulders, raises her eyebrows, and does a tiny bump and grind. I laugh. “That’s right. And then I guess we’ll go out and get drunk.”

  “I hope to God you do. You’ve been about as cheerful as a cemetery these last few days. And, that way, your hangover will keep you from bugging us tomorrow.”

  “What about your hangovers? I know the way you girls drink.”

  “Well, we’ll be paying for our own drinks,” says Harriet, “so I don’t think we’ll have that problem. But you’re going to be feted, like an international movie star.”

>   “You sure you don’t want to change your mind and come out with Vidal and me?”

  “We’re sure,” Louisa says. She looks down at me and gives a small, amused grunt. “An international movie star. And I used to change your diapers. I’ll be damned.” She is grave for a moment. “Mama’d be proud of you, you know that?” We look at each other and the air between us is charged with secrets which not even Harriet will ever know. “Now, get the hell out of here, so we can get dressed.”

  “I’ll take Paul on down to Mme. Dumont’s.”

  Paul is to have supper with her children and spend the night there.

  “For the last time,” says Mme. Dumont and she rubs her hand over Paul’s violently curly black hair. “Tu vas nous manquer, tu sais?” Then she looks up at me and laughs. “He doesn’t care. He is only interested in seeing the big ship and all the wonders of New York. Children are never sad to make journeys.”

  “I would be very sad to go,” says Paul, politely, “but my father must go to New York to work and he wants me to come with him.”

  Over his head, Mme. Dumont and I smile at each other. “Il est malin, ton gosse!” She looks down at him again. “And do you think, my little diplomat, that you will like New York?”

  “We aren’t only going to New York,” Paul answers, “we are going to California, too.”

  “Well, do you think you will like California?”

  Paul looks at me. “I don’t know. If we don’t like it, we’ll come back.”

  “So simple. Just like that,” says Mme. Dumont. She looks at me. “It is the best way to look at life. Do come back. You know, we feel that you belong to us, too, here in France.”

  “I hope you do,” I say. “I hope you do. I have always felt—always felt at home here.” I bend down and Paul and I kiss each other on the cheek. We have always done so—but will we be able to do so in America? American fathers never kiss American sons. I straighten, my hand on Paul’s shoulder. “You be good. I’ll pick you up for breakfast, or, if you get up first you come and pick me up and we can hang out together tomorrow, while your Maman and your Aunt Louisa finish packing. They won’t want two men hanging around the house.”

  “D’accord. Where shall we hang out?” On the last two words he stumbles a little and imitates me.

  “Maybe we can go to the zoo, I don’t know. And I’ll take you to lunch at the Eiffel Tower, would you like that?”

  “Oh, yes,” he says, “I’d love that.” When he is pleased, he seems to glow. All the energy of his small, tough, concentrated being charges an unseen battery and adds an incredible luster to his eyes, which are large and dark brown—like mine—and to his skin, which always reminds me of the colors of honey and the fires of the sun.

  “OK, then.” I shake hands with Mme. Dumont. “Bonsoir, Madame,” I ring for the elevator, staring at Paul. “Ciao, Pauli.”

  “Bonsoir, Papa.”

  And Mme. Dumont takes him inside.

  Upstairs, Harriet and Louisa are finally powdered, perfumed, and jeweled, and ready to go: dry martinis at the Ritz, supper, “in some very expensive little place,” says Harriet, and perhaps the Folies Bergère afterwards. “A real cornball, tourist evening,” says Louisa. “I’m working on the theory that if I can get Harriet to act like an American now, she won’t have so much trouble later.”

  “I very much doubt,” Harriet says, “that I will be able to endure the Folies Bergère for three solid hours.”

  “Oh, then we’ll duck across town to Harry’s New York bar and drink mint juleps,” says Louisa.

  I realize that, quite apart from everything else, Louisa is having as much fun as she has ever had in her life. Perhaps she, too, will be sad to leave Paris, even though she has only known it for such a short time.

  “Do people drink those in New York?” Harriet asks. I think she is making a list of the things people do or do not do in New York.

  “Some people do.” Louisa winks at me. “Do you realize that this Swedish chick’s picked up an Alabama drawl?”

  We laugh together. The elevator chugs to a landing.

  “We’ll stop and say goodnight to Paul,” Harriet says. She kisses me. “Give our best to Vidal.”

  “Right. Have a good time. Don’t let any Frenchmen run off with Louisa.”

  “I did not come to Paris to be protected, and if I had, this wild chick you married couldn’t do it. I just might upset everybody and come home with a French count.” She presses the elevator button and the cage goes down.

  I walk back into our dismantled apartment. It stinks of departure. There are bags and crates in the hall which will be taken away tomorrow, there are no books in the bookcases, the kitchen looks as though we never cooked a meal there, never dawdled there, in the early morning or late at night, over coffee. Presently, I must shower and shave but now I pour myself a drink and light a cigarette and step out on our balcony. It is dusk, the brilliant light of Paris is beginning to fade, and the green of the trees is darkening.

  I have lived in this city for twelve years. This apartment is on the top floor of a corner building. We look out over the trees and the roof tops to the Champ de Mars, where the Eiffel Tower stands. Beyond this field is the river, which I have crossed so often, in so many states of mind. I have crossed every bridge in Paris, I have walked along every quai. I know the river as one finally knows a friend, know it when it is black, guarding all the lights of Paris in its depths, and seeming, in its vast silence, to be communing with the dead who lie beneath it; when it is yellow, evil, and roaring, giving a rough time to tugboats and barges, and causing people to remember that it has been known to rise, it has been known to kill; when it is peaceful, a slick, dark, dirty green, playing host to rowboats and les bateaux mouches and throwing up from time to time an extremely unhealthy fish. The men who stand along the quais all summer with their fishing lines gratefully accept the slimy object and throw it in a rusty can. I have always wondered who eats those fish.

  And I walk up and down, up and down, glad to be alone.

  It is August, the month when all Parisians desert Paris and one has to walk miles to find a barbershop or a laundry open in some tree-shadowed, silent side street. There is a single person on the avenue, a paratrooper walking toward École Militaire. He is also walking, almost certainly, and rather sooner than later, toward Algeria. I have a friend, a good-natured boy who was always hanging around the clubs in which I worked in the old days, who has just returned from Algeria, with a recurring, debilitating fever, and minus one eye. The government has set his pension at the sum, arbitrary if not occult, of fifty-three thousand francs every three months. Of course, it is quite impossible to live on this amount of money without working—but who will hire a half-blind invalid? This boy has been spoiled forever, long before his thirtieth birthday, and there are thousands like him all over France.

  And there are fewer Algerians to be found on the streets of Paris now. The rug sellers, the peanut vendors, the postcard peddlers and money-changers have vanished. The boys I used to know during my first years in Paris are scattered—or corralled—the Lord knows where.

  Most of them had no money. They lived three and four together in rooms with a single skylight, a single hard cot, or in buildings that seemed abandoned, with cardboard in the windows, with erratic plumbing in a wet, cobblestoned yard, in dark, dead-end alleys, or on the outer, chilling heights of Paris.

  The Arab cafés are closed—those dark, acrid cafés in which I used to meet with them to drink tea, to get high on hashish, to listen to the obsessive, stringed music which has no relation to any beat, any time, that I have ever known. I once thought of the North Africans as my brothers and that is why I went to their cafés. They were very friendly to me, perhaps one or two of them remained really fond of me even after I could no longer afford to smoke Lucky Strikes and after my collection of American sport shirts had vanished—mostly into their wardrobes. They seemed to feel that they had every right to them, since I could only have wrested thes
e things from the world by cunning—it meant nothing to say that I had had no choice in the matter; perhaps I had wrested these things from the world by treason, by refusing to be identified with the misery of my people. Perhaps, indeed, I identified myself with those who were responsible for this misery.

  And this was true. Their rage, the only note in all their music which I could not fail to recognize, to which I responded, yet had the effect of setting us more than ever at a division. They were perfectly prepared to drive all Frenchmen into the sea, and to level the city of Paris. But I could not hate the French, because they left me alone. And I love Paris, I will always love it, it is the city which saved my life. It saved my life by allowing me to find out who I am.

  It was on a bridge, one tremendous, April morning, that I knew I had fallen in love. Harriet and I were walking hand in hand. The bridge was the Pont Royal, just before us was the great horloge, high and lifted up, saying ten to ten; beyond this, the golden statue of Joan of Arc, with her sword uplifted. Harriet and I were silent, for we had been quarreling about something. Now, when I look back, I think we had reached that state when an affair must either end or become something more than an affair.

  I looked sideways at Harriet’s face, which was still. Her dark-blue eyes were narrowed against the sun, and her full, pink lips were still slightly sulky, like a child’s. In those days, she hardly ever wore make-up. I was in my shirt sleeves. Her face made me want to laugh and run my hand over her short dark hair. I wanted to pull her to me and say, Baby, don’t be mad at me, and at that moment something tugged at my heart and made me catch my breath. There were millions of people all around us, but I was alone with Harriet. She was alone with me. Never, in all my life, until that moment, had I been alone with anyone. The world had always been with us, between us, defeating the quarrel we could not achieve, and making love impossible. During all the years of my life, until that moment, I had carried the menacing, the hostile, killing world with me everywhere. No matter what I was doing or saying or feeling, one eye had always been on the world—that world which I had learned to distrust almost as soon as I learned my name, that world on which I knew one could never turn one’s back, the white man’s world. And for the first time in my life I was free of it; it had not existed for me; I had been quarreling with my girl. It was our quarrel, it was entirely between us, it had nothing to do with anyone else in the world. For the first time in my life I had not been afraid of the patriotism of the mindless, in uniform or out, who would beat me up and treat the woman who was with me as though she were the lowest of untouchables. For the first time in my life I felt that no force jeopardized my right, my power, to possess and to protect a woman; for the first time, the first time, felt that the woman was not, in her own eyes or in the eyes of the world, degraded by my presence.