Another Country Read online

  Where was she? Where was she? With Ellis, certainly. Where? She had called the restaurant; but she had not called him. And she would say, “But we didn’t have any plans for tonight, sweetie, I knew you were seeing Cass, and I was sure you’d have supper with her!” Where was she? the hell with her. She would say, “Oh, honey, don’t be like that, suppose I made a fuss every time you went out and had a drink with someone else? I trust you, now, you’ve got to trust me. Suppose I really make it as a singer and have to see lots of people, what’re you going to do then?” She trusted him because she didn’t give a damn about him, the hell with her. The hell with her. The hell with her.

  Oh, Ida. She would say, “Mama called me after you left and she was real upset; Daddy got into a fight this week end and he was cut kind of bad and I just left the hospital this very minute. Mama wanted me to stay with her but I knew you’d be worried, so I came on home. You know, they don’t like the idea of my living down here with you one bit, maybe they’ll get used to it, but I’m sure that’s what makes my Daddy so evil, he just can’t get over Rufus, you know, sugar, please make me a little drink, I’m just about dead.”

  The hell with her. The hell with her.

  She would say, “Oh, Vivaldo, why do you want to be so mean when you know how much I love you?” She would sound exasperated and very close to tears. And then, even though he knew that she was using him against himself, hope rose up hard in him, his throat became tight with pain, he willed away all his doubts. Perhaps she loved him, perhaps she did: but if she did, how was it, then, that they remained so locked away from one another? Perhaps it was he who did not know how to give, did not know how to love. Love was a country he knew nothing about. And he thought, very unwillingly, that perhaps he did not love her. Perhaps it was only because she was not white that he dared to bring her the offering of himself. Perhaps he had felt, somewhere, at the very bottom of himself, that she would not dare despise him.

  And if this was what she suspected, well, then, her rage was bottomless and she would never be conquered by him.

  He walked out of the bar into the streets again, not knowing what to do but knowing he could not go home. He wished he had a friend, a male friend, with whom he could talk; and this made him realize that, with the dubious exception of Rufus, he had never had a friend in his life. He thought of calling Eric, but Eric had been away too long. He no longer knew anything about Eric’s life and tonight he did not want to know.

  So he walked. He passed the great livid scar of Forty-second Street, knowing that he could not endure sitting through a movie tonight; and on, down lonely Sixth Avenue, until he came to the Village. Again, he thought of calling Eric and again dismissed it. He walked eastward to the park; there were no singers there tonight, only shadows in the shadows of the trees; and a policeman coming into the park as he walked out of it. He walked along MacDougal Street. Here were the black-and-white couples, defiantly white, flamboyantly black; and the Italians watched them, hating them, hating, in fact, all the Villagers, who gave their streets a bad name. The Italians, after all merely wished to be accepted as decent Americans and probably could not be blamed for feeling that they might have had an easier time of it if they had not been afflicted with so many Jews and junkies and drunkards and queers and spades. Vivaldo peered into the bars and coffee houses, half-hoping to see a familiar and bearable face. But there were only the rat-faced boys, with beards, and the infantile, shapeless girls, with the long hair.

  “How’re you and your spade chick making it?”

  He turned, and it was Jane. She was drunk and with an uptown, seersucker type, who probably worked in advertising.

  He stared at her and she said, quickly, with a laugh, “Oh, now, don’t get mad, I was only teasing you. Don’t old girl friends have some rights?” And to the man beside her, she said, “This is an old friend of mine, Vivaldo Moore. And this is Dick Lincoln.”

  Vivaldo and Dick Lincoln acknowledged each other with brief, constrained nods.

  “How are you, Jane?” Vivaldo asked, politely; beginning to move, at the same time, in what he hoped was not their direction.

  But they, naturally, began to move with him.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she said. “I seem to have made an incredible recovery—”

  “Have you been ill?”

  She looked at him. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Nerves. Due to a love affair that didn’t work out.”

  “Someone I know?”

  She laughed, breathily. “You bastard.”

  “It’s just that I’m terribly accustomed to your dramatics. But I’m glad that everything’s working out for you now.”

  “Oh, everything’s fine now,” she said, and made a grotesquely girlish little skip, holding heavily onto Lincoln’s hand. “Dick doesn’t care much about soul-searching, but he’s good at what he cares about.” The man she thus described moved stiffly beside her, his face a ruddy mask of uncertainty, clearly determined to do the right thing, whatever the right thing might prove to be.

  “Come and have a drink with us,” Jane said. They were standing on the corner, in the lights spilling outward from a bar. The light illumined and horribly distorted her face, so that her eyes looked like coals of fire and her mouth stretched joylessly back upon the gums. “For old times’ sake.”

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I’m going on home. I’ve had a long, hard day.”

  “Rushing home to your chick?”

  “Good thing to rush home to, if you’ve got one,” Dick Lincoln said, putting his pink, nerveless hand on Jane’s shoulder.

  Somehow, she bore it; but not without another girlish twitch. She said, “Vivaldo’s got a great chick.” She turned to Dick Lincoln. “I bet you think you’re a liberal,” she said, “but this boy, baby, he’s miles ahead of you. He’s miles ahead of me; why, if I was as liberal as my friend, Vivaldo, here”— she laughed; a very tall Negro boy passed them, looking at them briefly— “why, I wouldn’t be with you, you poor white slob. I’d be with the biggest, blackest buck I could find!” Vivaldo felt his skin prickling, Dick Lincoln blushed. Jane laughed, and Vivaldo realized that others, both black and white, were watching them. “Maybe I should have gone with her brother,” Jane said, “would you have liked me better if I had? Or were you going with him, too? Can’t ever tell about a liberal,” and she turned her face, laughing, into Dick Lincoln’s shoulder.

  Lincoln stared helplessly into Vivaldo’s eyes. “She’s all yours, mister,” Vivaldo said, and at this Jane looked up at him, not laughing at all, her face livid, and old with rage. And all his anger left him at once.

  “So long,” he said, and turned away. He wanted to leave before Jane precipitated a race riot. And he also realized that he had become the focus of two very different kinds of attention. The blacks now suspected him of being an ally— though not a friend, never a friend!— and the whites, particularly the neighborhood Italians, now knew that he could not be trusted. “Hurry home,” Jane called behind him, “hurry home! Is it true that they’ve got hotter blood than ours? Is her blood hotter than mine?” And laughter rang down the street behind this call, the suppressed, bawdy laughter of the Italians— for, after all, Vivaldo was one of them, and a male, and apparently, a gifted one— and the delighted, vindictive laughter of the Negroes. For a moment, behind him, they were almost united— but then, each, hearing the other’s laughter, choked their laughter off. The Italians heard the laughter of black men; the black men remembered that it was a black girl Vivaldo was screwing.

  He crossed the Avenue. He wanted to go home and he wanted to eat and he wanted to get drunk and, also, perhaps out of simple fury, he wanted to get laid— but he did not feel that anything good would happen to him tonight. And he felt that if he were a real writer, he would simply go home and work and throw everything else out of his mind, as Balzac had done and Proust and Joyce and James and Faulkner. But perhaps they had never held in their minds the nameless things he held in his. He felt a very peculiar, a deadly resi
gnation: he knew that he would not go home until it was too late for him to go anywhere else, or until Ida answered the phone. Ida: and he felt an eerie premonition, as though he were old, walking years from now through familiar streets where no one knew or noticed him, thinking of his lost love, and wondering, Where is she now? Where is she now? He passed the movie theater and the tough boys and tough men who always stood outside it. It was ten o’clock. He turned west on Waverly Place and walked to a crowded bar where he could get a hamburger. He forced himself to have a hamburger and a beer before he called his apartment again. There was no answer. He went back to the bar and ordered a whiskey and realized that he was running out of money. If he were going to keep on drinking he would have to go to Benno’s, where he had a tab.

  He drank his whiskey very slowly, watching and listening to the crowd around him. They had been college boys, mostly, in his day, but both he and they had grown older and he gathered, from the conversations around him, that the college boys had graduated into the professions. He had his eye, vaguely, on a frail, blonde girl, who also seemed, somewhat less vaguely, to have her eye on him: incredibly enough, she seemed to be a lawyer. And he was abruptly very excited, as he had been years ago, at the prospect of making it with a chick above his station, a chick he was not even supposed to be able to look at. He was from the slums of Brooklyn and that stink was on him, and it turned out to be the stink that they were looking for. They were tired of boys who washed too much, who had no odor in their armpits and no sweat on their balls. He looked at the blonde again, wondering what she was like with no clothes on. She was sitting at a table near the door, facing him, toying with a daiquiri glass, and talking to a heavy, gray-haired man, who had a high giggle, who was a little drunk, and whom Vivaldo recognized as a fairly well-known poet. The blonde reminded him of Cass. And this made him realize— for the first time, it is astonishing how well the obvious can be hidden— that when he had met Cass, so many years ago, he had been terribly flattered that so highborn a lady noticed such a stinking boy. He had been overwhelmed. And he had adored Richard without reserve, not, as it now turned out, because of Richard’s talent, which, in any case, he had then been quite unable to judge, but merely because Richard possessed Cass. He had envied Richard’s prowess, and had imagined that this envy was love.

  But, surely, there had been love in it, or they could never have been friends for so long. (Had they been friends? what had they ever, really, said to one another?) Perhaps the proof of Vivaldo’s love resided in the fact that he had never thought of Cass carnally, as a woman, but only as a lady, and Richard’s wife. But, more probably, it was only that they were older and he had needed older people who cared about him, who took him seriously, whom he could trust. For this, he would have paid any price whatever. They were not much older now, he was nearly twenty-nine, Richard was thirty-seven or thirty-eight, Cass was thirty-three or thirty-four: but they had seemed, especially in the blazing haven of their love, much older then.

  And now— now it seemed that they were all equal in misery, confusion, and despair. He looked at his face in the mirror behind the bar. He still had all his hair, there was no gray in it yet; his face had not yet begun to fall at the bottom and shrivel at the top; and he wasn’t yet all ass and belly. But, still— and soon; and he stole a look at the blonde again. He wondered about her odor, juices, sounds; for a night, only for a night; then abruptly, with no warning, he found himself wondering how Rufus would have looked at this girl, and an odd thing happened: all desire left him, he turned absolutely cold, and then desire came roaring back, with legions. Aha, he heard Rufus snicker, you don’t be careful, motherfucker, you going to get a black hard on. He heard again the laughter which had followed him down the block. And something in him was breaking; he was, briefly and horribly, in a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color, nor of male and female. There was only the leap and the rending and the terror and the surrender. And the terror: which all seemed to begin and end and begin again— forever— in a cavern behind the eye. And whatever stalked there saw, and spread the news of what it saw throughout the entire kingdom of whomever, though the eye itself might perish. What order could prevail against so grim a privacy? And yet, without order, of what value was the mystery? Order. Order. Set thine house in order. He sipped his whiskey, light-years removed now from the blonde and the bar and yet, more than ever and most unpleasantly present. When people no longer knew that a mystery could only be approached through form, people became— what the people of this time and place had become, what he had become. They perished within their despised clay tenements, in isolation, passively, or actively together, in mobs, thirsting and seeking for, and eventually reeking of blood. Of rending and tearing there can never be any end, and God save the people for whom passion becomes impersonal!

  He went into the phone booth again, and, hopelessly, rang his number. It rang and rang. He hung up and stood in the booth for a moment. Now he wondered if something had happened to Ida, if there really had been some family crisis: but it was too late, now, to call the woman who lived next door to Ida’s family. Again, he thought of calling Eric and again decided against it. He walked through the bar, slowly, for he was down to carfare and hot-dog money, and would have to leave.

  He said, to the poet, but looking at the girl, as he came up to the table, “I just want to say that I know who you are and I’ve admired your work for a long time and— thank you.”

  The poet looked up, astonished, and the girl laughed, and said, “That’s very sweet of you. Are you a poet, too?”

  “No,” he said. He found himself thinking that it had been a long time since he had been with a white girl. He could not help wondering what it might now be like. “I’m a novelist. Unpublished.”

  “Well, when you do get published, you may make some money,” the poet said. “Clever bastard you were, to choose a field which may allow you to pay at least a modest rent.”

  “I don’t know if I’m clever,” Vivaldo said, “it just turned out like that.” He was curious about the girl, curious indeed; but other necessities crowded the center of his mind; perhaps they would meet again. “Well, I just wanted to say thank you, that’s all. So long.”

  “Thank you,” said the poet.

  “Good luck!” cried the girl.

  He waved his hand in a kind of parody of a hipster and walked out. He walked over to Benno’s. It looked as desolate as a graveyard. There were a couple of people there whom he knew, though he usually avoided them; but he was on a tab tonight, as everyone, instinctively, seemed to know; and, anyway, no one in a bar on a Wednesday night was in a position to be choosy.

  Certainly not the three people whose table he joined, who were also running out of money and who were not on a tab. One of these was the Canadian-born poet, Lorenzo, moon-faced, with much curly hair; and his girl, a refugee from the Texas backwater, scissor-faced, with much straight hair, and a thumb-chewing giggle; and their sidekick, older, lantern-jawed, with tortured lips, who scowled when he was pleased— which was rare— and smiled a pallid smile when he was frightened— which was almost always— so that he enjoyed the reputation of being extremely good-natured.

  “Hi, Vi,” cried the poet, “Come on over and join us!”

  There was, indeed, nothing else to do, unless he left the bar; so he ordered himself a drink and sat down. They were all drinking beer, and most of their beer was gone. He was introduced, for perhaps the thirtieth time, to Belle and to Harold.

  “How are you, man?” Lorenzo asked. “Nobody ever sees you any more.” He had an open, boyish grin, and it summed him up precisely, even though he was beginning to be rather old for a boy. Still, and especially by contrast with his boy and his girl, he seemed the most vivid person at the table and Vivaldo rather liked him.

  “I’m up and I’m down,” Vivaldo said— and Belle giggled, chewing on her thumb— “and I’m turning into a serious person; that’s why you never see me any more.”

  �
�You writing?” asked Lorenzo, still smiling. For he was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time. He carried a small notebook with him wherever he went and scribbled in it, and when he got drunk enough, read the results aloud. It lay before him, closed, on the table now.

  “I’m trying,” said Vivaldo. He looked above their heads at the window, out into the streets. “It’s a dead night.”

  “It sure is,” said Harold. He looked over at Vivaldo with his little smile. “Where’s your chick, man? Don’t tell me she’s got away.”

  “No. She’s uptown, at some kind of family deal.” He leaned forward. “We have a deal, dig, she won’t bug me with her family and I won’t bug her with mine.”

  Belle giggled again. Lorenzo laughed. “You ought to bring them together. It’d be the biggest battle since the Civil War.”

  “Or since Romeo and Juliet,” Belle suggested.

  “I’ve been trying to do that in a long poem,” Lorenzo said, “you know, Romeo and Juliet today, only she’s black and he’s white—”

  “And Mercutio’s passing,” grinned Vivaldo.

  “Yes. And everybody else is all fucked up—”

  “Call it,” suggested Harold, “Pickaninnies Everywhere.”

  “Or Everybody’s Pickaninnies.”

  “Or, Checkers, Anyone?”

  They all howled. Belle, still clinging to her thumbnail, laughed until tears rolled down her face.