Just Above My Head Read online

  BOOK FIVE

  The Gates of Hell

  It’s me, it’s me,

  It’s me, oh, Lord,

  Standing in the need of prayer.

  TRADITIONAL

  I know my robe’s going to fit me well

  I tried it on at the gates of hell.

  TRADITIONAL

  YOU have sensed my fatigue and my panic, certainly, if you have followed me until now, and you can guess how terrified I am to be approaching the end of my story. It was not meant to be my story, though it is far more my story than I would have thought, or might have wished. I have wondered, more than once, why I started it, but—I know why. It is a love song to my brother. It is an attempt to face both love and death.

  I have been very frightened, for: I have had to try to strip myself naked. One does not like what one sees then, and one is afraid of what others will see: and do. To challenge one’s deepest, most nameless fears, is, also, to challenge the heavens. It is to drag yourself, and everyone and everything and everyone you love, to the attention of the fiercest of the gods: who may not forgive your impertinence, who may not spare you. All that I can offer in extenuation of my boldness is my love.

  Today is Sunday, and I am alone in the house. Winter is in the air. It was raining earlier, but now, the sun is out. A couple of hours ago, I watched Ruth and Tony and Odessa pile into the car, to drive to the city. Ruth is taking them to a matinee of The Wiz.

  I was supposed to go, but, at the last moment, I asked Odessa to invite one of her girl friends. (I could not make the same suggestion to Tony, not out of even vaguely Puritanical motives, but, simply, to keep peace in the family. Odessa is persuaded that her brother is a sexist, and, considering my age, has her doubts about me. So. I’ll make it up to Tony.)

  I decided not to go, because, early this morning, Jimmy called, and said he’d like to see me, if I was free today. He’s been busy, and I’ve been busy, and we haven’t seen a lot of each other, and I know he’s been working on his book. And he said that Julia had suggested that we come by for a drink.

  The day proposed to me, in short, though somewhat more grueling than the matinee, was, equally, more urgent. Still, I feel a little guilty about not being with Ruth, and the children. But I have something, yet, to work out. I am not reconciled.

  You would think that, at my age, I would be. But an age means absolutely nothing until it is your age, and then, you don’t know what your age means. It doesn’t mean any of the things you imagined it might mean. It doesn’t mean that you are any wiser or any better or any different and it doesn’t mean that you can easily become reconciled or that you can become reconciled at all.

  Still, children are the beacon on this dark plain. They intimate what you must do, and dare: else, they never will be reconciled. I am their only key to their uncle, the vessel which contains, for them, his legacy. Only I can read this document for them. No more than I have dared to cheat in all that I have tried to say so far, do I dare cheat them.

  Tony and Odessa: God knows what they are making of all this. I can see myself in them, for I know what we, the elders, made of all this. I can see what we were, and what we have become, and it really all happened in the twinkling of an eye. Not one of us saw our futures coming: we lived ourselves into our present, unimaginable states, until, abruptly, without ever having achieved a future, we were trying to decipher our past. Which is all right, too, I guess, on condition that one does not consider the past a matter for tears, recriminations, regrets. I am what I am, and what I have become. I wouldn’t do it over if I could, and, if I could, if I had to do it over, I wouldn’t know how. The very idea causes the spirit within me to grow faint with fatigue. No. Thank you: I do not forget that fire burns, that water overwhelms, rolls, and drags you under, that madness awaits in the valley, the mirror, and on the mountaintop. I have no regrets, I have no complaints: furthermore, I know very well that there is no complaint department. I will carry on from here, thank you. My hand is on the Gospel plow, and I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now.

  But the children do not yet, of course, see themselves in us, are as imprisoned in their futures as we are in our pasts.

  Jimmy’s low-slung Triumph enters the driveway, and Jimmy steps out into the chilling, sunny, Sunday air. I watch him from the window. He is bare-headed, wearing a green military jacket and brown corduroy slacks, a black sweater. He takes a large paper bag out of the car.

  As he reaches it, I open the door.

  Jimmy gives me his quick, surprised grin. “Howdy, brother of mine. How you making it?”

  “How you doing? I’m hanging in.”

  “That’s better,” he concedes, “than hanging up. I’m trying to hang in there, too.” He puts the paper bag on the kitchen table. “I brought some beer, and stuff. So—the family’s gone with The Wiz?”

  “That’s right. Without the old man.”

  He gives me a consoling pat on the shoulder. “Don’t despair. It’s a big hit, you’ll get a chance to see it.”

  “Thanks.” Jimmy takes off his jacket, and goes into the living room. “What time is it?”

  “Close to four.”

  “What time is Julia expecting us?”

  “Oh. When we get there. We can call.”

  “Are you hungry? You want a drink, or what?”

  “I don’t know. It’s early. Let me have a beer.”

  “You want a glass?”

  “No.”

  I go into the living room with two cans of beer. Jimmy is standing near the piano.

  “Some days, I don’t know if I’m trying to write a book, or trying to write a symphony.” He takes the beer, and sits down on the sofa.

  I sit down in the big chair facing him. “How’s it going?”

  “I don’t know. It’s kicking my ass, though, I’ll tell you that.”

  I smile, and watch his face. He looks very, as we say these days, together; lean, single-minded, calm. Calm may not be quite the word: his stillness is the stillness of someone paying absolute attention, of someone quietly paying his dues. “I wanted to see you, but now, I can hardly say why. Well. You know what I mean. But maybe I just wanted to be able to check out my sense of reality. Because, memory, man, when you start fucking around with memory, that can be a bitch.”

  He takes a swallow of his beer, and smiles at me. “It’s true. I was trying to remember the very first time I saw Arthur. Of course, that’s bullshit, what difference does it make? But it was like a game I was playing with myself. It seemed to me, when we were running together, that he’d always been there, like I’d known him all my life.” He looks at me. “But that doesn’t jibe with the fact that I always felt that he’d made a great difference in my life.” He rises, and goes to his jacket, and takes out his cigarettes, lights one, sits down again, handing me the pack. He lights my cigarette for me. “It’s almost like—everything that happened to me before Arthur—didn’t happen,” and he pauses, frowns. “I think I understand that—but—they did happen, that’s why he made such a difference.” He laughs. “You see what I mean.”

  “Yes. But the first time you saw Arthur must have been at church.”

  “I know—like I know the first time I ever saw you was at church. But those churches all run together. I’ve blurred them all together. For me, church was mainly Julia—well, Julia, and my mother—I hated when Sunday came. It just meant that everybody was going to be all up on top of Julia, and pissing on me, and I think I must just have slept through all that. I hardly remember Arthur in the church. I remember”—this with a surprising shyness, and sipping his beer—”when you took us to the ice cream parlor. I thought we almost got to be friends that day, Arthur and me. Damn, I sure wanted a friend. But, no. He kept me waiting for a while.”

  “Why did you wait?”

  “Oh, come on. Who knows?” Then, he laughs. “Well. It wasn’t like I had so many other things to do.”

  “He leans back on the sofa. “I think I knew something, somewhere. Lik
e, you know, I hated Julia, but, at the same time, I knew something else.”

  “Well. Julia was in your way.”

  “Man, I always felt that nobody wanted to hang out with me because I had this freak of a holy sister!”

  We both laugh. Then Jimmy says abruptly, “But Julia felt that, too, though—all that shit, back there, has a lot to do with Julia, until today. And—tell you something else—if it hadn’t been for Julia, I might never have seen Arthur again.” He looks up at me, looking very much as he had, years ago, when everything was beginning. “I’m not making any sense, am I?—just going around in circles.”

  Arthur had come back into his life after everything else had gone out of it—his mother and his father, and, for a very long time, his sister. I thought I could see why Jimmy’s memory drew a blank. Furthermore, there was the church before Arthur, and the church after Arthur. And the church after Arthur—the church in which Jimmy functioned, at first without Arthur, and, then, briefly, with him—was in the apocalyptic South, on a battlefield. There was more than enough reason for the memory to stammer.

  Jimmy sets his beer down on the coffee table, and walks to the piano. He stares at it for a while, then sits down. He lifts up the cover, and touches the keys. He looks over at me. “I found it hard to touch a piano for a while.” He plays a chord. “But playing all over, like I did—that helped me.”

  Then he shakes his head, leaves the piano, and comes and stands in the middle of the room. “Look. I’ve been keeping to myself, you know, just working, making it on home, watching TV, if I don’t get home too late, not seeing nobody. And I woke up this morning, all of a sudden, around four or five o’clock, and I thought to myself, Damn, baby, you’re only thirty-seven, you’re supposed to be living, you are supposed to have a life. And you’re still fucking around here, in sackcloth and ashes. What is wrong with you?” He puts his hands in his pockets, takes them out, looks at his hands. I didn’t know it took so long, because I know he’s”—but he has to catch his breath before he can say the word—”dead. And I know he loved me, and doesn’t want me to suffer, he wants me to live. I know. But I just don’t seem to have any interest in—anything, really—and I just cannot imagine having an interest in anybody. It’s like my life stopped, too, in London. I still wish I’d gone with him.” He stops. “That’s what I can’t get out of my mind, it’s like that’s almost all I remember, and that’s so fucking stupid, and it’s wrong!” He stops, smiles, looks at me, tears standing in his eyes. “I didn’t come here to have a tantrum all over your nice clean carpet.”

  “Have a tantrum. I don’t mind. I don’t mind for me, that is. But you’re still feeling guilty, and that is stupid—you don’t have anything to feel guilty about.”

  Arthur had been singing on the Paris music-hall stage. He and Jimmy had had a fight in Paris, and that was why Arthur had left for London without him. But Jimmy had planned to pick him up in London, and travel with him back to the United States.

  Arthur had been very difficult those last months. I remembered very well. He had been difficult with me. He frightened me. I had begun to realize that he hated what he was doing. He did not know how to stop, and I did not know how to stop him. Jimmy had tried to stop him by threatening to leave, to cease being his accompanist. And, in fact, he had not played for Arthur that last night in Paris, and this is what torments him still.

  But Arthur, who had always been able to drink, had begun to drink with a difference, and he had discovered drugs—nothing more than hashish, Jimmy hoped, but he didn’t know: cocaine, and heroin, were also floating around, and there were some very creepy people in the world which had begun to encircle Arthur. And Jimmy had had to deal with all that. He lived with my brother. I didn’t. And, if love and fear sometimes caused Jimmy to blow his stack, who can blame him? Arthur often made me blow my stack, too, but then, I repeat, I wasn’t living with him.

  “That’s true,” Jimmy says. “I know that. But how long will it be before I believe it?” He blows his nose, and goes back to the piano.

  “Would you,” I ask carefully, “like a real drink now? Or do you want to wait until we get to Julia’s?”

  “I’ll have it now,” he says cheerfully, “if you’ll join me. Light on the usual, heavy on the rocks.”

  I go into the kitchen to do this. Jimmy begins improvising on the piano, around “Here Comes the Sun,” blending it with “Oh Happy Day,” and threatening, generally, to work himself up into a fine camp-meeting frenzy. It sounds very clear and beautiful, in my empty house, on this chilly, sunlit Sunday.

  I find the glasses and ice cubes, run water over the ice, and the music, somehow, blends with the feel of the cold, running water, the feel of the ice cubes, and the many lights the light strikes from them, and the light on my hands. I pour the dark, honey-colored whiskey into glasses like kaleidoscopes, as chords crash in the living room, and I realize that Jimmy is praying, is praying as hard as he knows how.

  I stand for a moment, then, at the kitchen window, watching the trees, and the yard, and the quiet street beyond, listening to a sound which remains, in essence, strange and menacing for this place.

  I come back into the room, and Jimmy finishes, elaborately, resoundingly, and stands up, and takes his glass.

  “Cheers,” we both say, and sit down. We talk of other things, work, money, politics, color—music, finally, for Jimmy says suddenly, “It might really turn into a symphony. It might not be a book.”

  I decide not to go, after all, to Julia’s with him, for, now, the sun is going down, and my tribe will be leaving the city, heading home, and I feel that I should be with them.

  When Arthur arrived from Paris, on that far-off Sunday, he had taken a taxi across the Williamsburg Bridge straight to his loft on Dey Street, and then, he had called me from there. I had not been in when he first called; he got me later, and we saw each other that night, and, more or less, figured out our next trip south.

  Arthur had started to call Jimmy, then decided to put it off. He had been afraid. Yet, he knew, somehow, that he was certain, now, to see him.

  Julia had, finally, come through Customs at about the time Arthur arrived at his loft, and had gone straight to the flat on 18th Street.

  New York seemed very strange, after the landscape to which she had chained herself for so long. She felt dizzy with space, awkward with freedom: she wondered if she could ever live here again. Jimmy’s note, which was several weeks old, did not surprise her. She thought of calling me, then decided to get her bearings first: and she was not sure that she had the right to call me. There were many things she wanted, indeed, needed, to talk about with someone; but, apart from us, the Montanas, that is, and her brother, she really had no friends here.

  She had made two friends in Abidjan, both women, one very old, and they had not wanted her to leave, to return to her mysteriously barbaric country. But she had felt herself beginning to shrivel in the French West African outpost. If she had wanted to find another definition of what it meant to be a woman, and especially a black woman, well, then, she had found it: but it did not appear to be a role that she could play.

  Now, she did not exist, on two continents.

  She had set down her bags, read Jimmy’s note, then gone into the bathroom, and run a bath as hot as she could bear it. Then she had undressed swiftly, as though discarding all evidence of her voyage. She had looked into the mirror. The African sun had darkened her skin and coarsened her hair: and she liked that. But she did not know—yet—what she had gained, or lost. She felt that she had gained—something—something for which she had, as yet, no words. Perhaps she had come home in order to make an assessment which could be made nowhere else.

  She had filled the tub with bath salts, and stepped into the tub, sinking into the heat, gratefully, scrubbing herself with a rough sponge, scrubbing her hair as though she meant to tear something from her skull, her brain, scrubbing her body as though to wash it of sin. And she had actually thought that, her movements made h
er think that; perhaps, indeed, that was what she had always thought. She had lain still for a while, resting in the water, as still as leaves on ponds she had seen in the airless noon. She had touched her body, her loins: not even Africa had been able to make her fertile.

  Then she had rubbed her body with her oils and perfumes, some of her fatigue subsiding into a kind of luxurious, lonely languor. But her loneliness was very particular, and it seemed that it would never end. And her beauty accused her.

  She had put on her long, gray robe, and gone into the living room, and poured herself a drink. She had lit a cigarette, sitting in vigil over her life.

  Arthur had come back to America with the intention of going south, and he began preparing for his journey at once. I hadn’t, yet, done everything necessary to free myself to go with him. One reason was that I was weary of compromise, and was considering burning my bridges. And the other reason was that I had just met Ruth. These reasons—with hindsight, one may say, of course—were to prove to be the very same reason: but, at the time I am speaking of, I was feeling my way.

  But we managed to get it all together. It wasn’t easy for me, and it wasn’t easy for Arthur: and it turned out to be my first rehearsal as Arthur’s manager.

  Arthur was not a star then, had no money except the money he made on the road. Also, a crucial matter which Ruth was the first to point out to me, he had virtually no clothes. Arthur thought of himself as dressed, when, in fact, he was merely covered, and, if asked, would have said that he loved to “dress.” But, in fact, as distinguished from his moving delusion, he lived, mainly, in old shirts, slacks, sweaters, and shit-kickers, went shopping only when he could no longer possibly avoid it, or when he saw something in a window, went in, bought it, and walked out: this always made him feel so tremendously virtuous that whatever he had bought would have worn out long before Arthur realized that it was time to go “shopping” again. As he was the very last person in the world to have been forced to live his life in a goldfish bowl, he was, of all voyagers, the least capable of packing a suitcase. His idea of packing was to throw everything he saw into a suitcase and close it, and rush to the next plane—he never thought of opening the closets, or the drawers. Thus, throughout what we call the “civilized” world, and even beyond its borders, there is an appalling chain of Arthur’s watches, charm bracelets, rings, lockets, combs, brushes, socks, shorts, shirts, ties, tiepins, cufflinks, jackets, trousers, shoes, wallets, address books, records, photographs, books, awards, appeals, fan mail, invitations, oil paintings, watercolors, notes, and scrolls, letters unanswered and letters unfinished.