Another Country Read online

  Out of the corner of his eye, Rufus watched him stabbing the table with his stir-stick.

  “I hope,” Cass said, “that you won’t sit around blaming yourself too much. Or too long. That won’t undo anything.” She put her hand on his. He stared at her. She smiled. “When you’re older you’ll see, I think, that we all commit our crimes. The thing is not to lie about them— to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it.” She leaned closer to him, her brown eyes popping and her blonde hair, in the heat, in the gloom, forming a damp fringe about her brow. “That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That’s very important. If you don’t forgive yourself you’ll never be able to forgive anybody else and you’ll go on committing the same crimes forever.”

  “I know,” Rufus muttered, not looking at her, bent over the table with his fists clenched together. From far away, from the juke box, he heard a melody he had often played. He thought of Leona. Her face would not leave him. “I know,” he repeated, though in fact he did not know. He did not know why this woman was talking to him as she was, what she was trying to tell him.

  “What,” she asked him, carefully, “are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to try to pull myself together,” he said, “and get back to work.”

  But he found it unimaginable that he would ever work again, that he would ever play drums again.

  “Have you seen your family? I think Vivaldo’s seen your sister a couple of times. She’s very worried about you.”

  “I’m going up there,” he said. “I haven’t wanted to go— looking this way.”

  “They don’t care how you look,” she said, shortly. “I don’t care how you look. I’m just glad to see you’re all right— and I’m not even related to you.”

  He thought, with a great deal of wonder, That’s true, and turned to stare at her again, smiling a little and very close to tears.

  “I’ve always thought of you,” she said, “as a very nice person.” She gave his arm a little tap and pushed a crumpled bill into his hand. “It might help if you thought of yourself that way.”

  “Hey, old lady,” Richard called, “want to make it in?”

  “I guess so,” she said, and yawned. “I suppose we’ve celebrated enough for one night, one book.”

  She rose and returned to her side of the table and began to gather her things together. Rufus was suddenly afraid to see her go.

  “Can I come to see you soon?” he asked, with a smile.

  She stared at him across the width of the table. “Please do,” she said. “Soon.”

  Richard knocked his pipe out and put it in his pocket, looking around for the waiter. Vivaldo was staring at something, at someone, just behind Rufus and suddenly seemed about to spring out of his seat. “Well,” he said, faintly, “here’s Jane,” and Jane walked over to the table. Her short, graying hair was carefully combed, which was unusual, and she was wearing a dark dress, which was also unusual. Perhaps Vivaldo was the only person there who had ever seen her out of blue jeans and sweaters. “Hi, everybody,” she said, and smiled her bright, hostile smile. She sat down. “Haven’t seen any of you for months.”

  “Still painting?” Cass asked. “Or have you given that up?”

  “I’ve been working like a dog,” Jane said, continuing to look around her and avoiding Vivaldo’s eyes.

  “Seems to suit you,” Cass muttered, and put on her coat.

  Jane looked at Rufus, beginning, it seemed, to recover her self-possession. “How’ve you been, Rufus?”

  “Just fine,” he said.

  “We’ve all been dissipating,” said Richard, “but you look like you’ve been being a good girl and getting your beauty sleep every night.”

  “You look great,” said Vivaldo, briefly.

  For the first time she looked directly at him. “Do I? I guess I’ve been feeling pretty well. I’ve cut down on my drinking,” and she laughed a little too loudly and looked down. Richard was paying the waiter and had stood up, his trench coat over his arm. “Are you all leaving?”

  “We’ve got to,” said Cass, “we’re just dull, untalented, old married people.”

  Cass glanced over at Rufus, saying, “Be good now: get some rest.” She smiled at him. He longed to do something to prolong that smile, that moment, but he did not smile back, only nodded his head. She turned to Jane and Vivaldo. “So long, kids. See you soon.”

  “Sure,” Jane said.

  “I’ll be over tomorrow,” said Vivaldo.

  “I’m expecting you,” Richard said, “don’t fail me. So long, Jane.”

  “So long.”

  “So long.”

  Everyone was gone except Jane and Rufus and Vivaldo.

  I wouldn’t mind being in jail but I’ve got to stay there so long….

  The seats the others had occupied were like a chasm now between Rufus and the white boy and the white girl.

  “Let’s have another drink,” Vivaldo said.

  So long….

  “Let me buy,” Jane said. “I sold a painting.”

  “Did you now? For a lot of money?”

  “Quite a lot of money. That’s probably why I was in such a stinking mood the last time you saw me— it wasn’t going well.”

  “You were in a stinking mood, all right.”

  Wouldn’t mind being in jail….

  “What’re you having, Rufus?”

  “I’ll stick to Scotch, I guess.”

  But I’ve got to stay there….

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t know what makes me such a bitch.”

  “You drink too much. Let’s just have one drink here. Then I’ll walk you home.”

  They both looked quickly at Rufus.

  So long….

  “I’m going to the head,” Rufus said. “Order me a Scotch with water.”

  He walked out of the back room into the roaring bar. He stood at the door for a moment, watching the boys and girls, men and women, their wet mouths opening and closing, their faces damp and pale, their hands grim on the glass or the bottle or clutching a sleeve, an elbow, clutching the air. Small flames flared incessantly here and there and they moved through shifting layers of smoke. The cash register rang and rang. One enormous bouncer stood at the door, watching everything, and another moved about, clearing tables and rearranging chairs. Two boys, one Spanish-looking in a red shirt, one Danish-looking in brown, stood at the juke box, talking about Frank Sinatra.

  Rufus stared at a small blonde girl who was wearing a striped open blouse and a wide skirt with a big leather belt and a bright brass buckle. She wore low shoes and black knee socks. Her blouse was low enough for him to see the beginnings of her breasts; his eye followed the line down to the full nipples, which pushed aggressively forward; his hand encircled her waist, caressed the belly button and slowly forced the thighs apart. She was talking to another girl. She felt his eyes on her and looked his way. Their eyes met. He turned and walked into the head.

  It smelled of thousands of travelers, oceans of piss, tons of bile and vomit and shit. He added his stream to the ocean, holding that most despised part of himself loosely between two fingers of one hand. But I’ve got to stay there so long…. He looked at the horrible history splashed furiously on the walls— telephone numbers, cocks, breasts, balls, cunts, etched into these walls with hatred. Suck my cock. I like to get whipped. I want a hot stiff prick up my ass. Down with Jews. Kill the niggers. I suck cocks.

  He washed his hands very carefully and dried them on the filthy roller towel and walked out into the bar. The two boys were still at the juke box, the girl with the striped blouse was still talking to her friend. He walked through the bar to the door and into the street. Only then did he reach in his pocket to see what Cass had pushed into his palm.

  Five dollars. Well, that would take care of him until morning. He would get a room at the Y.

  He crossed Sheridan Square and walked slowly along West Fourth Street. The bars were beginning to close. People s
tood before bar doors, trying vainly to get in, or simply delaying going home; and in spite of the cold there were loiterers under street lamps. He felt as removed from them, as he walked slowly along, as he might have felt from a fence, a farmhouse, a tree, seen from a train window: coming closer and closer, the details changing every instant as the eye picked them out; then pressing against the window with the urgency of a messenger or a child; then dropping away, diminishing, vanished, gone forever. That fence is falling down, he might have thought as the train rushed toward it, or That house needs paint, or The tree is dead. In an instant, gone in an instant— it was not his fence, his farmhouse, or his tree. As now, passing, he recognized faces, bodies, postures, and thought. That’s Ruth. Or There’s old Lennie. Son of a bitch is stoned again. It was very silent.

  He passed Cornelia Street. Eric had once lived there. He saw again the apartment, the lamplight in the corners, Eric under the light, books falling over everything, and the bed unmade. Eric— and he was on Sixth Avenue, traffic lights and the lights of taxis blazing around him. Two girls and two boys, white, stood on the opposite corner, waiting for the lights to change. Half a dozen men, in a heavy gleaming car, rolled by and shouted at them. Then there was someone at his shoulder, a young white boy in a vaguely military cap and a black leather jacket. He looked at Rufus with the greatest hostility, then started slowly down the Avenue away from him, waving his rump like a flag. He looked back, stopped beneath the marquee of a movie theater. The lights changed. Rufus and the two couples started toward each other, came abreast in the middle of the avenue, passed— only, one of the girls looked at him with a kind of pitying wonder in her eyes. All right, bitch. He started toward Eighth Street, for no reason; he was simply putting off his subway ride.

  Then he stood at the subway steps, looking down. For a wonder, especially at this hour, there was no one on the steps, the steps were empty. He wondered if the man in the booth would change his five-dollar bill. He started down.

  Then, as the man gave him change and he moved toward the turnstile, other people came, rushing and loud, pushing past him as though they were swimmers and he nothing but an upright pole in the water. Then something began to awaken in him, something new; it increased his distance; it increased his pain. They were rushing— to the platform, to the tracks. Something he had not thought of for many years, something he had never ceased to think of, came back to him as he walked behind the crowd. The subway platform was a dangerous place— so he had always thought; it sloped downward toward the waiting tracks; and when he had been a little boy and stood on the platform beside his mother he had not dared let go her hand. He stood on the platform now, alone with all these people, who were each of them alone, and waited in acquired calmness, for the train.

  But suppose something, somewhere, failed, and the yellow lights went out and no one could see, any longer, the platform’s edge? Suppose these beams fell down? He saw the train in the tunnel, rushing under water, the motor-man gone mad, gone blind, unable to decipher the lights, and the tracks gleaming and snarling senselessly upward forever, the train never stopping and the people screaming at windows and doors and turning on each other with all the accumulated fury of their blasphemed lives, everything gone out of them but murder, breaking limb from limb and splashing in blood, with joy— for the first time, joy, joy, after such a long sentence in chains, leaping out to astound the world, to astound the world again. Or, the train in the tunnel, the water outside, the power failing, the walls coming in, and the water not rising like a flood but breaking like a wave over the heads of these people, filling their crying mouths, filling their eyes, their hair, tearing away their clothes and discovering the secrecy which only the water, by now, could use. It could happen. It could happen; and he would have loved to see it happen, even if he perished, too. The train came in, filling the great scar of the tracks. They all got on, sitting in the lighted car which was far from empty, which would be choked with people before they got very far uptown, and stood or sat in the isolation cell into which they transformed every inch of space they held.

  The train stopped at Fourteenth Street. He was sitting at the window and he watched a few people get on. There was a colored girl among them who looked a little like his sister, but she looked at him and looked away and sat down as far from him as she could. The train rolled on through the tunnel. The next stop was Thirty-fourth Street, his stop. People got on; he watched the stop roll by. Forty-second Street. This time a crowd got on, some of them carrying papers, and there were no seats left. A white man leaned on a strap near him. Rufus felt his gorge rise.

  At Fifty-ninth Street many came on board and many rushed across the platform to the waiting local. Many white people and many black people, chained together in time and in space, and by history, and all of them in a hurry. In a hurry to get away from each other, he thought, but we ain’t never going to make it. We been fucked for fair.

  Then the doors slammed, a loud sound, and it made him jump. The train, as though protesting its heavier burden, as though protesting the proximity of white buttock to black knee, groaned, lurched, the wheels seemed to scrape the track, making a tearing sound. Then it began to move uptown, where the masses would divide and the load become lighter. Lights flared and teetered by, they passed other platforms where people waited for other trains. Then they had the tunnel to themselves. The train rushed into the blackness with a phallic abandon, into the blackness which opened to receive it, opened, opened, the whole world shook with their coupling. Then, when it seemed that the roar and the movement would never cease, they came into the bright lights of 125th Street. The train gasped and moaned to a halt. He had thought that he would get off here, but he watched the people move toward the doors, watched the doors open, watched them leave. It was mainly black people who left. He had thought that he would get off here and go home; but he watched the girl who reminded him of his sister as she moved sullenly past white people and stood for a moment on the platform before walking toward the steps. Suddenly he knew that he was never going home any more.

  The train began to move, half-empty now; and with each stop it became lighter; soon the white people who were left looked at him oddly. He felt their stares but he felt far away from them. You took the best. So why not take the rest? He got off at the station named for the bridge built to honor the father of his country.

  And walked up the steps, into the streets, which were empty. Tall apartment buildings, lightless, loomed against the dark sky and seemed to be watching him, seemed to be pressing down on him. The bridge was nearly over his head, intolerably high; but he did not yet see the water. He felt it, he smelled it. He thought how he had never before understood how an animal could smell water. But it was over there, past the highway, where he could see the speeding cars.

  Then he stood on the bridge, looking over, looking down. Now the lights of the cars on the highway seemed to be writing an endless message, writing with awful speed in a fine, unreadable script. There were muted lights on the Jersey shore and here and there a neon flame advertising something somebody had for sale. He began to walk slowly to the center of the bridge, observing that, from this height, the city which had been so dark as he walked through it seemed to be on fire.

  He stood at the center of the bridge and it was freezing cold. He raised his eyes to heaven. He thought, You bastard, you motherfucking bastard. Ain’t I your baby, too? He began to cry. Something in Rufus which could not break shook him like a rag doll and splashed salt water all over his face and filled his throat and his nostrils with anguish. He knew the pain would never stop. He could never go down into the city again. He dropped his head as though someone had struck him and looked down at the water. It was cold and the water would be cold.

  He was black and the water was black.

  He lifted himself by his hands on the rail, lifted himself as high as he could, and leaned far out. The wind tore at him, at his head and shoulders, while something in him screamed, Why? Why? He thought of Eric. His s
training arms threatened to break. I can’t make it this way. He thought of Ida. He whispered, I’m sorry, Leona, and then the wind took him, he felt himself going over, head down, the wind, the stars, the lights, the water, all rolled together, all right. He felt a shoe fly off behind him, there was nothing around him, only the wind, all right, you motherfucking Godalmighty bastard, I’m coming to you.

  2

  It was raining. Cass sat on her living-room floor with the Sunday papers and a cup of coffee. She was trying to decide which photograph of Richard would look best on the front page of the book-review section. The telephone rang.

  “Hello?”

  She heard an intake of breath and a low, vaguely familiar voice:

  “Is this Cass Silenski?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at the clock, wondering who this could be. It was ten-thirty and she was the only person awake in her house.

  “Well”— swiftly— “I don’t know if you remember me, but we met once, downtown, in a night club where Rufus was working. I’m his sister— Ida? Ida Scott—”

  She remembered a very young, striking, dark girl who wore a ruby-eyed snake ring. “Why, yes, I remember you very well. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Well”— with a small, dry laugh— “maybe I’m not so fine. I’m trying to locate my brother. I been calling Vivaldo’s house all morning, but he’s not home”— the voice was making an effort not to tremble, not to break— “and so I called you because I thought maybe you’d seen him, Vivaldo, I mean, or maybe you could tell me how to reach him.” And now the girl was crying. “You haven’t seen him, have you? Or my brother?”

  She heard sounds coming from the children’s bedroom. “Please,” she said, “try not to be so upset. I don’t know where Vivaldo is this morning but I saw your brother last night. And he was fine.”

  “You saw him last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’d you see him? Where was he?”

  “We had a couple of drinks together in Benno’s.” Then she remembered Rufus’ face and felt a dim, unwilling alarm. “We talked for a while. He seemed fine.”