(1964) The Man (49 page)

Yet what had made Otto Beggs feel furtive this time, for the first time, was not the lie to Gertrude (he had already lied to her two days ago), not the fact that he had told Ruby Thomas he would be there (he had been there with her three times before), but that he had lain awake several hours last night enacting a fantasy relationship with her. Even worse, late this morning, and again after lunch, with Austin’s lousy real estate primers open on the desk, he had been unable to study a line because Ruby had sat on the pages before him, Ruby dressed (which was like any other woman undressed), Ruby naked (which was like any other woman undressed), Ruby naked (which was like no sight on earth, he imagined), Ruby opening her arms to him (which had excited him as much as if he were a schoolboy).

It was this sudden obsession with her, and the realization that she might not be averse to fulfilling his dreams, that gave today’s meeting a special significance, and gave him pause in his advance toward the Walk Inn, where she waited. For now this was no more, at least to him, a casual meeting between chance acquaintances. It was something strange to him: an assignation. It was the kind of surreptitious activity of which he disapproved as being indecent, almost un-American, and yet it moved him like a force powerful enough to overwhelm his puritan will and fear of danger. Much as his mind resisted it, his body had become a partner to this rendezvous with Ruby. For in a life of disillusionment, where he was being ignored on a job he loved, being degraded into studying for a new and anonymous and sedentary career he detested, being disapproved of by those closest to him, being made less and less a virile male of action, there was one radiant light of hope. Ruby. It was Ruby who admired his looks, his position, his dreams. Ruby, who was young, magnificent, passionate (he was sure). It did not surprise him that he could not resist her. What did astound him was that the one radiant light of hope in his life, in this gray time, should shine from one so black. For Ruby Thomas, twenty-four, was a Negro.

He had progressed halfway up the block, and the neon in front of the Walk Inn loomed larger and more distinctly against the silver-gray midafternoon sky. His reluctant stride shortened, for he wanted added time to think, to decide if he was plumb crazy or plain lucky, to determine whether the lie he had told Gertrude a second time in three days was worth the risk.

Almost two weeks ago—an afternoon such as this one, he remembered—he had pulled the battered Nash Rambler up before the Walk Inn before continuing to work, because he was out of cigarettes. Once inside the dim interior of the saloon, reviving his resentment against the shiftless colored boys who had appropriated his place at the pinball machines, he had gone to the horseshoe bar for his cigarettes. Then, realizing that he was thirsty, he had lifted himself up on a stool and asked Simon, the former pugilist now a bartender, for a root beer in a frosted stein.

As the soft drink had been placed before him, Ruby Thomas had set herself on the stool beside him. She had made him conscious of her presence by pointing at his root beer and telling Simon, “That sho’ looks yum—I’ll have some of the same, but git me a J an’ B on the rocks on the side.” Immediately, two facts had made themselves clear to Otto Beggs: one, that this was the prettiest Negro girl he had ever seen; two, that despite her reserve she must be interested in him, for most of the stools at the bar were unoccupied, and yet she had deliberately and boldly chosen to sit beside him.

At first he had tried to ignore her, for fear that she was a streetwalker. This concern was quickly dispelled by her appearance and manner. She was attired in a crisp white uniform—he would learn she was a dental assistant, only recently moved into the neighborhood—and there was a fresh, unused look about her and a self-contained air of minding her own business.

Against his will, without being too obvious, he had inspected her several times from head to toe. She sat erectly on the stool, one leg crossed over the other, exposing a knee and shapely calf. She was, his thumping heart told him, breathtaking. Not since he had enjoyed and suffered through a long-distance crush on the singer Lena Horne, way back when he was a sophomore at Oregon State University, had he known a colored girl to attract him so instantly and engage him so totally. This one had tousled gamin hair, silken, brunette, sort of French, and widely spaced, large almond eyes, a short cute nose, and pouting lower lip. He guessed that she was no more than five feet two, and he thought it therefore remarkable how firm and large her breasts were beneath the white uniform, and how broad her thighs were against the tightened skirt. And she was black, although it kept amazing him how her color enhanced rather than detracted from her prettiness.

She had not spoken, and he had not spoken, that first time, until he had emptied his stein and was sorting his change. Suddenly she had turned to him and said, “I’m guessin’ who you are—Lordy, I kin tell—y’all the famous Mr. Beggs, the Secret Service hero.” He had flushed with pleasure and pride, and mumbled that he was no hero at all but that yes, he was Otto Beggs and he was a Secret Service agent. He had wondered how she knew. She had told him that everyone in the neighborhood knew—Lordy, he was the big celebrity in the neighborhood—and that he had been pointed out to her last week. She had been apologetic about intruding upon his privacy—“I knows you must git mighty tired of bein’ a celebrity”—but she wanted to brag to the girls in the office that she had met him. He had asked her name, and she had told him, and had told him where she worked, and he had said that he hoped to see her around, and he had fled (alive and young as that young one) into the brightening street.

That had been the first time, and that had been last week. The second time had been a few days later, again on his way to work, and this time she had been sitting at the bar, and he had summoned up the nerve to sit beside her, making some kind of joke to which she had responded with delightful laughter. They had talked incessantly, for twenty minutes maybe, this second time, until she had to leave to return to her dentist and his drills.

For five successive days after that, he had come into the Walk Inn in search of Ruby Thomas, and she had not been there. At last, casually, he had inquired of Simon what had become of her, and Simon had explained that she had to take her coffee break earlier now, that she was usually in at three o’clock instead of three forty-five. And so two days ago, motivated by this intelligence, Otto Beggs had contrived his first small lie for Gertrude. His shift at the White House began at four o’clock, and he had been leaving for work as late as twenty-five or even twenty minutes to four. At lunch he had told Gertrude that his new shift began at three o’clock, an hour earlier, and he would be leaving around twenty minutes to three. Gertrude had thought nothing of it, except to worry that he would have an hour less to bone up for his real estate examinations. He had promised her that he would make up the lost reading time at night.

Thus two days ago, he had driven to the Walk Inn and found Ruby at the bar, as he had known that he would, and had sat beside her and enjoyed an entire half hour with her. By the end of this meeting, the best there had been yet, he had learned a good deal about Ruby Thomas. She had lived in Louisiana and Indiana, and was an only child. She had managed to have one year of high school before being forced to quit and help support her family. She had wanted to be educated, though, and had saved up for mail-order courses, and tried to take one a year. She had been a photographer’s model—“but when them white boys kept wantin’ me to pose in the way it ain’t fittin’ to be seen, in my altogether, I sorta got it in my cottonpickin’ haid they was wantin’ more than pitchers an’ I told them where to go”—and so she had quit. She had been quick to assure Beggs that she was no prude—“I got as much lovin’ naycher in my bones as any no’mal gals”—but she did not believe in mixing business with pleasure.

She had seen an advertisement in
Ebony
magazine, and enrolled in a mail-order course that would graduate her as a dental assistant. Her diploma, she had learned later, had not been enough to make her a qualified dental assistant, but only a sort of assistant to an assistant, as well as a receptionist, file clerk, telephone operator, and jane-of-all-trades. She had held three such jobs already, including the new one, and she liked working for dentists because they were on their feet so much during the day, they were too tired to chase her at night. She ate lunch in the office, in order to get this daily midafternoon break, which she found picked her up when she most needed it and left her refreshed for the evening. She had located a pleasant, inexpensive double apartment a block from the Walk Inn, a furnished apartment with a private entrance, which was important to her because she liked her own business to be her own. Her only extravagance was a recently acquired hi-fi phonograph—she would pay it off in eighteen months—and her avocation was collecting classical jazz records. Did Otto Beggs like Jelly Roll Morton? Beggs had never heard of Jelly Roll Morton, but he had told Ruby he had never heard anyone better.

Best of all, she had enjoyed listening to Beggs, enjoyed questioning him and listening to his lengthy answers, her wide almond eyes concentrating on his lips. She was curious about his life, his achievements, his work in the Secret Service. He had been able to talk to her more easily than he had talked to anyone in years. The latter years with Gertrude had dammed up his pride in himself, and now he was able to release what had been too long held back. He had told Ruby of his boyhood, of his athletic triumphs at Oregon State, of his war days in Korea, of his Medal of Honor, of his numerous jobs, of his years in the Secret Service. He had avoided telling her about his family. All he had recounted to Ruby Thomas, every minute detail, every anecdote, even to the contents of his beloved scrapbooks, impressed and awed her. “Dog my cats!” she would exclaim. “You really done that?” Above all, she held his work in high esteem. Where Gertrude considered a Secret Service agent as nothing more than an underpaid game warden, Ruby considered the role of guarding the President an honor next to the Presidency itself.

Only one truth marred their relationship, and it trailed doggedly after him, following their third meeting. She was black.

Otto Beggs had long taken pride in his tolerance. Sure, Negroes were different from white folk, they were lazier, less dependable, trickier, less smart, but hell, they weren’t to blame, because look what they came from; they came from Africa and from plantation slavery. He had not known any Negroes, except Solly, who ran interference for him on the football team in Oregon, and a few others in the Army, and he had liked them well enough. Of course, he didn’t like Prentiss too much, because Prentiss had got the job as assistant to the head of the White House Detail that had rightfully belonged to himself. Still, he could not hold that against Prentiss personally. It was not Prentiss’ doing. If anyone was to blame, it was Chief Gaynor. Beggs couldn’t prove it yet, but he was willing to bet money Gaynor intended to promote as many colored agents as he could, which was natural when you played politics. As to President Dilman, Beggs wasn’t definite about him. He didn’t like him in general, that was for certain. On the other hand, he could not say he disliked him entirely, either. What he did dislike was having to track around on the heels of a Negro. Beggs knew that he was smarter than Dilman, more courageous (as he had once proved), and had more personality, and yet, look what that lumpy politician was paid per annum and look what he was paid. And worst of all, for the lousy money he was getting, Beggs was pledged to lay his life on the line to protect that colored man. For one of Beggs’s stature, gifts, potential, it was demeaning. Imagine Dilman doing anything to deserve a Medal of Honor? Ha!

Without being able to define it, Beggs felt uncomfortable around Negro men, especially the ones in this cruddy neighborhood, which even his so-called friends, the Schearers, had now abandoned. About Negro women, however, his feelings were more lenient, although still confused. After all, he had loved Lena Horne in his youth, well, when he was younger. He had always liked to watch Negro women in the street from his bedroom window. The young ones carried themselves great. And their builds, they were built for heroic men. Sometimes, but not often, in his pre-Ruby days, he had entertained wild thoughts about Negro women and their secrets. But then he would always get mixed up in his thoughts, for sometimes he would think they were below him, not in the street below but socially beneath him, and not good enough for him, with their secrets, those builds from Africa, and only Negro men could manage them.

Several times he had recalled the night that he had escorted President Dilman to that brownstone where the Reverend Spinger lived, and the crazy thing that had happened before they left, that colored girl, an older one but a swell looker, who had come dashing out after Dilman. The President had called her Miss Gibson and acted like she was a secretary, which she probably was, taking notes on the conference with Spinger, which she probably had done, yet Beggs could not forget that when she had come out, she had been kind of informal, calling after the President, “Doug.” Beggs had never heard of a secretary calling her boss by his first name, especially a boss who was President of the United States. He had tried to picture Miss Gibson exactly in his mind, but could only remember that she had been kind of light-colored and slender, and not bad for her age. He had wondered if she was Spinger’s secretary and had just called Dilman by his first name because she had known him a long time, or if maybe she was Dilman’s lady friend and nothing else. The latter thought had been so disrespectful, so Communistic, especially for one in his job, that Beggs had driven it from his mind as best he could and had not dared repeat the juicy speculation even to Gertrude.

But it had come back to him, the thought, in a different context last night when he could not sleep, when he had enjoyed his daring dreams of Ruby. If Dilman, he had told himself, could manage to take care of a pretty fair-looking light-colored girl—lady—then he, Otto Beggs, could do ten times better with any one of them. This feeling of superiority had brought some order to his confusion, and reinforced his ardor for Ruby Thomas. He had not waited for lunch to tell his lie to Gertrude. He had done so the moment that he had sat down to breakfast.