Going Down Fast (2 page)

Rowley's voice came through like a heavy hand falling on her shoulder. Singing, oh god. He had been backing up the girl with tactful inventive guitar—he played powerfully and well and she liked him singing blues. But his voice suffered like a beaten hound, in dialect yet. Bellowing away, the overbearing bulk pranced out through all those radios:

When I go to the kirk on Sunday

Many's the bonny lass I see

Sitting by her mother's side

And winking over the pews at me

Ha ha ha banged the guitar.

Now I can drink and not be drunken
,

I can fight and not be slain
,

I can lie with another man's lassie

And still be welcome to my own!

Like those signs shops used to hand out, fish-shaped for the fish-market, shoe for the cobbler: a great neon phallus, here lives Rowley the Rod, Satisfaction Guaranteed.

He was playing backup again beautifully when she heard him whistling outside. Hearing him too the cat Yente woke hanging over the top shelf of the bookcase. Someone ran down the front steps. Yente leaped from the shelf with a loud graceful plop and making for the door with his splayfooted gallop, set up a welcoming yowl.

As Rowley pushed the door open, Yente rose hugging his knee until he lifted him. “Hey Annie! Where are you!” He came toward her with the cat walking on his shoulders, leaning to lick the ends of his buffalo hunter moustache. On his big frame, six feet and broad as a wall, objects were slung: red and black hunter's jacket looped over his shoulder, records in a shopping bag, the
Sun-Times
, mail that had come at the studio, and the worn overnight case he used as a briefcase bulging through all its cracks.

Behind him in midsentence came his landlord Harlan Williams, who lived above him on the first floor. Though Harlan was about Rowley's height and age he looked younger, because of his quick nervous gestures, because of the hard neatness of his body, and because his dark redtoned mahogany skin was smooth and unlined except for one fine wrinkle that ran up from the top of his nose like a decoration. He was brandishing a newspaper and the line showed. “This is the end, man, I can't believe it. They're going to seize our land and throw us off!”

“The University can't seize anything. Keep your cool.”

“For married student housing. They can't call this a slum, but these are black blocks and that's enough. We can move back and sleep in the ghetto streets.” He let out his barbed laugh.

Tossing his stuff on the kitchen table Rowley took the neighborhood paper from Harlan and sat down to scan it. Harlan leaned against the sink drumming his fingers. She was glad she had straightened. Rowley and Harlan were bound in a sparring friendship from years before she'd met him. Harlan, a minor official in welfare, seemed to like her, but wafts of his wife Shirley's disapproval chilled the basement from time to time.

Handing her the paper Rowley pushed to his feet. “Their real estate lobby put through legislation downstate that lets them move to
prevent
slums. But I can't believe they expect to ride over so many people without protest. This announcement is to open the bargaining.”

“The University doesn't bargain, not with us. They're South Side slumlords, at the same time they've set up dummy organizations to keep their backyard white. You think I didn't try to buy a house over there? Every time I found one it would mysteriously go off the market.”

She looked up from the map. “Surprise number two. I notice on the big renewal plan that my own building's been added. I'm getting evicted too. It's not a fancy building, but it's solid cheap housing of a sort that's getting rarer and rarer—”

They both looked at her blankly and Rowley mumbled something about, So move in, and then they turned back man to man and resumed. As if there was room. As if Shirley would put up with that. She had been about to make a point about new construction, anyhow. Most of the women Rowley had dealt with, and they'd been many, had been casual lays and he was not above treating her that way in front of old friends, though if she challenged him about it he claimed she was imagining.

Rowley was pacing. “A university is a sensitive body. Can be embarrassed. Pressured.”

“A university, man, is a biggish corporation. If it acts like General Motors or U.S. Steel, why be surprised? Who are the trustees, anyhow?”

“Look, I'll ask around the station and see if I can find out what this means. I can't see how a private corporation can get eminent domain over people's homes.”

Harlan unpropped himself from the sink. “Depends on who the people are, looks like.”

“You want to leave me the paper?”

“No.” Harlan smiled at his own truculence but took it anyhow as he left.

Involuntarily she took a breath and braced herself. Whenever they were alone she felt her internal balance shift, she drew together more compactly. He smiled from his wideset tilted eyes and stooped to kiss her. She tasted beer and the remnants of spice on his tongue, leaning into him and holding tight. Good to be back. Um, tired. She felt like curling up in his arms and being loved.

“Annie—” He tilted her head back. “Want to go to a party?”

“A party?”

“Nothing much. Just Caroline Frayne is back from Europe.”

She shrugged. “I didn't expect her to turn up again around here. I though she'd gravitate to more glamour.”

He tangled his hand in her hair. “Leon called, said we should drop over. I said we would.”

She pulled free. Without asking her, again. “How is he?” She went into the bedroom to put herself together.

“How is Leon ever? The same jagoff. He's on a rampage about his exwife. I don't know what he thinks she's doing, but he's sure it's his business.” He lolled on the bed stroking the cat. “Feed Yente?”

“Sure.” She combed her hair. “You're friends with Leon only because you roomed with him. If you met him cold at a party you'd think, there's a loudmouthed operator.”

He shrugged evasively, tumbling Yente. “You're too hard on him.”

“I hardly know him,” she said equably. As she reached for her purse, he pinched her behind, and she cried out. “I don't like that!”

“Then you shouldn't have such a sweet ass or wear tight skirts.”

She tugged at her striped overblouse. “Is my skirt too tight?”

“No, Christsake, come on.” He steered her out. Rowley's apartment was on the ground floor, a couple of feet below the dirt line. They left by ducking around the broad staircase that went straight up to the Williams' front door.

As she climbed in her side of the VW, she noticed his guitar in back. “Are you going to perform tonight?”

He shrugged. “You didn't say how you liked my show?”

“It was very interesting.”

“Interesting—what does that mean? Did you
like
it?”

“Your selections are always first rate.”

“What are you getting at, Annie?”

“Nothing!” If only she had told him right out she had missed half his program, but he had Harlan with him when he came in. He had called her in Cleveland to ask her if she would be back Friday in time, and it was unlike him to fuss so much, and puzzling. They had left the predominantly black blocks where Rowley lived and drove through the campus, quiet between terms.

“All right, damn it, what are you not getting at?”

“I don't know why you will sing that sort of thing!”

“I see. You're having a bourgeois puritan hangup about a fine old song,
The Barnyards of Delgatty
.”

“You'll say a lot of people like it.” Something knocked in her stop, stop, but she could not. “Well, some of your friends would encourage you to eat glass if you took that into your head. If you started stripping at parties, they'd say it was wonderfully earthy.”

He stepped on the gas and burst into the thing again loud as he could, which was loud. Looking sideways at him with his black hair rumpled, his moustache waving, his big head flung back, she smiled and could not believe they were quarreling. He was taking out his annoyance at her leaving town. Through the brick leafy streets of faculty houses as he stomped on through the song she cast about for some way to signal her apologies.

But he said loudly, “So lady sociologists find me vulgar. I wouldn't offend you for the world, baby, but I'm just naturally offensive. It's all those yes-men stoking my ego.” He parked and hopped out to cross Leon's, between a secondhand bookstore and a closed-down coffeehouse. Leon had lived for years in one of a row of faded red concession stands put up for the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and used ever since for shops or artists' studios or apartments.

He strode ahead and she trotted after. His rambling, loose-jointed walk. She wanted him. If only she could take a deep breath and start over. “Why is Leon giving the party? Is Caroline his girl now?”

“Back when he was married I think he screwed around with her. Used her in a film.”

“Which pray god he doesn't show tonight.”

But Rowley would not smile, rapping on the door. Leon let them in, framed in the lit door with his bulky hirsute body and massive head like a chimpanzee. He grinned at Rowley who gave back the same calculating grin as they sidled round each other.

“How are you making it?” Leon said in his high harsh voice. As if contemptuous of height he slumped, leaning to look up at Rowley out of narrowed eyes.

“Not busted yet. How's the single life?”

They spoke and looked at each other with the same mixture of distaste and curiosity and warmth. Leon shrugged. “Doesn't make much difference, my marriage was never what you'd call a fulltime thing. It wasn't something all-over demanding like going steady or being engaged—hey, Caroline?” He turned toward the couch—a piece of Danish modern that looked as if an unclean elephant had nested there. Caroline sat beside another, younger girl, thin and black. When Caroline caught their gaze, she held up her hand with the diamond.

“In Firenze,” she called, “but he's American. He'll be here next month. Rowley, aren't you going to say hello? Don't you ignore me a minute longer!”

A dozen people milled around the large front room that had changed little since the time Leon was married to Joye. Inside the peeling walls, the flaking paint dabbed with squashed roaches and old film star posters, stood the furniture one or the other prosperous family had given them for marrying each other. Festooned from the ceiling were Joye's stubborn attempts at decoration: a net of pebbles, a wobbly mobile of bicycle parts, some gourds and Indian corn strung up wizened and miscolored as shrunken heads. Leon's editing table stood against one wall with a rack of clips by the small splicer. The screen was furled in its case, thank god, beside a flood without a bulb. Books were piled on the floor and boxes stood under tables or on chairs, half packed or half unpacked. Old butts lay in drifts against the walls with old paper splices.

She would call no one here a friend, nor were they currently Rowley's. There was one black filmmaker and his boyfriend, who left shortly, some stray girls, but the knot of men around Leon had known each other at the University. Their talk bristled with names at least one of them would have forgotten. Remember, said the natty one as they stood outside the kitchen, and they laughed ritually and the fat one slapped his thigh. Rowley would not join them: he used but did not sentimentalize his past. He had many pasts and she was always discovering a new one like a corridor opening out of a casual sentence: “One time in Duluth when I was working on the ore boats …” “When Kirk and I hit Baja California in his jeep …” “So my old man sent me down to the picket line at the East Gate …”

“
Owen
,” Leon was saying. “Course you haven't seen him around. He's locked up.”

“How come?” the natty one asked. “What did he do?”

“Heard voices, man. His folks committed him.” Leon drew his finger across his throat. “This time he'll never get out.”

The fat one shook his head, his jowls drooping in mournful folds. “What a rotten deal. Poor old Owen.”

“Shut up, Fisher!” Leon's voice rose like the whine of a saw. “I came to you asking you to find him a job in your father's snot-works, and all you had to say was, gee I'm busy. You sent him up there too, and don't forget it.”

Fisher flailed his arms shouting as Anna finally slipped past into the kitchen to get a beer for herself and another for Rowley, still chatting with Caroline. He took it and thanked her without breaking the rhythm of his story, standing with one foot on the rung of a chair. Climbing in the High Sierra. One good reason she did not enjoy parties as much as she used to.

He certainly was not handsome with his crooked nose and scar and his droopy walrus moustache and strange upslanting eyes, his ruddy face, his hair long and shaggy. He had a good body but thick in the waist. A fine man to cook for, with eagerness to try and strong belly and good teeth. In the bathtub he played like a porpoise and sang. He dropped to sleep like a ton of child. His other accomplishments were, alas, obvious. She had little against him except that he did not know he was mortal.

Caroline was lit up for him, signals hoisted. The girl beside her, looking the room over with a wondering disgust, contrasted strongly. She was perhaps nineteen with coppery black skin very smooth against the mattress ticking of her shift. Her hair was cropped close to her head in tight natural curls, set on a long neck. Black swan. Coltish long arms and legs. Her face, unmoving, had the slightly flattened precision of a mask. She brought out Caroline's coloring—the brown-blond haziness, the camelshair pastels. Next to her Caroline looked sexy, full of sap, but also a little obvious with her brows and lashes heavily made up, large complaisant mouth, a bigboned hippy selfconscious body that men would call childlike without meaning that. Regular soft features that Leon kept showing in that pretentious film wrapped in slimy seaweed or with beetles crawling over.