Rich Man, Poor Man (79 page)

‘You don’t write much, but in your letters I get the impression things aren’t so hot with you. I’m sorry. Maybe you ought to

change whatever it is you’re doing and do something else. If my friend Dwyer wasn’t so close to being a fag as to make no difference, I’d ask you to marry him, so you could be the cook. Joke.

‘If you have any rich friends who like the idea of a Mediterranean cruise this coming summer, mention my name. No joke.

‘Maybe it seems gaga to you and Rudy, your brother’s being a yacht captain, but I figure it must be in the blood. After all, Pa sailed the Hudson in his own boat. One time too many. Not such a joke.

‘The boat is painted white, with blue trim. It looks like a million dollars. The shipyard owner says we could sell it like it is right now and make 10,000 dollars profit. But we’re not selling.

‘If you happen to go East you could do me a favour. See if you can find out where my wife is and what she’s doing and how the kid is. I don’t miss the flag and I don’t miss the bright lights, but I sure miss him.

‘I am writing such a long letter because it is raining like crazy here and we can’t finish the second coat of the deck house (blue). Don’t believe anybody who tells you it doesn’t rain on the Mediterranean.

‘Dwyer is cooking and he is calling me to come eat. You have no idea how awful it smells. Love and kisses, Tom.’

Rain in Porto Santo Stefano, rain in Venice, rain in California. The Jordache’s weren’t having much luck with the weather. But two of them, at least, were having luck with everything else, if only for one season. ‘Five o’clock in the afternoon is a lousy time of day,’ Gretchen said aloud. To stave off self-pity she drew the curtains and made herself another drink.

It was still raining at seven o’clock, when she got into the car and went down to Wilshire Boulevard to pick up Kosi Krumah. She drove slowly and carefully down the hill, with the water, six inches deep, racing ahead of her, gurgling at her tyres. Beverly Hills, city of a thousand rivers.

Kosi was taking his master’s in sociology and was in two of her courses and they sometimes studied together, before examinations. He had been at Oxford and was older than the other students and more intelligent, she thought. He was from Ghana and had a scholarship. The scholarship, she knew, was not a lavish one, so when they worked together, she tried to arrange to give him dinner first at the house. She was sure he

wasn’t getting quite enough to eat, although he never talked about it. She never dared to go into restaurants too far off campus with him, as you never knew how head waiters would behave if a white woman came in with a black man, no matter how properly dressed he was and regardless of the fact that he spoke English with a. pure Oxford accent. In class there never was any trouble and two or three of the professors seemed even unduly to defer to him when he spoke. With her, he was polite but invariably distant, almost like a teacher with a student. He had never seen any of Colin’s movies. He didn’t have the time to go to movies, he said. Gretchen suspected he didn’t have the money. She never saw him with girls and he didn’t seem to have made any friends except for herself. If she was his friend.

Her practice was to pick him up at the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire in Beverly Hills. He didn’t have a car, but he could take the bus along Wilshire from Westwood, where he lived, near the university campus. As she came along Wilshire, peering through the spattered windshield, the rain so dense that the wipers couldn’t work fast enough to clear the glass, she saw him standing on the corner, with no raincoat, with not even the collar of his jacket turned up for protection. His head was up and he was looking out at the stream of traffic through his blurred glasses as though he were watching a parade.

She” stopped and opened the door for him and he got in leisurely, water dripping from his clothes and forming an immediate pool on the floor around his shoes.

‘Kosi!’ Gretchen said. ‘You’re drowning. Why didn’t you wait in a doorway, at least?’

‘In my tribe, my dear,’ he said, ‘the men do not run from a little water.’

She was furious with him. ‘In my tribe,’ she mimicked him, ‘in my tribe of white weaklings, the men have sense enough to come in out of the rain. You … You … ‘ She racked her brain for an epithet. ‘You Israelii’

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then he laughed, uproariously. She had to laugh with him. ‘And while you’re at it,’ she said, ‘you might as well wipe your glasses, tribesman.’

Obediently, he dried off his glasses.

When they got home, she made him take off his shirt and jacket and gave him one of Colin’s sweaters to wear. He was a small man, just about Colin’s size, and the sweater fitted him.

She hadn’t known what to do with Colin’s things, so they just lay there in the drawers and hung in the closets, where he had left them. Every once in a while she told herself that she should give them to the Red Cross or some other organisation, but she never got around to it.

They ate in the kitchen, fried chicken, peas, salad, cheese, ice cream and coffee. She opened a bottle of wine. Kosi had once told her he had gotten used to drinking wine with his meals at Oxford.

He always protested that he wasn’t hungry and that she needn’t have bothered, but she noticed that he ate every morsel she put before him, even though she wasn’t much of a cook and the food was just passable. The only difference in their eating habits was that he used his fork with the left hand. Another thing he had learned in Oxford. He had gone through Oxford on a scholarship, too. His father kept a small cotton-, goods shop in Accra, and without the scholarship there never would have been enough money to educate the brilliant son. He hadn’t been home in six years, but planned to go back and settle in Accra and work for the government as soon as he had written his thesis.

He asked where Billy was. Usually, they all ate together. When Gretchen said that Billy was away for the weekend, he said, Too bad. I miss the little man.’

Actually, Billy was taller than he, but Gretchen had become accustomed to Kosi’s speech, with its ‘my dears’ and its ‘little men’.

The rain drummed on !he flagstones of the patio outside the window. They dawdled over dinner and Gretchen opened another bottle of wine.

To tell you the truth,’ she said, ‘I don’t feel like working tonight’

‘None of that, now,’ he said reprovingly. ‘I didn’t make that fearful journey in a flood just to eat.’

They finished the wine as they did the dishes, Gretchen washing and Kosi wiping. The dishwasher had been broken for six months, but there wasn’t even much need for it, as there were never more than three people for any one meal and fiddling with the machine was more trouble than it was worth for so few dishes.

She carried the pot of coffee into the livingroom with her and they each had two cups as they went over the week’s work. He had a quick agile mind, by now severely trained, and he was impatient with her slowness.

‘My dear,’ he said, “you’re just not concentrating. Stop being a dilettante.’

She slammed the book shut. It was the third or fourth time he had reprimanded her since they had sat down at the desk together. Like a - like a governess, she thought, a big black mammy governess. They were working on a course on statistics and statistics bored her to stupefaction. ‘Not everyone can be as goddamn clever as you,’ she said. ‘I was never the brightest student in Accra, I never won a scholarship to…’

‘My dear Gretchen,’ he said quietly, but obviously hurt. ‘I never claimed to be the brightest student anywhere … ‘

‘Never claimed, never claimed,’ she said, thinking, hopelessly, I’m being shrill. ‘You don’t have to claim. You just sit there being superior. Or stand out in the rain like some idiotic tribal god, looking down on the poor, cowardly white folk slinking past in their decadent Cadillacs.’

Kosi stood up, stepped back. He took off his glasses and put them in his pocket., ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This relationship doesn’t seem to be working out…’

‘This relationship,’ she taunted him. *Where did you learn to talk like that?’

‘Good night, Gretchen/ he said. He stood there, his mouth tight, his body taut. ‘If you’ll just give me the time to change back into my shirt and jacket… I won’t be a minute.’

He went into the bathroom. She heard him moving around in there. She drank what was left in her cup. The coffee was cold and the sugar at the bottom of the cup made it too sweet. She put her head in her hands, her elbows on the desk, above the scattered books, ashamed of herself. I did it because of Rudolph’s letter this afternoon, she thought. I did it because of Colin’s sweater. Because of nothing to do with that poor young man with his Oxford accent.

When he came back, wearing his shirt and jacket, still shapeless and damp, she was standing, waiting for him. Without his glasses his close-cropped head was beautiful, the forehead wide, the eyelids heavy, the nose sharply cut, the lips rounded, the ears small and flat against the head. All done in flawless, dark stone, and all somehow pitiful and defeated.

‘I shall be leaving you now, my dear,’ he said.

‘I’ll take you in the car,’ she said in a small voice.

‘I’ll walk, thank you.’

‘It’s still pouring,’ she said.

‘We Israelis,’ he said sombrely, ‘do not pay attention to the rain.’

She essayed a laugh, but mere was no answering glint of humour.

He turned towards the door. She reached out and seized his sleeve. ‘Kosi,’ she said. ‘Please don’t go like that.’

He stopped and turned back towards her. ‘Please,’ she said. She put her arms loosely around him, kissed his cheek. His hands came up slowly and he held her head between them. He kissed her gently. Then not so gently. She felt his hands sliding over her body. Why not? She thought, why not, and pressed him to her. He tried to pull away and move her towards the bedroom, but she dropped on to the couch. Not in the bed in which she and Colin had lain together.

He stood over her. ‘Undress,’ he said.

‘Put out the lights.’

He went over to the switch on the wall and the room was in darkness. She heard him undressing as she took off her clothes. She was shivering when he came to her. She wanted to say, ‘I have made a mistake, please go home,’ but she was ashamed to say it

She was dry and unready but he plunged into her at once, hurting her. She moaned, but the moan was not one of pleasure. She felt as though she were being torn apart. He was rough and powerful and she lay absolutely still, absorbing the pain.

It was over quickly, without a word. He got up and she heard him feeling his way across the room towards the light switch. She jumped up and ran ‘into the bedroom and locked the door. She washed her face repeatedly in cold water and stared at her reflection in the mirror above the basin. She wiped off what was left of heir lipstick which had smeared around her mouth, She would have liked to take a hot shower, but she didn’t want him to hear her doing it. She put on a robe and waited as long as she dared, hoping he would be gone when she went out. But he was still there, standing in the middle of the livingroom, dressed, impassive. She tried to smile. She had no idea of how it came out.

‘Don’t you ever do anything like that again to anybody, my dear,’ he said evenly. ‘And certainly not to me. I will not be tolerated. I will not be condescended to. I will not be part f anybody’s programme of racial integration.’

She stood with her head lowered, unable to speak.

When you get your degree,’ he went on in the same flat, malevolent tone, ‘you can play Lady Bountiful with the peer bastards in the charity clinics, the beautiful, rich white lady

proving to all the little niggers and all the little greasers how democratic and generous this wonderful country is and how loving and Christian educated beautiful white ladies who don’t happen to have husbands can be.” I won’t be here to see it. I’ll be back in Africa, praying that the grateful little niggers and the grateful little greasers are getting ready to slit your throat.’

He went out silently. There was only the smallest sound as the front door closed.

After a while, she cleared the desk they had been working on. She put the cups and saucers and the coffee pot in the sink in the kitchen and piled the books on one side of the desk. I’m too old for school books, she thought. I can’t cope. Then, walking painfully, she went around and locked up. Arnold Simms, in your maroon bathrobe, she thought as she switched off the lights, rest easy. I have paid for you.

In the morning, she didn’t attend her two Saturday classes, but called Sam Corey at the studio and asked if she could come over and talk to him.

Even pregnant as she was, Jean ‘insisted upon coming down and having breakfast with him every day. ‘At the end of the day,’ she said, ‘I want to be as tired as you. I don’t want to be one of those American women who lie around all day and then when their husbands come home, drag the poor beasts out every evening, because they’re bursting with unused vigour. The energy gap has ruined more marriages by half than adultery.’

She was nearly at term and even under the loosely flowing nightgown and robe she was wearing, the bulge was huge and clumsy. Rudolph had a pang of guilt when he watched her. She had had such a neat delicate way of walking and now she was forced to balance herself painfully, belly protruding, pace

careful, as she went from room to room. Nature has provided women with a kind of necessary lunacy, he thought, for them to desire to bring children into the world.

They sat in the dining-room, with the pale, April sun streaming through the windows, while Martha brought them fresh coffee. Martha had changed miraculously since his mother’s death. Although she ate no more than before, she had filled out and was now matronly and comfortable. The sharp lines of her face had disappeared and the everlasting downward twitch of her mouth had been replaced by something that might even have been a smile. Death has its uses, Rudolph thought, watching her gently place the coffee pot in front of Jean. In the old days she would have banged it down on the table, her daily accusation against Fate.

Pregnancy had rounded Jean’s face and she no longer looked like a schoolgirl fiercely determined to get the best marks in the class. Placid and womanly, her face glowed softly in the sunlight. This morning,’ Rudolph said, ‘you look saintly.’ “You’d look saintly, too,’ Jean said, ‘if you hadn’t had any sex for two months.’ ‘I hope the kid turns out to be worth all this,’ Rudolph said. ‘He’d better.’