The End of a Primitive (11 page)

Roy had come too, bringing a very dignified and respectable looking woman whom he had introduced as Estelle. She had looked as out of place as Becky in that dirty two-room flat.

Paul had been well along the way when they arrived, receiving them dressed in a spotty tee-shirt that looked as if it might have served duty as a cleaning rag, and incredibly filthy white duck pants, the seat of which was absolutely black. And Kathy wore a soiled and rumpled sun-back playsuit that appeared to have made several tours of Coney Island since its previous laundering: the both of them giving the impression by their unkempt hair and red-smeared lips of having just arisen from bed.

The dinner, sent up from the corner delicatessen, had consisted of greenish-tinted slices of hard-boiled eggs, curled and fragrant slices of bologna sausage, withered slices of tomatoes dressed with dabs of yellow paste, and watery cabbage slaw; and had been served on an egg-and-wine-stained, repulsively filthy paper table covering. However, Paul had provided eight quarts of domestic ale and a gallon of California sherry, and since Roy’s ladyfriend drank only a very little sherry, and Kathy no more than a quart of ale, there had been plenty left for the three escapees from Skiddoo, wine and ale being a combination they’d found to be satisfactorily potent during their sojourn there.

Becky had drunk against despair.

When the sherry was finished, Paul and Kathy had begun slobbering over each other in a manner that presaged violent passionate action at any moment. Fearful of this action taking place right there on the floor, which would have been nothing new for Greenwich Village, and having no curiosity about the sex habits of psychotic writers, Estelle had quietly departed. And an hour later, never having remembered what took place in the interim, Jesse had found himself standing at the bar in
Nick’s
with Becky between himself and Roy, ordering three bottles of ale, and the bartender had charged him seventy cents for each. He had thought nothing of it until the woman at his left asked, “How much did he charge you for your ale?”

He looked at her, trying to get her face into focus. “Seventy cents. Why?”

“We had ale just before you came in and he only charged us thirty-five cents,” she informed him.

He didn’t remember what happened immediately following. The next thing he remembered he was shouting at the top of his voice, “What the hell kind of goddamned shit is this! You’re not in Georgia, goddamit, this is New York City!” And the headwaiter and another waiter were standing beside him and the bartender across from him, and all of them were trying to explain at once that after eleven o’clock, when the orchestra played, all prices were doubled. But he didn’t hear their explanations. Deep inside of his muddled thoughts he felt he’d been victimized because he was black, and he was asserting his rights. “I’m not sitting at a goddamned table!” he kept shouting, letting them know he knew the score. “We’re standing at this goddamned bar, and you charged everybody else here thirty-five cents—”

“I can’t stand it!” Becky had screamed suddenly, and had run outside, crying hysterically. “I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t! I can’t!”

Caught first in bewilderment, like finding oneself naked in Times Square, there followed a sudden hurt that went down through his body like the shock of death. “Becky baby! Becky! Wait, baby!” he had called thickly, his brain instantly sober, but his body still drunk as he had run staggering after her. “What’s the matter, baby? Wait, baby!”

Turning quickly to escape him, she had run out into the middle of Seventh Avenue before an on-coming car, hoping to be killed.

The squealing of the suddenly applied brakes and her sudden action threw him into panic. On catching her, he had clutched her about the waist, and had tried to drag her back to safety. But at his touch she’d gone crazy, fighting him in hysterical frenzy. In the struggle they had fallen to the street, rolling and threshing on the brick pavement as two persons fighting desperately. Not realizing what had happened, Roy had run after them and tried to separate them. Nick’s and the nearby bars had emptied their patrons into the street to watch the nigger fighting his woman, and there had been several hundred persons crowded along the curbs while he and Becky had threshed in the street.

Finally a policeman had come and yanked him to his feet.

“I don’t want her to get hurt!” he had shouted at the cop and had tried to push him away.

The cop had twisted his arm behind his back and Roy had helped Becky to her feet. Because of the gaping crowd and Becky’s hysteria, the policeman had let them take a taxi to the station.

Roy had been released but he and Becky had spent the night in jail.

That had been the most awful thing that had ever happened to Roy, and the day after the hearing he had revealed himself to Jesse as a homosexual, making a grand slam of all the white men Jesse had met that summer, which he always thought of afterward as the Summer of the Da-Da-Dee, a nameless tune, he had shouted through the nights at Skiddoo, coming back to the estate from the cheap bars in the early hours of morning, weary and bedraggled and blotto. Its basic theme was the melody of a popular song on the jukebox in his favourite downtown bar, sung by Ella Fitzgerald, with words that went,
I’ll get by as long as I have you
…but he had never known this. It was just a sound that had kept him going the four miles down the dark and sleeping elm-lined highway back to the quiet splendour of Skiddoo when he had felt more like just lying in the gutter and never getting up….

And why, after that, he chose to come back to Nick’s with Kriss—“Customary!” he thought grimly, as they alighted from the taxi. “They always return to the scene—what kind of detective stories have you been reading, you don’t know that?”

They were taken to a booth along the wall up front, to one side of the Dixieland Band. The place looked completely different from his memory of it, and now he could not conceive of why he had caused such a row. Everything seemed perfectly normal.

He thought of a boy he knew in Harlem who said he smoked marijuana because it made him feel so normal. “You know one thing, Jess, only time I ever feel normal is when I’m high.”

She had been thinking, “God damn Dave to hell!” The last time she’d been there, he had taken her, and she had felt the envy of the other women. Now she felt their indifference, bringing a sense of shame, and in a roundabout way she was enraged with Jesse by hating Dave. If Jesse were big and black like Charlie Thompson, the union official with whom she’d spent a weekend in Cleveland, clinging possessively to his arm as they walked down Euclid, she could have felt a daredevil defiance. Or, if he were gorgeous like Ted, she wouldn’t even have to look to see how they were taking it; she could just relax and feel hated. All of them had wanted Ted, his thick black curly hair and smooth moustache; he’d even slept with Lady—what was her name?—Lady—anyway, some relation of the Duke’s—all during the war when he was stationed in London with the Red Cross. They’d often talked about it, and he’d often said to flatter her, “She was a Lady but you’re a woman, sugar.”

Silently she watched Jesse give their order….

“No, both rare.”

“…to drink, sir?”

“…for me, Scotch for the lady. With soda.”

Their voices drifted in and out of her consciousness. She wondered what she’d ever seen in him that had once attracted her.

“You look sad, Kriss baby,” he observed.

For the first time she thawed a little, pleased that he had noticed it.

“Wan, really,” he continued, “But it gives you an interesting look. Are you grieving for your love?”

She grinned suddenly. “When I first went to the university I used to pray to become sick so I’d get thin and pale and interesting looking. I was disgustingly healthy and North Dakota stuck out all over me. I used to dream of having tuberculosis and looking like Camille.”

He smiled. “Transparent.” It was a term blacks applied to blondes which she had learned while at the Foundation, and when he added, “You’re transparent anyway, baby,” she gave him her sensual bedroom smile.

Through the comer of her eye she noticed the blonde he’d been staring at giving him a long appraising look and she began to feel a spread of warmth displacing her lethargy. He could be cute, she thought.

Seeing the change in her, he continued in the same vein, trying to get her in the mood, “Like gossamer. If it wasn’t for the table I’d kiss you.” Letting his desire flood from beneath lowered lashes into her bright blue staring eyes. “Like pink champagne.”

But the waiter served their steaks and broke it off. He ordered more drinks and asked curiously, “Do you ever hear from Ronny, Kriss?” and her melting mood froze again.

“He writes me every month. He’s in Austria—with the State Department.”

“I know. I heard he was married again.”

“He has a son now.”

“He has?” To himself he thought, “He must have given birth to it.”

A slow blush mounted to her face. “He’s cured now.”

“Really? What’s his wife like? Do you know her?”

“I’ve never seen her, but Arty knew her in Chicago. He tells everyone she’s a cheap edition of me.”

“I think I saw her at a party once at Harold’s,” he said, his interest straying. “He’d brought her. If she’s the same girl.” While talking, his gaze had wandered toward the blonde at the other table and locked for a moment with hers.

Noticing, Kriss said, “Let’s go!” in a way that sounded like a curse.

They rode in silence to her apartment, and when she’d unlocked her door, she turned on him in fury, her eyes wide and icy with repressed rage, and said brutally, “Jesse! I don’t want you to come in unless you’re really free of your wife. I am sick and tired of having you niggers’ wives hating me.” She was paying him for looking at the blonde.

But he didn’t realize it. Accepting her statement at face value, he said flatly, “I am really free of her,” adding to himself, “There’s a limit—even a nigger limit, bitch!”

“If you’re lying to me I’ll kill you,” she said gratingly.

Relaxing, he said, half-amused, “You’d have to bury me, baby, I’m not insured.”

She relaxed too, and, entering her front hall, permitted him to enter too. After hanging up their coats they went into the kitchen and he stood by silently while she missed highballs with four fingers of whiskey in each. To get the mood rolling, one way or another, he said, “I’ve always wanted you, Kriss baby, even when I couldn’t have you—but if you want me to go—”

She turned suddenly and embraced him, kissing him hard, her body feeling big and unwieldly in his arms. Their eyes locked for a moment, and then she thought with a sudden icy chill of how she had once felt about him and broke from his embrace.

Glancing at her watch, she said brusquely, “It’s time for Barry Gray,” and hurried to the sitting room, while he followed with the drinks. A thin, good-looking, aquiline-featured man came on the screen and the voice began saying something about Negroes.

She sat in her three-legged chair, listening as if to God, and he sat on the sofa and gulped his highball silently. “Big Talk, Small Do—Indians,” he thought and stood up to get another drink. Kriss gave him her glass too.

He made them stronger than before, kissing her hair as he placed hers on her coaster. Resuming his seat he stared at her profile, ignoring the television, and for the first time noticed the seams in her fleshy neck. The next thing he noticed his glass was empty and a film was showing. He got up to mix more drinks for them both and found both bottles nearly empty. “I must be getting drunk,” he thought, as he bumped against the wall when returning to the sitting room, then, half-amused, “Power of suggestion.”

He did not remember reaching the sitting room. His next conscious action was of walking nude from the living room to the bedroom and finding her nude body inert on the faded blue sheet, eyes closed. He stood looking down at it until vague wisps of desire were transmitted from his brain, then he heard his voice saying with a slightly shocked note, “Damn, you’re white!”

She opened her eyes and looked at him with the last flicker of sensual pleasure. “I am about as white as one can be,” she said distinctly.

For a long time their senses were dulled almost to insensibility with drunkenness. Her first reaction was memory:

He had come into her office in Chicago shortly before noon, wearing the same trench coat, new then and somehow dashing, and a double-breasted business suit with hand-stitched lapels. His hair was long and heavily greased with an interesting kinkiness, and she had noticed instantly his long girlish eyelashes and beautiful eyes. He didn’t look at all like the type of young black writer who’d been given fellowships, neither hungry nor scholarly nor intellectual nor “called.” More like a good lover with that air of frantic sexuality scarcely contained beneath his respectful manner. So she had taken him to the executives’ luncheon to meet the president and other officials, and afterwards she’d had him wait in her office while she finished some reports. He had sat in one of the straight-backed uncomfortable chairs, looking at her all the while with restrained and polite desire until she couldn’t stand the warmth. She’d suggested that he go and do whatever he had to do and come to her apartment at six for dinner. Ronny had been in the army then—overseas at that. He had brought bourbon, like this time, and she’d made her special goulash. Afterwards they’d sat on the sofa in her pleasant sitting-room, drinking slowly, and he had told her all about himself; she refusing to answer the intermittent ringing of the telephone. All that time sitting at opposite ends of the sofa, turned toward each other, her legs tucked beneath her and one of his beneath himself. Then he had said, “I think I’m going to kiss you,” and her face took on a melting look as she offered him her mouth and he had moved close to her and that first kiss had been almost as penetrating as the moment of conception. He had undressed first and was in bed and—of all things—covered up when she had come naked from the bathroom, and she had seen in that first look he had of her nakedness all she’d ever wanted from a man. On the very first time they finished in a dead heat, making the night too precious for sleep. Later sitting on the sofa again, the bed now consecrated and their nakedness as natural as the night, she had read aloud the whole of
This Is My Beloved
, then afterwards on the white bearskin rug before the hearth, and in the sunrise through the French doors to the terrace they had read to each other laughingly the early love twists of John Donne.