The Outsider (23 page)

Half an hour later, Cross, lugging his heavy suitcase, followed the crowd down the ramp toward the waiting rooms. As he edged forward, his anxieties began to mount. Care seemed to bring him these compulsive moods which, when they first made their presence felt, when they first declared their emotional authority, were nothing definite. They simply rose seemingly out of nowhere and in defiance of his rational capacity and began seeking their own object; failing to find it, they created it out of what was at hand, anything…Cross knew that this was himself acting, and that self was alien to him.

He passed the train's huge, sighing, black engine and longed to become as uncaring and passively brutish as that monster of steel and steam that lived on coal. But, no; his was to feel all of these anxieties in his shivering flesh. Goddamn! To swap the burden of this sorry consciousness for something else! To be a God who could master feeling! If not that, then a towering rock that could feel nothing at all! His life was becoming a tense prayer interspersed with curses. He wondered if the priest felt life as keenly as he did. Or had not the priest become a priest precisely in order
not
to feel it?

Through the bars of the gate he saw crowds milling in the station; porters rushed to and fro; hand-trucks piled with luggage rolled toward the exits; he heard shouts of friends greeting friends. If his apprehensions were true, if Houston were playing a game, he could expect the police to accost him. When he was out of the gate, he saw Houston and Father Seldon smiling and waving at him and he smiled and waved back. He was still safe.

Twice before he had been in New York with Gladys on summer vacations and he knew his way about. He headed for the Grand Central subway station and took the shuttle to Times Square where he changed for a Harlem train and stood at the front window of the first coach with his back to the other passengers, his emotions reading a secret language in the red and amber and green lights that swept past in the noisy night of the underground. At 110th Street he began to wonder where he would get off. Such were now the tiny decisions that clogged his consciousness. He was
too
free! For no reason at all he rode past 110th Street and at 125th Street he decided to get off simply because it was one of the best known thoroughfares in Harlem. Standing uncertainly on the platform, he debated: Maybe 125th Street is
too
crowded; it's just possible I might meet somebody I know…He waited for a local and rode to 135th Street and got off and climbed the stairs to the upper world.

Loitering, holding his suitcase, his cheeks stinging from the icy wind, he pondered what direction to take to find a room. When he finally ambled forward, he avoided looking into the faces of the passersby, feeling instinctively that he did not have the right to do so. He was without a name, a past, a future; no promises or pledges bound him to those about him. He had to become human before he could mingle again with people.
Yet he needed those people and could become human only with them. Dimly he realized that his dilemma, though personal, bore the mark of the general. The lives of children, too, were subjected to this same necessity; they, too, could become human only by growing up with human beings…

He came to Seventh Avenue and walked up to 136th Street, turned left, looking for FOR RENT signs. At last he saw a brick house set well back from the sidewalk with shutters closed and it appealed to him. It was as though his doubt about his right to exist blended with the closed shutters and the distance the house was from the street. He mounted stone steps and rang the bell; the opening door disclosed a woman with a brown face,—a burning cigarette slanting across her chin made her seem sluttish at first—wearing a dark blue dressing gown. He saw the tip of a soiled brassiere struggling to keep her bulging breasts to the dimensions of modesty. She was about twenty-eight or thirty, had hard surfacy eyes that might have indicated that she was limited in her thinking. Woman as body of woman shot through his senses, but he pushed the impulse from him; he was in too much danger now to play around…

“What can I do for you?” she asked bluntly.

“You have a room for rent, I think,” Cross said, a little taken aback by her abrupt manner. Yet he liked her. She was the kind of woman who would most likely take him for granted and not pry into his past; her attitude seemed to place her in the sane, ordinary events of Harlem life.

“Come on in if you want to see it,” she said.

He stepped inside, sat his suitcase in a corner, and followed her down a hallway and up a flight of steps to a second floor. She trailed an odor of tobacco smoke.
She opened the door of a large room and threw him a defiant glance.

“There it is,” she spoke flatly.

He sized her up as a naïve woman who had created about herself a hard-boiledness of manner to protect a too-believing nature that had been tramped on and abused by sundry men. In appearance, she was intensely feminine, seemingly ready to surrender in a yearning for a happiness which she was certain that she would be cheated out of in the end.

“How much is the rent?” he asked her.

“Ten dollars a week,” she said.

“I'll take it.”

“You don't have to decide right now,” she told him; she seemed to be uncertain of herself.

“I want a room and here is one: large, airy, clean. I'll take it,” he smiled at her, took out his wallet and gave her a ten-dollar bill.

“When do you want to move in?” she asked.

“I'm here,” he said. “My bag's downstairs. It's simple.”

Having identified himself as Addison Jordan, Cross, half an hour later, was lying on his bed, trying to plot out his life.

The weather continued bitterly cold. An icy wind swooped from a bleak sky, ripped against windowpanes, and clawed at passersby in the streets. Cross, overcome by a listlessness which he could not shake off, spent his days either lounging in his room or in the consoling shadows of movie houses. He was Mrs. Hattie Turner's only paying guest and he heard rather than saw her, slightly in her cups at times, stumbling around downstairs in her dining room or kitchen. He learned from a gossipy drugstore clerk that she was a widow who owned her own home, that she drank a little too much,
and that she had recently begun to receive the attentions of two men. Most of the time he could hear her playing blues or jazz records whose wild rhythms wailed up to him through the thin flooring. His morbid mood was susceptible to the lonely melodies and, as he tapped his feet to the beat of the tunes, his sense of estrangement became accentuated and he felt more inclined than ever to avoid contact with reality.

The raucous blue-jazz welling up from downstairs was his only emotional home now and he listened with an appreciation he had never had before. He came to feel that this music was the rhythmic flauntings of guilty feelings, the syncopated outpourings of frightened joy existing in guises forbidden and despised by others. He sensed how Negroes had been made to live in but not of the land of their birth, how the injunctions of an alien Christianity and the strictures of white laws had evoked in them the very longings and desires that that religion and law had been designed to stifle. He realized that this blue-jazz was a rebel art blooming seditiously under the condemnations of a Protestant ethic just like his own consciousness had sprung conditioned to defiance from his relationship to his mother who had shrilly evoked in him exactly what she had so desperately tried to smother, had posited in him that which she loathed above all in the world by bringing it too insistently to his attention. Blue-jazz was the scornful gesture of men turned ecstatic in their state of rejection; it was the musical language of the satisfiedly amoral, the boastings of the contentedly lawless, the recreations of the innocently criminal…Cross smiled with depressed joy as he paced about his room, his ears full of the woeful happiness of the blues and the orgiastic culpability of jazz.

He had enough money to keep him for awhile, but his pile of dollars was dwindling fast. Each night he
vowed that on the following morning he would do something practical about his problem of identity, but the morning found him ready with excuses for inaction. He avoided trying to justify his fear of activity, but in his heart he knew that to exert himself was to invite down upon him those spells of dread; so he remained inert, hoping that by blending his bleak mood with the empty hours he would elude his compulsions.

Of a morning or of an evening he would encounter Mrs. Turner in the downstairs hallway and they would exchange greetings. Whenever she asked him if he were comfortable, he would tell her that everything was all right in a tone of voice that sought to hold her off from him, for he sensed slumbering in her strained manner a nervousness whose content he did not want to know. Now and then he noticed two well-dressed Negroes coming to visit her, but they roused neither his interest nor jealousy.

When she did finally break in on his jealous solitude, it was with a naïve brusqueness that swept him before it and he was again acting with swift heartlessness to save himself. His anxiety rose when he noticed her staring at him. Inflamed, his dread sucked all innocent events into its greedy maw. Was she not suspicious about his background? Why did those two men come to see her? Why were they always
together
? Did not policemen act that way? Why was not Mrs. Turner more relaxed with him of late? He even wondered if she searched his suitcase when he was out…

On the morning of the day of the eruption, the coming storm was presaged by the brittle manner of Mrs. Turner who failed to return his greeting in the hallway. At noon she knocked on his door. He made sure that his gun was handy, then rose and opened the door. She stared at him blankly, embarrassed.

“God, I'm rattled today,” she complained. “I came up here to say something, and now, for the life of me, I can't remember what it was.” She tapped the knuckles of her hand against her forehead. “It'll come back to me in a minute. If it doesn't, then it couldn't've been so
very
important, could it? I'm silly.” She forced a smile and left.

Cross was frantic. Had she come up to make sure that he was in his room? He ached to grab her and shake the truth out of her. He was certain that she had not forgotten the object of her errand; a mere failure of nerve had swamped her before she could speak. Quickly he packed his suitcase. Maybe she was trying to tempt him…? Or maybe the cops were waiting downstairs? He sat on the side of the bed and sweated.

What stalled his fleeing was his recollection of past times when he had misread events under the hot promptings of anxiety. Was he wrong now? But too many unanswered questions stood between him and Mrs. Turner's nervousness. He fretted, listening for sounds in the house. No blue-jazz came up now, yet he knew that she was downstairs, alone. If the police cornered him in this room, what could he do? He looked out of the window upon a backyard whose deep snow gleamed bluish in the night. He could jump for it…He was suddenly alert, hearing slow footsteps on the upper stairs. Finally the sound of her heels tapped hesitantly along the hallway, then stopped at his door and all was quiet. He ran to the window, hoisted it, shivering in a stream of freezing air. He would never unlock that door until he was satisfied that she was alone. If the police were with her, they would have to bash in the door; meanwhile, he would leap out of the window…His suitcase? Hell, he'd just leave it…

She was standing quietly at his door. But why? He
fingered his gun and waited. At last there came the sound of a congested throat being cleared, then a light sigh. He stiffened as he heard Mrs. Turner's voice:

“Have you gone to bed yet?”

Why hadn't she knocked? And why hadn't she called him by his name? Perhaps she wasn't speaking to him? He decided not to answer. Then a timid rap came at his door.

“Are you sleeping?” she called loudly this time.

“Just a second,” he said. He closed the window, adjusted his gun, turned the key, and opened the door cautiously, keeping his weight back of it to slam it shut. She was standing quietly with her back to him. He had opened the door so noiselessly that she was unaware that he was looking at her.

“Yes?”

She whirled, drawing in her breath, looking at him in blank fright.

“You scared me,” she sighed, her hands flutteringly protecting her breasts. Then she laughed nervously. “I'm so jittery. I hate like hell to bother you.”

A mute begging swam in her dark eyes and his dread vanished.

“What's the matter?” he asked.

“You've
got
to help me,” she spoke as though she had debated for days on how to talk to him. “I need your advice about something terribly important.”

“Come in,” he said.

The dark blue dressing gown made her seem somehow naked, gave her an abandoned air that clothed her body in an appeal of sex. Cross fought shy of it. She moved to the center of the room, not looking at him. He left his door ajar as protection against any unexpected entry. Luckily, his packed suitcase was under the bed, out of sight. She seemed afraid of him; why? Was it
the severe reserve that he had imposed upon himself that made her hesitate? He was poised, his feelings mobilized to react violently and suddenly in any direction.

“Mr.—” she looked helpfully at him. “
What's
your name? I must be going out of my mind.” She sat and closed her eyes in confusion.

He smouldered. He knew it; she was fishing for information. Did she think that he was so naïve that he would inadvertently blurt out that he was Cross Damon? Yet, he was dubious; his mind believed her.

“Jordan's the name,” he flung it at her and waited for her to challenge it.

“Oh, yes. Mr.
Jordan
, I've something to ask you—”

“What is it?”

“I'm in trouble and worried sick…”

Cross relaxed a bit. This silly woman…Suppose she had
his
trouble? She'd jump out of a window, he thought.