Another Country (26 page)

Yves clattered into the bedroom.

“Are you going to take that shower or not?”

“Yes. Right away.”

“Well, start. I am leaving now, I will be back in a moment.”

“I know your moments. Try not to get too drunk with the natives.” He grinned and stood up.

Yves picked up a pair of socks from the floor, put them on, and put on his tennis shoes, and a faded blue pullover. “Ah.
Celui-tàje to jure
.” He took a comb from his pocket and pulled it through his hair, with the result that it stood up more wildly than ever.

“I’ll put you on your bicycle.”

They walked past the mimosas. “Hurry back,” said Eric; smiling, staring at Yves.

Yves picked up his bicycle. “I will be back before you are dry.” He rolled the bicycle through the gate and onto the road. Eric stood in the garden, watching him. The light was still very bright but, in the mysterious way of southern light, was gathering itself together and would soon be gone. Already, the sea looked darker.

Once past the gate, Yves did not look back. Eric turned into the house.

He stepped into the shower, which was off the bedroom. He fumbled with the knobs, and the water came crashing over him, first too cold, but he forced himself to take it, then too hot; he fumbled with the knobs until the water became more bearable. He soaped himself, wondering if he were really getting fat. His belly seemed firm enough, but he had always had a tendency to be chunky and square; it was just as well that he would soon, in New York, be going again to the gym. And the thought of the gym, while the water fell down over him, he was alone with his body and the water, caused many painful and buried things to stir in him. Now that his flight was so rigorously approaching its end, a light appeared, a backward light, throwing his terrors into relief.

And what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time’s true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. Precisely, therefore, to the extent that they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty; precisely because they lived in the dark were their shapes obscene. And because the taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate, he had nearly perished in the basement of his private life. Or, more precisely, his fantasies.

These fantasies began as fantasies of love and soured imperceptibly into fantasies of violence and humiliation. When he was little he had been very much alone, for his mother was a civic leader, always busy with clubs and banquets and speeches and proposals and manifestoes, aloft forever on a sea of flowered hats; and his father, rather submerged by this glittering and resounding tide, made his home in the bank and on the golf course, in hunting lodges, and at poker tables. There seemed to be very little between his father and his mother, very little, that is, beyond habit and courtesy and coercion; and perhaps each had loved him, but this was never real to him, since they so clearly did not love each other. He had loved the cook, a black woman named Grace, who fed him and spanked him and scolded and coddled him, and dried the tears which scarcely anyone else in the household ever saw. But, even more than he had loved Grace, he had loved her husband, Henry.

Henry was younger, or seemed younger, than his wife. He was a trial to Grace, and probably to them all, because he drank too much. He was the handyman and one of his duties was the care of the furnace. Eric still remembered the look and the smell of the glaring furnace room, the red shadows from the furnace playing along the walls, and the sticky-sweet smell of Henry’s breath. They had spent many hours together there, Eric on a box at Henry’s knee, Henry with his hand on Eric’s neck or shoulder. His voice fell over Eric like waves of safety. He was full of stories. He told the story of how he had met Grace, and how he had seduced her, and how (as he supposed) he had persuaded her to marry him; told stories of preachers and gamblers in his part of town— they seemed, in his part of town, to have much in common, and, often, to be the same people— how he had outwitted this one and that one, and how, once, he had managed to escape being put on the chain gang. (And he had explained to Eric what a chain gang was.) Once, Eric had walked into the furnace room where Henry sat alone; when he spoke, Henry did not answer; and when he approached him, putting his hand on Henry’s knee, the man’s tears scalded the back of his hand. Eric no longer remembered the cause of Henry’s tears, but he would never forget the wonder with which he then touched Henry’s face, or what the shaking of Henry’s body had caused him to feel. He had thrown himself into Henry’s arms, almost sobbing himself, and yet somehow wise enough to hold his own tears back. He was filled with an unutterably painful rage against whatever it was that had hurt Henry. It was the first time he had felt a man’s arms around him, the first time he had felt the chest and belly of a man; he had been ten or eleven years old. He had been terribly frightened, obscurely and profoundly frightened, but he had not, as the years were to prove, been frightened enough. He knew that what he felt was somehow wrong, and must be kept a secret; but he thought that it was wrong because Henry was a grown man, and colored, and he was a little boy, and white.

Henry and Grace were eventually banished, due to some lapse or offense on Henry’s part. Since Eric’s parents had never approved of those sessions in the furnace room, Eric always suspected this as the reason for Henry’s banishment, which made his opposition to his parents more bitter than ever. In any case, he lived his life far from them, at school by day and before his mirror by night, dressed up in his mother’s old clothes or in whatever colorful scraps he had been able to collect, posturing and, in a whisper, declaiming. He knew that this was wrong, too, though he could not have said why. But by this time he knew that everything he did was wrong in the eyes of his parents, and in the eyes of the world, and that, therefore, everything must be lived in secret.

The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters, because he
must
encounter, those people who see his secrecy before they see anything else, and who drag these secrets out of him; sometimes with the intention of using them against him, sometimes with more benevolent intent; but, whatever the intent, the moment is awful and the accumulating revelation is an unspeakable anguish. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp. How could Eric have known that his fantasies, however unreadable they were for him, were inscribed in every one of his gestures, were betrayed in every inflection of his voice, and lived in his eyes with all the brilliance and beauty and terror of desire? He had always been a heavy, healthy boy, had played like other children, and fought as they did, made friends and enemies and secret pacts and grandiose plans. And yet none of his playmates, after all, had ever sat with Henry in the furnace room, or ever kissed Henry on his salty face. They did not, weighed down with discarded hats, gowns, bags, sashes, earrings, capes, and necklaces, turn themselves into make-believe characters after everyone in their house was asleep. Nor could they possibly, at their most extended, have conceived of the people he, in the privacy of night, became: his mother’s friends, or his mother— his mother as he conceived her to have been when she was young, his mother’s friends as his mother was now; the heroines and heroes of the novels he read, and the movies he saw; or people he simply put together out of his fantasies and the available rags. No doubt, at school, the boy with whom he was wrestling failed to feel the curious stabs of terror and pleasure that Eric felt, as they grappled with each other, as one boy pinned the other to the ground; and if Eric saw the girls at all, he saw mainly their clothes and their hair; they were not, for him, as were the boys, creatures in a hierarchy, to be adored or feared or despised. None of them looked on each other as he looked on all of them. His dreams were different— subtly and cruelly and criminally-different: this was not known yet, but it was felt. He was menaced in a way that they were not, and it was perhaps this sense, and the instinct which compels people to move away from the doomed, which accounted for the invincible distance, increasing with the years, which stretched between himself and his contemporaries.

And, of course, in Eric’s case, in Alabama, his increasing isolation and strangeness was held, even by himself, to be due to the extreme unpopularity of his racial attitudes— or, rather, as far as the world in which he moved was concerned, the lack of any responsible attitudes at all. The town in which Eric lived was celebrated and well-to-do, but it was not very big; as far as Eric was concerned, the South was not very big, certainly, as it turned out, not big enough for him; and he was the only son of very prominent people. So it was not long before his appearance anywhere caused heads to shake, lips to purse, tongues to stiffen or else, violently, venomously, to curl around his name. Which was also, however, his father’s name, and Eric, therefore, encountered, very often and very soon, the hideous obsequiousness of people who depised him but who did not dare to say so. They had long ago given up saying anything which they really felt, had given it up so long ago that they were now incapable of feeling anything which was not felt by a mob.

Now, Eric stepped out of the shower, rubbing his body with the enormous, rough, white towel Yves had placed in the bathroom for him. Yves did not like showers, he preferred long, scalding baths, with newspapers, cigarettes, and whiskey on a chair next to the bathtub, and with Eric nearby to talk to, to shampoo his hair, and to scrub his back. The thought of the Oriental opulence which overtook Yves each time he bathed caused Eric to smile. He smiled, but he was troubled, too. And as he put on his bathrobe, his body tingled less from the effect of the towel and the toilet water than from his image, abruptly overwhelming, of Yves leaning back in the bathtub, whistling, the washrag in his hand, a peaceful, abstracted look on his face and his sex gleaming and bobbing in the soapy water like a limp, cylindrical fish; and from his memory, to which his image was somehow the gateway, of that moment, nearly fifteen years ago, when the blow had inexorably fallen and his shame and his battle and his exile had begun. He walked into the dining room and poured himself a drink. Then the bottle was empty and he dropped it in the waste basket. He lit a cigarette and sat down in a chair near the window, overlooking the sea. The sun was sinking and the sea was on fire.

The sun had been sinking on that far-off day, a Sunday, a hot day. The church bells had ceased and the silence of the South hung heavy over that town. The trees along the walks gave no shade. The white houses, with their blank front doors, their blackly shadowed porches, seemed to be in battle with the sun, laboring and shuddering beneath the merciless light. Occasionally, passing a porch, one might discern in its depths a still, shadowed, faceless figure. The interminable pickaninnies were playing in the invincible dirt— where Eric was walking that day, on a back road, near the edge of town, with a colored boy. His name was LeRoy, he was seventeen, a year older than Eric, and he worked as a porter in the courthouse. He was tall and very black, and taciturn; Eric always wondered what he was thinking. They had been friends for a long time, from the time of Henry’s banishment. But now their friendship, their effort to continue an impossible connection, was beginning to be a burden for them both. It would have been simpler— perhapsif LeRoy had worked for Eric’s family. Then all would have been permitted, would have been covered by the assumption of Eric’s responsibility for his colored boy. But, as things were, it was suspect, it was indecent, that a white boy, especially of Eric’s class and difficult reputation, should “run,” as Eric incontestably did, after one of his inferiors. Eric had no choice but to run, to insist— LeRoy could certainly not come visiting him.

And yet there was something absolutely humiliating in his position; he felt it very sharply and sadly, and he knew that LeRoy felt it, too. Eric did not know, or perhaps he did not want to know, that he made LeRoy’s life more difficult and increased the danger in which LeRoy walked— for LeRoy was considered “bad,” as lacking, that is, in respect for white people. Eric did not know, though of course LeRoy did, what was already being suggested about him all over town. Eric had not guessed, though LeRoy knew only too well, that the Negroes did not like him, either. They suspected the motives of his friendliness. They looked for the base one and naturally they found it.

So, shortly before, when Eric had appeared in the road, his hands in his pockets, a hoarse, tuneless whistle issuing from his lips, LeRoy had jumped off his porch and come to meet him, striding toward Eric as though he were an enemy. There was a snicker from LeRoy’s porch, quickly muffled; a screen door slammed; every eye on the street was on them.

Eric stammered, “I just dropped by to see what you were doing.”

LeRoy spat in the dusty road. “Ain’t doing nothing. Ain’t you got nothing to do?”

“You want to take a walk?” Eric asked.

For a moment it really seemed that LeRoy was going to refuse, for his scowl deepened. Then a faint smile touched his lips. “Okay. But I can’t walk far. I got to get back.”

They began to walk. “I want to get out of this town,” Eric said, suddenly.

“You and me both,” said LeRoy.

“Maybe we can go North together,” Eric said, after a moment, “where do you think’s best? New York? or Chicago? or maybe San Francisco?” He had wanted to say Hollywood, because he had a dim notion of trying to become a movie star. But he could not really imagine LeRoy as a movie star, and he did not want to seem to want anything LeRoy could not have.

“I can’t be thinking about leaving. I got my Ma and all them kids to worry about.” He looked at Eric and laughed, but it was not an entirely pleasant laugh. “Ain’t everybody’s old man runs a bank, you know.” He picked up a pebble and threw it at a tree.