Another Country (3 page)

From time to time Rufus found himself glancing upward at the silver ball in the ceiling, always just failing to find himself and Leona reflected there.

“Let’s go out to the balcony,” he said to her.

She held out her glass. “Freshen my drink first?” Her eyes were now very bright and mischievous and she looked like a little girl.

He walked to the table and poured two very powerful drinks. He went back to her. “Ready?”

She took her glass and they stepped through the French doors.

“Don’t let Little Eva catch cold!” the host called.

He called back. “She may burn, baby, but she sure won’t freeze!”

Directly before and beneath them stretched the lights of the Jersey shore. He seemed, from where he stood, to hear a faint murmur coming from the water.

When a child he had lived on the eastern edge of Harlem, a block from the Harlem River. He and other children had waded into the water from the garbage-heavy bank or dived from occasional rotting promontories. One summer a boy had drowned there. From the stoop of his house Rufus had watched as a small group of people crossed Park Avenue, beneath the heavy shadow of the railroad tracks, and come into the sun, one man in the middle, the boy’s father, carrying the boy’s unbelievably heavy, covered weight. He had never forgotten the bend of the man’s shoulders or the stunned angle of his head. A great screaming began from the other end of the block and the boy’s mother, her head tied up, wearing her bathrobe, stumbling like a drunken woman, began running toward the silent people.

He threw back his shoulders, as though he were casting off a burden, and walked to the edge of the balcony where Leona stood. She was staring up the river, toward the George Washington Bridge.

“It’s real beautiful,” she said, “it’s just so beautiful.”

“You seem to like New York,” he said.

She turned and looked at him and sipped her drink. “Oh, I do. Can I trouble you for a cigarette now?”

He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her, then lit one for himself. “How’re you making it up here?”

“Oh, I’m doing just fine,” she said. “I’m waiting tables in a restaurant way downtown, near Wall Street, that’s a real pretty part of town, and I’m rooming with two other girls”— they couldn’t go to
her
place, anyway!— “and, oh, I’m doing just fine.” And she looked up at him with her sad-sweet, poor-white smile.

Again something warned him to stop, to leave this poor little girl alone; and at the same time the fact that he thought of her as a poor little girl caused him to smile with real affection, and he said, “You’ve got a lot of guts, Leona.”

“Got to, the way I look at it,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’ll just give up. But—
how
do you give up?”

She looked so lost and comical that he laughed out loud and, after a moment, she laughed too.

“If my husband could see me now,” and she giggled, “my, my, my!”

“Why, what would your husband say?” he asked her.

“Why— I don’t know.” But her laugh didn’t come this time. She looked at him as though she were slowly coming out of a dream. “Say— do you think I could have another drink?”

“Sure, Leona,” and he took her glass and their hands and their bodies touched for a moment. She dropped her eyes. “Be right back,” he said, and dropped back into the room, in which the lights now were dim. Someone was playing the piano.

“Say, man, how you coming with Eva?” the host asked.

“Fine, fine, we lushing it up.”

“That ain’t nowhere. Blast Little Eva with some pot. Let her get her kicks.”

“I’ll see to it that she gets her kicks,” he said.

“Old Rufus left her out there digging the Empire State building, man,” said the young saxophonist, and laughed.

“Give me some of that,” Rufus said, and somebody handed him a stick and he took a few drags.

“Keep it, man. It’s choice.”

He made a couple of drinks and stood in the room for a moment, finishing the pot and digging the piano. He felt fine, clean, on top of everything, and he had a mild buzz on when he got back to the balcony.

“Is everybody gone home?” she asked, anxiously. “It’s so quiet in there.”

“No,” he said, “they just sitting around.” She seemed prettier suddenly, and softer, and the river lights fell behind her like a curtain. This curtain seemed to move as she moved, heavy and priceless and dazzling. “I didn’t know,” he said, “that you were a princess.”

He gave her her drink and their hands touched again. “I know you must he drunk,” she said, happily, and now, over her drink, her eyes unmistakably called him.

He waited. Everything seemed very simple now. He played with her fingers. “You seen anything you want since you been in New York?”

“Oh,” she said, “I want it all!”

“You see anything you want right now?”

Her fingers stiffened slightly but he held on. “Go ahead. Tell me. You ain’t got to be afraid.” These words then echoed in his head. He had said this before, years ago, to someone else. The wind grew cold for an instant, blowing around his body and ruffling her hair. Then it died down.

“Do
you
?” she asked faintly.

“Do I what?”

“See anything you want?”

He realized that he was high from the way his fingers seemed hung up in hers and from the way he was staring at her throat. He wanted to put his mouth there and nibble it slowly, leaving it black and blue. At the same time he realized how far they were above the city and the lights below seemed to be calling him. He walked to the balcony’s edge and looked over. Looking straight down, he seemed to be standing on a cliff in the wilderness, seeing a kingdom and a river which had not been seen before. He could make it his, every inch of the territory which stretched beneath and around him now, and, unconsciously, he began whistling a tune and his foot moved to find the pedal of his drum. He put his drink down carefully on the balcony floor and beat a riff with his fingers on the stone parapet.

“You never answered my question.”

“What?”

He turned to face Leona, who held her drink cupped in both her hands and whose brow was quizzically lifted over her despairing eyes and her sweet smile.

“You never answered mine.”

“Yes, I did.” She sounded more plaintive than ever. “I said I wanted it all.”

He took her drink from her and drank half of it, then gave the glass back, moving into the darkest part of the balcony.

“Well, then,” he whispered, “come and get it.”

She came toward him, holding her glass against her breasts. At the very last moment, standing directly before him, she whispered in bafflement and rage, “What are you trying to do to me?”

“Honey,” he answered, “I’m doing it,” and he pulled her to him as roughly as he could. He had expected her to resist and she did, holding the glass between them and frantically trying to pull her body away from his body’s touch. He knocked the glass out of her hand and it fell dully to the balcony floor, rolling away from them. Go ahead, he thought humorously; if I was to let you go now you’d be so hung up you’d go flying over this balcony, most likely. He whispered, “Go ahead, fight. I like it. Is this the way they do down home?”

“Oh God,” she murmured, and began to cry. At the same time, she ceased struggling. Her hands came up and touched his face as though she were blind. Then she put her arms around his neck and clung to him, still shaking. His lips and his teeth touched her ears and her neck and he told her. “Honey, you ain’t got nothing to cry about yet.”

Yes, he was high; every thing he did he watched himself doing, and he began to feel a tenderness for Leona which he had not expected to feel. He tried, with himself, to make amends for what he was doing— for what he was doing to her. Everything seemed to take a very long time. He got hung up on her breasts, standing out like mounds of yellow cream, and the tough, brown, tasty nipples, playing and nuzzling and nibbling while she moaned and whimpered and her knees sagged. He gently lowered them to the floor, pulling her on top of him. He held her tightly at the hip and the shoulder. Part of him was worried about the host and hostess and the other people in the room but another part of him could not stop the crazy thing which had begun. Her fingers opened his shirt to the navel, her tongue burned his neck and his chest; and his hands pushed up her skirt and caressed the inside of her thighs. Then, after a long, high time, while he shook beneath every accelerating tremor of her body, he forced her beneath him and he entered her. For a moment he thought she was going to scream, she was so tight and caught her breath so sharply, and stiffened so. But then she moaned, she moved beneath him. Then, from the center of his rising storm, very slowly and deliberately, he began the slow ride home.

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep. They murmured and sobbed on this journey, he softly, insistently cursed. Each labored to reach a harbor: there could be no rest until this motion became unbearably accelerated by the power that was rising in them both. Rufus opened his eyes for a moment and watched her face, which was transfigured with agony and gleamed in the darkness like alabaster. Tears hung in the corners of her eyes and the hair at her brow was wet. Her breath came with moaning and short cries, with words he couldn’t understand, and in spite of himself he began moving faster and thrusting deeper. He wanted her to remember him the longest day she lived. And, shortly, nothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs. She began to cry.
I told you,
he moaned,
I’d give you something to cry about,
and, at once, he felt himself strangling, about to explode or die. A moan and a curse tore through him while he beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies.

He lay on his back, breathing hard. He heard music coming from the room inside, and a whistle on the river. He was frightened and his throat was dry. The air was chilly where he was wet.

She touched him and he jumped. Then he forced himself to turn to her, looking into her eyes. Her eyes were wet still, deep and dark, her trembling lips curved slightly in a shy, triumphant smile. He pulled her to him, wishing he could rest. He hoped she would say nothing but, “It was so wonderful,” she said, and kissed him. And these words, though they caused him to feel no tenderness and did not take away his dull, mysterious dread, began to call desire back again.

He sat up. “You’re a funny little cracker,” he said. He watched her. “I don’t know what you going to say to your husband when you come home with a little black baby.”

“I ain’t going to be having no more babies,” she said, “you ain’t got to worry about that.” She said nothing more; but she had much more to say. “He beat that out of me, too,” she said finally.

He wanted to hear her story. And he wanted to know nothing more about her.

“Let’s go inside and wash up,” he said.

She put her head against his chest. “I’m afraid to go in there now.”

He laughed and stroked her hair. He began to feel affection for her again. “You ain’t fixing to stay here all night, are you?”

“What are your friends going to think?”

“Well, one thing, Leona, they ain’t going to call the law.” He kissed her. “They ain’t going to think nothing, honey.”

“You coming in with me?”

“Sure, I’m coming in with you.” He held her away from him. “All you got to do is sort of straighten your clothes”— he stroked her body, looking into her eyes— “and sort of run your hand through your hair, like this”— and he brushed her hair back from her forehead. She watched him. He heard himself ask, “Do you like me?”

She swallowed. He watched the vein in her neck throb. She seemed very fragile. “Yes,” she said. She looked down. “Rufus,” she said, “I really do like you. Please don’t hurt me.”

“Why should I want to hurt you, Leona?” He stroked her neck with one hand, looking at her gravely. “What makes you think I want to hurt you?”

“People
do,
” she said, finally, “hurt each other.”

“Is somebody been hurting you, Leona?”

She was silent, her face leaning into his palm. “My husband,” she said, faintly. “I thought he loved me, but he didn’t— oh, I knew he was rough but I didn’t think he was
mean
. And he couldn’t of loved me because he took away my kid, he’s off someplace where I can’t never see him.” She looked up at Rufus with her eyes full of tears. “He said I wasn’t a fit mother because— I— drank too much. I
did
drink too much, it was the only way I could stand living with him. But I would of died for my kid, I wouldn’t never of let anything happen to him.”

He was silent. Her tears fell on his dark fist. “He’s still down there,” she said, “my husband, I mean. Him and my mother and my brother is as thick as thieves. They think I ain’t never been no good. Well, hell, if people keep telling you you ain’t no good”— she tried to laugh— “you bound to turn out pretty bad.”

He pushed out of his mind all of the questions he wanted to ask her. It was beginning to be chilly on the balcony; he was hungry and he wanted a drink and he wanted to get home to bed. “Well,” he said, at last, “I ain’t going to hurt you,” and he rose, walking to the edge of the balcony. His shorts were like a rope between his legs, he pulled them up, and felt that he was glued inside them. He zipped up his fly, holding his legs wide apart. The sky had faded down to purple. The stars were gone and the lights on the Jersey shore were out. A coal barge traveled slowly down the river.

“How do I look?” she asked him.

“Fine,” he said, and she did. She looked like a tired child. “You want to come down to my place?”

“If you want me to,” she said.

“Well, yes, that’s what I want.” But he wondered why he was holding on to her.

Vivaldo came by late the next afternoon to find Rufus still in bed and Leona in the kitchen making breakfast.