Another Country (7 page)

Vivaldo looked at him, looked hard at him, up and down. And Vivaldo’s face told him how he looked. He moved away from the door, away from Vivaldo’s scrutiny.

“Ida’s been here; she’s half crazy. Do you realize you dropped out of sight almost a month ago?”

“Yes,” he said, and sat down heavily in Vivaldo’s easy chair— which sagged beneath him almost to the floor. He looked around the room, which had once been so familiar, which now seemed so strange.

He leaned back, his hands over his eyes.

“Take off your jacket,” Vivaldo said. “I’ll see if I can scare up something for you to eat— are you hungry?”

“No, not now. Tell me, how is Ida?”

“Well, she’s
worried,
you know, but there’s nothing wrong with her. Rufus, you want me to fix you a drink?”

“When was she here?”

“Yesterday. And she called me tonight. And she’s been to the police. Everybody’s been worried, Cass, Richard, everybody—”

He sat up. “The police are looking for me?”

“Well, hell, yes, baby, people aren’t supposed to just disappear.” He walked into his small, cluttered kitchen and opened his refrigerator, which contained a quart of milk and half a grapefruit. He stared at them helplessly. “I’ll have to take you out, I haven’t got anything to eat in this joint.” He closed the refrigerator door. “You can have a drink, though, I’ve got some bourbon.”

Vivaldo made two drinks, gave one to Rufus and sat down on the other, straight-backed, chair.

“Well, let’s have it. What’ve you been doing, where’ve you been?”

“I’ve just been wandering the streets.”

“My God, Rufus, in this weather? Where’ve you been sleeping?”

“Oh. Subways, hallways. Movies sometimes.”

“And how’d you eat?”

He took a swallow of his drink. Perhaps it was a mistake to have come. “Oh,” he said, astonished to hear the truth come out, “sometimes I sort of peddled my ass.”

Vivaldo looked at him. “I guess you had pretty rough competition.” He lit a cigarette and threw the pack and the matches to Rufus. “You should have got in touch with somebody, you should have let somebody know what was happening.”

“I— couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

“We’re supposed to be friends, you and me.”

He stood up, holding an unlit cigarette, and walked around the small room, touching things. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He lit the cigarette. “I know what I did to Leona. I’m not dumb.”

“So do I know what you did to Leona. Neither am I dumb.”

“I guess I just didn’t think—”

“What?”

“That anyone would care.”

In the silence that hung in the room then, Vivaldo rose and went to his phonograph. “You didn’t think Ida would care? You didn’t think I would care?”

He felt as though he were smothering. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought.”

Vivaldo said nothing. His face was pale and angry and he concentrated on looking through his records. Finally he put one on the machine; it was James Pete Johnson and Bessie Smith batting out
Backwater Blues
.

“Well,” said Vivaldo, helplessly, and sat down again.

Besides Vivaldo’s phonograph, there wasn’t much else in his apartment. There was a homemade lamp, brick-supported bookshelves, records, a sagging bed, the sprung easy chair, and the straight-backed chair. There was a high stool before Vivaldo’s worktable on which Vivaldo teetered now, his coarse, curly black hair hanging forward, his eyes somber, and his mouth turned down. The table held his pencils, papers, his typewriter, and the telephone. In a small alcove was the kitchen in which the overhead light was burning. The sink was full of dirty dishes, topped by a jaggedly empty and open tin can. A paper sack of garbage leaned against one of the kitchen table’s uncertain legs.

There’s thousands of people,
Bessie now sang,
ain’t got no place to go,
and for the first time Rufus began to hear, in the severely understated monotony of this blues, something which spoke to his troubled mind. The piano bore the singer witness, stoic and ironic. Now that Rufus himself had no place to go—
’cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no mo’,
sang Bessie— he heard the line and the tone of the singer, and he wondered how others had moved beyond the emptiness and horror which faced him now.

Vivaldo was watching him. Now he cleared his throat and said, “Maybe it would be a good idea for you to make a change of scene, Rufus. Everything around here will just keep reminding you— sometimes it’s better just to wipe the slate clean and take off. Maybe you should go to the Coast.”

“There’s nothing happening on the Coast.”

“A lot of musicians have gone out there.”

“They’re on their ass out there, too. It’s no different from New York.”

“No, they’re working. You might feel differently out there, with all the sunshine and oranges and all.” He smiled. “Make a new man of you, baby.”

“I guess you think,” said Rufus, malevolently, “that it’s time I started trying to be a new man.”

There was a silence. Then Vivaldo said, “It’s not so much what
I
think. It’s what
you
think.”

Rufus watched the tall, lean, clumsy white boy who was his best friend, and felt himself nearly strangling with the desire to hurt him.

“Rufus,” said Vivaldo, suddenly, “believe me, I know, I know— a lot of things hurt you that I can’t really understand.” He played with the keys of his typewriter. “A lot of things hurt me that
I
can’t really understand.”

Rufus sat on the edge of the sprung easy chair, watching Vivaldo gravely.

“Do you blame me for what happened to Leona?”

“Rufus, what good would it do if I
did
blame you? You blame yourself enough already, that’s what’s wrong with you, what’s the good of
my
blaming you?”

He could see, though, that Vivaldo had also hoped to be able to avoid this question.

“Do you blame me or don’t you? Tell the truth.”

“Rufus, if I wasn’t your friend, I think I’d blame you, sure. You acted like a bastard. But I understand that, I think I do, I’m trying to. But, anyway, since you
are
my friend, and, after all, let’s face it, you mean much more to me than Leona ever did, well, I don’t think I should put you down just because you acted like a bastard. We’re
all
bastards. That’s why we need our friends.”

“I wish I could tell you what it was like,” Rufus said, after a long silence. “I wish I could undo it.”

“Well, you can’t. So please start trying to forget it.”

Rufus thought, But it’s not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can’t forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It’s not possible to forget anybody you’ve destroyed.

He took a great swallow of his bourbon, holding it in his mouth, then allowing it to trickle down his throat. He would never be able to forget Leona’s pale, startled eyes, her sweet smile, her plaintive drawl, her thin, insatiable body.

He choked slightly, put down his drink, and ground out his cigarette in the spilling ashtray.

“I bet you won’t believe this,” he said, “but I loved Leona. I did.”

“Oh,” said Vivaldo, “believe you! Of course I believe you. That’s what all the bleeding was about.”

He got up and turned the record over. Then there was silence, except for the voice of Bessie Smith.

When my bed get empty, make me feel awful mean and blue,

“Oh, sing it, Bessie,” Vivaldo muttered.

My springs is getting rusty, sleeping single like I do.

Rufus picked up his drink and finished it.

“Did you ever have the feeling,” he asked, “that a woman was eating you up? I mean— no matter what she was like or what else she was doing— that that’s what she was
really
doing?”

“Yes,” said Vivaldo.

Rufus stood. He walked up and down.

“She can’t help it. And you can’t help it. And there you are.” He paused. “Of course, with Leona and me— there was lots of other things, too—”

Then there was a long silence. They listened to Bessie.

“Have you ever wished you were queer?” Rufus asked, suddenly.

Vivaldo smiled, looking into his glass. “I used to think maybe I was. Hell, I think I even
wished
I was.” He laughed. “But I’m not. So I’m stuck.”

Rufus walked to Vivaldo’s window. “So you been all up and down that street, too,” he said.

“We’ve all been up the same streets. There aren’t a hell of a lot of streets. Only, we’ve been taught to lie so much, about so many things, that we hardly ever know
where
we are.”

Rufus said nothing. He walked up and down.

Vivaldo said, “Maybe you should stay here, Rufus, for a couple of days, until you decide what you want to do.”

“I don’t want to bug you, Vivaldo.”

Vivaldo picked up Rufus’ empty glass and paused in the archway which led into his kitchen. “You can lie here in the mornings and look at my ceiling. It’s full of cracks, it makes all kinds of pictures. Maybe it’ll tell you things it hasn’t told me. I’ll fix us another drink.”

Again he felt that he was smothering. “Thanks, Vivaldo.”

Vivaldo dragged his ice out and poured two drinks. He came back into the room. “Here. To all the things we don’t know.”

They drank.

“You had me worried,” said Vivaldo. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“I’m glad to see you,” said Rufus.

“Your sister left me a phone number to call in case I saw you. It’s the lady who lives next door to you. I guess maybe I should call her now.”

“No,” said Rufus, after a moment, “it’s too late. I’ll go on up there in the morning.” And this thought, the thought of seeing his parents and his sister in the morning, checked and chilled him. He sat down again in the easy chair and leaned back with his hands over his eyes.

“Rufus,” Leona had said— time and again— “ain’t nothing wrong in being colored.”

Sometimes, when she said this, he simply looked at her coldly, from a great distance, as though he wondered what on earth she was trying to say. His look seemed to accuse her of ignorance and indifference. And, as she watched his face, her eyes became more despairing than ever but at the same time filled with some immense sexual secret which tormented her.

He had put off going back to work until he began to be afraid to go to work.

Sometimes, when she said that there was nothing wrong in being colored, he answered,

“Not if you a hard-up white lady.”

The first time he said this, she winced and said nothing. The second time she slapped him. And he slapped her. They fought all the time. They fought each other with their hands and their voices and then with their bodies: and the one storm was like the other. Many times— and now Rufus sat very still, pressing darkness against his eyes, listening to the music— he had, suddenly, without knowing that he was going to, thrown the whimpering, terrified Leona onto the bed, the floor, pinned her against a table or a wall; she beat at him, weakly, moaning, unutterably abject; he twisted his fingers in her long pale hair and used her in whatever way he felt would humiliate her most. It was not love he felt during these acts of love: drained and shaking, utterly unsatisfied, he fled from the raped white woman into the bars. In these bars no one applauded his triumph or condemned his guilt. He began to pick fights with white men. He was thrown out of bars. The eyes of his friends told him that he was falling. His own heart told him so. But the air through which he rushed was his prison and he could not even summon the breath to call for help.

Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can’t fall any farther. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.

“I don’t want to die,” he heard himself say, and he began to cry.

The music went on, far from him, terribly loud. The lights were very bright and hot. He was sweating and he itched, he stank. Vivaldo was close to him, stroking his head; the stuff of Vivaldo’s sweater stifled him. He wanted to stop crying, stand up, breathe, but he could only sit there with his face in his hands. Vivaldo murmured, “Go ahead, baby, let it out, let it all out.” He wanted to stand up, breathe, and at the same time he wanted to lie flat on the floor and to be swallowed into whatever would stop this pain.

Yet, he was aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, that nothing would stop it, nothing: this was himself. Rufus was aware of every inch of Rufus. He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within this body had driven him into such a desolate place. The most impenetrable of mysteries moved in this darkness for less than a second, hinting of reconciliation. And still the music continued, Bessie was saying that she wouldn’t mind being in jail but she had to stay there so long.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and raised his head.

Vivaldo gave him a handkerchief and he dried his eyes and blew his nose.

“Don’t be sorry,” said Vivaldo. “Be glad.” He stood over Rufus for yet another moment, then he said, “I’m going to take you out and buy you a pizza. You hungry, child, that’s why you carrying on like that.” He went into the kitchen and began to wash his face. Rufus smiled, watching him, bent over the sink, under the hideous light.

It was like the kitchen in St. James Slip. He and Leona had ended their life together there, on the very edge of the island. When Rufus had ceased working and when all his money was gone, and there was nothing left to pawn, they were wholly dependent on the money Leona brought home from the restaurant. Then she lost this job. Their domestic life, which involved a hideous amount of drinking, made it difficult for her to get there on time and also caused her to look more and more disreputable. One evening, half-drunk, Rufus had gone to the restaurant to pick her up. The next day she was fired. She never held a steady job again.