Lonely Crusade (12 page)

“Why, Lee, that isn’t so. You know, yourself—”

“Oh, let’s don’t argue,” he cut in. “Do you want to go or don’t you?”

“You make everything so hard,” she answered, but when he turned and started off, she reluctantly said: “Oh, all right, I’ll go.”

But the spontaneity was gone. Standing there a moment before replying, his head seemed to swell almost to bursting with a resentment underscored with bitter fury. Why couldn’t she just say yes for once without always pointing out his inconsistencies? Why did his slightest request have to bring on this bickering? Did she think he was an idiot, incapable of judgment? But to her he merely said: “Never mind, I’ll go alone,” and went out of the house and left her.

On the long drive out to Hollywood the fury left but the resentment kept riding him. With a stumbling preoccupation he followed Luther up the stairway over a garage into an incredibly disarranged room of lush, low divans, loud-colored sofas, and oil paintings. In opposite corners sat a black-faced doll with huge red lips and a white-faced doll with golden hair, facing across a white brick fireplace that smoked lazily. Four shaded lamps turned on against the early dusk shed a diffused green light over the Bohemian scene, stirring within Lee’s mind the first faint traces of aversion.

“Caliban?” A voice throaty with sex greeted them from the kitchen along with the smell of cooking food.

“Me, baby,” Luther called.

A middle-aged, horse-faced woman with burning eyes and a thin, wide mouth came into the room.

“Mollie, Lee,” Luther introduced. “This my old lady, man. Ain’t she fine?”

In the queer green light her hair was bright orange and her skin an embalmed white. Her short, chubby feet, white on top and blackish on the bottom with purple painted nails, were bare. And her soft, sagging body, which seemingly had reached satiety in years long past, was clad only in dirty green satin pajamas. There was an abandon in both her manner and appearance that was slightly obscene. She looked at Lee and began laughing.

“So this is Lee?”

“Oh—you’ve heard of me?” Lee stammered self-consciously.

“Should I have?” she asked, laughing with her lips while her bright blue eyes appraised him with a predacious stare.

“Oh, well no, that is—Well, you said: ‘So this is Lee,’ and I thought—”

Now her laughter came in gales. “It’s the Continental manner.”

Luther sat on a divan, took off his shoes and sox, and flexed his big, splayed feet which were black on top and whitish on the bottom. “What you got to eat, old lady?” he asked.

“I call him Caliban,” she said to Lee. “Don’t you think he’s marvelous?”

“Well, er, I don’t know what—”

“Oh, don’t bother,” she cut him off.

“As Marx would say,” Luther said, “a misdirected intent.”

Laughingly Mollie returned to the kitchen, her buttocks jiggling loosely in the pajamas.

Kicking a sofa to one side, Luther crossed the room and stacked Sibelius’s First Symphony on the record player. Against the symphonic music, he was grotesque, with his long, black, muscle-roped arms swinging from the white, T-shirted, convex slope of his shoulders like an ape’s. The impulse to laugh welled up in Lee but Luther’s appearance of absorption in the music quelled it.

“You like that?” Lee asked.

“I likes it,” Luther replied solemnly. “No culture too high for the proletariat.”

Lee could not decide whether he was being kidded or not. Luther continued to appear absorbed. Then Mollie returned to the room with a tray of vodka highballs and turned off the record player.

“Enough culture for one day, my Caliban,” she said, then lifted her glass. “To F. D. R.”

“To Joe Stalin,” Luther said.

“To the three component parts of Marxism,” Lee said slyly. He caught the quick glances exchanged between Mollie and Luther and grinned to himself.

But Mollie only said: “This calls for another,” and when she had refilled the glasses, moved Lee’s coat and pulled Lee down on the divan beside her.

“Well, what do you think about it?” she asked brightly, looking him slowly over with a disrobing, half-laughing interest.

“Er, about what?”

“Oh, anything. The war, politics, Marx, or Freud.”

“Oh, well—I’m not distinguished for my thinking.”

“Nor is my Caliban. But he doesn’t let that stop him from expounding on Marx and other of his gods.”

“I’m not a parlor pink,” Luther said, giving her a flat, muddy look. “Sucking around the party ‘cause I’m scared there might be a revolution and I’ll lose my little income.”

“You’re converted,” she jibed.

“Not converted—convinced! After the war people like you’ll be running back to your fascist friends.”

“I was a Marxist abroad long before it became popular over here.”

“You don’t act like it.”

Sitting erect, she took the pins from her hair, plied her fingers through it, and let it cascade down about her neck and shoulders. Then she cooed: “Come to me, my intellectual Caliban, my strong, black apostle with the pygmy brain; come to me and make love to me, my dark, designing commissar.”

“Body Marxist!” Luther said, turning his back to her.

“Then be an American Negro,” she said laughingly, “and refill our glasses while I talk to Lee.”

“And make love to ‘im too,” he muttered.

“At least give us time,” she murmured. “Lee might prefer women of his own race.”

“Well—yes,” he said.

“Such insolence! Such bourgeois puritanism! Let’s eat and forget it.”

Holding to an arm of each, she steered them into the kitchen. When they had seated themselves, Luther said to Mollie: “Say the blessing.”

“She knows I’m not a Communist,” Lee said.

Mollie laughed. They washed down the meat balls and spaghetti with a concoction of Rhine wine and vodka, which enhanced the taste of garlic in the sauce. Luther took off his T-shirt and suggested to Lee: “Take off your coat and tie, man. Your shirt, too. It’s hot in here.”

“What are we to have, a wrestling match between my two dark gladiators?” Mollie asked delightedly.

“I just b’lieves in being comfortable,” Luther said.

“Oh, I’m quite comfortable,” Lee declared.

“You are so beautiful, my Caliban, so unsullied and undomesticated. You remind me of a baboon I saw in the Paris zoo.” She was laughing outside and all down inside where the effect of the drinks was concentrating the heat of passion in her.

“That’s why you likes me.”

“I like you because you are black.”

“I know you likes me ‘cause I’m black.”

“Why else do I like you?”

“Now, Mama, we got company.”

She turned to Lee. “Isn’t he marvelous?” Then she began feeling the muscles in Lee’s arms as if she had just discovered them. “You are marvelous, too. A man of thin, dark tempered steel.”

“All dark mens is tempered steel to you,” Luther said sarcastically.

“You, my darling Caliban, are more than just steel. You are bone and steel. You are fire and bone and steel. What do you call those things that make all the noise in the street?”

“A garbage truck,” Lee suggested helpfully.

“Aw, man, she mean an air hammer,” Luther said sheepishly.

“You know what I mean, you air hammer, you.”

“We’re shocking Lee, Mama. He don’t go for all this stuff.”

“Oh, I’m doing fine,” Lee averred drunkenly.

“Do you see that nigger?” Mollie finally asked. “That nigger does something to me.”

“You drunk, Mama,” Luther said levelly. “If you warn’t I’d slap you ‘way from this table.”

“I’m a white woman, and you’re a nigger from Mississippi. You wouldn’t dare touch me. You lived in Mississippi too long.”

“Now quit showing off, Mama,” he warned. “You know I lived in Frisco too. That’s the sheet you gots to bleach.”

“What did you do in Frisco, as you call it, that was so important?”

“I had a fine time and you know it.”

She turned to Lee, laughing. “Let me tell you about my Caliban in San Francisco—”

Lee remembered only the part about Luther sunning on the beach, exercising his right as an American citizen and a member of the Communist Party, when a blond, skinny, predatory, oversexed white woman stopped to admire him, picked him up, took him home, fed him, and slept with him.

After that day, Luther quit his job on WPA and moved into her mansion, Mollie related, and under her supervision he began writing illiterate stories about his boyhood in Mississippi. She joined the Communist Party to be near him always, and informed the party officials about Luther’s beautiful soul. How exquisitely sensitive he was underneath his Negroid exterior, how noble and courageous, yet retaining the purity of the primitive, the unspoiled, uncluttered originality of the aboriginal—“Now, Mama, you laying it on too thick,” Luther interrupted her.

“And didn’t I take you away from her?” she asked.

“Must have. You got me.”

She took him by the hand and led him from the table. Without excuse or apology, they crossed the green-lighted living-room into the bedroom beyond and closed the door. Presently the sound of laughter came from within. Lee served himself another drink, speculating as to the cause for laughter now.

From unionism to Communism to sensualism, he thought with drunken cleverness. But was that not man’s spiral to man’s own humanism? For were not these two the appointed apostles of Marx and macrogenitals? And who was he, Lee Gordon, to make fun? What did he, Lee Gordon, believe in? Nothing! Lee Gordon did not even believe in salaciousness, which would have at least procured him a white woman in the last stages of debauchery and a green-lighted living-room on the Roman order, he told himself.

He awoke to find himself stretched upon the bedroom couch, dressed except for coat and shoes. From the other room came the sound of many voices. Jumping to his feet, he fought down the impulse to escape through the window and began a frantic search for his coat and shoes, throwing aside the bedding and disarranging the room. He could riot tell how long he had slept or what had happened during the interim, which was the thing that worried him. Finally finding the missing garments before his eyes, he fled to the bathroom where he sloshed cold water over his face until his sense of panic left.

A swift, engulfing fear of self-abasement sobered him. He scoured his memory until he had provided himself with a fragile absolution. But it was with considerable aversion that he put on his coat and went hesitatingly into the living-room.

In the weird green light, frantic people in defiant garb created the illusion of a costume ball. But the workers had come as workers —proudly, the Negroes as Negroes—apologetically, the Jews as Jews—defiantly. Only the two Mexican girls had come in costume—they had come as Castilian Spanish.

The self-styled Marxists of Los Angeles were having their hour. Each drink served across the table blocking the kitchen doorway meant another dollar for Russian aid. Russia was being aided while the guests were becoming hilarious, argumentative, indignant, or belligerent, as was their bent.

Nothing said in the babbling flow of words was intelligible. And had it been so, had each shouted word presented the answer to man’s eternal seeking, the import would have been lost on Lee Gordon. For Lee was troubled in mind and heavy in heart, hot but he could not sweat. His thoughts were on his wife now, and he was but little short of hating her. If she had come, her presence would have maintained some semblance of decorum, for not even a white woman as depraved as Mollie would want a Negro woman to witness her abandon with Negro men, he told himself. He would not have become drunk. And even if he had, he could have at least retained his self-respect so he would not now feel as depraved as those other two.

Seeing him, Mollie came over quickly and asked with an air of concern: “How do you feel now?”

“Oh, all right,” he muttered, avoiding her gaze.

Now debonair in a dramatic red dress, she seemed to have forgotten the episode. She laughed and felt the muscles of his arms.

“And you will do your bit for Russia too,” she said sardonically.

“Well—yes—”

“I’m sure you will.” She patted him on the cheek, laughing, and moved on.

And later Luther came over, his snow-white, turtle-neck sweater accenting the blackness of his skin. “Hey, man, how you doing?”

“Oh, all right. Have a drink.”

“You have one on me, man.”

They had their drink. Someone called Luther away. The girl on the other side of the table said precisely: “That will be two dollars.”

“Well I—Well yes—”

He wondered if they knew that he was not a Communist. Maybe a Communist had some way of identifying another Communist—as a Jew can identify another Jew, or a Negro, another Negro. Maybe a Communist could smell another Communist—the proletarian pungency or the Stalinist scent. The thought stirred a laugh in him.

A white girl passing turned a brightly painted smile. “Is it personal or can we all share in it?”

“Oh, it’s for the masses,” he assured her. “I was just thinking about the Stalinist scent.”

“What?”

“If a Communist could smell another Communist.”

The smile went off. She looked at him a moment longer with hostile curiosity, then went to the table, jerking her head toward him. “Where did they find that?”

The girl selling the drinks shook her head.

After that no one said anything to him or included him in what they were saying. And he had thought Communists were supposed to pounce on a single male Negro. But times had changed, he told himself. Now, there’s a war, didn’t you know? Or rather the Communist twist, there’s a war against fascism.

A defensiveness grew within him. They could not reject him any more than he could reject them. He bought another drink, staring into its amber depths as into a crystal ball, listening to the tinkle of the ice. And his thoughts went back to where for eight long years they had always ended and begun—Ruth!

During the time she had worked at Western Talkie, he had spent a week in San Francisco looking for a job. While he was there he had received a letter from her. He did not know how many times he had read that letter since, because it was the only letter he had ever received from her, and now the words of it came easily to his memory, “A little while ago a book entitled, You Might Like Socialism, fell into my hands and I read it to the delight of all my Leftist socialist-minded friends, who had persistently not given me up in spite of the fact that they labeled me as an ignoramus who dares live in America as a member of the most oppressed group without joining forces with them in their fight for freedom. My own efforts they say are silly, ineffectual, and even a bit ridiculous. They tell me that unless I awaken very soon I will be living in a world bowed down in slavery forevermore by international fascism.