The Man Who Cried I Am (10 page)

Max remembered the orgasm Boatwright had just had. All of that for just an orgasm? It would be easier to jerk off. But perhaps the orgasm came after the fact of the act. Does he have it every time he relates the story?

“Family?” Max said.

“A mother, father, two sisters and a brother.”

“Close?”

“If your father swept the floor at Kodak and you had already done a preliminary dissertation basing a social philosophy on Einstein's theory, what do you think you would have to say to each other?”

“Mother?”

“If you ever want to get rid of all your family, Mr. Reddick, just eat someone.”

“I have no family.” Max rose and gave Boatwright the rest of his cigarettes. “I'll be coming back,” he said, “if it's all right with you.”

“Why?”

“It's my job.”

“It's not your job,” Crockett was saying so loudly that everyone in the converted storefront office immediately became busy, too busy. Mary, the secretary Max had been going with, sat stiff in her red dress glaring at Crockett's back. “You spend too much time with that little cannibal. You gave us the series. You did the man, his family, his education, his crime and why—according to you. What in the hell else do you expect to get from him?”

Max sat down. It was true. He had gone to Rochester, to Boston. He had prowled around the Village and he had visited Boatwright every other day, and had not missed one hour of his four-day trial. Three and a half months had passed and winter was stalking toward New York City. Max's disgust and horror of Boatwright had slowly changed. He did not want to call it pity. Compassion, perhaps. There was nothing else left to get from Boatwright; one week from today he'd be dead. He'd given him books, cigarettes, human company. He was a reporter. He wasn't supposed to feel sorry for anyone, just do his job. “There's just the execution now,” Max said to Crockett. “That's all there is.”

Crockett glared at him. All right. So Reddick's series had stirred the authorities enough to make them administer a second series of sanity tests to Boatwright—after the tearsheets had been sent to them. Circulation had jumped a few hundred. So? “Are you going?”

“He asked me to come.”

Crockett shuffled papers impatiently. “And you're going just because he asked you to?”

Max looked at his cigarette. “Yes.”

“Okay, Reddick. That'll wind it up.” Crockett watched him rise and walk to Mary's desk. Damn fool, he thought. I don't see no nail holes in his hands or feet.

“Ready?” Max asked Mary. She was a small, brown woman with slight hips but shapely legs. Not much breast.

“In a minute,” she said. “I've got to make up. Be right back.” She took her purse and walked quickly to the rear of the office. Max felt drained, like a man unable and unwilling to shed an unfaithful wife and who hopes death will resolve the problem, death in sleep, an auto accident, a heart attack. He would feel better next week, after the execution. He wondered what phrases, what look of the eyes, bound him to Boatwright and Boatwright to him.

Mary returned, stuck out her tongue at Crockett's back, put on her coat and they left the office, drifted down Eighth Avenue where they were meeting Harry and Charlotte. Max hadn't spent too much time with Harry in the past weeks. On the way down he debated whether or not they should join them. For one thing, he didn't want to put the damper on what was to be a fun night. Mary wouldn't object. She never objected to anything. That was what was wrong with her. On the other hand, Max wanted desperately to begin living himself again; he wanted to be with people, be smothered by them, people who wanted to live, people who did not seek with uncanny diligence a way to die.

When they were all settled at dinner, Harry said, “I see where your boy gets the chair next week.”

“Is it next week?” Charlotte said, tossing her yellow hair with a snap of her sharp chin. “My, how quickly time flies.”

“You been invited?” Harry asked, wolfing down some ham hocks and red beans.

“Yes.”

“Going?”

“I don't know yet,” Max lied. He sensed Mary looking covertly at him.

“Well, there's your next novel,” Harry said, nudging Charlotte with his elbow. “The other side of the coin to my last book. Here you have a kid from, for Negroes today, a middle-class family. Good education. Bright. Stinking bright. But black, see. New pressures. New disappointments, frustrations. Hope, but after all, no hope. Right, Max?”

Max gave Harry a wry smile. He thought, Well, listen to old Harry. “You could be right.” Inwardly Max drew back, then gave himself to the floor show, the chorus line of fleshy, false-eyelashed brownskins stamping and bucking, shimmying and boogieing to the music, high-kicking. He watched the musicians sitting behind their scarred and battered bandshells in their dark glasses. Most of them had seen better days: some tune with Jimmy Lunceford or Duke or Basie; with Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy or with Erskine Hawkins. The attraction came on. A man with a phony whip and a sinuous “slave woman” chased each other across the small, dirty floor. They fell panting and slow-moving toward each other. Each time the man, with an excess of facial grimacing lashed forward with the whip, the woman snapped up, rolled her buttocks and moved forward, pelvis in perpetual motion. Finally, to the bray of brass, they collapsed in the center of the floor.

Max looked at Charlotte, then at the couple climbing to their feet for the applause. Charlotte clapped loudly. Harry bent forward toward Charlotte and she stopped. Harry didn't want to be stared at, even in Harlem. The show went on, but Max placed it beyond his thoughts. He would not go to Boatwright's execution. How could Harry have known that he was thinking of writing about Boatwright? Max remembered: they had talked about the relationship between observation and creation. How could he have fooled himself so? He had known enough about the horrors man perpetrated upon his fellows not to be
that
upset about Boatwright. He had been blinded and trapped by his own need to show compassion—which now that Harry had brought it up had been only so deep. He knew enough about Boatwright so that any book about him could almost write itself. Rotten, this business of
seeming
to give of one's self. It was a kind of evil and perhaps Boatwright knew all the time; he was no fool. He could feel pity, play it as a fisherman with a good rod and reel and good wrists, and exact from it precisely what he wanted. One could not only get hung by his own petard, but have it well-knotted in the bargain. Getting under the pretext of giving is as bad as—

Then he had a recognition, that sweet-sharp awareness of having done something before in just the same manner, or having been once again to a place he had visited when …? He turned slowly toward Mary and his thoughts went through her to a day when he had first come to New York and he was driving over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn. In the middle of the bridge a brand-new Hudson Terraplane was stalled. A young man leaned against the opened hood with a book (instructions?) in his hand looking at the motor. Traffic pulled out and went around. Max got lost in Brooklyn, found his way back to Flatbush Avenue, went up to Grand Army Plaza, took the wrong turn to Ocean Avenue. From there he eased his way through heavy traffic back to Eastern Parkway. Driving slowly down the broad Avenue past the library, he saw once more, this time with unbelieving horror, the same young man, the same Hudson Terraplane with the opened hood, the same book. In a fraction of a second, after pulling out to go around, the tableau, immobilized for just another fraction of a second in his rear-view mirror, vanished.

Now Max was looking at Mary. Mary and Moses. Mary, single, middle thirties, always a secretary, always alone, friendless. Which was why, Max knew now, she really enjoyed Charlotte's company, despite the fact that she
talked
about Charlotte. And she liked Harry's company and Max's. Some recognizable part of the world she knew intimately. Mary and Moses. Mary was not pretty nor was she ugly. That uneasy in-between where, with three drinks, one believed her capable of every conceivable act in bed, which she was, Max thought, ordering another round of drinks. Over the rim of his glass, he looked at Mary and she smiled at him, a bit of a pout: Why, darling, did you order another? There's plenty at home. Oh this will be a night, won't it, darling? She stroked him inside one of his thighs and turning directly toward him so she would not be seen by Charlotte or Harry, she flicked the tip of her tongue through slightly parted lips, then smiled once more, and Max let a grin form on his face as he thought, The last time for you too, Mary, with your loneliness, your still, quiet apartment, your Bach and Schoenberg. The last time, Mary with your Shirley Temple theatrics, your Rita Hayworth touches, those yelping little self-created orgasms. Moses, Mary, the Recognition.

“Hey,” Harry was saying, “Lunch tomorrow?”

“Lunch,” Max said, “sure.” Soon after, as the second show was coming on, they left. Harry and Charlotte hailed a cab going one way and Max and Mary another. Max hated the feel of Mary on his arm at times like this. Her body shook, her voice trembled and everything was “Darling.” Max hated her because she couldn't wait, and he hated her more because he had pitied her once. He thought of Boatwright when they got in the cab. Ah, man, you saw me coming; it was written all over me, wasn't it? Really, he told himself, I've got to stop this crap.

“Darling?” Mary.

“What?”

She came close. “What are you thinking?”

Goddamn it, they ate you up with their stinking quiet, beaten ways. “Nothing,” he said.

Harry's house seemed strangely empty the next day. All the furniture was there, in place. Perhaps it was Harry's demeanor that suggested a change. At first he was hearty and as usual, Harry. He had made the spaghetti and meatballs and bragged about them. But lunchtime was growing to a close; Crockett didn't like for city desk people to be out long if they were not on an assignment. Finally: “Wanda's gone. Been gone four days now.”

Max nodded.

“You know why, don't you?”

“Charlotte.”

“Yeah, Charlotte. We're getting married.”

Max looked up, then speared another meatball and chewed it cautiously.

“Say something,” Harry said.

“What do you want me to say?”

“You don't like Charlotte, do you?”

“Jesus, Harry, I don't know her that well. But, are you really getting married?”

“Yeah.” Harry looked out the window at the ugly rooftops. “Imagine, me from Mississippi, black, burly, marrying her. For months I've had to examine it alone. Charlotte because she's white? Jesus, Max, in the past five years I've had more fay pussy than black. Once I stumbled on a cute little Negro chick in Chicago and I cried when I held her. I remember (I
was
a little high) watching my tears run down her brown back, a brown back with soft, almost invisible little black hairs.”

Max felt the softest of weights descending upon his shoulders; the last part of his meatball went down hard. A phrase from a current song drifted through his mind:
Why are you telling me your secrets …?

“I want to feel happy, you know,
wild
, but I feel like Sisyphus rolling that goddamn stone.” Harry smiled. “I guess I'm worryin' you with my troubles. Okay, you can worry me sometime. Max, do you know the day will come when a black man will not marry a woman he loves
simply
because she's white? Well, not simply, it's not that simple. He'll be afraid to. There'll be too much there, history, all kinds of people, work, play, revenge.” Harry threw up his hands. “I'd like you to be the best man.”

In that moment when Harry looked at him, Max knew that Harry too was alone and that jolted him. He pictured Harry, when he was not with him, in the center of a crowd at a party talking, gesturing, with every eye following; he pictured Harry practicing lines for Wanda so he could get out to see someone else. He did not picture Harry Ames alone until now.

The weight. It was down now, heavily. The phrase from the song came again:
Why are you telling me your secrets
…?

“Okay,” Max said. “Be glad to.”

Harry went off to Alabama for his divorce. That was the week Max received the note from Moses Boatwright with a covering letter from the warden at Sing Sing. The note, written the afternoon before the execution said:

Dear Max,

Thanks for coming. There won't be another Negro there. I guess we took advantage of each other, but, they say, all's fair in love and war. To answer your question of some months ago, I took the heart and the genitals, for isn't that what life's all about, clawing the heart and balls out of the other guy? Thanks.

Moses L. Boatwright

Okay, Moses, what was it like to walk out of the corridor and into a room filled with composed white faces? No anger, no revulsion, no hate, Moses, because they
had
you! I see you, Moses, coming out, scanning those rows of faces, scanning again and again because you told yourself there were shadows and maybe you were missing me. Then, Moses, the chair, and you peering out still, growing afraid, the fear gnawing at you like a hundred sewer rats, and the mask, the straps for the legs and wrists, the doohickey for the shaved part of your head. And you knowing now that I wasn't there. Goddamn it, Moses, did you
really
need me then?

The note was burning in his pocket when he met Harry and Charlotte at City Hall where they got their license and were married by a clerk. Max was conscious of people peeking through half-opened doors, of people crowding up to the windows, of a pulsating undercurrent of hatred. Then they walked to the street, released from it, but bearing its stamp as indelibly as the signatures on the license. Behind her veil, Charlotte looked blanched. Harry was somber and then there was a gentleness between them, a sharing of the pain, so keen that Max, then, believed they would last forever, the both of them, together. Harry patted Charlotte's hand which responded by curling around his. Harry looked at Max and shrugged. “Well, the tweeby blee and a ree whee kee …”