The Man Who Cried I Am (15 page)

“Colored.”

“Go, Max!”

“Lillian Patch. Teacher. You'll meet her when we have this venison dinner at your place.”

“Are you trying to tell me, Max, that this is the thing?”

Max watched four men coming up the trail, their rifles slung or held in that manner that tells you right away that they were through for the day, and he felt that he was blushing. “You're right!” Max said.

“Well, go, Max go,” Harry repeated. Then they both rose to greet the other men. Back at the lodge they would hang the deer by his hind feet and dress it.

“Ga-ood God!” Harry said, pulling Max away from where Lillian and Charlotte were chatting. “Where did you find
that?
” Now, speaking rapidly, Harry said, “I tell you, Max, if she wasn't yours—oh, Lordie Lord—fweepis fwap and ditty-dit-dat!”

Max knew that what Harry was saying was this: I don't give a damn if she's yours or not! Given the chance, baby, given the chance …

And Max was suddenly angry, angry at Harry, angry at Charlotte, whose eyes, he could see, were measuring Lillian and doing something else as well. It was the way women were, he guessed, but wasn't she somehow telling Lillian
some
thing? Telling her in that way women have—the eyes (the ever-so-studied, so possessive glance that told the other woman that you
knew
, yes, positively knew what those pants contained, how the arms fit and all), the voice that did things when it should have done nothing or, on the other hand, did nothing when it should have done something. Almost like a double exposure, Max seemed to see Charlotte again holding Harry's head in her lap at Wading River on the day he met Ames. He had seen something then. How much was there to see?

There came a peal of laughter from Lillian and suddenly, as though coming out of a fever, Max dismissed most of his recent thoughts. Lillian was not laughing with Charlotte so much as
at
her. Neither Harry nor Charlotte had seemed to mind Mary from the
Democrat
office, or those others. After all, a man had to get his nuts off. (And after all, in Harlem there was untold prestige in getting as much pussy as possible, in having cats whisper to one another as you passed: That cat is a
Cocksman's
Cocksman!”) But now, there was something different with Harry and Charlotte, a kind of hostility Max felt floating around the table. Then he knew what it was, at least on Charlotte's part. The girl he should have fallen in love with should have been white. His loving Lillian was a rejection of their marriage. He was a traitor. Where was his courage to face the world with a white wife and say to it: Screw you, Jack!

(“—don't you, Max, don't you?”)

(“I guess so. Logical.”) That bitch, Charlotte, Max was thinking while Harry went on talking after Max had thrown out an answer calculated to show that he was still with him. Harry was talking about Africa, a continent where freedom was going to break out with a bang. The British, French and Portuguese were going to pack up and go home. The United Nations might be a good thing, if it avoided the trap the League of Nations had fallen into. “Africa and Asia,” Harry said. “The other side of the globe, that's where things are going to be happening, and I want to be there when they do. Here, it's the same. Look what they did to Robeson in Peek-skill; that colored vet whose eyes they gouged out down home. Nothing's changed.”

“But we should hope for a change for the better,” Lillian said with such confidence that it startled Max.

Harry pushed back his chair. “Why?”

Lillian opened her mouth, pursed it, relaxed. This man would not be argued with. She felt something akin to distaste for Harry and Charlotte. She laughed. Max smiled. Harry chuckled but he was puzzled. Charlotte flashed a look at him, bent her head and played with the silver.

Max and Harry moved into the living room. Max could never help looking at the bookshelves and particularly the one where Harry's books stood. Max always counted them. Charlotte and Lillian were in the kitchen, cleaning up. Max had liked it that Lillian had not volunteered to help, but Charlotte had not been above asking for it. Then Lillian had jumped up brightly. “Oh yes, of course!”

“I was talking with a man from Nigeria,” Harry went on, still talking about Africa. “He figures that at the outside, they should be rid of England in ten years. Can you imagine that? A free Africa. Big, rich, three hundred million people, untold wealth. Can't you see what will have to happen to the white man's politics? Africa, Max, I tell you, that's the only frontier left on the globe. Keep it in mind. I know all those stories the white folks have told us for years. But, listen, if white folks took so much time to tell us how bad and silly and heathen it is, then it can't be so bad. What have they ever told us that was of any use?”

Africa. The continent had been like something you knew you had to buy or see or go to, but always forgot. The Black Is Best groups were always talking about it. Then there were the J. A. Rogers books and Max had read them many times, with tremendous doubt and with humor. The Africans had kings and princes and great armies and wealth and culture, Rogers said. Maybe so. The books in the Schomburg Collection up on 135th Street near Lenox also said as much. The Collection was some place. Every Negro feeling the toe of the world halfway up his ass could duck in there and read about how great Africa was and how great black people in general were, but few had done it. The white man's hate-self-serum had created a hard stale rind of disbelief.

But it tantalized, Africa. Which was real, Mungo Park's or René Maran's? Garvey's vision of it or Stanley's dollar-propelled race through it? There were bright spots. The Fuzzy-Wuzzys, the Mahdi kicking the stuff out of the British in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the Ethiopians cutting the balls off the Italians at Adowa, the Zulus cutting up the British.

But why think of it in terms of wars? Why? Because that's just the way the white folks spelled it out. Francis X. Bushman, Glenn Morris, Johnny Weissmuller, Lex Barker, all kicking the natural pure-dee apeshit out of the natives. Go, Tarzan, just don't let them Zulus (Negro actors who ate every time they made a Tarzan movie) catch you with your codpiece down. Or Jane. Maybe you'd better put Boy in a safe place too. You know how them niggers are. Not really like Gunga Din at all.

“Damn it, let's go there some time,” Harry said.

“Sure, why not?” They were always planning to do things together, but at the last moment, something happened. Might not be a bad idea, Africa.

But now he was walking through upper Manhattan with Lillian. They came out of the subway at 116th Street, so different from Washington Square Park, the Village. They couldn't even see downtown Manhattan; it was hidden by the trees in Central Park. Up on 145th Street, Max knew, you could stand on a corner and see all the way downtown or, at least, that rigid, square spire, the Empire State Building. One and the same. Uptown where they were, life still flooded the streets. Horse-drawn junk wagons, their drivers asleep, clip-clopped past them. The new sounds drifted out of Minton's, new sounds that no one could dance to anymore. They called the music rebop or bebop and it was played by musicians with crazy names like Monk, Bird, Diz, Fats, Sweets, Little Jazz. These were the streets that belonged to Sugar Ray, the Cutie, The Unscarred, and to a fat, balding Joe Louis and a bullet-headed Jersey Joe Walcott. The streets belonged also to Wynonie Blues Harris whose voice was blasting into the streets from a loudspeaker fastened to the front of a record shop. The double-deck buses, still vibrating the dust of Fifth Avenue, groaned up Seventh Avenue. Hipsters, their legs going loose, their shoulders held stiffly, passed from the shadows to the lights of chili joints, barbecue joints and bars. At the bars they would drink with their left hands, and the other customers would mark them for bad. Max and Lillian sauntered past storefront churches and spired churches, past cops glad that fall had come to cool the blood of the inhabitants. On the corners men stood loudly exchanging jokes and gossip. And the hustlers went by, little ones, big ones, ugly ones, attractive ones, with big tits and little tits, with big butts and no butts at all, and each of them seemed to say with their stride, I got the best that's going. The muscatel smell lingered on corners like a live thing. Ghetto. The people who lived south of Central Park even concealed their lights behind the curtain of trees to avoid exciting the natives. (Watch that codpiece, Tar-zan.) Off in an alley somewhere, Max bet, someone, frustrated and drunk with whiskey and rage at Mister Charlie (although he wouldn't be aware of it; he would lie to himself) was making a pincushion of a man in his own color-image, another Sambo. A man had to strike out. Not many men struck at the right places. Black men at any rate. They moved down the street, past Big Ola Mae's chili house. Max saw Sergeant Jenkins gulping his free bowl of chili. Jenkins liked to work nights; they concealed his sadism. “Nuthin' I like better'n beatin' a bad nigger's head,” he often said. They turned off the street at the Nearly All Inn for one for the road they still had to make.

He sat across the table from Lillian and let his eyes tell her that he loved her. Insane when you thought of many animals, their love and hate, the swift couplings and even swifter departures. This thing men have, he thought, this love and loving, how unnatural! What causes it, fear? Possession, like the animals, but bound by men's laws which have also been worse than animal laws. No. Not as good. The laws of man condemned you to repeat over and over the rituals of love and loving to the death. Love. Marriage. A thing for the poor (natives also) to keep them happy, while kings screwed themselves to death or
got
screwed to death, but while all this was going on, there always being more poor than rich people, the attitudes and habits, the arts and language overtook the rich in their clappy beds and shitty castles and made marriage, and love, the human condition. But is the Bible first concerned with man-woman love? No. Stop fighting. Did Rameses ever order a statue of his love? No. Me, me, me. Ever go into a cave and see a prehistoric drawing of a man and woman, boy and girl in the postures of love? No. Animals, yet, eating stuff. Did the White Lady of Brandberg on that cave wall in Southwest Africa allow herself to be discovered in a compromising position? No. She was out hunting, surrounded by hunters and Springbok, looking for that eating stuff again. So what? Lillian, I love you.

They finished the drink and walked once more. Max was still thinking of love when she spoke. The heart, they used it for everything: courage, guts, love. (“Have you ever slept with Charlotte?”)

Floomp
, the heart again. Nothing in the head, just a new set of dials turned on. She knows something, Max thought. No, she's guessed something, and he thought once more of how Charlotte had been at dinner. (“No, why do you ask that?”)

“Oh, I just wondered. I'm not jealous.”

He heard her clearly now, all thoughts of love whisked away in favor of defending himself. Stoutly. “That's a hell of a thing to be thinking about.”

“I'm sorry then.”

“What if I'd said yes?”

“I didn't expect you would, Max.”

They both sighed with relief when they entered his apartment. It had gotten chilly and too much walking when you are in love can be exhausting. Lillian opened the nightcase she had brought before they had gone to Harry's and pulled out a gown. She was going, she had told her parents, to visit a friend in New Rochelle for the weekend. She looked at the bag and said aloud, “They know. Most people know things. All they want is a lie plausible enough to believe.”

“Stop it,” Max said. She was, of course, referring to her earlier question about Charlotte. He put his head in her lap. She said, “It was before I met you. I don't care if you did. She is nice and not nice. Harry—”

Max sat up. “What about Harry?”

Lillian put the gown down and got up to make drinks. “Does he really make a living writing?”

“Yes.”

“But he's written more books than you.”

“Yes, he's also a little older. Lillian, what is it?”

“Nothing, here.” She gave him his drink.

“Don't do that.”

“What?”

“Start something and not finish it.”

“Sorry.”

“Go on.”

“With what? Really, there's nothing.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

Max gulped his drink. “Okay. One more, then to bed.”

Lillian watched him from the chair. She was so quiet that Max turned. “Okay, now what?”

She laughed and went to him, holding him tightly. “Ah, well. Honey?”

“Tell me what.”

“I think I love you very much.” She didn't look at him.

It was sometime during the far side of the night. Both had heard and seen separately something in black (was it?), prancing at the top of a hill, ready to gallop down. Max turned first. Lillian was there in her sleep, refusing to wake completely, enveloped in that millennia-old dream of women to be taken, to be had; and she was warm when Max slipped the gown from her and the nipples of her breasts grew taut and hard; her skin rippled and her light bones slipped under it. Max came at her and his dream was old too, the dream of men to take (and therefore be free, animal-like, of the consequences), and to match the mock submission he created a mock rage and they stroked and kissed on the knife edge of capture and theft. And they knew each of them, the reality and fantasy of what they were doing and their movements were gentle, as if with great sorrow. Even the bed gave back no sound. After, they held each other; their orgasms had been long and sweet and thorough, as if to signify that that narrow place between what was real and what was not was the best place after all.

Max woke as the first gray sifted through the room. “Lillian,” he said, pushing her gently. “Lillian. Let's get married, okay? Okay, Lillian?”