The Man Who Cried I Am (3 page)

He looked into Margrit's clear blue eyes. He moved his hand up her arm. Quite suddenly his eyes grew wet with remembering and even as he turned his head to fake a cough, he knew that the Pernod had helped to bring the tears on. “Whiskey,” Max said to the waiter, who was watching them. Give her something quick, Max thought, before she starts remembering and runs away. Remembers the bad things.

But she was remembering some things already. She looked at him directly, head on, unblinking, without fear or remorse or pity—without, goddamn it, he thought,
anything
. But hell, he had never been able to decipher her looks, not once except when she cried. God, make me sober—no drunker. “… and another Pernod,” he called, fingering with surprise the half-full glass already in his hand. He took a deep breath and fought down a rising pain. “How are you?” he said.

“Okay, Mox. You? Hi.”

“Fine. Okay. Hi yourself.”

“When did you come?”

“Today. About three hours ago.”

“Are you well?”

“I—never better.” He patted her hand.

“You look sick.” She smiled her thanks at the waiter who placed the drinks before them.

“No. Just tired. Took the train from Paris.”

“Paris? Harry died, didn't he? It was in
De Arbeiderspers
and
Het Parool
and some other papers. Were you there?”

Max smiled. The Europeans. The goddamn Europeans with their Black Peters and Black Madonnas and blackface celebrations. Five hundred years of guilt transposed into something like vague concern for anyone with a black skin. But Harry was loved more in Europe—and hated too—but not more than back home. There was some kind of balance here that the New York
Times
and the Chicago
Sun-Times
and the “Skibbidum Times” could never have when it came to Harry Ames. He spoke: “I was just a bit too late. We were to have drinks that day—”

“Oh, Mox, it must have been awful for you.”

He felt angry. “Hell, it was all right! Harry was my friend, like a brother. But he had to go. We all have to go. He went quick. Didn't hurt at all. I'm all right. You know me.”

Margrit bent her head and studied her Scotch. It was a very expensive alcohol. Genever would have been all right for her, even though in New York she had come to like Scotch. Yes, she knew. Harry's death had hurt Max. There was a time when he never admitted anything, but then, she thought, there was another time when he did. She stole a look at him. Yes, he was still handsome. He was graying evenly through his hair and moustache, but the lines in his square face had deepened, as if cut by a tired sculptor creating a hardness to offset the wide, soft eyes. But the eyes (how that soft look had deceived her!) were red, the almost amber-colored pupils diffused as though in the process of melting. He
isn't
well! she thought with a shock. “How long are you here?”

Max drank from the unfinished Pernod and then sipped from the other. “Not long. I wanted to tell you something, Margrit. Margrit, baby, I have news for you!”

His voice had risen and gone spinning loudly into space. She looked at him with cautious eyes. She knew the waiter and bartender and the customers who were coming in now were used to
Neger uitbundigheid
, Negro exuberance; they smiled at it. It was the image they had.

“What is your news, Mox?” Margrit was suddenly irritated. She and Max had spent so much time talking about images. “Is it good news? You have come all this way to tell me?” She smiled thinly. “Are you to be married?”

He rose and touched her shoulder. Automatically she lent support to his unsteady fingers. “Will you wait until I return? I have to pee.” He giggled. She smiled. But as soon as he had left her, she turned to watch him. Something was the matter.

Max wavered to the men's room again. A vicious cycle. If he didn't drink, he wouldn't have to urinate. To urinate was to suffer the most intense pain. But, if he didn't drink he would have to take either the pills or the morphine tucked into the pouch of the jock strap he was wearing. He had thrown the cup away. The morphine got the pain right by the balls he thought, with a weak chuckle, but it didn't let him operate the way he had to during the day. But then the pain was growing every day. It gripped him at the most inopportune moments and left him breathless, weak, and with his eyes watering.
Jesus Christ!
he moaned, leaning against a wall which for a few seconds seemed to have vanished altogether. Did Herod ever have it so bad? He pushed himself away from the wall and went into one of the stalls. Clean. At least the Dutch wouldn't give him as many germs as the French. He took out the cotton and looked at it. It was soaked through with dark red blood. Almost came through that time, he thought, and pulled a roll of fresh cotton from his pocket and tore off a piece. This he pushed gently into place. While sitting, he pulled at the jock strap and looked at the plastic five-cc syringe and at the morphine itself. He felt his breast pocket to see if the needle was still there. Not now, later. The pain subsided.

He returned to the table and without looking at her said, “Margrit, I'm sorry. Easy to say. Said it before, but believe me, I am sorry. Late, I know. Don't want anything. I can't want anything, not even you again. I just wanted to see you and say that.”

“Well …” She wanted to say that it was all right, but she knew it wasn't and he knew it too. Then she wanted to reach across the table and slap him as hard as she could.
Sorry!
But the black Americans were all the same: they walked away from things mumbling, “Sorry.” Sorry! After a moment, the bitterness ebbed. “But you look tired. Maybe you should get some rest. If you like, we can talk later [more sorry!]. Where are you staying?”

Come full circle on the Dutch, he was thinking as she spoke. He knew he was giving her answers. (“Yes, a little tired. Don't know where I'll be staying. Maybe the American. Do it up right. Last trip, Ducks, ho?”)

“One more drink,” he said aloud. “Then I'll get my bag and go to the hotel. If you have dinner with me. In that corner. You know.” He rushed on, not wanting her to decline. “You know where we sat for four hours just watching people pass …”

Margrit thought, Yes, I know, I remember, I remember, and the waiters trying to rush us, and it seemed as if the sun would never come down.

“… and maybe after dinner we can find Roger and some of the other guys. How are they doing? Do you see them often?” He paused. He didn't give a damn about Roger or the others. It was too late. “Will you, will you have dinner?”

“No more drinks then,” she said.

“All right.” He breathed deeply in relief.

“I will get your bag,” she said.

“No you won't,” he said. Then with sudden vehemence he said, “Will you
stop
doing things for me!”

Unruffled she said, “Mox, you will walk across the street to the hotel and get your room. I will touch up a bit, call a taxi and get your bag. The driver will help me and the hotel boys will help me. Give me the ticket.” She held out her hand for the ticket as his hands went limply into pocket after pocket. Finally he found it. Taking it she said, “You don't look well. I am worried.”

“How can you be worried?”

She hunched her shoulders. “I just am. Please go.”

“All right, Maggie.” He sucked in his breath quickly. The pain. She was right. Let her get the goddamn bag. Get to the hotel. Fast! Get off your feet. Take a pill.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A belch. I had to belch.”

“Happy New Year, then.”

“Thanks. Shall we go now?”

He paid the waiter and they left. “It will not be long,” she said.

“All right. Maggie?”

“What?”

“I am truly sorry.”

“Shut up, Mox,” she said, not unpleasantly. “I will not be long.”

He wondered if her apartment was the same. It overlooked one of the canals, had high ceilings and dark musty hallways. And cats. One was a striped, swollen brown that padded softly about the rooms. The other was a sleek young black with a triangle of white on the face, a female. He had watched them lick each other's backs and play, but there had been no catting between them, only with the other cats that gathered on the rooftops at night. Max wondered if the walls were still thick with the paintings of friends, or if the bedroom was the same, with the windows to the east so that as soon as the sun took a notion to rise,
whop!
daylight in the room. And in that room, he thought, discovering without surprise that he had the key to his hotel room in his hand and that he was following the bellman, she would be touching herself up a bit.

Suddenly he wanted to listen to someone else's rhythms; his own were sonorous, too labored. He paused. There was something he wanted, something … Ah, a paper. He had just picked up the
Tribune
when he saw, out of the corner of his eye, another Negro. How the eye catches color in a country where there is so little! Or how that same eye catches no color—an albino in Africa—where color abounds. Kiss my ass, Max thought, drawing back without knowing why, Alfonse Edwards.

2

AMSTERDAM

He sat waist-deep in the lukewarm water of his bath and watched it turn slowly from a clear to pinkish color. He could hear the trams ringing their bells as they pulled off from the stop in front of the hotel. Why, he wondered, couldn't Alfonse Edwards be in Amsterdam too? What instinct (Negroes not only had that good old natural rhythm, but instinct too) had made him draw back? True, he had
not
liked Edwards from the first, from Nigeria. Even less since he had been with Harry when Harry died.

Edwards had told it like this:

He and Harry were walking out of Rue de Berri and paused at the corner waiting for a traffic light to change. Harry had gone down just like an FFI caught in the crossfire of snipers. Max imagined that crowds gathered and someone finally recognized that dark round face, the bitterness on it suddenly replaced by surprise, and shouted, “
Le M'sieu Ames, le romancier américain.
”

“Boom, like that,” Edwards had said in Paris, his lean face suggesting rather than actually possessing sorrow. Max remembered that even then he wondered just why Harry would bother with a type like that. He must have been getting senile. Edwards was a black Ivy Leaguer. Close-cropped hair, for he
wanted
Europeans to know that he was American. The other Negroes let their hair grow long and bushy—nappy—in order to be mistaken for Africans. Not Edwards. American all the way. Red white and black.

So, anyway, there was Harry down in the street at the corner where the Rue de Berri runs into the Champs-Elysées, with the Arc de Triomphe humped up through the noon haze. Harry was down and didn't get up and later there was Edwards describing his death: “Boom, like that,” and Max also thought then, These hippies, Ivy League or Watermelon League, they never learn. English is limiting but it's all we know well, and there are times and places when it should be used, such as when describing how Harry died. Harry would never die “Boom, like that.”

Why not? Because he was too goddamned evil. And why else not? Because.

Max had taken the morphine as much for the shock of Harry's death as for the pain. He stood at the rear of the small, hastily assembled crowd within the walls of Cimetière du Montparnasse. Edwards was there. Charlotte, Harry's wife was there, a few Americans, like Iris Stapleton of the nightclubs, painters and writers. There were some Africans, a few Indians. And it was only twenty hours after Harry had died. Very few of them had been summoned by Charlotte. The papers had announced his death, and they had come unbidden. Max stood there drunk with the drug, sick with pain and shock, and suddenly he noticed that Michelle Bouilloux, even more isolated from the small crowd than himself, was staring at him. He
thought
she was staring. Max turned back to listen once more to the eulogies. When he turned again to Michelle, he let his eyes roam; her husband wasn't there. She seemed to have moved closer to him, and now he knew she was staring from under her veil. And she was doing something with her hands, he couldn't tell what, because she was wearing black gloves and moving her hands against the background of a black suit. Then she took off one glove and one startlingly white hand showed, and one of its fingers curled back and forth at him. Her eyes seemed to come through the veil. Max thought, Ah, Michelle, Michelle, he's dead. The eulogies were over. The crowd started to break up. Michelle threw one glance at Charlotte, who even now was approaching Max, snatched up her veil displaying a glint of red hair, pointed fiercely to herself, then stumbled toward the gate. “Please join us, Max,” Charlotte said. Alfonse Edwards was standing at her shoulder.

“No,” Max said. He had seen enough men cremated in tanks, the bodies curling and snapping and frying in their own juices. He wasn't going to sit in anybody's anteroom and wait for Harry to be cooked down to ashes. “But why?” he croaked as the others, not invited to wait for the Harry-fry, gathered behind her and Edwards. “Why couldn't you let him lay around a little while so people could come and look at him. He'd like that.”

“Oh, Max, shut up,” Charlotte said, turning from him. Edwards paused before turning, and there was nothing in his look and yet everything. “To hell with you too,” Max said and left, caught a taxi, picked up his bag and took the train to Amsterdam.

Why else not? Michelle Bouilloux. He glanced at his watch. M. Bouilloux would be home now. Maybe not. Maybe he hadn't seen her at the funeral at all. Hell, he wasn't sure of anything anymore except that he had a great, raging pain in the ass. And then, having thought of Charlotte, he admitted to himself for the first time that he had hated the hell out of her ever since he had known her. She had run Harry out of one marriage and into another with her. She understood, she had said. But it faded, of course, that understanding. She demanded more and more time from the great man (and he had had times of greatness, but America pretended not to see them, and Harry
wanted
America to acknowledge his greatness. But America had said in essence:
We may study you in freshman English anthologies, and if we ever arrive at the point where we show our fear or admit that we are guilty and ignore that guilt, we will study you first, Harry Ames!)
. Charlotte had been a pain in the ass (Ho! Ho!). Always when things were rough, she made a point of reminding Harry how much she had given up to marry him: family, friends, a whole culture. And Harry had always countered by saying, “Tough titty. You can go. I didn't want you because you're white. Go.” But Charlotte never went. She stayed and sulked, and sulked even more when things were going well. She was, after all, a mediocre person when it came to dealing with the things Harry juggled with ease: history, politics, economics, people. Charlotte could only deal with herself. When had sulking turned to hatred?