The Man Who Cried I Am (33 page)

Max seldom saw the older Negroes, the ones who'd come after World War I, except in passing through Neuilly or San Gervaise or other sections that did not throb and seethe as the Left Bank. Sometimes he saw middle-aged mixed couples, expatriates, walking arm in arm, speaking English. They were unnoticed except by other Negroes. Max wondered how life was for the mixed couples, how it had been, what had caused them to come to Paris. He would watch them walk out of sight along the quays or in the Tuileries. O, beautiful for spacious skies and amber waves of grain … If Janine were with him, she would give him a look of triumph, as if to say, You see, we French
are
different! That difference, of course, making them better. That implication was always there.

It was in the hundred little clubs that Max saw other American Negroes with their French men or French women listening to bop, France's latest American import. And he saw them when the great musicians from the States came through on tour, Ellington, Parker, Davis, Mingus, Roach, Mulligan.

Most of all, Max noticed the white Americans in Paris in their often inadvertent contacts with Negroes. Gone now was their self-assurance that an entire nation was behind whatever they chose to do or say to a Negro. If a Negro was with a French woman, the white Americans might glare or ignore them altogether; some rankling embarrassment kept them from seeking any middle ground. White Americans who at home would not be caught dead trying to smile at a Negro, did so in Paris when recognizing a Negro as an American by his dress, and often, very often, they were cut dead. Smile at me at home, the sullen Negroes seemed to be saying, not in Paris. In Paris I don't have to give a good goddamn about you.

Early in September, after having Paris largely to themselves during August, the tourists went home. The new Negro expatriates cast about with increasing desperation. Summer was over and so was the first flush of Paris; they had to be set for winter, somewhere, somehow. Requests for loans of francs came more frequently now. The one restaurant in Paris that served food home-style was crowded with Negroes waiting to meet other Negroes who might be able to put them onto something. Others resigned themselves to the mean hustles that would carry them through their first Paris winter. Max watched all this grimly. He recalled the nine months he was out of work. Would Paris have been better than New York? He admired the youngsters. Starve in Paris first, rather than in New York where you'd starve and get your ass kicked too. He hoped Paris changed very slowly, so the kids wouldn't see that it was becoming in many ways very much like home. Then they'd do all right, those kids. But none of them would be Josephine Bakers or Redtops; the French were over their black exoticism. The kids would be just people, which would be all right for a change, if things just held steady.

When the first autumn chill hit Paris, Max and Harry took Little Max with them on a hunting trip to Viviers to try out the Spanish guns. Harry, Max remembered, had driven the entire distance with a furrowed brow, and Max knew that the reason they had driven so far and fast was to put as much distance between Charlotte and Harry as humanly possible in three days. Little Max was along not so much to be introduced to the sport (Harry was often both sharp and short with him) as to deprive Charlotte of his presence.

Once, when they had paused at the end of the shooting for cigarettes and cognac and were watching Little Max handle the unloaded guns, Harry asked, “How's Janine?”

Max was surprised. That was another rule he'd broken. You didn't talk about each other's girlfriends until you had brought her name up. “Okay,” Max answered. Had he and Janine been seeing
that
much of each other? Harry snorted. “I'm glad she's French. If she were American I'd have to kick your ass!” He shouted to Little Max: “Hold it higher, boy,
higher!
” Harry sat down upon a hummock of grass. The late afternoon sky was tinged with greens and reds. “Sometimes I wish I hadn't left the States, goddamn it!”

“Getting to you?” Max asked.

“To me? You mean
through
me.” Harry sighed and watched his son. “I sleep badly. My work isn't going well. I wake up in the morning sometimes and wonder who in the hell is this broad next to me. Charlotte.” He sucked wetly on his cigarette. “Tell me the truth. If I could get back into the States without being hounded to death, what would it be like for me—hell, forget it. I feel this way every fall when the tourists have gone. I miss the accents from Nebraska and even Mississippi. When we first got here, I used to sit in the lobbies of hotels where Americans would be, just to hear their voices. I miss Harlem too. The summer. The first warm day when everybody gets down in the streets, lying and crying, and it's hot and muggy, the niggers are evil and the jukeboxes are blaring and you can smell fried chicken and barbecued ribs in the air on any corner; I even miss the cops holding up the corners in threes and fours when the summer comes. And the watermelon cats, hollering and jiving and getting rid of those melons as quickly as you'd spit out a watermelon seed. How I miss it.”

“Yeah,” Max said with a slow smile.

Harry said, “Being here, I feel like I'm not doing enough to make things better. Here I am writing about Spain and China and Africa. If we solve the problem at home we solve it around the world.”

“What's solved around the world could also solve it at home,” Max countered. “Yeh, I feel that way too, sometimes, like there's more I can do.”

Harry grinned cruelly. “I'll bet. All summer I've been watching you while
you
were noticing the happenings. I'd say to myself, Look at old Max. Digging it all. What does he think about it? Me, I talk too fucking much to notice anything.” Then Harry laughed and it was kind of a release. “That's what you are, Max, a noticer, a digger of scenes. Max the Digger; Max the man.”

“Get off me, Harry.”

“Man, I ain't never been
on
you.” Harry eased his bulk down between his legs, coming off the hummock, as if about to diagram a football play on the ground. “You're anal, man. I mean tight. Like you're determined to be the only cat surviving this whole mess. It's hard to get to you, Max. You never got over that girl, Lillian. You write good. You knock me out, but open it up a little. For myself, I wonder where it went. I don't
feel
it anymore. Maybe being away. I don't know how a guy keeps the feel of it.”

“You haven't lost anything,” Max said. “I worry about losing it. It's tough enough worrying what the faggots will make
in
in any year. That's what kills you, Harry. It's all like women's fashions, that's the way it is now.”

“There's Zutkin,” Harry said.

“So what else is new?”

“Like that, huh?”

“The man's getting tired. You
get
to be tired, doing what he does. They stymie him, too.”

“Then, there's the being black.”

“There's that too, yes.”

Harry said, “That's insurmountable.”

“That's exciting,” Max said. “Never a dull moment.”

“Ain't it the truth?” Harry crushed out his cigarette. Together they turned to watch Little Max hold his father's gun and say, “Boom! Boom!”

“We ought to clean these birds and get them on ice,” Max said.

“Yep, guess so,” Harry said. “I don't feel mad at Charlotte anymore. Y'know, sometimes all this gets to her. She loved her old man, and was sure he wouldn't mind. She'd never liked her mother, but it was the mother who came through. You remember how Charlotte used to take Little Max to the house when the old man wasn't there, in a taxi, at some ridiculous hour so the neighbors wouldn't tell the old man. The old man died since we've been here. Her mother came once to visit us. She's getting on; they always get on when you're away from them. Charlotte won't come out and say she wants to go home. In a way she doesn't. Here, no one stares at her when she's got the boy; no one curses under his breath—that she knows of—when she passes. It's all right. I think she feels that she owes her mother her presence. All this has been bugging her and making her impossible to live with. That and the good fortune I've had. If it had been otherwise, we'd have no choice but to go home. Then, there's always Michelle for her to find out about. Aw, hell. She gives herself to the kid now. Maybe you've noticed; you notice everything else, you bastard.”

Max laughed and gathered up his birds.

Winter came and Paris was naked of charm except under a fresh snowfall. What was the big deal about Paris, Max wondered, glumly, staring through his steamed window. This you could get in New York with better central heating. The novel rolled slowly ahead. On the days when nothing came or he was just too lazy to work, he fled to the museums or to the streets or spent an afternoon and evening at Janine's, a woman who was all for the lending and borrowing of those bits of human flesh and company without ever asking for an accounting. They were good for and with each other. When he left Paris she'd find someone like him; chances were that before him there had been some guy he had resembled in the ways that mattered to her. If he could, Max would find someone like her in New York, but they didn't grow that type as thickly in the States as they did in France. If he did not see Janine or go to the museums, he walked the sodden streets, peering into cafe windows to see if he knew anyone. Sometimes he found some of the new expatriates and treated them to drinks or meals in the restaurants that lace the tiny streets in the Quartier. Whatever he did, his single concern was with his novel. New York, his job and all the people he knew there seemed from another time when he had met them only in passing. There were times when he thought of a person in New York, pictured that person, but could not call up the name. Except Regina. He thought of her with pale, swift concern. He had received two notes from her. The first asked, when he had been in Paris two weeks, if he had caught the clap yet. In the second note she said she'd never had a desire to return to Europe, and felt that those who had earlier escaped it were foolish to go back to the slaughterhouse just because slaughtering had stopped for a season or two.

Not once did Max think of Shea until a letter came from him, asking if Max would consider working for
Pace
when he returned. When was he going to return?

Roger Wilkinson reappeared, claiming that the Swedish broads were great, but he could do without the winters. The group still took coffee in the mornings, but they'd have to brush the steam off the windows so they could see who, head bent against rain, snow or wind, was passing. As usual, rumors filled the cafe: Dawes was going home soon. His book was finished, sold, and he had got a nice piece of change. He would be missed at Les Halles where, when he had money, he and his streetboys would sit in one of the cafes extolling the virtues of a rotten onion soup. An expatriate Negro, caught stealing sheets he had hoped to pawn from a little hotel on Rue Jacob, had been arrested. One of his buddies was taking up a collection from among the Negroes to pay his bail. Time Curry and his group (he was having trouble with his old lady, Iris) had gotten some bookings on the Riviera. Another policy battle had exploded between the Afro-Americans and the Franco-Africans. Harry Ames (who was not at the cafe that morning) had insisted that true independence, when it came, meant working outside the French Family of Nations, not within it. The Africans had answered that the French, responsible for curtailing their development in the first place, should be willing to contribute economically and socially to the Africans and the easiest way for them to do that was for the African countries to stay in the Family. Harry then told them that what they would get would not be independence; that the single difference with the coming of what the Africans chose to call independence would be black people instead of white people stealing and taking from black people, with the French seeing that their boys got the most. He had left the meeting in an uproar. “Slave!” the Africans had sneered at Harry. “
Negro!
”

It was also in the cafe that, when winter began to loose its grip on the city, the plans for spring dominated the talk, while everyone looked around the table, as if surprised that they were still there, had survived still another winter.

“Holland at tulip time,” Harry said. “They still love me in Holland.”

“No, man, Scotland.”

“Portugal.”

“Are you crazy!”

“I heard of a place tourists ain't been to yet—Ibiza. Next year this time you won't be able to get on the island. Tourists; they're just like flies gatherin' over a horseball.”

“Tangier, that's the place they tell me.”

“Yeah, sure,” Harry said. “Every place under the sun but black Africa.”

Everyone laughed. “We'll take you at your word about Africa, Harry.”

One of the musicians said, “We ought to take up a collection and send Professor Bazaam down there. Wouldn't he be a smash with his Apple shit, them knobs and that four hundred-year-old suit?”

“We know where Max is going to be come summer,” Harry said. “Back home.”

They looked at Max, smiled and said nothing, each with his private thoughts of home, the good thoughts of home which, seconds later, were ambushed and wiped out by the bad ones.

“Back to the paper?” Roger asked.

“I don't know. I've got an offer from
Pace.
” As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn't. The eyes swung toward him again and fell away. Max could almost hear their thoughts: Here they were, by the dozens, wondering where their next meal was coming from, not all of them, but a great many of them, and there he was, Max, just like them, spade, boot, nigger, with a job waiting at
Pace
—everybody knew
Pace
—and another book almost ready and advances were going out of sight these days. Whose ass was he kissing, this Max Reddick? Had to be kissing somebody's ass. Otherwise a spade just don't make it in the States. Hard to believe old Max is a Tom.