The Man Who Cried I Am (49 page)

He said, “Stronger with you, Maggie.”

“I am not so strong alone,” she said wistfully. “But now …”

Max remembered that they had just come back.

They had driven to Paris to see Harry. They had seen Harry and Charlotte and Michelle. Women. How happy both of them were to see him married. Both of them happy at different times, of course, and in different places. Charlotte had had a look of triumph on her face. The
I knew it
look. And Michelle: “Ah, Max, she is
right
for you. One can see it very plainly. Yes, you have done well. My love to you both.”

They had driven on to Javea in Alicante province in Spain, their wedding bands hardly scratched, and there Margrit had got a splendid tan from the Spanish late autumn sun. They had rested in the quiet little seaside town, and swum in the placid waters of the cove. They had spent almost two weeks shopping, cooking and eating; reading, making love and walking along the deserted beach beneath the light blue sky marred only by the contrails of B-52's making their overflights.

Yes, they had just come back and closed the door behind them and in the mail there was a cable and a letter from
Pace
. Max opened the cable first:

EXPACE NEW YORK SORRY ABOUT ILLNESS STOP JUST AS WELL STOP SADLY BOARD HAS SUDDENLY CUT BUDGET ON OVERSEAS BUREAUS STOP DISMANTLE LAGOS DESK FROM HOLLAND EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY STOP RETURN NEW YORK NEW ASSIGNMENT STOP FIRST RATE FILE ON CONGO ANGOLA STOP SORRY STOP SHEA

Now he opened the letter. It explained in detail what had happened. The Board of Directors of
Pace
felt that for the present one desk in Africa was quite enough. Since Devoe had seniority, his would be maintained and Max's cut. Perhaps, Dempsey went on, if Max had not taken the job in Washington, his performance in Africa by this time would have been proof to the Board that two desks were needed. Dempsey had acted on the basis of
Pace
's needs, but the Board had settled for
Pace
's mere presence in Africa. Also the Paris and London offices were lopping off personnel. Stringers were being upgraded to “special correspondents” in Rome, Madrid, Saigon and throughout South America. Max would go back to National Affairs.

Max handed the letter and cable to Margrit while he thumbed through the rest of the mail. What a fucking year this has been, he thought. Forty thousand miles more or less and probably more; New York, Washington, Amsterdam, Paris, Lagos, Leo, E'ville, Amsterdam again and New York. And the African bush. Yep. From the White House to the bush where little beasts got you straightened out if you thought you were hot shit, by eating your insides out and each time you crapped a little bit of yourself went with it. Sore butt, sore gut and now this.
If he hadn't taken the job in Washington
… Why, goddamn them, Dempsey and Shea were so tickled that a
Pace
man was going to Washington they were turning handsprings in the halls.
Look
turned out ambassadors, but
Pace
helped to make policy. Yeah.

He glanced at Margrit. She had spent every available moment in the sun as if, by tanning, she could minimize the difference between them. These white people and the sun, he thought with a smile. Minister Q had told him once that the time to take over America was during the summer, beach by beach when all the white folks were laying out in the sun getting blisters trying to look like black people. Margrit was very dark except for her very white ass and the lower parts of her breasts which looked like two lost half moons in search of some sky.

Finished with the letter and the cable Margrit searched her husband's face. “So it will be America then.”

“Yes.”

“Are you pleased? No.” They had talked about Africa a great deal, about the house in Ikoyi, Johnson, Charity, the Marina at night, Tarkwa Bay. Now Africa was out. But there was America. How glad she was that she had been taught English!

The generations would begin anew in New York, in America. Friesland would be far away, even farther away than Amsterdam. Only the old gravekeeper in the north would watch over her parents' final resting place now. She would not be able to drive up and weed and set fresh flowers anymore. Perhaps they wouldn't mind too much now because they would have liked Max. They would have said, “A gentleman. One can tell. It is so obvious.”

“It doesn't matter,” Max was saying. “We're together.”

Margrit saw to the final things while Max continued his treatments and retrieved his New York apartment from his tenants and discharged Charity, Johnson and Jimmy.

During those days, the sky grayed quickly and heavy cold winds buffeted the city and the smell of snow wafted through the air. Roger Wilkinson was a frequent visitor. He sat drinking coffee or Genever while Max and Margrit packed and labeled. “Tell my father,” Roger said one night, “as discreetly as you can, that I would appreciate a little bread whenever he can send it, dig?”

“Nothing goes over your father's head,” Max said. “He's going to kick discretion out of the window. He'll send it to you.” Max liked Roger's father. He was a small, light-skinned man who lived on 158th Street. He liked reliving the old days when he had been in the rackets and liked nothing better than to sit in Frank's Restaurant with an old cronie and talk about the days when even Negroes were banned from colored joints in Harlem to make the white downtown trade feel more comfortable. Once Mr. Wilkinson had said to Max, “Whenever I think of Roger, I think of a trick he pulled on me once. That thing never leaves me. A bunch of boys had ambushed him down around 140th Street and he came home crying. I sent him back out to get even. He came home the second time grinning. ‘What happened?' I asked him. ‘I got 'em all. I beat 'em good. They won't be no more trouble.' Years later we were over in Brooklyn watching ol' Newk work a good game and he told me that when he went back out, he hid for a long time, then came home and told me a lie. Never forgot that. Never.”

The round of goodbye parties for Max and Margrit ended and the day came when Max awoke in the morning, his vitals heavy with dread, and he knew that that afternoon he and Margrit would be leaving for New York.

Part  Four

27

AMSTERDAM

Margrit looked once more at the clock. It was two. She had left the gallery at noon, sure that Max would be calling her shortly after she got home. What was so important in Leiden that she could not have gone with him this morning? She knew he was very ill. It was in the way he talked, biting every word, and in the way he held his body, as if to ward off pain. At one-thirty Margrit made herself go downstairs, leaving the silent telephone. She went down step by step, slowly, holding the handful of dried bread crumbs which she threw into the canal for the ducks. Then, just as slowly, she ascended the stairs, listening intently for the ringing of the phone which never came. She called Roger, but he wasn't home or was not answering his phone. And she called Max's hotel. Now it was two o'clock and the time weighed heavily upon her, like the taste of brass lingering in the mouth.

For the third time she went to her bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She wanted to look good for Max, show him what he was missing. Who could tell what might happen? The hips, to her disgust, were extending to a wide curve, hips he once had dug his fingers into to draw her all the way to him, belly to belly. Her legs were getting heavier and the varicose veins in them more pronounced. Deep lines sat at the corners of her eyes and only folded neatly into the skin when she smiled. How could that be when she hadn't smiled for such a long time, it seemed? She returned to the front room and gazed blankly out at the canal. She had not got used to it after all, as she had thought she would when she returned from New York.

Almost three years. What did it matter if it were two or three months less? Three years with Max, New York, America, and now she was back, still tied to Max in a way she could not explain. Maybe he had more to tell her than he had so far. Some explanation for the breakup. She knew that he knew sorry was not enough; there had to be more and she was going to find out what it was.

The three years had passed so quickly and in such a flurry of people and places, that she hadn't yet recovered. She awoke sometimes at night thinking she could hear the Seventh Avenue subway train racing beneath the building, drowning out Max's snoring; and sometime she thought she could hear the high-pitched, desperate, forlorn calls of the faggots to each other as they emerged from the Riker's diner to go home alone. But awake there were only the soft night sounds of Amsterdam, nothing else, and those made her think of Camus's
Le Chute
and the meetings on Amsterdam's bridges.

What had happened? She had been so sure.

A child might have helped, a tan child, but there had been no children. Every month the menses came in spite of the furious, exhausting orgies almost every night, for he had got over the bilharzia, and he saved strength from the job and the book—his last he had said—for her, like a dessert.

After a few months spring came with its pitiful little green shoots to hide some of the dirt of the city, and she started to work in a gallery not far from their apartment. All the paintings had been bad, very bad, but it had been something to do.

Her memory wound around the people they had known: Harry and Charlotte (and Michelle whom she'd seen twice in Paris after her return); Zutkin, an old, lumpy dumpling, a perfect dinner guest who liked to tune up his French on her; Shea, at whom Max smiled secretly when he observed Shea staring at her; Minister Q, whom she knew Max liked and admired; Ted Dallas—handsome man—always held at arm's length by Max … so many others to welcome her, to like and love her because they liked or loved her husband.

Late one fine spring night, when they could clearly smell the rivers for the first time and she was feeling settled and very much a part of his life, she kissed him suddenly on a corner where many people were milling around a newsstand for their papers. He (she felt it keenly, like a rebuke) submitted, and they walked on in silence until he said, “Maggie, for Christ's sake, I don't like to be kissed on the street.”

“I forgot, Mox.”

“Well, try to remember, will you?”

“Why does it make you angry when I kiss you on the street?”

“Never mind. Just don't do it.”

Something had drained out of her then and had been replaced by a furtive guilt. She had started to take his arm, but changed her mind.

The weekends they had spent in the woods near Brattleboro or East Hampton, walking and fishing. And taking target practice with a .22 rifle.

“But Mox, you know I don't like guns.”

“Learn to shoot it. One day you may be glad you did.”

There had been a look in his eyes that urged her to find the answer in her own soul, so he would not have to soil the air with the words. The rifle was in her hands, walnut and steel, and his hands gently set her arms and legs.

“Now, squeeze, squeeeeze …”

“Bam!”

“Again.”

“Bam!”

“Once more.”

“Bam!”

The noise startling the still woods, Max down at the target, smiling. Had he been trying to tell her that one day her life might depend on whether or not she could shoot a gun?

“Squeeeeze, Maggie.”

The lessons had been conducted calmly, even a little sadly. “It's a question of dignity, Margrit.” That statement when he had finally taken the gun from her, after each lesson, to clean it.

Summer came and with it the trips to St. Thomas, Puerto Rico and Mexico.

St. Thomas with its jungle smell, its iodic odor of the bright, blue sea, bluer than the Mediterranean, the long swims in it, his kissing
her
in public, feeling her up under the water, a stroking hand pausing lightly on her
poesje
, a flat, gentle hand pressed against her breasts, a mock horselike mounting in ten feet of water … and dinner that same night, candlelights dancing in the heavy, humid breeze, the steel drum band playing softly, the air filled with the scents of a hundred jungle flowers, and her not noticing anything until he had tipped the table getting up quickly, breaking the top of his glass and wheeling on a group of American sailors with it in a single, frightening motion, a group of sailors who were fanning out around him, sailors there to pick up the women who came alone, wanting to be picked up … and she, with her drink wet and sticky in her lap, heard the band straggling on, and she did not know, did not understand what had created this ominous, ugly tableau which dissolved finally with the presence of still more sailors with a yellow
SP
on their sleeves.

“What happened, Mox, what were they doing?”

And his eyes: accusing, his eyes incredulous that she had not seen or heard or understood.

The next morning they did not play in the water together. He swam alone a long distance out and back and then went to the bar for a martini. It was not even ten in the morning, Margrit remembered.

Puerto Rico with its brave gloss and terrible slums below the cliff, facing out to sea, between the forts. They went to the old city for dinner and stopped at the bar of their hotel for a nightcap, St. Thomas almost a memory. The bar was filled with people; the music was cha-cha-cha and behind them the dancers whirled and posed on the floor. Puerto Rican Spanish was rising and falling around them. “
Arriba, 'rriba,
” and she heard Max say to her quite calmly, “Move your stool back just a little, Maggie.” And she had followed his gaze to the drunk American who was gesturing angrily with his thumb toward them, noticing too that the bartender was frowning at the drunk, then smiling at them. “It's waxed.” Max again, sliding his foot on the floor, and she just started to understand that Max was watching the American, waiting for him to make a move, say a word; waiting, Max was, like an executioner who knows the job must be done; she remembered the fright she felt and how she started to pluck at Max's elbow. “Stop that.” He was going to place it all in jeopardy—what he was, Max Reddick, what it meant to be Max Reddick—because of a drunk white American.