The Man Who Cried I Am (50 page)

“He's drunk, Mox.”

“Not too drunk to open his big mouth: move over a little.”

Her eyes were drawn to his eyes and she did not know them. Desperate, she stood, threaded her way a few feet through the dancers and stopped, obviously waiting. There was one agonizingly long instant when their eyes met, and she had put her mind to leaving the room alone, defeated, when he slid off the stool and came after her.

“Mox, you would have fought him.”

“Maggie, I would have killed him.”

The hall had tile floors and their heels sounded loud upon them. She felt sick, like vomiting. “I am going to be sick, Mox.”

They rushed up in the elevator to their room, in time. I must try harder to understand this thing, she told herself in the bathroom.

She knew if they did not make love that night, the morning would be unpleasant, and somehow he knew it too, and came softly at her, removing the gown, and she embraced him hard and lovingly with her whiteness, opening all of herself, for she wanted him to know in the fullest way that white could love black and did, and they both sensed that the drunk American downstairs had to be erased with love, and they went from one bed to the other without a pause, a mass of black and white, with arms and legs twisted, their breath coming short above the music from downstairs and Margrit remembered crying silently, her tears mixing unnoticed with the perspiration of their bodies and how, when they left the beds, they drifted across the room to the sun parlor where the full moon leaned patiently against the windows while the sea rushed headlong against the seawall a few hundred yards away downstairs, exploding into billions of phosphorescent bubbles; they put out their cigarettes and began to make love again in a sun parlor chair, lap-love, and the moonlight stroked their restless, jerking bodies, him in her, her around him, moving in that good rhythm until the little cries came again and the pimples rose on their flesh and the nipples of her breasts shot hard and trembling beneath his kneading hands; the exhausted bodies unhinged; they heard the sea withdraw from the wall; the swollen lips parted and Margrit felt a hot, electric quivering down there, a reaction, as she slid from his lap.

And the morning was quite all right.

Cuernavaca was a better memory with its beamed-ceiling seventeenth-century house hidden from a shabby street. There was a swimming pool set in the center of an acre of well-tended grass, and around the fringes were clusters of roses and mimosa, honeysuckle, bougainvillea and the nameless Mexican flowers that breathe a sweetness through day and night. In Cuernavaca the smiles came again, and the work went well, and their lovemaking, on the eight beds in the giant house, was without desperation. The house was on a hill, and through the vines on the fence they could look down on the city from three sides, see the ragged buses droning up the other steep hills, hear the soldiers in the barracks across the way singing and shouting. Everyone in the town talked of a writer named Malcolm Lowry and Max smiled and said: “I'll bet that cat didn't know
half
these people who say they knew him. Poor bastard; he could have used some knowing.” Max hated to leave the place. On the plane the tension started to come once more, his quiet, angry tension that frightened her so, but she could see him fighting it off and she was content.

Near their first anniversary Max bought a new rifle; he already had four guns. This did not disturb her as much as his matter-of-fact manner. That puzzled and upset her, but she could not bring herself to speak of the weapons which, granted, he used when he went hunting. At the same time, nightly, she witnessed on television the humiliations of the black Americans throughout the country; acid was thrown into the swimming places they tried to integrate; electric cattle prods were put to their bodies when they sat at lunch counters and participated in other demonstrations. It seemed to Margrit that what was
happening
provided the connection to what Max was
doing
. She wondered if other black men were silently going about as he was, hunting regularly (“Brushing up the old eye, baby”), buying guns. In Holland it had been very easy to urge that violence be met with violence. But, being in America, it was somehow different …

A few months later, plagued by his increasing sensitivity to the way people looked at them when they were together, his purchases of boxes of ammunition he could never use up in three seasons of hunting, let alone one, she timidly asked: “Mox, what is it all about?”

“What, Maggie?”

“The guns, your touchiness, the target shooting.”

“I'm simply trying to keep my head, but these bastards are trying to make me lose it.”

“Your mind is closed to me. I feel so distant from you sometimes, as if I were one of
them
. I feel left out and that something terrible is about to happen. Let us return to Holland, Mox. I'm afraid.”

He took a long time answering.

“Dear Margrit. I had hoped you'd understand by now. There's us and there's them. Us means me because I'm black, and it means you because I love you, and it means all the people who want to feel as we do about each other, and all the people who've never had a chance to feel anything. Things are changing so fast. Things are getting very nasty and things happen more quickly and viciously and everyone says they couldn't see them coming. I won't lie; I see them coming. You remember St. Thomas and Puerto Rico. Those are the small things you are involved in every day if you're a black man and your wife is white. They just put it to you that way; all they really want to do is to beat your ass good, but they don't know that when they want that, they want your life, because things have changed and nothing is going to stop with an ass-beating anymore; it's the whole thing or nothing—”

“Mox—”

“Let me finish, darling. I want to finish. I am sorry. I don't mean for these people to do this to us; I won't let them and this is the only way I know.
Nothing else has worked
. There seems to be no turning back from this need to apply force. They are at you and they understand nothing about the position they've put you in.

“The law in this country, just like in most countries, is for the privileged and if you're white in America, you are privileged. We hope for the law to protect us, but it doesn't. I've seen the White House break laws, and I am not about to console myself that if brought before the court for being in a street fight, I can count on a fair dispensation of justice. The other side has guns, Maggie, and power, everything serious killers should have to do their jobs. Without law on my side, I become the law; my guns are the law, and the only law people in any nation live by is the law of force or the threat of force. Love don't do what a good ass-kickin' can.

“I've worked too long and too hard and seen too much and know too much to go quietly if and when they come for me. I'm not Dutch, baby, I'm an American. What business do I have in Holland with Negroes who won't face up to what's really happening here? When you first started to learn to shoot, I hoped there was something in your European existence that would help you understand how necessary it is to learn to defend one's self. Nine million people were murdered because they did not defend themselves, more people than in the armies and civilian forces that killed them. Now, that doesn't make any kind of sense, does it?

“It won't be like that here. At least, not in the beginning. Some of us have learned some hard lessons from what happened in Europe, and I mean black and white. We have also learned some hard lessons from our own country. I know civil rights leaders who talk about guns and island hideouts, privately of course. They know about the enemy and if the enemy knows this, knows we are in another time in which we will kill back or kill
first
, he will move slowly, if he moves at all. The military call this deterrent strength. I mean no harm with these guns, Maggie. I can't begin to tell you what has happened inside me to make me even think like this. But I have some measure of peace now, because I can answer the white man's choice for the future: death or peace. I will only harm him if I know he means to harm me. I think he does.”

“Did you know this when we married?”

“Yes, I knew it.”

His words, enormous, ghastly, elusive, animal. But he seemed calm and sure sitting there, watching her anxiously.

“All this talk shocks me. It frightens me, too, Mox. I did not know—”

“What did you know then?” His voiced cracked out at her.

“I—”

“‘I,'
hell
, Maggie! I'm telling you the way it is and you're talking about shock.
Don't you know who you married?
Did you forget everything we ever talked about?”

“That was in Holland,” she fought back. “It did not seem
real
. And we never talked like
this
—”

“You didn't really listen, then. You watch the news every night. What do you think? Those poor colored people? Isn't it terrible? Is that what you think, Margrit? Honey, come
on!
You know better. I
taught
you better. This ain't Holland, baby, this is the
YOO ESS AY
, where niggers have had it with getting their heads beat, and I'm a nigger! Do you
hear
me? And you're married to a nigger unless you don't want to be any longer. That's really all there is to it, Maggie, right?”

Her voice came out desperately. “But life has to go on. I
am
married to you; we
do
have each other. You are an uncommon man, therefore, there must be other ways for this peace.”

“There is and this is it. What looks like death is life and what for so long looked like life was death. Baby, they don't want us to have each other. The guns are here because we have
got
to have each other.”

She flung herself up, crying and screaming. “T
HAT IS SO PARANOID
,
WHAT YOU ARE SAYING AND DOING AND THINKING
!”

His eyes alone seemed to smile at her, tenderly as at a strange child passing. “Margrit, in the twenties and thirties when Europeans came here to become Americans, they had only to say ‘nigger' and they got their papers. In the fifties and sixties the language became a little more polite; those people had only to say ‘you're paranoid.' Congratulations, now you really are an American.”

She had fled, and crying entered that labyrinth, the ugly, dark middle of it, uncertain, lost, but from where she had to commence her search for him. She ran toward every illusion of light; she tapped for hollowness in the walls behind which there might be a lever to pull and suddenly flood the interiors with blinding light so she could see him and lead him out; she trod the moss-covered floors and touched wet, dank walls, and nasty little animals slithered away from her. Once she stepped on something large and it made a long hisssssing sound, and she ran past it, screaming. Then one day, she assumed it was a day, for there was neither day nor night in that place, only the remembered period of twenty-four hours, a day, she thought she heard tapping on another wall and a voice, hoarse with much use. She tapped and cried out. The tapping on the other side became louder and she heard his voice just as another little beast slid between her fingers toward the floor:

—
Margrit, Maggie, baby, it's me, Max! Keep to your left, Maggie, keep going left, baby, the heart-side. Can you hear me? Move to your left. I am moving to the left, the heart-side
—

—
Yes my
schatje,
I hear you. I am moving to the left also, to the heart-side
—

“It's here,” he said with a smile, and hefted the galleys in his hand. He kissed her. “This is when you finally begin to feel as though you've written a novel.”

There was bright sun, and spring once more. She sat beside him while he opened the envelope and unfolded the curled pages of the proofs.

“Max, not really, now. You can't mean there will never be another book. It is your life; it is our life. What would we do? You will not work for
Pace
forever?”

“Well, I think I mean it.”

“Darling, you tease me too much.”

“Hey, Maggie.”

“Yes?”

“Let's rip off a little, what say, baby?”

“Ugh, such an ugly picture you make. Right now?”

“Yes, right now.”

“But dinner will be late.”

“So?”

“So.”

Later she asked, “What does the good Dr. Woodson have to say?”

“Oh, I have to go back.”

“But why?”

“I hadn't flushed myself out very well.”

“Poor Mox. Soon all the troubles will be over with your little behind and you will be quite all right again.”

“Promise?”

“My darling, I promise everything good for us.”

One day he came home in high agitation and she believed it had to do with what was happening in the South, Birmingham and other places; it was 1963. There followed a period of moving, doing things, going places and seeing people. He kissed her in public after that time, she remembered. In the small hours of the morning, she would awake to find him at his typewriter, as if in a frenzy to hold on to every passing moment. So often when she spoke to him, his mind was far away, and she had to lead him back gently, as if afraid to wake a sleepwalker. That period sloped suddenly down into one when he woke up and stared at the ceiling, then announced that he wasn't going to work, to hell with
Pace
. Sometimes he left before breakfast and she knew he was not going to work, and she would not see him until late in the evening, martinis reeking on his breath. He spent each Sunday cleaning his guns, although they didn't need it. Before them on television danced the police dogs, police and Negroes; fire hoses gushed and Margrit felt lost again, deserted.

“Mox, not again, not with those guns and that look about you. I can't stand any more of it. I won't stand for it. I hate it all, all of it, those stupid whites and those taunting blacks. I am sick of it!”