Going Down Fast (32 page)

“It's all coming down on Leon. Clearly he invites people to use him. Me, for instance, now. But still—”

“Are you saying you're staying here platonically?”

She looked at him levelly. The amusement that had been working in her face along with a submerged tension, surfaced. “I am neither saying that nor its opposite. I am not saying anything like that, since it's clearly none of your business.”

“Insofar as I know both of you—”

“Oh, in a way.” But she was not truly interested in scoring off him. “I'm scared Leon will let her use him.”

He was not grateful she had let him off. “I think you'll find Leon taking care of himself. He never gets more involved with a woman than he means to.”

She made a wry face. “You're both bigger improvisors than the other thinks.”

She was wrapped in Leon like a flag. “I was always defending Leon and you were wondering why. If we've changed sides, it's not because Leon's changed any. He's the same confused guy.”

“As Leon says, last year I didn't see who he was. He claims Caroline has to be made to see who he is, in a similar way. I'm scared that she will and take him for the patsy he is. I mean, in regard to her.”

“You have the field in hand.”

She threw that away with her right hand. “But her need, her obvious urgent need is much greater.”

He felt dizzy. The conversation proceeded by rules known to her, not to him. He had a sore urge to make her talk about him instead of Leon. “Are you straight that I should marry her?”

“I know you're not up to that. Besides, I wouldn't, but I'm prejudiced, as Leon says. I told Leon in September you wouldn't marry her.”

“Thanks. I could have told him that in March. You know Vera broke up with me over this?”

She nodded. “Paul's relieved, of course. By the way, how is that fight coming? Are things happening there?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Where Vera teaches. The parents were trying to get the Board of Ed to bus the kids out to white schools with room. Finally they got fed up and then they were organizing to try to take over the school. You know anything recent?”

He did not know anything unrecent. How little Vera communicated to him. “I knocked on that door a long time. That's all I know.”

“Paul's a strange one too. Unlike Leon, I liked to see them together. They played with style. That moved me.”

There she coiled in the chair, the bow of her hips, breasts rubbing against the striped jersey. That he couldn't have her if he wanted seemed unreasonable. She had passed beyond him, miles past Sally bitter still at the party. Anna was not bitter. He had the bizarre feeling he could tell her his troubles and she would listen and cluck, thinking of Leon all the while.

“Leon says you're being nasty to Caroline because you feel guilty. And I do think you could make your position clear without being brutal. It isn't her fault you knocked her up.”

“If you use the expression ‘Leon says' once more, I'll pick you up and shake it out of you.”

She laughed. “Ah well, new disciples are the most earnest.”

“What are you a disciple to?”

“You've never taken him seriously.”

“Once or twice,” he said dryly.

“Well then.” She shrugged her round shoulders. He caught her glancing at the clock.

“If you'd got stuck I wouldn't have felt this way.”

“Gee thanks, dad. Why don't you go talk to her?”

“Instead of hanging around here? I can't argue her into an abortion. Jesus, she'll be some mother.”

“Leon thinks motherhood will redeem her—in spite of what it did to Joye. He has his illusions. Thinks it will fulfill her.”

“What would fulfill that girl? Disneyland?”

“Are you finding her a nuisance?” she asked with syrup and looked openly at the clock.

So he left. Climbing over a snowbank to the VW he shook his head. Then he grinned.

He used the newspaper first and then walked the streets. Got two narrow rooms at the top of a gray stone building back up in Herb's neighborhood, but on a poor scroungy street. A real place anyhow. To begin trying to figure out who the hell he was now. He wrote a check, got the key and sat back to the wall on the floor of the room with the bay. Not even shades. A period in his life had closed down. In almost all ways a good one but defunct, already the stuff of nostalgia and revision. In the interstices of a rich society he had lived. A society that paid him to entertain it and to preserve pieces of its urban folklore for future entertainment, and paid him better than his father had ever been paid for making its steel. Now he was cutting down his standard of living. He was preparing for something else.

Cracks, crevices. One time he had stayed in the Mecca with a friend, jazz composer who was making a living playing cocktail piano. He was working the freighters then, he was in between and somebody was getting married. So he slept at Fred's.

The Mecca had been built in the nineties as a fancy U-shaped block. Inside you walked down block-long arcades dim and echoey with the only light leaking through skylights four floors up and sixty years of city grime. Wrought iron balconies. Two thousand people lived there. It hummed. No sound came at you sharp. The building mumbled, kids playing in the interior streets, people yelling off the balconies, music. An elderly white woman lived there and a girl married to a bass player, but aside from them the only whites he saw those ten days were a bill collector and a social worker. Torn down. Two thousand gone noplace as cheap. Another institution ate it. He had lived in the cracks where people could now and then get together, disaffiliated but easy among themselves, and when a crack closed he found a new one. Thus he had lived in his society without confronting it, and now he did not know where to begin.

Saturday night. Not the local bars yet. He drove back down to Woody's. He drank at the bar, keeping to himself. He wanted to prolong his new mood until he understood it. He felt the bones of his life setting into a new form. He had been passive for too long. Vera had finally crawled into his arms because he seemed less menacing than the rest of the world. He had not been honest with her. He had waited around until she had shown him how she should be seduced. He had failed to make her want the risks he offered. Leon had been more successful with Anna: Leon had taken thorough possession. How much did he dislike that?

The beer made him feel bloated, so he switched to bourbon. He drank more from the habit of the week than desire for that thickening of mind tonight. Several thoughts seemed on the point of articulating themselves, but never came through. At the bar no enlightenment was going to descend. But he stood there and drank because he considered the night wasted already and because he did not want to go to Herb's couch but hardly relished sleeping on the bare floor. He exchanged a few words with friends but stayed at the bar because he felt too clotted with ideas and longings to talk.

The guy had been standing beside him a couple of minutes before he felt the stare on his face and turned. A guy his height, fairhaired, whose face was reddened with a tightly reined anger. A guy who stood in Woody's as if it stank in his nostrils, who wore a handsome tweed overcoat, leather gloves, and a hat. The hat should not be forgotten.

“You're George Rowley?” The thin lips opened just enough to emit the words. Piss on the tongue. “I'm Liggott. Bruce Liggott.”

He waited, puzzled. Guy wanting to pick a fight?

“Bruce Liggot, Caroline's fiancé.”

“Oh.” He looked into the blue eyes squinched with anger. He wanted to laugh, but invisibly.

“Are you coming outside, or do I hit you here?”

“Sure. Outside we go.” He finished the shot he didn't want and waved at Gus. Paid him. Followed the back of that handsome tweed overcoat out. Man to man. The jerk kept marching around the corner, toward the alley. On the way they passed a Jag at the curb. Caroline lowered the window as they went by and opened her mouth. Under the greenish streetlight her face looked pale, her open mouth very dark. She did not speak. Her breath stirred the fur of her collar. Rowley followed the jerk into the alley.

Anna

Friday, December 19–Saturday, December 27

“It was a goddamn madass stupid thing to do. Get yourself kicked out of school. Find yourself drafted next, cannon fodder. Jesus, you were thinking with your elbows!”

“It's not clear I'll be kicked out. And those people are losing their homes.”

“So you want to be a hero,” Leon muttered. “Fight cops, look for a little action. Fed up with your own life and problems. Time to run around the streets and feel like a man.”

“If a student isn't a man, what am I? Come on, these are my problems. I'm as black as anybody in those streets.”

“How much you got in common with a numbers runner? Think you could talk to him for five minutes? He's going to find you white. It's like I decided to identify with the Jews in the Mea Shearim who throw rocks at tourists.”

“Maybe I have to talk to him. Maybe he has to talk to me. Maybe that's the problem.” Paul slipped down on the couch with his legs stuck way out, his hands in fists.

Leon rubbed his hands against the cold. “Look, maybe I'm no one to talk. I got myself tossed out for boosting books. But—”

“It's not the same thing!”

“Damn straight it's not. I needed the bread.”

“Look. You're telling me I was raised lucky.” Paul felt for the words. “The cost of being black has eaten me less maybe than the cost of being a Jameson. Of course people have kicked me in the face and so on—”

“Has anybody ever kicked you in the face, I mean for real?”

“Of course not,” Paul said. “You know what I mean.”

“You know what I mean too,” Leon drawled.

Oh god. She stared from one to the other. What was eating Leon?

“I was trying to say that being black had worked to my advantage too. Not for Vera, even. I could choose my school. I got a good scholarship. Frats approached me. The first thing I liked about you was that you didn't come any further for me than for anybody else—you came that far for everybody.”

“But now you don't listen. You don't ask advice. You go around with plans in your head you're not open about—”

“A thing I had to do. Since I went to those hearings.”

“With your sister and Rowley. He's all for dashing around. If he's a sort of sloppy pink it's because it runs in his family, like being Baptist or Lutheran. Sing him ‘Solidarity Forever' and he takes off his cap. Mushy politics, mushy thinking, mushy feeling.”

Paul was drawn up now, staring. “Who cares about my inner hangups? Haven't you said time and again you can tell a person's real ideas by what they do? What they put on the line?”

“What did you put on the line playing tag with a bulldozer? Throwing rocks at a wrecking ball, is that what you think?”

Paul shook his head helplessly. “The bad part was, there were some black guys on the wrecking crew. They felt like we were trying to take their jobs away. They were ready to fight us.”

“‘I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.' Jay Gould. A favorite quote of Rowley's. Throwing yourself at a bulldozer can't do anything only because the wrong man is driving it.”

They looked at her blankly. Intruding in their private quarrel. Leon felt betrayed because Paul had acted without him. Paul felt betrayed because Leon could not understand his act. They nursed their betrayals. It ended with Paul walking out, slamming the big door so the glass rattled.

Leon sat in a thick brutish silence, picking his nose. On the sagging couch she skimmed the newspaper fat with Christmas ads. “Why are you taking it this way?”

He gave her a grimace deploring stupidity. He looked sunk into his chair. His depression yellowed the air.

“Want to go to a movie?”

“We've seen everything twice.”

“We could go to Woody's.”

“Alcohol is a notorious poison.”

“Are you hungry? How about a pizza?”

“We're always feeding our faces. You never think of anything else.”

“So get out the projector.”

“Why don't you just ask me to slit my throat?”

“It's a pity you don't have music,” she said helplessly.

“Joye took the hi fi. That bitch.”

She did the supper dishes and read and worried. The rooms were cold and she fiddled with the stove. Then it was late and Leon stirred himself and they went to bed: like husband and wife, unspeaking, indifferent, in the double bed.

After five minutes of dark he poked her with his elbow. “Hey, you want to?”

She laughed and put her arm around him. She had no sense of doing a new thing. His warm, blocklike, somewhat inert hairy body was familiar. Worry had left acid in her muscles, and she could not gather herself into great excitement. The room was cold and its iron air pressed on them. They huddled under the full load of covers awkward, fumbling, patient. Like children, children figuring it out. They were quiet. She felt a little shy. He was gentle, his hands and mouth light, cool, careful—leaves on her.

They wriggled out of their clothes. Side by side they lay under the blankets and quilt and shifted here and gave there and poked around until he had come into her and still they were side by side facing. Slowly he moved in her and she seconded him cautiously. The bed hardly creaked. Every once in a while he would slip out. Each time he fitted himself back she grew more excited. Coming into her freshly he felt hot. Side by side they lay at ease except for the slow cautious fuck with its more and more but still localized excitement.

It was a game: that each scarcely moved. That she held her breath tightly controlled and never let it break from her. That his hands on her and hers on him were casual open palms that did not close. The roots of the game ran into childhood furtive curiosities and explorations, into the attics and basements and garages and tents of that first green and snotty sex. They did not challenge or threaten. Side by side they met in subtle exercise and the excitement was local and intense as an itch and full of teasing.