Going to Meet the Man (22 page)

“No,” says Ada, “it doesn’t matter.” She looks up. “It’s almost morning.”

“I would gladly,” says Vidal, stammering, “gladly—”

But she is herself again. “I wouldn’t think of it. We had a wonderful time tonight, a wonderful time, and I wouldn’t think of it.” She turns to me with that urchin-like grin. “It was wonderful meeting you. I hope you won’t have too much trouble getting used to the States again.”

“Oh, I don’t think I will,” I say. And then, “I hope you won’t.”

“No,” she says, “I don’t think anything they can do will surprise me any more.”

“Which way are we all going?” asks Vidal. “I hope someone will share my taxi with me.”

But he lives in the sixteenth arrondissement, which is not in
anyone’s direction. We walk him to the line of cabs standing under the clock at Odéon.

And we look each other in the face, in the growing morning light. His face looks weary and lined and lonely. He puts both hands on my shoulders and then puts one hand on the nape of my neck. “Do not forget me, Chico,” he says. “You must come back and see us, one of these days. Many of us depend on you for many things.”

“I’ll be back,” I say. “I’ll never forget you.”

He raises his eyebrows and smiles. “
Alors, Adieu.
”

“
Adieu, Vidal.
”

“I was happy to meet all of you,” he says. He looks at Ada. “Perhaps we will meet again before you leave.”

“Perhaps,” she says. “Goodby, Monsieur Vidal.”

“Goodby.”

Vidal’s cab drives away. “I also leave you now,” I say. “I must go home and wake up my son and prepare for our journey.”

I leave them standing on the corner, under the clock, which points to six. They look very strange and lost and determined, the four of them. Just before my cab turns off the boulevard, I wave to them and they wave back.

Mme. Dumont is in the hall, mopping the floor.

“Did all my family get home?” I ask. I feel very cheerful, I do not know why.

“Yes,” she says, “they are all here. Paul is still sleeping.”

“May I go in and get him?”

She looks at me in surprise. “Of course.”

So I walk into her apartment and walk into the room where Paul lies sleeping. I stand over his bed for a long time.

Perhaps my thoughts traveled—travel through to him. He opens his eyes and smiles up at me. He puts a fist to his eyes and raises his arms. “
Bonjour, Papa.
”

I lift him up. “
Bonjour.
How do you feel today?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet,” he says.

I laugh. I put him on my shoulder and walk out into the hall. Mme. Dumont looks up at him with her radiant, aging face.

“Ah,” she says, “you are going on a journey! How does it feel?”

“He doesn’t know yet,” I tell her. I walk to the elevator door and open it, dropping Paul down to the crook of my arm.

She laughs again. “He will know later. What a journey!
Fusqu’au nouveau monde!
”

I open the cage and we step inside. “Yes,” I say, “all the way to the new world.” I press the button and the cage, holding my son and me, goes up.

P
AUL
did not yet feel her eyes on him. She watched him. He went to the window, peering out between the slats in the Venetian blinds. She could tell from his profile that it did not look like a pleasant day. In profile, all of the contradictions that so confounded her seemed to be revealed. He had a boy’s long, rather thin neck but it supported a head that seemed even more massive than it actually was because of its plantation of thickly curling black hair, hair that was always a little too long or else, cruelly, much too short. His forehead was broad and high but this austerity was contradicted by a short, blunt, almost ludicrously upturned nose. And he had a large mouth and very heavy, sensual lips, which suggested a certain wry cruelty when turned down but looked like the mask of comedy when he laughed. His body was really excessively black with hair, which proved, she said, since Negroes were generally less hairy than whites, which race, in fact, had moved farthest from the ape. Other people did not see his beauty, which always mildly astonished her—it was like thinking that the sun was ordinary. He was sloppy about the way he stood and sat, that was true, and so his shoulders were already beginning to be round. And he was a poor man’s son, a city boy, and so his body could not really remind anyone of a Michelangelo statue as she—“fantastically,” he said—claimed; it did not have that luxury or that power. It was economically tense and hard and testified only to the agility of the poor, who are always dancing one step ahead of the devil.

He stepped away from the window, looking worried. Ruth closed her eyes. When she opened them he was disappearing away from her down the short, black hall that led to the bathroom. She wondered what time he had come in last night; she wondered if he had a hangover; she heard the water running. She thought that he had probably not been home long. She was very sensitive to his comings and goings and had often
found herself abruptly upright and wide awake a moment after he, restless at two-thirty in the morning, had closed the door behind him. Then there was no more sleep for her. She lay there on a bed that inexorably became a bed of ashes and hot coals, while her imagination dwelt on every conceivable disaster, from his having forsaken her for another woman to his having, somehow, ended up in the morgue. And as the night faded from black to gray to daylight, the telephone began to seem another presence in the house, sitting not far from her like a great, malevolent black cat that might, at any moment, with one shrill cry, scatter her life like dismembered limbs all over this tiny room. There were places she could have called, but she would have died first. After all—he had only needed to point it out once, he would never have occasion to point it out again—they were not married. Often she had pulled herself out of bed, her loins cold and all her body trembling, and gotten dressed and had coffee and gone to work without seeing him. But he would call her in the office later in the day. She would have had several stiff drinks at lunch and so could be very offhand over the phone, pretending that she had only supposed him to have gotten up a little earlier than herself that morning. But the moment she put the receiver down she hated him. She made herself sick with fantasies of how she would be revenged. Then she hated herself; thinking into what an iron maiden of love and hatred he had placed her, she hated him even more. She could not help feeling that he treated her this way because of her color, because she was a colored girl. Then her past and her present threatened to engulf her. She knew she was being unfair; she could not help it; she thought of psychiatry; she saw herself transformed, at peace with the world, herself, her color, with the male of indeterminate color she would have found. Always, this journey round her skull ended with tears, resolutions, prayers, with Paul’s face, which then had the power to reconcile her even to the lowest circle of hell.

After work, on the way home, she stopped for another drink, or two or three; bought Sen-Sen to muffle the odor; wore the most casually glowing of smiles as he casually kissed her when she came through the door.

She knew that he was going to leave her. It was in his walk, his talk, his eyes. He wanted to go. He had already moved back, crouching to leap. And she had no rival. He was not going to another woman. He simply wanted to go. It would happen today, tomorrow, three weeks from today; it was over, she could do nothing about it; neither could she save herself by jumping first. She had no place to go, she only wanted him. She had tried hard to want other men, and she was still young, only twenty-six, and there was no real lack of opportunity. But all she knew about other men was that they were not Paul.

Through the gloom of the hallway he came back into the room and, moving to the edge of the bed, lit a cigarette. She smiled at him.

“Good morning,” she said. “Would you light one for me too?”

He looked down at her with a sleepy and slightly shame-faced grin. Without a word he offered her his freshly lit cigarette, lit another, and then got into bed, shivering slightly.

“Good morning,” he said then. “Did you sleep well?”

“Very well,” she said, lightly. “Did you? I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Ah, I was very quiet,” he said teasingly, curling his great body toward her and putting his head on her breast. “I didn’t want to wake you up. I was afraid you’d hit me with something.”

She laughed. “What time
did
you come in?”

“Oh”—he raised his head, dragging on his cigarette, and half-frowned, half-smiled—“about an hour or so ago.”

“What did you do? Find a new after-hours joint?”

“No. I ran into Cosmo. We went over to his place to look at
a couple new paintings he’s done. He had a bottle, we sat around.”

She knew Cosmo and distrusted him. He was about forty and he had had two wives; he did not think women were worth much. She was sure that Cosmo had been giving Paul advice as to how to be rid of her; she could imagine, or believed she could, how he had spoken about her, and she felt her skin tighten. At the same moment she became aware of the warmth of Paul’s body.

“What did you talk about?” she asked.

“Oh. Painting. His paintings, my paintings, all God’s chillun’s paintings.”

During the day, while she was at work, Paul painted in the back room of this cramped and criminally expensive Village apartment, where the light was bad and where there was not really room enough for him to step back and look at his canvas. Most of his paintings were stored with a friend. Still, there were enough, standing against the wall, piled on top of the closet and on the table, for a sizable one-man show. “If they were any good,” said Paul, who worked very hard. She knew this, despite the fact that he said so rather too often. She knew by his face, his distance, his quality, frequently, of seeming to be like a spring, unutterably dangerous to touch. And by the exhaustion, different in kind from any other, with which he sometimes stretched out in bed.

She thought—of course—that his paintings were very good, but he did not take her judgment seriously. “You’re sweet, funnyface,” he sometimes said, “but, you know, you aren’t really very bright.” She was scarcely at all mollified by his adding. “Thank heaven. I hate bright women.”

She remembered, now, how stupid she had felt about music all the time she had lived with Arthur, a man of her own color who had played a clarinet. She was still finding out today, so many years after their breakup, how much she had learned from him—not only about music, unluckily. If I stay on this
merry-go-round, she thought, I’m going to become very accomplished, just the sort of girl no man will every marry.

She moved closer to Paul, the fingers of one hand playing with his hair. He lay still. It was very silent.

“Ruth,” he said finally, “I’ve been thinking …”

At once she was all attention. She drew on her cigarette, her fingers still drifting through his hair, as though she were playing with water.

“Yes?” she prompted.

She had always wondered, when the moment came, if she would make things easy for him, or difficult. She still did not know. He leaned up on one elbow, looking down at her. She met his eyes, hoping that her own eyes reflected nothing but calm curiosity. He continued to stare at her and put one hand on her short, dark hair. Then, “You’re a nice girl,” he said, irrelevantly, and leaned down and kissed her.

With a kiss!
she thought.

“My father wouldn’t think so,” she said, “if he could see me now. What is you’ve been thinking?”

He still said nothing but only looked down at her, an expression in his eyes that she could not read.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “that it’s about time I got started on that portrait of you. I ought to get started right away.”

She felt, very sharply, that his nerve had failed him. But she felt, too, that his decision, now, to do a portrait of her was a means of moving far away enough from her to be able to tell her the truth. Also, he had always said that he could do something wonderful with her on canvas—it would be foolish to let the opportunity pass. Cosmo had probably told him this. She had always been flattered by his desire to paint her but now she hoped that he would suddenly go blind.

“Anytime,” she said, and could not resist, “Am I to be part of a gallery?”

“Yeah. I’ll probably be able to sell you for a thousand bucks,” he said, and kissed her again.

“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” she murmured.

“You’re a funny girl. What’s not nice about a thousand dollars?” He leaned over her to put out his cigarette in the ash tray near the bed; then took hers and put it out too. He fell back against her and put his hand on her breast.

She said, tentatively: “Well, I suppose if you do it often enough, I could stop working.”

His arms tightened but she did not feel that this was due entirely to desire; it might be said that he was striving, now, to distract her. “If I do
what
enough?” he grinned.

“Now, now,” she smiled, “you just said that I was a nice girl.”

“You’re one of the nicest girls I ever met,” said Paul soberly. “Really you are. I often wonder …”

“You often wonder what?”

“What’s going to become of you.”

She felt like a river trying to run two ways at once: she felt herself shrinking from him, yet she flowed toward him too; she knew he felt it. “But as long as you’re with me,” she said, and she could not help herself, she felt she was about to cry; she held his face between her hands, pressing yet closer against him. “As long as you’re with me.” His face was white, his eyes glowed: there was a war in him too. Everything that divided them charged, for an instant, the tiny space between them. Then the veils of habit and desire covered both their eyes.

“Life is very long,” said Paul at last. He kissed her. They both sighed. And slowly she surrendered, opening up before him like the dark continent, made mad and delirious and blind by the entry of a mortal as bright as the morning, as white as milk.