Lonely Crusade (39 page)

And thus they started up the ladder to the way it might have been. “Why were you angry at me?” she asked. “You mean when I left? I wasn’t angry with you.”

“You sounded hurt. Is that why you did it—to hurt me back?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes on hers, and after a moment added as if thinking aloud: “To get something, I guess.”

She waited so long he thought she would not reply, then she asked: “Did you?”

“Can’t you tell? It makes now possible.”

“I’m glad,” she said, and after a moment added: “It seems like a thousand years ago, in another life, and I was very foolish then.”

“You were never very foolish.”

“I was always foolish, because I wanted you afraid of me.”

“I was afraid,” he said. “That’s partly why I did it.”

“Darling, why did you let me make you so afraid of me?”

“Of myself, too. Of how I might feel about you in the end.”

“How do you feel?”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. And now tomorrow. And now always.”

“I love you now.”

“Oh, darling, darling, darling—”

And then they kissed again and got up and left the food because they could not eat anymore. They did not turn out the kitchen light or turn on the bedroom light in their urgency. And then it was after midnight and they showered again.

“You don’t feel badly about me?” she asked.

“Why should I?”

“About what happened to me?”

“Of course I feel badly about what they did to you. I’d like to kill the dirty bastards!”

She had such a tired, warm, lovely, luxurious, satisfied feeling clinging lazily to him in the lukewarm bath that her emotions were diffused and the Communist Party seemed very far away.

“You shouldn’t, darling. I’m not angry at them myself anymore. If it hadn’t been me it would have been someone else.”

“Why couldn’t it have been Luther?”

“You should know why not, Lee. For the same reason the party hasn’t framed you. They hate you—or do you know it?”

“I know it.”

“But as long as you’re a Negro, they’re not going to touch you.”

“For a long time then,” he said and laughed, and it was not a bitter laugh. Then after a moment he added: “Rotten bastards!”

“Darling, you’re hurting me,” she said. “You’re pulling my hair and water’s getting in my eyes. And this is hardly the place for a political discussion anyway. Or the time.”

“You’re sweet,” he said, and kissed her in the water.

“I’m sleepy, darling.”

But when they had returned to bed she could not go to sleep. “You know, now that I am out of it, I wonder how I ever was a Communist.”

“You were just playing at it. I could tell that when I first saw you.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was serious. I believed in it. And yet I’ve always known what they were like.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I mean more than you could get to know if you were not a member. They wanted me to make you frame McKinley.”

“I know. You should have gotten out then.”

“I didn’t think that they would do this thing to me.”

“Why not you, baby? What was your claim to immunity from a Communist like Bart?”

“I—You know how everyone is, darling. You never expect anything to happen to yourself.” After a moment she added as if it troubled her: “I talked to Maud Himmelstein trying to get back.”

“The one-armed woman? What did she have to say?”

“It was a funny thing. At the time I thought she was only trying to hurt me. But after I had left her I had a funny feeling that maybe she wanted to help.”

“I doubt it—” And then: “Jackie—”

“Yes, Lee?”

“Did you put the thing about the Rasmus Johnson case in my pocket?” Now he could ask.

And suddenly she was crying again. “Oh, Lee! Oh, darling! I don’t know why I did it!”

The taste of tears; the feel of sobbing in his arms—

“But now it’s different, isn’t it?”

“You know it’s different! You know it, darling! You know it!”

“And you are mine?”

“Oh, Lee! I am forever yours.”

“Without regret?”

“Yes, yes, without regret, I am yours—”

Lost—

Gasping, choking, now breathing again. Now cooling. Tears drying. Talking again—

“I’m going to see Foster tomorrow.”

“What good would that do?”

“I could get a statement and send it to the dailies.”

“They wouldn’t use it.”

“They would if I put enough dirt in it about the party.”

“But you’d have to name me. You’d be in it, too. It’d become so involved. I can’t go through all that again, darling.”

“You want to hurt them, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes—No—I don’t know what I want to do. All I want right now is for you to love me, darling.”

“Baby—”

“Not like that. Not now. Not again. I mean in your heart.”

“I do love you in my heart.”

“I want you to love me like that, too. Oh yes, I want you to, darling. But I’m not used to so much at one time.”

“Nor am I.”

“But you’ve had a lot of practice.”

“Not for you. There never was any practice for you.”

“You overwhelm me, darling.” But after a moment: “And there’s your wife you have to think about, too, Lee. The papers would put our names together.”

Now in the softly running silence: “Jackie—”

“Yes, Lee?”

“I’m going to leave Ruth.”

“No, darling.”

“But I want to.”

“No, darling. That isn’t the answer either.”

“But I must.”

“No, Lee. That would hurt her terribly.”

“She wouldn’t care,” he said bitterly. “She wouldn’t give a damn.”

And now they let the silence run again.

“Jackie, don’t you see? This is it! This is all of it! Nothing else will ever matter!”

“Oh, Lee, I don’t want to hurt anybody. I’ve been hurt so badly myself I can’t bear to see anyone else hurt.”

“Did they hurt you so much, baby?”

“Hold me, Lee. Hold me tight, darling.”

Then she was crying again—

“The bastards! The dirty, rotten, lousy bastards!”

Now the sound of sobbing and the shaking of her body in his arms—

“You know that night you played the symphony when I was going home—I had the strangest feeling that the earth was being lost and only heaven would be left, and I wanted so much to be in love with you I ached with it.”

“If I could be that,” she whispered as if in awe. “If I could be heaven and always have you in my heart.”

After that nothing was real. It was fantasy, ecstasy, dread, and apprehension. And it was glory. They did not need a thing—neither people nor food nor sleep nor the world. There was too much of each other within the hours that they would never have. And the hours passed through this enchanted unreality, wired together and meteoric.

One of them he spent with Smitty in his office, tendering his resignation—thinking at the time: “I’ve always been a fool.”—Because he had to give her something.

Smitty would not accept his resignation. ‘Take a few days off, Lee. You’re upset.”

“Yes, I am upset, Smitty,” he said. “But after what the union did to Jackie Forks I am through with it.”

“Lee, as I’ve said to you before, the union of workers is a bigger proposition than any one person, whoever that person may be.”

“That may be true, Smitty, but you can not crucify people and expect to have a union.”

“We don’t have the union, Lee; the union is the workers.”

“Or expect to have the workers—to have their confidence in order to build a union.”

“We must have the workers’ confidence, Lee. You know that. But if some one gets hurt, inadvertently, accidentally, or deliberately, the union will go on, Lee, and have the workers’ confidence. No matter how much we might hate the fact of some on getting hurt—”

“Crucified! Framed-up—”

“Crucified, then. No matter how much we may hate it, we have to keep working for the union, keep our confidence in it, and keep building up the confidence of others. Unionization is a fact of salvation for the working class. The only fact. There’ll be more and more people working toward that end. If not you or me, someone else. Only, I hope it will also be you, Lee. I like you, man.”

“I don’t have anything personal against you, Smitty. But I’m through with this union.”

“Well, think it over, Lee. I’ll wait.”

“You don’t have to wait, Smitty. I’ve already thought it over.”

And later Jackie cried: “If our being together is going to hurt you, darling, then we shouldn’t be together.”

“Do you really mean that, Jackie?”

“Oh, darling, you know I don’t mean that. But I don’t want to hurt anybody. Not you, darling! Not you! I want it to be the best of everything for you.”

“It is the best of everything.”

“But you quit your job.”

“Jackie, you don’t understand. I had to.”

“Why, Lee? Because of me?”

“Because of you.”

“I ought to go away and leave you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“But what about your wife?” For at some moment within each hour Ruth was there between them.

And then she was crying again—She cried in his arms—at the beginning and at the end and even afterwards as they lay in each other’s arms, spent—spent but not finished, not done, not through. They cried out for a leveling, a fusing, a meeting, a togetherness of spirit, and a communion of soul—a fulfillment of themselves in each other.

They sought for it in music, confessing their emotions as the records played.

And they sought for it in words. At sundown she read him love poems with the bruised, splashed sunset in the window framing her hair in a flaming aureole, while he lay on the davenport watching the motion of her lips and the expression of her eyes. They laughed at a Shakespearean sally: “If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! if to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned: if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved…”

And that night they talked of skin color as if it were a casual thing.

“I love to watch your muscles ripple. They’re like fluid bronze.”

“Where did you get this?” he asked, fingering the tiny scar at her hairline.

“Playing when I was a little girl.”

“You must have played awfully rough.”

“I always play rough.”

“And get hart too.”

And it was back again—the awful hurt. And she was in his arms—the anodyne of sex—seeking, searching, hoping for fulfillment.

And sometimes it was almost sacred—but never quite. And sometimes it was weird as from phase to phase they ventured.

When the mood struck them, they dressed and went out, seeking it in the company of others. They went to shows, bars, the South Side, the beach, or just walking hand in hand along Hollywood Boulevard—at any time. Time meant nothing—only as an enemy. For they were two people bent on having everything there was to have of each other in their allotted time.

At first to Lee Gordon it was as if he had been in a shell or had been inanimate and was just coming to life. Food tasted better and skin felt softer and breasts were warmer and sleep was lovely. And that was when they almost reached it.

But they could not fulfill each other, for they had two strikes on them from the first. Out of their lives as they had lived them, came the shadow of their racial differences. And between them some time within each hour there was Ruth—and each time Jackie felt more like a whore.

Lee felt this in her, and he said as reassurance: “I’d like to have a son.”

For a long moment she did not move or breathe, and then she asked: “What color do you think he would be?”

“Probably a beautiful sepia like McKinley’s kids.”

“That’s it, Lee.”

“That’s what?”

“He’d be a Negro son.”

“Well—yes.” This was the first major disappointment.

But that was the way it was—if not Ruth, it was race, and most times it was both.

It hung over their heads, staining every moment with a blind, futile desperation, beneath which everything was distorted and magnified all out of proportion, so now things that should have been stirring became hurting, and minor incidents that might have sunk beneath a kiss grew into deep frustrations.

One day in a little cafe on Western Avenue they heard a recording of King Cole’s
I’m Lost
, and that was the way she felt. Always afterward, wherever she was, sipping rum and cola at a bar, or eating barbecue on Central Avenue, it made her cry. And whenever anyone looked at her for crying, Lee Gordon wanted to fight.

He wanted to kick in the juke boxes and break the records. He wanted to strike out at anything, any place, that hurt her.

And yet at times, from this frustration of unfulfillment, he wanted to hurt her himself. He did not understand it. He was ashamed of it and tried to hide it. But she could see it in his eyes.

“Go ahead and hit me.”

“I don’t want to hit you.”

“You can’t hurt me any more than I am already hurt.”

“Jackie, stop it! Stop it, please!”

“Why don’t you? You want to.”

“Why should I want to?”

They had tried so many things that sex was running stale…But each time afterwards they went a little farther, for since they could not make it to the top, it seemed as if they would try it to the bottom.

The fifth night the telephone rang. She turned to answer it. “Hello—

“Now?—

“But I can’t now—

“I’ll call you back—”

And then she turned over to Lee. “It was some smart aleck producer who’s been trying to make me,” she said casually.

“What did he want now?”

“He wanted me to spend the night with him. He’s always calling me up asking me to come to his apartment.”

He did not answer, for the thought of her in another’s arms was horrifying.

“He offered me a hundred dollars.”

“The cheap bastard,” he said, trying to keep it light.

Then, at the end of the long pregnant silence: “Lee—”

“What, Jackie?”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Go where?”

“To make the hundred dollars.”

“Jackie!”

“I’d be a whore for you, Lee.”

“Please stop it, Jackie.”