Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (41 page)

“
You
look at Paul Robeson. Robeson was a football star, he's one of the greatest singers in the world, and one of the most handsome men in the world, and he's built like a hero. You think he's a good model for me?”

“Oh, shut up. You know what I mean.”

“And, with all that, what's he played?
The Emperor Jones
and
Othello.
”

“I didn't say that you looked like Paul Robeson. I said that your voice is an asset, and you ought to use it. People will hear you, and that means that they'll see you, and—well, there
are
other roles besides
The Emperor Jones
and
Othello.
”

“There are? You've really been scouting around.”

“And you could start this winter. Really, why don't you? So we'd both be working—”

“You have a job lined up for this winter already?”

“No. But I've heard of a couple of things. I was going to go down to the city next week to—to investigate. You know, this is August. The summer's almost over.”

“I know.” For no reason at all, I thought of Dinah Washington, singing “Blowtop Blues.”

“And I know you've been practicing the guitar. And there are places in the Village where you could start out. Oh, you know, there's that West Indian restaurant. I bet they'd be glad to have you start out there.”

“If they want people to sing West Indian songs, why would they come to
me?
I'm not West Indian.”

“Oh, Leo, you are too. You're
part
West Indian. You're just putting up objections so I can knock them down. I know you. It's a damn good idea, and you know it.”

I had thought about it before; I began to think about it again. “Maybe.”

“You could be the singing waiter.” She laughed. “You'd be a tremendous drawing card.”

I thought, It's true that I have to start somewhere. I said, “I'm not ready to start singing in public yet.”

“But, Leo, the whole point of starting out in a place like that is that you haven't got to be
ready.
They'll think you're doing it just for fun. But that's how you'll
learn.
”

“And I can just see me, twenty years from now, playing my guitar all over the Bowery.”

“You will not. You'll use it to get what you want.”

“I'm not always sure that I know what I want.” I held her a little closer and I stared at our little fire.

“I think—sometimes—when a person says that, he just says it because he's—afraid—that he won't get what he wants.”

“Maybe. But you know what
you
want. Don't you?”

“I know that I want some things I'll never get.”

“What things?”

She shifted her weight a little. “Oh. You know. The corny things. A husband. A home.” She paused. “Kids.”

“Why can't you have those things, Barbara?”

“Maybe I don't want them enough,” she said. “I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.” I felt her watching me. “It's funny. I haven't turned out to be the kind of girl I thought I'd be. I'm not yet twenty, and I've had, oh, about three affairs and one abortion already. It makes you feel kind of used up. And sometimes I get frightened—oh, well.” She sighed, and shrugged, smiling. “Sing me another song.”

“After what you've said, I don't know what song to sing. Poor Barbara. I don't make your life any simpler, do I?”

“I'm not complaining. You didn't make the world.”

“No,” I said, “I didn't.” I looked up at the sky. “Sometimes, you know? I still wonder who did. I wonder what whoever it was was thinking about.”

“He wasn't,” she said, with an unexpected harshness in her voice, “thinking about you and me.”

“No. What rotten casting,” I said, and we laughed.

“Sing me one more song, please?” she said. “Before we go to sleep.”

I sang,

We crawled into our sleeping bag at last, and lay
there for awhile, watching the fire drop and disperse and die. The stars were very close, and I saw one fall. I made a wish. I wished that Barbara and I, no matter what happened, would always love each other and always be able, without any bitterness, to look each other in the eye. The familiar and yet rather awful heat and pressure rose in my chest and descended to my loins; and I lay there, while the heat wrapped me round, holding Barbara with one arm and feeling her delicate trembling. The heat rose and rose, partly against my will, partly to my delight. For I was beginning to realize that vows were made with the body as sacred as those made with the tongue. And these vows were at once harder to keep, and harder to break. We turned to each other. Everything was still. We began to make love very slowly, more gently and more sorrowfully than we ever had before. We did not say a word. Every caress seemed to drag us up from the depths of ourselves, revealing another nakedness, a nakedness we could scarcely bear. Her face, in the starlight, in the faint light of the embers of our fire, was a face I had never known. I caressed that face, and held it and kissed it, with that passion sometimes produced by memory, the passion of our deepest dreams. I seemed to know, that night, that we were trapped, trapped no matter what we did: we would have to learn to live in the trap. But that night it did not seem impossible. Nothing seemed impossible. Barbara began to moan. It was a black moan, and it was as though, trapped within the flesh I held, there was a black woman moaning, struggling to be free. Perhaps it was because we were beneath the starlight, naked. I had unzipped the sleeping bag, and the August night traveled over my body, as I trembled over Barbara. It was as
though we were not only joined to each other, but to the night, the stars, the moon, the sleeping valley, the trees, the earth beneath the stone which was our bed, and the water beneath the earth. With every touch, movement, caress, with every thrust, with every moan and gasp, I came closer to Barbara and closer to myself and closer to something unnameable. And her thighs locked around me, sweeter than water. She held me, held me, held me. And I was very slow. I was very sure. I held it, held it, held it, held it because I knew it could not long be held. All this had nothing to do with time. The moment of our liberation gathered, gathered, crouched, ready to spring, and Barbara sobbed; the wind burned my body, and I felt the unmistakable, the unanswerable retreat, contraction, concentration, the long, poised moment before the long fall. I murmured,
Barbara,
and seemed to hear her name, my call, ringing through the valley. And her name echoed in the valley for a long time. Then the stars began to grow pale. I zipped the sleeping bag over us. We curled into each other, and slept. We had not spoken.

It was a bright morning. The sun woke us early, and, naked, we dared to wash, and splash each other in the cold stream which trickled near the path. The silver cold water stung us wide awake, and made us proud of our bodies. Naked, I built the fire, and boiled our coffee. Naked and happy, facing each other, we drank it. We became drunk on the sun and the coffee and our nakedness and touched each other's bodies with a terrible wonder everywhere and we had to make love again. Then, we were covered with sweat, and we washed in the stream again. Then, the sun was high, warning us that the world might be on the way, and we got dressed. I rolled up the sleeping bag, and
Barbara packed the knapsack, and we started down. No one was coming up the trail. It was a bright, clear, still morning, and birds were making those sounds we call singing. As we descended, my fear began to return, like the throb of a remembered toothache before the new toothache begins.

As we approached the clearing which held the old ladies' home, just coming off the trail, now, and walking on level ground, one of the old ladies, silver hair and silver spectacles flashing, stepped down from the porch with astonishing speed and came running toward us, waving a newspaper above her head as though it were a banner. Barbara and I were too astounded even to look at each other. We were both afraid that the lady would fall, and we began to run toward her so that she wouldn't have to run toward us. But she kept running, just the same. When we reached her, she was out of breath, and she just sat down on the grass. “Look,” she said, “look!”

We were afraid that she was ill, and we simply stared at her.

“Look,” she said again,
“look!”
With one hand, she pounded the newspaper into the grass. “The war is over. The war is over.”

Then I saw that she had been crying. Some of the other ladies were standing on the porch. We looked down at the newspaper. Well, we understood that the war was over; for a long time, that was all that we understood. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two cities we had never heard of, had been leveled with single, unprecedented bombs. At first, I only wished that I had paid more attention to mathematics and physics when I had been in high school; what did it mean to split the atom? The old lady kept
making sounds between tears and jubilation. I kept thinking,
They didn't drop it on the Germans. The Germans are white. They dropped it on the Japanese. They dropped it on the yellow-bellied Japs.
I stared at the old lady. She was still sitting on the grass. She stared up at me, but I knew she wasn't seeing me. “Isn't it wonderful?” she cried. “Isn't it wonderful? This terrible war is over.
Over!
”

We helped her to her feet.

“Yes,” said Barbara, terribly pale in the merciless sun, “yes, it's wonderful that the war is over.”

“Truly wonderful,” I said, parroting Father Divine—I did not know what I was saying.

We began walking the old lady back to the porch. The other old ladies had gathered now, and they, too, were jubilant. But, unlike the first old lady, they were not blind with jubilation. Behind their spectacles, they watched Barbara with a disapproving wonder and they watched me with a profound distrust; they made a sound like dry pebbles on the bed of a vanished stream. Some they loved had died in the war, in this particular war, for they remembered others. Some they loved were coming home. Their hands, their faces, their voices shook, wavered, cracked, climbed. They looked at me from time to time, and they were not unwilling to include me, but they addressed themselves, in the main, to Barbara. Something made them know, somehow, that their day of jubilee might not be mine. And I was base, I must say. I watched them, and I pitied them. I pitied them with a pity not easily distinguished from contempt, which was yet informed by wonder. They were rejoicing. The faith of their fathers—living yet!—had made them victorious
over their enemies—had they ever considered me their friend? What was most vague in their consciousness was most precise and alive in mine. But they were old—old ladies rejoicing in the light of the August morning. I felt that they had little enough to rejoice about.

At last we were moving away, waving, smiling to the last. We got into the car. They remained on the porch, and waved as we drove away. Then, Barbara said, with a shudder, “Maybe we better not drive through town. They'll all be in the streets.”

And so we drove back the way we had come, but we were not left in peace for long. As night was falling, some of the Workshop kids came over, to carry us to the San-Marquands. They were having a Victory Ball.

Caleb had been wounded in the European theater, and they had shipped him home. And, again, my memory here is vague. I talked with Caleb about it only once. He was wounded in the lung, and he very nearly died. He was in a military hospital for a long time, but I know I didn't see him in the hospital. I can't remember why. I know my mother and father went down to see him. I remember that they wanted me to come, too, but they couldn't find me—something like that. I think that I was simply afraid to see Caleb. He had already written us a couple of letters about having found the Lord. When he came back to New York, I don't know where I was; by the time I saw him, he had already joined The New Dispensation House of God. He told me he was saved. And then I didn't see him.

Barbara and I came back to New York when the summer ended. We made the mistake—though I don't
know if one can accurately describe as a mistake what one couldn't help doing—of returning to Paradise Alley. Well, I had a feeling that we should not have gone there: but we had no place else to go. And, at least, we knew Paradise Alley. It was a decrepit slum, and it didn't matter to the landlord
who
lived there. We didn't have the courage to tackle a strange landlord, and I didn't have any money.

Being back in Paradise Alley meant that we were confronted with the debris of our recent past. Jerry's socks and shoes, sweatshirts, jockstrap, blue jeans, ties, notes in his handwriting, a photograph of Jerry and Barbara, a photograph of Jerry and Charlie and me—all of us looking historical. There was all my old shit, my winter clothes—by which I mean, principally, sweaters—and heavy shoes, everything referring to a life we had ceased to live. But all of it menaced the life we hoped to live. Silently, we were sickened by it, silently we were reproached. We put it all in two boxes and hid the boxes in a corner of the room. (For, one day, the owners might arrive.) And we settled down. We tried to settle down. Barbara got a job as a waitress. And I got a job at the West Indian restaurant as a waiter, a waiter who sang. Late some nights, after we had finished serving, I would take down my guitar and sing a few songs. Barbara had been right. They liked it, and it was good for me. That job held Barbara and me together, that winter, longer than we might have stayed together. And the job had an effect, obliquely, on my career. A singing black waiter in the Village in those days was bound to be noticed, and so, without realizing it, I became what I was later able to sell: a personality.