Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (50 page)

“All right, princess,” and I rose. I had to say it: “I thought you might be a little afraid of seeing Christopher again.”

Barbara laughed. “Good Lord, no. How could I be afraid of anything, Leo, after all those years of storm and strife with you?” Her face changed. “What happened between Christopher and me happened because of you.
We
both know that.
You
haven't got to know it. And we both love you.
We
both know that. Now, go to bed.”

We kissed each other—like brother and sister. “Good-night,” I said.

“Good-night, my dear.”

I turned into my bedroom and undressed and got into bed. Barbara was right; I was very tired. I was very peaceful, after our long storm. Barbara had done something very hard and rare. As though she had known I would need it, and would always need it, she had arranged her life so that my place in it could never be jeopardized. This room in which I lay had cost her more in the way of refusals than she would ever tell; perhaps it had given her more in the way of affirmation than anyone would ever know. The incestuous brother and sister would now never have any children. But perhaps we had given one child to the world, or helped to open the world to one child. Luckier lovers hadn't managed so much. The sunlight filled the room. I heard voices, muted, laughing, in the big, wide room. My watch said ten to one. I went to my window and opened the blinds. It was a very bright day, and I suddenly wanted to be out in it. I went into my bathroom and stripped naked and stepped
under the shower. For some reason, I thought of Paradise Alley. I laughed to myself, and I sang. I put on a sweater and slacks and walked out into the big room. Pete was sitting on the sofa, laughing, there was a suitcase near him, and Christopher, long and black, and dressed in a black suit, was talking on the phone.

“Look who's here!” Pete said.

Christopher looked over at me. “He just this minute stepped out of his room,” said Christopher. “Yeah, just this minute. He looks all right, I can tell ain't nothing wrong with him that wasn't wrong with him before, you people are too much, I swear, got me all the way out here on a bullshit tip, you know how many affairs I had to cancel to make it out here? Shame on you! Shame, yeah, that's what I said. What?” He laughed. “Well, you want me to spell all that to you when I see you? No, you don't want me to do that, no, you don't. Yeah. Pete's got the address. We'll be there. What? Of course, he'll feel like coming, he ain't got nothing else to do, don't you know
I'm
here now?
I'm
his doctor, don't know why you didn't send for me before. Yeah, bye-bye, you have a nice lunch, you hear, and don't you let them people jive you, you too sweet and pretty. Now, why you want to say a thing like that? You hurting my feelings, Barbara. Yeah. Old brother Christopher is on the scene now, baby, bye-bye, see you later.” He put down the receiver and smiled, and held out his arms. “Come here, Big Daddy. Look like you just can't do right. I ain't going to let you out of my sight no more. The minute you out of my sight, you got to go and fall flat on your face in front of umpteen million people. Shame on you!” He grabbed me and hugged me and kissed me. “I'm glad to see you, baby. I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” I said. “How've you been?” And then, “You look all right.”

“I've been fine. The people is pretty sick, but
I'm
all right.”

“Black Christopher!” Pete said.

“Yeah, baby,” Christopher said, “
black
—just like Kenyatta, and all them folks.” He laughed again. “You better believe I'm black.”

“It's hard to doubt it,” I said, “when you put it with such force.”

Christopher threw back his head, and laughed. “If anything was ever the matter with him, he's all right now. I know your little digs. You mean, if I didn't tell you I was black, you wouldn't know I was black. I heard you. All right.”

It was good to see him, striding up and down this room, with his face so bright.

“What do you want, big man?” Pete asked me. “You want some coffee? You ready for lunch?”

“He shouldn't be drinking coffee,” said Christopher, “that's bad for his heart. Let him have some orange juice, or something.”

“I thought maybe he wanted something hot,” Pete said humbly.

“Well, let him drink some
cocoa.
Or some Ovaltine. He ain't supposed to be drinking no coffee or tea.”

“I think,” said Pete to me, “that you may have a problem.”

“Couldn't we compromise on coffee, with a
lot
of milk in it?” I asked.

“Now, it's
your
heart,” said Christopher. Then he looked out of the window, and smiled and blushed. “Just make sure you put a
lot
of milk in it—hell,
I'll
do it,
you
won't do it right,” and he suddenly walked out of the room.

“When did he
get
here?” I asked.

“A couple of hours ago. He must have packed his bags the minute he got the telegram. I
told
you he'd have been here already, if he'd had any bread.”

“It's nice of him to come,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Pete, “especially considering how many other places he has to go.”

“All right, Pete,” I said.

“I mean, just don't go through your usual bullshit routine of thinking it was a great sacrifice or anything. It's no sacrifice for a kid to come to San Francisco for the first time to see some people who love him. If you'd get such details as
that
through your mind,
you
wouldn't be such a kid yourself, and Barbara and all of us would have a much easier time.”

“Do I give you all such a hard time?”

Pete laughed. “Now, if I say yes, what are you going to do? Leap out of this window, or go off and have another heart attack?” He laughed again. Then, he sobered. “You give us a hard time, man, when we watch you giving yourself a hard time. That's all. You can't hide nothing from us, and you
damn
sure don't have anything to prove to us.
We
know you're Leo Proudhammer.
You
don't know it.”

I watched him. He wasn't smiling now. I sat down on the sofa. Christopher came clattering in, carrying a bottle of milk in one hand, and balancing a cup and saucer in the other. He set them both down on the table before me, and said, standing over me, “Now, let's see what
you
think is a whole lot of milk—I put in two sugars, but I didn't stir.”

Since the coffee cup held a little less than half a cup of coffee, my only possible option was to fill the cup. I stirred it a little, and I tasted it. Christopher watched me. “Very good,” I said gravely, “thank you.”

He watched me with his deep and wry distrust. He sat down on the sofa, and put one hand on my knee. “What's happening in this town?” he asked Pete.

“Oh,” said Pete, “a whole lot's happening in this town, from broads to pot to civil rights to urban renewal. Which scene do you want to dig first?”

“How do you tell them apart?” I asked.

Christopher punched my knee. “The broads and the pot smokers tend to talk less,” he said, “now, you'd remember that if you hadn't been so sick.” He turned back to Pete. “Well, we can't have Big Daddy here making them scenes, so you can just kind of cool me and I'll make it on my own.”

“This town's not exactly as nice as it looks,” I said.

“You trying to scare me?” Christopher asked. “You tried that once before. Remember?” He smiled and forced me to smile. “I thought you'd learned your lesson. Ah. I might have to remind you again, bye and bye.”

I watched him as he talked to Pete, watched his big teeth, his big hands, listened to his laugh. He sounded so free; a way I'd never sounded: a way I'd never been.

A double-minded man is never much of a match for a single-minded boy. When Christopher first met me, he decided that he needed me: that was that. He needed human arms to hold him, he could see very well, no matter what I said, that mine were empty, and that was that. If I was afraid of society's judgment, he was not: “Fuck these sick people. I do what
I
like.” Or, laughing: “You
afraid that people will call you a dirty old man? Well, you
are
a dirty old man. You're
my
dirty old man, right? I dig dirty old men.” And, in another tone: “I just do not want to be out here, all hungry and cold and alone. Let's not sweat it, baby. Love me. Let's just be nice.”

I first met Christopher at a party, briefly, when I had been in rehearsal, and didn't see him anymore until after the play had opened. When we had settled into our run, his face leaped out at me again, the way a hungry dog in the cellar leaps when you open the door.

We saw each other at another party, very late at night, uptown, where I didn't live anymore. I very nearly didn't get there. I was dead, because I had had a class in the morning, then the matinée, then the evening show. Then I had drinks in my dressing room with my agent, who wanted to talk to me about a guest appearance on a pretty lousy TV serial—he said that it might be a breakthrough. I finally fell into a taxi and realized, once it began to move, that I had absolutely no money on me. I asked the driver to take me to a bar near my apartment, where I could cash a check. Then the idea, tired as I was, and so close to home, of traveling to the party, seemed intolerable. I went into the bar, cashed the check, paid the driver, went back into the bar for a drink. The bar was absolutely hideous with gray, lightless people. I went into the phone booth to call up my host and ask him not to expect me.

But this was a friend from the evil days. He had been nice to me, and he was a Negro, and his life wasn't going too well. I sighed to myself as I heard the tone of his voice: “We're all waiting for you. Of course, it's not too late, are you kidding? There are people here who want to
meet you, they've been waiting all night. Get in a cab and come on, you can pass out here.”

Christopher told me later that he had been about to leave when the phone rang; and it was me; and he waited. They all waited but from the moment I walked into the room I had eyes only for him. I was introduced to the people, who looked at me with the kind of wary respect with which I imagine they would greet a baboon or a lion who was free of his cage for the evening. Some people had seen me in the play, and they congratulated me on my performance. I was flattered, as always, chilled, as always. Someone remembered the small part I had done in that movie more than ten years before. I had been very young then, but this caused me to remember that I was not young anymore. And I was watching the boy, who was watching me.

People who achieve any eminence whatever are driven to do so; and there is always something terribly vulnerable about such people. They very soon discover that their eminence makes of them an incitement and a target—it does not cause them to be loved. They are trapped on their hill. They cannot come down. They cannot bear obscurity as some organisms cannot bear light—death is what awaits them when they come down from the hill.

“I met you before,” said Christopher, “do you remember?” The hand with which he grasped my own was very large and dry; something in the nervous alertness of his stance, and the wary hopefulness in his eyes made him seem poised to run. The candor of his panic made me smile. I envied him.

“Of course,” I said, “how've you been?”

“Oh,” he said, with great cheerfulness, “I've been all
right.” He had a slight Southern accent. I had not noticed it before. “Oh! Congratulations. Your play's a big hit. Everybody's talking about it.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It looks like we may run for awhile.” I wanted to ask him if he had seen the play, or if he wanted to, but for some reason I didn't.

“So,” he said, after a moment, “I guess that's all you've been doing? Making it to the theater, and making it on home?”

“
And
crashing an occasional party.”

He laughed, but looked at me quickly, speculatively. “You must be tired. Don't you have anybody to fight off the world for you, to protect you from jokers like this”—he indicated the room—“and jokers like me—don't you have anybody to make sure you come home nights?”

“No,” I said sorrowfully, “not a soul,” and we both laughed again.

“Shame on you. You shouldn't be wandering around alone, you're too valuable—I'm not joking, I mean it. This town is full of all kinds of sick people.”

“Well, I think I've met most of them by now. So I'm safe.”

“If you think
that,
” he said, with a peculiarly aggressive distinctness, “you really
are
crazy.” And then he added, almost as an afterthought, it seemed, and to himself, “You really
do
need somebody to take care of you—why don't you hire me as your bodyguard, man? That way, the future of the American theater will be a whole lot brighter.” He said it with a smile, but also with a shrewd, calculating, coquettish look, as though he were saying,
That's right, mother. I'm bucking for the job.

I was still impressed by his candor, but he was beginning to frighten me. We moved to the window. It was a
high window, it was a blue-black night, we looked out on the cruel half-moon and the patient stars and fires of Manhattan.

“Look at that,” he said, and put one great hand under my elbow, “look at that. Isn't that a gas? From so high up, it almost looks like a place where a human being could live.” Then he looked down. He dropped my elbow. “But from down there, sweetheart, on that cold cement, you know you could howl and scream forever and not a living soul would hear you.” Then he smiled. “But you don't know nothing about that, do you? You don't walk these streets, you just ride through them. You only see cats like me through glass.”