Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (54 page)

I watched his face. His face made me want to smile. “Well. First things first. We'll try to make you ready.”

He looked down, then looked into my eyes again. “You know something?”

“What?”

“I got a birthday coming soon.”

I laughed. “And what do you want for your birthday?”

He laughed, too. “Would you get me a camera? Just a simple, ordinary camera. I thought I might fool around with that for awhile—you know, maybe I can at least make a kind of record of what's happening. And I can go a whole lot of places where no camera's ever been.”

I said, watching him, “I'm hip.”

“So it wouldn't really be a waste of your money.”

I pulled his head onto my chest again. “Don't sweat it, baby. Everything's going to be nice.”

“I believe you,” he said, after a moment, and then we lay quietly on the floor, until the sun was long gone, and night filled the room. The street lights pressed against my window. It was very silent. Christopher had fallen fast asleep, snoring and whistling. I lay there, and stroked his kinky hair and thought of my father and mother, and my brother, and of Christopher, and a line suddenly came flying back at me, out of my past, from
The Corn Is Green.
It made me laugh, and hold my breath and it almost made me cry. It was Bunny's curtain line:
Moffat, my girl, you mustn't be clumsy this time. You mustn't be
clumsy.
Ah. So! I laughed to myself, and stroked Christopher's hair, laughed perhaps a little sadly and ironically, but without grief. This little light of mine.

“I
can
explain it, in a way, and, in another way, I can't,” Barbara said. She stood very straight, walking up and down my living room. It was about three o'clock in the morning. Christopher was God knew where. “If I could have explained it before it happened, then, obviously, it wouldn't have happened.”

I said, “Barbara, I don't need any explanations. I really don't. I don't feel—whatever you're supposed to feel when something like this happens. I just don't. I don't feel—
wronged.
” I watched her. Her face hurt me. It was true that I did not feel wronged: what
did
I feel? An immense fatigue, a sense of going down beneath a burden; of barely holding on. “Don't you see what I mean? Old Princess?”

She turned away from me, and walked back to my bar and poured herself another drink. I joined her at the bar. My living room was lit by one dim light, and my record player was playing Dinah Washington, very low.

I poured myself a drink, and touched her face. She smiled, and we touched glasses. She sat down on one of the barstools, and lit a cigarette.

“He reminded me of you,” she said, “when we were young. I was reaching backward for you—and for me—I think—reaching backward, over twenty years.” She sipped her drink, and smiled, threw back her head, and sighed. “He was you before our choices had been made. Before we'd become—what we've become.” She looked at me, seemed to try to look into me, her eyes were enormous. “Do you know what I mean?”

“I think I do.” Then, “Do you think what we've become is so awful, Barbara?”

“No. Oh, I don't mean that. But it isn't—is it?—exactly what we had in mind. I didn't,” she said at last, “expect to become so lonely.”

“Neither did I,” I said. Then, for a moment, Dinah's voice was the only sound in the room.

“I think
he
wanted”—she stopped—“I think
he
wanted to find out—if love was possible. If it was really possible. I think he had to find
out
what I thought of
his
body, by taking mine.” She paused. “It wasn't like that,” she said, “with you and me.”

“No. It wasn't like that with you and me.”

“I'm glad for one thing,” she said. “I was afraid that I'd—seduced Christopher, or allowed Christopher to seduce me, only in order to hurt you. I was terribly afraid that I was only acting out of bitterness. And that would have had to mean that I'd been bitter all this time. But it wasn't that. It was just—
you.
That's terrible, in its way, but it's true. I wasn't trying to hurt you. I was trying to get back to you. And he realized that, oh, very quickly.
Then,
he realized that love was possible. I shouldn't be surprised if that didn't frighten him.”

“He'll be back,” I said. “He'll be back, or I'll go into the streets to find him. He's not lost, don't sweat it. I won't let him be lost.” She said nothing. “Look. That's all that matters now, isn't it—that the kid not be lost?”

“I hope I haven't wrecked everything,” she said.

“I don't think you have. But if you have, then we'll have to face that, too. And if you have, well, I don't know how I'll feel then. But I don't think you have. And now you ought to go home. We've both had it.”

“I suppose so,” she said, and rose. She was still very
straight and steady. “When he left me—he said he was coming here.”

“It's only been three days. He's probably at his sister's house. He'll be along.”

“I must tell you,” she said, “it has not been easy for me. It has not been easy at all to have lived all these years the life I've lived and to know, no matter who I was with, no matter how much I loved them or hoped to love them and no matter what they offered me, it has not been easy to know that if you whistled, called, sang, belched, picked up the telephone, sent a wire, I'd be there. I'd have no choice, I wouldn't be able to help myself. I've not been free—not all these years. And with time flying—and time's worse for a woman than it is for a man. No, it's not been easy. And sometimes I hated you and hated myself and hated my life and wanted to die, to die!”

Her words and her voice rang in my ears, they always will, and her face burns in my mind.

I said, from the depths of my terrible fatigue, “I couldn't have done otherwise. I couldn't have done otherwise—
then!
And once we'd made that turning—could we have done otherwise later, Barbara?
Could
we?”

“I know,” said Barbara. “I know.” She sat down on the barstool again. She picked up her glass and raised it in a sorrowful, gallant, mocking toast. “Let us drink to the new Jerusalem.”

She left, and I went to sleep, wearier than I'd ever been in all my life. Sometime that morning, Christopher came crawling into bed beside me. He was as cold as sweating metal, almost that dangerous to touch, as funky as a fishstall. God knows where he had been. I never asked him. He crawled into my arms, sighing like a
mother, found a place for his head, and then lay still. And then we slept.

On our last night but one in San Francisco, I was allowed to go out. It was to be a very quiet evening; the idea was for me to be bothered as little as possible by people who might recognize my face. We were to pick up Pete and Barbara at the theater, after the show. Pete loaned Christopher his car, and we drove to a Chinese restaurant, crowded and fashionable, but very good. It was strange to be out. I felt, well,
rested
is perhaps the only word, and for the very first time in my whole life. I was not, so to speak, running, but was learning how to walk. At the door to the restaurant, my notoriety suddenly hit me, like a glove—a not unpleasant tap, but a definite one. I had been exulting in the glory of having had my sight returned to me, I was going to be able to see the world again, for awhile. I hadn't thought about the world seeing
me.
Yet, here the world was, in the headwaiter's face, in the faces turning toward us, in the hum, the buzz, the
rustle,
which marked our passage through the room. Christopher marched before me, stern, elegant, and tall like a chieftain or a prince, taking very seriously his role of lieutenant and bodyguard. We found our table, and sat down, and people smiled at us, and it was a rather nice feeling, that evening, to feel oneself recalled to life. We ordered two dry martinis, and our menus came, bigger than the most thorough map of the world, and Christopher grinned, and said, “This is certainly not the moment to start thinking of the starving Chinese. You know what some of my friends would say if they saw me in a place like this?”

“Well, then, order your usual bowl of rice, baby, and
eat it in the kitchen. The starving peasants will rejoice, believe me, to have you swell their ranks.”

“Later for the kitchen. I know that I can
always
make it in the kitchen. But let me see what I can do out here with—let's see now—some sweet and sour pork, how does that strike you? You know, we mustn't forget our roots, they ain't hardly got no grits, but how about some egg foo
young?
” And he went on like this, until mercifully, our waiter suggested that we put ourselves in his hands and allow him to order our meal. So we did that, and he didn't let us down. Perhaps it was because I'd been away so long, but everything tasted wonderful, and the room, the people, the rise and fall, the steady turning, as of a wheel, of many voices, the laughter, the clink of glass and silver, the shining hair, the shining dresses, the rings and earrings and necklaces and spangles and bangles and bracelets of the women, the tie clasps and watches and rings of the men, all created an astounding illusion of safety and order and civilization. Evil did not seem to exist here, or sorrow, or intolerable pain, and here we were, a part of it. I was a celebrity, with a bank account, and a future, and I had it in my power to make Christopher's life secure. We were the only colored people there. I had worked in the kitchen, not a hundred years ago; outside were the millions of starving—Chinese.
I'm going to feast at the welcome table,
my mother used to sing—was
this
the table? This groaning board was a heavy weight on the backs of many millions, whose groaning was not heard. Beneath this table, deep in the bowels of the earth, as far away as China, as close as the streets outside, an energy moved and gathered and it would, one day, overturn this table just as surely as the earth turned and the sun rose and set. And: where will you be, when
that first trumpet sounds? I watched Christopher, making out with the chopsticks, smiling, calm, and proud. Well. I want to be with Jesus, when that first trumpet sounds. I want to be with Jesus, when it sounds so loud.

I signed the restaurant's golden book, and I signed a couple of autographs—but the people were nice, they remembered I'd been sick—and we walked out to the car. It was a beautiful, dark-blue, chilly night. We were on a height, and San Francisco unfurled beneath us, at our feet, like a many-colored scroll. I was leaving soon. I wished it were possible to stay. I had worked hard, hard, it certainly should have been possible by now for me to have a safe, quiet, comfortable life, a life I could devote to my work and to those I loved, without being bugged to death. But I knew it wasn't possible. There was a sense in which it certainly could be said that my endeavor had been for nothing. Indeed, I had conquered the city: but the city was stricken with the plague. Not in my lifetime would this plague end, and, now, all that I most treasured, wine, talk, laughter, love, the embrace of a friend, the light in the eyes of a lover, the touch of a lover, that smell, that contest, that beautiful torment, and the mighty joy of a good day's work, would have to be stolen, each moment lived as though it were the last, for my own mortality was not more certain than the storm that was rising to engulf us all.

I put my hand on Christopher's neck. We stood for a moment in silence. We got into the car.

We drove through the streets of San Francisco, though I wanted to walk. “You can't,” said Christopher flatly, “you'll be mobbed on every streetcorner. I promised Barbara and Pete to take real good care of you, so stop giving me a hard time, all right? Be nice.”

“I really would like,” I said, “to know more than I do about what's going on in the streets.”

He looked at me. “You
do
know. You want to know if they still love you in the streets—you want to know what they think of you.” He sighed. He was driving very slowly. “Look. A whole lot of cats dig you, and some of them love you. But, Leo—you a fat cat now. That's the way a whole lot of people see you, and you can't blame them, how
else
can they see you? And we in a situation where we have to know which people we can trust, which people we can
use
—that's the nitty-gritty. Well, these cats are out here getting their ass whipped all the time, Leo. You get
your
ass whipped, at least it gets into the papers. But don't nobody care what happens to these kids—nobody! And all these laws and speeches don't mean shit. They do not mean
shit.
It's the spirit of the people, baby, the
spirit
of the people, they don't want us and they don't like us, and you see that spirit in the face of every cop. Them laws they keep passing, shit, they just like the treaties they signed with the Indians. Nothing but lies. they never even
meant
to keep those treaties, baby, they wanted the land and they got it and now they mean to keep it, even if they have to put every black mother-fucker in this country behind barbed wire, or shoot him down like a dog. It's the truth I'm telling you. And you better believe it, unless you want to be like your brother and believe all that okey-doke about Jesus changing people's hearts. Fuck Jesus, we ain't about to wait on him, and him the first one they got rid of so they could get their shit together? They didn't want him to change their hearts, they just used him to change the
map.
” Then he stopped. He said, in another tone, “I'm just trying to tell it to you like it is. We can't afford to trust the white
people in this country—we'd have to be crazy if we did. But, naturally, a whole lot of black cats think you might be one of them, and, in a way, you know, you stand to lose just as much as white people stand to lose.” He paused again, and he looked at me again. “You see what I mean?” he asked me very gently. I nodded. He put one hand on my knee. “You're a beautiful cat, Leo, and I love you. You believe me?”