The End of a Primitive (23 page)

She made coffee, two pieces of dry toast, soft-boiled one egg, got the Sunday
Herald-Tribune
from the mat outside her door, cleared a space on the table, and while sipping her black coffee and munching her egg-dipped toast, began methodically reading the paper from cover to cover. She read rapidly, making mental notes of all items concerning foundations and the India Institute, her brilliant mentality with its wide research experience rapidly condensing the facts and discarding the journalistic repetitions, functioning at the high degree of efficiency attributed to Harvard-trained scientists who live normal lives, eat balanced diets, are happily married and sexually complete, and have never tasted an intoxicating beverage. With one comer of her mind she listened to Jesse grinding his teeth and muttering angrily in his sleep and once, giggling with the therapeutic amusement which humans derive from the antics of monkeys in the zoo, paused for a moment to watch him thresh about like an eel in a net. “Kill you!” he shouted in a fit of rage and struck out with his fist, striking the wall with such force she crossed the room to see if the paint was scarred. After that he turned onto his side, and tucked his bruised hand between his legs. He blew a snort of laughter and said in a distinct voice, ‘T got mine, now you get yours.” Kriss laughed girlishly with incurious delight and resumed her perusal of an address delivered for U. S. President Truman by U. S. Secretary of State Acheson to the effect that unless suffering was wiped out in underdeveloped countries it might be used by a new dictatorship “more terrible” than the Soviet Union.

Since the first instant of sleep Jesse had dreamed countless horrible scenes of violent rape and murder and savage fights and apoplectic arguments, all of which had been blasted from memory at the moment of awakening by the last macabre dream of millions of black men, women and children being driven off a cliff into a bottomless gorge by a genial mob of white horsemen, himself watching them disappear, wave after wave, like mute zombies without anger or protest or entreaty, but when it came his turn he cried out in a voice of terror, “But I signed the paper!” and the laughing horsemen spurred their beasts toward him, one of them saying, “Who said you could write?” and trampled him over the edge, and as he fell turning over and over, he caught glimpses of columns of horsemen galloping through the sky and thought, half-amused, of a story his father used to tell about two slaves raiding the ham-house one dark and rainy night; old master was waiting inside and when the first slave reached underneath a loose board to swipe a ham, old master whacked his hand with a hammer, and hearing his buddy jerk back his hand, the second slave asked, “You get it?” to which the first slave replied, “Ah got mine, now you get yours.”

He awakened instantly in the middle of his fall and feeling the blanket wound about his head thought someone was trying to strangle him, and took a desperate leap backward, clawing at the murderous hands. He landed with a loud thud on his side in the middle of the floor. When finally he’d torn off the offending blanket from his face he saw Kriss sitting at the table, grinning at him.

“You’ve been having a bad time, baby,” she said. “Was some woman’s husband trying to trap you?”

“I thought I was being strangled,” he confessed sheepishly.

She giggled. “You shouldn’t fight so much, baby. You wouldn’t be so afraid.”

He stood up, threw the blanket on the sofa and rubbed his bruised hip bone. “Those bastards jump me while I’m sleeping,” he said self-mockingly. “Won’t come out and fight when I’m awake and sober.”

“When is that, dear?”

He noticed his clothes on the floor, the knocked-over glass, slept-on sofa, heaped ashtrays, dirty dishes and blew laughter through his nose. “Kilroy was here. On a bender, too.” Then to himself, “Not
Kil
roy,
Le
roy!” Suddenly realizing he’d slept on a sheet, he asked wonderingly, “Did you make the sofa?”

“No, dear, when I went to bed you were cooking.” She grinned. “You were having a cooking good time.”

He remembered the burning steak and laughed. “Damn right!” Then he noticed her staring analytically at his nude body. “What am I bid?”

“You have a beautiful body, Jesse,” she said with honest lasciviousness.

“It ought to be,” he thought. “All those workouts I got pushing that mop in White Plains.”

“If we still owned slaves I’d pay a year’s wages for you—”

“Don’t be so goddam cheap!”

“I’d keep you in my bedroom for a pet and give you a gold collar and nameplate—”

“Be the envy of all the bitches with the Pekineses because I can talk.”

“You can do more than talk, baby. You’re much better equipped than a Pekinese!”

“Don’t have their finesse, evidently.”

She grinned. “You are having a hard time getting started, aren’t you, baby?”

“If this keeps up—” But in the middle of it he had a sudden attack of diarrhoea and had to dash. “Actions speak louder than words,” he thought, then, “Phew! Bastards not only beat me in my sleep but made me eat with the buzzards.” Afterwards he examined his drink-swollen face in the mirror. It had the smooth greasy sheen of a syphilitic pimp’s, and his glazed stunned eyes, now a jaundiced yellow, looked inhuman. “Black Dracula,” he said. He felt pleasantly dazed and slightly tickled as if a bubble of laughter floated about in his delightful derangement, yet perfectly normal, other than that his body felt sore and bruised. “Kriss, baby,” he called, sticking his head out of the doorway, “you haven’t by any chance been beating me with a poker in my sleep?”

“No, dear, I regret to confess. You were beating it yourself.”

Turning back, he shook his head at his reflection. “Jesse Robinson, what’s the matter, son? You’ve been with this bitch for two whole nights and still haven’t scored.” Then, while showering, “If you don’t get started soon, son, they’re gonna farm you out to the Bush League.” He put a new blade in her safety razor and shaved, applied her comb and brush to his wet kinks and used the first toothbrush he touched, thinking, “Don’t let those hygienists catch you, boy.”

Returning to the sitting room he dressed in shorts, socks and shoes, hung the remainder of his clothes in her clothes closet, after which he went behind her and bent down and kissed her on the nape of her neck, noticing with a slight revulsion a faint rash on her back.

“Get me my glasses, dear,” she commanded. “They’re on the night stand in the bedroom.”

He fetched them obediently, thinking, “That bitch would love to switch me.” Aloud he asked, “How about breakfast, baby?”

“I’ve had my breakfast, dear. I was eating while you were fighting your enemies in your sleep.”

He started to say, “You call that a breakfast for a big girl like you,” but instantly realized she was too big a girl for that remark.

Then on entering the kitchen he exclaimed, “Great damn, Kilroy brought his whole fuckin’ family,” adding amusedly when he saw the knife sticking in the door, “Blazed a trail for Mr Ward too!” Then, to himself, “Damn, son, you’ll never be a Hamlet at this rate.” But for an instant he was shocked out of his nice sensation of deranged normality and felt a tremor of fear. “I ought to get the hell out of here!” he thought, but quickly drowned it was a drink. They’d drunk two bottles of Scotch and a half bottle of bourbon, he noticed, as he started on the remainder of the bourbon.

“Jesse!” Kriss spoke so sharply at his back he gave a violent start and dropped the empty glass in the sink where it shattered into pieces. “Goddamit, Kriss—” he gasped protestingly.

She was vastly tickled by his frightened start but repressed it long enough to say viciously, “I want you to have that door fixed. I’m not going to have you niggers break up this apartment. Maud hacked my dining room table to pieces with a kitchen knife—”

“Maud? I thought—”

“That was in Chicago. She tried to make Harold pay me some money he owed me and he slapped her—”

“Good for him!”

But she wouldn’t let him off that easily. “It cost me three hundred dollars to have this place painted and I’m not going to let you hungry niggers—”

“—Three hundred dollars? Before I’d have paid that I’d have fucked and got myself another one.”

Grinning, she moved into him and squeezed him painfully. “You would?”

“Ouch, goddamit, that hurts!”

Their bodies locked together and they kissed with mechanical skill, but the sight of her clad only in shell-rimmed spectacles and rayon shorts kept reminding him of the cartoons of Africans clad only in top hats and interfered with his passion, and he took them off and began all over again. For the moment following her vicious abuse of him she felt passionate, but it soon waned and she broke away. “Jesse, I want you to clean up this mess you and Harold made—” Such animal rage spewed from his yellow eyes she broke off to giggle. His hands trembled as he poured a drink to steady himself. Gulping it, he gasped, “One of these times, baby—”

“Oh, Jesse, why didn’t you drink the bourbon,” she complained with genuine emotion. “You and that son of a bitch drank up my good Scotch—”

“He’s your friend, baby.”

“I hate him!” she said, venomously, and returned to her paper.

“Well, as long as there’s food, there’s hope,” he said to himself, and after making a tall iced bourbon highball, prepared for himself a breakfast of four sausages, four slices of kidney, three fried eggs and two browned rolls.

“You going on a journey, baby?” she asked at the sight of his plate.

“You called me a
hungry nigger
,”

“Hungry, anyway.”

“No, I like the
hungry nigger
better. I like to think of myself as a nigger when I’m fucking you.”

She smiled her secret sensual smile and turned his face toward her and kissed his greasy mouth and after that he had a hard time swallowing it, but he made it.

When he had finished eating, he washed the dishes, cleaned the stove, scoured the grill and wiped up the floor while she made her bed, straightened the sitting room, ran the carpet sweeper and emptied the garbage into the incinerator in the hall. Then he put on his trousers and shirt and she dressed in her red silk Chinese Mandarin robe and Turkish-toed slippers and they sat in their respective seats, he on the sofa and she in her three-legged chair, tall iced civilized highballs in silver coasters within reach, to watch a television program called “Zoo Parade.” At that moment they formed a picture of Manhattan domestic tranquillity on a Sunday afternoon, painted by some idiot who has never been east of the Hudson River. The charming director of Chicago’s Lincoln Zoo, who conducted the performances of the animals on the show, had just reached a climatic scene, handling a couple of poisonous snakes, when the telephone rang. “Oh shit!” Kriss exclaimed. Snakes fascinated her, the more poisonous the greater the fascination, in addition to which the director had twice been snake-bitten on the show before, and she wouldn’t want to miss seeing him bitten again for the world. Her first impulse was to ignore the telephone, but after letting it ring to within one split-second of the end of any male caller’s patience, she dashed in to answer it. Over the sound of the television Jesse heard her gushing incoherently with a warmth she never showed toward man or woman and thought dreamily, “Take a card, any card.” With his fourth drink he had entered a blurred, half-heard world of complete indifference to which he could give vague attention or even choose another. He only pretended interest in the television programs to please Kriss, now he closed his eyes and began to play with words:

I bit a tit

to twit a chit

but the chit had the grit

to sit on her split and would not submit

though I smit and she fit and I hit and she spit and I grit

I must admit I could not outwit the sprit and had to quit…

“That was Don,” Kriss said, and he opened his eyes. “He’s coming over. You like Don, don’t you, baby?”

“Oh, sure,” he said, thinking, “I like de big gut, do you like de big gut…”

“He’s on the wagon, drinking nothing but cola.” She was all excited as if her closest girlfriend were calling, and when she added, “I love Don, he’s so sweet when he’s sober,” her face took on a look of melting sympathy.

“Can’t be a successful fag without being sweet sometime,” he said, and she became suddenly cross. “Jesse, if you’re going to be nasty—”

“—baby, baby, I love—”

“Don’s been an angel to me and—”

“Let’s not argue any more, baby.”

She relented. “Make us drinks, dear, while I order Coca-Cola. Mine Scotch this time.” Calling to him in the kitchen, “Make some ice, dear.”

“Make some ice, dear…make some drinks, dear…wash the dishes, dear…scrub the floor, dear…climb a tree, dear…fuck yourself, dear…“he muttered to himself as he melted the ice from the trays, but the back of his mind was still playing with the rhyme:

but if you will permit

I most humbly remit

I desire only to transmit

what would most
befit

nay, benefit

any slit

oh, definite!

to whit:

I would emit

so exquisite a pit

as to acquit—

“Jesse!” He gave such a start the ice tray flew birdlike from his hand and clattered in the sink. Kriss stood in the doorway, grinning, “What are you thinking about, dear?”

He’d been absently running water over the ice cubes in the sink, melting them. “Abwout Twitty, bwaby,” he said lispingly on recovering.

“Well, think about the ice now, dear, Don will be here in a minute.”

He began putting the cubes into the glass tray. “Yes, baby.

I’ll think about the ice cubes, baby. Anything else you want me to think about, baby?”

A scholarly-looking, dark-haired Harvard-type young man who turned out to be the delivery boy from the delicatessen brought twelve bottles of Coca-Cola, four bottles of sparkling water, tins of cheese-bits and assorted nuts, and to show how broadminded he was, he gave Jesse a confidential wink. “Ain’t what you think, bub,” Jesse thought. “I’ve been sleeping on the sofa.”

Then Don came with six bottles of Pepsi-Cola for himself and a bottle of Scotch for Kriss and she flung her arms about him like a proud mother-bear and kissed him. They came into the kitchen, talking incoherently: