The End of a Primitive (8 page)

“It’s just my country look,” Kriss giggled. “That’s a very pretty blouse, baby.”

“Oh, this old thing!” It was a soft white nylon of a mannish cut, worn with a large black bow. “You’ve seen it before.”

Kriss wished that Dot would wear things that were more feminine. It would do her good. “Quit despising yourself,” Kriss wanted to say. Dot’s air of wistful self-deprecation always slightly angered her. She quickly changed the conversation from clothes.

“Watson’s going to keep on until Anne sits on him someday,” she said. “And he doesn’t know how much Anne weighs.”

“Oh, that reminds me of a joke I want to tell you. Mrs Donahue told it to me last night.” She grinned. “I don’t know where she hears such things.”

Kriss knew Mrs Donahue, the eighty-two year old semi-invalid with whom Dorothy lived, and she knew why the old lady told Dorothy those Rabelaisian jokes—she thought her prim genteel roomer much too respectable for her own good. So did Kriss. She gave Dorothy a wicked grin. “Tell me, baby.”

Anne came in at that moment with the coffee and Dorothy hesitated. She couldn’t bear to be intimate with another woman. But when Kriss urged, “Go on. Dot, tell Anne, too,” she began. “Well—” then looked at Anne and blurted, “I got this from my landlady.”

Anne flung her a quick look and continued serving the coffee.

“She knows, dear,” Kriss said, but the sarcasm was lost on Dorothy.

“Well—there was a Texan wandering about the city wearing a ten gallon hat—”

Now Anne looked solidly at Dorothy, but bit back the words, “You don’t say?” Instead she put her sting into the anonymous Texan. “With water on the brain.”

Kriss chuckled. “No doubt, dear, but not ten gallons!”

“Just like a Texan. Always exaggerating.”

“Do you want to hear this story or not?” Dorothy complained jealously.

“Let Dot tell her story,” Kriss said.

“Well, this Texan ran into an actor on Broadway dressed like a Quaker. He’d never seen a Quaker before. So he went up to the actor and said, ‘Talk some Quaker for me, will you. Friend.’ The Quaker smiled indulgently and tried to pass, but the Texan took hold of his arm ‘Oh, come on, partner, talk some Quaker for me. Ah never heard nobody talk Quaker.’ The actor tried to disengage his arm, but the Texan held him firmly. ‘Ah tell you what I’ll do. Friend. If you talk some Quaker for me, I’ll buy you the best feed they can throw together at 21.’ When the Texan said that, the actor turned slowly and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Fuck thee!’ he said.”

Kriss laughed with childish glee. “Someone should tell that to Watson. The last part, I mean.”

Even Anne giggled. “I’ll tell him,” she said. “You just wait. And I won’t say
thee
, either!”

Dorothy glanced at her watch. “Oh, I’ve got to run; Kirby wants me before lunch.” She gave Kriss a beseeching smile. “What I wanted was to ask you to go with me to the Museum of Modem Art this evening. It’s the opening of the Monet exhibition.” Through the corners of her eyes Kriss noticed Anne flick a glance at her as she began stacking the dirty cups and saucers. Once they had discussed Dorothy’s passion for art exhibitions, but now she felt a faint disloyalty for having done so.

“I’m so tired, baby. Can’t we go some other time,” she begged off.

Anne carted off the coffee service with no comment.

“Oh, Kriss—” She’d promised herself not to feel badly if Kriss couldn’t go, but she couldn’t keep the disappointment from her voice.

Kriss felt sorry for her. “Oh, baby, I’m just so tired.” Then, relenting, she said, “Why don’t you come and have dinner with me tonight.”

“But—but—” She couldn’t bring herself to ask.

“He won’t be there tonight,” Kriss assured her. “Nor any other night,” she thought bitterly.

Now Dorothy was happy. She looked like a girl who’d been asked on a date. “All right. But you let me do everything. Promise?”

Kriss wondered again if Dorothy understood her own emotions. Probably not, she thought. A veil lowered over her eyes. “I promise,” she said, chuckling mechanically. If I find myself in bed with Dot, that’ll be the bitter end, she thought. Anyway, I’d like a virgin, she added mentally, chuckling to herself. “Make it around seven-thirty.”

“All right, then, at seven-thirty.”

Immediately after Dorothy left, she regretted asking her. But at least Dot would be better than being alone, she confessed. Anything was better than being alone. Although she’d never come to the stage of letting herself be picked up…“You son of a bitch!” she thought with sudden venom, but whether her venom was directed toward Ronny or Ted or Dave or anyone else in particular, she didn’t even know herself.

Chapter 4

J
esse came up from the subway through the arcade with its tobacco shops, barber shops, shoeshine parlours, notion stores, florists, lunch counters, turkish baths, to the north side of 42nd Street, next to the comer drugstore. ‘This is what they mean by the underworld,” he had thought in passing, and now he viewed the upper side with equal distaste.

From where he stood at the corner of Eighth Avenue—a pesthole of petty thugs where a man could buy a gun, hot or cold, for fifteen dollars up—down to the tri-cornered, old stone
Times
building in the narrow angle where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue, was a block of infinite change. Once in the lives of very old men it had been a mudhole; then had come an era of fashion, of furred and diamonded women with their potbellied escorts alighting from lacquered carriages beneath the glittering marquees of plush modern play-houses. Now it was descending into a mudhole again, but of a different kind. The once famous playhouses, lumped together on both sides of the street, were now crummy second-and-third run movie theatres, contesting with the cheap appeal of a penny arcade with its shooting galleries, mechanical games, flea circus, thimble arena where Jack Johnson had done a daily stint of boxing in his waning years. And in between there were the numerous jewelry stores with fake auctions every night, beer joints, cafeterias, sporting goods stores, shoe stores, shoe repair and valet shops, book stores that dealt principally in pornography, second-class hotels and filthy rooming houses.

“Poor man’s Broadway,” Jesse thought sourly, as his searching gaze flitted from the lighted movie signs to the passing faces: then his mind began improving on the commonplace phrase, “Melting pot…already melted—rusting now…last chance…I can get it for you hot—hotter than you think, bud…this side of paradise—way this side…” His eyes rested on a black couple, the man tall and strutting in a cream coloured suit, a yam-coloured woman with a hundred pounds of hams…“Nigger Haven too…”

Ahead of him a short swarthy man in a striped blue suit backed angrily from a narrow-fronted hash joint, shouting belligerently, “You come out here, you bastard, I’ll show you!” A big blond buck, Swedish looking, dressed in a white apron, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, obviously the counterman, charged onto the sidewalk. His face was red with rage. “Don’t you call me no bastard, you son of a bitch!” The short swarthy man stood his ground defiantly. “Don’t you call me no son of a bitch, you bastard! You’re out here on the street now and I’ll knock you on your ass!” Whereupon the big blond counterman knocked him down with one wild swing. The short swarthy man staggered to his feet and lurched about dizzily in a fighting stance. “You ain’t got no counter now to protect you,” he said. Whereupon the big blond buck swung wildly and knocked him down again. Jesse recalled his dream where the short squat man had brained the big wild man with a heavy oak chair, and said, half-laughing, “Law of averages.”

A cop ambled up lazily and broke it up. “Go on, go on, get on back tuh work ‘fore I lock you up!” he said to the counterman, giving him a push, then he turned to the short swarthy man, “Whyoncha pick on somebody yo’ own size?” A snigger ran through the crowd. “He slipped up on me,” the short man defended his prowess. “Go on, go on,” the cop said. “I can tell you never wuz a boy scout.”

“Never was a boy, son,” Jesse thought. “Where’d you study psychiatry?”

Further on, a book store claimed his vagrant attention. He stopped for a moment, searching among the titles for those of his own two books. There were several books by black writers, but not his. “If you ever find someone who’s read your books you’ll drop dead,” he told himself. His gaze picked out the title.
Lost Horizon
. “Good and lost right here,” he thought.

Then he recalled an editor who’d rejected his second book, complaining, “Why do you fellows always write this kind of thing? Some of you have real talent. Why don’t you try writing about people, just people.” He had countered, “White people, you mean?” The editor had reddened. “No, I don’t mean
white
people. I mean
people!
Like Maugham and Hilton write about, for instance.” He laughed at the recollection and his bitterness left. “I should have told him I don’t want no Eskimos, and that’s all the
people
they left. Don’t even know no ape-men, I should have told him, and no apes either, for that matter—although he probably wouldn’t have believed that, close as he thinks I am to Africa.” The thought kept tickling him as he ambled along, unmindful of the gay who trailed him on the leeside. “My folks didn’t do right by me,” he said aloud suddenly. “They shouldn’t have got themselves caught.”

Suddenly he turned and retraced his steps to another small bookstore that had just registered on his mind, disconcerting the gay. He stared at the titles without really seeing them, a sort of reflex gesture. “What I really ought to have told the son of a bitch,” he thought, “is why don’t you read the Old Testament, son? Or even Rabelais for that matter. That’s the way I should have started the damn book.” He blew laughter from his nostrils. “The nigger woke, sat up, scratched at the lice, stood up, farted, pissed, crapped, gargled, harked, spat, sat down, ate a dishpan of stewed chitterlings, drank a gallon of lightning, hated the white folks for an hour, went out and stole some chickens, raped a white woman, got lynched by a mob, scratched his kinky head and said. Boss, Ah’s tahd uh gittin’ lynched. Ah’s so weary kain keep mah eyes open, and the Boss said. Go on home an’ sleep, nigger, that’s all you niggers is good for. So he went back to his shanty, stealing a watermelon on the way, ate the watermelon rind and all, lay down on his pallet, blinked, yawned, and went to sleep hating the white folks.” “We can’t print this crap,” the editor would have said.

“Why not?” he would have asked.

“It’s too bitter. People are fed up with this kind of protest.”

“What is protest but satire?”

“Satire? Satire must be witty, ironic, sarcastic; it must appeal to the intelligent. This crap is pornography.”

“Depends on where you think a man’s brains are.”

“What does?” a falsetto voice squeaked at his side.

For the first time he noticed the gay. He was big, blond and well-dressed, had a pleasant face but greedy blue eyes.

Jesse turned and walked on without replying. In front of him two painted showgirls flanking a tall, woozy westerner, came from the Hotel Dixie and crossed toward a waiting taxi. He caught a whiff of Lanvin’s
My Sin
and found himself looking at their slender nyloned legs, long-eyed and woman-hungry. For an instant he stopped and considered turning back to 8th Avenue and heading uptown. There were always cruising whores in that section from 42nd Street through Jacob’s Beach, even this early in the morning. But he put it from his mind. He’d always been afraid of disease, syphilis in particular. Not so much for his own sake, but he’d been afraid of infecting his wife. “Wouldn’t believe that about a nigger, would you?” he thought. Although once he’d taken on all comers who were thought to be healthy.

For a moment his thoughts went back to that time in 1944, when all the liberals were trying desperately to elect Roosevelt for a fourth term against strong fascist opposition and the CIO’s Political Action Committee had been all rage—“Clear it with Sidney”—Sidney Hillman and the boys. He always thought of that time at least once a day. Not so much with regret as with wonder. Greatest time in the history of the Republic for interracial lovemaking. “Nothing like politics for getting white ass. Black ass either, for that matter. Better than Spanish fly. Although the black ass don’t need a crusade” he amended. “Just some good white boy who wants it.” And after a moment he said aloud, “Old Jimmy. Wonder if he ever got enough.” Jimmy had been a lieutenant in the navy then, handsome chap in his whites. Hollywood scenario writer now; he’d seen a first run. Class A picture a few weeks ago Jimmy had done the scenario for. Cleo, the wife of a black newspaper editor, had been nuts about him. “This is Cleo, Jimmy, she’ll screw hanging from a chandelier,” had been the way Maud had introduced them. For a moment his thoughts lingered pleasantly on Maud.

“What a bitch!” he thought. “A great woman, really. Greater than anybody’ll ever know!” Many times he’d considered writing a novel about her. But he’d never been able to get the handle to the story. “Great whore! Madame, actually. Worked with her tools. That whore did everything. Besides which she was a cheat, liar, thief, master of intrigue, without conscience or scruples, and respectable too. That was the lick—the respectability.” He felt a cynical amusement. “Son, that’s the trick. Here’s a whore who’s friend of the mighty, lunches with the Mayor’s wife, entertains the rich, the very rich, the Rockefellers, on all kinds of interracial committees, a great Negro social leader. While you, you son of a bitch, with your so-called integrity, are just a pest and a nuisance.”

Suddenly he was at the curb of Seventh Avenue. Opposite was the
Times
building; across 42nd a restaurant with tables out of doors. Uptown to his left was another small theatre that specialized in weird off-trail films, displaying a huge poster of a leopard-skinned wild man bearing off a half-clad blonde. “That’s what you should be, son,” he told himself. “Then you could just grab a piece of ass and run and all they’d do would just be to make a film of it.” Beyond was the glittering front of the Astor Hotel, looking onto the chasm of Times Square; the bottom of the V where the canteen had been, now a recruiting centre; and on the other side the old stone profile of Hotel Claridge which had once housed the Hall of Science on the second floor behind the Camel Cigarette sign where he had worked as a porter. He thought of the narrow marble stairway he’d had to scrub five times a day. “I wonder who’s scrubbing you now,” he thought to the tune of the popular song. But the Hall of Science was gone, defunct, no more, and the Great White Way looked cheap and naked and repulsive in the bright morning sunlight, like a striptease on awakening, fumbling about a small dingy hotel room in a soiled kimona, fixing her morning needle.