The Last of the Savages (16 page)

“Will doesn’t listen to anybody.”

“He’ll trust you to be objective.” Having said this, Cordell tried to compromise my alleged neutrality. “Patrick, you’ve broken bread and hunted with us. I think you understand us, and I know you’ll do right by Will.”

This shameless appeal to my vanity did not entirely miss its mark. As
we finished the excellent wine, I promised to find out what I could, though it seemed ridiculous, since Will was living in Memphis, right under Cordell’s patrician nose.

Once his hepatitis cleared up, Will established a talent management and production company, Cement Mixer Music, and started cruising the back roads of the Deep South in a two-tone, cream-and-beige ’55 Packard, scouring the dives for talent. In February, he had called me to report, with uncharacteristic pride and exhilaration in his voice, that Lester Holmes had a single on the R-and-B charts.

After Cordell’s visit, I dutifully dialed the number of Will’s office and left a message with someone who sounded too stoned to remember it. I had no home number for Will, and I wasn’t sure where he was living. Shortly after Christmas break I received a package from Memphis. Inside was a record, a 45. The photograph on the sleeve looked familiar, but it was not until I saw the name—Taleesha Johnson—that I realized the singer was the shy, beautiful girl who’d once slapped Will’s face. Examining the label, I found that Will had both production and cowriting credits.

Home for a long weekend, I was sitting at the dinner table with my mother and father, Nana Keane, my aunt Colleen and her son, Jimmy. Aunt Colleen had just said, “How about a little music?” when the phone rang, alleviating the dreadful silence around the table.

“I’ll get it,” I said, jumping up.

“What’d you think of the record,” Will asked, without preamble, once I picked up.

“Hey, it’s great,” I lied, having been far too busy to even think about listening to it. “Of course, you know me,” I hedged, “I’m no expert or anything.”

“It’s not meant for experts, Patrick. It’s for everybody—even you buttoned-down guys. She’s crossed over to the pop charts, and we’re following up with another single next month.”

All he wanted to talk about was Taleesha and her career, and I began to think his father’s suspicions were well founded. He asked me if I
could meet them in New York in three days; Taleesha was doing a gig at the Apollo. When I told him I’d try, classes would’ve started up again by then, he said:

“I need you to be there, Patrick.”

On a Wednesday afternoon, I met Will under the clock at the Biltmore. My idea: I liked to picture myself as the kind of guy who hopped on the train from New Haven after classes and casually met his friends under the famous clock, like a character in an O’Hara story. My train was late and Will was waiting when I arrived—the only time he’s ever waited on me. Normally he was at least half an hour late for any rendezvous, and often never turned up at his appointed destination. Days or weeks might go by before he called again. Drugs had something to do with this, but the condition was chronic—an unconscious function, I think, of the inherited sense of entitlement. Moreover, he was utterly convinced of the importance of his mission, of the work he needed to perform in the world, and immune to the fear of inconveniencing his fellow creatures, that nervous lower-middle-class anxiety which plagued me as I pushed through the throng of Grand Central beneath the dirty blue zodiacal dome on my way to meet him.

“I feel like a fucking cliché,” he complained when I ran up, breathless, “waiting under the damn clock at the Biltmore. It doesn’t get any more Dink Stover than this.”

“Well, you look like a freak.” He was gaunt, almost spectral. His hair was longer, draped thickly around his shoulders, and he was further shrouded in a long black cape over a lush paisley shirt.

“That’s what I’ve been telling him,” said the young black woman who rose from an armchair, bathed in the spotlight of Will’s rapturous gaze.

“Taleesha Johnson, may I present Patrick Keane.”

She took my hand. “So you’re my big rival.”

More than faintly pleased to hear this, I smiled. “And you’re the owner of that amazing voice. I’ll never forget the first time I heard you sing in that little church in the Delta.”

“Wait till you hear the shit we just recorded,” said Will, squeezing her to his chest. “She’s even hotter singing the devil’s music.”

“Will, you know I don’t like when you say that,” she said, pushing away from him.

“She’s a believer,” Will said fondly. “Lord knows what she’s doing with this heathen.”

“You know I’m only interested in your money,” she said. “Anyhow, you’re no heathen.”

She was right. Will was actually the most religious person I knew, though his belief in a submerged and spiritual order in the universe was neither readily apparent nor easily comprehended.

Cordell was also right. Things were pretty far advanced between them. And I could feel the logic of it. They made a potent couple. An inch or two taller than me, Taleesha seemed even taller, the verticality of her long limbs and regal carriage crowned with a sharp chin and a rich swell of lips and flared nostrils beneath the horizontal slash of her cheekbones. You simply had to look at her.

We took a cab to the Village and walked around, past Sheridan Square. “A barbaric Yankee general,” Will said, pointing at the statue at one end of the park. “And in this corner—my people.” He gestured toward the longhairs and the low-lifes congregated around the benches.

He was exuberant. The furtive mournfulness he carried like a hump on his back seemed to have lifted away. He was in love and the scent of marijuana was in the air. The slaves were growing their hair out and marching on Washington. The Pentagon would shortly be levitated. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jimi Hendrix were still among us.

We wandered the downtown streets for hours, pausing in front of various nightclubs which Will considered hallowed, until he finally suggested an early dinner at the Cedar Tavern, which he commended as the watering hole of artists and hipsters.

“They look pretty down and out to me,” Taleesha said, observing the clientele. Over the course of the afternoon I’d been impressed with the way Taleesha managed Will and teased him, cheerfully squelching his wilder fantasies without mocking his hopes. She’d been considerate enough to annotate the music-biz talk for my benefit. Even by my conventional standards she was accomplished. At one point, when Taleesha ducked into a store on Bleecker to look at shoes, Will informed me that
she’d been a National Merit scholar at Booker T. Washington High and that she’d received scholarship offers from all over the country. Except when she giggled at Will, a high, birdlike sound, it was hard to believe she was our age, so canny and self-assured was she. Her voice was rich and authoritative. At times her grammar was almost stiltedly correct, her diction chiseled. And then suddenly she would sound both southern and black—the slang, the melting elision of consonants and the lazy vowels. She tended toward the latter when deflating Will’s pretensions.

A look passed between them and she excused herself from the table. Whatever was coming I saw they’d agreed that this was the moment for it to start.

“What do you think,” he asked foolishly—not a question a man can ever answer honestly, when his best friend asks it about the woman he loves.

“What can I say? She’s beautiful.” This was one of the rare moments since I’d known Will that the balance of power had shifted to the point that he needed my approval; love had made him vulnerable.

He leaned forward, fixing me with those unnaturally blue eyes. “We’re making it official.”

I can’t say I was entirely unprepared, but I was still surprised to hear him say it. And I suppose I felt a twinge of loss, a jealous fear that I was losing him.

“We’re going to city hall tomorrow and I’d like you to be my best man.”

“Honored,” I said, once I’d regained some portion of my composure.

“But what?”

“No buts …”

“Come on, goddamnit!”

Whether out of pique or good sense, I felt irresistibly compelled to play superego, or at least to test his resolve. I had, after all, accepted his father’s commission. And so I reminded Will that he was only nineteen, that they’d known each other just a few months, that on many occasions he’d proclaimed marriage an outmoded bourgeois convention.

“And of course,” he sneered, “there’s the racial question.”

“That’s the least of it,” I lied. A counterattack suggested itself. “Is that why you’re marrying her? Because she’s black?”

“Fuck you, Patrick.”

“It
is
a great way to say ‘Fuck you’ to everybody, isn’t it? A great big statement—”

“If you don’t want to be my witness—”

“I’ll be your witness,” I shouted. “I’ll follow you off a cliff if you want me to.”

I paused, wary of Will’s rage; it was always near the surface, and another sharp cut would have unleashed it. Softly, I said, “Just tell me what I’m witnessing.”

He settled back into his chair, swallowed half a mug of ale. “Look,” he said, “I just know this is right. Okay? I feel it all the way down. You know I operate on instinct. Taleesha’s what I want in my life and marrying her’s the right thing. Her old man’s very religious, and she has pretty strong spiritual convictions herself. It’s gonna be hard enough living together. But being married will make it easier.”

“What about
your
family?”

“They’ll learn to live with it,” he said. “Or they won’t.”

Taleesha returned cautiously to the table. “I stayed in there about as long as I could,” she said.

I rose from my seat. “Congratulations.”

She took my hands and I leaned forward, and upward, to kiss her cheek.

Will reminded me that one does not congratulate the bride, that the groom is presumed to be the lucky one, citing polite convention even as he prepared to fly in the face of all of his breeding and upbringing.

“I told the boy—‘You’re crazy,’ ” Taleesha said apologetically. “I tried to talk him out of it. Tried and tried.”

Will nodded happily. “She did.”

“But he
loves
trouble.”

“Just paying my dues.”

I had never seem him giddy before. It was, on him, a bizarre mood to behold.

“I still think we should keep it a secret,” Taleesha said, “least for a while.”

“Why the fuck should we,” Will declared. “I’m not ashamed.”

“No, of course not,” she said, puckering her lips at him. “But has it
ever occurred to you I might be? What do you suppose my friends are gonna say? ‘Shit girl, you gonna marry a
white
man?’”

Her humor and her prudence would serve them well, I thought. Will had little of either. I ordered a bottle of champagne, something I’d never done before. When Will went to the men’s room I asked Taleesha how her family was likely to react.

“Well, my mama isn’t likely to know. And Daddy don’t approve of anything, he’s real old-fashioned. Momma used to sing the blues, but he made her give it up when they got married. She tried, I guess, but when I was seven she up and ran off—just disappeared.”

As if to make light of this fact, she suddenly adopted a breezier tone.

“Daddy’s always been kind of high hat, anyway. A pillar of the black community, and all that, very—I don’t know—
white
in his behavior, and even though he’d never admit it he’s secretly proud as hell of his light skin, he’s about three shades lighter than me. His great-granddaddy was probably some white planter in Greenwood, Mississippi. But that doesn’t mean he believes the races should mix any more than Will’s father does. In his own way he’s as conservative as an old peckerwood.”

Will returned, seeming a little stoned, a little broader of smile. After the champagne arrived I toasted their future—imagining their love as a noble cause, a force for healing the jagged rift across the face of our land.

What can I say—we were all very young at the time.

They dropped me off at the Yale Club, and I watched the cab pull away, feeling the bittersweet loneliness of the city as the champagne faded from the sooty canyon of Vanderbilt Avenue. In the bar upstairs I might find company, but I chose to indulge my solitude and wander uptown. At that time, before catalytic converters, the New York air was an even thicker medium than it is today, granular and purple with petrochemical by-products and particulates. You could practically taste it. Under-dressed for the evening chill in my tweed jacket, I saw myself, not unhappily, as a poignant figure, a mendicant wandering the cosmopolitan streets where no one knew me, no one waited for me.

The city was an ontological challenge, defying you to prove that you existed.

Someday these would be my streets. Meanwhile, I found myself on Fifth Avenue, moving with a crowd admiring the lavish windows of Saks. And suddenly I was in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The city of my aspirations was a godless metropolis composed largely of Protestant landmarks—the University Club, the Stock Exchange, the Plaza Hotel—and encountering this monument to my native faith was something like spotting one’s parents in the midst of an orgy.

I climbed the steps and joined the few souls within, dipping my hands in the holy water and blessing myself, genuflecting in the aisle and kneeling with my head in my hands, listening to the rustling echo of whispering voices. Raised a strict Catholic, I no longer had quite enough faith to pray for myself, but I said a prayer for Will and his fiancée and lit a candle for them on the way out.

The next morning—an overcast day threatening rain. I shivered nervously outside the club, surveying the grimy west flank of Grand Central. They arrived twenty minutes late in a chauffeured Rolls. Even as Will handed me a glass of champagne I couldn’t shake the thought that someone was going to try to stop us. Taleesha seemed as nervous as me, all scrunched up inside her lanky self, wearing a smart, proper white suit with a hat and veil. But Will was as flamboyant as the brightly striped gambler’s vest he wore beneath an ancient morning suit complete with silk top hat.

We climbed out of the limousine in front of a dour, block-long office building which hardly answered my Jeffersonian notion of city hall. Inside, we followed the ruffled shirts and the white dresses to the appropriate office. Seeing the lines in front of the registration windows, Will seemed to experience a moment of doubt about the demotic venue. I paced back and forth, unconsciously guarding the door and admiring in this drab and soulless setting the physical and sartorial variety of the matrimonial candidates: an Indian woman in a chartreuse sari and her bridegroom in white; a black man in a pink tuxedo that matched his
bride’s dress; a pale, trembling Slavic bride in a beaded floor-length gown with tight braids and flowers coiled atop her head.