An American Dream (23 page)

“Don’t talk too much.”

“I want to know.”

“Something happened with you,” she said.

“What happened?”

She shook her head. “Why do you insist? It’s bad luck to go on. But you insist. So, listen, Stephen, you can have it, it happened with you. I had an orgasm with you. I was never able to before. Now, pick up on that.” But there was a delicate hint of gloom to her remark, as if it had happened with the wrong man at the wrong time.

“What do you mean, never?” I asked—the need was to make her repeat it.

“Never before. Every other way, yes. But never, Stephen, when a man was within me, when a man was right inside of me.”

“All those years?”

“Never.”

“Christ almighty.”

“I swear.”

“Can I believe you?”

“Yes, you can. Because I always had the feeling once it happened I would soon be dead. I know that’s special and doubtless very crazy of me, but that’s been my little fear.”

“And now you don’t have it?”

“I don’t know if I have it, or lost it, or what. All I know is I’m happy. Now, hush, stop trying to spoil it.”

There was a sharp little rap on the door. The sentinels had not warned us after all. The rap beat out a tricky little rhythm, as weighted inside as a drummer’s tattoo on the rim of his snare. Cherry looked across the table at me with a face from which all expression was gone. “That’s Shago,” she said.

A key turned in one of the tumblers, then the other. The door came open. An elegant Negro with a skin dark as midnight was standing there. He looked at the robe I was wearing.

“All right,” he said to me, “get dressed. Get your white ass out of here.”

I
HAD SEEN
Shago Martin in the final reel of a movie about some jazz musicians, and his photograph on slip jackets for his records—a handsome face, thin and arrogant, a mask. I had even gone on caravan once with Deborah to the Latin Quarter or the Copacabana, a rare excursion for the lady since there was nothing she found more unsettling than a large nightclub, but Martin was singing that evening and Deborah and her friends had come to watch. “He’s the most attractive man in America,” she told me when he went on.

“What do you mean, ‘most attractive’?” I asked. I was doing my best to be a young Harvard banker in from Boston for the night.

“Shago,” Deborah said, “comes from one of the worst gangs in Harlem. I think you see it in his walk. There’s something about him independent, something very fine.”

“He sounds loud enough to me.”

“Well,” said Deborah, “he may be loud at times, but there are people who can hear what he is saying.”

There were few matters in which Deborah was bloody; music was one of them—she did not know bugger from beans—I had decided long ago that Shago was the most talented singer in America. Whereas Deborah and her friends had come to him lately. They had always repected him, too many experts said he was good, but they had never respected him thus famously; now the roulette of fashion came up double-zero: Shago was in. They were enchanted that he was oblivious to fashion; or at least oblivious to the shift in taste which made him fashionable this season in New York. He was singing only at the Copa and Latin Quarter these days—any other season this would have disqualified him forever—but now since it proved impossible to invite or attract him to the parties which made up the inner schedule of the season each week, everyone’s desire for such an evening took on the proportions of a frontier war. Deborah and I were present that night because Deborah had stalked him (by telephone) into the promise to give an interview after his eleven o’clock set: she was going to hog him to a contract to sing at a charity ball coming up in four weeks and three days. But Shago was not in his dressing room when the set was over; he had left a note with his valet:
Sorry, lady, but I can’t go that milk and charity shoot
. “Oh, dear,” said Deborah, “the poor man must be trying to spell shit.” She was, however, livid. The world was now more defined. In return for this raid on good feelings, Deborah got Shago good. I never knew how many phone calls it took, nor how many looks were dropped on how many marble floors: “Do you really like the man?” but in four weeks and three days, by the night of the charity ball, no hostess I knew was keening for Shago. That was that. There was a base to Deborah’s humor which smelled of old brass.

I used thereafter to keep his records, and I would play them. Actually, I did not enjoy him altogether. His talent was too extreme.
He was not often evocative of the smell of smoke in a fog or the mood which is near a young girl when she comes into a room, he did not suggest that the nicest affair of the year was about to start, he did not make me think, as other singers often did, of landscapes in Jamaica, of mangoes, honey, and a breast beneath a moon, of tropical love and candy which went from dark to dawn, no, Shago gave you that, he gave you some of that, but there were snakes in his tropical garden, and a wild pig was off in the wilderness with a rip in its flank from the teeth of a puma, he gave you a world of odd wild cries, and imprisoned it to something complex in his style, some irony, some sense of control, some sense of the way everything is brought back at last under control. And he had a beat which went right through your ear into your body, it was cruel, it was perfect, it gave promise of teaching a paralytic to walk: he was always announced at places like the Copa as “The Big Beat in Show Biz,” and the worst was that some publicity man was right for once, his voice had a bounce as hard as a hard rubber ball off a stone floor, listening to him was cousin to the afternoon one played a match with a champion at squash—the ball went by with the nicest economy, picking up speed as it went, taking off as it blew by; so Shago Martin’s beat was always harder, faster, or a hesitation slower than the reflex of your ear, but you were glowing when he was done, the ear felt good, you had been dominated by a champion.

The only difficulty was that his talent persisted in shifting. Deborah began to dance with spiritual delight at some of his later records. “You know, I despise that man,” she would say, “but his music is improving.” She was right. His voice had developed to the point where you could not always distinguish it from a trumpet or even on virtuoso occasions from a saxophone. Once off on a ride, his song seemed able to take a step between each step of the rapid elegant dance a jazzman’s fingers could pick across the keys. But of course he had become too special—no average nightclub audience could follow him. He was harsh. Some of his most experimental
work sounded at first like a clash of hysterias. It was only later that one discovered his power of choice—he was like a mind racing between separate madnesses, like a car picking its route through the collision of other cars. It was harsh. The last I heard he was even singing at times in the kind of cabaret which closes on the fatal Thursday night when there is not enough in the cash register to pay the police their weekly protection. That was what delighted Deborah. That was what she heard finally in his music: he was no longer in danger of developing into a national figure.

Now, as he stood inside Cherry’s door, he was wearing a small black felt hat with a narrow brim, his gray flannel suit had narrow pants, he wore short boots of some new and extraordinary cut (red-wine suede with buttons of mother-of-pearl) and a red velvet waistcoat to match. A shirt of pink silk took light from the vest, even as a crystal glass picks up an echo in the color of the wine, and his tie was narrow, black knit, with a small pin. With his left hand he held a furled umbrella, taut as a sword in its case, and he kept it at an angle to his body, which returned—since his body was tall and slim—some perfect recollection of a lord of Harlem standing at his street corner.

This was a fair sum to notice in the time it took him to open the door, come in, look at Cherry, look at me, see his bathrobe on my back, and tell me to get dressed and out, but I saw it all, my sense of time—like that hesitation before the roller coaster drops—was as long as the first breath of marijuana when the lung gives up its long sigh within, and time goes back to that place where it began, yes, I saw it all, had memories of Shago singing, and Deborah reading the note, I had one very long instant indeed as he looked at me. A wind came off him, a poisonous snake of mood which entered my lungs like marijuana, and time began to slow.

Then a curious happiness came to me from the knowledge Shago was capable of murder, as if death right now would carry me over just that moment I had known in Cherry when something went up
and into the fall. So I smiled at him, no more, and pushed a pack of cigarettes in his direction.

“Get out,” he said.

Our eyes met and stayed together. There was an even raw gaze in his which stung like salt on the surface of my eyes. But I felt damnably abstract, as if my reaction had been packed away, were instruments in a case. When I didn’t move, Shago turned to Cherry and said, “He won’t run?”

“No.”

“I be damn,” said Shago, “you got yourself a stud who can stand.”

“Yes.”

“Not like Tony?”

“No.”

“Well, stand! you mother-fucker,” said Shago to me.

When I stood up, Martin opened his fingers. He had been holding a switchblade in his right hand, and it opened from his palm like a snake’s tongue. The flick of the blade made no more sound than a stalk of grass being pulled from its root. “I’ll tell you,” said Shago, “get dressed. I would not like,” he went on, “to get cut while I was wearing another man’s robe.”

“Put away your blade,” I said. My voice spoke out of that calm.

“I put it away, man, after I cut my initials on you. That’s S. M. Shit on Mother,” said Shago. He turned his head to Cherry, his eyes a startling golden yellow in his black face, they were nearly a match to hers, and began to laugh. “Oh Jesus,” he said, “shee-it, shee-it,” and he held up the blade and flicked it closed. Like a magician. “She’s my honey,” he said to me, “she my wife.”

“Was your wife,” said Cherry, “till you were so evil.”

“Well, shit a pickle,” said Shago.

“Yeah,” she said, “shit a pickle.”

They were like a man and woman balancing on a tight wire.
“Evil,” he cried out, “evil,” he demanded, “listen, Sambo,” he said to me, “you look like a coonass blackass nigger jackaboo to me cause you been put-putting with blondie here, my wife, you see, dig? digaree? Evil! Evil? Why the white girl’s evil, you see.” There was a tiny froth at the corner of his immaculate lips, a strain of red in the white of his eyes. “What you doing with him?” asked Shago of her, “he’s fat.”

“He’s not,” cried Cherry, “he’s not.”

“Keep wasting,” said Shago, “he’s a tub of guts.”

“Just go on talking,” I said.

“You say that?” he asked of me.

“Yes, I said that.” My voice was not as good the second time.

“Don’t cut me, boy,” said Shago. The blade was out again.

“You’re a disgrace,” said Cherry.

“Every nigger’s a disgrace. Look at Sambo here. He’s a disgrace to the fat white race. What you doing with him? Why he’s a professor, he’s a professor. He hugged his wife so hard she fell down dead. Ha, ha. Ho, ho. Then he push her out.”

“Close your knife,” said Cherry.

“Shee-it.”

“There’s bird on your lip,” said Cherry.

“Not bleeding a bit.” He took his umbrella and flipped it behind him to the door. It made a muffled sound like a woman thrust aside. “Her womb is full of blood,” he said to me. “She had a kid and afraid to have it. Afraid to have a kid with a black ass. What about you, uncle, going to give a kid with a white ass, with a white diarrhetic old ass? Kiss my you-know-what.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Get my knife, shit-face.”

I took a step toward him. I did not know what I was going to do, but it felt right to take that step. Maybe I had a thought to pick up the whiskey bottle, and break it on the table. The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a
man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.

Shago retreated a step, the blade held out in his open palm, his wrist dipping to some beat he heard in the mood. Looking at that blade was like standing on the edge of a high cliff, one’s stomach sucking out of one, as one’s eyes went down the fall. I had a moment when I remembered the German with the bayonet, and my legs were gone, they were all but gone; I felt a voice in me sending instructions to snatch the whiskey bottle and break it, break it now that he was out of reach and so could not slash me with the knife, not without taking a step, but the voice was like a false voice in my nerves, and so I ignored it and took another step forward against all the lack of will in my legs, took the step and left the bottle behind as if I knew it would be useless against a knife. My reflexes were never a match for his. What I felt instead was an emptiness in his mood which I could enter.

Shago took another step back and closed the blade. “Well, Cherry,” he said in a cool voice, “this cat’s got valor,” giving a Spanish pronunciation to the word. Then he put the knife away. And gave us both a sweet smile. “Honey,” he said to Cherry, “laugh! That’s the best piece of acting I done yet.”

“Oh, God, Shago, you’re evil,” she told him. But she had to shake her head. There was admiration despite herself.

“I’m just sweet and talented, honey.” He smiled sweetly at me. “Shake hands, Rojack, you’re beautiful,” he said, and took my hand.

But I did not like the feel of his palm. There was something limp and leathery to the touch. “How’s that for putting you on?” he asked of me.

“First-rate,” I said.

“Oh, beautiful,” he said. “Such beautiful dozens. Such éclat.”

I was near to being ill.

“That’s how Shago can sicken you,” Cherry said.

“I’m a sick devil, no doubt of that,” he said with charm. And his
voice was beginning to take a few turns. Accents flew in and out of his speech like flying peacocks and bats. “Haul ass, the black man is on the march,” Shago said to me suddenly, “and he won’t stop until his elementary requirements are met. Ralph Bunche. Right? ‘Take your hand off my fly,’ said the Duchess to the Bishop cause she was a Duke in drag. Chuck, chuck, chuck.” He looked at me with eyes which were suddenly wild as if the absence of rest had set them racing like cockroaches under the flare of a light.