Another Country (2 page)

He was going to leave his traps there until Monday afternoon. When he stepped down from the stand there was this blonde girl, very plainly dressed, standing looking at him.

“What’s on your mind, baby?” he asked her. Everybody was busy all around them, preparing to make it to the party. It was spring and the air was charged.

“What’s on
your
mind?” she countered, but it was clear that she simply had not known what else to say.

She had said enough. She was from the South. And something leaped in Rufus as he stared at her damp, colorless face, the face of the Southern poor white, and her straight, pale hair. She was considerably older than he, over thirty probably, and her body was too thin. Just the same, it abruptly became the most exciting body he had gazed on in a long time.

“Honeychild,” he said and gave her his crooked grin, “ain’t you a long ways from home?”

“I sure am,” she said, “and I ain’t never going back there.”

He laughed and she laughed. “Well, Miss Anne,” he said, “if we both got the same thing on our mind, let’s make it to that party.”

And he took her arm, deliberately allowing the back of his hand to touch one of her breasts, and he said, “Your name’s not really Anne, is it?”

“No,” she said, “it’s Leona.”

“Leona?” And he smiled again. His smile could be very effective. “That’s a pretty name.”

“What’s yours?”

“Me? I’m Rufus Scott.”

He wondered what she was doing in this joint, in Harlem. She didn’t seem at all the type to be interested in jazz, still less did she seem to be in the habit of going to strange bars alone. She carried a light spring coat, her long hair was simply brushed back and held with some pins, she wore very little lipstick and no other make-up at all.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll pile into a cab.”

“Are you sure it’s all right if I come?”

He sucked his teeth. “If it wasn’t all right, I wouldn’t ask you. If I say it’s all right, it’s all
right
.”

“Well,” she said with a short laugh, “all right, then.”

They moved with the crowd, which, with many interruptions, much talking and laughing and much erotic confusion, poured into the streets. It was three o’clock in the morning and gala people all around them were glittering and whistling and using up all the taxicabs. Others, considerably less gala— they were on the western edge of 125th Street— stood in knots along the street, switched or swaggered or dawdled by, with glances, sidelong or full face, which were more calculating than curious. The policemen strolled by; carefully, and in fact rather mysteriously conveying their awareness that these particular Negroes, though they were out so late, and mostly drunk, were not to be treated in the usual fashion; and neither were the white people with them. But Rufus suddenly realized that Leona would soon be the only white person left. This made him uneasy and his uneasiness made him angry. Leona spotted an empty cab and hailed it.

The taxi driver, who was white, seemed to have no hesitation in stopping for them, nor, once having stopped, did he seem to have any regrets.

“You going to work tomorrow?” he asked Leona. Now that they were alone together, he felt a little shy.

“No,” she said, “tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“That’s right.” He felt very pleased and free. He had planned to visit his family but he thought of what a ball it would be to spend the day in bed with Leona. He glanced over at her, noting that, though she was tiny, she seemed very well put together. He wondered what she was thinking. He offered her a cigarette putting his hand on hers briefly, and she refused it. “You don’t smoke?”

“Sometimes. When I drink.”

“Is that often?”

She laughed. “No. I don’t like to drink alone.”

“Well,” he said, “you ain’t
going
to be drinking alone for awhile.”

She said nothing but she seemed, in the darkness, to tense and blush. She looked out of the window on her side. “I’m glad I ain’t got to worry none about getting you home early tonight.”

“You ain’t got to worry about that, nohow. I’m a big girl.”

“Honey,” he said, “you ain’t no bigger than a minute.”

She sighed. “Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.”

He decided against asking what she meant by this. He said, giving her a significant look, “That’s true,” but she did not seem to take his meaning.

They were on Riverside Drive and nearing their destination. To the left of them, pale, unlovely lights emphasized the blackness of the Jersey shore. He leaned back, leaning a little against Leona, watching the blackness and the lights roll by. Then the cab turned; he glimpsed, briefly, the distant bridge which glowed like something written in the sky. The cab slowed down, looking for the house number. A taxi ahead of them had just discharged a crowd of people and was disappearing down the block. “Here we are,” said Rufus; “Looks like a real fine party,” the taxi driver said, and winked. Rufus said nothing. He paid the man and they got out and walked into the lobby, which was large and hideous, with mirrors and chairs. The elevator had just started upward; they could hear the crowd.

“What were you doing in that club all by yourself, Leona?” he asked.

She looked at him, a little startled. Then, “I don’t know. I just wanted to see Harlem and so I went up there tonight to look around. And I just happened to pass that club and I heard the music and I went in and I
stayed
. I liked the music.” She gave him a mocking look. “Is that all right?”

He laughed and said nothing.

She turned from him as they heard the sound of the closing elevator door reverberate down the shaft. Then they heard the drone of the cables as the elevator began to descend. She watched the closed doors as though her life depended on it.

“This your first time in New York?”

Yes, it was, she told him, but she had been dreaming about it all her life— half-facing him again, with a little smile. There was something halting in her manner which he found very moving. She was like a wild animal who didn’t know whether to come to the outstretched hand or to flee and kept making startled little rushes, first in one direction and then in the other.

“I was born here,” he said, watching her.

“I know,” she said, “so it can’t seem as wonderful to you as it does to me.”

He laughed again. He remembered, suddenly, his days in boot camp in the South and felt again the shoe of a white officer against his mouth. He was in his white uniform, on the ground, against the red, dusty clay. Some of his colored buddies were holding him, were shouting in his ear, helping him to rise. The white officer, with a curse, had vanished, had gone forever beyond the reach of vengeance. His face was full of clay and tears and blood; he spat red blood into the red dust.

The elevator came and the doors opened. He took her arm as they entered and held it close against his chest. “I think you’re a real sweet girl.”

“You’re nice, too,” she said. In the closed, rising elevator her voice had a strange trembling in it and her body was also trembling— very faintly, as though it were being handled by the soft spring wind outside.

He tightened his pressure on her arm. “Didn’t they warn you down home about the darkies you’d find up North?”

She caught her breath. “They didn’t never worry me none. People’s just people as far as I’m concerned.”

And pussy’s just pussy as far as I’m concerned, he thought— but was grateful, just the same, for her tone. It gave him an instant to locate himself. For he, too, was trembling slightly.

“What made you come North?” he asked.

He wondered if he should proposition her or wait for her to proposition him. He couldn’t beg. But perhaps she could. The hairs of his groin began to itch slightly. The terrible muscle at the base of his belly began to grow hot and hard.

The elevator came to a halt, the doors opened, and they walked a long corridor toward a half-open door.

She said, “I guess I just couldn’t take it down there any more. I was married but then I broke up with my husband and they took away my kid— they wouldn’t even let me see him— and I got to thinking that rather than sit down there and go crazy, I’d try to make a new life for myself up here.”

Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble. But he shook the suggestion off. He wouldn’t be around long enough to be bugged by her story. He just wanted her for tonight.

He knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. Straight ahead of them, in the large living room which ended in open French doors and a balcony, more than a hundred people milled about, some in evening dress, some in slacks and sweaters. High above their heads hung an enormous silver ball which reflected unexpected parts of the room and managed its own unloving comment on the people in it. The room was so active with coming and going, so bright with jewelry and glasses and cigarettes, that the heavy ball seemed almost to be alive.

His host— whom he did not really know very well— was nowhere in sight. To the right of them were three rooms, the first of which was piled high with wraps and overcoats.

The horn of Charlie Parker, coming over the hi-fi, dominated all the voices in the room.

“Put your coat down,” he told Leona, “and I’ll try to find out if I know anybody in this joint.”

“Oh,” she said, “I’m sure you know them all.”

“Go on, now,” he said, smiling, and pushing her gently into the room, “do like I tell you.”

While she was putting away her coat— and powdering her nose, probably— he remembered that he had promised to call Vivaldo. He wandered through the house, looking for a relatively isolated telephone, and found one in the kitchen.

He dialed Vivaldo’s number.

“Hello, baby. How’re you?”

“Oh, all right, I guess. What’s happening? I thought you were going to call me sooner. I’d just about given you up.”

“Well, I only just made it up here.” He dropped his voice, for a couple had entered the kitchen, a blonde girl with a disarrayed Dutch bob and a tall Negro. The girl leaned against the sink, the boy stood before her, rubbing his hands slowly along the outside of her thighs. They barely glanced at Rufus. “A whole lot of elegant squares around, you dig?”

“Yeah,” said Vivaldo. There was a pause. “You think it’s worthwhile making it up there?”

“Well, hell, I don’t know. If you got something
better
to do—”

“Jane’s here,” Vivaldo said, quickly. Rufus realized that Jane was probably lying on the bed, listening.

“Oh, you got your grandmother with you, you don’t need nothing up here then.” He did not like Jane, who was somewhat older than Vivaldo, with prematurely gray hair. “Ain’t nothing up here old enough for you.”

“That’s enough, you bastard.” He heard Jane’s voice and Vivaldo’s, murmuring; he could not make out what was being said. Then Vivaldo’s voice was at his ear again. “I think I’ll skip it.”

“I guess you better. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Maybe I’ll come by your pad—?”

“Okay. Don’t let grandma wear you out now; they tell me women get real ferocious when they get as old as she is.”

“They can’t get too ferocious for me, dad!”

Rufus laughed. “You better
quit
trying to compete with me. You ain’t never going to make it. So long.”

“So long.”

He hung up, smiling, and went to find Leona. She stood helplessly in the foyer, watching the host and hostess saying good night to several people.

“Think I’d deserted you?”

“No. I knew you wouldn’t do that.”

He smiled at her and touched her on the chin with his fist. The host turned away from the door and came over to them.

“You kids go on inside and get yourselves a drink,” he said. “Go on in and get with it.” He was a big, handsome, expansive man, older and more ruthless than he looked, who had fought his way to the top in show business via several of the rougher professions, including boxing and pimping. He owed his present eminence more to his vitality and his looks than he did to his voice, and he knew it. He was not the kind of man who fooled himself and Rufus liked him because he was rough and good-natured and generous. But Rufus was also a little afraid of him; there was that about him, in spite of his charm, which did not encourage intimacy. He was a great success with women, whom he treated with a large, affectionate contempt, and he was now on his fourth wife.

He took Leona and Rufus by the arm and walked them to the edge of the party. “We might have us some real doings if these squares ever get out of here,” he said. “Stick around.”

“How does it feel to be respectable?” Rufus grinned.

“Shit. I been respectable all my life. It’s these
respectable
motherfuckers been doing all the dirt. They been stealing the colored folks blind, man. And niggers helping them do it.” He laughed. “You know, every time they give me one of them great big checks I think to myself, they just giving me back a
little
bit of what they been stealing all these years, you know what I mean?” He clapped Rufus on the back. “See that Little Eva has a good time.”

The crowd was already thinning, most of the squares were beginning to drift away. Once they were gone, the party would change character and become very pleasant and quiet and private. The lights would go down, the music become softer, the talk more sporadic and more sincere. Somebody might sing or play the piano. They might swap stories of the laughs they’d had, gigs they’d played, riffs they remembered, or the trouble they’d seen. Somebody might break out with some pot and pass it slowly around, like the pipe of peace. Somebody, curled on a rug in a far corner of the room, would begin to snore. Whoever danced would dance more languorously, holding tight. The shadows of the room would be alive. Toward the very end, as morning and the brutal sounds of the city began their invasion through the wide French doors, somebody would go into the kitchen and break out with some coffee. Then they would raid the icebox and go home. The host and hostess would finally make it between their sheets and stay in bed all day.