Another Country (8 page)

One evening Vivaldo came to visit them in their last apartment. They heard the whistles of tugboats all day and all night long. Vivaldo found Leona sitting on the bathroom floor, her hair in her eyes, her face swollen and dirty with weeping. Rufus had been beating her. He sat silently on the bed.

“Why?” cried Vivaldo.

“I don’t know,” Leona sobbed, “it can’t be for nothing I did. He’s always beating me, for nothing, for nothing!” She gasped for breath, opening her mouth like an infant, and in that instant Vivaldo really hated Rufus and Rufus knew it. “He says I’m sleeping with other colored boys behind his back and it’s not true, God knows it’s not true!”

“Rufus knows it isn’t true,” Vivaldo said. He looked over at Rufus, who said nothing. He turned back to Leona. “Get up, Leona. Stand up. Wash your face.”

He went into the bathroom and helped her to her feet and turned the water on. “Come on, Leona. Pull yourself together, like a good girl.”

She tried to stop sobbing, and splashed water on her face. Vivaldo patted her on the shoulder, astonished all over again to realize how frail she was. He walked into the bedroom.

Rufus looked up at him. “This is my house,” he said, “and that’s my girl. You ain’t got nothing to do with this. Get your ass out of here.”

“You could be killed for this,” said Vivaldo. “All she has to do is yell. All
I
have to do is walk down to the corner and get a cop.”

“You trying to scare me? Go
get
a cop.”

“You must be out of your mind. They’d take one look at this situation and put you
under
the jailhouse.” He walked to the bathroom door. “Come on, Leona. Get your coat. I’m taking you out of here.”

“I’m not out of
my
mind,” Rufus said, “but
you
are. Where you think you taking Leona?”

“I got no place to go,” Leona muttered.

“Well, you can stay at my place until you
find
some place to go. I’m not leaving you here.”

Rufus threw back his head and laughed. Vivaldo and Leona both turned to watch him. Rufus cried to the ceiling, “He’s going to come to
my
house and walk out with
my
girl and he thinks this poor nigger’s just going to sit and let him do it. Ain’t this a bitch?”

He fell over on his side, still laughing.

Vivaldo shouted, “For Christ’s sake, Rufus!
Rufus!
”

Rufus stopped laughing and sat straight up. “What? Who the hell do you think you’re kidding? I know you only got one bed in your place!”

“Oh, Rufus,” Leona wailed, “Vivaldo’s only trying to help.”

“You shut up,” he said instantly, and looked at her.

“Everybody ain’t a animal,” she muttered.

“You mean, like me?”

She said nothing. Vivaldo watched them both.

“You mean, like me, bitch? Or you mean, like you?”

“If I’m a animal,” she flared— perhaps she was emboldened by the presence of Vivaldo— “I’d like you to tell me who made me one. Just tell me that?”

“Why, your husband did, you bitch. You told me yourself he had a thing on him like a horse. You told me yourself how he did you— he kept telling you how he had the biggest thing in Dixie, black
or
white. And you said you couldn’t stand it. Ha-
ha. That’s
one of the funniest things I
ever
heard.”

“I guess,” she said, wearily, after a silence, “I told you a lot of things I shouldn’t have.”

Rufus snorted. “I guess you did.” He said— to Vivaldo, the room, the river— “it was her husband ruined this bitch. Your husband and all them funky niggers screwed you in the Georgia bushes. That’s why your husband threw you out. Why don’t you tell the truth? I wouldn’t have to beat you if you’d tell the truth.” He grinned at Vivaldo. “Man, this chick can’t get enough”— and he broke off, staring at Leona.

“Rufus,” said Vivaldo, trying to be calm, “I don’t know what you’re putting down. I think you must be crazy. You got a great chick, who’d go all the way for you— and you know it— and you keep coming on with this
Gone with the Wind
crap. What’s the matter with your head, baby?” He tried to smile. “Baby, please don’t do this. Please?”

Rufus said nothing. He sat down on the bed, in the position in which he had been sitting when Vivaldo arrived.

“Come on, Leona,” said Vivaldo at last and Rufus stood up, looking at them both with a little smile, with hatred.

“I’m just going to take her away for a few days, so you can both cool down. There’s no point in going on like this.”

“Sir Walter Raleigh— with a hard on,” Rufus sneered.

“Look,” said Vivaldo, “if you don’t trust me, man, I’ll get a room at the Y. I’ll come back here. Goddammit,” he shouted, “I’m not trying to steal your girl. You know me better than that.”

Rufus said, with an astonishing and a menacing humility, “I guess you don’t think she’s good enough for you.”

“Oh, shit. You don’t think she’s good enough for
you
.”

“No,” said Leona, and both men turned to watch her, “ain’t neither one of you got it right. Rufus don’t think he’s good enough for
me
.”

She and Rufus stared at each other. A tugboat whistled, far away. Rufus smiled.

“You see?
You
bring it up all the time.
You
the one who brings it up. Now, how you expect me to make it with a bitch like you?”

“It’s the way you was raised,” she said, “and I guess you just can’t help it.”

Again, there was a silence. Leona pressed her lips together and her eyes filled with tears. She seemed to wish to call the words back, to call time back, and begin everything over again. But she could not think of anything to say and the silence stretched. Rufus pursed his lips.

“Go on, you slut,” he said, “go on and make it with your wop lover. He ain’t going to be able to do you no good. Not now. You be back. You can’t do without me now.” And he lay face downward on the bed. “Me, I’ll get me a good night’s sleep for a change.”

Vivaldo pushed Leona to the door, backing out of the room, watching Rufus.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

“No, you won’t,” said Rufus. “I’ll kill you if you come back.”

Leona looked at him quickly, bidding him to be silent, and Vivaldo closed the door behind them.

“Leona,” he asked, when they were in the streets, “how long have things been like this? Why do you take it?”

“Why,” asked Leona, wearily, “do people take anything? Because they can’t help it, I guess. Well, that’s me. Before God, I don’t know what to do.” She began to cry again. The streets were very dark and empty. “I know he’s sick and I keep hoping he’ll get well and I can’t make him see a doctor. He knows I’m not doing none of those things he says, he knows it!”

“But you can’t go on like this, Leona. He can get both of you killed.”

“He says it’s me trying to get us killed.” She tried to laugh. “He had a fight last week with some guy in the subway, some real, ignorant, unhappy man just didn’t like the idea of our being together, you know? and, well, you know, he blamed that fight on me. He said I was encouraging the man. Why, Viv, I didn’t even
see
the man until he opened his mouth. But, Rufus, he’s all the time looking for it, he sees it where it ain’t, he don’t see nothing else no more. He says I ruined his life. Well, he sure ain’t done mine much good.”

She tried to dry her eyes. Vivaldo gave her his handkerchief and put one arm around her shoulders.

“You know, the world is hard enough and people is evil enough without all the time looking for it and stirring it up and making it worse. I keep telling him, I know a lot of people don’t like what I’m doing. But I don’t care, let them go their way, I’ll go mine.”

A policeman passed them, giving them a look. Vivaldo felt a chill go through Leona’s body. Then a chill went through his own. He had never been afraid of policemen before; he had merely despised them. But now he felt the impersonality of the uniform, the emptiness of the streets. He felt what the policeman might say and do if he had been Rufus, walking here with his arm around Leona.

He said, nevertheless, after a moment, “You ought to leave him. You ought to leave town.”

“I tell you, Viv, I keep hoping— it’ll all come all right somehow. He wasn’t like this when I met him, he’s not really like this at all. I
know
he’s not. Something’s got all twisted up in his mind and he can’t help it.”

They were standing under a street lamp. Her face was hideous, was unutterably beautiful with grief. Tears rolled down her thin cheeks and she made doomed, sporadic efforts to control the trembling of her little-girl’s mouth.

“I love him,” she said, helplessly, “I love him, I can’t help it. No matter what he does to me. He’s just lost and he beats me because he can’t find nothing else to hit.”

He pulled her against him while she wept, a thin, tired girl, unwitting heiress of generations of bitterness. He could think of nothing to say. A light was slowly turning on inside him, a dreadful light. He saw— dimly— dangers, mysteries, chasms which he had never dreamed existed.

“Here comes a taxi,” he said.

She straightened and tried to dry her eyes again.

“I’ll come with you,” he said, “and come right back?”

“No,” she said, “just give me the keys. I’ll be all right. You go on back to Rufus.”

“Rufus said he’d kill me,” he said, half-smiling.

The taxi stopped beside them. He gave her his keys.

She opened the door, keeping her face away from the driver.

“Rufus ain’t going to kill nobody but himself,” she said, “if he don’t find a friend to help him.” She paused, half-in, half-out of the cab. “You the only friend he’s got in the world, Vivaldo.”

He gave her some money for the fare, looking at her with something, after all these months, explicit at last between them. They both loved Rufus. And they were both white. Now that it stared them so hideously in the face, each could see how desperately the other had been trying to avoid this confrontation.

“You’ll
go
there now?” he asked. “You’ll
go
to my place?”

“Yes. I’ll go. You go on back to Rufus. Maybe you can help him. He needs somebody to help him.”

Vivaldo gave the driver his address and watched the taxi roll away. He turned and started back the way they had come.

The way seemed longer, now that he was alone, and darker. His awareness of the policeman, prowling somewhere in the darkness near him, made the silence ominous. He felt threatened. He felt totally estranged from the city in which he had been born; this city for which he sometimes felt a kind of stony affection because it was all he knew of home. Yet he had no home here— the hovel on Bank Street was not a home. He had always supposed that he would, one day, make a home here for himself. Now he began to wonder if anyone could ever put down roots in this rock; or, rather, he began to be aware of the shapes acquired by those who had. He began to wonder about his own shape.

He had often thought of his loneliness, for example, as a condition which testified to his superiority. But people who were not superior were, nevertheless, extremely lonely— and unable to break out of their solitude precisely because they had no equipment with which to enter it. His own loneliness, magnified so many million times, made the night air colder. He remembered to what excesses, into what traps and nightmares, his loneliness had driven him; and he wondered where such a violent emptiness might drive an entire city.

At the same time, as he came closer to Rufus’ building, he was trying very hard not to think about Rufus.

He was in a section of warehouses. Very few people lived down here. By day, trucks choked the streets, laborers stood on these ghostly platforms, moving great weights, and cursing. As he had once; for a long time, he had been one of them. He had been proud of his skill and his muscles and happy to be accepted as a man among men. Only— it was they who saw something in him which they could not accept, which made them uneasy. Every once in a while, a man, lighting his cigarette, would look at him quizzically, with a little smile. The smile masked an unwilling, defensive hostility. They said he was a “bright kid,” that he would “go places”; and they made it clear that they expected him to go, to which places did not matter— he did not belong to them.

But at the bottom of his mind the question of Rufus nagged and stung. There had been a few colored boys in his high school but they had mainly stayed together, as far as he remembered. He had known boys who got a bang out of going out and beating up niggers. It scarcely seemed possible— it scarcely, even, seemed fair— that colored boys who were beaten up in high school could grow up into colored men who wanted to beat up everyone in sight, including, or perhaps especially, people who had never, one way or another, given them a thought.

He watched the light in Rufus’ window, the only light on down here.

Then he remembered something that had happened to him a long time ago, two years or three. It was when he had been spending a lot of time in Harlem, running after the whores up there. One night, as a light rain fell, he was walking uptown on Seventh Avenue. He walked very briskly, for it was very late and this section of the Avenue was almost entirely deserted and he was afraid of being stopped by a prowl car. At 116th Street he stopped in a bar, deliberately choosing a bar he did not know. Since he did not know the bar he felt an unaccustomed uneasiness and wondered what the faces around him hid. Whatever it was, they hid it very well. They went on drinking and talking to each other and putting coins in the juke box. It certainly didn’t seem that his presence caused anyone to become wary, or to curb their tongues. Nevertheless, no one made any effort to talk to him and an almost imperceptible glaze came over their eyes whenever they looked in his direction. This glaze remained, even when they smiled. The barman, for example, smiled at something Vivaldo said and yet made it clear, as he pushed his drink across the bar, that the width of the bar was but a weak representation of the great gulf fixed between them.