Goodbye Without Leaving (7 page)

She sat next to me on a love seat in front of the wood-burning fireplace. We had been served our leg of lamb and were having coffee in the Listers' enormous living room.

“Now,” she said, “Johnny tells me you work for a foundation. I do too! Which one do
you
work for?”

I said I worked for the Race Music Foundation.

“Really,” Betty said. “I've never heard of it. Who does it give money to?”

“It takes money from,” I said. “It isn't a foundation in your sense. It's an archive for the preservation of black music.”

“How marvelous!” Betty said. This was the sort of thing
her
foundation funded. “And what is the guiding principle of the Race Music Foundation?”

“The Race Music Foundation believes that the white man is trying to eradicate black music from the face of the earth with incessant remakes by white performers.”

Johnny gave me a look of pain.

“I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean,” Betty said.

Bill emerged from the kitchen and put a tray of demitasse cups in front of us. Betty sipped at her coffee. Her hair was a kind of coppery color with streaks of gray. She wore it cut to her shoulders with a tortoiseshell clip on one side.

“Co-option is death,” I said. “It's all in Dr. Willhall's pamphlet
Here's What I Believe
.”

“That sounds rather paranoid,” Betty said. “I'm afraid I have trouble with organizations that seek to tear apart the fabric of our country rather than to mend it. Now our Crocket-Parker project, for instance, takes gifted children from the inner city and mainstreams them into some of our good private schools.”

“How about if some of the gifted students from our good private schools were mainstreamed into the inner city?” I said. This was debate! Now I had the hang of it! Social life was a snap. I turned to beam at Johnny but I saw from his face that I had gotten it all wrong, so I drank my coffee and shut up.

Betty turned from me and to the company at large. They were on to a different topic: Nazis. Do neo-Nazis have the right to exist in a free and just society? On this subject everyone had a lengthy opinion.

17

At home I played a desultory round of a game I had invented called Who Likes Negroes Most? It had, at one time, amused my sweetheart endlessly.

“Who likes Negroes most?” I said. “Why, Bill Lister likes Negroes most. If a Negro were drowning in a lake of burning lighter fluid, Bill would take an ice cube from his own drink and float it out to the Negro so he could have an ice cube for
his
drink.”

“We say ‘black people,'” Johnny said.

“Vernon and Ruby found that demeaning,” I said, and continued. “Who else likes Negroes most? Betty Lister does, because her foundation once gave fifty thousand dollars to a blond man from Yale who
said
he was a Negro.”

“What makes you feel superior to these people?” Johnny said.

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “I mean, I just used to live with black people. I worked for them. I sat and ate at the same table with them. During that big snowstorm in St. Paul two years ago, I actually slept in the same bed with one.”

“Really?” said Johnny. “Which one?”

“The hotels were overbooked. It was a freak blizzard. Everybody doubled up. I slept with Grace, and Ivy slept with Ruby.”

“What about old Vern?”

“He slept in a chair.”

“And what about Doo-Wah?”

“He slept on the floor. These guys don't share beds with guys under any circumstances. It probably comes from not having gone to expensive sleep-over camps when they were little.”

Johnny, who had gone to an expensive sleep-over camp when
he
was little, darkened. He looked at me glumly.

“Listen,” he said. “Betty's foundation wrote the script for about a dozen of those inner-city schools for gifted children. There are hundreds of kids in Ivy League colleges now because of her. Bill oversees all the pro bono work at the firm. He is responsible for an immense amount of good. So what's your problem—that they don't regularly eat lunch with darkies?”

“I think they are morally bankrupt and out to lunch,” I said. “They're like those debutantes who used to go into the slums and tell poor women how to raise their children. What makes you think it's so swell for some kid from the inner city to go to Yale and be surrounded by people who spend more on a pair of shoes than his mama does on food for a month and who have no idea where he's coming from?”

“I love you,” said Johnny. “You're definitely right, and you're also wrong. You can be morally bankrupt and out to lunch and still do really good things for people. You don't see how well-meaning they are. You think they're full of shit because the only black people they know are servants.”

That about wrapped it up.

“I can see both sides,” Johnny said. “They're right, and you're right.”

I merely looked at him. I felt a little as if I were drowning in a lake of burning lighter fluid.

“Speak,” Johnny said.

“You'll get like them,” I said. “Their values will cover you like slime. They'll get under your skin like chiggers and pour their attitudes into your blood. They'll invade your brain like tropical parasites and take you over.”

“Aren't you
lurid
!”

“I'm so unhappy.”

“Don't be,” Johnny said. “You can go to a dinner party and not lose your essential self. You can be true to your school and still make normal conversation. You can act like a regular person and still boogie in your soul.”

I listened earnestly but I felt that none of these things were true.

On the other hand, Johnny was my golden mean. He did boogie in his soul and I was deficient because I was too truculent to find any place for myself in what most people would call “the real world.” Who else would ever have been so perfect for me? Johnny was a translator and I was a foreign language. Without him I would have been lost somewhere in outer space. Without me he would have adapted himself out of existence. We were made for each other. I told him so.

“I'm glad you feel that way,” he said, kissing my ear. “Because next month the Listers are having a really big dinner party with caterers and everything, so start practicing now.”

I did not look forward to this event but, on the other hand, fair was fair. Johnny came with me to the Newark Armory to catch a show of James Brown and the Famous Flames. He told me that, before he met me, he had gone to a dinner party at the Listers' and a large, drunken sportswriter named Adrien McWirter had slid a cornichon down the back of the wife of the dean of the law school. How I wished I had been there!

“Gee, does that guy get invited anymore?” I said, hopefully.

“Well, he made a lot of trouble. He stood up in the middle of a dinner party one night and said, ‘Oh, how I adore neo-Nazi bikers. Those attractive leather uniforms and all.' And then he passed out on the couch.”

He sounded like a man after my own heart, but Johnny told me that McWirter had been abandoned by all his friends, who could no longer stand to be around him. I sighed.

The week of the party I suggested to Johnny that I wear one of my old dance dresses since I could not go to a black-tie dinner in either of my two uniforms: blue jeans and turtleneck for home wear, black skirt and turtleneck for office. Johnny suggested that I go buy a dress and, on second thought, he'd go with me.

He sat in a chair like an elderly husband or sugar daddy and watched me try on things, and he made me buy a plain black dress which he said would look good with pearls. I said I had no pearls and two days later my enterprising swain was back with a string of pearls in a blue leather case. The enclosed card read: “For forays into the adult world.”

I looked at the pearls. “Why don't you fuck off?” I suggested.

Johnny did not take this seriously. “See here, my good woman,” he said. “I buy you a string of extremely good pearls and you tell me to fuck off. How about throwing your arms around me and saying thank you.”

I threw my arms around him and said thank you. Then I said, “Why don't you marry Carol Adams?”

Carol Adams had been my predecessor.

“She's married,” he said into my ear. “Now let's get dressed and get going.”

At the Listers' our coats were taken by a handsome black man in a purple serving jacket. A handsome black butler served champagne and hors d'oeuvres from a silver tray. We were introduced to Mr. Something, a famous civil libertarian, and Mrs. Something Else, whose oversized black glazed pots were on view at the Hammerschuld Gallery. The enormous dining room table sat twenty. I found the sight of it depressing.

As we stood with our drinks, the door of the kitchen opened. A fine-looking black woman in a black taffeta dress and white apron stood at the door. “Dinner now, Mrs. Lister.”

I gaped at her. “Grace!” I gasped. “Grace, far out!” For it was Grace Bettes, my old dance mate.

“What a world of surprises!” Grace said. And she retreated to the kitchen.

Every head was turned toward me. I felt flushed and hot with confusion. Clearly an explanation was required.

“We were in the Marine Corps together,” I said, struggling to my feet.

I propelled myself into the kitchen. “Grace!” I said, close to tears. “You got your catering thing together!”

“I sure did,” Grace said. “And you've still got your Boy Scout. This is my brother-in-law, Percy. Graham's in the living room with the hors d'oeuvres.”

Grace was putting frilly pantaloons on the crown roast. She looked wonderful. She had perfectly manicured nails and beautiful eyelashes and, even in her taffeta uniform, she looked very glamorous. She told me that she and Graham had a house in Brooklyn and that they had four people working for them. In six months she was going to ease up because she had just discovered that she was going to have a baby.

“This pays ten times more than that cheap bastard Vernon ever paid me,” she said, “and it's mine.”

“It was fun,” I said.

“Not for me. It was my way out. It got me out of the projects. I sweated my tail off. Now we plow all our profits back into the business and someday Ruby will beg me to cater for her. We're going to be b-i-g.”

I asked her if she ever heard from anyone from the old days.

“Huh,” she said. “I'm glad those days are over. Ivy got married and she has a little baby girl. Remember Harold Hicks, the drummer? He teaches music in a high school in Arizona. Hey, I gotta work—here's my card. Give a call.”

Betty's guests were far too polite to ask me any questions, or perhaps they weren't interested in how Johnny's girlfriend knew Betty's cook.

Dinner was delicious but I was too distressed to eat. I sat in a fog. I heard Johnny explaining who Ruby Shakely was and how shy I was about my brilliant career. As I picked at my spinach soufflé, I remembered Grace and Ivy on stage in their dance dresses, throwing love beads and rose petals.

When we got home, I felt rather low. The feeling that everyone had organized lives except me caused me to collapse on the couch without speaking.

Johnny put his arms around me.

“I guess it was hard seeing Grace,” he said.

I said it had been.

“I guess it demonstrated something to you,” he said.

I told him it had, but on further reflection it was hard to pin down just exactly what.

P
ART
T
WO

Race Music

18

My darling Johnny was not too keen on Mary Abbott, my oldest and dearest friend. Perhaps this was plain jealousy; she had come before him in my affections and had known me longer. Or perhaps he intuited that I deferred to Mary. The fact is, she was my moral beacon.

Mary had dark hair, worn straight to her shoulders, and little round glasses. We wore the same clothes interchangeably and after a few years we did not have my clothes or your clothes, but ours. We spent our time drinking tea, listening to records and talking. I told Mary everything. From long habit as the eldest, she told me what she felt I needed to know. Thus, if she did not want to discuss what looked to me very much like a love affair she was conducting with one of her professors, we did not discuss it. I did not mind this a bit. It was part of what Johnny called Mary's quite unnecessary mysteriousness.

She was the oldest of four daughters in a liberal Catholic family that was constantly scrambling to reconcile the teachings of their church with the social problems of their times. They lived in a ramshackle Victorian house in a Connecticut suburb. Mr. Abbott was a chemist, and Mrs. Abbott was a reading teacher. They had a big Irish setter and a number of cats. The front porch was littered with bird and chipmunk guts. The dog, who was extremely stupid, was frequently lost and large search parties were constantly organized on his behalf. While my parents and I lived in slightly reduced grandeur and sat down every night to a formally set table, the Abbotts lived in a charmingly out-of-control messiness. In order to have dinner, any number of child or adult projects had to be pushed out of the way—this would have been quite unheard of in my parents' house.

I knew the smell of the Abbott house as well as I knew the house I grew up in. I knew Mary's likes and dislikes as well as my own. I thought everything about her was original and wonderful, from her taste in music (plainchant, which I found thrillingly exotic, and Tarheel Slim and Little Ann singing “It's Too Late”) to the fact that she liked to combine hot and cold cereal for breakfast. Before she put her glasses on she was blind as a mole. She had an oldest sibling's sense of constant responsibility. Nevertheless, she had no fixed opinions, no vested interests, and she was perfectly free to see clearly who was a jerk and who was not. She was awesomely judgmental, but since her judgments matched mine, by and large, this was not much of a problem except when Mary turned her gaze on me.