The Man Who Cried I Am (4 page)

Michelle. No, long before Michelle. Max looked at his watch again. He would call her. He placed the call and lay back. Great pills, absolutely fantastic pills. Margrit would be coming soon, too. Not too soon. She would give him a chance to rest a little. Damn her anyway. When the phone rang he said, “Max. Michelle?”

“Yes. How is Margrit?”

God
damn these women, he thought. “All right. We are having dinner in a little while. Listen,” he said speaking carefully, “I have not been well. It is nothing serious. But did I imagine that you were signaling me at the funeral?”

“Yes, I would see you. It is most urgent. It is about Harry.”

Max mashed out his cigarette.

“It is about Harry,” she said again.

“What, what about Harry?” Then he said, “Edwards?”

“Tonight by express, I will come to Rotterdam. From there the other train to Leiden. Will you meet me tomorrow?”

“What address?”

She gave him the address and quickly rang off. Max lay back once more and closed his eyes. What in the hell was going on? Why didn't he leave well enough alone. Harry wasn't going to revert to flesh and blood. Charlotte. I bet she enjoyed thinking about him cooking and curling behind that wall. Got her kicks every stinking minute it took.

Margrit. Even if he wanted Margrit back he couldn't have her. Maybe it was good it went the way it did. He would have hated to have her around now, twenty-four hours a day, shuttling between the house and the hospital, doing with a smile the tasks that every nurse he'd had frowned at.

He had dressed and was dozing on the bed when Margrit called from the lobby. He felt better and smiled as he straightened his tie. The old Margrit would have walked briskly through the lobby, taken the lift and come up to the room and talked while he dressed. And he would not have dressed until afterward.

He took a deep breath, patted his things into place and went downstairs. She had said she would be at the table. “What table?” he had almost asked, but he remembered in time.
The
table, of course.

She smiled up at him. “You got your bag all right, I see.”

“Sure,” he said, sliding over the seat to the window side. What was she talking about? Of course he had his bag. Then he remembered. When had he slept? When he woke he went directly to his bag, opened it, took out a fresh shirt and underwear. He hadn't even remembered that when he entered the room he had been without his bag. Jesus, he thought, Jesus Christ. “Drink?” he said.

“Yes, of course.”

He smiled and looked across the street at the side entrances of the Stadsschouwburg and thought once again that Amsterdam was the one city he could have lived in other than New York. Idly he watched a Surinamer saunter down the street, past their window. Traffic was much thinner now, not so many bicycles, not so many cars; there were many people walking. “It remains constant, doesn't it?”

Margrit turned to the window—she had been looking at him. “The same, you mean? Yes, nearly so.”

“Fantastic place.” He marveled as they sipped their drinks, how in Amsterdam, except when you headed a little south, all that was new had been built around the old, had not overwhelmed the narrow, steeply gabled houses, nor the canals. Suddenly, he wished he were younger and starting all over again.

“What is the matter, Mox?”

“Nothing, Margrit. Hi. It's good to see you again. Why haven't you married some lucky Dutchman?”

“I haven't been waiting for you,” she said.

“I didn't want you to. I didn't think you would.”

“And you, Mox, who do you see now?”

“I'm kind of a fugitive.”

“Fugi—”

“I'm not seeing anyone.”

“Oh. Oh, I don't believe that, Mox.”

He laughed. The pill and the liquor were making him high very fast. “I didn't think you would, but it is the truth.”

She snorted. “You have had an amputation then.”

“Yes.” He glanced around the huge dining room. The tables and chairs were a rich, warm brown, the white tablecloths crisp and stiff. An elderly man was sitting at the reading table, poring over the papers from the racks.

“You are with the same magazine, Mox?”

He looked up quickly. He had forgotten that too. “No,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

He looked at her with exasperation, then remembered that she wasn't his wife anymore, and that he had no right to be exasperated with her. But she had seen the look. “Or shouldn't I ask?”

“I've taken a leave,” he said. “Tired.”

“Yes,” she said, turning once again to the window, her hair trailing a soft gold, “you were always tired, Mox.”

Max signaled the waiter for more drinks. He supposed he was always tired. Bored, that's what brought it on, bored with all of it, the predictability of wars, the behavior of statesmen, cabdrivers, most men, most women. Bored because writing books had become, finally, unexciting; bored because The Magazine too, and all the people connected with it, did their work and lived by formulae. He was bored with New Deals and Square Deals and New Frontiers and Great Societies; suspicious of the future, untrusting of the past. He was sure of one thing: that he was; that he existed. The pain in his ass told him so.

“I guess I was always tired. Tired when I was born, maybe.”

“That's what you always said.”

“See? Nothing new. How's Roger?”

“Roger? Roger is still Roger, what else?”

“Still macking in his own intellectual way?”

“Still what—?”

“Macking. Macking. Oh, Margrit, you know what macking is.”

“But no, I don't.”

“We talked about it,” he insisted. Shut your mouth, he told himself.

“No, we didn't.”

“Okay, okay. Roger's still the same, that means he's macking.”

“Have it your way.”

“Thanks.”

Roger was not an ordinary macker; he gave a little more than most Negroes in Europe who were thus engaged between books or articles or showings or jazz engagements. Roger gave his women laughs and little peeks at Kafka, Mann, Wright, Jami of Samarkand, the suppressed Books of Enoch; and he talked in ringing poetic tones of Wardell Gray, Bird, Pres; of Fats Navarro and the early Miles, and then, shifting pace, breaking it down into a long, smooth lope, he would go into Kant, Kierkegaard, Spinoza and Walter Van Tilburg Clark's philosophical handling of
The Ox-bow Incident;
he studied Hausa and Swahili and planned to get into Yoruba, Ga and Ibo—oh, Max remembered, Roger macked with finesse. After all this,
then
he would get the money from a Parisienne, a stacked female Swede or Dane or Hollander, and for dessert, he would climb aboard, down periscope and sail that sub. Roger worked at macking. He gave something Mack the Knife never had time for. The others, the pussy carried them away. They could be starving, but the pussy came first. Always the pussy.

They ordered dinner. It was after nine and the night was descending slowly. Midway through, she said, “Do you want to see him?”

“See who?”

“Roger.” She hated it when he was this way, his mind slipping from one thing to another so quickly that she could never follow it. She had noticed that he had ordered chopped sirloin well done, the vegetables well cooked and creamed potatoes. Not unusual, only the way he kept jabbing his fork into the food to see just how well done it was.

“Yes. And tell me, do you know a guy, Negro, named Alfonse Edwards?”

“Sure.”

Max's gorge rose. What does
that
mean, he asked silently,
Sure
. “What's his hype now? I mean is he really writing, or has he become a painter or a sculptor or a tourist?”

Margrit was on her third drink and she broke into laughter. “Tourist,” she echoed. “Tourist.”

“Yeah, so what's he really do?” You can get out of New York, Max thought, but you couldn't get New York out of you; you felt better knowing where a guy's pigeonhole is.

“I tell you they say he is a writer.”

Max sagged in his seat then. For the moment he was feeling so good that he wondered if the doctor wasn't wrong. Then he remembered the long session in the doctor's office after the first biopsy. That long session while Margrit was working happily in the gallery in New York. Anyway, he felt good. But they were talking of Edwards. What in the world would he be doing in Holland? Writing? Who, Edwards? He hadn't talked to him about writing in Paris. Why not? When Harry was too busy to talk writing, they turned to him—Max. The younger fellows remembered that once Max had been considered better than Harry, a fact that made Harry sullen for over two years. They turned to Max when Harry was addressing the various Pan-African conferences or busy at something else.
That
was one of the odd things: Edwards had not in any way explained himself lately. A hipster would, somehow, with a casual turn of phrase, a word, a couple of words dropped here or there, let you pick up the pieces and complete your puzzle. A hipster knew how to play the game. No one came up to you and said, My name is Rinky-Dink and I'm a landscape artist. Anybody hip, they dropped signals and you got them. Most of the world went that way.

“What's he written?”

“They say he's working on a couple of novels, and he does articles.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

Okay, he thought. Edwards a writer? I know what he
was
, but is he now? Max went on thinking. No, with his background he isn't just sitting around Europe starving between books and articles waiting for race riots to break out in the States so he can interpret them for the European press. How long until the next race riot? Edwards in Nigeria, Edwards in Europe.

Dessert, coffee and cognac, and then Margrit asked, pushing back the silence that had fallen, “What is the matter, Mox? Won't you tell me?”

He glanced up, tempted to ask her to go with him tomorrow to meet Michelle in case it became too hard for him. They'd gotten along well, the two of them. But then he thought, To hell with her. I'll go alone. He'd rent a car; it would be better than a train. He could stop and pull over and lie down if he had to. He could change the cotton if it felt too messy. It would be awkward on a train—he remembered the trip from Paris—and worse on a bus. “I told you,” he said. “I'm tired.”

“There is more than that this time. You won't tell me?”

“No.”

“Is it bad?”

“Maggie, it was bad when I was born.”

“You mean born black?”

“If you choose.”

Margrit said, “Somehow, this conversation sounds like so many we had when we were together.”

Max laughed and took her hand. “It does, doesn't it? Ah, Margrit. It's all a bit too much for old Max. Tell me now about Edwards. Does he come up here often? Has Roger cleared him of being a U.S. Government fink? Roger has a nose for that, you know. And Edwards did work for the government in Nigeria.”

“They all say he does not work for your government any more, but they don't like him. He starts trouble. He picks fights for nothing. No one likes him. The tables become quiet on the Leidseplein when he is in town. I don't know who his friends are. Roger talks to him sometimes.”

“Did he ever talk about Harry Ames?”

“Not to me, and I don't know anyone who ever mentioned his talking about Harry. What is it, Mox? What is going on?”

He said, “I don't know,” and looked down at her hand. White, beginning to wrinkle, the wedding band on the right hand. He looked at the hand and pressed it. He too was wondering what was going on. Little pieces sometimes fell into place with a bang. Her voice drifted with a question. He answered it. She spoke again and he answered, but he was back in Paris, his very first time there, on leave from the
Century
and the Korean War was three years old.

He had been working, as usual. (Third novel, fourth novel?) From time to time he paused and looked out on the Paris rooftops, a hodgepodge of color against the blue summer sky. The phone rang. Harry.

“Hey, man, listen. Get right over here, can you? Tell you what's going on: just got a call from Senator Braden's number-one boy. That's right. Is he a faggot, do you know? Anyway, he's coming over to talk about some of my opinions I've put out over coffee at the cafe. He sounded real ominous, you know? After that business with that rotten magazine. I don't want to talk to nobody unless I got a witness. Make a million dollars that way. Come on over and listen to some of this shit. Goddamn Government won't let me alone, I tell you, Max, a man with pen and paper is dangerous, but don't let him be black too—that's a hundred times worse. Make it in fifteen? Go, Max. See you.”

When Max arrived, Harry was rubbing his hands in glee. “Those people really think they're pretty sharp. They can scare the pants off the whole of the United States, but they can't scare Harry Ames. Shit, I come from Mississippi; the rest of America can't begin to compare to the crackers they make down there. Where shall I put you? Sure wish that tape recorder was working. All this Philips stuff they got here in Europe, I don't know, man. Don't like General Electric and can't stand Westinghouse, but they gotta have something. Take that Calvados and get behind that closet curtain. That's it. Wait. That Calvados stinks. Oh, hell, take the Scotch, but don't drink too much of it, you bastard. No! Not like that! Max, don't be such a goddamn clown. You drink all that Scotch and Charlotte's going to pitch a bitch …”

Sipping the Scotch, Max had peeked out at Michael Sheldon. He was a handsome young man, polite, sure of himself. Max saw Harry's eyes glittering with false cheeriness; Harry behaved just as a shark must behave when it has come across a choice morsel.

“In foreign countries, particularly those with strong attractions to communism,” Sheldon began, “we'd like all Americans to be careful in their criticisms. Now, you, Mr. Ames, have been rather harsh on us.”