Timebends (12 page)

“Looking for a subway?”

“I thought I'd catch a cab.”

“A cab? Up here? No, no, you can't find cabs up here.”

They worked at administrative jobs at the college, had attended my lecture, and had watched the scenes the students played for me. Beforehand they had looked up my 1932 academic record and laughingly reported that I had made all D's for the two weeks I had been, at least bodily, present. We chatted for a while, but I noticed a tenseness in their smiles—they were not eager to relax with me on the corner, and after only a brief exchange one of them offered to escort me to the subway a few blocks away. Stout black women had always been good to me. I thanked them, embarrassed at the idea of their protecting me even as I guessed that they were tougher than I was, as middle-class and overweight as they appeared to be.

“I think I'll stick it out for a few minutes. But thanks anyway,” I said.

They walked off, their anxiety undisguised now. Alone again on the corner I glanced up at the windows where the black faces were still watching me, waiting no doubt for the chicken to be plucked. I knew, of course, that I was caught in the remote past when as a boy I had sweated up these grades on my bike in order to coast down. It may also have been that I still associated the facades of many of the apartment houses, the emblems on cornices and window frames, with a certain upper-middle-class stylishness (some are similar to the buildings in the Sixteenth Arrondissement in Paris, that elegant if boring neighborhood). In any case, I could not penetrate my unwillingness to face facts and flee, nor can I now. It was as though I was home on that Harlem street. If I have a
psychic root it is sunk in those sidewalks, and those facades still emanate a warm and enfolding energy toward me. How could I run from them like a stranger, an invader? Nevertheless, as I realized that I had been standing there for more than fifteen minutes and that the sun was going down, I thought of returning to the college to try to call a cab. And I belatedly realized that the two women had not only been offering to lead me to the subway but to accompany me downtown, where they said they also were headed, implying that it was even unsafe for me to enter the subway alone.

Now I saw what appeared to be a taxi three blocks away, moving slowly in my direction; it had a broad white stripe around its middle and was painted brown, not a taxi color in New York, but there was a broken sign on the roof that I assumed had at one time read “Taxi.” As it came closer I saw the cracked side window, the wires holding the fenders on, and the absence of a radiator grill, and I saw that the driver was a black man. The car slowed to a stop in front of me. The passenger in the back seat paid the driver, then opened the door and stepped out, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in my life. As she straightened up, her grocery bag clutched to her side, I exchanged a glance with her. A model, I thought. Her chocolate skin and straight teeth, the wit in her eyes, her mink hat and beige cloth coat—her soaring femininity caught me by the throat. I was enslaved then and there.

With a slightly arched eyebrow and a grin of mock amazement she asked, “You getting in
there?”

I laughed. “If he'll let me.”

“Huh! I have now seen everything.” And she walked off in the spikiest heels I had seen since the fifties, on a thrilling pair of legs.

I leaned in to the driver, a small bearded man in his thirties who was folding up his money and barely glancing at me, so unwilling was he even to begin a conversation.

“Can you take me downtown?”

“How am I going to go downtown?”

“Why not?”

Now he looked at me, his money stashed. “Where downtown you goin'?”

“Well”—I thought quickly—“you can go as far as Ninety-sixth Street, can't you?” This was a gypsy cab, unlicensed and technically illegal, I knew.

“I can, but I probably be stuck down there. I won't get nobody coming back up.”

The hard border between the two civilizations is Ninety-sixth
Street; I had known this for years, of course, and had simply put it out of mind. Something in me still refused to admit how definite the frontier was.

“How about you take me down,” I said, “and I'll pay you double so you won't lose getting back up here?”

He turned and stared through the windshield for a moment and then agreed. I got in. The seat was situated on the floor some distance from the backrest, and I wrestled it into its more or less correct position, but it was still uncomfortably low. Rubber foam was sticking out of the upholstery as though chickens had been plucking at it. One door had no handles at all. We drove slowly downtown. I was happy.

“Quite a car,” I said.

“This? This is not a car, this is history.” The remark seemed more educated than I had expected. “What are you doing up here?” he asked suddenly, an edge of suspicion in his tone.

There was on his skin a kind of powder-gray dust. And I saw now that he seemed terribly tired. His fingers were as long as pencils, his nails were long flat yellow ovals and very clean. He wore two cable-knit sweaters and drove with both hands clutching the wheel as though he expected the front end to twist off the road any minute.

“I gave a talk at the college,” I explained.

He drove on in silence for a block. Then he asked, “Talk about what?”

“About the theatre. I write plays for the theatre.”

He drove another block in silence. “Ever give a talk at Columbia?”

“Actually, yes, a few years ago. Why?”

He said nothing for another block or so, then decided to speak. “I was a teaching fellow in sociology.”

Then I was right not to have fled!

“The government cut the program I was involved with, so I'm doing this.”

“You making out?”

“It slows the decay a little.”

“What program were you on?”

“A study of Ethiopians in New York—I'm Ethiopian.”

“Born there?”

“Yes. I'm only staying on here because I've got rank in the army and they'd have their hands on me the minute I stepped off the plane.”

“But how long can you go on driving the cab?”

“That's it—I don't know. I don't really make enough. But I'm not going back to that senseless war.”

“What's it all about? I haven't kept up.”

“Officers like wars, that's all. They get to be important and rich.” His voice was soft, like a light breeze.

When we got to Ninety-sixth he offered to take me all the way to Twenty-third, to the Chelsea Hotel, and then we had a beer at the bar next door. I asked him if I had been foolhardy to stand on that corner all alone. He had grayish eyes and a narrow face, an ascetic air. He looked down at his drink and then up at me with a shrug and a silent shake of the head, as baffled as I was, as reluctant to give up a deeply held faith, and at the same time as incapable of belief, as morally paralyzed. The ultimate human mystery may not be anything more than the claims on us of clan and race, which may yet turn out to have the power, because they defy the rational mind, to kill the world.

One lovely evening not long afterward, my wife Inge and I came out of a theatre and decided to walk home to the Chelsea instead of taking a cab from the West Forties theatre district. Below Forty-second Street life thins out around midnight, but south of Thirty-fourth there is nothing at all at that hour, hardly a car on Seventh Avenue, the fur district deserted, and not a single pedestrian. Apart from the occasional newspaper delivery truck or cruising cab there is no movement, and you could pitch a tent without being disturbed on that broad thoroughfare, which in daylight is jammed with commercial traffic. We were strolling southward, chatting about the play we'd just seen, when I noticed three or four men standing on the corner of Twenty-seventh Street. Half a block distant I heard a burst of laughter that had, I thought, the loosened clang of drink. I drew Inge closer, and we passed the group. They were black and young, in their twenties, but a quick glance was vaguely reassuring—their hair was rather neatly clipped. On the other hand, they had gone silent as we passed. We continued walking, and I could not help looking down the avenue for possible help in case we needed any. There was nothing, a dark empty boulevard. And yet it was not fear I felt but a curious suspension of soul, a kind of dying of life inside me. I supposed that to really fear them at this moment I would have to feel some hatred, but hatred, along with all other feeling, was absent. Now I heard running behind us. Several pairs of feet were slapping down hard on the pavement at high speed. I moved Inge toward the curb, thinking that our only safety might be to draw them into the middle of the street rather than be thrust into a doorway.

A deep baritone voice shouted, “Mr. Miller! Mr. Miller!”

I turned around, incredulous, as four tall black youths bore down on us calling my name. How wonderful to be famous! Breathless, they came to a halt before us.

“You
are
Mr. Miller, aren't you?”

“I sure am!”

“I knew it!” one of them shouted triumphantly to the others and, turning to me, said, “I recognized you.”

“Well, frankly, you guys had me scared there for a minute.”

We all laughed, and the one who had recognized me shook my hand and said, “Man, I have always enjoyed your music!”

What to say? “You fellas in school?” I asked.

“We go to NYU.”

“Well, you've got the wrong Miller. I think you mean Glenn, the bandleader who died a long time ago. I'm a writer.”

Embarrassment, apologies, but they had studied my plays and sweetly pretended to be as enthusiastic as if I had played trombone. We shook hands all over again to validate my revised recognition and parted happily waving to one another.

The shock of release from tension lifted us in a momentary surge of self-satisfaction, as though not luck but my talent had drawn a charmed protective circle around us—a response I recognized to be ridiculous. But if it was not fear I had felt with those running feet bearing down on us, it should have been, I told myself. Was I incapable of real despair? Or was it possible that things in this city were not as bad as advertised?

I knew that my memories of Harlem were deceptively warm. Even in my dreams black people surfaced most often as sufferers and injured, though sometimes obscurely threatening. Like the figure in one dream I had in the sixties, a man at a café table bent over a glass of wine, the brim of his straw hat concealing his face from above—for I was hovering in midair looking down at him—and as I floated closer I saw that a hole had been cut in the side of his hat through which the eyes of a black man were staring at me with an expression neither menacing nor friendly, just frighteningly open to interpretation. He had eyes in the side of his head, saw in all directions, the silent symbol of the force of judgment or the measurer of my high-flying presumptions, or both.

An ambiguous place, Harlem was packed nevertheless with the living and much hope. As darkness fell in the warm evenings, Sid Franks and I would release captured fireflies from jars and watch
them swoop down the six stories from our front windows and cross 110th Street to vanish in the park. We would sit impatiently waiting at those windows in the dead of winter, eyes on the flagpole above the boathouse until the red ball flag went up announcing the hardening of the ice, which sent us yelling our way down the elevator and across to the edge of the lake to sit struggling with clamp-on skates that never stayed on very long. It was the Harlem of Joe Aug's bike store on East 111th, a sensual place in my mind after my fourteen-year-old cousin Richard began hanging around there with a condom drooping out of his breast pocket, the first such apparatus I had seen, the size of it intimidating and promising at the same time. Richard was the one who slept with his mother because he had an incipient case of tuberculosis—the mystery of the connection was never to be solved in my mind—and as if these pied signals of the forbidden were not enough, he had also appointed himself Joe's helper and clerk, fascinated as he was by the bicycle, a machine that by the age of seven I also found deep pleasure in riding or just thinking about. It would be thirty years or so before a dream gave me the reason: I saw a bicycle turned upside down, and under the sprocket bearing-housing there were three holes, and under them a word lighting up one letter at a time like a theatre marquee—“M-U-R-D-E-R.” That was a hard period with women for me, and the triangular frame of the machine was the female.

But one of my missions to Joe's store, the most vivid one, had a far more tragic connection with womankind. My mother's adored mother had had a leg amputated as a result of her diabetes, and something was needed to keep the sheet raised off her wound. I thought the rear fender of my bike might work and, encouraged by my mother, went to Joe to have it removed. Joe was a friend of our family, and his sister Sylvia, still in high school, had been hired by my mother as our all-around helper, museum guide, and spirit of encouragement. She was our baby-sitter, pinner of my mother's hems, exclaimer of praise for my singing, fetcher to my schoolroom of books I had forgotten, and awestruck audience for any elaborate tale I came home with.

As Joe, a kindly thin little man forever with a cigarette, squinted one eye and unbolted the fender, Cousin Richard held the bike firm, and despite the solemnity of the occasion I found it indecently hard to keep my eyes off the condom hanging from his pocket. Richard, who would become a solid businessman one day, was not yet respectable; through a most pleasant and relaxed cat's grin he
ceaselessly dropped obscenities that had Joe laughing and me embarrassed. He was cool decades before Cool. As I rode off, my fender under my arm, Richard called after me from the doorway of the store, “Ride careful! Watch out for your
pipik
!”—a particularly sacrilegious farewell when I was bound for the house of my dying grandmother with an object that might well prolong her life. When I arrived at her apartment and softly knocked and the brown mahogany door slowly opened to reveal my mother looking down at me, I knew she had forgotten our plan about the fender. I entered the living room, the eyes of half a dozen anxious faces looking uncomprehendingly down at me and my invention, which I managed to stash next to the doorway before backing out of the apartment like an irreverent disturbance. When Grandmother Barnett died, a few days later, it did cross my mind to ask for my fender back, but it was beyond me to raise the issue. I suspected that it had never even been used, a hard lesson but maybe a necessary preparation for the future's rejection of so much of my creation.