Ralph Ellison - Invisible man

Afterwards at the Chthonian it was like old times. Jack's birthday was an occasion for champagne and the hot, dog-day evening was even more volatile than usual. I felt highly confident, but here my plan went slightly wrong. Emma was quite gay and responsive, but something about her hard, handsome face warned me to lay off. I sensed that while she might willingly surrender herself (in order to satisfy herself) she was far too sophisticated and skilled in intrigue to compromise her position as Jack's mistress by revealing anything important to me. So as I danced and sparred with Emma I looked over the party for a second choice.

We were thrown together at the bar. Her name was Sybil and she was one of those who assumed that my lectures on the woman question were based upon a more intimate knowledge than the merely political and had indicated several times a willingness to know me better. I had always pretended not to understand, for not only had my first such experience taught me to avoid such situations, but at the Chthonian she was usually slightly tipsy and wistful -- just the type of misunderstood married woman whom, even if I had been interested, I would have avoided like the plague. But now her unhappiness and the fact that she was one of the big shot's wives made her a perfect choice. She was very lonely and it went very smoothly. In the noisy birthday party -- which was to be followed by a public celebration the next evening -- we weren't noticed, and when she left fairly early in the evening I saw her home. She felt neglected and he was always busy, and when I left her I had arranged a rendezvous at my apartment for the following evening. George, the husband, would be at the birthday celebration and she wouldn't be missed.

IT WAS a hot dry August night. Lightning flashed across the eastern sky and a breathless tension was in the humid air. I had spent the afternoon preparing, leaving the office on a pretense of illness to avoid having to attend the celebration. I had neither itch nor etchings, but there was a vase of Chinese lilies in the living room, and another of American Beauty roses on the table near the bed; and I had put in a supply of wine, whiskey and liqueur, extra ice cubes, and assortments of fruit, cheese, nuts, candy and other delicacies from the Vendome. In short, I tried to manage things as I imagined Rinehart would have done.

But I bungled it from the beginning. I made the drinks too strong -- which she liked too well; and I brought up politics -- which she all but hated -- too early in the evening. For all her exposure to ideology she had no interest in politics and no idea of the schemes that occupied her husband night and day. She was more interested in the drinks, in which I had to join her glass for glass, and in little dramas which she had dreamed up around the figures of Joe Louis and Paul Robeson. And, although I had neither the stature nor the temperament for either role, I was expected either to sing "Old Man River" and just keep rolling along, or to do fancy tricks with my muscles. I was confounded and amused and it became quite a contest, with me trying to keep the two of us in touch with reality and with her casting me in fantasies in which I was Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are-possible.

Now it was late and as I came into the room with another round of drinks she had let down her hair and was beckoning to me with a gold hairpin in her teeth, saying, "Come to mamma, beautiful," from where she sat on the bed.

"Your drink, madame," I said, handing her a glass and hoping the fresh drink would discourage any new ideas.

"Come on, dear," she said coyly. "I want to ask you something."

"What is it?" I said.

"I have to whisper it, beautiful."

I sat and her lips came close to my ear. And suddenly she had drained the starch out of me. I pulled away. There was something almost prim about the way she sat there, and yet she had just made a modest proposal that I join her in a very revolting ritual.

"What was that!" I said, and she repeated it. Had life suddenly become a crazy Thurber cartoon?

"Please, you'll do that for me, won't you, beautiful?"

"You really mean it?"

"Yes," she said, "yes!"

There was a pristine incorruptibility about her face now that upset me all the more, for she was neither kidding nor trying to insult me; and I could not tell if it were horror speaking to me ont of innocence, or innocence emerging unscathed from the obscene scheme of the evening. I only knew that the whole affair was a mistake. She had no information and I decided to get her out of the apartment before I had to deal definitely with either the horror or the innocence, while I could still deal with it as a joke. What would Rinehart do about this, I thought, and knowing, determined not to let her provoke me to violence.

"But, Sybil, you can see I'm not like that. You make me feel a tender, protective passion -- Look, it's like an oven in here, why don't we get dressed and go for a walk in Central Park?"

"But I need it," she said, uncrossing her thighs and sitting up eagerly. "You can do it, it'll be easy for you, beautiful. Threaten to kill me if I don't give in. You know, talk rough to me, beautiful. A friend of mine said the fellow said, 'Drop your drawers' ... and --"

"He said what!" I said.

"He really did," she said.

I looked at her. She was blushing, her cheeks, even her freckled bosom, were bright red.

"Go on," I said, as she lay back again. "Then what happened?"

"Well ... he called her a filthy name," she said, hesitating coyly. She was a leathery old girl with chestnut hair of fine natural wave which was now fanned out over the pillow. She was blushing quite deeply. Was this meant to excite me, or was it an unconscious expression of revulsion?

"A really filthy name," she said. "Oh, he was a brute, huge, with white teeth, what they call a 'buck.' And he said, 'Bitch, drop your drawers,' and then he did it. She's such a lovely girl, too, really delicate with a complexion like strawberries and cream. You can't imagine anyone calling her a name like that."

She sat up now, her elbows denting the pillow as she looked into my face.

"But what happened, did they catch him?" I said.

"Oh, of course not, beautiful, she only told two of us girls. She couldn't afford to let her husband hear of it. He ... well, it's too long a story."

"It's terrible," I said. "Don't you think we should go ... ?"

"Isn't it, though? She was in a state for months ..." her expression flickered, became indeterminate.

"What is it?" I said, afraid she might cry.

"Oh, I was just wondering how she really felt. I really do." Suddenly she looked at me mysteriously. "Can I trust you with a deep secret?"

I sat up. "Don't tell me that it was you."

She smiled, "Oh, no, that was a dear friend of mine. But do you know what, beautiful," she said leaning forward confidentially, "I think I'm a nymphomaniac."

"You? Noooo!"

"Uh huh. Sometimes I have such thoughts and dreams. I never give into them though, but I really think I am. A woman like me has to develop an iron discipline."

I laughed inwardly. She would soon be a biddy, stout, with a little double chin and a three-ply girdle. A thin gold chain showed around a thickening ankle. And yet I was becoming aware of something warmly, infuriatingly feminine about her. I reached out, stroking her hand. "Why do you have such ideas about yourself?" I said, seeing her raise up and pluck at the corner of the pillow, drawing out a speckled feather and stripping the down from its shaft.

"Repression," she said with great sophistication. "Men have repressed us too much. We're expected to pass up too many human things. But do you know another secret?"

I bowed my head.

"You don't mind my going on, do you, beautiful?"