James Baldwin - Another Country

“I guess we won’t be going downtown with you, after all,” Richard said, coming back into the room. “I’m sorry. I’m sure they’re all right but Cass wants the doctor to look at them and we have to wait for him to get here. Anyway, I don’t think we should leave them alone tonight.” He took Eric’s glass from his hand. “Let me spike this for you.” He walked over to the bar; he was not as calm as he pretended to be. “Little black bastards,” he muttered, “they could have killed the kid. Why the hell can’t they take it out on each other, for Christ’s sake!”

“They beat Michael pretty badly?”

“Well — they loosened one of his teeth and bloodied his nose — but, mainly, they scared the shit out of him. Thank God Paul was with him.” Then he was silent. “I don’t know. This whole neighborhood, this whole city’s gone to hell. I keep telling Cass we ought to move — but she doesn’t want to. Maybe this will help her change her mind.”

“Change my mind about what?” Cass asked. She strode to the low table before the sofa, picked up her cigarettes, and lit one.

“Moving out of town,” Richard said. He watched her as he spoke and spoke too quietly, as though he were holding himself in.

“I’ve no objection to moving. We just haven’t been able to agree on where to move.”

“We haven’t agreed on where to move because all you’ve done is offer objections to every place I suggest. And, since you haven’t made any counter-suggestions, I conclude that you don’t really want to move.”

“Oh, Richard. I simply am not terribly attracted to any of those literary colonies you want us to become a part of—”

Richard’s eyes turned as dark as deep water. “Cass doesn’t like writers,” he said, lightly, to Eric, “not if they make a living at it, anyway. She thinks writers should never cease starving and whoring around, like our good friend, Vivaldo. That’s fine, boy, that’s really being responsible and artistic. But all the rest of us, trying to love a woman and raise a family and make some loot — we’re whores.”

She was very pale. “I have never said anything at all like that.”

“No? There are lots of ways of saying”—he mimicked her—“things like that. You’ve said it a thousand times. You must think I’m dumb, chicken.” He turned again to Eric, who stood near the window, wishing he could fly out of it. “If she was stuck with a guy like Vivaldo—”

“Leave Vivaldo out of this! What has he got to do with it?”

Richard gave a surprisingly merry laugh, and repeated, “If she was stuck with a guy like that, maybe you wouldn’t hear some pissing and moaning! Oh, what a martyrdom! And how she’d love it!” He took a swallow of his drink and crossed the room toward her. “And you know why? You want to know why?” There was a silence. She lifted her enormous eyes to meet his. “Because you’re just like all the other American cunts. You want a guy you can feel sorry for, you love him as long as he’s helpless. Then you can pitch in, as you love to say, you can be his helper. Helper! ” He threw back his head and laughed. “Then, one fine day, the guy feels chilly between his legs and feels around for his cock and balls and finds she’s helped herself to them and locked them in the linen closet.” He finished his drink and, roughly, caught his breath. His voice changed, becoming almost tender with sorrow. “That’s the way it is, isn’t it, sugar? You don’t like me now as well as you did once.”

She looked terribly weary; her skin seemed to have loosened. She put one hand lightly on his arm. “No,” she said, “that’s not the way it is.” Then a kind of fury shook her and tears came to her eyes. “You haven’t any right to say such things to me; you’re blaming me for something I haven’t anything to do with at all!” He reached out to touch her shoulder; she moved away. “You’d better go, Eric, this can’t be much fun for you. Make our excuses, please, to Vivaldo and Ida.”

“You can say that the Silenskis, that model couple, were having their Sunday fight,” said Richard; his face very white, breathing hard, staring at Cass.

Eric set his drink down, carefully; he wanted to run. “I’ll just say you had to stay in on account of the kids.”

“Tell Vivaldo to take it as a warning. This is what happens if you have kids, this is what happens if you get what you want.” And, for a moment, he looked utterly baffled and juvenile. Then, “Hell, I’m sorry, Eric. We never meant to submit you to such a melodramatic afternoon. Please come and see us again; we don’t do this all the time, we really don’t. I’ll walk you to the door.”

“It’s all right,” Eric said. “I’m a big boy, I understand.” He walked over to Cass and they shook hands. “It was nice seeing you.”

“It was good seeing you. Don’t let all that light fade.”

He laughed, but these words chilled him, too. “I’ll try to keep burning,” he said. He and Richard walked to the hall door. Cass stood still in the center of the living room.

Richard opened the door. “So long, kid. Can we call you — has Cass got your number?”

“Yes. And I have yours.”

“Okay. See you soon.”

“Sure thing. So long.”

“So long.”

The door closed behind him. He was again in the anonymous, breathing corridor, surrounded by locked doors. He found his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, thinking of the millions of disputes being waged behind locked doors. He rang for the elevator. It arrived, driven by another, older man who was eating a sandwich; he was dumped into the streets again. The long block on which Cass and Richard lived was quiet and empty now, waiting for the night. He hailed a cab on the Avenue and was whirled downtown.

His destination was a bar on the eastern end of the Village, which had, until recently, been merely another neighborhood bar. But now it specialized in jazz, and functioned sometimes as a showcase for younger but not entirely untried or unknown talents or personalities. The current attraction was advertised in the small window by a hand-printed, cardboard poster; he recognized the name of a drummer he and Rufus had known years ago, who would not remember him; in the window, too, were excerpts from newspaper columns and magazines, extolling the unorthodox virtues of the place.

The unorthodox, therefore, filled the room, which was very small, low-ceilinged, with a bar on one side and tables and chairs on the other. At the far end of the bar, the room widened, making space for more tables and chairs, and a very narrow corridor led to the rest rooms and the kitchen; and in this widened space, catty-corner to the room, stood a small, cruelly steep bandstand.

Eric had arrived during a break. The musicians were leaping down from the stand, and mopping their brows with large handkerchiefs, and heading for the street door which would remain open for about ten minutes. The heat in the room was terrifying, and the electric fan in the center of the ceiling could have done nothing to alleviate it. And the room stank: of years of dust, of stale, of regurgitated alcohol, of cooking, of urine, of sweat, of lust. People stood three and four deep at the bar, sticky and shining, far happier than the musicians, who had fled to the sidewalk. Most of the people at the tables had not moved, and they seemed quite young; the boys in sport shirts and seersucker trousers, the girls in limp blouses and wide skirts.

On the sidewalk, the musicians stood idly together, still fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs, their faces blandly watchful, ignoring the occasional panhandlers, and the policeman who walked up and down with his lips pursed and his eyes blind with unnameable suspicions and fears.