James Baldwin - Another Country

“Yes?”

“I haven’t got anything in the house to drink. If you’ll pick up a bottle of Scotch, I’ll pay you for it when you get here.”

“Any special kind?”

“Oh, I don’t care. Any kind you like.”

A stone, miraculously enough, seemed to rise from her heart for a moment. She laughed. “Black Label?”

“Crazy.”

“In a minute, then.”

“In a minute. I’ll be here.”

She hung up, staring for a moment at the shining black instrument of her — deliverance? She marched into the street, found a liquor store and bought a bottle; and the weight of the bottle in her straw handbag somehow made everything real; as the purchase of a railroad ticket proves the imminence of a journey.

What would she say to him? What would he say to her?

He called, “Is that you, Cass?” She called back, “Yes!” and ran clumsily up the steps, like a schoolgirl. She reached his doorway out of breath, and he stood there, in a T-shirt and a pair of old army pants, smiling and pale. His reality shocked her and so did his beauty — or his vigor, which, in a man, is so nearly the same thing. She might have been seeing him for the first time — his short, disordered red hair, a rather square forehead with lines burned into it, heavier eyebrows than she remembered and darker eyes, set farther back. His chin had a tiny cleft — she had never noticed it before. His mouth was wider than she remembered, his lips were fuller, his teeth were slightly crooked. He had not shaved and his red beard bristled and gleamed in the weak yellow light on the landing. His trousers had no belt and his hare feet were in leather sandals. He said, “Come in,” and she brushed quickly past his body. He closed the door behind her.

She walked into the center of the room and stared about her, seeing nothing; then they stared at each other, terribly driven, terribly shy, not daring to imagine what came next. He was frightened, but very self-contained. She felt that he was studying her, preparing himself for whatever this new conundrum might prove to be. He had made no decisions at all as yet, was trying to attune himself to her; which placed her under the necessity of finding out what was in his heart by revealing what was in hers. And she did not yet know what was in her heart — or did not want to know.

He took her bag from her and set it on the bookcase. The way he did this made her realize that he was unaccustomed to having women in his room. The Shostakovich Fifth Symphony was on his record player; the play, Happy Hunting Ground, lay open on his bed, under his night light. The only other light in the room came from a small lamp on his desk. His apartment was small and spare, absolutely monastic; it was less a place to live in than it was a place to work; and she felt, suddenly and sharply, how profoundly he might resent the intrusion into his undecorated isolation of the feminine order and softness.

“Let’s have a drink,” he said, and took the bottle from her bag. “How much do I owe you?”

She told him, and he paid her, shyly, with some crumpled bills which were lying on the mantelpiece, next to his keys. He moved into the kitchen, tearing the wrapper off the bottle. She watched him as he found glasses and ice. His kitchen was a mess and she longed to offer to clean it up for him, but she did not dare, not yet. She moved heavily to the bed and sat down on the edge of it and picked up the play.

“I can’t tell if that play’s any good or not. I can’t tell any more, anyway.” Whenever he was unsure, his Southern accent became more noticeable.

“Which character are you playing?”

“Oh, I’m playing one of the bad cats, the one they call Malcolm.” She looked at the cast of characters and found that Malcolm was the son of Egan. The script was heavily underlined and there were long notes in the margin. One of these notes read, On this, maybe remember what you know of Yves, and she looked at the underlined sentence, No, I don’t want no damn aspirin. Man got a headache, why don’t you let him find out what kind of headache it is? Eric called, “Do you want water, or just ice?”

“A little water, thanks.”

He came back into the room and handed her her highball. “I play the last male member of a big, rich American family. They got rich by all kinds of swindles and by shooting down people, and all that jazz. But I can’t do that by the time I’m a man because its all been done and they’ve changed the laws. So I get to be a big labor leader instead, and my Dad tries to get me railroaded to jail as a Communist. It gives us a couple of nice scenes. The point is, there’s not a pin to choose between us.” He grinned. “It’ll probably be a big, fat flop.”

“Well, just make sure we have tickets to opening night.” A brief silence fell, and her we resounded more insistently than the drums of Shostakovich.

“Oh, I’m going to try to pack the house with my friends,” he said, “never fear.” Silence fell again. He sat down on the bed beside her, and looked at her. She looked down.

“You make me feel very strange,” he said. “You make me feel things I didn’t think I’d ever feel again.”

“What do I make you feel?” she asked. And then, “You do the same for me.” She sensed that he was taking the initiative for her sake.

He leaned forward and put one hand on her hand; then rose, and walked away from her, leaving her alone on the bed. “What about Richard?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen between Richard and me.” She forced herself to look into his eyes, and she put her drink down on the night table. “But it isn’t you that’s come between Richard and me— you don’t have anything to do with that.”

“I don’t now, you mean. Or I don’t yet.” He put his cigarette down in the ashtray on the mantelpiece behind him. “But I guess I know what you mean, in a way.” He still seemed very troubled and his trouble now propelled him toward her again, to the bed. He felt her trembling, but still he did not touch her, only stared at her with his troubled and searching eyes, and with his lips parted. “Dear Cass,” he said, and smiled, “I know we have now, but I don’t think we have much of a future.” She thought, Perhaps if we take now, we can have a future, too. It depends on what we mean by “future.” She felt his breath on her face and her neck, then he leaned closer, head down, and she felt his lips there. She raised her hands to stroke his head and his red hair. She felt his violence and his uncertainty, and this made him seem much younger than she. And this excited her in a way that she had never been excited before; she glimpsed, for the first time, the force that drove older women to younger men; and then she was frightened. She was frightened because she had never before found herself playing so anomalous a role and because nothing in her experience had ever suggested that her body could become a trap for boys, and the tomb of her self-esteem. She had embarked on a voyage which might end years from now in some horrible villa, near a blue sea, with some unspeaking, unspeakably phallic, Turk or Spaniard or Jew or Greek or Arabian. Yet, she did not want it to stop. She did not quite know what was happening now, or where it would lead, and she was afraid; but she did not want it to stop. She saw the smoke from Eric’s cigarette curling up from the mantelpiece — she hoped it was still in the ashtray; the play script was beneath her head, the symphony was approaching its end. She was aware, as though she stood over them both with a camera, of how sordid the scene must appear: a married woman, no longer young, already beginning to moan with lust, pinned down on this untidy and utterly transient bed by a stranger who did not love her and whom she could not love. Then she wondered about that: love; and wondered if anyone really knew anything about it. Eric put one hand on her breast, and it was a new touch, not Richard’s, no; but she knew that it was Eric’s; and was it love or not? and what did Eric feel? Sex, she thought, but that was not really the answer, or if it was, it was an answer which clarified nothing. For now, Eric leaned up from her with a sigh and walked back to his cigarette. He leaned there for a moment, watching her; and she understood that the weight between them, of things unspoken, made any act impossible. On what basis where they to act? for their blind seeking was not a foundation which could be expected to bear any weight.