James Baldwin - Another Country

He came back to the bed and sat down; and he said, “Well. Listen. I know about Richard. I don’t altogether believe you when you say that I don’t have anything to do with what’s happening between you and Richard, because obviously I do, I do now, anyway, if only because I’m here.” She started to say something, but he raised his hand to silence her. “But that’s all right. I don’t want to make an issue out of that, I’m not very well placed to defend — conventional morality.” And he smiled. “Something is happening between us which I don’t really understand, but I’m willing to trust it. I have the feeling, somehow, that I must trust it.” He took her hand and raised it to his unshaven cheek. “But I have a lover, too, Cass; a boy, a French boy, and he’s supposed to be coming to New York in a few weeks. I really don’t know what will happen when he gets here, but”—he dropped her hand and rose and paced his room again—“he is coming, and we have been together for over two years. And that means something. Probably, if it hadn’t been for him, I would never have stayed away so long.” And he turned on her now all of his intensity. “No matter what happens, I loved him very much, Cass, and I still do. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone quite like that before, and”—he shuddered—“I’m not sure I’ll ever love anyone quite like that again.”

She felt not at all frightened by his lover. She remembered the name written in the margin: Yves . But it was better for the name of his lover to fall from his lips. She felt very strangely moved, as though she might be able to help him endure the weight of the boy who had such power over him.

“He sounds very remarkable,” she said. “Tell me his name, tell me about him.”

He came back to the bed and sat down. His drink was finished, and he sipped from hers.

“There isn’t much to tell. His name is Yves.” He paused, “I can’t imagine what he’ll think of the States.”

“Or of all of us,” she said.

He assented, with a smile. “Or of all of us. I’m not sure I know what I think.” They laughed; she took a sip of her highball; the atmosphere between them began to be easier, as though they were friends. “But — I’m responsible for him when he gets here. He wouldn’t be coming if it weren’t for me.” He looked at her. “He’s the son of somebody he can scarcely remember at all, and his mother runs a bistro in Paris. He hates his mother, or thinks he does.”

“That’s not the usual pattern, is it?” Then she wished that she had held her tongue, or could call the words back. But it was too late, really, to do more than blandly compound her error: “I mean, from what we’re told, most men with a sexual bias toward men love their mothers and hate their fathers.”

“We haven’t been told much,” he observed, mildly sardonic. “I used to know street boys in Paris who hadn’t had any opportunity to hate their mother or their fathers. Of course, they hated les flics —the cops — and I suppose some safe slug of an American would work it out that they hated the cops because they were father-figures — we know a hell of a lot about father-figures here because we don’t know anything about fathers, we’ve made them obsolete — but it seems just as likely to me that they hated the cops because the cops liked to beat the shit out of them.”

It was strange how she now felt herself holding back — not from him, but from such a vision of the world. She did not want him to see the world this way because such a vision could not make him happy, and whatever made him unhappy menaced her. She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to feel menaced by one. Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman — for she had never thought of them as being very bright — seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it. Easy enough if one’s own place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own. For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.

She stroked Eric’s hair, remembering how she and Richard, when they had first met, had argued over this very question: for he had been very conscious, in those days, of his poverty and her privilege. He had called her the icebound heiress of all the ages, and she had worked very hard to prove him wrong and to dissociate herself, in his mind, from those who wielded the knout of power.

Eric put his head in her lap. He said, “Well, anyway, that’s the story, or all the story I know how to tell you now. I just thought you ought to know.” He hesitated; she watched his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed; and he said, “I can’t promise you anything, Cass.”

“I haven’t asked you to promise me anything.” She bent down and kissed him on the mouth. “You’re very beautiful,” she said, “and very strong. I’m not afraid.”

He looked up at her, looking upside down, so that he was for her at that moment both child and man, and her thighs trembled. He kissed her again and took the two clips out of her hair, so that her golden hair fell over him. He turned and held her beneath him on the bed. Like children, with that very same joy and trembling, they undressed and uncovered and gazed on each other; and she felt herself carried back to an unremembered, unimaginable time and state when she had not been Cass, as she was now, but the plain, mild, arrogant, waiting Clarissa, when she had not been weary, when love was on the road but not yet at the gates. He looked on her body as though such a body were a new creation, still damp from the vast firmament; and his wonder infected her. She watched his naked body as he crossed the room to turn off the lamp, and thought of the bodies of her children, Paul and Michael, which had come, so miraculously formed, and so heavy and secret with promise, out of her; and, like the water which sprang in the desert when Moses struck the rock with his rod, tears sprang to her eyes. He glowed in the light which came from the lamp above her head. She could not bear to turn it off. She watched him as he bent to take the long-silent record off the machine, and the green eye of the machine clicked off; then he turned to face her, very grave indeed, and with his eyes darker and set farther back than ever. Now, less than ever, did she know what love was — but she smiled, for joy, and he answered her with a small, triumphant laugh. They were oddly equal: perhaps each could teach the other, concerning love, what neither now knew. And they were equal in that both were afraid of what unanswerable and unimaginable riddles might be uncovered in so merciless a light.

She switched off the lamp at the head of the bed, and watched him come to her in the gloom. He took her like a boy, with that singlemindedness, and with a boy’s passion to please: and she had awakened something in him, an animal long caged, which came pounding out of its captivity now with a fury which astounded and transfigured them both. Eventually, he slept on her breast, like a child. She watched him, watched his parted lips and the crooked teeth dully gleaming, and the thin, silver trickle of saliva, flowing on to her; and watched the tiny pulsations in the vein of one arm, the red hairs gleaming on it, thrown heavily across her hip; one leg was thrust out behind him, one knee pointed toward her: the little finger of the hand farthest from her, on the edge of the bed, palm upward, twitched; his sex and his belly were hidden.

She looked at her watch. It was ten past one. She would have to go home and she was relieved to discover that she was apprehensive, but not guilty. She really felt that a weight had rolled away, and that she was herself again, in her own skin, for the first time in a long time.