James Baldwin - Another Country

And he sipped his drink.

“But she’s in love with you,” said Vivaldo. “Isn’t she?”

Eric raised his eyebrows. “I guess she is. She thinks she is. I don’t know. What does it mean, to be in love? Are you in love with Ida?”

“Yes,” said Vivaldo.

Eric rose and walked to the window. “You didn’t even have to think about it. I guess that tells me where I am.” He laughed. With his back to Vivaldo, he said, “I used to envy you, you know that?”

“You must have been out of your mind,” said Vivaldo. “Why?”

“Because you were normal,” Eric said. He turned and faced Vivaldo.

Vivaldo threw back his head and laughed. “Flattery will get you nowhere, son. Or is that a subtle put-down?”

“It’s not a put-down at all,” said Eric. “But I’m glad I don’t envy you any more.”

“Hell,” said Vivaldo, “I might just as easily envy you . You can make it with both men and women and sometimes I’ve wished I could do that, I really have.” Eric was silent. Vivaldo grinned. “We’ve all got our troubles, Buster.”

Eric looked very grave. He grunted, noncommittally, and sat down again. “You’ve wished you could — you say. And I wish I couldn’t.”

“ You say.”

They looked at each other and smiled. Then, “I hope you get along with Ida better than I did with Rufus,” Eric said.

Vivaldo felt chilled. He looked away from Eric, toward the window; the dark, lonely streets seemed to come flooding in on them. “ How, ” he asked, “did you get along with Rufus?”

“It was terrible, it drove me crazy.”

“I figured that.” He watched Eric. “Is that all over now? I mean — is Cass kind of the wave of your future?”

“I don’t know. I thought I could make myself fall in love with Cass, but — but, no. I love her very much, we get on beautifully together. But she’s not all tangled up in my guts the way — the way I guess Ida is all tangled up in yours.”

“Maybe you’re just not in love with her . You haven’t got to be in love every time you go to bed. You haven’t got to be in love to have a good affair.”

Eric was silent. Then, “No. But once you have been—!”

And he stared into his drink. “Yes,” Vivaldo said at last, “yes, I know.”

“I think,” said Eric, “that I’ve really got to accept — or decide — some very strange things. Right away.”

He walked into the dark kitchen, returned with ice, and spiked his drink, and Vivaldo’s. He sat down again in his straight chair. “I’ve spent years now, it seems to me, thinking that one fine day I’d wake up and all my torment would be over, and all my indecision would end — and that no man, no boy, no male —would ever have power over me again.”

Vivaldo blushed and lit a cigarette. “ I can’t be sure,” he said, “that one fine day, I won’t get all hung up on some boy — like that cat in Death In Venice . So you can’t be sure that there isn’t a woman waiting for you, just for you, somewhere up the road.”

“Indeed,” said Eric, “I can’t be sure. And yet I must decide.”

“ What must you decide?”

Eric lit a cigarette, drew one foot up, and hugged one knee. “I mean, I think you’ve got to be truthful about the life you have . Otherwise, there’s no possibility of achieving the life you want .” He paused. “Or think you want.”

“Or,” said Vivaldo, after a moment, “the life you think you should want.”

“The life you think you should want,” said Eric, “is always the life that looks safest.” He looked toward the window. The one light in the room, coming from behind Vivaldo, played on his face like firelight. “When I’m with Cass, it’s fun, you know, and sometimes it’s, well, really quite fantastic. And it makes me feel kind of restful and protected — and strong — there are some things which only a woman can give you,” He walked to the window, peering down through the slats in the Venetian blinds as though he were awaiting the moment when the men in their opposing camps would leave their tents and meet in the shadow of the trees. “And yet, in a way, it’s all a kind of superior calisthenics. It’s a great challenge, a great test, a great game. But I don’t really feel that— terror —and that anguish and that joy I’ve sometimes felt with — a few men. Not enough of myself is invested; it’s almost as though I’m doing something — for Cass.” He turned and looked at Vivaldo. “Does that make sense to you?”

“I think it does,” said Vivaldo. “I think it does.”

But he was thinking of some nights in bed with Jane, when she had become drunk enough to be insatiable; he was thinking of her breath and her slippery body, and the eerie impersonality of her cries. Once, he had had a terrible stomachache, but Jane had given him no rest, and finally, in order to avoid shoving his fist down her throat, he had thrown himself on her, hoping, desperately, to exhaust her so that he could get some sleep. And he knew that this was not what Eric was talking about.

“Perhaps,” said Vivaldo, haltingly, thinking of the night on the roof with Harold, and Harold’s hands, “it’s something like the way I might feel if I went to bed with a man only because I— liked him — and he wanted me to.”

Eric smiled, grimly. “I’m not sure that there is a comparison, Vivaldo. Sex is too private. But if you went to bed with a guy just because he wanted you to, you wouldn’t have to take any responsibility for it; you wouldn’t be doing any of the work. He’d do all the work. And the idea of being passive is very attractive to many men, maybe to most men.”

“It is?” He put his feet on the floor and took a long swallow of his drink. He looked over at Eric and sighed and smiled. “You make the whole deal sound pretty rough, old buddy.”

“Well, that’s the way it looks from where I’m sitting.” Eric grimaced, threw back his head, and sipped his whiskey. “Maybe I’m crying because I wanted to believe that, somewhere, for some people, life and love are easier — than they are for me, than they are. Maybe it was easier to call myself a faggot and blame my sorrow on that.”

Then silence filled the room, like a chill. Eric and Vivaldo stared at each other with an oddly belligerent intensity. There was a great question in Eric’s eyes and Vivaldo turned away as though he were turning from a mirror and walked to the kitchen door. “You really think it makes no difference?”

“I don’t know. Does the difference make any difference?”

“Well,” said Vivaldo, tapping with his thumbnail against the hinges of the door, “I certainly think that the real ball game is between men and women. And it’s physically easier.” He looked quickly at Eric. “Isn’t it? And then,” he added, “there are children.” And he looked quickly at Eric again.

Eric laughed. “I never heard of two cats who wanted to make it failing because they were the wrong size. Love always finds a way, dad. I don’t know anything about baseball, so I don’t know if life’s a baseball game or not. Maybe it is for you. It isn’t for me. And if its children you’re after, well, you can do that in five minutes and you haven’t got to love anybody to do it. If all the children who get here every year were brought here by love, wow! baby, what a bright world this would be! ”

And now Vivaldo felt, at the very bottom of his heart, a certain reluctant hatred rising, against which he struggled as he would have struggled against vomiting. “I can’t decide,” he said, “whether you want to make everybody as miserable as you are, or whether everybody is as miserable as you are.”