Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

Rick didn’t even look up. He put his head down and pushed off the back wall with one foot. The man was knocked to the ground. The woman jumped back. Was she reaching for something in the drawer?

Rick was in the doorway, but the man leapt from the floor and was on him, two sinuous arms around Rick’s waist, wrestling. The man dropped one arm only to throw a punch that missed and grazed Rick’s ear with a nasty sting.

“Tyrone, don’t. He’s just a boy,” the woman shouted. He had Rick against the wall.

“I was just hiding. I swear to God. I had to hide.”

“You came damn close to hiding in a hole in the ground.”

The woman sat and exhaled. She was pregnant. She and the man could have been brother and sister. He was a shade darker but with long, straight hair.

“You scared the crap out of me. I thought I was going to have it right then.”

“Please, I haven’t done anything. I just want to go home.”

“Come and sit down and tell us what the hell is going on.” The woman pushed a kitchen chair toward him with her foot. “I think you owe us that much.”

Rick sat, feeling the unsteadiness in his legs just as he made contact with the chair.

“You look pretty young to be cheating someone out of their money.”

“How do you know he was cheated?” Rick asked. “Sometimes, you just lose.”

Tyrone smiled despite himself.

“They charge a lot of money for these papers?” Andre tried to ask in a nonchalant way.

“It depends,” Rick replied. “If Tyrone has to write the paper, they charge more than if they just buy it already written from another student.”

“But how does the student that’s buying the paper know? He should charge everybody based on how many pages are in the paper.”

“You can be his business manager.”

“Sounds like somebody needs to.”

“The folks from the pool hall can’t be still looking for us,” Rick said, changing the subject. “I didn’t come here to spend my summer inside.”

“You want to spend it in the hospital? Besides, the Smithsonian ain’t going nowhere. Tell me about this Tyrone and the Schwartz guy too.”

“Schwartz is actually a woman, pregnant, as a matter of fact.”

“OK, but what about the operation?”

“What difference does it make? You don’t even like to read subtitles. How are you going to help crank out papers to sell?”

“You pay to read subtitles. He gets paid for the papers. That’s a whole other world.”

On his second visit to Tyrone and Schwartz’s, Rick got high and had sex. He had seen people when they were drunk and/or high and had read about the effect of psychoactives: cannabis leaf, hashish, LSD, mushrooms, and the like. He had noted the similarities between the more intense psychedelic experiences and meditation. But this was the thing itself.

Time puzzled him. It suddenly seemed like he’d always been high and had simply failed to realize it. The moments when Tyrone had gone upstairs to write and Schwartz had turned to Rick smiling and lit a joint and asked him if he’d ever felt a baby moving all collapsed into the moment his ear was on her stomach, and then, thoughtless and clear, he turned his lips to brush against the gentle swell.

When had she actually handed him the cigarette? It was warm. Why had it surprised him that something lit on one end and that she had been holding on the other end was warm? He inhaled, choked, drank some water and tried again. The upright chair in the kitchenette that had been utterly comfortable a moment ago now seemed to urge him to sit on the softer, tiny couch near the stairs.

There, the title of a book— Black No More —caught his attention. It looked old and, as he began to read it, he was amazed that it had been published in the 1930s. It began with a black man, the apparent protagonist, who paid to turn himself white using a method developed by a black scientist whose aim was to get rid of racism in the US. The man who paid to become white made the change in no small part to pursue a white woman who wouldn’t go out with black men. Racial identities leap-frogged over and over in Rick’s head and then exchanged themselves in some sort of mirror and took him back to Schwartz.

She turned on the radio. Strange rock music smeared itself into the smell of the smoke in the room. He chuckled hearing the obviously white singer say “Lord have mercy.” He didn’t know white people even knew the phrase existed. Then there was the curious refrain, “white light, white heat.”

It seemed to her like he’d been reading forever, though he was flipping pages faster than even she could have done. She tried to use her fascination with watching him read to replace the other thoughts that rose in her like a swift current. He was underage, right? If she asked him how old he was and he lied or confirmed what she feared, what then?

She saw his eyes when she closed her eyes as he had moaned against her stomach and the vibration made her wet. She did not want to admit that being pregnant had made her want sex in a way she never had before. She also had not wanted to admit that she missed her lover, nor that the only thing that dampened her anger at what her brother had done to him was the memory of making love in a space cleared in the woods. She told herself smoking marijuana would calm her disruptions and urges but suspected that was close to being a lie.

How old was he, really, this boy plowing through the novel? It seemed like he’d been reading forever.

Whatever happened would be alright, she thought. The apartment was temporary. Everything in that place was just for a time.

When he looked up from the book to ask her the question reading had given him the courage to ask—why was her name Schwartz?—she was unbuttoning her blouse and walking towards him.

After having sex for the first time while being high for the first time, it took every ounce of self restraint for Rick to try not to go back the very next day very early in the morning. She had told him it was best if they remained “discreet.”

As far as Rick was concerned, “discretion” also meant going back alone, without Andre. Though it took a lot to convince Andre not to accompany him on his third visit to Tyrone and Schwartz’s place.

“It’s still new. I am working things out. It’s delicate because of the way I rushed in there and everything,” Rick worked to persuade his cousin. He had to promise over and over to mention Andre’s idea about charging per page and to tell whose idea it had been.

Even before he’d made love with Schwartz, Rick wanted the visits to himself to talk books. He couldn’t imagine Andre talking anything but business. He wondered why Andre was adamant about being part of the academic paper scheme. For that matter, he began to question his own motivation.

He had never been part of anything illegal or even unseemly until that summer. Was it the money? Certainly, he had never had as much money as the pool hall split with Andre. The paper mill hustle was different from the pool hustle but it was still a hustle, albeit one that was now conflated in Rick’s mind with seduction. Rick was unsure of where the college paper scheme was in terms of legality and didn’t feel up to asking. The prospect of another hustle ending in fiasco did not encourage him. He could still feel where the sharp pebbles from the alley had dug into his feet while he ran desperately from the pool hall pursuers. His shoes had taken a beating and he remembered how his hands shook even after he’d been sitting for a while.

Hustle or no, he glowed at the idea of spending time with Schwartz and Tyrone. He’d never talked about Ann Petry or William Faulkner with anyone outside of class. The couple seemed to live with books the way his family and friends lived with music. He’d also never before considered a pregnant woman attractive, and then there was her voice. He remembered how during his accidental first visit she sang a Marvelettes’ song as Tyrone poured their tea. In the song, tables are turned, reality shifts, and the world becomes a new place as it had become with his escape into their small, jerry-rigged apartment.