From Baldwin, Early Novels & Stories: Go Tell It on the Mountain; Giovanni's Room; Another Country; Going To Meet the Man, edited by Toni Morrison, published by The Library of America

Another Country

E WAS FACING Seventh Avenue, at Times Square. It was past midnight and he had been sitting in the movies, in the top row of the balcony, since two o'clock in the afternoon. Twice he had been awakened by the violent accents of the Italian film, once the usher had awakened him, and twice he had been awakened by caterpillar fingers between his thighs. He was so tired, he had fallen so low, that he scarcely had the energy to be angry; nothing of his belonged to him anymore—you took the best, so why not take the rest?—but he had growled in his sleep and bared the white teeth in his dark face and crossed his legs. Then the balcony was nearly empty, the Italian film was approaching a climax; he stumbled down the endless stairs into the street. He was hungry, his mouth felt filthy. He realized too late, as he passed through the doors, that he wanted to urinate. And he was broke. And he had nowhere to go.

The policeman passed him, giving him a look. Rufus turned, pulling up the collar of his leather jacket while the wind nibbled delightedly at him through his summer slacks, and started north on Seventh Avenue. He had been thinking of going downtown and waking up Vivaldo—the only friend he had left in the city, or maybe in the world—but now he decided to walk up as far as a certain jazz bar and night club and look in. Maybe somebody would see him and recognize him, maybe one of the guys would lay enough bread on him for a meal or at least subway fare. At the same time, he hoped that he would not be recognized.

The Avenue was quiet, too, most of its bright lights out. Here and there a woman passed, here and there a man; rarely, a couple. At corners, under the lights, near drugstores, small knots of white, bright, chattering people showed teeth to each other, pawed each other, whistled for taxis, were whirled away in them, vanished through the doors of drugstores or into the blackness of side streets. Newsstands, like small black blocks on a board, held down corners of the pavements and policemen and taxi drivers and others, harder to place, stomped their feet before them and exchanged such words as they both knew with the muffled vendor within. A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. A hotel's enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded the city which never slept.

Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude. There were boys and girls drinking coffee at the drugstore counters who were held back from his condition by barriers as perishable as their dwindling cigarettes. They could scarcely bear their knowledge, nor could they have borne the sight of Rufus, but they knew why he was in the streets tonight, why he rode subways all night long, why his stomach growled, why his hair was nappy, his armpits funky, his pants and shoes too thin, and why he did not dare to stop and take a leak.

Now he stood before the misty doors of the jazz joint, peering in, sensing rather than seeing the frantic black people on the stand and the oblivious, mixed crowd at the bar. The music was loud and empty, no one was doing anything at all, and it was being hurled at the crowd like a malediction in which not even those who hated most deeply any longer believed. They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening, and the people at the tables found it pleasant to shout over this stunning corroboration and the people at the bar, under cover of the noise they could scarcely have lived without, pursued whatever it was they were after. He wanted to go in and use the bathroom but he was ashamed of the way he looked. He had been in hiding, really, for nearly a month. And he saw himself now, in his mind's eye, shambling through this crowd to the bathroom and crawling out again while everyone watched him with pitying or scornful or mocking eyes. Or, someone would be certain to whisper Isn't that Rufus Scott? Someone would look at him with horror, then turn back to his business with a long-drawn-out, pitying, Man! He could not do it—and he danced on one foot and then the other and tears came to his eyes.

A white couple, laughing, came through the doors, giving him barely a glance as they passed. The warmth, the smell of people, whiskey, beer, and smoke which came out to hit him as the doors opened almost made him cry for fair and it made his empty stomach growl again.

It made him remember days and nights, days and nights, when he had been inside, on the stand or in the crowd, sharp, beloved, making it with any chick he wanted, making it to parties and getting high and getting drunk and fooling around with the musicians, who were his friends, who respected him. Then, going home to his own pad, locking his door and taking off his shoes, maybe making himself a drink, maybe listening to some records, stretching out on the bed, maybe calling up some girl. And changing his underwear and his socks and his shirt, shaving, and taking a shower, and making it to Harlem to the barber shop, then seeing his mother and his father and teasing his sister, Ida, and eating: spareribs or pork chops or chicken or greens or cornbread or yams or biscuits. For a moment he thought he would faint with hunger and he moved to a wall of the building and leaned there. His forehead was freezing with sweat. He thought: this is got to stop, Rufus. This shit is got to stop. Then, in weariness and recklessness, seeing no one on the streets and hoping that no one would come through the doors, leaning with one hand against the wall he sent his urine splashing against the stone-cold pavement, watching the faint steam rise.

He remembered Leona. Or a sudden, cold, familiar sickness filled him and he knew he was remembering Leona. And he began to walk, very slowly now, away from the music, with his hands in his pockets and his head down. He no longer felt the cold.

For to remember Leona was also—somehow—to remember the eyes of his mother, the rage of his father, the beauty of his sister. It was to remember the streets of Harlem, the boys on the stoops, the girls behind the stairs and on the roofs, the white policeman who had taught him how to hate, the stickball games in the streets, the women leaning out of windows and the numbers they played daily, hoping for the hit his father never made. It was to remember the juke box, the teasing, the dancing, the hard-on, the gang fights and gang bangs, his first set of drums—bought him by his father—his first taste of marijuana, his first snort of horse. Yes: and the boys too far out, jackknifed on the stoops, the boy dead from an overdose on a rooftop in the snow. It was to remember the beat: A nigger, said his father, lives his whole life, lives and dies according to a beat. Shit, he humps to that beat and the baby he throws up in there, well, he jumps to it and comes out nine months later like a goddamn tambourine. The beat: hands, feet, tambourines, drums, pianos, laughter, curses, razor blades; the man stiffening with a laugh and a growl and a purr and the woman moistening and softening with a whisper and a sigh and a cry. The beat—in Harlem in the summertime one could almost see it, shaking above the pavements and the roof.

And he had fled, so he had thought, from the beat of Harlem, which was simply the beat of his own heart. Into a boot camp in the South, and onto the pounding sea.

While he had still been in the Navy, he had brought back from one of his voyages an Indian shawl for Ida. He had picked it up someplace in England. On the day that he gave it to her and she tried it on, something shook in him which had never been touched before. He had never seen the beauty of black people before. But, staring at Ida, who stood before the window of the Harlem kitchen, seeing that she was no longer merely his younger sister but a girl who would soon be a woman, she became associated with the colors of the shawl, the colors of the sun, and with a splendor incalculably older than the gray stone of the island on which they had been born. He thought that perhaps this splendor would come into the world again one day, into the world they knew. Ages and ages ago, Ida had not been merely the descendant of slaves. Watching her dark face in the sunlight, softened and shadowed by the glorious shawl, it could be seen that she had once been a monarch. Then he looked out of the window, at the air shaft, and thought of the whores on Seventh Avenue. He thought of the white policemen and the money they made on black flesh, the money the whole world made.

He looked back at his sister, who was smiling at him. On her long little finger she twisted the ruby-eyed snake ring which he had brought her from another voyage.

"You keep this up," she said, "and you'll make me the best-dressed girl on the block."

He was glad Ida could not see him now. She would have said, My Lord, Rufus, you got no right to walk around like this. Don't you know we're counting on you?

Seven months ago, a lifetime ago, he had been playing a gig in one of the new Harlem spots owned and operated by a Negro. It was their last night. It had been a good night, everybody was feeling good. Most of them, after the set, were going to make it to the home of a famous Negro singer who had just scored in his first movie. Because the joint was new, it was packed. Lately, he had heard, it hadn't been doing so well. All kinds of people had been there that night, white and black, high and low, people who came for the music and people who spent their lives in joints for other reasons. There were a couple of minks and a few near-minks and a lot of God-knows-what shining at wrists and ears and necks and in the hair. The colored people were having a good time because they sensed that, for whatever reason, this crowd was solidly with them; and the white people were having a good time because nobody was putting them down for being white. The joint, as Fats Waller would have said, was jumping.

There was some pot on the scene and he was a little high. He was feeling great. And, during the last set, he came doubly alive because the saxophone player, who had been way out all night, took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid of about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And, again, Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated, with all of the force the boy had. The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared. They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery; but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them. When the set ended they were all soaking. Rufus smelled his odor and the odor of the men around him and "Well, that's it," said the bass man. The crowd was yelling for more but they did their theme song and the lights came on. And he had played the last set of his last gig.

He was going to leave his traps there until Monday afternoon. When he stepped down from the stand there was this blonde girl, very plainly dressed, standing looking at him.

"What's on your mind, baby?" he asked her. Everybody was busy all around them, preparing to make it to the party. It was spring and the air was charged.

"What's on your mind?" she countered, but it was clear that she simply had not known what else to say.

She had said enough. She was from the South. And something leaped in Rufus as he stared at her damp, colorless face, the face of the Southern poor white, and her straight, pale hair. She was considerably older than he, over thirty probably, and her body was too thin. Just the same, it abruptly became the most exciting body he had gazed on in a long time.

"Honeychild," he said and gave her his crooked grin, "ain't you a long ways from home?"

"I sure am," she said, "and I ain't never going back there."

He laughed and she laughed. "Well, Miss Anne," he said, "if we both got the same thing on our mind, let's make it to that party."

And he took her arm, deliberately allowing the back of his hand to touch one of her breasts, and he said, "Your name's not really Anne, is it?"

"No," she said, "it's Leona."

"Leona?" And he smiled again. His smile could be very effective. "That's a pretty name."

"What's yours?"

"Me? I'm Rufus Scott."

He wondered what she was doing in this joint, in Harlem. She didn't seem at all the type to be interested in jazz, still less did she seem to be in the habit of going to strange bars alone. She carried a light spring coat, her long hair was simply brushed back and held with some pins, she wore very little lipstick and no other make-up at all.

"Come on," he said. "We'll pile into a cab."

"Are you sure it's all right if I come?"

He sucked his teeth. "If it wasn't all right, I wouldn't ask you. If I say it's all right, it's all right."

"Well," she said with a short laugh, "all right, then."

They moved with the crowd, which, with many interruptions, much talking and laughing and much erotic confusion, poured into the streets. It was three o'clock in the morning and gala people all around them were glittering and whistling and using up all the taxicabs. Others, considerably less gala— they were on the western edge of 125th Street—stood in knots along the street, switched or swaggered or dawdled by, with glances, sidelong or full face, which were more calculating than curious. The policemen strolled by; carefully, and in fact rather mysteriously conveying their awareness that these particular Negroes, though they were out so late, and mostly drunk, were not to be treated in the usual fashion; and neither were the white people with them. But Rufus suddenly realized that Leona would soon be the only white person left. This made him uneasy and his uneasiness made him angry. Leona spotted an empty cab and hailed it.

The taxi driver, who was white, seemed to have no hesitation in stopping for them, nor, once having stopped, did he seem to have any regrets.

"You going to work tomorrow?" he asked Leona. Now that they were alone together, he felt a little shy.

"No," she said, "tomorrow's Sunday."

"That's right." He felt very pleased and free. He had planned to visit his family but he thought of what a ball it would be to spend the day in bed with Leona. He glanced over at her, noting that, though she was tiny, she seemed very well put together. He wondered what she was thinking. He offered her a cigarette, putting his hand on hers briefly, and she refused it. "You don't smoke?"

"Sometimes. When I drink."

"Is that often?"

She laughed. "No. I don't like to drink alone."

"Well," he said, "you ain't going to be drinking alone for awhile."

She said nothing but she seemed, in the darkness, to tense and blush. She looked out of the window on her side. "I'm glad I ain't got to worry none about getting you home early tonight."

"You ain't got to worry about that, nohow. I'm a big girl."

"Honey," he said, "you ain't no bigger than a minute."

She sighed. "Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing."

He decided against asking what she meant by this. He said, giving her a significant look, "That's true," but she did not seem to take his meaning.

They were on Riverside Drive and nearing their destination. To the left of them, pale, unlovely lights emphasized the blackness of the Jersey shore. He leaned back, leaning a little against Leona, watching the blackness and the lights roll by. Then the cab turned; he glimpsed, briefly, the distant bridge which glowed like something written in the sky. The cab slowed down, looking for the house number. A taxi ahead of them had just discharged a crowd of people and was disappearing down the block. "Here we are," said Rufus; "Looks like a real fine party," the taxi driver said, and winked. Rufus said nothing. He paid the man and they got out and walked into the lobby, which was large and hideous, with mirrors and chairs. The elevator had just started upward; they could hear the crowd.

"What were you doing in that club all by yourself, Leona?" he asked.

She looked at him, a little startled. Then, "I don't know. I just wanted to see Harlem and so I went up there tonight to look around. And I just happened to pass that club and I heard the music and I went in and I stayed. I liked the music." She gave him a mocking look. "Is that all right?"

He laughed and said nothing.

She turned from him as they heard the sound of the closing elevator door reverberate down the shaft. Then they heard the drone of the cables as the elevator began to descend. She watched the closed doors as though her life depended on it.

"This your first time in New York?"

Yes, it was, she told him, but she had been dreaming about it all her life—half-facing him again, with a little smile. There was something halting in her manner which he found very moving. She was like a wild animal who didn't know whether to come to the outstretched hand or to flee and kept making startled little rushes, first in one direction and then in the other.

"I was born here," he said, watching her.

"I know," she said, "so it can't seem as wonderful to you as it does to me."

He laughed again. He remembered, suddenly, his days in boot camp in the South and felt again the shoe of a white officer against his mouth. He was in his white uniform, on the ground, against the red, dusty clay. Some of his colored buddies were holding him, were shouting in his ear, helping him to rise. The white officer, with a curse, had vanished, had gone forever beyond the reach of vengeance. His face was full of clay and tears and blood; he spat red blood into the red dust.

The elevator came and the doors opened. He took her arm as they entered and held it close against his chest. "I think you're a real sweet girl."

"You're nice, too," she said. In the closed, rising elevator her voice had a strange trembling in it and her body was also trembling—very faintly, as though it were being handled by the soft spring wind outside.

He tightened his pressure on her arm. "Didn't they warn you down home about the darkies you'd find up North?"

She caught her breath. "They didn't never worry me none. People's just people as far as I'm concerned."

And pussy's just pussy as far as I'm concerned, he thought—but was grateful, just the same, for her tone. It gave him an instant to locate himself. For he, too, was trembling slightly.

"What made you come North?" he asked.

He wondered if he should proposition her or wait for her to proposition him. He couldn't beg. But perhaps she could. The hairs of his groin began to itch slightly. The terrible muscle at the base of his belly began to grow hot and hard.

The elevator came to a halt, the doors opened, and they walked a long corridor toward a half-open door.

She said, "I guess I just couldn't take it down there any more. I was married but then I broke up with my husband and they took away my kid—they wouldn't even let me see him—and I got to thinking that rather than sit down there and go crazy, I'd try to make a new life for myself up here."

Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble. But he shook the suggestion off. He wouldn't be around long enough to be bugged by her story. He just wanted her for tonight.

He knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. Straight ahead of them, in the large living room which ended in open French doors and a balcony, more than a hundred people milled about, some in evening dress, some in slacks and sweaters. High above their heads hung an enormous silver ball which reflected unexpected parts of the room and managed its own unloving comment on the people in it. The room was so active with coming and going, so bright with jewelry and glasses and cigarettes, that the heavy ball seemed almost to be alive.

His host—whom he did not really know very well—was nowhere in sight. To the right of them were three rooms, the first of which was piled high with wraps and overcoats.

The horn of Charlie Parker, coming over the hi-fi, dominated all the voices in the room.

"Put your coat down," he told Leona, "and I'll try to find out if I know anybody in this joint."

"Oh," she said, "I'm sure you know them all."

"Go on, now," he said, smiling, and pushing her gently into the room, "do like I tell you."

While she was putting away her coat—and powdering her nose, probably—he remembered that he had promised to call Vivaldo. He wandered through the house, looking for a relatively isolated telephone, and found one in the kitchen.

He dialed Vivaldo's number.

"Hello, baby. How're you?"

"Oh, all right, I guess. What's happening? I thought you were going to call me sooner. I'd just about given you up."

"Well, I only just made it up here." He dropped his voice, for a couple had entered the kitchen, a blonde girl with a disarrayed Dutch bob and a tall Negro. The girl leaned against the sink, the boy stood before her, rubbing his hands slowly along the outside of her thighs. They barely glanced at Rufus. "A whole lot of elegant squares around, you dig?"

"Yeah," said Vivaldo. There was a pause. "You think it's worthwhile making it up there?"

"Well, hell, I don't know. If you got something better to do——"

"Jane's here," Vivaldo said, quickly. Rufus realized that Jane was probably lying on the bed, listening.

"Oh, you got your grandmother with you, you don't need nothing up here then." He did not like Jane, who was somewhat older than Vivaldo, with prematurely gray hair. "Ain't nothing up here old enough for you."

"That's enough, you bastard." He heard Jane's voice and Vivaldo's, murmuring; he could not make out what was being said. Then Vivaldo's voice was at his ear again. "I think I'll skip it."

"I guess you better. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Maybe I'll come by your pad—?"

"Okay. Don't let grandma wear you out now; they tell me women get real ferocious when they get as old as she is."

"They can't get too ferocious for me, dad!"

Rufus laughed. "You better quit trying to compete with me. You ain't never going to make it. So long."

"So long."

He hung up, smiling, and went to find Leona. She stood helplessly in the foyer, watching the host and hostess saying good night to several people.

"Think I'd deserted you?"

"No. I knew you wouldn't do that."

He smiled at her and touched her on the chin with his fist. The host turned away from the door and came over to them.

"You kids go on inside and get yourselves a drink," he said. "Go on in and get with it." He was a big, handsome, expansive man, older and more ruthless than he looked, who had fought his way to the top in show business via several of the rougher professions, including boxing and pimping. He owed his present eminence more to his vitality and his looks than he did to his voice, and he knew it. He was not the kind of man who fooled himself and Rufus liked him because he was rough and good-natured and generous. But Rufus was also a little afraid of him; there was that about him, in spite of his charm, which did not encourage intimacy. He was a great success with women, whom he treated with a large, affectionate contempt, and he was now on his fourth wife.

He took Leona and Rufus by the arm and walked them to the edge of the party. "We might have us some real doings if these squares ever get out of here," he said. "Stick around."

"How does it feel to be respectable?" Rufus grinned.

"Shit. I been respectable all my life. It's these respectable motherfuckers been doing all the dirt. They been stealing the colored folks blind, man. And niggers helping them do it." He laughed. "You know, every time they give me one of them great big checks I think to myself, they just giving me back a little bit of what they been stealing all these years, you know what I mean?" He clapped Rufus on the back. "See that Little Eva has a good time."

The crowd was already thinning, most of the squares were beginning to drift away. Once they were gone, the party would change character and become very pleasant and quiet and private. The lights would go down, the music become softer, the talk more sporadic and more sincere. Somebody might sing or play the piano. They might swap stories of the laughs they'd had, gigs they'd played, riffs they remembered, or the trouble they'd seen. Somebody might break out with some pot and pass it slowly around, like the pipe of peace. Somebody, curled on a rug in a far corner of the room, would begin to snore. Whoever danced would dance more languorously, holding tight. The shadows of the room would be alive. Toward the very end, as morning and the brutal sounds of the city began their invasion through the wide French doors, somebody would go into the kitchen and break out with some coffee. Then they would raid the icebox and go home. The host and hostess would finally make it between their sheets and stay in bed all day.

From time to time Rufus found himself glancing upward at the silver ball in the ceiling, always just failing to find himself and Leona reflected there.

"Let's go out to the balcony," he said to her.

She held out her glass. "Freshen my drink first?" Her eyes were now very bright and mischievous and she looked like a little girl.

He walked to the table and poured two very powerful drinks. He went back to her. "Ready?"

She took her glass and they stepped through the French doors.

"Don't let Little Eva catch cold!" the host called.

He called back. "She may burn, baby, but she sure won't freeze!"

Directly before and beneath them stretched the lights of the Jersey shore. He seemed, from where he stood, to hear a faint murmur coming from the water.

When a child he had lived on the eastern edge of Harlem, a block from the Harlem River. He and other children had waded into the water from the garbage-heavy bank or dived from occasional rotting promontories. One summer a boy had drowned there. From the stoop of his house Rufus had watched as a small group of people crossed Park Avenue, beneath the heavy shadow of the railroad tracks, and come into the sun, one man in the middle, the boy's father, carrying the boy's unbelievably heavy, covered weight. He had never forgotten the bend of the man's shoulders or the stunned angle of his head. A great screaming began from the other end of the block and the boy's mother, her head tied up, wearing her bathrobe, stumbling like a drunken woman, began running toward the silent people.

He threw back his shoulders, as though he were casting off a burden, and walked to the edge of the balcony where Leona stood. She was staring up the river, toward the George Washington Bridge.

"It's real beautiful," she said, "it's just so beautiful."

"You seem to like New York," he said.

She turned and looked at him and sipped her drink. "Oh, I do. Can I trouble you for a cigarette now?"

He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her, then lit one for himself. "How're you making it up here?"

"Oh, I'm doing just fine," she said. "I'm waiting tables in a restaurant way downtown, near Wall Street, that's a real pretty part of town, and I'm rooming with two other girls"—they couldn't go to her place, anyway!—"and, oh, I'm doing just fine." And she looked up at him with her sad-sweet, poor-white smile.

Again something warned him to stop, to leave this poor little girl alone; and at the same time the fact that he thought of her as a poor little girl caused him to smile with real affection, and he said, "You've got a lot of guts, Leona."

"Got to, the way I look at it," she said. "Sometimes I think I'll just give up. But—how do you give up?"

She looked so lost and comical that he laughed out loud and, after a moment, she laughed too.

"If my husband could see me now," and she giggled, "my, my, my!"

"Why, what would your husband say?" he asked her.

"Why—I don't know." But her laugh didn't come this time. She looked at him as though she were slowly coming out of a dream. "Say—do you think I could have another drink?"

"Sure, Leona," and he took her glass and their hands and their bodies touched for a moment. She dropped her eyes. "Be right back," he said, and dropped back into the room, in which the lights now were dim. Someone was playing the piano.

"Say, man, how you coming with Eva?" the host asked.

"Fine, fine, we lushing it up."

"That ain't nowhere. Blast Little Eva with some pot. Let her get her kicks."

"I'll see to it that she gets her kicks," he said.

"Old Rufus left her out there digging the Empire State building, man," said the young saxophonist, and laughed.

"Give me some of that," Rufus said, and somebody handed him a stick and he took a few drags.

"Keep it, man. It's choice."

He made a couple of drinks and stood in the room for a moment, finishing the pot and digging the piano. He felt fine, clean, on top of everything, and he had a mild buzz on when he got back to the balcony.

"Is everybody gone home?" she asked, anxiously. "It's so quiet in there."

"No," he said, "they just sitting around." She seemed prettier suddenly, and softer, and the river lights fell behind her like a curtain. This curtain seemed to move as she moved, heavy and priceless and dazzling. "I didn't know," he said, "that you were a princess."

He gave her her drink and their hands touched again. "I know you must be drunk," she said, happily, and now, over her drink, her eyes unmistakably called him.

He waited. Everything seemed very simple now. He played with her fingers. "You seen anything you want since you been in New York?"

"Oh," she said, "I want it all!"

"You see anything you want right now?"

Her fingers stiffened slightly but he held on. "Go ahead. Tell me. You ain't got to be afraid." These words then echoed in his head. He had said this before, years ago, to someone else. The wind grew cold for an instant, blowing around his body and ruffling her hair. Then it died down.

"Do you?" she asked faintly.

"Do I what?"

"See anything you want?"

He realized that he was high from the way his fingers seemed hung up in hers and from the way he was staring at her throat. He wanted to put his mouth there and nibble it slowly, leaving it black and blue. At the same time he realized how far they were above the city and the lights below seemed to be calling him. He walked to the balcony's edge and looked over. Looking straight down, he seemed to be standing on a cliff in the wilderness, seeing a kingdom and a river which had not been seen before. He could make it his, every inch of the territory which stretched beneath and around him now, and, unconsciously, he began whistling a tune and his foot moved to find the pedal of his drum. He put his drink down carefully on the balcony floor and beat a riff with his fingers on the stone parapet.

"You never answered my question."

"What?"

He turned to face Leona, who held her drink cupped in both her hands and whose brow was quizzically lifted over her despairing eyes and her sweet smile.

"You never answered mine."

"Yes, I did." She sounded more plaintive than ever. "I said I wanted it all."

He took her drink from her and drank half of it, then gave the glass back, moving into the darkest part of the balcony.

"Well, then," he whispered, "come and get it."

She came toward him, holding her glass against her breasts. At the very last moment, standing directly before him, she whispered in bafflement and rage, "What are you trying to do to me?"

"Honey," he answered, "I'm doing it," and he pulled her to him as roughly as he could. He had expected her to resist and she did, holding the glass between them and frantically trying to pull her body away from his body's touch. He knocked the glass out of her hand and it fell dully to the balcony floor, rolling away from them. Go ahead, he thought humorously; if I was to let you go now you'd be so hung up you'd go flying over this balcony, most likely. He whispered, "Go ahead, fight. I like it. Is this the way they do down home?"

"Oh God," she murmured, and began to cry. At the same time, she ceased struggling. Her hands came up and touched his face as though she were blind. Then she put her arms around his neck and clung to him, still shaking. His lips and his teeth touched her ears and her neck and he told her, "Honey, you ain't got nothing to cry about yet."

Yes, he was high; everything he did he watched himself doing, and he began to feel a tenderness for Leona which he had not expected to feel. He tried, with himself, to make amends for what he was doing—for what he was doing to her. Everything seemed to take a very long time. He got hung up on her breasts, standing out like mounds of yellow cream, and the tough, brown, tasty nipples, playing and nuzzling and nibbling while she moaned and whimpered and her knees sagged. He gently lowered them to the floor, pulling her on top of him. He held her tightly at the hip and the shoulder. Part of him was worried about the host and hostess and the other people in the room but another part of him could not stop the crazy thing which had begun. Her fingers opened his shirt to the navel, her tongue burned his neck and his chest; and his hands pushed up her skirt and caressed the inside of her thighs. Then, after a long, high time, while he shook beneath every accelerating tremor of her body, he forced her beneath him and he entered her. For a moment he thought she was going to scream, she was so tight and caught her breath so sharply, and stiffened so. But then she moaned, she moved beneath him. Then, from the center of his rising storm, very slowly and deliberately, he began the slow ride home.

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep. They murmured and sobbed on this journey, he softly, insistently cursed. Each labored to reach a harbor: there could be no rest until this motion became unbearably accelerated by the power that was rising in them both. Rufus opened his eyes for a moment and watched her face, which was transfigured with agony and gleamed in the darkness like alabaster. Tears hung in the corners of her eyes and the hair at her brow was wet. Her breath came with moaning and short cries, with words he couldn't understand, and in spite of himself he began moving faster and thrusting deeper. He wanted her to remember him the longest day she lived. And, shortly, nothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs. She began to cry. I told you, he moaned, I'd give you something to cry about, and, at once, he felt himself strangling, about to explode or die. A moan and a curse tore through him while he beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies.

He lay on his back, breathing hard. He heard music coming from the room inside, and a whistle on the river. He was frightened and his throat was dry. The air was chilly where he was wet.

She touched him and he jumped. Then he forced himself to turn to her, looking into her eyes. Her eyes were wet still, deep and dark, her trembling lips curved slightly in a shy, triumphant smile. He pulled her to him, wishing he could rest. He hoped she would say nothing but, "It was so wonderful," she said, and kissed him. And these words, though they caused him to feel no tenderness and did not take away his dull, mysterious dread, began to call desire back again.

He sat up. "You're a funny little cracker," he said. He watched her. "I don't know what you going to say to your husband when you come home with a little black baby."

"I ain't going to be having no more babies," she said, "you ain't got to worry about that." She said nothing more; but she had much more to say. "He beat that out of me, too," she said finally.

He wanted to hear her story. And he wanted to know nothing more about her.

"Let's go inside and wash up," he said.

She put her head against his chest. "I'm afraid to go in there now."

He laughed and stroked her hair. He began to feel affection for her again. "You ain't fixing to stay here all night, are you?"

"What are your friends going to think?"

"Well, one thing, Leona, they ain't going to call the law." He kissed her. "They ain't going to think nothing, honey."

"You coming in with me?"

"Sure, I'm coming in with you." He held her away from him. "All you got to do is sort of straighten your clothes"— he stroked her body, looking into her eyes—"and sort of run your hand through your hair, like this"—and he brushed her hair back from her forehead. She watched him. He heard himself ask, "Do you like me?"

She swallowed. He watched the vein in her neck throb. She seemed very fragile. "Yes," she said. She looked down. "Rufus," she said, "I really do like you. Please don't hurt me."

"Why should I want to hurt you, Leona?" He stroked her neck with one hand, looking at her gravely. "What makes you think I want to hurt you?"

"People do," she said, finally, "hurt each other."

"Is somebody been hurting you, Leona?"

She was silent, her face leaning into his palm. "My husband," she said, faintly. "I thought he loved me, but he didn't—oh, I knew he was rough but I didn't think he was mean. And he couldn't of loved me because he took away my kid, he's off someplace where I can't never see him." She looked up at Rufus with her eyes full of tears. "He said I wasn't a fit mother because—I—drank too much. I did drink too much, it was the only way I could stand living with him. But I would of died for my kid, I wouldn't never of let anything happen to him."

He was silent. Her tears fell on his dark fist. "He's still down there," she said, "my husband, I mean. Him and my mother and my brother is as thick as thieves. They think I ain't never been no good. Well, hell, if people keep telling you you ain't no good"—she tried to laugh—"you bound to turn out pretty bad."

He pushed out of his mind all of the questions he wanted to ask her. It was beginning to be chilly on the balcony; he was hungry and he wanted a drink and he wanted to get home to bed. "Well," he said, at last, "I ain't going to hurt you," and he rose, walking to the edge of the balcony. His shorts were like a rope between his legs, he pulled them up, and felt that he was glued inside them. He zipped up his fly, holding his legs wide apart. The sky had faded down to purple. The stars were gone and the lights on the Jersey shore were out. A coal barge traveled slowly down the river.

"How do I look?" she asked him.

"Fine," he said, and she did. She looked like a tired child. "You want to come down to my place?"

"If you want me to," she said.

"Well, yes, that's what I want." But he wondered why he was holding on to her.

Vivaldo came by late the next afternoon to find Rufus still in bed and Leona in the kitchen making breakfast.

It was Leona who opened the door. And Rufus watched with delight the slow shock on Vivaldo's face as he looked from Leona, muffled in Rufus' bathrobe, to Rufus, sitting up in bed, and naked except for the blankets.

Let the liberal white bastard squirm, he thought.

"Hi, baby," he called, "come on in. You just in time for breakfast."

"I've had my breakfast," Vivaldo said, "but you people aren't even decent yet. I'll come back later."

"Shit, man, come on in. That's Leona. Leona, this here's a friend of mine, Vivaldo. For short. His real name is Daniel Vivaldo Moore. He's an Irish wop."

"Rufus is just full of prejudice against everybody," said Leona, and smiled. "Come on in."

Vivaldo closed the door behind him awkwardly and sat down on the edge of the bed. Whenever he was uncomfortable—which was often—his arms and legs seemed to stretch to monstrous proportions and he handled them with bewildered loathing, as though he had been afflicted with them only a few moments before.

"I hope you can eat something," Leona said. "There's plenty and it'll be ready in just a second."

"I'll have a cup of coffee with you," Vivaldo said, "unless you happen to have some beer." Then he looked over at Rufus. "I guess it was quite a party."

Rufus grinned. "Not bad, not bad."

Leona opened some beer and poured it into a tumbler and brought it to Vivaldo. He took it, looking up at her with his quick, gypsy smile, and spilled some on one foot.

"You want some, Rufus?"

"No, honey, not yet. I'll eat first."

Leona walked back into the kitchen.

"Ain't she a splendid specimen of Southern womanhood?" Rufus asked. "Down yonder, they teach their womenfolks to serve."

From the kitchen came Leona's laugh. "They sure don't teach us nothing else."

"Honey, as long as you know how to make a man as happy as you making me, you don't need to know nothing else."

Rufus and Vivaldo looked at each other a moment. Then Vivaldo grinned. "How about it, Rufus. You going to get your ass up out of that bed?"

Rufus threw back the covers and jumped out of bed. He raised his arms high and yawned and stretched.

"You're giving quite a show this afternoon," Vivaldo said, and threw him a pair of shorts.

Rufus put on the shorts and an old pair of gray slacks and a faded green sport shirt. "You should have made it to that party," he said, "after all. There was some pot on the scene that wouldn't wait."

"Well. I had my troubles last night."

"You and Jane? As usual?"

"Oh, she got drunk and pulled some shit. You know. She's sick, she can't help it."

"I know she's sick. But what's wrong with you?"

"I guess I just like to get beaten over the head." They walked to the table. "This your first time in the Village, Leona?"

"No, I've walked around here some. But you don't really know a place unless you know some of the people."

"You know us now," said Vivaldo, "and between us we must know everybody else. We'll show you around."

Something in the way Vivaldo said this irritated Rufus. His buoyancy evaporated; sour suspicions filled him. He stole a look at Vivaldo, who was sipping his beer and watching Leona with an impenetrable smile—impenetrable exactly because it seemed so open and good-natured. He looked at Leona, who, this afternoon anyway, drowning in his bathrobe, her hair piled on top of her head and her face innocent of make-up, couldn't really be called a pretty girl. Perhaps Vivaldo was contemptuous of her because she was so plain—which meant that Vivaldo was contemptuous of him. Or perhaps he was flirting with her because she seemed so simple and available: the proof of her availability being her presence in Rufus' house.

Then Leona looked across the table and smiled at him. His heart and his bowels shook; he remembered their violence and their tenderness together; and he thought, To hell with Vivaldo. He had something Vivaldo would never be able to touch.

He leaned across the table and kissed her.

"Can I have some more beer?" asked Vivaldo, smiling.

"You know where it is," Rufus said.

Leona took his glass and went to the kitchen. Rufus stuck out his tongue at Vivaldo, who was watching him with a faintly quizzical frown.

Leona returned and set a fresh beer before Vivaldo and said, "You boys finish up now, I'm going to get dressed." She gathered her clothes together and vanished into the bathroom.

There was silence at the table for a moment.

"She going to stay here with you?" Vivaldo asked.

"I don't know yet. Nothing's been decided yet. But I think she wants to—"

"Oh, that's obvious. But isn't this place a little small for two?"

"Maybe we'll find a bigger place. Anyway—you know—I'm not home a hell of a lot."

Vivaldo seemed to consider this. Then, "I hope you know what you're doing, baby. I know it's none of my business, but——"

Rufus looked at him. "Don't you like her?"

"Sure, I like her. She's a sweet girl." He took a swallow of his beer. "The question is—how much do you like her?"

"Can't you tell?" And Rufus grinned.

"Well, no, frankly—I can't. I mean, sure you like her. But—oh, I don't know."

There was silence again. Vivaldo dropped his eyes.

"There's nothing to worry about," said Rufus. "I'm a big boy, you know."

Vivaldo raised his eyes and said, "It's a pretty big world, too, baby. I hope you've thought of that."

"I've thought of that."

"Trouble is, I feel too paternal towards you, you son of a bitch."

"That's the trouble with all you white bastards."

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