CHAPTER 7

Keel walked from Della’s apartment in the lower Murray Hill section crosstown along 23rd Street to his own West Village place. He didn’t mind the cold. In two hours with Della, utter exhaustion had seized him, an exhaustion of the mind which had nothing to do with his having been up the entire day. Now he walked alone between the great concrete walls of buildings which rose on either side of the wide street. Here the wind had free play, speeding from river to river unchecked, swinging signs and throwing small clinkers of debris against windows.

All the store windows had been darkened at this hour—four in the morning. Even had it been Christmas or Easter, those seasons when store windows brim with color and light above 23rd Street, this section would have remained stark. It was a limbo—until daybreak when busses and subways loosed their hordes of persons, many of whom worked in the mass of non-profit organizations centered along this street. But now: nothing.

Keel plodded westward, foolishly conscious of the mechanism of his legs and feet. Once he felt he was marching and broke step with a curse, yet soon resumed it. Once more flecks of snow spewed down upon the walks, and he exulted in the clean smell.

Tonight, walking along with the snow stinging his face, Keel felt lost Yet he knew New York. He had been born here, had gone to school here and had explored it damned near as much as Meyer Berger, or so he liked to think in more pleasant moments. Unlike many Harlem Negroes he had learned what was in the city below 125th Street, why it was and where it was, though they too, more and more, were striking out beyond the areas where they worked. Keel knew how the Negro ghetto, which once had been around the corner from his shop, had moved to the Pennsylvania Station area and then uptown to Harlem, once the wooded heights of the well-to-do. Prejudice and discrimination being what they were—tied inextricably first to economics, though economics was really the least important—the old buildings up there still maintained their sometimes exquisite, sometimes cumbersome, rococo frescoes and stone ornaments, since it would have been too costly, the landlords said, to remove them. Now the largest ghetto in the world was the one place in New York City where vestiges of the meaningful architectural work of the last century remained. Elsewhere, the new buildings were sleek, almost prefabricated structures with window upon window, air conditioner above air conditioner, unguarded by gargoyle or angel, untrimmed except by a modest layer of colored brick.

The buildings Keel was now passing were smutty and flat-walled; they appeared gutted. They had been built solely for office space, perhaps a hundred or seventy-five years before, and he knew, though he couldn’t see, that the upper façades bore the name of the owner and the date of the erection of each building in brick bas-relief. Now Keel turned south, then west again at 10th Street and walked slowly over to his building near the West-side Highway and the railroad tracks. He dragged himself slowly upstairs and into his apartment where he began climbing out of his clothes as soon as he had closed the door behind him. A shower and a cigarette were enough to send him staggering, completely without strength, to bed.

It seemed a million years later—when he started in the darkness at the sound of his doorbell and came to. Della, his mind raced. The window of his room was filled with a sheen of silver-gray. The bell rang again, and once more his mind registered: Della. Then: no.

She would not come like this. She had done it twice before, and each time it had been an awkward situation. He paused to light a cigarette and on the first draw decided it must be Eagle. Nude, he walked to the door, took off the latch and pulled it open.

“Damn,” Eagle said, brushing past him, “I thought you was going to leave us out there in that goddamn cold.”

“What the hell you doin’ out of bed?” Keel asked wearily. One could always assume that Richie Stokes would do little to save himself. “Whatcha let him up for?” Keel asked Hillary, knowing full well that a hundred men like himself and Hillary couldn’t keep Eagle in bed once he had made up his mind to get up. Keel didn’t wait for Hillary’s answer.

“Della here?” Eagle whispered slyly.

“No, she isn’t here. C’mon in the bedroom. I’m cold.”

They returned to the bedroom and sat on the bed after Keel had got back in. He closed his eyes and asked, “What’s happenin’?”

“Me and Prof. Just walkin’ around,” Eagle said.

“Makin’ connections?”

“How you sound, man?” Eagle jeered, but admitted nothing.

“You tryin’ to get Prof in trouble, bastard? Let him stay clean, for Christ’s sake!”

For the first time Eagle looked sheepish. “Look, man, can we take off our things and get some grease?”

“Go the hell on,” Keel said, turning away from them and pulling the sheets above his head.

Hillary had been tired all day, but with the coming of night he had moved into a tranquil stage, where things happened and were absorbed without shock, without feeling. Now, with the cold gray of morning nudging in through the window and the sounds of traffic on the nearby highway growing louder every minute, he sat in the neat kitchen and absent-mindedly watched Eagle, his fat, dark face sagging with tiredness, fix breakfast.

“I enjoyed all of it,” Hillary said.

“Wasn’t nothin’ to enjoy,” Eagle muttered.

“Wrong word,” Hillary said. He passed a hand over his forehead. “I wanted to say, I learned. Sometimes that can be an enjoyment.”

“Depends,” Eagle said, shifting the skillet with the eggs in it above the fire, “on what you’re learning.”

“Lots of things,” Hillary said, feeling suddenly, even as dazed as he was, self-conscious.

“Like what?” Eagle insisted. He turned the flame up under the coffee.

“Nothing, man.” How could you tell a man like Eagle what you were learning from him, from his world, his friends and his enemies—that even if you wanted to lie down and die you had to fight for the right and sometimes, fighting for that right, you discovered that you wanted to live?

It was not that Hillary underestimated Eagle’s ability to understand; he had already learned that the man’s understanding was almost without limit. What made for Hillary’s hesitation was the code of this world. How did one speak with meaning of things of the heart? Things that welled up in a man’s throat and made him eager to turn away, so that if his eyes should water it would not be seen? He had not yet seen obvious tenderness, though tenderness there was, brief, fleeting, jocular, not to be lingered over when the battle for existence and dignity took up all the time. Hillary felt this keenly.

But he also felt that he could not admit to these feelings and something within him nagged that, regardless, he was an outsider, was better than they—would be better off at least, once rid of the guilt of Angela’s death.

He fingered Eagle’s hundred dollar bill and thought: Crap!—how could he be better, living off their handouts? They would have been the first in their brutal manner to call a handout a handout. But he knew they would also have said that misfortune gets a turn with everyone. They seemed to understand that—damn them—better than any people he had ever known.

Eagle had shrugged off Hillary’s reply and correctly diagnosed the problem. The guy was quiet enough and he wasn’t always layin’ on you with hippy-dip talk the way so many white studs did in trying to prove that “Man, I am one of you!” He could duke too, and Eagle smiled seeing again how the drummer had moved into the path of that waiting right.

“You know many colored guys before you came down here, Prof?” Eagle asked on a hunch.

“No. I grew up with a guy, though. Name was Borden.”

They pulled up their chairs and bent to their meal. “What was he like?” Eagle asked, mouth filled with bread, coffee, and eggs.

“A good kid,” Hillary answered briefly.

“What happened?” Eagle insisted. Yes, he wanted to hear it again. He asked it whenever he had the chance, hoping that one of those childhood friendships would not have dissolved at thirteen or fourteen.

“We grew up,” Hillary said.

“He taught you how to box?”

Hillary reddened. “We used to box out in the fields.” Hillary smiled. “He whipped my ass every day.” He knew it would bring a smile to Eagle’s face. It did.

They ate in silence, finishing the eggs and the entire pot of coffee. Eagle strained back in his chair expansively and said, “Listen, let me lecture to one of your classes when you go back. On jazz.”

Hillary looked up at him but didn’t reply.

“Ain’t you goin’ back?” Eagle said.

“I don’t know.”

“This ain’t no life for an intelligent man,” Eagle mused. “You ain’t got to do it. You white.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Hillary asked angrily. These people based everything on black and white; every goddamn time they opened their mouths it was “you white.”

“Everythang,” Eagle said, accentuating the “thang.” “I spent a whole lot of years telling myself that it didn’t matter, and I was gettin’ hung up every other day. Finally I was able to see it: see the way it was an’ I feel better now. I know where I’m at. Which don’t make me not want to get my damned gun sometimes and blow this motherin’ town and every other dump in this country right off the map.…

“Tell me about jazz and American art and how us niggers did it. Sheeeeeeeeeet!” Eagle leaned across the table. “This is my business. This is all I know, man. I ain’t makin’ a quota.” He was saying quarter, but he dragged it out, lingering on the first syllable so that it sounded both hip and southern. “Ain’t no spade critics. All the spade deejays, they playin’ rock ’n’ roll, ain’t but a few spade joints that can pay my way—Sheeeeeeeeet! Paddy boys pick up a horn and go boo-bip, and right away, man they’re playing’ jazz. Now ain’t that some shit?”

Eagle had spoken rapidly, fiercely, with his eyes sparking and his shoulders hunched forward, his words coming in smooth, cleverly enunciated rhythms. Now he nodded his head to his next words: “Do you dig, frig? Now do you understand? You white. It’s your world. You won’t let me make it in it and you can’t. Now ain’t that a bitch?”

Eagle climbed heavily to his feet and without another word retrieved his coat and went out.

In his room, in his bed, Keel dreamed, unmindful that Eagle had left, and that an hour later, Hillary too had gone, his face grim, his lips tight, to buy some clothes and get some stationery and stamps.

In his dream, Keel knocked the woman down. She had been beating him with a whip. (Alice?) Then he found some money, a lot of it. It made him feel good and he slipped it in his pocket. A man and a woman approached him through the shadows. They asked if he had found any money. He lied and said he hadn’t. He felt good about the lying. He felt so good he started to run, the way he used to when he was a kid, loping along in the pace of the half-miler. But he couldn’t seem to get up on his toes; he was running awkwardly, flatfootedly, and he was distressed. But suddenly he was with someone (a woman?) near an airfield; then more suddenly still he was in a plane, a plane like the Corsairs that used to scream between the rows of cocoanut trees on Tulgai. Another plane was bearing down on him. A crash was imminent, and it came, the other plane smashing into his own—doubling him up with a snap, but by some herculean effort, he braced himself and pushed all the wreckage away.

The dream had ended. Keel twisted quickly onto one elbow and lit a cigarette. He stared at the clear, cold daylight that flooded his room. He thought: All right, Joseph, you with your sharp-assed coat of many colors, what does it mean? Tagore, you tell me. Jesus, speak out and say what it means; or you, Mohammed. Sigmund, with your ratty-assed couch, how about you?

The silence in the room was deadening. The man and the woman … the man and the woman? Why couldn’t he run? And the money. This reminded him that he had to see about money today.

In disgust he crushed out his cigarette. There was little doubt that the dream concerned himself and Della. He glanced at the phone near the bed. Deeply troubled, he climbed slowly out of bed and made his way through the kitchen, where he observed the mess Eagle and Hillary had made, into the bathroom. He turned on the shower and went out to check the coffee pot. It was empty and he made some more. He was grateful for the sudden train noises on the tracks a block away. He was about to step into the shower when he remembered he had had one earlier so he shut it off and returned to the kitchen. The train noises had stopped and the world outside was empty again, as it was inside too. The deep whistle of a ship’s first warning sounded, echoing and re-echoing down the river.

Where are all my Lords in this hour? a small, hidden part of him whispered. I face the East and bow, I face the west and bow and the north and the south, and I hear nothing but ship’s whistles and the echoes of music. Everything else is—is nothing, empty. Except Della. And I cannot decide, Lords who trod the earth no more (if you ever did and you didn’t, because if you had I know I would have seen you): no, I cannot decide, Lords, whether I love her or hate her.

The coffee had started perking now, and Keel waited until the fragrance came. As he rose from his chair, the ship’s whistle sounded again, twice, and Keel paused to listen to it slam back and forth off the façades of Manhattan and the Palisades. I am in love with her, I believe—he thought—but it is also possible that I hate more than love, and if I hate, how may I love?

The three, final, sonorous blasts of the ship preparing to leave its berth came some fifteen minutes later, as Della walked down the street from the agency on her way to a lunch she had no appetite for. In her mind was the need to keep up her strength for the ordeal in which she was involved.

Though it had been unspoken the evening before, she knew just as Keel did that the final separation was only a short time away. She was numbed by the thought, for they had passed that period of frequent separations and had gone on to approach marriage. Now this thing was between them—and it nullified dramatically all the gains they had made. If what Keel had told her were true, and she had no reason to doubt him (though it did hurt, his talking about other women, even with a psychoanalytic preface), then what was not right between them could only stem in great part from her.

With her mind, she tried to deny the selfishness which makes up the major part of love and wondered if, for Keel’s sake, the separation might not be the best thing.

Della thought of the long year in which their love had remained unexpressed. She had been patient. She had extended idea after idea and had waited: she knew she had to, having learned that love has no meaning without the person one loves. Was it minutes before she saw David Hillary with a suit-box under his arm that she thought this?—but balanced it quickly with the idea that no genuine love is sullied by sleeping with a person one does not love. Didn’t sex then become medicinal, a soporific? These thoughts might have come, on the other hand, precisely at the moment she saw Hillary or even seconds after.

She quickened her pace, threading through the crowd until she was close enough to hail him.