JUST ABOVE MY HEAD

“They called ahead, and gave their friends the license number of our car, and a description, and when—about when—they could expect us,” Peanut said, and silence fell in the room and, for a moment, Mr. and Mrs. Elkins did not look at each other. There were three women and two men in the room, and they all had the same look on their faces, a weary, exasperated fear and sorrow.

“We can’t prove it,” said Mrs. Elkins carefully, “and I know it might sound like we’re all crazy—but a lot of our phones, down here, are tapped.”

“We’re on the FBI’s Most Wanted List,” said the man with the pipe. He said this with a proud, bitter smile.

“They’re such assholes,” said Mr. Elkins. “But I bet you that’s what happened.”

“And so that cracker could harass you,” said Mr. Elkins, “and maybe kill you, and, now that he’s got our address, too, bomb this house!”

That’s hard to believe, I wanted to say, but I said nothing: was it hard to believe? I remembered my swift, uncertain impression that the men had been interrupted at something—interrupted at what?—that they had not expected, or desired, to see us. They had not planned the confrontation. Only, when they saw us, they had not been able to control their reflexes. They could not have foreseen, any more than we, that the woman would step out on her porch and scream, that the street would fill up so fast. They could not have guessed, any more than we could have, that Mr. Elkins, one of the pillars of the church, and an apostle of nonviolence, also, nevertheless, kept a gun handy.

Mr. Elkins walked to the window, and stood there, with his back to us, looking out.

“If they come back at all,” said Mrs. Elkins, “they won’t be coming back till after nightfall.” She had forced herself to recover; she was very calm.

“That’s just what I’m worried about,” said Mr. Elkins. But he turned away from the window.

“Well, now,” Mrs. Elkins mimicked suddenly, “what about our guests?” She turned to Peanut and me. “In all this excitement, I don’t believe I’ve had the presence of mind to introduce you to anybody—”

“Oh, we’ve made our own introductions, more or less,” said one of the women, the youngest. She was copper-colored, Indian-looking, with dark, slanted eyes and silky hair twisted into an elegant bun at the top of her head. She emphasized her Oriental characteristics with long, jade earrings, and a heavy, barbaric-looking bronze bracelet, and she wore several rings on her long, very beautiful fingers. She wore a loose, green dress with a wide brown belt with a savage, gleaming buckle at her narrow waist. “I’m Luana King,” she said, “Miss Luana King” and she laughed. “I always tell that to the visiting firemen, keep hoping that one of them will carry me out of here.”

“You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself, away from here,” said Mrs. Elkins.

“Oh,” said Miss King, and sipped her old-fashioned, “I bet you I’d think of something.”

The other two women were Mrs. Rice and Mrs. Graves. Mrs. Rice was quite dark, and, as we say, heavy-set, with a pleasant, kind of pushed-in face, and very bright, intelligent, dark eyes. She was dressed in dark blue, wore a wedding band and a silver brooch, and waved one friendly hand at Peanut and me. Mrs. Graves was thin, and dark, seemed, somehow, disappointed, and “came,” as she put it, as though they were parcels, “with Mr. Graves,” who was the gray-haired man with the pipe. “I’m sorry about what happened to your brother,” she said. “Will he be able to sing tonight?”

“Herb, I see no sense at all in your sitting up in this dark house all night long, by yourself, with a gun. And it ain’t but one gun, you got to remember that, and they never come by ones.”

“I think we should just go on like we intended. Sister Beulah, across the street—that’s the one who screamed so loud,” she explained to Peanut and me—“she can keep an eye on the house, and call the police if she sees anything—funny.”

“Well. And we ought to call the police, just the same, and report what happened this afternoon, just so it’ll be in the record.”

“Yeah. I’ll do that right away. You know,” he said to Mr. Graves, “we going to have to do what we been talking about doing, and arrange to guard each other’s houses. Ain’t nobody else going to do it for us, now, you can hurry up and believe that.” He started out of the room. “I’ll be ready in a minute,” he called back, and we heard him climb the stairs.

Silence fell in the room, an exhausted silence. It was also the silence of people who have more on their minds than they can utter, or than they care, or dare, to utter.

Peanut had not moved from the mantelpiece. I finally, at long last, walked over to the bottles, and poured myself a drink. Then I walked over to Peanut.

“Yeah—hell, I don’t know. I think I’m going crazy.” He sipped his drink, and we watched each other. “I wanted to commit murder this afternoon. I mean, I really wanted to kill. That’s not me.”

“Well,” said Peanut, finally, catching his breath, “maybe we should go and check out Arthur. Then we can decide what we doing.”

“I’m not sure,” I said, “that anyone is going to allow us to drive at night, out of here, through Georgia. And they might be right.”

“I thought of that, too,” said Peanut. “Come on. Let’s check on Arthur.”

“Excuse us,” I said to the others—they were seated around Mrs. Elkins, speaking in low tones—“we’re going to check on my brother.”

We walked the long hall to the bedroom. Arthur lay on his back, his eyes closed, the ice pack held firmly to his mouth. We looked down at him, not knowing whether he was asleep or not. Just as I leaned down, intending to lift the ice pack so that I could see his lip, he opened his eyes.

He had handed me the ice pack. Now he touched his upper lip, gingerly, with his tongue.

Peanut switched on the light, and Arthur staggered to the mirror above the chifforobe. He peered at himself. The swelling had considerably diminished, but it was still visible, making Arthur look rather like a precociously decadent juvenile delinquent. He smiled, winced, forced himself to smile again.

“Well, maybe I can sort of hum my way through,” Arthur said. “Actually, if one of you was to bring me a drink, I might be as good as new.”

“Okay,” I said. I put down my drink on the night table, and went back to the living room.

“Let me go and see about that child.” She rose. “You all excuse me a minute,” she said to the others. I poured Arthur a healthy vodka on the rocks, and Mrs. Elkins and I walked back to the bedroom together.

Arthur was laughing, though with some difficulty, at something Peanut had said, and Mrs. Elkins walked over to him, firmly took his chin in her hand, and studied his upper lip.

“It’s a little better,” she said. “But try to sing with your lip like that, it’s liable to pop wide open.”

“You got a ways to go yet,” she said, “before you start singing quiet songs—open your mouth. Wider—does that hurt?”

“It’s likely to be worse tomorrow, that’s what I’m afraid of. But—all right. I’ll explain to the people that you can only sing one or two quiet songs. And then you come back here, and put some more ice on that thing, and you go straight to bed, you hear?”

Mrs. Elkins took the drink from me, and handed it to Arthur. “There. And then you better make yourself presentable and come on out and meet the people, and we’ll go on on.”

“Ain’t nothing. Start getting ready now,” and she hurried off down the hall.

We had been more or less expecting the police to come to the house, but they hadn’t by the time we were ready to leave. We did not know whether to take this as a good sign, or a bad sign: a good sign, if it meant that they were wholly ignorant of the matter; a bad sign, if it meant that they already knew all about it, and were hatching other plots. We were running late—there had been two worried telephone calls from the church already—and so it was decided that Mr. Elkins, Peanut, and Arthur, and I would go to the police station in the morning to put the remarkable visit of the three white men on record. Nothing would come of it, that we knew, but still, it would be best to bring this visit to the official attention of the guardians of the public peace.

We got to the church. This church has so haunted my dreams, so often and for so long, that I have not known, for years now, when I attempt to describe it, whether I am describing the reality, or the dream. I did not know Atlanta then, and do not really know it now, and have never desired or attempted to return to the place we were that night. It seems to me that the church must have been on the outskirts of Atlanta, for I remember the setting as being entirely rural, innocent of sidewalks, asphalt, traffic lights, the sounds and the rush of the city. But this may be, merely, the optical delusion of a native New Yorker, a creature for whom all other cities are bound to seem somewhat rustic. It seems to me that there was a bridge nearby, perhaps a railroad bridge, I am not certain. The church was violent with light: the lights bathed the wide front steps of the church and spilled over the lawn, covering the parked cars and the people walking up the steps, or standing on the church veranda, and whitened the faces of the white policemen, on their motorcycles, or standing beside their cars, and lent a dull sheen to their holsters and the handles of their guns. We approached the church carefully, slowly, idling past the motorcycles and the patrol cars, careful of the people walking on the road. Lights flared in our faces: the lights from another car, a flashlight, the lights from the church. We crawled up the road: there was no possibility of parking anywhere near the church. We crawled past the cemetery across the road from the church, and parked, along with many other cars, in an open field.

We were in two cars. Mr. Elkins and his wife, Peanut, Arthur, and I, were in the first car, and Mr. and Mrs. Graves and Mrs. Rice and Miss King followed close behind us.

Mr. Elkins stopped the car, switched off the lights and the motor, and wiped his face with an enormous red handkerchief. Mr. Graves parked beside us, and we all stepped out, into the surprisingly mild southern air. The sky was an electrical blue-black, and the stars hung low. The trees were great, massed silhouettes on the edge of the field, by the side of the road, seeming to contain the darkness, and to act as a bulwark against it.

We started walking down the road, toward the church, two by two by two. Peanut was just ahead of me, with Miss King, Mr. and Mrs. Elkins walked together, just behind me, and I could faintly hear Arthur, who was walking with the heavy-set Mrs. Rice. I couldn’t see him, for he was behind me, but, indeed, I could scarcely see Peanut, who was only a few paces ahead of me—the southern darkness is surprisingly swift and powerful.

I kept my eyes straight ahead, but I was aware of the white faces watching us, the faint, murmuring sounds our passage caused, an occasional rebel laugh. The air became, as we moved closer to the church, almost too thick to breathe. My chest hurt a little; my armpits, the palms of my hands, my forehead and between my legs, were damp. The faces of the afternoon returned to me, and Arthur on the ground, and Rodent Eyes and me, and my hands around his neck. I thought of Peanut’s face when he said, I wanted to kill. That’s not me. I thought, That’s not me, either, but, deep within, I began to tremble. Music, wave upon wave, rolled from the church and I tried to baptize myself in it. I didn’t know the song they were singing, couldn’t make out the words, but the violence of the beat began to calm the violence in my heart.

We crossed the lawn and mounted the church steps. The people on the steps greeted us with smiles, with mocking admonitions concerning our tardiness; listened gravely, with a watchful wonder, to Mr. Elkins’s laconic account of the reasons for our tardiness; agreed that they would meet, and discuss the matter in depth on the morrow. We entered the church, Mr. and Mrs. Elkins in the lead. And, like Mr. Reed, in Richmond, Mr. Elkins joined other men on the wall. Mrs. Elkins found a seat for me in the front row, and took Arthur and Peanut with her, placing them in camp chairs beside the pulpit. She then entered the pulpit, and vanished from my sight.

My memory of that night is chaotic, kaleidoscopic, at once blurred and vivid. I remember watching Peanut and Arthur, who were sitting one behind the other, facing me, directly in my line of vision. Peanut was sitting behind Arthur, leaned forward from time to time to whisper this or that, or Arthur, would lean back—they were perpetually smiling, but very circumspect. Arthur’s slightly swollen lip emphasized the mischievous, impish quality of his face—from time to time, I made faces at them, tried to embarrass them by making them crack up, but they remained impervious and dignified.

There were several speakers, brief, low-keyed, intense, addressing themselves to various aspects of the black community’s problems, and possibilities: it was not their fault that precision favored the former. Yet they made the latter real, too, if only by their insistence that the present and future of black people had to be taken in black hands. If, beneath this, thundered the relentless question, How? they were not wrong to make us remember that the longest journey begins with a single step. And every black person there could prove this, could prove it in himself, by taking a long look back. Courage is a curious, a many-sided force, and real courage is always allied with the unshakable faith which forces one to go beyond the appearance of things to the essence, the driving force, the key, the wheel in the middle of the wheel.

Mrs. Elkins, true to her word, announced that “our guest singer” had met with a small accident, and had been forbidden—by her—to sing more than one or two “quiet” songs. “But we will get him back down here,” she promised, “just as soon as his scars are healed!” She elicited from the church a noisy corroboration, and then introduced “Mr. Arthur Montana. Accompanied by Mr. Alexander T. Brown,” and Arthur and Peanut took their positions.

Arthur stepped forward, moving a little away from the piano, and said, “I really am sorry about this accident. If you knew me better, you’d know I don’t always look exactly like this. Something happened to my upper lip, and it’s a little swollen.” He smiled, and grimaced, and there was a murmur of sympathy from the church. “So, when I get to the chorus, I wish you good people would help me out and join me, help me sing the song.” He paused, and smiled. “I know all of you know it—it’s a real old quiet song.” He stepped back, Peanut hit the keys, and Arthur sang:

and a pleased, muffled roar came from the church, and some people began to hum. It was a song I had not heard for years.

Wherever man is found,

Wherever human hearts

And human woes abound

Let every mortal tongue

Proclaim the joyful sound,

The Comforter has come!

He paused, and raised his hands, a welcoming gesture, and the voices of the church rose,

The Comforter has come,
The Comforter has come!
The Holy Ghost from heaven,
The Father’s promise given.
Go spread the tidings round,
Wherever
man is found
The Comforter
has come!

He stepped back and bowed, and age-old blessings, older than the song, poured over him. I watched him, and I listened to the people, especially the old people, and I watched the faces of the old people, and I watched the faces of the young. Who would dare to say there was no Comforter, even in Georgia, tonight? Even in spite of whatever might happen in the next five minutes.

There was a great crowd, friendly confusion, as we moved toward the doors of the church. I was being introduced to people, shaking hands, I felt Arthur’s presence nearby. Then we were on the church steps, people were leaving, heading swiftly toward their cars. The motorists and the cyclists watched us, silent and wicked—they were all still there when we came out, not one had left: as far, anyway, as we could tell. We were standing on the church steps—we: we, at this moment, were Mr. and Mrs. Elkins, Arthur, Mrs. Graves, who was saying a last good-bye to Mrs. Elkins and arranging to meet later in the week, and I was saying good night, somewhat elaborately, to Miss King, and thinking about tomorrow and the visit to the police station and then hitting the road out of here. Miss King and Mrs. Graves turned and went down the steps, into the darkness, and then, Mrs. Elkins said, “Why, where is Mr. Brown?”

There were still many people in the -church, and we assumed he was behind us. Arthur said, “He left me to go to the bathroom, just a few minutes ago.” We didn’t think anything, yet. I walked back into the church, anyway, and looked around, but there was no Peanut in sight. I came back out, and I asked, “Where’s the bathroom, I’d like to go myself.”

“It’s a country toilet,” said Mr. Elkins. “It’s right around there,” and he pointed toward the darkness at the left of the church. Then, for the first time, with no warning, a sickness of terror rose up in me, for I could only very dimly make out the shape of a building in the darkness. And, then, in a flash, as though I had communicated it, Mr. Elkins stared toward the outhouse in the darkness, as though he had never seen it before, and, without a word, he and Arthur and I began running toward it. I prayed it would be locked from the inside.

But it wasn’t. Arthur got there first, and yanked the door open, yelling, Peanut! Hey, Peanut!

There was no answer. The place was empty. There was a kerosene lamp burning low on a shelf above the latrine, and I picked this up, uselessly, and looked around the place. Yes, it was empty. I even held the light above the deep, stinking hole.

“Look,” said Arthur. His face was absolutely bloodless, his eyes were black, his lips seemed parched, his voice was as rough as sand.

He was pointing to the floor. I leaned down, and picked up the green notebook with the yellow metal clasp. I knew at once that it was Peanut’s, but I opened it anyway, and looked at his name, in his somewhat florid handwriting, handwriting more elaborate and self-conscious than one would have imagined Peanut to be: Alexander Theophilus Brown, and his Washington address, and the address of Red’s mother in New York.

His face was—indescribable: the way a man might look when pinned beneath a boulder.

Mr. Elkins moved to the door of the outhouse, and leaned there for a moment. Arthur moved past him, into the darkness, screaming, Peanut! Peanut! at the top of his lungs. I came out of the outhouse, holding the kerosene lamp, looking in the direction Arthur had gone—I could no longer see him. After a moment, I yelled, “Arthur! Come back! Come back!”

The sounds of our voices were beginning to change the sounds of the other voices: they began to respond to the note of alarm, of terror, and some people began moving toward us. I was suddenly certain that Arthur, too, had been swallowed up, and I screamed his name again, again, and again, until I saw him come loping toward me. He looked into my face, and put his hand on my arm—we were both trembling.

From the outhouse door, Mr. Elkins asked, “How long had he been gone before you missed him?”

“I don’t know,” Arthur said. “Not long—five minutes, maybe, not more than ten.”

“Yes, sir.” Then, after a moment, “Of course I didn’t know where the bathroom was.”

Mr. Elkins sighed a mighty sigh, and moved from the door. “Well. Look like, some other folks did.” He paused. I sensed him fighting himself, his terror, surprise, and pain, fighting himself upward to a place where he could begin to act. “They couldn’t have been waiting for him—must just have seen him run in there.” He looked around, helplessly, at the dark wilderness which surrounded us. “We had just about raised the money for an indoor toilet.”

I looked up. We were surrounded by people—by black people. They stared at us with a grave, frightened, solemn sympathy, loath to ask the question the answer to which would torment their sleep—the answer might make sleep impossible for many days and nights.

I said, “We found his notebook in the latrine,” and I held it up, as though to prove something, I don’t know why.

A man’s voice said, “There ain’t nobody in the church now, sister. The church is empty. I believe it’s already been locked up.”

As though to prove this, the church lights now went out. A high, triumphant, rebel laugh came from the motorists and the cyclists. They were preparing to move out.

Mrs. Elkins looked toward them with a face which might have been present when bitterness was first distilled.

“Won’t do no good, but let’s ask them anyhow,” she said, and we started across the road, Mr. Elkins in the lead.

We stopped at the first trooper we saw, the nearest one. He stood there with his arms folded, smiling, chewing gum.

His buddies, at some distance, stopped whatever they were doing, and listened—every once in a while, there was a muffled laugh, and, intermittently, that high-pitched rebel squeal of a laugh.

“Officer,” said Mr. Elkins, “we’re missing one of our party, and we wonder if you might have seen him”—and he described Peanut, very well, under the hideous circumstances, the trooper smiling, and chewing gum the while.

“All I can tell you, he might have found some more attractive company—happens all the time with young black bucks. Go on home, he’ll show up in the morning, more dead than alive, probably won’t be able to move for a couple of days.”

I was standing next to Mr. Elkins, and I felt his trembling as I felt my own. It was not fear, or, if it was fear, it was the fear of madness—of suddenly turning into something as total as an earthquake, as vicious as a plague. What would I not have given at that moment to have been able to pierce those bright blue eyes with red-hot needles, clogged the nostrils with boiling tar, poured cement in his asshole, cut his prick off at the tip, hacked off one, and one only, of his feet, and one, only one, of his hands, and then not killed him, no: set him free to wander this wide world until he learned what anguish was! Or, it was fear, yes, it was fear, fear that one word, one gesture, one whispered nuance of mine would set him free to kill my brother, and all the others standing there. I sweated, trembled, sweated, I could not bear that Mr. Elkins say another word to him, I held my peace but could not prevent myself from saying, with the most hideous grin I could manage, the vindictiveness of which must have nearly penetrated even that thick skull, “Well, we surely thanks you for your kindness, Cap’n, believe me, we won’t never forget it. Won’t never forget it, you can believe that. I sure hope I live long enough to see the Lord pour down His blessings on your head.” I took Mr. Elkins’s arm, and we moved away. “Good night, Cap’n. Good night, all.” At least, for a moment, with his mouth open, he hadn’t chewed his gum.

“We go to the police station,” he said. “Lord, why didn’t I take those crackers’ names?”

“Hush,” said Mrs. Elkins. “Don’t start that, it ain’t going to do no good. Wouldn’t have mattered what names they give you. They got as many names as Satan.”

And we went to the police station, we spent days at the police station. The captain was a little more urbane than his men, but that only made it worse, and it made him worse than his men. We put ads in papers, we ransacked Georgia: but we never saw Peanut again.

That blow, the loss of Peanut, seemed to have the effect of fragmenting each of us where we stood, and, fragmented, we scattered everywhere. His grandmother took the news in silence, but never left her apartment again. Within three months, worn out with waiting for his return, she set out to find him. Red’s mother found her lying on the floor of her kitchen, fully dressed, her suitcase packed and standing beside her, her keys in her hand.

Red was nowhere to be found. After the funeral, Red’s mother packed up, too, and went back to live among her remaining relatives, in Tennessee. She was not old, just a little past fifty, but, after Peanut’s disappearance, her graying hair turned white, her skin turned dry. “I’d like to laugh again, one day,” she told me the last time I saw her. “Peanut used to know how to make me laugh.” She didn’t mention Red, or leave any address for him.

Arthur went west, and then, from Seattle, back to Canada, and then, for the first time, to London, and visited, for the first time, Paris, Geneva, and Rome. His postcards were laconic, and I sensed in him a new note—dry, wary, bitter. It’s lonely as a mother out here, he wrote, but maybe that’s the best way for it to be. Can’t nobody hurt you if they can’t get close to you. But this formula was not entirely satisfactory: Love must be the rarest, most precious thing on earth, brother, where is it hiding? I knew that he was already being pressured to “branch out” from Gospel, and that he was warily considering this.

In those days, I had no particular feeling about the kind of music Arthur sang. It seemed to me that this was entirely Arthur’s affair, and I was not to make certain connections until I saw these connections menaced: perhaps nothing is more elusive than the obvious. Then I was worried about Arthur’s private tally sheet, what he made of what time had done to his friends. Red was out of it, he never saw Crunch anymore, Peanut was gone—was almost certainly dead: they had all sung the Lord’s song together. Julia was more mine, perhaps, than his, but she was, nevertheless, unanswerably, also his: I received cryptic communications from her, from time to time, from Abidjan, where, it seemed to me, she could not possibly be happy. But I did not dare think too much about her, I kept her outside. I never saw Jimmy. I supposed that he was still on 18th Street, and, every once in a while, I thought of calling him, but I never did.

I left the agency and took the job in the advertising department of the black magazine: and, though my circumstances there were far more agreeable, and I no longer had to deal with that wretched creep Faulkner, it was, really, in essence, the same job, and I knew I was not happy. But I didn’t know if my unhappiness was due to the job, or the loss of Julia, or was just, simply, due to me. I felt—unused, therefore, useless, and I felt unwanted, I felt, as the song puts it, so unnecessary.

But I, like a multitude of others, got up in the morning and took the subway to work, hacked myself through my working day, even finding small, utterly superficial satisfactions in that day, in the work, and in a kind of provisional camaraderie. I knew that the real reason I got on well with my co-workers was that I was able, but not ambitious; didn’t care enough to scheme for advancement, threatened nobody’s job. I was marking time, but, on the other hand, time wasn’t marking time; time was moving. And, in a few years, if I didn’t contrive to rise, I would inexorably descend, and the camaraderie of my co-workers—and my superiors—would be stained with contempt and pity. I knew that I could never bear that, and I would, then, furthermore, be over the hill.

I could never, at bottom, take advertising seriously. I felt it as demeaning. It seemed to me to be really a shell game, based squarely on the sucker principle. One could scarcely respect the people who went for all this okeydoke, who were, indeed, addicted to it. The sense of life with which advertising imbued them—or vice versa—made reality, or the truth of life, unbearable, threatening, and, at last, above all, unreal: they preferred the gaudy image, which they imagined to be under their control. Thus, they entered the voting booth as blindly cheerful and incoherent as they were at the supermarket, reaching out for the “brand” name, the name, that is, which had been most ruthlessly and successfully sold to them. They did not know, and did not dare to know, what was in the package: it had been “guaranteed,” and everybody else was buying it. True, there were occasional scandals, moments which might cause one to suspect that the public confidence had been abused: but the noise of scandal was swiftly conquered by the sprightly music of the next commercial. The music of the commercial simply reiterates the incredible glories of this great land, and one learns, through advertising, that it is, therefore, absolutely forbidden to the American people to be gloomy, private, tense, possessed; to stink, even a little, at any time; to grow gray, to wrinkle, to be sexless; to have unsmiling children; to be lusterless of eye, hair, or teeth; to be flabby of breast, belly, or bottom; to be gloomy, to know despair, or to embark on any adventure whatever without the corroboration of the friendly mob. Love, here, demands no down payment, though it must have the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and, though love may be driven from Eden, it is only so that it may “mature” among friendly neighbors. This stupefying ode to purity has pornographic undertones: consider the classic hair-ad which has the portrait of a lady in the foreground and a naked infant in the background. The legend reads, hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure! The legend is a dirty street-joke, and has reference to the lady’s pubic hair: but the presence of the baby washes the legend clean. The infant’s presence informs us that this is, indeed, a lady, a married one at that, and a mother, and her husband has nothing to fear from her hairdresser—who, probably, furthermore, like all hairdressers, is a faggot. Faggots, of course, never appear in this technicolored bazaar, except as clowns, or as the doomed victims of their hideous lusts, and it goes without saying that here, death shall have no dominion.

Much later, I was to realize that my discomfort was due to the fact that I was operating far, too far, beneath my level; or, in other words, I had more to give than was being demanded and I was being weighed down by the residue. I was also realizing that, though people endlessly fool themselves, they cannot really be fooled: what you really feel shines through you. So, my co-workers, and my superiors, in spite of the camaraderie, sensed my real attitude toward advertising, and, therefore, toward them, and distrusted me—soon, inevitably, they would dislike me. I could not blame them, for, if my attitude toward advertising as concerned the great, white, faceless mass was, at best, ironic, my attitude toward advertising as concerned black people was very painfully ambivalent. I felt that black people had a sense of reality far more solid and arresting than the bubble-gum context in which we operated—though I had days, God knows, when I wondered about this, too.

But who was I, anyway, after all, to have an attitude? I was doing the same thing, in the same office, and for the same reason: we had to eat. And we were expected to be aware, too, that the presence of blacks in advertising was a major sociological breakthrough. Was it? for our breakthroughs seemed to occur only on those levels where we were most speedily expendable and most easily manipulated. And a “breakthrough” to what? I was beginning to be wary of these breakthroughs, was not certain that I wanted a lifetime pass to Disneyland. On the other hand, here we were, and you can’t have your cake and eat it, too: we would simply have to find a way to use, and survive and transcend this present breakthrough the same way we had survived so many others.

But this is not the best possible attitude for the salesman to take toward the people who buy the stuff he sells.

Arthur called me from Paris, to say that he would be coming home in a few days, and he hoped that I would be able to take time off to go south with him. He had been haunted throughout his journey, everywhere he’d been—I could hear this in his voice, and I, too, was haunted.

“It’s not just Peanut,” he said, “but all of it, the whole terrible scene. And I just have the feeling that if I don’t go back right away, I never will go back and—well, I just don’t think I want to let it go down like that.”

I could see the truth in that, and I told him so. I wasn’t sure about getting time off, but I’d begin working on that question right away. I asked him if he wanted me to meet him at the airport.

“No, don’t bother. I’ll get a cab, and go on home and drop my things. Then I’ll call you and we’ll take it from there.”

I knew he had sung in a club in London, and sat in with some musicians in a club in Paris. “How did it go?”

He laughed. “I don’t know, really. I think it went all right, but it was strange.” Then, “I dug it, though, I think I’m learning. And I think the people dug it, although”—and he laughed again—”I don’t know exactly what it was they dug. But they were nice.”

Arthur hangs up the phone, after talking to me, and walks to the window of his hotel room. This is a long, French window, and it opens on a small stone balcony. He is in a small hotel on the quai St.-Michel, and his room faces the river. He had called me at work, at three P.M., my time: it is nine P.M. for him. He has not yet eaten supper and he has no one to eat with and he has been alone all day but he is not, as he might be, depressed. He had liked walking around Paris alone. It is his first time in France, and he speaks no French, and, yet, strangely, he feels more at ease in Paris than he had felt in London.

He watches the lights in the dark and gleaming water, the orderly procession of lights on the farther bank. It is a chilly night, yet the people walk at a more deliberate pace than is common in New York. In Paris, he feels free to be an outsider, to watch; nothing in Paris really reminds him of home, in spite of the disastrous French attempts to imitate the American scene. These imitations, though, are so blatant that they cannot possibly elicit anything resembling nostalgia, and anyway, he has not been away from home long enough for that. Here he feels free, more free than he has ever been, anywhere; and, though he has yet to realize this consciously, this freedom is very largely due to the fact that he moves in almost total silence. His vocabulary exists almost entirely in his fingers and in his eyes: he is forced to throw himself on the good nature of the French and he will never, luckily, live here long enough to be forced to put this good nature to any test.

And if he cannot speak, neither can others speak to him, and he cannot even eavesdrop. He has no way of understanding what they are saying, therefore, it does not matter what they are saying: in the resulting silence, he drops his guard.

He could never have done this in New York, where all his senses were always alert for danger, or in London, which was exasperating because it spoke a foreign language which sounded, superficially, like his own. But they were saying different things in London, or they were saying the same things in a different way. His efforts to break the code exhausted him.

But nothing is demanded of him in Paris. In Paris, he is practically invisible—practically, free.

He soaps and washes his face, combs his hair, puts a jacket on over his black turtleneck sweater, puts on his overcoat, locks his door behind him, and walks down the two flights of stairs to the tiny, narrow lobby. The concierge, or the night watchman or the owner sits in a cubbyhole not much larger than a closet, all day and all night long. This cubbyhole is next to a short, L-shaped counter; on the wall behind this counter, the room keys hang on a board. The mail is piled high on a desk in the cubbyhole, and, Arthur has noted (he is not expecting any mail) that being given one’s mail demands some patience, the concierge or the watchman or whatever he is, being nearly blind, and unaccustomed to foreign names; indeed, he seems to resent the clear impossibility of pronouncing these barbaric names only slightly less than he resents the fact that his clients get any mail at all. Arthur, not having been guilty of this lapse, or oversight, seems still to be in the guardian’s good graces. At any rate, he nods his head as Arthur places his key on the counter, and says, “Bonsoir, m’sieu,” as Arthur passes the cubbyhole.

Arthur also nods and smiles, and, helplessly, mimics him—the first step toward learning French: “Bonsoir, m’sieu.” And he walks into the street.

He is in the student quarter of Paris, has been guided there by some of the people he had worked with at the dub in London. In the two days he has been in Paris, he has walked all over the city, from Sacré-Cœur to Notre-Dame, from Notre-Dame to the Eiffel Tower, from the Eiffel Tower to L’Étoile. He has got lost in the side streets running off Pigalle—having been warned not to go wandering along these side streets at night. He has been told that, as long as he can find the Seine, he can find his way home. This has turned out to be true, though the river can sometimes be a discouragingly long ways off. It isn’t true that you can’t lose the river—you can lose it, all right—but it functions as the North Star, if you can find it, you can be guided by it.

He turns away from the river now, and walks the boulevard St.-Michel until he comes to the boulevard St.-Germain. He walks up St.-Germain toward Odéon and St.-Germain-des-Prés. There is a big pizza place between Odéon and St.-Germain-des-Prés, and, simply because ordering a pizza presents no problems, he walks in and orders a pizza, and a glass of red wine.

And, now, perhaps, he rather regrets his solitude, and wishes he had someone to eat with, someone with whom to share the city. He wishes that I were there, but he needs someone else more than he needs me, he needs a friend. He needs someone to be with, needs someone to be with him.

The pizza is hot—there is not much else to be said for it, except that it will keep hunger at bay—and he nibbles on it, and sips his wine, watching the throng on the boulevard.

They seem carefree and happy, in a way that he has never been. My brother is old enough to know—or has seen, at least, enough to suspect—that they cannot be what they seem to him to be. They may be better or worse, happy or less happy, wicked or desperate: they are, in any case, in all cases, other than what his imagination makes of them. There is always more—or less—than one sees: and what one sees is mitigated by ten thousand tricks of light. Arthur, nibbling on his pizza, alone in the alien, splendid capital, tries to make something coherent and bearable out of all that he sees, and doesn’t see.

For that, he needs another: in order to see what he fears to see, he must, himself, be seen. He needs to give himself to someone who needs to give himself to Arthur.

He has been tormented by this for a long time now, but he cannot honestly say that he has been confused. Crunch frustrated confusion by thrusting on him an anguish absolutely lucid: so lucid and so total that it would have been nearly a relief to have been able to find a haven in guilt and shame. Yet guilt and shame nag at him, too, when he worries about his father’s judgment, or anticipates mine. (He is not worried about his mother’s judgment, but is worried about causing her pain.) At bottom, he really feels that his father, and brother, will not love him less for the truth. In a sense, he feels obligated to tell the truth, both for our sakes, and his own. For it is perfectly possible, after all, that it is his judgment that he fears and not ours, that he reads his judgment in our eyes.

Still, the step from this perception to articulation is not an easy one. He has faltered and turned back many times. And yet, he knows that, when he was happy with Crunch, he was neither guilty nor ashamed. He had felt a purity, a shining, joy, as though he had been, astoundingly, miraculously, blessed, and had feared neither Satan, man, nor God. He had not doubted for a moment that all love was holy. And he really does not doubt it now, but he is very lonely.

And if he walked into these streets outside, right now, and simply looked a way he knew he could look, he need not spend this night alone. He knew that. Sometimes, his encounters had been very, very pleasant, even beautiful; sometimes the encounter had led to friendship, friends who slept together whenever they met, for the pleasure it gave them both, for the ease it brought them. This was not love, but it was very close to love, and easier; but, though it was easier, it was not enough. Both parties recognized this, which was, in a sense, the proof of their friendship: Ah, they could say, jokingly, as they were getting dressed again, we’ll always have each other! Some of these men were married men, with children, whose masculinity had never been questioned by anyone, including, perhaps, above all, themselves: and, indeed, there was no reason to question it. They were living their lives, and their loves.

But these men, though by no means so rare as is generally supposed, nevertheless, were rare: freedom is rare. Sometimes, the encounter was—not so much sordid or demeaning or dangerous, one learned, fairly quickly, where not to go fishing—it was that it was, simply, nothing, nothing made flesh, emptiness in one’s bed, in one’s arms, in one’s heart and soul. One felt that the other had been cheated, and that one had cheated oneself, and, if one continued cheating, love could never come again. Arthur does not know if he can live without love. Neither, on the other hand, can he invent it.

He watches the boulevard. He is practically on the boulevard, divided from it merely by a pane of glass. It is like being in the theater, and being, at the same time, a part of the audience and a part of the spectacle. The people on the boulevard can also see him as they pass, a strange-looking, wide-eyed black boy, eating a lonely pizza. An American black man—Arthur does not know how he knows he is American—with a mustache, and wearing a beret, passes by swiftly, with a Harlem strut, throwing him a wink. Arthur nods, and smiles, but the man is already gone. Two blue-jeaned students, a male and a female, she in a long cape, he in a heavy sweater, pass by, laughing, the girl’s cape billowing out behind her. Two North Africans, one quite young, with brilliant eyes, the other not so young, whose eyes are hooded, large, and wary, walk by slowly, deep in conversation—planning a hijacking, perhaps, or, perhaps, simply, a matter which can be almost equally complex, calculating how, and where, to eat and sleep tonight. A policeman walks by slowly, his weighted cape swaying slightly, swinging his club. He stops at the corner, under the light, looking down the boulevard. The dock above the métro station says ten to ten. The lights turn red and the boulevard traffic stops, hordes of people cross the boulevard. One of them is a small, round, brown man, carrying a sketch pad and a shopping bag, and wearing a large knitted hat, of many bright colors. He is remarkable, even a joyous apparition; Arthur cannot imagine where he was born. The shopping bag seems heavy. He pauses at the corner, under the light, near the policeman, and puts the bag down, rubbing his hands together as though to warm them. The policeman looks at him, he looks at the policeman. Suddenly, he throws back his head, and laughs. The policeman, uncertain, bewildered, laughs, too. The small, round, brown man, as though he has scored a victory, picks up his shopping bag and moves on, throwing a brilliant smile at Arthur as he passes. Arthur almost rises to follow him.

A blond woman, probably but not certainly American, walks by, swiftly, purposefully on high heels. She, too, is quite remarkable. Her coat is long and elegant, of some soft, yellow fur. Her hair is fashioned into a bun at the back of her head, her hair pulled up from the nape of the neck. Her eyes are large and dark brown, full of humor and expectation. A tall, thin boy, with curly hair and an upturned nose, dressed too lightly for this weather, runs across the boulevard, barely missing falling under the wheels of the bus he is running to catch. The policeman, exasperated, blows his whistle, but the boy gets to the bus stop and boards the bus. The bus disappears down the boulevard. Another boy, wearing a shapeless gray overcoat too large for him, walks slowly, as in a daze, carrying a violin. Arthur finishes his pizza, orders coffee, sits awhile sipping the coffee and smoking a cigarette, pays the waiter, and joins the boulevard caravan.

He walks up, past the church, on his right, stands a moment before the glass-enclosed terrace of Deux Magots, watching the soundless, somehow glittering people, continues to the Café de Flore, where the terrace is packed. In another mood, he would go in, merely to be consoled by the anonymous body heat, but not tonight. Still, for a moment, he looks over the crowd, noting, prominently, a small woman wearing bangs and an incredible amount of makeup, white on her face, black on her eyes, a thoroughly chilling scarlet on her lips. She holds a tiny Pekingese on her lap, and is smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. She is looking in his direction—for a moment, it seems that everyone is—and he suddenly very nearly panics, reverting to adolescence, and wondering what he looks like. He looks lonely and vulnerable, that’s what he looks like, in his old, navy blue duffel coat, his black turtleneck sweater, his blue-flannel pants,. his scuffed black shoes, that spinning rain forest of nappy black hair, and those big eyes. He looks as though he has just come ashore after six months at sea; and a giant of a man, about thirty, perhaps, with red hair, a square, friendly face, and deep-set, dark brown eyes, looks at him with a kind of friendly amusement, a tiny smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

Arthur turns, and looks across the street. The terrace of Chez Lipp is very nearly empty, and so, he crosses the street, pushes open the terrace doors and takes a table in the corner. There are only three other people on the terrace, a heavy, gray-haired man, smoking a pipe and reading a book, and a middle-aged couple, sitting the length of the terrace away from Arthur, in the opposite corner, against the glass wall.

The waiter comes, and Arthur orders cognac because he has hardly ever tasted it before, and it would be a pity to be in France and not drink it at the source.

He sits there, sipping the cognac, smoking a cigarette, and his mind went back to Crunch.

He was no longer surprised that Crunch remained so vivid for him, after so many years. Crunch had been his first lover, that was reason enough. He did not know if he had been lucky or unlucky in his first love. The question did not make much sense. It could be said that he had been lucky, and Crunch had not been, but the reasons for this were more mysterious than luck. It was only through meeting Jimmy again that he had begun to see how complex the matter might have been for Crunch.

At first, when Crunch had returned, he had felt that it was his concern for Julia, and his torment over the baby, that accounted for his sullen distance, and his unforeseeable rages. He had not wanted to touch Arthur: he said that that was “all over.” Arthur had to grow up, and realize what kind of world he was living in. Arthur felt that he knew very well what kind of world he was living in—he intended to have as little to do with it as possible—but he did not see what that had to do with him and Crunch. The world was the world: so fuck the world, who gives a shit what those creeps think?

Ah, but those creeps have the power of life and death, my friend. They can grind your ass to powder!

Crunch went to New Orleans, and came back, more sullen, more silent, than ever, and with a bright, bewildered pain in his eyes. Arthur spent days down on 14th Street, sitting in a corner, still, watching him, not knowing what to say, or do.

The worst of it was that, while Crunch insisted that it was “all over,” Arthur knew that it was not all over: not in him, not in Crunch. Crunch wanted to believe that it was all over, for myriad reasons of his own, but he was not able to will passion out of existence. It was in his eyes, every time he looked at Arthur, it was in his lightest touch, it was in his voice, it was in all his contradictions. He would give Arthur, at great length, unanswerable reasons for their not seeing each other, and, then, five minutes later, as though he had said nothing of all that, ask Arthur to run an errand for him, or make a date to see him the next day. And he would actually say, with a small, wistful smile, “Now, you’ll be there, won’t you? Don’t keep me waiting.”

And, in answer to Arthur’s question, “Hell, yes, I love you, that’s why I’m trying to beat some sense into your stubborn, hard head. I want you to be all right, what’s the matter, don’t you understand that?”

Arthur did not know how to say that he couldn’t be all right, if Crunch wasn’t. He waited, numbly, for the tide to turn, for the dam to break, and for Crunch to come back to him.

He never, in all this, blamed Julia, and never felt, in fact, that she had very much to do with it: in this, he was wiser than he knew. The baby, yes, the destroyed fetus weighed much more heavily, but nothing could undo that. Even finding Joel Miller, and beating him to a pulp, would not undo what he had done. Julia would never come to Crunch, that was over, certainly. And Arthur was not certain that Crunch really wanted Julia so much as he wanted some unassailable corroboration of his manhood. This, precisely, so far as Crunch was concerned, Arthur could not supply.

He could only as Crunch saw it, menace his manhood, as he feared he was destroying Arthur’s. For, after all, inevitably, the dam did break, more than once, during those flame-colored, awful months, nearly drowning them in the flood. And it was Crunch, at the absolute limit of his endurance, no longer able, simply, to contain it, who roughly pulled Arthur into his arms, sobbing and shaking, plowing home. And afterward, he could scarcely dissemble his happiness. It seemed mightily to relieve him to be able to tell Arthur how much he loved him. Yet, at the same time, the shadow lay between them still, the war was not over. Arthur moved between hope and joy and fear and trembling. Eventually, each reconciliation was tinged by the inevitable nightmare of remorse and hostility which would follow it: then, the reconciliation itself became a nightmare. Crunch could say neither yes nor no, and it was Arthur, finally, who crawled away from Crunch, because there was no way, any longer, for them to be together. The dam would break, and break again, but the tide would never turn, and Crunch would never come back to him.

There is still a great, flowing press of people on the boulevard, very close to him, and very far away, leaving him remote and secure in his corner. He looks up, and signals the waiter for another cognac, thinking of Jimmy.

When he and Jimmy had left us, on the night of our dinner at the Red Rooster, Jimmy had suggested a nightcap, and, so they had stopped at a bar Arthur knew, on the Avenue, near 125th Street.

Arthur had gone into mild shock upon the discovery that Julia and I were living together, and were happy, but this was as nothing compared to his astonishment at seeing Jimmy again. This astonishment was compounded by an unbelievable, unforeseen, and, therefore, rather frightening delight: it may be said that it was his joy at seeing Jimmy again that constituted his astonishment.

For he had scarcely ever looked at him before. There had been, after all, virtually nothing to look at. Jimmy had been Child Evangelist Julia Miller’s sullen, and somewhat scrappy younger brother, who didn’t get along too well in the household where everyone was so busy kissing Sister Julia’s ass that they only noticed him when he got between them and Sister Julia’s butt, and, then, they just pushed him out of the way, and went on smacking. It was assumed, with all that, that he’d certainly turn out “bad,” there didn’t seem to be any other way he could turn out. Arthur, like everyone else, had only a dim idea of where he was, no idea at all of what he was doing, and no one, really, ever expected to see Jimmy again. That we did was due entirely to Julia, as Arthur had very quickly divined, but this did not prepare him for Jimmy. For he found Jimmy funny, brave, and terribly moving. If Jimmy had not been Julia’s younger brother—and, perhaps, if Julia and I had not been living together—Arthur might have realized that his reaction to Jimmy, what Jimmy caused him to feel, was not very far from what is called love at first sight: and what is not far from love at first sight probably is love at first sight. That, anyway, is the way I always read it.

But Jimmy was Julia’s younger brother, and something like four years younger than Arthur—perhaps, even, after all, a minor—and, during that first drink, Arthur was busy running the other way. “Look,” he had said, finally, when they had ordered their second drink. “You’re a beautiful kid, and I dig you, but you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Because it’s true. You say you want to hang out with me, get to know me, play piano for me. How do you know all that? You don’t know me, you don’t know me at all. I might be one weird motherfucker.”

Arthur laughed, uneasy, turning his face away, and shifting in his seat. He was happy, and he was miserably uncomfortable. He wished that the boy and he were sitting side by side, instead of face to face—though it was he who had instituted this arrangement—so that he could touch him. He wanted to stroke that face, wanted to kiss him, hold him, and never let him go. The sweat on his back caused his shirt to cling, and become ice-cold, and the temperature sped to his jacket. This was just a kid. He didn’t have any right to fuck him up.

“How weird are you? Come on, you might as well tell me, I’m going to find out anyway. You don’t know me, you’re just getting yourself into more and more trouble.”

“Does your sister know about all this?” But Arthur had not meant to ask that question.

“I guess so.” He watched Arthur with direct, very candid eyes. “Does your brother know about you?”

“What about me?” Arthur countered, laughing. “What do you know about me?”

“Just about everything I need to know. You know, you forget. I was watching you when you didn’t know I was watching you.”

“You don’t do anything for people to spy on. No, I just mean, when I was a kid, you know, I used to watch you.” He sipped his drink. “You were very nice to me.”

“Yeah. You used to give me candy sometimes, or a penny—once in a while, when you were rich, a nickel. I remember all that. You gave me movie fare a couple of times. And I remember when you and your brother took me to the ice cream parlor.” Then he grinned. “You all didn’t like Julia much.”

“Yeah. But that wasn’t really her fault. Of course, I didn’t know that then.” He took another sip of his drink. “Hey, if I get drunk, you’re going to have to take me home, and carry me up all those steps.”

“Then for Christ’s sake, don’t get drunk, man. How fucking much do you weigh?”

“I was only kidding—not so much. About one hundred and forty—forty-five, somewhere around in there.”

Arthur was watching him, a little smile on his face: he couldn’t help it. Jimmy was watching him, too, with those astounded, vulnerable eyes, and Arthur realized that Jimmy was never going to be misled by anything Arthur might say. He was not listening to him, he was watching him. And Jimmy asked, “You know what’s funny?”

“When two people have so much to say to each other that there’s almost nothing they can say, and they just stare at each other. But that’s saying something, too.”

Jimmy looked down. “I think you know.” Then, looking up, “I always hoped I’d see you again. When Julia came, I knew I would—somehow, somewhere, I’d see you. So—I’m real happy to be looking at you, man,” and he grinned and nodded. “Real glad.”

“And what are you doing? I mean, you going to be hanging around the city, you going back south, or what?”

“I don’t know yet. I’d like to say that that depends partly on you, because I meant everything I was saying before. But I’d like to get back south fairly soon.”

“I’d like to get there, too. But I think I’ve got to go west first, from here.”

Silence fell between them, and Jimmy stared at him steadily, not smiling, his arms folded.

Jimmy might have laughed, but he didn’t. Later on, when Arthur asked this question, he always cracked up. But now, his arms still folded, he said very calmly, “No. I think you’re exactly the right age for me.” He paused. “I think I’m exactly the right age for you, too. Since you brought up the question of your age, I might say that you seem to be getting a little set in your ways—not much, just a little. I’ll be good for you. You need somebody to stir you up.” He pursed his lips, trying not to smile. “I’ll be good for you, I’ll keep you stirred up.” He nodded gravely, his lips still pursed in that unwilling smile. He handed Arthur a cigarette, lit Arthur’s cigarette, and his own, and picked up his drink. “If I seem a little forward, it’s only because I know how shy you are.”

Arthur laughed, but he was a little frightened, too, his heart was racing, his clothes were suddenly too tight. “You’re crazy.”

“I’m not crazy. I know what I want.” Then, very gravely, “You know, you shouldn’t worry about my sister, or your brother. They’ll be very happy for us. I know it. My sister will be very happy to trust me with you. And your brother will be very happy to trust you with me. Believe me. I know it.”

Jimmy looked a little exasperated. “They love us, that’s how I know it. You ought to know it, too. You ought to trust it. Then you wouldn’t have to go through all those changes about a dirty old man like you fucking up a sweet little boy like me.”

Arthur thought of Crunch again, and stared at Jimmy. It was true: he was, perhaps, not as worried about fucking up Jimmy’s life as he was about exposing his own.

Jimmy smiled a very beautiful smile. “All right, old man? Listen. The only way you’re going to fuck me up is if you don’t love me. And, by the way, I’ve been talking so much, we never got around to that—do you?”

Arthur felt dizzy, as though the kid were dragging him, roughly, up a very steep hill. “Never got around to what?” With Jimmy’s brilliant eyes staring into his, he began to get his bearings. Unwillingly, he smiled, beginning to surrender. “Do I what?”

Arthur leaned across the table and touched Jimmy on the face for a moment. He whispered, “Yes, you clown, I love you. I’ve just been playing hard to get.”

“But, then, you’ll be drunk and I’ll have to carry you up all those stairs.”

“Oh, I’ll take a piss before we leave here, and I won’t hardly weigh nothing at all.”

They laughed, and Arthur signaled the waitress. He signaled the waitress out of fear: he felt such a sudden sharp desire to take Jimmy with him out of this place, to be alone with Jimmy, and begin a voyage unlike any he had ever imagined. And this desire caused him to panic. He signaled the waitress, and ordered drinks, in order to give himself time to catch his breath, to steady his hands, to conquer the violence between his legs, the violence of hope in his heart. He had not felt anything so total since his time with Crunch, and then—then—-he had been a boy a little younger than Jimmy was now. Nothing in this moment reminded him of anything in his past, least of all of Crunch. He did not even feel, any longer, that he could ever be at all like Crunch, or ever so betray the boy before him: and the word betray had never before entered his mind. Still, he was frightened. The boy before him was suddenly sacred, causing Arthur to feel gross, ugly, and clumsy. He wanted them to leave, and get beyond this moment: and he wanted nothing more than this moment. He was urgently seduced by Jimmy’s eyes, voice, presence, by the combination in him of vulnerability and power, of innocence and knowledge. He did not know what he would do with it—which means that he did not know what it would do with him— and, so, presently, he signaled the waitress again.

They were happy, on the other hand, in a way new for them both. Desire and delight transfixed them where they were: and they were certain, after all, that they had all the time in the world.

Then, suddenly, it was closing time. They looked at each other, and, in silence, they walked out into the long, quite silent, not quite dark streets.

This, from Jimmy, with a smile at once tentative and daring, eyes at once blazing and opaque.

They were approaching the subway, which, at this moment, in the electrical gloom, could quite truly be considered the valley of decision. And if Arthur now, once more, panicked, it was for reasons both passionate and practical.

For he was being truthful when he said, “I don’t want to spend a couple hours with you, and then jump up and run. And I got an early morning.”

“So,” said Arthur, “why don’t we both just go on and do what we got to do—and then hook up this evening, when we got all the shit behind us—and we can just hang out—and be together?”

He wanted to kiss the boy. He contented himself with touching his face lightly. Yet that light, brief touch seemed to cause each of them to tremble as they stood in the grim light at the top of the subway steps.

They both laughed. They stood in that brief void between the retreating night and the crouching morning.

“Well,” Arthur said, “whoever gets home first, calls the other. Okay? And you meet me down at my place. Okay?”

Arthur dared, in the void, the silence, the stillness, to put one hand on the nape of Jimmy’s neck and held him like that for a moment.

“I won’t hardly forget,” he said. Then, “Let’s go. We got to make tracks.”

They walked down the subway steps together: but they did not hook up that evening. Arthur’s morning appointment led him to California on that afternoon: he left a message for Jimmy, but he did not see him. When Arthur came back from California, Jimmy was in the South: they failed to make connections. Then there was the storm of Julia’s leaving, of which I remember almost nothing. I know that Arthur was in Chicago. Jimmy was exceedingly downcast, partly because of him and Arthur, partly because of Julia and me. His life then seemed to him to be nothing more than a series of ruptures: I know that I was no help to him at all. Which brings us up to the trip south, when Arthur was really hoping to find Jimmy, and when we lost Peanut. Jimmy and Arthur did not meet again for more than two years.

But the truth, beneath all these events, details, circumventions, is that Arthur panicked: he was terrified of confession.

But nothing less than confession is demanded of him. He dreams of Jimmy, and comes, almost, to prefer the dream because dreams appear to be harmless: dreams don’t hurt. Dreams don’t love, either, which is how we drown. Arthur had to pull himself to a place where he could say to Paul, his father, and to Hall, his brother, and to all the world, and to his Maker, Take me as I am!

Everyone has now abandoned the terrace Chez Lipp, where he sits, sipping his cognac, and thinking what a thoroughgoing Puritan he is, after all. And he is, indeed. But everyone must be born somewhere, and everyone is born in a context: this context is his inheritance. If he were a Muslim, or a Jew, or an Irish, Spanish, Greek, or Italian Catholic, if he were a Hindu or a Haitian or a Brazilian, an Indian or an African chief, his life might be simpler in some ways and more complex in others; more open in one way, more closed in another. An inheritance is a given: in struggling with this given, one discovers oneself in it—and one could not have been found in any other place!—and, with this discovery, and not before, the possibility of freedom begins.

So my brother is not entirely cast down, in spite of all his cowardice, folly, and rage. He feels, somehow, certain that he will soon see Jimmy again. He senses that something is moving, that he has moved: something is about to happen, something is being changed. He sits still. People are beginning to leave the restaurant.

The red-haired giant whom he has seen seated at the Café de Flore comes to the door of the terrace, smiles, enters, and comes over to him.

“With pleasure,” says the redhead. He sits down, looks around, looks at his watch. “But this place is closing very soon.” He looks at Arthur, with a smile. “Will you make me the pleasure to offer you a drink in another place I know? It is, oh, less than two minutes from here.”

“With pleasure,” Arthur says. He finishes his cognac, looks at his bill, and leaves some money on the table. They both rise.

“You are an American,” says the redhead. “You have tipped him too much. You will ruin the French economy.”

He laughs heartily as he says this, as though the French economy were a thing to be laughed at anyway, and they go into the street.

“Ah! That is the name of a bar near here—but I think we will not go there.” They begin walking. “You are not named for the state of Montana, are you?”

They turn right, at the immediate corner. There are about half a dozen laughing, unsteady boys and girls, sometimes arabesquing before them, sometimes behind them, sometimes surrounding them. Guy walks with a steady, wide-legged stride, a slightly rolling motion, his hands in his coat pockets. His short, heavy black overcoat is open, his gray scarf is thrown across his neck and one shoulder. The wind ruffles his short, curly red hair, bringing it forward over his brow. He looks straight ahead. They are on a long, wide, dark street. The street grows darker as they move away from the boulevard.

“Hell, I’ve never even seen Montana. No. From New York, and, then, London, and—now—here.”

Guy touches Arthur’s elbow lightly, and they cross the street, entering a narrower, darker street. This street is also filled with people—with the moving shapes of people—and music and voices come from the lighted windows and doorways on either side of the street. It is a little like a walk through a bazaar. One might pause at any window, walk through any door, and discuss—oh, many things—while agreeing or disagreeing, as to the quality and the price of the merchandise.

“I don’t know. You’re the first person I’ve talked to. But I really—really—dig Paris.”

Guy turns to him with a smile unexpectedly and disarmingly shy. “Good. I shall do all my best, then, for to make you dig—me.”

They stop at a door which seems locked, next to windows which seem barred, though muffled sounds of life are coming from within. Guy pushes a doorbell and smiles into Arthur’s somewhat anxious face. “It is all right. I assure you, I do not disturb no one: it is a private club.”

And, indeed, from a slot in the door, an eye peers out. The slot drops back into place—Arthur thinks of the guillotine—and the door buzzes open.

Guy pushes Arthur in before him. They are, then, in a short, narrow vestibule, pale gray or dusty white, facing the high, wide, square entrance to the club—a doorway, really, with the door removed. Some people are seated on the staircase, which is immediately beyond the entrance; to the left, there is a corridor, and another room. To the right, there is a cage, in which a woman sits. It is she who controls the buzzer that opens the door. The person, her indispensable accomplice, who had peeped through the slot and given the signal to the lady in the cage, is a dark-haired youth who is smiling and shaking Guy’s hand. Arthur is being inundated, suddenly, by the sound of the French language, and by music—music from home—coming at him from somewhere to his right. He is also drowning in smiles, a tidal wave of smiles: from the youth who now takes his duffel coat and takes Guy’s coat and shakes his hand, de-daring himself, as Arthur hears it, enchanted, and from the lady in the cage who leans out and kisses Guy on both cheeks and shakes Arthur’s hand, declaring herself, as Arthur hears it, ravished, and calling him M’sieu Montana! as though she has been looking forward to this meeting for a while. Through all this, Guy is impeccably charming and single-minded, conveying to Arthur, always by means of a slight pressure on his elbow, to keep moving past the smiles and the greetings.

They are, finally, in the dub. There are people standing at the bar, seeming to wait, as Arthur senses it, to pounce, and eager males and females smiling from the staircase. Arthur scarcely dares to look into the room on the left, which seems to contain a kitchen: something in all of this, insanely enough, reminds him of Harlem.

Guy looks sharply to the right, where the tables all are full—he smiles and waves, but keeps Arthur to one side of him and does not go near the tables. He gives a signal to the lady in the cage, who responds with all her teeth—including, even, the missing ones, which ache—and he and Arthur, gently displacing the smiling sexes, picking their way through silk and flannel, climb the stairs.

They enter a very large dining room, nearly empty now, and sit down at a table in a corner.

Guy smiles, and says, “I am sorry it was so—mouvementé. It is not always like this—never, when I come here alone.”

Arthur is fascinated, is having a ball; is grateful for being exposed to something of Paris—and this is, certainly, something of Paris; and, for having been shaken out of himself, he is grateful to Guy.

This is more fun, anyway, than his hotel room, more challenging than his lonely walks.

“Well,” says Guy, “at least it stays open until all hours. And no one will bother us here.”

. He takes out a package of Gitanes, and extends the pack to Arthur. Arthur, ruefully, shakes his head.

“I tried one of those the other day. I thought my lungs was trying to come up through the top of my skull.” They both laugh. Guy lights his Gitane. “When I come back, maybe. I might have more courage.”

“Oh. For a cigarette, it does not matter. You will be coming back—? That would be very nice, it means you like us. When?”

There is silence for a moment. Guy watches him through the smoke of his cigarette.

“If you would like to come back, then you will come back. And I would like very much to see you again.”

Arthur is not really being coy: he isn’t, in any case, coy, it isn’t one of his attributes. Perhaps he is being reckless, or, possibly, ruthless, because he is not in America. “Me? How come? You don’t know me. You just met me.”

“Well. It was necessary for me to meet you in order to know that I would like to meet you again.”

They watch each other. Arthur wryly nods and smiles, and someone who is apparently the waiter—one of the people who had been sitting on the stairs—arrives with a tray, and clears the table, and waits.

The waiter disappears. Arthur realizes that the other couples in the dining room have left. It is as though someone has given orders that he and Guy should be left alone.

This cannot really be true, and yet, it seems partly true. He doesn’t really care. He is curious. He would like to get drunk. He doesn’t care what happens tonight. It might be a ball to ball.

It is at this moment, without quite realizing it—or, perhaps, without quite facing it—that he begins to be more and more fascinated by Guy.

A silence falls, and Arthur lights a cigarette—at the same moment, Guy puts his out—and the waiter comes back with their double vodkas.

“No. I came late to Paris. I am from a town, no one has ever heard of it—near Nantes.”

“I am”—with a smile—“a kind of damned soul—you say that?—I am in les assurances—insurance, you call it—”

“No. I am not quite as damned as all that. I have my honor.” He looks at Arthur’s face, and laughs. “No. Not life insurance. Property. Fire. Theft. Those things. I am very good at it. I help people who have money to keep it—is that not a valuable function?”

“Oh. That is much more delicate. And more ambitious. I may ask—what do you do?”

Arthur smiles into the intent, wondering brown eyes. “I sing—gospel songs. I’m a gospel singer.”

“I understand now. As Mahalia Jackson is—I would love to hear you sing, one day.”

A longer silence falls. Music, from far downstairs, seems to be coming up through the floor. Arthur’s fingers drum on the table.

“Yes. I do,” and they smile at each other, a smile which, remarkably, clears the charged air.

Arthur begins to speak about the music, to translate, so to speak, as if he were standing outside. He is a little surprised that he can speak this way, of his life, me, the South—he speaks of the trees, but he does not speak of Peanut: Guy’s face becomes more and more somber, and he speaks of his days as a soldier in Algeria. Without premeditation, only semiconsciously, they are trying to use all that which might divide them to bring them closer together. Instinct, far more than knowledge, brings them in sight of the danger zone: they hope they can remain outside it. They are speaking as people who have met in a crowded waiting room, on different journeys, speak; wishing that they had met before, hoping that they will meet again, and yet, at the same time, forced to realize that it is only because of their very different journeys that they have met at all. “You got to learn to take the bitter with the sweet!” Arthur suddenly croons, and Guy nods, responding more to Arthur’s tone, and the look on his face than to the words: though he understands the conjunction of bitter and sweet. “Mais, tu es formidable!” he says, with a delighted, childlike grin, and Arthur clowns and scats a little more. The waiter reappears, and Guy says, “You will attract an audience. They will all leave le dancing.” Arthur grins, and they order two more double vodkas.

Arthur sobers. “I’m not sure. I was thinking of leaving today—tomorrow—I’ve got to get back.”

He has already told Guy that he is going south as soon as he gets back to America.

“You must not leave today,” says Guy with urgency. “You cannot, it is already past three in the morning.” To dissemble his intensity, he sips his drink, and lights a cigarette. Then his dark eyes look very candidly into Arthur’s. “I am hoping you will spend the day with me—this day, and many days, it would make me very happy.” He raises his eyebrows, smiling, and puts one hand on Arthur’s hand. “D’accord? You will say yes?” His hand is very large, and heavy, very—friendly; it is impossible not to respond to his insistence. Arthur grins, leaning forward, and Guy grins with him. “Please. I will make myself free today, and we will wake up—I will cook you a lunch, I am a very good cook, you know, or we can go out, it does not matter—and I will show you Paris, I will show you—me—and we will take care of our day, it will be a beautiful day!”

They laugh again, but not as before. Guy’s hand tightens on Arthur’s, Arthur’s hand tightens on Guy’s.

With those interlocked hands, looking into each other’s eyes, each pulls the other closer, and their parted lips meet—thirst slaking thirst. Guy closes his eyes. A trembling begins in Guy which transmits itself to Arthur. Guy opens his eyes and stares into Arthur’s eyes, with a kind of helpless, stricken wonder, not unlike a child’s delight, and Arthur takes Guy’s face between his hands and kisses him again. He is trembling in a kind of paroxysm of liberty. Kissing a stranger in a strange town, and in a strange upper room, and with all the world too busy to notice or to care or to judge, with Mama and Daddy sleeping, and Brother out to work, and God scrutinizing the peaceful fields of New England, his past seems to drop from him like a heavy illusion, he feels it fall to the floor beneath them, he pushes it away with his feet, all, Julia, Crunch, Peanut, Red, Hall, the congregations, the terror of trees and streets, the weight of yesterday, the dread of tomorrow, all, for this instant, falls away, all, but the song—he is as open and naked and questing as the song. He feels Guy tremble with delight, his tremendous, so utterly vulnerable weight shakes the table, and Arthur trembles, too, with love and gratitude: for he knows, too, that all has dropped from him he must pick up again, but not now—now, he and another will lie naked and open, in each other’s arms.

They pull back from each other. Neither speaks. Each inhales, faintly, with a delicate, private delight, the other’s odor.

“It wouldn’t be, if it had a number instead of a name. Anyway—them holy fathers had to be a bitch.”

Though they are leaving, neither is yet quite prepared to move. They light each other’s cigarettes and lean back, sipping the vodka, catching their breath.

The waiter is back—how long has he been there? But it does not matter. Guy asks him for the bill, and pays him.

They finish their vodka in a very rare silence, set their glasses down, and rise, walking the length of the room to the staircase, which is unencumbered now. The bar is more than half empty, music still pounds upward from the cellar. Those left at the tables are in deep conversation with each other, and have no eyes for them. They get their coats from yet another cheerful lady; Guy tips her, and they walk out into the streets.

The streets are now empty—only, every once in a while, a lone, somehow desolate figure crosses a street, stands motionless on a corner. The streets frighten Arthur. Perhaps they always have. Perhaps they always will. After he and Crunch had broken up, he had wandered many streets at night, terrified and burning. It had been like wandering through hell. He is still terrified that that time will come again, the way someone with an affliction lives in terror of the symptoms which announce a new relapse.

They come to a great wall on Guy’s long, narrow street, and Guy puts a key in the door in the wall. They are, then, in a great courtyard—Arthur has had no idea that such splendor lay behind such walls, which are all over Paris—and they cross the courtyard to enter an old and massive building. The entrance is wide, with a loge on one side, and a broad, curving staircase on the other. They climb the staircase to the first floor, and enter Guy’s apartment.

It is old. This is the first note struck in Arthur’s consciousness—old and high, with rooms unfolding on rooms, not as though it had been built but as though it had somehow evolved, patiently developing year after year, and century after century. There are great high mirrors and massive chairs, one wall is hung with a tapestry—faded, but celebrating a battle. Arthur makes out horses and hounds, shields, sabers, and suits of armor. Guy takes Arthur’s coat, takes off his own, and throws them both on a large sofa, and they leave this foyer and go into a larger room, higher and less cluttered, with an immense dark sofa, easy chairs, a massive wooden cabinet, a chandelier—Guy clicks it on with the wall switch—another cabinet with a glass door, holding ornaments and goblets, a long, low table before the sofa, other round tables in corners of the room, two high windows, heavily draped, a door opening onto two corridors, one straight ahead, one to the left. The one straight ahead leads to the kitchen and the pantry, a bathroom, a small bedroom. The corridor to the left leads to Guy’s bedroom, his study, his W.C., and his bathroom—Arthur is to discover that these two facilities are (or were) separate in France.

“Wow,” he says, wandering around the room, his hands in his pockets, staring at the paintings on the walls.

Guy watches the long, dark figure in the old blue pants, the turtleneck sweater, the scuffed black shoes, with delight. But, “It is old,” he says.

“I’m hip it’s old. But it’s beautiful.” He turns to face Guy. “You live here all alone?”

“I had a friend here for a while—a friend from Algeria—but he has gone back to his home.” He paces a little, his hands in his pockets; Arthur realizes that his rolling stride is due to the fact that he is a little bowlegged. “I imagine that he will never come back to France.”

“Well—as you may know—there is some misunderstanding—some difficulties, so I might say—between France and Algeria these days.”

Arthur does know this—that is, he has read and heard about the Algerian revolt against the French—but he does not really know, and, watching Guy’s face, does not want to pursue it.

Guy walks to the wooden cabinet. “Would you like—what do you call it? We say un bonnet de nuit—enfin—would you like a night-cap—before we wash up and retire?”

Arthur is fascinated by him, yes, but he also likes him more and more. There is something very lonely and vulnerable about him. At the same time, he realizes that this is practically the very first time he has felt so at ease with a white man. But it is only now, seeing Guy in his house, standing, so to speak, among the witnesses to his inheritance, that he thinks of him as white. He would not have reacted to Guy in New York as he has reacted to him here, certainly not so quickly. He stares at Guy for a moment. Then, he shakes his head. The truth is, he thinks of Guy as French, someone, therefore, who has nothing to do with New York, or Georgia. He has no learned, or willed response to him because Guy has never existed for him; neither in his imagination, nor in his life, has he ever been threatened by him—that is, by a Frenchman. But he is dimly aware that this may be connected with his reluctance to discuss Algeria. He shakes his head again.

The kitchen is big, and very old-fashioned. It is a kitchen, Arthur thinks, that his mother would love. They get the ice out of a refrigerator far from modern, and the glasses out of the cupboard, and return to the living room. Guy pours the vodka, and they sit down on the sofa.

Guy lights a cigarette, and goes to one of the windows and opens the drapes. The dawn, a kind of electrical gray, fills the room.

“I have sat here many mornings alone, and watched the day come. Sometimes, it is sad, sometimes it is not so sad, but always it is—something awaiting you.” He looks at Arthur. “It is so, no? Something waiting, just out there.”

“We have a song something like that,” Arthur says. “Well, for me, it’s just like that. You ever hear of a blues singer named Bessie Smith?”

“Well, she has a song, goes, Catch ‘em. Don’t let them blues in here!”

Guy laughs, and Arthur laughs, watching him. “Why, yes,” says Guy. “It is a little like that.”

Then he puts out his cigarette and turns to Arthur, putting one great hand on the nape of Arthur’s neck. “I do not feel the blues this morning, though.”

Arthur puts down his glass, suddenly feeling as tentative and as powerful as a boy. Tentative, because he is watching, sensing, awaiting Guy, powerful because a depth of desire has been struck in him which will cause both Guy and himself to tremble—powerful, because this desire, dormant for so long, has been awakened by Guy’s desire. Again, he feels a kind of thrill of freedom. He and his newfound friend are alone. They have each other to discover; and, for the moment, only each other. He laughs, low in his throat, for pure joy, and Guy laughs with him, and pulls him closer.

Guy is still sleeping when Arthur wakes up, at about three o’clock in the afternoon.

Guy’s bedroom opens on his adjoining study, and, in the study, one of the windows has been left slightly open. A small breeze comes through this window, as pleasant and peaceful as the half-light coming through the drapes. Arthur is luxuriously wide awake: wide awake, that is, without wishing to move.

Guy lies on his side, facing Arthur, one arm outstretched toward Arthur. Some faces, in sleep, become tormented, endure hard wrestling matches, undergo great trials: Guy’s face was as quiet and defenseless as it must have been when he was three years old. He is snoring slightly, his teeth faintly gleaming through his parted lips. His rough hair is slightly damp and tangled on his forehead. The covers are half off: Arthur watches the faint rise and fall of the hairy chest. He is the spy of the midafternoon: Guy does not see him watching him. The hand at the end of the arm which had been thrown across Arthur twitches slightly, not yet alarmed—but soon, some message will be carried to Guy’s brain, waking him up.

Arthur does not disturb the covers, does not touch Guy. He can see all that there is to see—the navel, the darker pubic hair, the labyrinthine sex, the thighs, knees, ankles, the buttocks—all, and much more, all that is not seen, without touching the covers, or disturbing a millimeter of the universe. He will see all this forever, it has become a part of him. When yesterday, last night, shortly before or after the flood, whenever, kissing Guy, he had felt the weight of his past, of his experience, drop from him, so that he could be naked, he had known that he would have to pick it up again. He had not known that it would be heavier, made heavier by a night.

He watches Guy. Anguish translates, it travels well, has as many tongues as vehicles: but desire is among the chief of these, and if desire is not a confession, it can only be a curse. Never, in all of Arthur’s life, has anyone been so helpless in his arms, or wanted or needed so much, or given so much. He feels—transformed: in a night, he has grown much older.

He watches Guy, and wishes to protect him. He does not feel that this is ridiculous; or, if it is, he doesn’t care. He knows that Guy also wishes to protect him—he does not feel that this is ridiculous, either. It is real to him, for the first time, that this is what lovers do for each other—by daring to be naked, by giving each other the strength to have nothing to hide.

He lights a cigarette, and leans back on the pillow. He looks straight ahead into the vast old study, seeing Guy’s desk, and chairs, his lamps, his books, one or two pieces of sculpture; the paintings, some on the wall, some, like scrolls, piled high on a corner; the mail, the ornate North African letter opener, the telephone; the photographs, on the desk, on the walls, some of Guy in uniform, some in North African dress, one photograph of his friend, Mustapha, in a corner above the record player; the records, with a vast selection of Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Django Reinhardt, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Ida Cox, Fats Waller—and others, obscure even for him, including some seventy-eights he would love to get his hands on, all tirelessly catalogued and labeled, each in its place.

This apartment, which had seemed so vast last night, he sees, now, as a kind of purgatory; it seems to ring with the quiet and somehow gallant horror of Guy’s days and nights.

He looks over at Guy again, Guy has not moved. But his arm moves blindly, and his body lurches closer to Arthur.

Arthur looks straight ahead. His life has grown heavier by a night: for, we are all waiting for him, in America.

He does not feel the romantic schizophrenia. He knows very well that he cannot stay here: that knowledge is as real as the air blowing through this room. But so is the man in the bed as real as that.

Neither does he feel that it is his duty to return—there are a thousand ways of evading a duty. Nor is it a matter of loyalty, a questionable document which can always be torn up, and always, furthermore, for excellent reasons.

He moves quietly out of bed, and, naked, pads to the W.C., and, then, to the enormous bathroom, where he throws water on his face. He looks at his face in the mirror, but one’s face, when one searches it in the mirror, reveals nothing at all. He looks tired, triumphant, and sad—as though he has seen more than he wished to see, and is now about to see more than that.

He walks back into the bedroom and stretches out on the bed. He lights another cigarette.

“Hey, you remember me? I speak English.” But he lights a Gitane, coughs, and hands it to Guy.

And he stumbles out of bed, and pads down the hall. Arthur walks to the study window, and stares out at the chilly day. He has no desire to face it. He feels that, perhaps, he should call his hotel, or, rather, have Guy call; sooner or later, he must call me; but not now. He wants to go back to bed. He wants to be with Guy as long as he can be.

Guy puts out his cigarette butt, and crawls into bed beside him. He takes Arthur in his arms.

As they kiss, as the heat rises between them, as they claim the hours of this afternoon, the coming night, the hours which remain, as Guy’s hands and mouth and tongue adore his body, as he gives himself and gives himself to Guy, as they come closer to the impending miracle of mutual surrender, laughing a little, pausing, simply looking at each other, sobbing a little, stroking the rigid, burning sex, drinking in each other’s odors, each astounded by the other’s color—how many colors a color has! What a labyrinth!—as they descend into quiet places, only slowly, to grow up again, coming closer to the edge, holding back, wanting it never to end, searching each other’s eyes, laughing at what each sees there, then, somber, dedicated, like wrestlers, delicately probing, like physicians, testing muscles, experimenting with tastes, comparing discoveries, the one lying still, then the other, each becoming more and more helpless and open to the other, using themselves in defiance of murder, time, language, and continents, history knotted in the balls, hope, glory, and power pounding in the prick, knowing that this suspension cannot last much longer, that each is coming to his own edge, lying quietly in each other’s arms, then turning again, this time Arthur’s slow long entry into Guy, oh don’t move, the stillness, then, the slow rising and falling, the tremendous conjunction, that sense of mysteries overturned and the sky exploding, something fragile and everlasting being accomplished between two lovers, two men, the gentleness of armpits, nipples, nape, and hair, the unmistakable pounding power of the going-home thrusts ah oui oh baby, the last unbelievable burning rigidity, the intolerably prolonged split second before lover finally pours himself into lover, the coming together, the endless fall, the rising into daybreak, weary, spent, at home in each other, there is, yet, a strange, cold pain in everything, and Arthur is thinking, I wish I could stay. I hope we meet again.

They go to Arthur’s hotel that evening. Arthur pays his bill, for he is moving into Guy’s flat. During this brief transaction—Guy has a cab waiting at the door—Arthur can see that the concierge is very impressed by Guy, and a little annoyed with himself for not having suspected that the black American might have had such splendid connections. Arthur has never seen him smile or bow: now he does both, at great length, and with great pleasure. Arthur is not allowed to touch his bags. A creature he has never seen before appears from the cellar and carries them out to the cab.

Ah. The European bewilderment concerning the black American connections is very nearly the root of the problem his presence poses abroad.

Laughing, breathless, a little like children, they deposit Arthur’s belongings in Guy’s foyer, and immediately leave the house. They are going to the movies, then they are going to eat, and Guy has extracted a promise from Arthur: they will not discuss his departure, or make any plans concerning it, until suppertime, tomorrow. They will steal twenty-four hours. What difference can the theft of twenty-four hours mean to eternity? The calendar has so many days to play with: why should the calendar care if we steal one? Arthur knows, now, that eternity is a jealous tyrant, demanding an accounting of every breath, and the calendar a malicious, meticulous bookkeeper pleased to be in the service of eternity—but, never mind, Guy is right, there are moments when one must challenge the tyrant. And tell his clerk to kiss you where the sun don’t shine.

So, they leave Arthur’s bags in the foyer, rush down the stairs and cross the courtyard again, jump into the still waiting taxi, and are carried off to the Champs-Élysées. Or rather, as Guy directs the driver, to L’Étoile. “So, we start at the top,” says Guy, “and walk down. That way, you can see it all.”

Anyway, Arthur has never seen the Champs-Élysées by night. It is best, of course, to see it for the first time at night, and, if one can manage to be young, that helps. If, in addition to being young, one can also arrange to see it for the first time at night with a lover, one cannot claim to be doing too badly. But, if in addition to being young and seeing the Champs-Élysées for the first time at night with a lover, that lover happens, furthermore, to be French, one is in a rare and exalted category indeed: and might as well take the vow of silence, for if your story is ever believed, it can only poison your relationships.

Nevertheless, at about eight o’clock on this particular Thursday evening, the cab crossed the bridge and left Concorde behind and began rolling up the broad, pompous tree-lined avenue, which seemed to be alive with light. Straight ahead, like the promise of victory, and seeming to be on a height, stood the massive, perhaps somewhat Teutonic, Arc de Triomphe—L’Etoile—under which arch burns the eternal flame for the unknown soldier. There is nothing at all Elysian about the Champs-Elysees; neither does it bring to mind a field. It is a very serious marketplace, both by day and by night. By day, in the spring and the summertime, and some days in the early fall, it can be quite magical, exhilarating, in spite of the piratical prices; and anyway, one can walk on this crowded avenue and still feel quite alone.

Anyway, if one has seen it for the first time at night when one was young, when one was happy, the memory comes back from time to time, and the memory stings, but it causes you to remember that you have not always been unhappy and need not always be.

For Arthur, the shock of discovery and delight is mingled with the certainty of imminent departure. Thus, everything is double-edged. But there is a certain wisdom in Guy’s insistence that they not discuss his departure for twenty-four hours. This twenty-four hours is deliberately, consciously stolen—ike playing hooky—and so, they are free to make the most of it.

Now there is absolutely nothing to see on the Champs-Élysées, especially at night, except other, rather weary and calculating faces, mile upon mile of advertising, shop windows, shop windows, cinemas, and café terraces. But it is all quite magical tonight. Technically, their errand, now, is to decide which film to see, and, after that, where to eat.

Guy says that seeing French movies is a great way of learning French, but concedes that there is really no point in beginning Arthur’s education tonight. So they will see an American film, but the marquees they pass are not terribly encouraging. Guy is willing to see a Western, but Arthur is not: “I didn’t come all the way to Paris just to see another TV show, man.” Guy is partial to Hitchcock, but there is no Hitchcock, and anyway, it begins to be apparent that neither of them is concentrating. They are merely taking a walk. Arthur is fascinated by the men’s clothes in the shop windows, and so, they keep stopping, Arthur calculating whether he can buy this, or that, but knowing that he almost certainly can’t. There is a raincoat in a window that he particularly admires. Guy agrees to come with him on the morrow—“before suppertime?” pleads Arthur—to try it on.

In the meantime, they have covered almost no territory on the famous avenue, and it is beginning to be late to go to the movies. Now they will have to wait until ten, or ten thirty. “Then let me buy you a drink,” says Arthur, “and we can discuss it. I’d love to buy my man a drink in a café terrace on the Champs.”

At the hotel, Arthur had changed his underwear, and put on a white, open-neck shirt and a navy blue suit and a black gabardine topcoat, with a belt, and changed his socks and shoes. He looks quite elegant, and he is still young enough for this elegance to make him look younger. He is like a winning, questing student, and he is very happy, and this makes him look radiant. Guy smiles every time he looks at him, and calls him le chanteur sauvage—the savage singer—and sometimes, “my savage singer.”

“Keep it up,” says Arthur, “you don’t know that, where I come from, some savage motherfucker would already have done savaged you. I’m nice.”

“I wonder,” says Arthur, “what it would have been like to have been born here.”

“Ah,” says Guy. “I know one thing—you would feel very differently about it.” He searches for his words. “I don’t know. I think you might still love it. But you would know so very much more about it that it would be a very different kind of love.” He nods, wryly, affectionately, at Arthur. “Maybe you would not like it when I joke and call you—mon chanteur sauvage. But”—and a kind of torment crosses his face—“I don’t know.”

“Well,” says Arthur carefully, “if you came to New York, it would also be very new for you, right?”

Since neither is certain of the other’s language, each is compelled to look the other in the eye when they speak, to make certain that the meaning is getting through.

“And you might love New York—but in a very different way from the way”—he grimaces, looking doubtful—“I love New York. If I love it. I’ve never made up my mind.” He looks out at the unknown avenue. “I may not know if I love it—well—that’s very complicated. But, Lord, I know I can hate it.”

“I am certain,” Guy says firmly, “that I could never love anything you hate. It would destroy me. I do not know,” he continues, searching Arthur’s face, “anything about America, and I do not really trust what I hear. But I do not like the Frenchmen I know who like New York—or Florida, or Los Angeles, for that matter. This is just something, you understand, for me. It does not have anything to do with you. I have always felt this way. Oh,” and he lights a cigarette, “I do not mean the people who go for ten days, or so, and come back and tell me all about your Radio City or Times Square. They always sound as though they are relieved to have escaped with their lives.”

Arthur throws back his head, and laughs. Guy continues. “No. I mean those people who really love it, who take it all seriously, all your shit, and want to be like the Americans. Not just because they work there.” He pauses again. “It’s hard for me to explain myself. It is, perhaps, that they take a model which I believe is false, and they want to be like that. I work for the Americans, too, of course, and you can say that I am no better than the others, and maybe I am not, I know that. But I do not want to be like that, it is like wanting to be German. And, me, I think, it is already much more than enough to be French. Truly.”

Arthur watches him. He has understood something, something unexpected, again, mainly from the tone, and, in another way, from Guy’s eyes. “How? Enough to be French?”

“To be hypocrites, to be racists—we do not need any models. We are very, very good at it, all by ourselves!” He grinds out his cigarette, immediately lights another. “I am a Frenchman. I have been a French soldier. I know.”

Again, Arthur feels almost as though he is eavesdropping: he does not want to pursue this aspect of what he perceives to be Guy’s torment. And he has another, deadlier, drier apprehension: if Guy is offering his credentials; he does not want to see them, much less be compelled to examine them.

He thinks about it another way, carefully sipping his whisky, and lighting a cigarette—these gestures are made almost in order to hide his face. If Guy is saying that he does not like being a Frenchman, what would he think of Arthur if Arthur proclaimed that he did not like being a black American? And, indeed, for the very first time, and almost certainly because he is sitting on this unknown avenue, he puts the two words together black American and hears, at once, the very crescendo of contradiction and the unanswering and unanswerable thunder and truth of history—which is nothing more and nothing less than the beating of his own heart, his song. In many ways, he does not like being a black American, or being black, or being American, or being Arthur, and, for many millions of people, in his country, and elsewhere—including France—his existence was of the unspeakable perversity of history, a flaw in the nature of God. However: here he is, sitting on the Champs-Élysées, with Guy, a Frenchman, a stranger, and a lover, not yet a friend. He does not want to think about it, it will ruin the stolen twenty-four hours, and make his burden, already heavier by a day, much heavier.

He wonders about Guy’s Mustapha. He has gone back to Algeria. He is going back to America. He does not want to think about it now, he will think about it on the plane, and, swallowing his whisky, he leaps back into the present:

“I suggest,” he says, “that we forget about empires past, present, or to come, from Ashanti to Charlemagne to Queen Victoria to Eisenhower, and have another drink and decide where we’re going to eat. And then, if there’s any music in this town, we can go and hear some music. If not, not. Anyway, we shouldn’t hang out too late, right? Get our buns in the house at some reasonable hour, and maybe play a couple of your records and go to bed and make love and go to sleep. How you feel about that, pudding?”

“Ça va très bien,” Guy says gravely: but he has been watching Arthur’s face, and is aware that Arthur’s mood has changed. He is aware, too, that this has something to do with some new assessment Arthur is making as concerns him.

He signals the water, and they order their whiskies. Then he looks back at Arthur. He leans forward, one elbow on the table, holding his cigarette, watching Arthur, with a frown.

“I don’t know if I make myself clear,” he says. “I really would hate for you to misunderstand me.”

“So would I,” says Arthur, “but”—and he decides to take the plunge, the Puritan in him having announced that the horizontal position will soon be joyless if the vertical position is a lie—“can I tell you something? Well, tell you something, and ask you something?

“Of course.” Guy’s square face is tight with concentration, his dark eyes nearly black. He still leans forward on one elbow, the cigarette ash is about to drop.

“Well—first—listen. I just got here, right? Never saw Paris before, never saw London—well, I had seen London—but this is not my territory, if I hadn’t met you, I’d probably be on a plane by now, or I’d be sitting in my hotel room, jerking off, and I’d be walking the streets, you dig? I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

The cigarette ash drops, just as the waiter returns. He is elaborately resigned about this misadventure—which Guy has failed to notice—sets down his tray, wipes the table, empties the ashtray, picks up the empty glasses, sets down the full glasses, puts the bill under the ashtray, leaves.

“Listen. You were talking about France before, and America, and you mentioned Germany, and you don’t want to be like the Americans, and you don’t want to be like the Germans, and you don’t even want to be like the French. Well, I have to ask myself who the fuck do you want to be like? Hold it,” for Guy has made a gesture. He picks up a cigarette, and Arthur lights it for him. Then he picks up his whisky, and lifts it toward Guy. “Cheers. But listen. All these places may be different. They are different for you. Shit, they eat knockwurst in Germany, and pâté in France, and some awful slop in England, and you got different flags and systems and whatnot and you’re always at each other’s throats and you think that makes you different. But you want me to tell you where you are all alike? The only subject on which you ain’t got no disagreement?”

Guy leans back, drawing on his cigarette, watching Arthur with a dry, shrewd pursing of the lips, not quite a smile, with narrowed eyes.

Arthur touches his chest. “Me. You got no disagreement about me. I just told you that this is not my territory. I just got here. But I met every single one of you motherfuckers long before I got here.”

“I met you all in America, working for you. And every single one of you call me nigger, me and my mamma and my daddy and my brother and my sister and my daughter and my son. So I don’t really give a shit what you think about France or Germany or Switzerland or England—the differences between you are not important. Whenever you think I’m getting out of hand, you can forget your differences long enough to come and kick my ass. That may not be all I know about you, and I hope that ain’t all there is to you, but, baby, that’s what I’ve learned about you, and that’s enough.”

He takes another swallow of his whisky, and lights a cigarette. Now he cannot read Guy’s face.

“And—this is all I got to say—I told you I was going to ask you something, this is what I want to ask you—don’t you think, on top of all the other shit I got to go through, that I might think it a little excessive that I got to give you my sympathy, too? Shit, you still got all the gold and diamonds and all the jet bombers, and my ass, and you want to cry in my arms, too? Come on, man, there’s got to be a limit.”

He starts laughing, because Guy has thrown back his head, and is shaking with laughter.

“Chapeau. I have never heard it put so before. Sympathy!” He laughs again. “I agree, that is somewhat excessive, as you say.” He sobers, not without some difficulty. “But yes, sympathy is needed, there is no other hope.” He finally manages to take a swallow of his whisky. “I, in fact, do not have the jet bombers and so forth, and, after all, if I have your ass, you also have mine, which may entitle me to a little sympathy.” He sobers again. “But I do not joke. I am paying for something which I do not have and certainly do not want. I do not want a slave, I do not want a colony, I want to be your friend, I want you to look on me as a man like you. That is true, I think you know that. It is true that I am French, and what you say about Europe is true—I can see that. But I have never called you nigger, I do not think that it is in me to do so. Of course, you may not believe me. It is perfectly possible that you cannot afford to believe me.” He looks down. “Perhaps so brutal a history can produce only a brute. But I do not believe that, and you do not believe it, either. All history is brutal. I think”—now very earnest, lighting another cigarette, frowning, looking down—“I think that my history has made me a bankrupt in all but the material sense, and will soon make me a bankrupt in that sense, also, and it is not your sympathy, not even your love, which can save me from that mathematic. I am not clinging to my history; my history is clinging to me. My history has told too many lies about too much, has blasphemed what is sacred. I am far from being unaware of that. I know why we needed Africa, and it was not merely for the gold and the diamonds! That was the lie we told ourselves: because we were civilized.” He pauses again, and finishes his whisky. “We had to be. It is a miracle that any one of us can even fart, much less shit.” He looks at his glass, wonderingly, then at Arthur. “In spite of all appearances, cher chanteur sauvage, you are not the victim. You have been the object of a conspiracy, and the conspiracy has failed.”

He watches Arthur with a weary, affectionate smile. “I know, in any case, no matter what you say, that you will never abandon anyone you love. And that is enough.” He puts out his cigarette, lights another, a little shy now. “I am drunk enough, just a little, to have one more drink”—he looks at Arthur—“will you join me? And, then, we will go someplace and eat and maybe you will sing for me, later? Out of sympathy.” And he laughs a very moving laugh. “Ah. I am very glad we talked.”

They leave the café, and continue walking down the avenue. Both are beginning to be hungry, and it is beginning to be cold, but they feel, for the moment, a need to walk together. The pretext, though they do not really need one, is that Guy wants to walk a little, to clear his head: the truth is that walking together can induce a very particular silence. There is an important safety in the sound of the other’s footfalls, a reassurance in the light touch of the other’s shoulder. The profile of the other comes into and out of the light, and each time subtly different, infinities being re-corded at a speed outside of time. One can speak, or not speak, particularly if there is peace between you.

Perhaps, if they had not spoken in the café, they would have leapt into a cab, and hurried to some other public place; would have been compelled to run, that is, instead of being able to walk. Arthur puts up his coat collar, Guy knots his scarf. Each has his hands in his pockets. Guy’s bowlegged roll causes his shoulder to touch Arthur’s from time to time; from time to time, Guy elaborates this roll a little, deliberately, and he and Arthur glance at each other, smiling.

They do not speak until they reach the large fountain, at an intersection. There is a cab stand in the center of the avenue.

Guy makes a face, looks around the avenue. “I do not like to eat around here. This is not”—he laughs—“my territory.”

“Shall we, then, cross the river? We can find a place near home, d’accord? And, then, perhaps, we shall find some music in le quartier latin? That is where you were living,” he explains. “I see that you do not remember your old neighborhood at all. Ah! Les touristes!”

“Listen, baby. Just get me to some grits, okay? I don’t know why all you Frenchmen pick out the coldest-ass street corners to start running down your shit.”

“Ah! comme tu es mal poli! Ils sont tous comme ça, chez toi? Donc, je commence à comprendre enfin ce sacré probléme noir!’ He takes Arthur by the arm, laughing, and they cross to the cab stand. “Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Guy tells the driver, and they get into the cab.

“I won’t lie about it, man,” says Arthur. “Ça va très bien—my French is improving, right?”

“You are making great progress. If only—” The cab begins speeding toward the Place de la Concorde. The lights spin by, making Arthur remember the lights of a children’s carnival, in his childhood, or in his dreams, he does not know. Guy sighs, then grins, and turns to Arthur. “We must not speak of your amazing linguistic gifts before supper, tomorrow night. But it would be a pity to let them go to waste.”

“I imagine,” says Arthur, “that we’re going to have a pretty late supper.”

Arthur watches the immense column of the Place de la Concorde come closer, as icy as some relic watched over only by the moon. Perhaps it does not belong here; just as it is strange to name a place where the guillotine once stood. Concorde.

But history may be the most mystical of all our endeavors, and Arthur turns his mind away from the monument exactly as the cab turns, and begins to cross the river.

They eat in some crowded, cheerful, friendly place, somewhere in the shadows of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince. They are at a corner table, in what must have been a Chinese, or, in any case, Oriental restaurant, because waiters keep coming with dishes. They seem to eat for hours, and, since they are happy, everyone around them seems to be celebrating something. They drink a lot of wine: waiters keep coming with bottles. They talk—or Arthur talks: into Guy’s square, flushed, and laughing face, Guy’s hand always seeming to be poised above yet another covered dish. Arthur shovels it all in, and so does Guy, it is as though they are connected by invisible threads, choreographed from the depthless center, as though the calendar has been corrected by eternity, and eternity is smiling.

Yes. My brother was happy. I wish I had been there. I am glad that I could not have been there. He could not have seen, if I had been there (though I could have seen it—of course) that he was happy because he made Guy happy. He has never known himself to make anyone happy before.

He does not really know this, now: yet, here it is, before him, Guy’s radiant face, Guy, with those deep-set brown eyes, that just-beginning-to-be-weathered brow, that rough, red, curly hair. Above all, the delight in those eyes when they look at Arthur.

It must have been a Chinese—or an Oriental—restaurant, for they drink tea, finally, after all the exotic dishes have been cleared away. The restaurant, abruptly, is less crowded, but it is not late. Arthur looks at his watch, and it is just a little past midnight.

He picks up Arthur’s pack of cigarettes, lights one, and hands it to Arthur. Arthur takes it, and they watch each other.

There is a look in Guy’s eyes which Arthur is beginning to know. There is an anguish in those eyes, at the bottom of those eyes, like something living, and determined to live, in the depths of a dungeon, having been hurled there: which knows, and wants you to know that it knows, what happened: something which refuses reconciliation. This is also the look at the very bottom of Arthur’s eyes, though Arthur does not know this, and, of course, has never seen it: in his own eyes, that is.

Guy sees in Arthur what Arthur would not dream of looking for in Guy. The stubborn anguish Guy sees in Arthur corroborates Guy’s reality, may be said, even, to give him the right to live; it begins to divest him of his irksome privilege, his blinding color, and welcomes him, so to speak, into the human race. Thus, he can, he hopes, he imagines, meet Arthur on Arthur’s ground. But there is absolutely no point in attempting to meet Arthur on Arthur’s ground, and anyway, Guy cannot do this, not yet, and Arthur knows it. It is not because he cannot know Arthur’s ground, but because he does not know his own. Guy and Arthur may be equally lonely, but Guy is far more isolated. Arthur is far more a stranger for Guy than Guy can be for Arthur; at least, in principle, and as a result of history. Arthur does not need Guy’s suffering to corroborate his own reality, or Guy’s. Those realities, simply, are not in question, and, as for being welcomed into the human race, that was long ago accomplished, by iron and fire.

Guy has said that his history is clinging to him, but what he means is that he has no acceptable access to that history: it cannot feed him, it can only diminish him. In any case, it must all be reexamined and overhauled before it can possibly be used, and this examination will take the rest of Guy’s life. Guy, like many another, like Arthur, like you and me, in fact, would rather spend his life without wrestling with history.

For this is also Arthur’s torment, although the terms are so unutterably different.

To overhaul a history, or to attempt to redeem it—which effort may or may not justify it—is not at all the same thing as the descent one must make in order to excavate a history. To be forced to excavate a history is, also, to repudiate the concept of history, and the vocabulary in which history is written; for the written history is, and must be, merely the vocabulary of power, and power is history’s most seductively attired false witness.

And yet, the attempt, more, the necessity, to excavate a history, to find out the truth about oneself! is motivated by the need to have the power to force others to recognize your presence, your right to be here. The disputed passage will remain disputed so long as you do not have the authority of the right-of-way—so long, that is, as your passage can be disputed: the document promising safe passage can always be revoked. Power clears the passage, swiftly: but the paradox, here, is that power, rooted in history, is also, the mockery and the repudiation of history. The power to define the other seals one’s definition of oneself—who, then, in such a fearful mathematic, to use Guy’s term, is trapped?

Perhaps, then, after all, we have no idea of what history is: or are in flight from the demon we have summoned. Perhaps history is not to be found in our mirrors, but in our repudiations: perhaps, the other is ourselves. History may be a great deal more than the quicksand which swallows others, and which has not yet swallowed us: history may be attempting to vomit us up, and spew us out: history may be tired. Death, itself, which swallows everyone, is beginning to be weary—of history, in fact: for death has no history.

Our history is each other. That is our only guide. One thing is absolutely certain: one can repudiate, or despise, no one’s history without repudiating and despising one’s own. Perhaps that is what the gospel singer is singing.

For presently, Guy and Arthur leave the restaurant, which is, somewhere, forever, in the shadows of the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and they walk, in the chilly winds, and along various byways, and along the quai St.-Michel, looking down at the river and across to the other shore, and enter, finally, the rue de la Huchette: which translates, Arthur told me, as “the street of the fishing cat.” (He seemed to feel that the street had been named for him.)

It is Guy’s idea, for he knows, as Arthur does not, that there are several jazz joints—“Dee-xie-land,” according to Guy—along this street. They enter one of them, purely at random, pulled in by the music. There is an American trio playing, and an old blues singer from Memphis, Sonny Carr, is sitting in.

The place is not very large, is very crowded, and the trio—two young blacks, and one young white, piano, bass, and slide trombone—are playing. All of the tables are occupied. Guy takes their coats to the vestiare, and they stand at the bar, which is also very crowded.

It is a fairly young crowd, and somewhat more varied than would be likely to be found in any other quarter of Paris: young French students, and students not so young, children from the Netherlands, from Germany, from England, Americans, black and white, black Africans, and children from North Africa.

The last two groups are the people who intrigue and intimidate Arthur most. He feels a great need to reach them, but does not know how; does not know, for that matter, if they want to be reached, and, in any case, he does not speak French. He does not know if he likes them or not, and this is because he is so terrified of not liking them. In this, he does not see how American, how Western, how white he is being, which is to say, and in the most subtle sense of the word, how racist: for why should he like them, after all, to say nothing of how? Nobody likes great crowds of people, unless he intends to use them, and some of the people who make up such a marked mob are perfectly aware of this. Earlier, Arthur had hoped not to be forced to examine Guy’s credentials, but now, he is somewhat worried about his own. If he doesn’t know what he thinks of them, he certainly doesn’t know what they think of him, and he is not a crowd.

But the ancient blues singer, a weary and triumphant mountain of a man, is sitting quietly—or, more precisely, quietly towering—at the end of the bar, and he and two or three of the young Africans seem to be having a fine time together.

The old blues singer is as black as the black Africans, or very nearly, and much darker, of course, than the North Africans. Though this observation is somewhat too swift; it is necessary to revise the optic through which one sees what has come to be called color. The children from the Netherlands, from Germany, from England, for example, are all, more or less, the same color, and this would not even have been a question, had Arthur found them in New York, or in Boston. In the harsh, democratic light of these metropolises, they would have been the same color, whether they liked it or not. But, truthfully, if one really looks at them, though they are, anonymously, the same color, they are not, intimately, the same shade. Different histories, and different hazards, are written just beneath the skin, these histories and hazards accounting for the subtleties of shade. Some descend from the Viking by way of Constantinople, some from the Turk by way of Vienna, some from the Jew by way of Turkey, some from Turkey by way of the Spanish Jew, some from the Portuguese by way of New England: and all from a history, if that is the word we want, which predates what is known as Europe. And these subtleties are in their eyes—if one wished, ruthlessly, to pursue the matter, in their names. They are, therefore, not only what their history has made of them, they are also what they make of their history. And what brings them here? So far from the Druid forest? To listen to a trio, piano, bass, and slide trombone, from, after all, let’s face it, the Lord alone knows where. One will not find the answer in the colors of their skins.

And this is also true of the venerable blues singer, and the Africans who surround him. In New York or in Boston, they would, of course, all be the same color, being seen, necessarily, through the optic of power and guilt—being seen, necessarily indeed, as objects. But here, in this beleaguered capital, and not as far from home as Arthur is, no matter which way he turns, which body of water he faces, or which overland journey, their shades are more vivid than their color. Their shades are mute testimony to a journey which the Netherlands, for example, deny. It is impossible to know what future can be made out of an alabaster past so resounding, and an ebony past so maligned, but some key may be found in the palette which experiments with colors in order to discover shades, which mixes shades in order to arrive at a color, or color, which, by the time one has arrived at it, and by means of this process, always bears an arbitrary and provisional name. Shades cannot be fixed; color is, eternally, at the mercy of the light.

Sonny Carr’s hair is pepper-and-salt, and still very thick; his teeth are still bad news for a pork chop. Arthur has heard of him all of his life, and scarcely dares imagine how old he must be.

Paul has spoken of him, had known him in the South, many years ago, and briefly: but Sonny Carr had been a man when his father had still been a boy. And he has not really worked in the United States for very nearly as long as Arthur has been on earth.

Here he is, now. Arthur dare not imagine what drove him here, what his connections are, or have been. He appears to be treated with a mocking, respectful affection. Arthur sees this in the faces of the young men, and in the old man’s face: though he does not really think of him as an old man, there is something in the face too present, too joyous, and too generous. But they are not really talking, for the trio is playing. Sonny Carr growls encouragement to the trio from time to time, and the trio responds with the faintest suggestion of a mocking flourish—but always responds—and this is almost precisely the rapport between the blues singer and the Africans: easy, tense, and precise.

Arthur wonders about all this, and Guy touches his elbow. “What will you drink?”

For the barmaid is standing before them, a tall, thin, dark-haired girl, with high cheekbones and enormous dark eyes, and a genuine smile.

“Bonsoir, mam’selle.” He looks at her, at Guy, feeling a little embarrassed, he does not know why. “I’ll have a whisky,” he says, “with ice.”

“Bien.” She goes to the end of the bar, suddenly, apparently having been summoned by Sonny Carr. She leans toward him, while he whispers something to her. She nods, smiles, and pours their drinks, returns.

She puts their drinks on the bar, before them. When Guy attempts to pay, she puts up one hand, in refusal. “Later.” She turns away, with a laugh. “Do not go. You will understand, later.” She addresses something she sees in Guy’s face. “Attends. Que ça reste entre nous.”

“I really cannot tell you,” Guy says, and lifts his whisky. “Cheers. Sacré chanteur sauvage.”

The trio finishes with a genuine flourish—it must be admitted that Arthur has not really been listening to them, has been plunged into his own version of a tale of two cities: but has been horribly aware of the black pianist, who reminds him of Peanut, and the slide trombonist, who reminds him of Crunch, and, in some way, of me. And he shakes his head against all these terrors, and sips his drink.

For the slide trombonist, riding the applause, has taken the microphone, and, wiping his brow with a willed and florid handkerchief—a handkerchief with a history—and smiling, says, “Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, I cannot tell you how honored I am to be able to stand here and present one of the greatest blues artists of all time—mesdames, messieurs, notre père et notre ami, le grand—Sonny Carr!”

There is a curious and subtle difference in him when he takes his place before the microphone. He does not, in the first place, seem to know what the microphone is doing there: it is clear that the microphone is a trivial and dubious instrument and he is willing to put up with it, if it acts right. In the second place, he seems to grow, not so much taller as, in every way, immense, as though he is threatening the roof and the walls. He grins, and one sees the dimple in one cheek, which cannot have changed very much since he was young, and a wonder in his eyes. He says nothing. He looks around him once, at the musicians, and snaps his fingers, and, at the same moment, begins:

Water-boy,

now, tell me

where you hiding?

If you don’t a-come,

I’m going to tell your mammy,

sounding cajoling, tender, stern and weary—thirsty, for he really needs that drink of water, then he smiles, seeming to look straight down the bar, at Arthur,

you jack of diamonds,

I know you of old, boy,

yes, I know you of old!

See, see rider,

See what you done done,

Take this hammer,

carry it to the captain.

Tell him I’m gone, boys,

tell him I’m gone.

And ending like that, something like the blow of a hammer, with the trombone supplying the vast and hostile landscape, and the bass and the piano supplying the rigors of days and nights. The place explodes with applause, and Sonny Carr stands there, and bows his head.

It is, suddenly, a mighty gesture. Arthur has seen this gesture all his life, and yet, has never seen it before.

It is a gesture as far beyond humility as it is beyond pride. Sonny bows his head before what his audience supposes to be his past, and his condition. He bows his head before their profound gratitude that this past, and this condition, are his, and not theirs. He bows his head before their silent wonder that he can be so highly esteemed as a performer and treated so viciously as a man: whenever, and wherever, he is esteemed to be one. He hears, in their applause, a kind of silent wonder, inarticulate lamentations. They might, for example, be willing to give “anything” to sing like that, but fear that they haven’t “anything” to give: but, far more crucially, do not suspect that it is not a matter of being “willing.” It is a matter of embracing one’s only life, even though this life so often seems to be, merely, one’s doom. And it is, in a way, though not “merely.” But to refuse the doom of one’s only life is to be trapped outside all nourishment; their wonder, then, is mixed with, and their lamentations defined by, that paralyzing envy from which what we call “racism” derives so much of its energy. Racism is a word which describes one of the results—perhaps the principal result—of our estrangement from our beginnings, from the universal source.

And the applause functions, then, in part, to pacify, narcotize, the resulting violent and inescapable discomfort.

Sonny brings the applause to an end by raising one hand, and saying, with a smile, “Merci, messieurs-dames. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I think we might have a surprise for you a little bit later. Don’t go ‘way.”

He looks at the trio, and they bounce into an old, good-natured ballad Paul sometimes sang for Arthur, when Arthur was little, “Get Along Home, Cindy, Cindy,” and they make something very cheerful and bawdy out of it. Arthur assumes that the crowd can certainly not understand Sonny’s down-home, sexual cross-references—Cindy, in Sonny’s version, is quite a prodigy, but he, somehow, forces himself to match her—but they appear to follow him with no effort at all. They are following his eyes, and his voice, of course, and he telegraphs, and comments on, each joyous convolution. Arthur wonders what he would feel like before this audience.

The trombone’s moan cuts off the applause, a warning, urgent, insistent sound. The bass and the piano have melancholy news, and Sonny begins to spell it out:

Ever since Miss Susan Johnson

lost her Jockey, Lee,

“That is my song!” he whispers. “It is Bessie Smith. Never have I heard anyone else sing it before!”

There has been much excitement,

more to be

Very dry, an announcement, suggesting, furthermore, that there is nothing new about it. Yet, he has the entire room waiting for the news.

You can hear her moanin’

night and morn.

Wonder where

my Easy Rider’s gone?

This is quite another girl than Cindy; or it is Cindy, later. Sonny is merely telling the tale. It is, furthermore, an exceedingly laconic tale, and Arthur wonders what the present audience can make of it. The room is absolutely silent, as though everyone held his breath, waiting for the message to be delivered.

All day, the phone rings,

but it’s not for me.

Arthur looks around the tense, silent room, and he wonders; wonders what they are hearing, indeed; but, beyond that, wonders. The voice does not falter in the telling of the tale: the three musicians supply the literally unutterable truth. A world is being created around this laconic event, an event, which, without commenting on itself, steadily becomes more terrible. An anonymous runaway, and his pacing, waiting woman, somewhere in the American Deep South, when? Right now, if one is to judge from the silence on the faces, and in the room, and the runaway, or the woman, may walk in from the streets at any moment.

He’s gone where

the Southern

“cross”

the Yellow Dog.

All possibilities open, or all possibilities closed. The question is left hanging until it is submerged by applause.

The applause is tremendous, but it is time, says the trombonist, that they take a break.

“Il est formidable.” He purses his tips, smiling, and nods his head. “Merde.” He looks over Arthur’s shoulder, and his face changes.

Arthur turns, and sees Sonny Carr walking down the bar, and he comes straight to Arthur.

“Maybe I’m mistaken,” says Sonny Carr to Arthur, “but if two and two and two make four, I believe I can call your name. Just tell me yes or no: is your name Arthur? Your first name?”

“Yes, sir.” Arthur cannot help smiling. He does not know what is happening to him.

“Tell you how I know. I got friends in London, told me about a young dude come through, singing gospel, name of—I’ll recognize the name, now, you give it to me—now, what is it? Wisconsin? Oklahoma? Ohio? Indian name, I believe—not Chattanooga?”

They are both laughing, and Guy is laughing, and so is the barmaid. The trio, and everyone else in the bar, are immobilized.

“Oh. I used to talk to him—when he was little.” He smiles, and takes Arthur’s hand in his. “Will you sing a little for us? Come on.” Then he pauses, very delicately—Lord, the humility, the depthless courtesy, with which experience recognizes youth!—and looks at Guy. “Good evening, sir. Bonsoir, and God bless you. I’m going to try to kidnap him for a little while, but I ain’t going to take him far. He’ll be right where you can see him.” He smiles and extends his hand.

Guy takes his hand, smiling. “I am most honored to meet you. I am Guy Lazar.”

“I’m glad to meet you, too. Come on up here, and have a drink with us.” He throws an arm around Arthur, and signals Guy, and the three of them walk back to the end of the bar.

So he is to meet the Africans, and the North Africans, after all. He is keenly aware that he is, visibly, with Guy. He wonders how the North Africans, especially, will take this.

It occurs to him that he is now in a position not entirely unlike that of a white person in the States, worried about how his white friends will look at his black friend—well: worried, too, about how his white friends will look at him.

He need not have worried. He has entered Sonny Carr’s orbit with Sonny’s arm around him, Sonny has sought him out, and claimed him. This makes him special and makes Guy special, at least for this moment, tonight.

They shake hands, all around. There is, perhaps, the very slightest stiffening and exaggeration of courtesy in the North African reception of Guy, but it passes swiftly, like a faintly acrid odor on the air. Sonny announces what the barmaid already knows, that Guy and Arthur are his guests—they have been his guests since they entered—and that Arthur is the son of an old friend of his, from way back yonder, and that Arthur will sing. So he meets the trio. The white bass player is from Chicago, the trombonist from Oakland, the piano player from Syracuse. And, after the first few stiff, shy seconds, they begin to talk to each other, Guy and two of the North Africans entering into a discussion which sounds—or, rather, perhaps, looks—guarded, friendly, and intense.

The trio establishes, above and beside them, a fine, rocking beat into which Arthur can enter at will. Sonny announces him as the “surprise” he had promised earlier. Arthur steps on to the bandstand.

Sonny, sitting on his bar stool, towers over Guy, who. stands beside him. The faces of the Africans, and the North Africans, burn in the dim light, like statues in a cave. And the faces beyond this circle, beyond the circle nearest Arthur, are both vivid and shapeless, a kind of breathing, waiting sea.

Arthur moves with the beat for a moment, his shoulders back, as I have seen him move while dancing. But his mind has gone blank: he cannot think of the words to a single song. He looks at Sonny, and Sonny sees this in his face, and laughs.

Daniel
saw the stone
that was hewed
out the mountain,

and everything comes together, he and the trio and the beat, Sonny’s black face and Guy’s white face, and all the other faces.

Daniel
saw the stone
that was rolled
into Babylon.

It is all right. Sonny is clapping his hands: “Well, let’s have a little church in here!” Guy’s face is burning. The other, darker faces meet him with the intensity and the beauty of the beat he rides, and the faces beyond this circle seem to come forward with a mute appeal.

Jesus is the stone
that was hewed out the mountain,
tearing down
the kingdom of this world!

The applause washes over him, like the sound of a crumbling wall. The crowd refuses to let him go. Finally, Arthur and Sonny sing together,

Oh, when I come

to the end of my journey,

weary of life,

and the battle is won.

Arthur hears the great, gallant weariness of someone making himself ready for the last, or the first, great test. Now standing next to Arthur, at once towering over him and leaning on him, one arm on Arthur’s shoulder, Sonny does not look, or seem, but is his age. It is almost certain that he will never see Arthur again. He will surely never see Paul again: but he is standing here, singing with Paul’s son.

Carrying the staff,

and the cross of redemption

Yes, Sonny Carr is old. For Arthur, he is unimaginably old. Standing next to him, Arthur can feel, as they sing together, the faint, uncontrollable tremor in the hand on his shoulder, the rasp at the bottom of his voice. His breath is slightly acrid from the years of women and whiskey and smoke; of wandering, rejection, silence, and sound; of wandering, of going under and rising up; of tears, and rage, and laughter and lust and tenderness. Arthur cannot imagine what lies before Sonny now. Does the road open, or does it close? Does he look back, wishing to turn back? What does he remember?

He remembered my father, Arthur thinks, from when my father was young. And that’s how he recognized me.

But he is too young, by far, for these speculations. So far from trying to detach himself from memory, he is only beginning to acquire one. Anguish is still, for him, a new and dreadful country, he has yet to pitch his tent, and contest the weather there. Nor does he know whether the road before him is open, or closed. Oh, yes, Sonny growls, I know, and Arthur sings with him, the last lines of the last song they sang together that night,

I’m pleased with what you’ve done,
and your race has been run
and I’ve brought you the key
and I’ve got your key here with me
and I praise God, I have another building,
not made with hands!

Guy and Arthur spend the night with Sonny and his friends, ending up having breakfast in Sonny’s apartment, which is in a courtyard off Pigalle. They get home long after the sun is up, and sleep till suppertime.

Then, there is, of course, their late, prolonged, and quiet suppertime. This is Friday night, and they agree that Arthur will leave on Sunday night.

“Paris will be empty without you,” says Guy, lying on the sofa, his head in Arthur’s lap. “I will miss you, mon cher chanteur sauvage. But even if I were a million times more unhappy than I am, I could not be sorry to have met you. It has meant very much to me, it has”—he smiles up at Arthur—“given me the hope to live again.”

“It’s been beautiful for me, too,” Arthur says. Then, “Let’s not spend the weekend saying good-bye. You know, shit, let’s have a ball. Like, let’s go and price that raincoat tomorrow, for example, and let’s say good-bye at the airport, just like that. Because you’ll see me again, baby, don’t worry about it.”

Guy grimaces. “Do not forget to send me tickets when you open at L’Olympia. That is where Josephine Baker, all the great ones, Trenet, Piaf, Montand—they all have sung there.” Arthur grunts. “No, I am not kidding. You will surely sing there, one day.”

Guy takes him to the airport on Sunday, and kisses him good-bye at the barrier. Arthur is wearing the raincoat he so admired, which Guy has insisted on buying for him. “That way, whenever it rains, you will surely think of me. Perhaps, there will be a deluge in America. That would please me very much.”

He watches Arthur’s back while Arthur gets his passport stamped. Then Arthur turns, one last time, and waves. Guy waves back. He feels tears gathering behind his eyes. Arthur’s long, lean, loping figure disappears up the ramp.

Julia had flown from Abidjan to Paris the day before, and arrived in New York, on another flight, on that same Sunday. She had warned no one of her arrival except Jimmy, but Jimmy was in the South.