“And you, Louise?” the man asked me, tapping his cigarette on the table. He was slim and stylishly dressed in a pale suit, and he possessed a confident gaze that was now trained on me. “What do you write?”
I took a drag of my cigarette to kill time. What was a former waitress to do when she found herself in Rome, the Eternal City, with her fella and the likes of James Baldwin? Throw out her elbows, that’s what, smoke languidly, take up as much room at the table as her little body allowed, and hope that they wouldn’t notice her tremble.
“I’ve done some political pieces,” I said at last, even though I’d written exactly one, for Downtown. Sweat dripped from the back of my neck into the collar of my new red blouse. Rome was rippling with heat that evening, like the air escaping from an oven. Scooters and small cars kicked up exhaust beyond the patio where we sat. I could see the lights of the Colosseum, and a naked column lit up in the Forum, standing with nothing to support.
“And I write fiction,” I added, a bit shyly.
“What kind of fiction?” asked Baldwin. Baldwin! I understood now why Joe had seemed so nervous in the hotel, tying and retying his tie, chain-smoking on the balcony as he waited for me to get ready. The anxiety was catching; I had it now, like a coughing bug. I’d read Go Tell It on the Mountain the minute it hit the shelves, and, in my youthful upstart way, I’d wanted to assign the book to every old white person I knew. But in the end, I’d had the guts to recommend it only to a few friends who I knew would be receptive.
We’d spent the early part of our meal discussing writers whom both Joe and Baldwin knew, what they were working on these days, their whereabouts and states of mind; that is to say, I’d been silent for the most part. This guy had decided to try his hand at poetry; this other fellow was following Hemingway around Havana, even though Hemingway couldn’t stand him. Joe and Baldwin seemed to have known each other for a while, and spoke with some camaraderie, but I noticed a sort of veil between them. They would chuckle together, but their laughter would end too soon. To me, Baldwin appeared a bit guarded, Joe tense. Both seemed relieved to turn their attention to me.
“I’d like to hear this, too,” Joe said, smiling, as he reached for his wine. “Louise is quite private when it comes to her work.”
I cleared my throat. “I’m writing a novel about a girl who moves to the moon.”
Both men made sounds of surprise. “A girl who moves to the moon,” Baldwin said. “Science fiction?”
“In a sense. It’s also a romance.” I waited for the requisite masculine eye-roll, but Baldwin’s expression did not change. I couldn’t read Joe’s. “She accepts a mission to the moon because she can’t stand where she is anymore. The girl was a pilot during the war, when there were no men to dust crops. Now that the boys are back, she’s expected to keep house. But she’d rather be sent into space.”
Baldwin tilted his head. “Who sends her?”
I hadn’t expected him to ask. Joe lifted his chin, watching me. I paused to take a bite of grilled octopus and took my time to chew.
“The Soviets.”
“The what?” said Joe.
“The Soviets,” I repeated, watching Baldwin react. He nodded slowly, a hint of a smile on his lips.
Joe raked a hand through his hair. “But that’ll outrage your readers. They’ll be clutching their apron strings.”
I let out a throaty laugh, even though my fingertips tingled in irritation. “Joe, dear, don’t make me wrap an apron string around your neck. The American heroine gets the better of the Soviet spaceman in the end. You’ll see.”
“Is it a rape fantasy?” Baldwin asked.
“Oh, goodness, no,” I said. The idea of writing a rape fantasy, though I knew it was the convention, made me feel sick to my stomach.
Baldwin raised his eyebrows. “Premarital relations, but not rape? That’s even more scandalous. You know they’re strict about who can have relations with whom, how it all goes down in fiction.”
“Good luck finding a publisher in that case,” Joe added.
I was fully ticked off at Joe now. I’d never heard him speak this way to me, so mocking, so disdainful. “Again, fellas, you’re assuming I haven’t worked all this out for myself. My hero and heroine are on the moon, remember? Marriage isn’t an option.”
Baldwin laughed. “Good girl.”
I beamed at him, ignoring Joe’s scowl. “I will say, it has something in common with rape fantasies. The male is always dangerous—an outlaw, a Greek god, some sort of rogue. I’m simply giving my reader the ultimate in forbidden men.”
“A romance with a Russian space captain.” Baldwin exhaled a laugh through his nostrils. “Might be just what the doctor ordered.”
Luckily, our dinners arrived before Joe could add anything. A waiter refilled our wineglasses, and Joe asked for a martini. When it arrived, he took a sip and opened his mouth to speak. I was halfway through my sea bass with lemon sauce, and Baldwin had tucked into his frutti di mare. Joe had barely eaten a bite.
“And you, old boy,” Joe said, and winced. In turn I winced for him, and for Baldwin. Old boy? Baldwin regarded him evenly. “What is it you’re working on these days?”
Baldwin wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Essays, mostly. I have one coming in Harper’s.”
“Really?” Joe asked, leaning forward. “What about?”
“A little town in Switzerland, of all things. I went there to recuperate, after having had some troubles. To ‘take the cure,’ as people say. Lucien brought me there, to stay in his parents’ chalet.”
Joe nodded. I felt myself flush. I’d never heard a man speak so frankly of his male partner before. Baldwin’s face remained admirably cool.
“The white people, in this isolated Swiss village,” Baldwin continued. “I was a stranger to them in the purest sense of the word: they had never seen a Black man before. There was a naïveté to their brand of racism. The children smiled as they called me the devil. The adults boasted of having ‘purchased’ heathen Africans and brought them to Christianity, as if this were a good thing. As though they had no idea there were echoes of the slave trade in their language, their ‘buying’ of Africans.” He took a drag. “It was the kind of innocence that American whites act as if they have, regarding racism. White Americans pretend to have no racist past, even though it is absolutely embedded in our history.” He regarded Joe for a long moment, without blinking. “That’s what the essay is about.”
I noticed then that Joe’s left hand, its fingers splayed on the table, trembled a little. “Racism…” he began. “Embedded in American society.” His voice sounded artificial, to me, anyway; I wondered if someone who didn’t know him well would be able to tell he was nervous. I supposed it was only natural, a white man feeling strange asking a Black man about race. But why was he pushing the issue? “What do you mean by that?”
“What do I mean by that?” For the first time, Baldwin, too, seemed ruffled. “Oh, Joe.” He slid his fingers into his jacket pocket, searching for another cigarette. “There you go, proving my point.”
My heart beat violently. I couldn’t look Baldwin in the eye. When he spoke of “American whites,” he wasn’t counting us as exceptions. We were part of the problem. And why wouldn’t Joe just shut up, already? Instead, he attempted a laugh. “I just mean…can you tell us any specifics, old—” He stopped himself. “Any other specifics, from the article?”
A waiter appeared and lit Baldwin’s cigarette. He gave the man a nod. “There’s a specific for you.” He gestured in a coil of smoke. “That man right there, lighting my cigarette. In the U.S., right now, there would be no white waiter offering me a light. I wouldn’t even be allowed to sit at this table.”
“It isn’t right,” I said, feebly.
Baldwin didn’t acknowledge me. “You can’t expect us to be silent,” he said to Joe, pointing his lit cigarette at him.
I looked from him to Joe. I had a sense they’d had a conversation like this one before. Joe was licking his lips, seeming to search for something to say. He took a long drink of ice water as Baldwin smoked.
I laid my hand on top of Joe’s. “Darling,” I said, “you can always read the essay when it comes out.”
Finally, Baldwin laughed. “That he can,” he said, and returned to his meal.
Joe smiled, but it was more of a grimace. He waited a second, then withdrew his hand from mine.
“Hey,” I said later as we walked toward the hotel, “I wanted to shoot the breeze for a while; let’s go back to the fountain.” We’d just stumbled through the little square that held the outsized Trevi Fountain, or at least I thought that was what it was, tucked among throngs of young people eating gelato and smoking. At well past midnight, the crowd seemed only to be getting started, and I had no desire to return home to bed.
“The food was tops, don’t you think? Just amazing,” I said when Joe didn’t answer. I hobbled along with him, the backs of my heels shredded to lunch meat by the new pumps I hadn’t bothered to break in. “And what Baldwin said about McCarthy losing power—I hope he’s right. Can’t you slow down a bit?”
Joe kept looking forward, ignoring me. He’d said very little after we left the restaurant. I assumed he felt embarrassed by the gaffes he’d made and ruffled by what Baldwin had to say about race. In the green light cast by a neon pharmacy sign, I saw a muscle clench in Joe’s jaw.
At last, I kicked off both shoes and scooped them up, leaving my bare soles to the grimy paving stones. “Ouch. Much better.” Joe walked a bit ahead of me, hands in his pockets, and I had to skip to catch up with him. “You haven’t said a word in five minutes. What’s on your mind?”
He paused for a while, pursing his lips. “If you must know, it’s you.”
“Me?” You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. “Me?!”
“Yes, you. Going on about your novel, about a girl defecting to the Soviets. What in the hell would make you think that was a good idea?”
My face felt very hot. “I thought it wouldn’t matter, since—what was it?—the average apron-wearer reading my work probably wouldn’t know anything about politics.”
He raised both clenched hands in front of him, as if he were crushing an imaginary beach ball. “You’re an American writer,” he began, as if I didn’t know this already. “You write things that are critical of America, you’re doing exactly what the Soviets are doing to us deliberately and effectively at this very moment. Haven’t you noticed how rude they are to Americans here?”
“Not really,” I muttered, even though I had felt snubbed in a few places.
“Well, they are, because the Kremlin wants them to be. There’s propaganda all around us, floating in the airwaves, over the wires: Americans are illiterate cowboys who eat cheeseburgers and drive Chevrolets. Americans have no culture. Baldwin may be right about those Swiss treating him badly, but he missed the bigger picture: we’re all strangers in Europe, because we’re Americans. White or Black.”
“I don’t know that our experience really compares.”
Joe ignored me. “We’re going to lose this war if at the very least we don’t put our best faces forward and get some of Europe’s elites on our side. You can’t aid the Soviets in producing anti-American propaganda.”
I watched him wipe a bit of spittle from his lower lip. Were we still talking about me, or was this really about Baldwin? Was I the easier target? “My book isn’t Soviet propaganda,” I replied. “A woman defects to the Soviets, yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m pro-Soviet.” I was on a roll now, my voice gaining volume. “I already told you, the girl gets the better of the Russian guy in the end. My book will be critical of the Soviets and the Americans. Weren’t you listening?”
We’d passed yet another apothecary, and in the sickly greenish glow I’d seen someone I knew. But that was impossible. We were in Rome, not New York. I craned my neck, peering over Joe’s shoulder.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “We just passed someone I’ve seen before.”
“That’s impossible, Lou, we’re nowhere near home,” Joe replied. He’d just begun to walk faster, it seemed, and I strained to focus on the man in the hat huddled in the doorway.
“Oh!” A memory fired in my brain. “I know where I saw him. He was the man in the café this morning. You would’ve laughed—this guy had an American book tucked into an Italian newspaper. I told him I wouldn’t spill. Wait….” It looked as if he’d left the pharmacy’s stoop and joined the people strolling behind us. “Is he following us?”
“I doubt it,” Joe said, but then his hand was firm at my elbow. We were taking a sudden left, him steering me, even though I was sure we needed to go right to get to our hotel.
“Joe,” I hissed, looking backward, “Jesus Christ! The guy is following us. Aren’t you worried? I see him this morning, and now again—”
Joe grabbed me by the wrists and slammed me against the wall of the alley. His eyes, close to mine, were dark and hooded and barely recognizable.
“Stop. It.” His breath smelled both sweet and foul, like red wine. “Your voice is too loud. You’re talking nonsense. Understand?”
We were alone in the narrow passage, an ancient drainage path between two stone buildings. Sluice channels, probably laid in Caesar Augustus’s day, felt slimy and wet under my bare feet. I thought of what Joe had said to Harry, the way he’d held him, just as he was holding me.
“Why do I need to be quiet, Joe?” I whispered.
Joe held my gaze for another minute; then, slowly, he let me go. He looked up and down the alley—no one there. His shoulders fell a bit. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, half in a daze. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Joe.” Tears had sprung to my eyes, even though I felt more angry than sad. “What in the world? You’ve never done something like this to me before.”
“I’m just…” He wiped his hand across his brow. “Had too much to drink. I—I’m sorry.”
We did not touch the rest of the way home, but I could still feel the imprint of his fingers on my wrists. My mouth opened several times; each time, it closed.
We did not speak once we returned to our room, either, but brushed our teeth beside each other with all the intimacy of strangers on a subway, then curled up on opposite corners of the bed.
When I woke up at two in the morning, head pounding and mouth dry, Joe’s side of the bed was empty. I came through the double French doors into the main part of the room, squinting. Joe stood in his loafers by the little closet, quietly getting into his jacket.
“Joe,” I croaked, “come on now. What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” he whispered. “I have to go out for a bit. Go back to bed.”
He turned his back on me. I had the sense that I was bothering him, that I’d become an unwelcome guest in my own hotel room. It made my stomach ache. I did as he said and returned to bed. But I did not sleep, not until he came in, at near five in the morning, and slid back under the covers beside me, in silence.