The men noticed me through the hazy light and motioned excitedly for me to approach them. They had longish hair in the prevailing style and swarthy, unshaven faces, though I could tell from their voices that they were in their twenties, the youthful ring still there.
“Hey, man, c’mover here, yeah,” the skinnier one said to me. “Hey, Sonny, look, man, it’s like, ‘The Master.’ Hey, old-timer, c’mover here and have a toke with us.”
I decided to speak to them, as I thought to ask them if they knew Sunny, and whether she was inside.
“Hey, man,” the same one said, handing me the pipe. “Would you mind calling me ‘Grasshopper’? Will you say it?”
“I’m looking for my daughter.”
“Yeah, sure. Will you just say it?”
“Do you know her? Is she inside?”
“Just a sec, old-timer, first things first. C’mon, say it for us. Say, ‘Well done, Grasshopper.’”
“The entire phrase?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
So I said to him, “Well done, Grasshopper.”
At this they instantly broke out in laughter, the skinny one slapping his knee as he bellowed. His thick-cheeked friend was slower in his movements, not laughing as soundly but almost silently, as if he’d tickled himself with a funny idea.
I asked them, “Do you know my daughter, Sunny? Is she inside the house?”
The skinny one kept laughing but thumbed toward the front door, waving me to go in. All the while he kept saying the phrase to his friend in a choppy, halting voice, not at all as I had spoken it. My accent has never been perfect, and was less so then, but I’ve always been somewhat proud of my flowing verbiage, and that I speak in the familiar, accepted rhythms.
“Is she inside?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the skinny one said, hardly able to look at me without gasping, “everybody’s in the house.”
“Thank you.”
I returned the pipe (untried) and ventured up the tumbled, cracked concrete steps to the door. I banged the fake brass knocker but even I could hardly hear it for the loudness of the music inside. The knob hung loose and was almost falling off and the door swung open with a slight push. The place was raucous and crowded. As there was no foyer I was immediately in the small living room, where people were crammed onto the sectional L-shaped sofa, as well as sitting on its back and low arms. People were dancing everywhere, couples and then sole men unsteadily swaying to themselves. What struck me immediately was that a number of the partygoers were black and Puerto Rican; colored people were a rare sight in Bedley Run, especially at social events, and never did one see such “mixed” gatherings. I, certainly, would sometimes find myself at Mary Burns’s country club for social hours and dances, the only one of my kind, a minor but still uncomfortable feeling, like the digging edge of an overstarched collar. But here everyone seemed unconcerned, and I was strangely heartened by the fact, though my next thought was that Sunny wasn’t simply involving herself intimately with all these men white and brown and black, but was living with them as well, with no other company but theirs.
I didn’t see her anywhere in the room. There were glances and bemused stares but no one seemed to care much about my presence as I went from one group to the next. I was surprised by how few women there were, perhaps a handful out of the crowd of twenty-five or thirty. They looked much older than Sunny, at least twice her age, sallow and fleshy and long-traveled from their youth. I was reminded of the women who sat on stools outside certain alley shops of my native seaside town, their faces painted the colors of crimson and ash, languorous popular songs filtering out beneath the lanterned eaves of their tiny “houses.”
The house kitchen was a rancid, overflowing mess of bottles and ashtrays and spaghetti sauce — stained dishes, the doorless cupboards mostly bare except for a few cans of chili and soup. Down the corridor to the bedrooms there were people sitting on the floor against the walls, drinking beer and smoking while they waited for the bathroom. I could see the doors of the two bedrooms down at the end, and suddenly I was deeply afraid of what I might do if I found her behind one of them. I couldn’t bear to imagine what awful sight it might be, what horrible tangle and depravity. I had only really seen Sunny with boys at the country club, all of them in their tennis whites and sneakers, or at the cotillion-type gatherings in the evenings, their bodies orderly and arranged and the touching in steady orchestrations, the careful waltzes and reels. Even then I used to wonder how I should feel when I saw some severely slim, tall lad place his hand on the small of her back, let it slip down a notch, whether I ought to burn with indignation or shiver or stand back in prideful and surrendering melancholy. And if she were only mine, of my own blood, would the feelings run different? Would I tremble and shake with an even purer intensity?
The first door was half-opened, and when I peered inside a group of a half-dozen or so young people were sitting in a circle, passing around a large pipe. Someone jeered at me and as I didn’t see Sunny among them, I quickly shut the door. I knocked on the other door and announced myself as loudly as I could, but there was no answer. I repeated the action but to no avail. I tried the knob and found it, like everything about the house, unsecured. A stereo was playing its own blaring music. The room was illuminated by a bizarre flowing-liquid bulb of a lamp, the light poor and in a dizzying mix of colors, and in the dim I saw a large bed with high corner posts, a gauzy sheet thrown over as a makeshift canopy. Two figures languidly wrestled within the lair; I called to them, but again could hardly hear my own voice. Then one of them, I thought the man, kneeled up on the bed and lay on the other. The two began then, moving in that clipped, rolling action I dreaded to see. I shuddered with the thought that she was under him. I couldn’t hear them and they couldn’t hear me, and I approached the veiled bed. They didn’t see me, being in their own realm. Were I an assassin, they would have been doomed.
I touched the netting at the foot of the bed, and at that moment the music paused and a murmur rose up — she had noticed me. And yet she didn’t rebel. It was hard to see and I called her name and she cooed, and what I could make out finally was that she was beckoning me, darkly, taunting me with the vile display of her carnality. I had with me a small dagger, which I sometimes carried for self-defense, but now I felt its menacing weight in my breast pocket, its leather scabbard hard against my chest. My heart flooded black, and at that moment I wished she were nothing to me, dead or gone or disappeared, so that I might strike out at the bodies with the full force of my rage, tear at them with whatever strength I could muster.
“Hey, man, it’s not like a block party,” a gruff voice said. “You gotta be invited.”
“Sunny,” I said, suddenly unable to speak but weakly. “Sunny…”
“Let him in, sugar,” a softer voice lazily answered. “C’mon. C’mon, sugar, yeah, come inside.”
The record repeated and the woman inside the bed reached out to me. She had turned on a bed lamp. Her fingers were long and thin, and I realized it wasn’t Sunny at all. She had a narrow, drawn expression with sleepy eyes. She smiled faintly, her lips moving, saying something. Her partner had already ceased caring about my presence, and he went back to his business, his hips working their way between her heavy, stippled thighs. But she kept her attention on me, unctuously gesturing, and even as he leaned and bucked into her she held out her open hand to me, as if I should take it when I crept my way inside.
I left the room straightaway, nearly stumbling over the huddled drinkers and smokers in the narrow corridor. All of a sudden the house seemed unbearably small and stifling. Someone was flicking on and off the hall and living room lights, and the effect was maddening and disorienting. Most everyone in the house began to dance, the music having changed from rock songs to the incessant beat of disco music, which was immensely popular at the time. But to me everything seemed a jangle of limbs. I began to feel that this house, these people, the party, were spinning out of control. The living room was transformed into a rank swamp of bodies, and having no path of exit, I stepped outside the back kitchen door as quickly as I could.