He missed his jasmine shirt, too, which had been a gift from Irene on his thirty-eighth birthday, and which he had cherished over the interceding year and a half, almost two years. The maroon sweater had disappeared a long time ago, gone the way of all shabby sweaters and attitudes, and now the jasmine shirt had a bullet hole in it, and it too had been replaced with a bass guitar player’s excellently tailored threads, and Melanie had promised to swallow him alive.
The suspense was killing him.
The suspense at first was compounded of two equal parts: the possibility that Freddie and Lou might at any moment knock on the apartment door, and the further possibility that Melanie might at any moment swallow him alive. There was something very strange about Melanie in that she had told him she did not trust any white man (he believed her) and yet she would not let him out of her sight, would not let go of his hand, would not stop rubbing her long sinuous cat’s body against him at every opportunity. He was beginning to suspect that she was naked beneath the clinging Pucci silk, and the notion of exploring this darkest heart, the possibility of being swallowed alive by a race and an intelligence that went back millenniums, consumed as it were by someone or something that simultaneously hated him and desired him was tantalizing and terribly exciting. But conversely, and contradictorily, and contrarily, he was terrified that she would indeed envelop him in her blackness, completely enclose him in the centuries-old vastness of her mother womb, absorb him, cause him to disappear from view entirely, swallow him alive exactly as she had promised.
Adding to the suspense was the advancing hour. He had crashed the party at perhaps twenty minutes past midnight, and it was now ten minutes past one, with still no sign of the diligent Freddie and Lou. This was a large apartment building, of course, and it could be assumed that if they were knocking on every door it would take them quite a while to work their way around to Melanie’s apartment, by which time she might already have feasted upon him and drunk his blood. Or, worse fate, Freddie and Lou might break in on the moment of climax, catch them in delicto, as it were, adding Indecent Exposure to their charges, or perhaps Disorderly Conduct, or perhaps extraditing him to Alabama and slapping him with a retroactive charge of Miscegenation, there were all sorts of possibilities to the law now that he was a fugitive.
By this time, many of Melanie’s guests, both black and white (the white ones puzzled him since he couldn’t understand why someone who didn’t trust white men would have three white men and two white women among her Friday-night party guests), were beginning to say their farewells and go off into the night to pursue their separate desires. He knew for certain now that Melanie was naked beneath the silk. He touched her breast and saw the nipple rise against the fabric and then she pulled away from him and smiled in wicked encouragement, and he saw desire and hatred mingled again on her face and wanted to love her and simultaneously wanted to destroy her, it was all very confusing.
In one moment, he hoped that Freddie and Lou would arrive quickly, revolvers drawn, handcuffs waiting, to carry him away from this dangerous, hateful cannibal who would most surely destroy him. But in the next moment, he devoutly wished that they would never find him, that he could take this exciting, beautiful, passionate and wanton woman, ravage her repeatedly, hate her, love her, possess her, be possessed by her, merge with her, become one with her, become some vaguely defined beige mixture of arms and legs and lips, settle the entire civil-rights movement there on her bed without assistance from Martin Luther King or anyone, thrash out the hate and leave only the love, and yet knowing this was impossible because too much of it was compounded in hate. Suspensefully, Melanie took his hand between her own two hands, palms full and cushioned and moist, and brought them to her mouth and nibbled at his fingers while he watched the clock. Help me Freddie and Lou, he thought, why is there never a cop around when you need one?
He noticed a rather fat and frizzled Negro woman sitting in an easy chair near the record player, moving her crossed leg in time to the music, so that her sandaled foot tapped out the beat on thin air. The woman was perhaps fifty or fifty-five, and she was wearing a black muu muu, white pearls around her throat, hair cut just like Melanie’s, in close tight African style. She kept beating her foot on the air as though she were squashing white missionaries and Belgian nuns, her skin very black, her teeth very white, her black eyes darting around the room as the number of guests dwindled, until finally it was a quarter-to-two, and the only people in the room were Melanie, the very black and menacing woman in the muu muu, and he himself, Andrew Mullaney.
It occurred to him along about then that Freddie and Lou were not going to find him this night, and so he began resigning himself to the pleasurably hateful fate of making love to Melanie. Suspense being a delicate thing at best, however, he realized that whereas Freddie and Lou were no longer a qualifying element, the large woman in the muu muu definitely was. He wondered if she was planning to spend the night, and then wondered how he could delicately ask about her.
Melanie saved him the trouble by saying, “I don’t think you’ve met my mother.”
“I don’t think I have,” Mullaney said. “Pleasure.”
“The white man is a horse’s ass,” Melanie’s mother said, not meaning anything personal.
“Don’t mind her,” Melanie said. “Would you help me take out the garbage?”
“The white man is fit for taking out the garbage,” Melanie’s mother said.
“Don’t mind her,” Melanie said. “The incinerator is down the hall.”
“The white man is fit for the incinerator,” Melanie’s mother said, which sent a shiver up Mullaney’s spine.
They gathered up the bags of garbage in the kitchen, and carried them to the front door. At the door, Melanie said, “Why don’t you go to sleep, Mother,” and Mother simply replied, I’m not sleepy.”
“Very well,” Melanie said, and sighed, and opened the door. She preceded Mullaney down the empty hallway toward the small incinerator room. He pulled open the furnace door for her, and she dropped the bags of garbage down the chute. Below, somewhere in the bowels of the building, there was the sense if not the actual sound and smell of licking flames, a hidden well of fire destroying the waste of a metropolis. He released the handle, and the door banged back into place. Below, the building throbbed with consuming fire, a dull steady roar that vibrated into the soles of his feet and shuddered through the length of his body.
“Kiss me,” Melanie said.
This is the gamble, he thought as he took her into his arms. This is why I took the gamble a year ago, I took it for this moment in this room, this girl in my arms here and now, I have written sonnets about girls like this. I took the gamble so that I could make love to women in the stacks of the New York Public Library, I took the gamble so that I could make love to women in incinerator rooms, black or white, yellow or red, lowering her to the floor and raising the Pucci silk up over her brown thighs and reaching his hand into the thick tangled black hair suddenly revealed, the pink wet wonder of her parting to receive him, “I hate you,” she said, “Yes,” he said, “love me,” and she wrapped her long legs around him. He reached for the top of her dress, lowered it off her shoulders and kissed the dark nipples against the dark skin, “I hate you,” she said again, “Love me,” he said, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” her teeth clamped into his lips, he could taste blood, he thought She will kill me, and thought This is the gamble, and remembered he had once very long ago when he was a soldier made love, no, had not made love, had laid, had humped, had fucked a Negro prostitute in a curbside crib while his buddy waited outside for his turn, and had not considered it a gamble. And had later told Irene that he had once laid a colored girl, and she had said, “How lucky you arc,” and he had not known whether or not she was kidding. Here and now, here with the fires of hell burning in the building below, here with a girl who repeated over and over again as he moved inside her, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” he wondered about the gamble for the first time in a year, and came without her. “I hate you,” she said, with excellent reason this time.