He thought, Oh, it’s coming now, and felt a strange, bitter relief. He finished his drink and lit another cigarette, and watched her.
She looked over at him, as though to make certain that he was still listening.
“Nothing you’ve said so far,” he said, carefully, “seems to have much to do with being black. Except for what you make out of it. But nobody can help you there.”
She sighed sharply, in a kind of rage. “That could be true. But it’s too easy for you to say that.”
“Ida, a lot of what you’ve had to say, ever since we met, has been — too easy.” He watched her. “Hasn’t it?” And then, “Sweetheart, suffering doesn’t have a color. Does it? Can’t we step out of this nightmare? I’d give anything, I’d give anything if we could.” He crossed to her and took her in his arms. “Please, Ida, whatever has to be done, to set us free — let’s do that.”
Her eyes were full of tears. She looked down. “Let me finish my story “
“Nothing you say will make any difference.”
“You don’t know that. Are you afraid?”
He stepped back. “No.” Then, “Yes. Yes. I can’t take any more of your revenge.”
“Well, I can’t either. Let me finish.”
“Come away from the stove. I can’t eat now.”
“Everything will be ruined.”
“Let it be ruined. Come and sit down.”
He wished that he were better prepared for this moment, that he had not been with Eric, that his hunger would vanish, that his fear would drop, and love lend him a transcendent perception and concentration. But he knew himself to be physically weak and tired, not drunk, but far from sober; part of his troubled mind was far away, gorging on the conundrum of himself.
She put out the fire under the frying pan and came and sat at the table. He pushed her drink toward her, but she did not touch it.
“I knew there wasn’t any hope uptown. A lot of those men, they got their little deals going and all that, but they don’t really have anything, Mr. Charlie’s not going to let them get but so far. Those that really do have something would never have any use for me; I’m too dark for them, they see girls like me on Seventh Avenue every day. I knew what they would do to me.”
And now he knew that he did not want to hear the rest of her story. He thought of himself on Seventh Avenue; perhaps he had never left. He thought of the day behind him, of Eric and Cass and Richard, and felt himself now being sucked into the rapids of a mysterious defeat.
“There was only one thing for me to do, as Rufus used to say, and that was to hit the A train. So I hit it. Nothing was clear in my mind at first. I used to see the way white men watched me, like dogs. And I thought about what I could do to them. How I hated them, the way they looked, and the things they’d say, all dressed up in their damn white skin, and their clothes just so, and their little weak, white pricks jumping in their drawers. You could do any damn thing with them if you just led them along, because they wanted to do something dirty and they knew that you knew how. All black people knew that. Only, the polite ones didn’t say dirty. They said real. I used to wonder what in the world they did in bed, white people I mean, between themselves, to get them so sick. Because they are sick, and I’m telling you something that I know. I had a couple of girl friends and we used to go out every once in a while with some of these shitheads. But they were smart, too, they knew that they were white, and they could always go back home, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it. I thought to myself, Shit, this scene is not for me. Because I didn’t want their little change, I didn’t want to be at their mercy. I wanted them to be at mine.”
She sipped her drink.
“Well, you were calling me all the time about that time, but I didn’t really think about you very much, not seriously anyway. I liked you, but I certainly hadn’t planned to get hung up on a white boy who didn’t have any money — in fact, I hadn’t planned to get hung up on anybody. But I liked you, and the few times I saw you it was a kind of—relief—from all those other, horrible people. You were really nice to me. You didn’t have that look in your eyes. You just acted like a real sweet boy and maybe, without knowing it, I got to depend on it. Sometimes I’d just see you for a minute or so, we’d just have a cup of coffee or something like that, and I’d run off — but I felt better, I was kind of protected from their eyes and their hands. I was feeling so sick most of the time through there. I didn’t want my father to know what I was doing and I tried not to think about Rufus. That was when I decided that I ought to try to sing, I’d do it for Rufus, and then all the rest wouldn’t matter. I would have settled the score. But I thought I needed somebody to help me, and it was then, just at the time that I—” She stopped and looked down at her hands. “I think I wanted to go to bed with you, not to have an affair with you, but just to go to bed with somebody that I liked. Somebody who wasn’t old, because all those men are old, no matter how young they are. I’d only been to bed with one boy I liked, a boy on our block, but he got religion, and so it all stopped and he got married. And there weren’t any other colored men, I was afraid, because look what happened to them, they got cut down like grass! And I didn’t see any way out, except — finally — you. And Ellis.”
Then she stopped. They listened to the rain. He had finished his drink and he picked up hers. She looked down, he had the feeling that she could not look up, and he was afraid to touch her. And the silence stretched; he longed for it to end, and dreaded it; there was nothing he could say.
She straightened her shoulders and reached out for a cigarette. He lit it for her.
“Richard knows about me and Ellis,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone, “but that’s not why I’m telling you. I’m telling you because I’m trying to bring this whole awful thing to a halt. If that’s possible.”
She paused. She said, “Let me have a sip of your drink, please.”
“It’s yours,” he said. He gave it to her and poured himself another one.
She blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “It’s funny the way things work. If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t think Ellis would ever have got so hung up on me. He saw, better than I did, that I really liked you and that meant that I could really like somebody and so why not him, since he could give me so much more? And I thought so, too, that it was a kind of dirty trick for life to play on me, for me to like you better than I liked him. And, after all, the chances of its lasting were just about equal, only with him, if I played it right, I might have something to show for it when it was all over. And he was smart, he didn’t bug me about it, he said, Sure, he wanted me but he was going to help me, regardless, and the one thing had nothing to do with the other. And he did — he was very nice to me, in his way, he was as good as his word, he was nicer to me than anyone had ever been before. He used to take me out to dinner, to places where nobody would know him or where it wouldn’t matter if they did. A lot of the time we went up to Harlem, or if he knew I was sitting in somewhere, he’d drop in. He didn’t seem to be trying to hype me, not even when he talked about his wife and his kids — you know? He sounded as though he really was lonely. And, after all, I owed him a lot — and — it was nice to be treated that way and to know the cat had enough money to take you anywhere, and — ah! well, it started, I guess I’d always known it was going to start, and then, once it started, I didn’t think I could stand it but I didn’t know how to stop it. Because it’s one thing for a man to be doing all these things for you while you’re not having an affair with him and it’s another thing for him to be doing them after you’ve stopped having an affair with him. And I had to go on, I had to get up there on top, where maybe I could begin to breathe. But I saw why he’d never been upset about you. He really is smart. He was glad I was with you, he told me so; he was glad I had another boy friend because it made it easier for him. It meant I wouldn’t make any scenes, I wouldn’t think I’d fallen in love with him. It gave him another kind of power over me in a way because he knew that I was afraid of your finding out and the more afraid I got, the harder it was to refuse him. Do you understand that?”