He was silent for a moment. Then, “Of course, he’s an asshole, too. Lord. I used to like to just get on a bus and go to some strange part of town by myself and just walk around or go to the movies by myself or just read or just goof. But, no. You had to be a man where I come from, and you had to prove it, prove it all the time. But I could tell you things” He sighed. “Well, my Dad’s still there, sort of helping to keep the liquor industry going. Most of the kids I knew are dead or in jail or on junk. I’m just a bum; I’m lucky.”
She listened because she knew that he was going back over it, looking at it, trying to put it all together, to understand it, to express it. But he had not expressed it. He had left something of himself back there on the streets of Brooklyn which he was afraid to look at again.
“One time,” he said, “we got into a car and drove over to the Village and we picked up this queer, a young guy, and we drove him back to Brooklyn. Poor guy, he was scared green before we got halfway there but he couldn’t jump out of the car. We drove into this garage, there were seven of us, and we made him go down on all of us and then we beat the piss out of him and took all his money and took his clothes and left him lying on that cement floor, and, you know, it was winter.” He looked over at her, looked directly at her for the first time that morning. “Sometimes I still wonder if they found him in time, or if he died, or what.” He put his hands together and looked out of the window. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m still the same person who did those things — so long ago.”
No. It was not expressed. She wondered why. Perhaps it was because Vivaldo’s recollections in no sense freed him from the things recalled. He had not gone back into it — that time, that boy; he regarded it with a fascinated, even romantic horror, and he was looking for a way to deny it.
Perhaps such secrets, the secrets of everyone, were only expressed when the person laboriously dragged them into the light of the world, imposed them on the world, and made them a part of the world’s experience. Without this effort, the secret place was merely a dungeon in which the person perished; without this effort, indeed, the entire world would be an uninhabitable darkness; and she saw, with a dreadful reluctance, why this effort was so rare. Reluctantly, because she then realized that Richard had bitterly disappointed her by writing a book in which he did not believe. In that moment she knew, and she knew that Richard would never face it, that the book he had written to make money represented the absolute limit of his talent. It had not really been written to make money — if only it had been! It had been written because he was afraid, afraid of things dark, strange, dangerous, difficult, and deep.
I don’t care, she told herself, quickly. And: It’s not his fault if he’s not Dostoievski, I don’t care. But whether or not she cared didn’t matter. He cared, cared tremendously, and he was dependent on her faith in him.
“Isn’t it strange,” she said, suddenly, “that you should be remembering all these things now!”
“Maybe,” he said, after a moment, “it’s because of her. When I went up there, the day she called me to say Rufus was dead — I don’t know — I walked through that block and I walked in that house and it all seemed — I don’t know—familiar.” He turned his pale, troubled face toward her but she felt that he was staring at the high, hard wall which stood between himself and his past. “I don’t just mean that I used to spend a lot of time in Harlem,” and he looked away, nervously, “I was hardly ever there in the daytime anyway. I mean, there were the same kids on the block that used to be on my block — they were colored but they were the same, really the same — and, hell, the hallways have the same stink, and everybody’s, well, trying to make it but they know they haven’t got much of a chance. The same old women, the same old men — maybe they’re a little bit more alive—and I walked into that house and they were just sitting there, Ida and her mother and her father, and there were some other people there, relatives, maybe, and friends. I don’t know, no one really spoke to me except Ida and she didn’t say much. And they all looked at me as though — well, as though I had done it — and, oh, I wanted so bad to take that girl in my arms and kiss that look off her face and make her know that I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t do it, whoever was doing it was doing it to me, too.” He was crying, silently, and he bent forward, hiding his face with one long hand. “I know I failed him, but I loved him, too, and nobody there wanted to know that. I kept thinking, They’re colored and I’m white but the same things have happened, really the same things, and how can I make them know that?”
“But they didn’t,” she said, “happen to you because you were white. They just happened. But what happens up here”—and the cab came out of the park; she stretched her hands, inviting him to look—“happens because they are colored. And that makes a difference.” And, after a moment, she dared to add, “You’ll be kissing a long time, my friend, before you kiss any of this away.”
He looked out of the window, drying his eyes. They had come out on Lenox Avenue, though their destination was on Seventh; and nothing they passed was unfamiliar because everything they passed was wretched. It was not hard to imagine that horse carriages had once paraded proudly up this wide avenue and ladies and gentlemen, ribboned, be-flowered, brocaded, plumed, had stepped down from their carriages to enter these houses which time and folly had so blasted and darkened. The cornices had once been new, had once gleamed as brightly as now they sulked in shame, all tarnished and despised. The windows had not always been blind. The doors had not always brought to mind the distrust and secrecy of a city long besieged. At one time people had cared about these houses — that was the difference; they had been proud to walk on this Avenue; it had once been home, whereas now it was prison.
Now, no one cared: this indifference was all that joined this ghetto to the mainland. Now, everything was falling down and the owners didn’t care; no one cared. The beautiful children in the street, black-blue, brown, and copper, all with a gray ash on their faces and legs from the cold wind, like the faint coating of frost on a window or a flower, didn’t seem to care, that no one saw their beauty. Their elders, great, trudging, black women, lean, shuffling men, had taught them, by precept or example, what it meant to care or not to care: whatever precepts were daily being lost, the examples remained, all up and down the street. The trudging women trudged, paused, came in and out of dark doors, talked to each other, to the men, to policemen, stared into shop windows, shouted at the children, laughed, stopped to caress them. All the faces, even those of the children, held a sweet or poisonous disenchantment which made their faces extraordinarily definite, as though they had been struck out of stone. The cab sped uptown, past men in front of barber shops, in front of barbeque joints, in front of bars; sped past side streets, long, dark, noisome, with gray houses leaning forward to cut out the sky; and in the shadow of these houses, children buzzed and boomed, as thick as flies on flypaper. Then they turned off the Avenue, west, crawled up a long, gray street. They had to crawl, for the street was choked with unhurrying people and children kept darting out from between the cars which were parked, for the length of the street, on either side. There were people on the stoops, people shouting out of windows, and young men peered indifferently into the slow-moving cab, their faces set ironically and their eyes unreadable.