Again something warned him to stop, to leave this poor little girl alone; and at the same time the fact that he thought of her as a poor little girl caused him to smile with real affection, and he said, “You’ve got a lot of guts, Leona.”
“Got to, the way I look at it,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’ll just give up. But—how do you give up?”
She looked so lost and comical that he laughed out loud and, after a moment, she laughed too.
“If my husband could see me now,” and she giggled, “my, my, my!”
“Why, what would your husband say?” he asked her.
“Why — I don’t know.” But her laugh didn’t come this time. She looked at him as though she were slowly coming out of a dream. “Say — do you think I could have another drink?”
“Sure, Leona,” and he took her glass and their hands and their bodies touched for a moment. She dropped her eyes. “Be right back,” he said, and dropped back into the room, in which the lights now were dim. Someone was playing the piano.
“Say, man, how you coming with Eva?” the host asked.
“Fine, fine, we lushing it up.”
“That ain’t nowhere. Blast Little Eva with some pot. Let her get her kicks.”
“I’ll see to it that she gets her kicks,” he said.
“Old Rufus left her out there digging the Empire State building, man,” said the young saxophonist, and laughed.
“Give me some of that,” Rufus said, and somebody handed him a stick and he took a few drags.
“Keep it, man. It’s choice.”
He made a couple of drinks and stood in the room for a moment, finishing the pot and digging the piano. He felt fine, clean, on top of everything, and he had a mild buzz on when he got back to the balcony.
“Is everybody gone home?” she asked, anxiously. “It’s so quiet in there.”
“No,” he said, “they just sitting around.” She seemed prettier suddenly, and softer, and the river lights fell behind her like a curtain. This curtain seemed to move as she moved, heavy and priceless and dazzling. “I didn’t know,” he said, “that you were a princess.”
He gave her her drink and their hands touched again. “I know you must he drunk,” she said, happily, and now, over her drink, her eyes unmistakably called him.
He waited. Everything seemed very simple now. He played with her fingers. “You seen anything you want since you been in New York?”
“Oh,” she said, “I want it all!”
“You see anything you want right now?”
Her fingers stiffened slightly but he held on. “Go ahead. Tell me. You ain’t got to be afraid.” These words then echoed in his head. He had said this before, years ago, to someone else. The wind grew cold for an instant, blowing around his body and ruffling her hair. Then it died down.
“Do you?” she asked faintly.
“Do I what?”
“See anything you want?”
He realized that he was high from the way his fingers seemed hung up in hers and from the way he was staring at her throat. He wanted to put his mouth there and nibble it slowly, leaving it black and blue. At the same time he realized how far they were above the city and the lights below seemed to be calling him. He walked to the balcony’s edge and looked over. Looking straight down, he seemed to be standing on a cliff in the wilderness, seeing a kingdom and a river which had not been seen before. He could make it his, every inch of the territory which stretched beneath and around him now, and, unconsciously, he began whistling a tune and his foot moved to find the pedal of his drum. He put his drink down carefully on the balcony floor and beat a riff with his fingers on the stone parapet.
“You never answered my question.”
“What?”
He turned to face Leona, who held her drink cupped in both her hands and whose brow was quizzically lifted over her despairing eyes and her sweet smile.
“You never answered mine.”
“Yes, I did.” She sounded more plaintive than ever. “I said I wanted it all.”
He took her drink from her and drank half of it, then gave the glass back, moving into the darkest part of the balcony.
“Well, then,” he whispered, “come and get it.”
She came toward him, holding her glass against her breasts. At the very last moment, standing directly before him, she whispered in bafflement and rage, “What are you trying to do to me?”
“Honey,” he answered, “I’m doing it,” and he pulled her to him as roughly as he could. He had expected her to resist and she did, holding the glass between them and frantically trying to pull her body away from his body’s touch. He knocked the glass out of her hand and it fell dully to the balcony floor, rolling away from them. Go ahead, he thought humorously; if I was to let you go now you’d be so hung up you’d go flying over this balcony, most likely. He whispered, “Go ahead, fight. I like it. Is this the way they do down home?”
“Oh God,” she murmured, and began to cry. At the same time, she ceased struggling. Her hands came up and touched his face as though she were blind. Then she put her arms around his neck and clung to him, still shaking. His lips and his teeth touched her ears and her neck and he told her. “Honey, you ain’t got nothing to cry about yet.”
Yes, he was high; every thing he did he watched himself doing, and he began to feel a tenderness for Leona which he had not expected to feel. He tried, with himself, to make amends for what he was doing — for what he was doing to her. Everything seemed to take a very long time. He got hung up on her breasts, standing out like mounds of yellow cream, and the tough, brown, tasty nipples, playing and nuzzling and nibbling while she moaned and whimpered and her knees sagged. He gently lowered them to the floor, pulling her on top of him. He held her tightly at the hip and the shoulder. Part of him was worried about the host and hostess and the other people in the room but another part of him could not stop the crazy thing which had begun. Her fingers opened his shirt to the navel, her tongue burned his neck and his chest; and his hands pushed up her skirt and caressed the inside of her thighs. Then, after a long, high time, while he shook beneath every accelerating tremor of her body, he forced her beneath him and he entered her. For a moment he thought she was going to scream, she was so tight and caught her breath so sharply, and stiffened so. But then she moaned, she moved beneath him. Then, from the center of his rising storm, very slowly and deliberately, he began the slow ride home.
And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep. They murmured and sobbed on this journey, he softly, insistently cursed. Each labored to reach a harbor: there could be no rest until this motion became unbearably accelerated by the power that was rising in them both. Rufus opened his eyes for a moment and watched her face, which was transfigured with agony and gleamed in the darkness like alabaster. Tears hung in the corners of her eyes and the hair at her brow was wet. Her breath came with moaning and short cries, with words he couldn’t understand, and in spite of himself he began moving faster and thrusting deeper. He wanted her to remember him the longest day she lived. And, shortly, nothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs. She began to cry. I told you, he moaned, I’d give you something to cry about, and, at once, he felt himself strangling, about to explode or die. A moan and a curse tore through him while he beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies.