“Yes. I told her before anything happened.” He smiled. “But you know how that is — we were trying to be honorable. Nothing could really have stopped us by that time; we needed each other too much.”
“What are you going to do now? When does”—he gestured toward the letter, which was somewhere beneath his belly button—“Yves get here?”
“In about two weeks. According to that letter. It may be a little longer. It may be sooner.”
“Have you told Cass that?”
“No. I’ll tell her tomorrow.”
“How do you think she’ll take it?”
“Well, she’s always known he was on his way. I don’t know how she’ll take — his actual arrival.”
In the streets, they heard footsteps, walking fast, and someone whistling.
Eric stared at the wall again, frowning heavily. Other voices were heard in the street. “I guess the bars are beginning to close,” said Eric.
“Yes.” Vivaldo leaned up, looking toward the blinds which held back the jungle. “Eric. How’s one going to get through it all? How can you live if you can’t love? And how can you live if you do?”
And he stared at Eric, who said nothing, whose face gleamed in the yellow light, as mysteriously impersonal and as fearfully moving as might have been a death mask of Eric as a boy. He realized that they were both beginning to be drunk.
“I don’t see how I can live with Ida, and I don’t see how I can live without her. I get through every day on a prayer. Every morning, when I wake up, I’m surprised to find that she’s still beside me.” Eric was watching him, perfectly rigid and still, seeming scarcely to breathe, only his unmoving eyes were alive. “And yet”—he caught his breath—“sometimes I wish she weren’t there, sometimes I wish I’d never met her, sometimes I think I’d go anywhere to get this burden off me. She never lets me forget I’m white, she never lets me forget she’s colored. And I don’t care, I don’t care — did Rufus do that to you? Did he try to make you pay?”
Eric dropped his eyes, and his lips tightened. “Ah. He didn’t try. I paid.” He raised his eyes to Vivaldo’s. “But I’m not sad about it any more. If it hadn’t been for Rufus, I would never have had to go away, I would never have been able to deal with Yves.” And then, rising and walking to the window, from which more and more voices rose, “Maybe that’s what love is for.”
“Are you sleeping with anyone besides Cass?”
Eric turned. “No.”
“I’m sorry. I just thought you might be. I’m not sleeping with anyone except Ida.”
“We can’t be everywhere at once,” said Eric.
They listened to the footfalls and voices in the street: someone was singing, someone called, someone was cursing. Someone ran. Then silence, again.
“You know,” said Eric, “it’s true that you can make kids without love. But if you do love the person you make the kids with, it must be something fantastic.”
“Ida and I could have great kids,” said Vivaldo.
“Do you think you will?”
“I don’t know. I’d love to — but”—he fell back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t know.”
He allowed himself, for a moment, the luxury of dreaming of Ida’s children, though he knew that these children would never be born and that this moment was all he would ever have of them. Nevertheless, he dreamed of a baby boy who had Ida’s mouth and eyes and forehead, his hair, only curlier, his build, their color. What would that color be? From the streets, again, came a cry and a crash and a roar. Eric switched off the night light and opened the blinds and Vivaldo joined him at the window. But now there was nothing to see, the street was empty, dark, and still, though an echo of voices, diminishing, floated back.
“One of the last times I saw Rufus,” Vivaldo said, abruptly — and stopped. He had not thought about it since that moment; in a way, he had never thought about it at all.
“Yes?” He could barely make out Eric’s face in the darkness. He turned away from Eric and sat down on the bed again, and lit a cigarette. And in the tiny flare, Eric’s face leapt at him, then dropped back into darkness. He watched the red-black silhouette of Eric’s head against the dim glow of the Venetian blinds.
He remembered that terrible apartment again, and Leona’s tears, and Rufus with the knife, and the bed with the twisted gray sheet and the thin blanket: and it all seemed to have happened many, many years ago.
But, in fact, it had only been a matter of months.
“I never told this to anybody before,” he said, “and I really don’t know why I’m telling you. It’s just that the last time I saw Rufus, before he disappeared, when he was still with Leona”—he caught his breath, he dragged on his cigarette and the glow brought the room back into the world, then dropped it again into chaos—“we had a fight, he said he was going to kill me. And. at the very end, when he was finally in bed, after he’d cried, and after he’d told me — so many terrible things — I looked at him, he was lying on his side, his eyes were half open, he was looking at me. I was taking off my pants, Leona was staying at my place and I was going to stay there, I was afraid to leave him alone. Well, when he looked at me, just before he closed his eyes and turned on his side away from me, all curled up, I had the weirdest feeling that he wanted me to take him in my arms. And not for sex, though maybe sex would have happened. I had the feeling that he wanted someone to hold him, to hold him, and that, that night, it had to be a man. I got in the bed and I thought about it and I watched his back, it was as dark in that room, then, as it is in this room, now, and I lay on my back and I didn’t touch him and I didn’t sleep. I remember that night as a kind of vigil. I don’t know whether he slept or not, I kept trying to tell from his breathing — but I couldn’t tell, it was too choppy, maybe he was having nightmares. I loved Rufus, I loved him, I didn’t want him to die. But when he was dead, I thought about it, thought about it — isn’t it funny? I didn’t know I’d thought about it as much as I have — and I wondered, I guess I still wonder, what would have happened if I’d taken him in my arms, if I’d held him, if I hadn’t been — afraid. I was afraid that he wouldn’t understand that it was — only love. Only love. But, oh, Lord, when he died, I thought that maybe I could have saved him if I’d just reached out that quarter of an inch between us on that bed, and held him.” He felt the cold tears on his face, and he tried to wipe them away. “Do you know what I mean? I haven’t told Ida this, I haven’t told anyone, I haven’t thought about it, since he died. But I guess I’ve been living with it. And I’ll never know. I’ll never know.”
“No,” said Eric, “you’ll never know. If I had been there, I’d have held him — but it wouldn’t have helped. His little girl tried to hold him, and that didn’t help.”
He sat down on the bed beside Vivaldo. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“Hell, no.” Vivaldo dried his eyes with the back of his hand. “Let’s have another drink. Let’s watch the dawn come up.
“Okay.” Eric started to move away. Vivaldo grabbed his hand.
“Eric—” He watched Eric’s dark, questioning eyes and the slightly parted, slightly smiling lips. “I’m glad I told you about that. I guess I couldn’t have told anybody else.”
Eric seemed to smile. He took Vivaldo’s face between his hands and kissed him, a light, swift kiss, on the forehead. Then his shadow vanished, and Vivaldo heard him in the kitchen.
“I’m out of ice.”
“The hell with the ice.”