“You English?”
“Oh, very much so.”
“My wife is English also. The oppressiveness of the class system cause her to leave your shores.”
“I sympathize. It can be very wearing. Is she in the arts too, your wife?”
“Yeah. She does—”
But Pharsin’s monosyllable was quite canceled by city stridor—someone detonating a low-yield nuclear weapon or dropping a dumpster from a helicopter. “And yourself?” said Rodney.
“Sculptor. Mathematician. Choreographer. Percussionist. Essayist. Plus the art you and I engaged in some while ago.”
“Oh, I remember,” said Rodney humbly. “I’m a painter. With other interests.” And he said what he usually said to Americans, because it was virtually true, geographically (and what would they know?): “I studied literature at Cambridge.”
Pharsin gave a jolt and said, “This intrigues me. Because I’ve recently come to think of myself as primarily a novelist. Now, my friend. There’s something I’m going to ask you to do for me.”
He listened, and said yes. Why not? Rodney reckoned that Pharsin, after all, would be incredibly easy to avoid.
Pharsin said, “I’ll be in an excellent position to monitor your progress with it.”
Rodney waited.
“You don’t recognize me. I work the door of your building. Weekends.”
“Oh of course you do.” In fact, Rodney had yet to begin the task of differentiating the three or four black faces that scowled and glinted through the gloom of his lobby. “The coincidence,” he mused, “of the arts. Tell me, are you all a little family down there?”
“Why would we be? I don’t associate with those animals. Now. I’ll bring you my novel early tomorrow. Casting all false modesty aside, I don’t believe you’ll have a problem falling under its spell.”
“Um,” said Rodney.
“Three months you been sitting on it, and you don’t even know the fucking title?”
“Um,” he repeated. Like the novel itself, the title, Rodney recalled, was very long. Pharsin’s typescript ran to more than eleven hundred pages: single-spaced. Pharsin said it comprised exactly one million words—a claim (Rodney felt) that few would ever call him on. “It’s very long.” He looked up into Pharsin’s blood-spoked eyes and said, “‘The…’”
“The what?”
“‘The Words of…’” Wait. “‘The Noise of the…’”
“‘Sound.’”
“‘The Noise of the Sound…’”
“Bullshit! The Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words, man. The Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words.”
“Exactly. The Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words.”
“Commit the fucking energy, man. I say this because I’m convinced that your effort will be rewarded. The structure you’ll particularly relish. And also the theme.”
After another forty column-inches of reproach, dissimulated threat, moral suasion, and literary criticism, Pharsin wrapped things up, adding, as an audible afterthought,
“Thirteen weeks. And he doesn’t even know its name?”
“Forgive me. I’m stupefied by, uh, ‘amorous excess.’”
“That I can believe. You look totally fucked out. Man, take care: you’re going to blow away on the wind. My marriage has survived thus far, but woman action and woman trouble I know all about. What’s her name?”
Rodney murmured some feminine phoneme: Jan or Jen or June.
But the truth was he didn’t know her name either.
“We’ve slimed.”
“Good man. Tell all.”
This time Rod and Rock were to be found in some kind of Irish restaurant high up on Lexington Avenue. They occupied two places near the head of a table laid for eighteen. Their practice on such occasions was to meet an hour early, to chat and drink cocktails, before some Americans showed up and paid for it all. This night, in Rock’s comfortable company, Rodney belied his eight-and-a-half stone. Pared down to the absolute minimum (carrying just two or three extra grams in that buxom upper lip), he nevertheless seemed to share in his friend’s bland rotundity; they both wore the cummerbund of inner fatness conferred by their class. Black Velvet, quaffed from pewter tankards, was their tipple of the hour.
“What’s there to say?” said Rodney. “Frankly, I’m speechless. Words cannot…”
“Dear oh dear. Well describe her body at least.”
“Actually I’d rather not. I mean there’s nothing to say, is there, when things go so gloriously?”
“…It’s Mrs. Peterson, isn’t it?” Rock paused unkindly. “No. Far too swarthy for you. You like the dairy-product type. Raised on curds and whey. They have to look like English roses. Or you get culture shock.”
“How very wrong you are,” said Rodney in a strained voice. “It may interest you to know that my inamorata happens to be… ‘bleck.’”
“Bleck?”
“Bleck,” said Rodney with emphasis. It sounded more like blick than black. A year or two ago they might have said bluhck. But having largely shed their class signatures, the two men were now recultivating them.
“Bleck?” repeated Rock. “You mean a proper…? What are they calling themselves these days. A proper American-African?”
“African-American.” As he continued, Rodney’s voice grew drowsy, and it was with a haggard sensuality—slow inhalations, feeding some inner fire—that he relished his nightly cigarette. “Well, African. I sense Africa in her. I taste Africa in her. One of the French bits, probably. Senegal, perhaps. Sierra Leone. Guinea-Bissau.”
Rock was looking at him.
“She moves like an empress. A Dahomey Amazon. Cleopatra was very dark, you know.”
“So she’s posh, too, is she? As well as bleck. Where does she say she’s from?”
Simultaneously ignoring this and rousing himself, Rodney said, “It’s what’s so wonderful about America. There aren’t any good bleck girls in London. All they’ve got there are those squeaky Cockneys. Magnificent creatures, some of them, but—quite impossible. Simply not on the cards, over there. But over here, in the great, uh, ‘melting pot’…”
“The salad bowl.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Rodney, looking around for the salad bowl.
“They call it the salad bowl now. Not the melting pot.”
“Do they indeed.”
“In a way, you could say that English blecks are posher than their American cousins.”
“How so?”
“How so?”
Here were two men living in a silent movie: when they were alone together, the millennium seemed about a century away. Rock was now about to speak of the historical past; but his urbanity faltered, and he suddenly sounded sober.
“Oh come on. We know a little bit about this, don’t we? The English contingent, they were shipped in after the war. To run the tubes and so on. And the buses. Contract labor. But not—but not like American blecks.”
“Same stock, though. One imagines.”
Rod and Rock: their family trees stood tall. Their family trees stood tall and proud. But what kind of trees were they—weeping willow, sallow, mahogany, ash? And something ailed or cankered them, shaping their branches all arthritic and aghast… The Peels had been among the beneficiaries when, on a single day in 1661, Charles II created thirteen baronetcies on the plantation island of Barbados. Rock’s lot, the Robvilles, rather disappointingly (rather puzzlingly, from Rodney’s point of view), didn’t go back quite so far. But the Peels and the Robvilles alike had flourished at a time when every English adult with cash or credit owned a piece of it: a piece of slavery. The place where Rock’s dad lived had been assembled by massive shipwright profits out of Liverpool, circa 1750. Intelligence of these provenances could never be openly acknowledged by either of the two men. Lifelong inhibition protected them: in their childhood it was like something terrible hiding under the bed. Still, Rock was a businessman. And he had never expected business to be pretty. He said,