It was as he crossed Tenth Street that he realized she was following him. Realized, too, in the light of day, that she was as black as night. And twice his size. His first impulse (one not quickly overcome) was to make a run for it. On Eleventh Street the darkened window of Ray’s Pizza told Rodney that she was still behind him. He halted and turned, weakly squinting, and she halted, intelligently smiling, and he took a step toward her, and she took a step back, and he moved on, and she followed. Across Twelfth Street. Now with every step his legs were getting heavier and tenderer; it felt like the marrow-ache of adolescent growth. Despairingly he turned left on Thirteenth Street. She stopped following him. She overtook him. And as her pace slowed and slackened, and as he attended to the amazing machine of her thighs and buttocks, the parts accommodating themselves so equably in the close quarters of her skirt, all his fears (and all thoughts of his easel) gave way to a reptile vacuity. For the first time in his life Rodney was ready for anything. No questions asked.
When she reached his building she turned and waited. He summoned breath to speak—but she smoothly raised a vertical forefinger to her lips. And he understood, and felt like a child. He talked too much. He talked too much… Mounting the steps, he pushed the inner glass door and held it open behind him; when he felt the transfer of its weight he withstood a rush of intimacy, as intimate as the press of boiling breasts on his spine. Dismissing the elevator as an impossibility, he began the long ascent, afraid to turn but minutely alert to her tread. His door. His keys all jammed and tangled in their ring, which he weepily picked at. Each lock turned a different way, the English way, the American way. He pushed, and felt the air rearrange itself as her shape moved past his back.
Many times, during that first half hour, speech gulped up in Rodney’s throat—and just as often her forefinger sought her lips (and there would be a frown of real warning). The finger side-on, always. But then they were standing near the piano, when she had completed her tour of his space; Rodney swallowed his most recent glottal stop, and her finger was once again raised; only now she turned it, rotating her whole hand through ninety degrees, showing him the bruised pink of the nail. After a beat or two Rodney took this as an invitation. He hovered nearer still and strained upwards. He kissed.
“Well what the fuck’s the story, Rod? You read my novel yet or what?”
Jesus: the guy was like a neighbor’s dog that just kept on hating you. You never gave him an instant’s thought until there he was, balanced upright on the tautness of his leash, and barking in your face.
“Not yet,” Rodney conceded, as he stepped out of the elevator.
“Now this is basically some rude shit we’re looking at here. Why the contempt, Rod? What’s your answer?”
Rodney wrongly regarded himself as an expert at excuses. After all, he and excuses had been through a lot together. Gazing upwards, with tubed lips, he softly said,
“You’re going to hate me for this.”
“I hate you already.”
Feeling a furry hum in either armpit, Rodney decided to change tack. The occasion called for something more than a negligent simper. “But there was nothing I could do,” he found himself saying. “My aunt died, do you see. Suddenly. And I had to compose the, uh, ‘eulogy’ for her funeral.”
“Your aunt where? In England?”
“No. She lives in…” This was not the verb Rodney wanted. “She was in, uh, Connecticut. It was all very awkward. I took the train to, to Connecticut, do you see. Now normally I’d have put up with Auntie Jean, but her, her son was there, with his family, and I…”
When he wasn’t talking, which wasn’t often, Pharsin had a stunned look. As if he couldn’t believe he was listening to a voice other than his own. Rodney’s agonizing tale had brought them out on to Thirteenth Street. In the middle distance the Empire State seemed to sway for a moment, and was then restiffened by its stress equations.
“…and that train was canceled too. So with one thing and another I’ve had my hands full all week.”
Pharsin’s expression had softened to something more quizzical, even indulgent. He said, “I see it. I see what you’re doing here, Rod. You’re digging yourself into a situation. You want to read my novel. But it’s like you left it so long you can only see it coming back the other way.” Pharsin tapped his temple. “I understand the mind. I know the mind. Last year I took a lot of—”
He paused as if to listen. Rodney was expecting the next word to be Prozac. But Pharsin went on quickly,
“—psychology courses and I know how we do this, how we set these traps for ourselves and walk right into them. I understand. Rod?”
“Yes, Pharsin?”
“You’re going to read my book next week. Isn’t that right?”
“Pharsin, I will.”
“One more thing. You got to imagine that novel is written in my blood. In my blood, Rod. It’s all there. Everything I am is in that—”
Rodney tuned out for a while and listened to Manhattan. Listened to Manhattan, playing its concerto for horn.
“—the trauma and the wounds. Written in my blood, Rod. Written in my blood.”
That night (it was Sunday, and Rock was out of town) Rodney faced a void of inactivity. He was so at a loss that for the first time ever he contemplated digging out his typescript of The Sound of the Words, the Sound of the Words. But there turned out to be a reasonably diverting documentary about synchronized swimmers on TV. And he managed to kill the rest of the evening by washing his hair and rolling around in twenty-dollar bills.
“I see her in an Abyssinian setting. Or Ancient Ethiopia. She’s a Nefertiti. Or one of the Candaces. Here’ll do. Actually I think it’s a gay place but they don’t seem to mind me coming here.”
No irony was intended or understood by this last remark, and Rock followed Rodney unsmilingly down the steps.
Rock’s older brother Inigo had known Rodney at Eton; and in his school days Rodney had apparently been famed for his lending library of glamour magazines and his prolific onanism. So Rock sensed no sexual ambiguity in his friend. But others did. For instance, it had never occurred to any of his sitters’ husbands that Rodney was straight. And Rodney himself had entertained inevitable doubts on this score, in the past, in London, lying on his side and apologetically stroking the back of yet another unslain giantess of the gentry.
They ordered their Highballs. The clientele was all male but also middle-aged (woollen, paunchy), and Rodney received no more than his usual deal of stares.
He said, “This’ll amuse you. The first time we, uh, ‘hid the salami’… No. The first time I revealed the salami—I felt a real pleb. A real cur. Like an Untouchable.”
“How so?”
“I’m a Cavalier.”
“Me too.”
“Of course. We’re English. But over here they’re all Roundheads. It’s posh to be a Roundhead here. Only the hicks and Okies are Cavaliers.” Rodney well remembered Mrs. Vredevoort, wife to the construction grandee: how, when at last she had found the salami (the salami having been located and identified), she gave a little mew of surprised distaste, and immediately came up for air. “Ours look like joints. As opposed to cigarettes. Which is what they’re used to. I bet they’re all Roundheads in Africa.”
“But there’s not much difference, is there, when you’ve got the horn.”
“Exactly! That’s exactly it. Anyway, mine didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t say anything.”
“She never says anything.”