16
Paul Shoboater, critic for the Downtown Mandarin, kept Ian waiting. He looked at his watch. Paul was forty-five minutes late. He was like that, especially toward up-north fellas. They were from the same neck of the woods, but back home he and Paul didn’t move in the same circles. Shoboater had been in the North as long as Ball had, but refused to drop his down home accent. Shoboater knew that Ball would probably be uncomfortable in this kind of place, with its white and black checkerboard tile floor, and waitresses in black silk dresses and white aprons, and tuxedoed waiters. Ball sat at the bar, sipping from a glass of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
The bartender had sighed when Ball ordered it. Shoboater finally entered, or swept in. He saw Ball, but pretended not to notice him as he greeted some of his friends. Artists and critics from the downtown art scene. He finally reached the spot where Ball was seated, and gave him a cool handshake. The maitre d’ came up bowing and scraping before Shoboater, greeting him as he escorted the pair to Shoboater’s reserved table. Ball followed Shoboater, carrying his Pabst with him and finally placing it on the white linen tablecloth. When the waiter asked them what kind of cocktails they wanted, Shoboater ordered some vintage wine, and Ball ordered another Pabst. The waiter and Shoboater shared a chuckle. The fellas called Shoboater “Eye Spy” because they claimed that his column for the Mandarin was actually a literary reconnaissance mission for tourists who wanted to become acquaintances with the trends and styles of Afro-American culture. An expedition into the heart of darkness, as it were. The fellas claimed that his position made him lazy because his editors didn’t know whether he was faking it or telling the truth. Others said that his real role was that of a hit man for modernism, Pound’s “botched bitch gone in the teeth” reeling from blow after successive blow. The modernists could take Sartre’s late disavowal of existentialism, and the failure of Marxism, or even the death of abstract expressionism, but Freud’s fall, that was the severest blow, and finished off the movement that had been traveling a steady intellectual downhill since the revelations about Stalinism. Freud had achieved the status of a Holy Man for them.
Brashford had claimed that the Jews ran the Downtown Mandarin, and that even though it carried articles that opposed quotas and affirmative action as methods for subsidizing blacks, fifty percent of the revenue of Jewish organizations was derived from government subsidies, and though they had put Shoboater up to claiming that black talent got by because of liberal guilt, the same thing was said about Jewish talent in the fifties; that the rise of the American Jewish novelist coincided with a wave of guilt that swept the country after the discovery of the Holocaust. The fellas also ridiculed Shoboater’s “show-out” ornamental prose style that made his work nearly unreadable — they said that if his prose style were a horse someone would have put it out of its misery long ago.
After a weak toast to Ball’s play, Shoboater skimmed through Ball’s script as though Ball wasn’t even sitting there. Ball could tell that this was the first occasion upon which Shoboater had availed himself of reading the manuscript. When the waiter came up and asked for their orders, Shoboater ordered in impeccable French, which must have impressed the waiter because he had a huge smile while scribbling the order. They both looked at Ball, who said that he would have the same thing as Shoboater.
“So what is this crazy shit of yours that the Lord Mountbatten is doing?” Shoboater said.
“It’s not going to be done at the Mountbatten. They’ve moved it over to the Queen Mother,” Ball said, choking on his pride. Shoboater grinned widely when he heard that.
“Reckless Eyeballing, heh. Nigger, you are crazy, like they say.” Ball wanted to knock his teeth out right there. But thought better of it. He gritted his teeth and in his mind’s eye saw Paul Shoboater falling from the chair and cracking his skull against one of those stone pillars of the restaurant, or the heavy pot that held ferns. He saw the waiter rise from where Paul lay — blood pouring from his head, spattering his three-piece French-cut suit — shaking his head before the shocked fellow diners, and announcing, “He’s dead.”
“And Ham Hill. Why Ham Hill?”
“Ham Hill gets lynched for staring at this southern white woman. I call him that because it’s kind of like Ham in the Bible, who gets cursed to be “black” and “elongated” for staring at Noah’s nakedness. Brashford tells me, however, that this version was perpetuated by a Jewish commentator and can’t be found in the Bible.”
“Well, I hope you don’t think that’s anything original,” Shoboater said sarcastically. “All over the world there are legends and myths about men staring at women or staring into their eyes or at them bathing, and being cursed.”
“I didn’t say anything about it being new,” Ball said. Their lunch arrived. It looked like vomit. Some kind of veal covered with a rich, creamy sauce. Shoboater began to eat; Ball pushed his plate away and continued to drink from his second Pabst. He couldn’t understand why Paul sneered at Pabst. If you ever examined the can or bottle closely you could see the reproduction of the medals the beer had received in international competitions with other beers, he thought. Shoboater kept scribbling in a leather-bound notebook with a red fountain pen that probably cost about five hundred dollars.
“Why are you so hung up on eyes? I remember in that travesty of yours, Suzanna, there were a lot of eye monologues and dialogues.”
“Eyes reveal a person’s true intentions. They are, as Rousseau said, the soul’s mirror. I also like to provide my actors and actresses an opportunity to do mime. I use the term ‘reckless eyeballing’ because on one level the play is about people intruding into spaces that don’t concern them.”
“Yeah. Well, you might try to rationalize it that way, but it seems to me that you’re trying to make amends for your awful reputation as a male chauvinist. Admit it. The tables have turned since the seventies and now this women’s thing is hot, you’re trying to cash in on it.”
“That’s your opinion, Paul.”
“My opinion, huh. Clever of you, I must admit. That bit about this woman having the body of Ham Hill exhumed twenty years after his lynching in hopes that a new trial might erase the lingering doubts that she brought the attention of his eyes upon herself — that is hilarious. Just like those dizzy feminists. I like that.” He chuckled, but in his column he was always pretending to be a feminist or a womanist, probably because women wielded some power at the Mandarin. There was something odd and weird about Paul. Come to think of it, the nigger did resemble Peter Lorre a bit with his Dr. Moto spectacles, his whiney, nasal voice.
“I’m glad you liked that,” Ball said, watching him eat the veal and sauce. Just watching him eat it made him feel nauseous.
Ball looked around because he felt some heat at the back of his neck. A woman dressed in the art nouveau fashion of the restaurant was staring at him, but when he caught her eyes, she fluttered them nervously and stared again toward her male companion. Lot’s wife, Ball thought.