Had he realized I’d been trying to duck him, had he walked over to Lexington Avenue only to make it easier for me, figuring I’d head for my usual post at 126th and Park? Or had I offended him in some manner, had I said something the week before that had caused him to make a simultaneous and identical decision: we would no longer ride with each other, we would no longer share.
And then I realized what it was.
I had at last done the thing Harry had been waiting for me to do all along. After all that talk, after all those explanations and revelations and confidences freely offered, I had at last managed to convey to Harry the certain knowledge that I was only, at best, a Negro. I had finally and unprotestingly accepted his generosity, only to become in that instant the white man’s burden. I had made the terrible mistake, again, of thinking I could walk across that bridge with immunity, allow Harry to pay my fare at last because, you see, I was an equal who understood all about tax deductions, an accountant, you see, an educated man — even perhaps, a friend.
It was not a cold day, it was the middle of March, and spring was on the way, but I felt a sudden chill and longed to join the old men still huddling over coal fires in the side streets of Harlem. At 86th Street, I gave the driver a dollar and a quarter and got out of the cab.
I had forgotten to light my cigar.
Since that day, I have avoided Harry by taking an earlier train, the 7:30 out of Stamford, which arrives at 125th Street at 8:20. This gives me a little extra time, so I no longer have to ride a taxi to work in the morning. Instead, I walk over to Lexington Avenue, and I board the downtown express there on a platform that is thronged with Negroes like myself.
I do not mind it except when it’s raining.
When it’s raining, I think of Harry riding a cab downtown, alone, and I wonder if he has the window open a crack, and I wonder if anything will ever convince him that I was able to pay my own way, and that I would have happily done so if he’d only given me the chance.
The Couple Next Door
The closet was a big walk-in, far more storage space than we needed on such a short Caribbean vacation. After we’d folded our beachwear into three dresser drawers, there was little else to hang — Kara’s two cocktail dresses, my own lightweight Navy blue blazer and gray slacks. We would be here for only five days, a brief respite from New York’s brutal February.
“Honey?” the voice in the closet said. “Come take a look at this!”
Kara and I had come up from the beach at a quarter past four, and were napping before dinner time. The voice sounded so immediate I thought it was actually in the room with us. It was a male voice, young and obviously impressed by whatever it was he was asking “Honey” to come see. Startled out of a light sleep, it took me a moment to realize that the voice was coming from our closet, and another moment to comprehend that it was coming from beyond the closet wall.
“Someone’s at the door,” Kara mumbled.
“No, he’s in the closet,” I said.
“Mm, funny,” she said.
We were both awakened an hour later by the sound of female moans, male groans, genderless gutter talk and heavy breathing. Kara sat up in a flash, directing a green-eyed laser beam at the closet, from beyond which the sounds of sexual engagement were emanating. Only once before in our twelve years of married life had we overheard a man and a woman making love in another room. That was in the Connaught Hotel in London, at two A.M. on a moonlit night in May, the windows wide open, the tumultuous tossings and passionate cries of pleasure rising from across the courtyard. Oddly, when it was all over and the night was once again still, the woman kept repeating over and over again, like the heroine in a Victorian novel, “You, sir, are a blackguard,” an epithet that reduced us both to helpless muffled laughter.
Here in the tropics, there was the sound of the ocean rushing the beach beyond our shuttered windows, and the whisper of palm fronds on the moonlit balmy night, and once again the same cries of passion spilling from the closet and across the room to where we lay listening, captive in our own bed.
We learned the next day that the object of attraction in the closet next door was an enormous tropical spider. From what we could overhear, and we overheard all, this was a truly extraordinary bug.
“God, he’s gigantic, sweetie!”
“Just don’t get too close, honey.”
“Look at all those colors!”
“Is that green or blue?”
“Green and blue.”
“Some red, too.”
“Do you think he’s poisonous?”
“I don’t think so, honey.”
“What shall we do with him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well... should we spray him or something?”
“I don’t think he’ll hurt us.”
“But let’s hang our things away from that corner, okay?”
At which point, I swear to God, they both began clapping their hands and singing “Eansie-Beansie Spider.”
It wasn’t as if either of us had secret lovers. There was no one else. Neither had we “outgrown” each other, as the cliché would have it. I’m an oboe player. I do sit-in work with whichever symphony orchestra has a musician out sick or otherwise unable to meet a performance date. That winter, I was playing on and off with the Philharmonic, but such work is rare, believe me. I usually play with far less distinguished orchestras here and there around the city. If you have occasion to look me up in a program sometime, I’m Richard Haig. I sit there in the woodwinds section, a pleasant-looking man in a black suit, in no way outstanding. I once played a Galway concert. That was truly exciting.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with very many children’s book illustrators. I happen to know quite a few of them because that’s what Kara does for a living. They’re a particularly gentle breed, most of them with children of their own, though Kara and I haven’t been blessed in that respect. She’s thirty-seven years old, my wife, to my forty-two, a quite beautiful, soft-spoken blonde with a keen sense of humor and a lovely smile, particularly radiant now that she’d begun to tan. Perhaps the most flamboyant thing about her is her name. Cara, of course, means “dear” in Italian, but Kara’s mother tacked a Teutonic K onto it, giving it a post-modernist twist that singled her out from every other little girl growing up in the sixties.
What I’m trying to say is that neither of us had progressed very far beyond the other in our twelve years of marriage. I had not achieved anything more important than Kara had. She had no real reason to feel threatened by me. She was happy with what she did, and had won no recognition that might have caused me to feel envious or resentful. There was no competition between us. We were equal partners, perfectly content with the people we were.
That’s not what was wrong with our marriage.
I don’t know what was wrong with it.
While Kara took long, solitary walks on the beach, I tried to determine which of the hotel guests were the two in the room next door. They were young, yes, or at least their voices sounded youthful. They were energetic, too, undeniably so. In addition to their clockwork afternoon matinees, Kara and I were treated to audio performances at midnight, and highly vocal encores just before breakfast. I figured they had to be honeymooners. But then, something Sweetie said — he was the male — changed my mind about that.
They were talking about a sweater they were searching for in the closet; the nights here in the tropics tended to get a bit chilly. Sweetie was trying to remember where they’d purchased it. It was clear that they’d been together on vacation someplace. Had it been Bali? South America? My interest was piqued. Kara and I had been to these places as well. Then Sweetie said, “I remember.”