— In the basement.
The cousin’s brother-in-law knew a lot of people who had found work to get started with, and knew how from that base you could move up towards the kind of position you wanted, so long as you had education where you came from and could learn to speak the language well, learn the skills. Night college courses, schools of technology, advanced computer training, computer science — that’s it! This man had all the information, addresses of institutions, foundations, openings, opportunities. Chances.
America. To him, beside her, it was a single concept: but America, its vastnesses, so many Americas, from the casinos in California to Idaho (where she had skied) to New York (where she frequented museums and theatres), Charlottesville (where one of her lovers came from, she remembered), to Seattle, to Florida …
Where is he, in America? What city would we go to?
Chicago. He’s in Chicago. And his brother and a friend like a brother are in Detroit, there’s work there. For a start, that’s all right. They say they could find something for me. We might go to Detroit. You been there, you know it?
Her upper and lower lips are drawn, mum, into her closed mouth; her head moves as if she is searching.
He watches: ah yes, thinking back to another adventure.
She never was in Detroit but she knows, remembers, the other kind of distances in the vastness of America. From the houses of Sutton Place with their doormen attired as royal flunkeys (Daddy Summers had sent her to be received by his friends at an address) to the slums of Chicago and New York where a worn old man or blowzy woman sits on the broken doorstep of a decaying building where emigrants ‘of colour’ find lodging, a bed-space, along with the black American poor, born down-on-their-luck.
For the first couple of weeks Ismail says we can stay with them, they’ll make room for us in their place, Chicago. They have this janitor’s apartment — I told you. They must be very nice, wonderful people — don’t know us but of course we are family.
And then.
He rose, away from her, and began to walk about the room; so confined that only a few paces took him back and forth. Her eyes followed him to read what the movement might mean. His unaccustomed expansiveness had dried up; she was back to reading him in other ways, as she had learnt to. Was he pacing the cage of refusals for the last time, ritually, just before it was about to swing open wide, on America; never easy to read him.
Depends what happens. I’ll go to Detroit. That’s it. I think it will be.
Have they found a place for us? To live, in Detroit.
Well, I’ll sleep somewhere, wherever they do. They are without wives, not been able to send for them yet. They’ve only been there a year… a bit more …
He had come back, to stand before her, his legs touching her knees where she sat. I’ll look for something for us right away. An apartment. Even some rooms.
You. ‘You’. Was she understanding him. What d’you mean?
It will be good if you go to California. To your mother, just for some days.
She bent forward with the flesh over her cheek-bones lifted in anguished pressure against her eyes, her head tipped to him, trying to scrutinize what might be written for her on his smooth tarnished-gold forehead under the fall of black silk hair.
How did you think that.
He had come to know the power of his particular smile, she had made him conscious of it, so that what he had been unaware of, when the impulse to smile came, was now a tactic to be employed; this is one of the possibilities of power that come with what he had though he couldn’t afford; what the privileged call love. The smile offered himself to her.
Julie. You are not always right about your parents. Of course they are not like you. Not in many ways. But in some ways they are there— He put the flat of his hand on her breast-bone, just above her breasts. It was touch, a gesture, very different from his seeking out her breasts in a caress; it brought him closer to her than any sexual advance.
It is like with my parents.
It’s nothing like with yours. Your mother. What can I say. Then there came to her as a slap in the face, something that had been intended to be a pleasant surprise: How do you know my mother would want me there? Around-thirty-year-old daughter to prove to everyone that my mother is much older than her latest husband.
And then what there was to be read in him was deciphered: Have you been in touch with her? Have you?
On the phone, yes. The letters she sent, from her husband. They were a great thing — help — to get my visa. We won’t ever know how much. Until I took those letters, nothing happened. You know that.
California. Take on the casino style, for my mother and her husband. Her voice was backing, away, away. California.
The smile had opened a flow in him again. It is good sense. You don’t understand what it is like. Come in a country like I do. I have done — how many times? Even legal. It’s hard, nothing is nice, at the beginning, Julie. Without proper money to live. You are a stray dog, a rat finding its hole as the way to get in. I know you don’t mind, you even seem to like to live … rough … it’s like a camping trip to you. But this is different, it can be bad, bad. I can’t take you into it. I don’t want you to experience… I don’t mind for me — because this time I have the chance to move out of all that, finished, for ever, for ever, do what I want to do, live like I want to live. That is the country for it. There’s plenty of chances again now, there; you don’t read the papers, but the unemployment is nothing. Lowest for many years. Work for everybody.
And the meantime. — She seems to force herself to speak.
What is that?
Before the chances to live the way you want to. What work will you do.
Same as immigrants, always. Anything. If you have some brains and education, it doesn’t matter. I tell you, you don’t know what happens there. It isn’t your country, never get out of the garage! You don’t know — one of the biggest, the most important financiers in the whole world today was an immigrant from Hungary, he started there in New York as a waiter in a club. He was white, a Jew, yes. But people where I come from make it, there, even if not so high as that, they’re in computers, in communications, that’s where the world is!
Women here — his home — do what their men tell them to. Is that what is happening in the makeshift walls of the lean-to, are there listeners with ears to the clapboard door hearing what is being said, is he who ‘runs away from home’ (Uncle Yaqub) yet taking an assumption from all he abandons? He and she won’t go on talking about it: California. That may mean anything. That he has accepted her rejection; that she has accepted her assent.
Chapter 39
Just say the word
There was no strain between them and that cannot be explained. Better not. For either to try to. Not everything between two people can be laid before The Table for resolution. That’s it. He was sorting out the contents of the canvas bag, there were things, time-fingered documents, to unburden himself of forever, now; legality is light to carry. He looked up to give her the smile as she opened the door … going out to his sister or somewhere about the house.
She walked as a somnambulist slowly down the street to its end, the desert. The bean rissole vendor must have seen her, the man with a donkey cart hawking melons must have passed her, the nasal harmonies of house radios and the electronic call of the mosque trailed round her familiarly unfamiliar figure. The dog was waiting. If there is not The Table, there is always someone. She sat on the clump of masonry that had once been a house and the dog stood on its splayed thin legs a little way off. The desert. Always. The true meaning of the common word tripping off every tongue to suit every meaning, comes from the desert. It is there before her and the dog. The desert is always; it doesn’t die it doesn’t change, it exists.