Another Country

Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude. There were boys and girls drinking coffee at the drugstore counters who were held back from his condition by barriers as perishable as their dwindling cigarettes. They could scarcely bear their knowledge, nor could they have borne the sight of Rufus, but they knew why he was in the streets tonight, why he rode subways all night long, why his stomach growled, why his hair was nappy, his armpits funky, his pants and shoes too thin, and why he did not dare to stop and take a leak.

He had expected her to resist and she did, holding the glass between them and frantically trying to pull her body away from his body’s touch. He knocked the glass out of her hand and it fell dully to the balcony floor, rolling away from them. Go ahead, he thought humorously; if I was to let you go now you’d be so hung up you’d go flying over this balcony, most likely. He whispered, “Go ahead, fight. I like it. Is this the way they do down home?”

“Rufus,” Leona had said—time and again—“ain’t nothing wrong in being colored.”

Sometimes, when she said this, he simply looked at her coldly, from a great distance, as though he wondered what on earth she was trying to say. His look seemed to accuse her of ignorance and indifference. And, as she watched his face, her eyes became more despairing than ever but at the same time filled with some immense sexual secret which tormented her.

“Rufus said he’d kill me,” he said, half-smiling.

The taxi stopped beside them. He gave her his keys. She opened the door, keeping her face away from the driver.

“Rufus ain’t going to kill nobody but himself,” she said, “if he don’t find a friend to help him.” She paused, half-in, half-out of the cab. “You the only friend he’s got in the world, Vivaldo.”

He stood at the center of the bridge and it was freezing cold. He raised his eyes to heaven. He thought, You bastard, you motherfucking bastard. Ain’t I your baby, too? He began to cry. Something in Rufus which could not break shook him like a rag doll and splashed salt water all over his face and filled his throat and his nostrils with anguish. He knew the pain would never stop. He could never go down into the city again. He dropped his head as though someone had struck him and looked down at the water. It was cold and the water would be cold.

He was black and the water was black.

“Have you been to the police?” Richard asked.

“Yes.” She made a gesture of disgust and rose and walked to the window. “They said it happens all the time—colored men running off from their families. They said they’d try to find him. But they don’t care. They don’t care what happens—to a black man!”

“Oh, well, now,” cried Richard, his face red, “is that fair? I mean, hell, I’m sure they’ll look for him just like they look for any other citizen of this city.”

“I didn’t love Rufus, not the way you did, the way all of you did. I couldn’t help feeling, anyway, that one of the reasons all of you made such a kind of—fuss—over him was partly just because he was colored. Which is a hell of a reason to love anybody. I just had to look on him as another guy. And I couldn’t forgive him for what he did to Leona. You once said you couldn’t, either.”

No one, in any case, had written very often; he had not really wanted to know what was happening among the people he had fled; and he felt that they had always protected themselves against any knowledge of what was happening in him. No, Rufus had been his only friend among them. Rufus had made him suffer, but Rufus had dared to know him.

This note of despair, of buried despair, was insistently, constantly struck. It stalked all the New York avenues, roamed all the New York streets; was as present in Sutton Place, where the director of Eric’s play lived and the great often gathered, as it was in Greenwich Village, where he had rented an apartment and been appalled to see what time had done to people he had once known well. He could not escape the feeling that a kind of plague was raging, though it was officially and publicly and privately denied. Even the young seemed blighted—seemed most blighted of all.

But, as he said this, he realized that he did not care what Richard had been doing. He was merely being polite because Richard was married to Cass. He wondered if he had always felt this way. Perhaps he had never been able to admit it to himself. Perhaps Richard had changed—but did people change? He wondered what he would think of Richard if he were meeting him for the first time. Then he wondered what Yves would think of these people and what these people would think of Yves.

“Is it because they’re colored and we’re white? Is that why?”

Again, Richard and Eric looked at each other. Richard swallowed. “The world is full of all kinds of people, and sometimes they do terrible things to each other, but—that’s not why.”

“I understand,” said Ida, carefully, “that you were a very good friend of my brother’s.”

“Yes,” he said, “I was. Or at least I tried to be.”

“Did you find it so very hard—to be his friend?”

He wished that he could rescue her, that it was within his power to rescue her and make her life less hard. But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable—only love, and love itself mostly failed; and he had never loved her. He had used her to find out something about himself. And even this was not true. He had used her in the hope of avoiding a confrontation with himself which he had, nevertheless, and with a vengeance, been forced to endure.