school and gotten the Howard scholarship when what he wanted was to box in the Golden Gloves; now he was no less a whiz in college, while his poetry, when he showed it to his professors, didn't kindle any enthusiasm. At first he kept up his roadwork and his boxing for the fun of it, until one day at the gym he was approached to fight a four- rounder at St. Nick's Arena, offered thirty-five dollars to take the place of a fighter who'd pulled out, and mostly to make up for all he'd missed at the Golden Gloves, he accepted and, to his delight, secretly turned pro.
So there was school, poetry, professional boxing, and there were girls, girls who knew how to walk and how to wear a dress, how to move in a dress, girls who conformed to everything he'd been imagining when he'd set out from the separation center in San Francisco for New York — girls who put the streets of Greenwich Village and the crisscrossing walkways of Washington Square to their proper use. There were warm spring afternoons when nothing in triumphant postwar America, let alone in the world of antiquity, could be of more interest to Coleman than the legs of the girl walking in front of him. Nor was he the only one back from the war beset by this fixation. In those days in Greenwich Village there seemed to be no more engrossing off-hours entertainment for NYU's ex-GIs than appraising the legs of the women who passed by the coffeehouses and cafes where they congregated to read the papers and play chess. Who knows why sociologically, but whatever the reason, it was the great American era of aphrodisiacal legs, and once or twice a day at least, Coleman followed a pair of them for block after block so as not to lose sight of the way they moved and how they were shaped and what they looked like at rest while the corner light was changing from red to green. And when he gauged the moment was right — having followed behind long enough to become both verbally poised and insanely ravenous — and quickened his pace so as to catch up, when he spoke and ingratiated himself enough so as to be allowed to fall in step beside her and to ask her name and to make her laugh and to get her to accept a date, he was, whether she knew it or not, proposing the date to her legs.
And the girls, in turn, liked Coleman's legs. Steena Palsson, the eighteen-year-old exile from Minnesota, even wrote a poem about Coleman that mentioned his legs. It was handwritten on a sheet of lined notebook paper, signed “S,” then folded in quarters and stuck into his mail slot in the tiled hallway above his basement room. It had been two weeks since they'd first flirted at the subway station, and this was the Monday after the Sunday of their first twenty-four-hour marathon. Coleman had rushed off to his morning class while Steena was still making up in the bathroom; a few minutes later, she herself set out for work, but not before leaving him the poem that, in spite of all the stamina they'd so conscientiously demonstrated over the previous day, she'd been too shy to hand him directly. Since Coleman's schedule took him from his classes to the library to his late evening workout in the ring of a rundown Chinatown gym, he didn't find the poem jutting from the mail slot until he got back to Sullivan Street at eleven-thirty that night.
He has a body.
He has a beautiful body—
the muscles on the backs of his legs and the back of his neck.
Also he is bright and brash.
He's four years older,
but sometimes I feel he is younger.
He is sweet, still, and romantic,
though he says he is not romantic.
I am almost dangerous for this man.
How much can I tell
of what I see in him?
I wonder what he does
after he swallows me whole.
Rapidly reading Steena's handwriting by the dim hall light, he at first mistook “neck” for “negro”— and the back of his negro... His negro what? Till then he'd been surprised by how easy it was. What was supposed to be hard and somehow shaming or destructive was not only easy but without consequences, no price paid at all. But now the sweat was pouring off him. He kept reading, faster even than before, but the words formed themselves into no combination that made sense. His negro WHAT? They had been naked together a whole day and night, for most of that time never more than inches apart. Not since he was an infant had anyone other than himself had so much time to study how he was made. Since there was nothing about her long pale body that he had not observed and nothing that she had concealed and nothing now that he could not picture with a painterlike awareness, a lover's excited, meticulous connoisseurship, and since he had spent all day stimulated no less by her presence in his nostrils than by her legs spread-eagled in his mind's eye, it had to follow that there was nothing about his body that she had not microscopically absorbed, nothing about that extensive surface imprinted with his self-cherishing evolutionary uniqueness, nothing about his singular configuration as a man, his skin, his pores, his whiskers, his teeth, his hands, his nose, his ears, his lips, his tongue, his feet, his balls, his veins, his prick, his armpits, his ass, his tangle of pubic hair, the hair on his head, the fuzz on his frame, nothing about the way he laughed, slept, breathed, moved, smelled, nothing about the way he shuddered convulsively when he came that she had not registered. And remembered. And pondered.
Was it the act itself that did it, the absolute intimacy of it, when you are not just inside the body of the other person but she is tightly enveloping you? Or was it the physical nakedness? You take off your clothes and you're in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you've concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that's what the shyness is all about and what everybody fears. In that anarchic crazy place, how much of me is being seen, how much of me is being discovered? Now I know who you are. I see clear through to the back of your negro.
But how, by seeing what? What could it have been? Was it seeable to her, whatever it was, because she was a blond Icelandic Dane from a long line of blond Icelanders and Danes, Scandinavian-raised, at home, in school, at church, in the company all her life of nothing but ... and then Coleman recognized the word in the poem as a four- and not a five-letter word. What she'd written wasn't “negro.” It was “neck.” Oh, my neck! It's only my neck! ... the muscles on the backs of his legs and the back of his neck.
But what then did this mean: “How much can I tell / of what I see in him?” What was so ambiguous about what she saw in him? If she'd written “tell from” instead of “tell of,” would that have made her meaning clearer? Or would that have made it less clear? The more he reread that simple stanza, the more opaque the meaning became — and the more opaque the meaning, the more certain he was that she distinctly sensed the problem that Coleman brought to her life. Unless she meant by “what I see in him” no more than what is colloquially meant by skeptical people when they ask someone in love, “What can you possibly see in him?”
And what about “tell”? How much can she tell to whom? By tell does she mean make—“how much can I make,” et cetera — or does she mean reveal, expose? And what about “I am almost dangerous for this man.” Is “dangerous for” different from “dangerous to”? Either way, what's the danger?
Each time he tried to penetrate her meaning, it slipped away. After two frantic minutes on his feet in the hallway, all he could be sure of was his fear. And this astonished him — and, as always with Coleman, his susceptibility, by catching him unprepared, shamed him as well, triggering an SOS, a ringing signal to self-vigilance to take up the slack.
Bright and game and beautiful as Steena was, she was only eighteen years old and fresh to New York from Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and yet he was now more intimidated by her — and her almost preposterous, unequivocal goldenness — than by anybody he had ever faced in the ring. Even on that night in the Norfolk whorehouse, when the woman who was watching from the bed as he began to peel off his uniform — a big-titted, fleshy, mistrustful whore not entirely ugly but certainly no looker (and maybe herself two thirty-fifths something other than white)— smiled sourly and said, “You're a black nigger, ain't you, boy?” and the two goons were summoned to throw him out, only then had he been as undone as he was by Steena's poem.
I wonder what he does
after he swallows me whole.
Even that he could not understand. At the desk in his room, he battled into the morning with the paradoxical implications of this final stanza, ferreting out and then renouncing one complicated formulation after another until, at daybreak, all he knew for sure was that for Steena, ravishing Steena, not
