over. Like this. Stars just throb and throb and throb and sometimes, when they can’t throb anymore, when they can’t hold it anymore, they fall out of the sky.”
7
THE BLACK GIRLS in New York City were crying and their men were looking neither to the right nor to the left. Not because they were heedless, or intent on what was before them, but they did not wish to see the crying, crying girls split into two parts by their tight jeans, screaming at the top of their high, high heels, straining against the pull of their braids and the fluorescent combs holding their hair. Oh, their mouths were heavy with plum lipstick and their eyebrows were a thin gay line, but nothing could stop their crying and nothing could persuade their men to look to the right or look to the left. They stoked their cocks into bikini underwear and opened their shirts to their tits. But they walked on tippy-toe through the streets looking straight ahead, and Son looked in vain for children. He couldn’t find them anywhere. There were short people and people under twelve years of age, but they had no child’s vulnerability, no unstuck laughter. They cracked into the M2 bus like terrified bison running for their lives, for fear the school at their backs would grab them and eat them up one more time. It wasn’t until he caught the downtown A that he saw what they had done with their childhood. They had wrapped it in dark cloth, sneaked it underground and thrown it all over the trains. Like blazing jewels, the subway cars burst from the tunnels to the platforms shining with the recognizable artifacts of childhood: fantasy, magic, ego, energy, humor and paint. They had taken it all underground. Pax and Stay High and the Three Yard Boys. Teen, P-Komet and Popeye. He sat on a bench at the Fifty-ninth Street station watching the childhood flash by. Now all he needed to know was where were the old people. Where were the Thereses and Gideons of New York? They were not on the subways and they were not in the street. Perhaps they were all in kennels. That must be the reason the men walked that way—on tippy-toe looking neither to the right nor to the left. The old people were in kennels and childhood was underground. But why were all the black girls crying on buses, in Red Apple lines, at traffic lights and behind the counters of Chemical Bank? Crying from a grief so stark you would have thought they’d been condemned to death by starvation in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall. Death by starvation in Mikell’s, death by starvation on the campus of C.U.N.Y. And death by starvation at the reception desks of large corporations. It depressed him, all that crying, for it was silent and veiled by plum lipstick and the thin gay lines over their eyes. Who did this to you? Who has done this thing to you? he wondered, as he walked down Columbus Avenue looking first to the right and then to the left. The street was choked with beautiful males who had found the whole business of being black and men at the same time too difficult and so they’d dumped it. They had snipped off their testicles and pasted them to their chests; they put the weighty wigs Alma Estee dreamed of on their heads and feathery eyelashes on their eyes. They flung sharp hips away to the right and away to the left and smiled sweetly at the crying girls and the men on tippy-toe. Only the Hilton whores seemed to him quiet and feeling no pain. He had tried a little television that first day, but the black people in whiteface playing black people in blackface unnerved him. Even their skin had changed through the marvel of color TV. A gray patina covered them all and they were happy. Really happy. Even without looking at their gray, no-color faces, the sound of their televised laughter was enough to tell him so. Different laughter from what he remembered it to be—without irony or defiance or genuine amusement. Now all he heard were shrieks of satisfaction. It made him shiver. How long had he been gone, anyway? If those were the black folks he was carrying around in his heart all those years, who on earth was he? The trouble he’d had the night he checked in was representative of how estranged he felt from these new people. The Hickey Freeman suit passed muster easily enough, and he wadded Jadine’s four hundred dollars in his fist as he approached the desk. The clerk was about to give him a very hard time because no, he would not be paying with a credit card, and no, no check either. Cash. Two nights. Cash. Son had chosen that line to wait in because the clerk’s little pecan-pie face looked friendly; now he realized the boy was in love with his identification badge. Son was surprised at himself. He seldom misjudged people. He thought the love thing with Jadine must have thrown his sensibilities off, derailed his judgment, so he leaned toward the clerk and whispered, “Brother, do you want to get home tonight? This ain’t your fuckin hotel.” But now he thought it was less an error in judgment than it was being confronted with a whole new race of people he was once familiar with.
He was heart-weary when he opened the door to his room, and the purple carpet fairly took his breath away. He wanted her in that room with him giving him the balance he was losing, the ballast and counterweight to the stone of sorrow New York City had given him. Jadine would lighten up the purple carpet, soften the tooth-white walls. She’d read the room-service menu as though it were a private message to them both and then choose a corner of the room to make love in. They had spent two whole days following the Christmas dinner in or near each other’s arms, and the demoralized house never noticed. But they both understood that Son had to get out fast, so he used Jadine’s ticket and Gideon’s passport, and split. She was to follow as soon as she could get a flight and had seen what Ondine’s and Sydney’s situation was—whether they would stay or leave.
He sat down in a plastic tub chair, rested his arms on the windowsill and looked down at Fifty-third Street. How hard this one night’s wait would be, shot full already of fallen airplanes and missed connections. Even if he managed to sleep from 6:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., what would he do with the morning? Refuse to have breakfast until nine; shave long and shower longer till noon when Air France would glide like a crane into Kennedy. Did she say baggage claim or lobby? Or did she say to wait at the hotel? His mouth went suddenly dry with the possibility of losing her in that city. Was he in the right hotel? Was it the New York Hilton or the Statler Hilton? She just said Hilton. There was no way to call and find out without letting Sydney know. He might answer the phone himself, or Ondine might, and if they knew she was joining him, they both might try to stop her. He could call Gideon. He tried to remember that hillside hut, but all he could summon were the powder pink walls and the record player sitting on a shelf. Gideon had no telephone, but messages got to him via a store halfway down the hill that sold rum and meat pies and lent out hair clippers.
That was foolish. What could Gideon tell him anyway? He was so angry at the Americans, he was actually helping Therese prepare all sorts of potions and incantations for their destruction, just in case there was such a thing as magic after all. And he was quite willing to lend his passport to the man who shared his anger at the Americans. He could not understand why Son wanted to return to the country too terrible for dying, but he agreed that one black face would look like another and a difference of twenty years would not be noticed in a black man’s five-year-old passport. Therese gave Son, as a going-away present, a tiny, dirty bag of good fortune, but he tossed it away—it
There was nothing to do; he would have to trust to her city-sense to do the right thing and be in the right places. And this time tomorrow he could smooth back her hair and sweep her eyebrows with his thumb. This time tomorrow the side teeth in her smile would divert him from what she was saying or laughing at. He loved to watch her eyes when she was not watching his. And to listen to the four/four time of her heels. Son sat there wagging his knees back and forth like a schoolboy. Not thinking most of the important things there were to think about: What would they do? Where would they go, live? How would he earn money to take care of her and, later, their children? He smiled at the vigor of his own heartbeat at the thought of her having his baby. Watch her. He would watch her stomach while she slept just the way he had when he’d lived like an animal around the house and spent the hind part of the night at her bedside pressing his dreams into hers. Now those dreams embarrassed him. The mewings of an adolescent brutalized by loneliness for a world he thought he would never see again.
There was a future. A reason for hauling ass in the morning. No more moment to moment play-it-as-it-comes existence. That stomach required planning. Thinking through a move long before it was made. What would he name his son? Son of Son?
