about it; I didn't want to get mixed up with a lot of crazy thoughts. So I kept looking at the people on the street as I drove home. I pulled up in front of the house and cut the motor before I realized I was there. I gave a little laugh and went inside.
I took so long bathing and getting dressed, Ella Mae said, 'So you got another heavy on tonight.'
'I'm just a playboy at heart,' I laughed, trying on another sport shirt.
I was wearing my beige gabardine pumps, grey flannel slacks, camel's-hair jacket, but I couldn't find a shirt that satisfied. I wanted to look sharp but I wanted to feel comfortable too. I could wear an outfit over on the Avenue and feel strictly fine, but if I went downtown in it I felt gaudy. Now I was trying to get a combination I'd feel all right in if I had to take the dame out somewhere. I finally decided on an aqua gabardine shirt. Then I stepped into the kitchen to let her gape me.
'See what I mean?' I said.
She tried to look scornful. 'You just think you look cute. You'll stumble in here 'bout four o'clock all messed up and wanna kill everybody.'
I grinned. 'I'm going out with my white chick tonight. She takes good care of me.'
'You're saying it for a joke,' she said derisively, 'but I believe you, you're just the type.'
'You know I like my white women, baby,' I teased. 'Couldn't get along without 'em.'
'You just like all the other niggers,' she came back. 'Get a white woman and go from Cadillacs to cotton sacks.' Then she added offhandedly, 'Alice called while you were in the tub,' and gave me a sharp look, catching me off guard. 'Oh, so, it's like that now. Just last week you were bragging 'bout how you were gonna marry her.'
I got my face under control again and said, 'Now you know I'm waiting for Henry to die so I can marry you, baby. What do you say we bump him off?'
She went on washing the baby's diapers, ignoring me. I stepped into the front room and called Alice. She answered the phone.
'Hello, baby. Bob,' I said.
'Bob, I've been trying to get you.' Her voice sounded as though it was under wraps; it was still low, controlled, but it wasn't mellow.
'I stopped and ate on the way home,' I said.
For a time she didn't say anything, then she asked, 'Bob, did you do what I asked you to?'
I knew what she meant but I said anyway, 'What did you ask me to do?'
'Let's don't play games with each other, Bob,' she said. 'You know what I asked you to do.' There was strain in her voice.
'I didn't do it,' I said.
She waited for me again and when she saw I wasn't coming, she asked, 'Are you going to?'
'No,' I said.
There was another blank and when her voice came now it was a little desperate. 'Do you love me, Bob?'
'Yes,' I said. I was fighting against her, trying to keep her from touching me. I didn't want to get all mixed up, mad or remorseful or even sensible; I wanted to go see Madge and to hell with everybody.
'You have a funny way of showing it,' she said.
'I told you, baby,' I said. My voice was getting heavy.
She was silent again for a time, then she asked, 'Am I going to see you tonight?'
'What for, so we can have another argument?'
'I want you to take me out to Hollywood. Lawson's going to lecture,' she said. 'Afterward we can have a snack and go to a night club if you like.'
Now it was my turn to hesitate. I tried to think of some way to let her down light but couldn't think of anything she wouldn't know was a lie. Finally I said, 'Not tonight, baby.'
'I want to talk to you, darling,' she said. I could tell she didn't want to let me go.
But I wanted her to hang up; it was getting inside of me, touching me. 'Not tonight, baby,' I said gruffly. 'I've got something to do tonight. I'll see you tomorrow night.'
I could hear her sighing over the phone. 'Tomorrow night might be too late, darling.'
I didn't say anything at all.
Finally she asked, 'Is this goodbye, Bob?'
'Look baby,' I said. 'I'm not in the mood to listen to your all this and heaven too.'
She hung up. 'Goddamnit!' I said. Now I was beat. I didn't even feel like going to see Madge any more, but I knew I had to.
I went out, drove down to Forty-ninth Street, and turned over to Broadway. I stopped at a Thrifty's drugstore and bought a bottle of brandy-'27 Years Old,' it said on the label. Then I got on Figueroa and kept straight down to the Hotel Mohave near Third Street.
It was a narrow four-storey building with a dry-cleaning joint on the first floor. The hotel entrance was to one side, a narrow stairway leading to the second floor with a round white dirty globe over the doorway. The neighbourhood was spotted with vacant lots and cheap hotels, a stagnant part of town between the downtown section to the east and the residential district to the west.
I drew up across the street and tried to spot Madge's room. Don had said it was a second-floor front but I didn't know which side. There were double windows on each side with drawn venetian blinds and a bare centre hallway window. Both front rooms were dark.
I knew these joints; if I walked in there dressed as I was, everybody who saw me would be hostile and curious; and the chances were somebody would call the police and have me arrested on general principles.
So I drove down the street until I came to a beer joint with a telephone sign outside. It was one of those dingy, dirty joints, but the moment I stepped inside everybody in the joint got on their muscle.
I stifled an impulse to say, 'Don't worry, folks, I don't want to be served,' said quickly in the direction of the bar, 'Just wanna use the phone,' kept on back to the booth. I found the Mohave's number and dialled.
A dried-up querulous voice said, 'Hotel Mohave.'
'I'd like to speak to Madge Perkins in room 202,' I said.
'She's out,' the voice said impatiently.
I hesitated. 'Do you know when she'll be back?'
'Don't know,' the voice said, and hung up.
I went out, turned around, and drove down on the same side as the hotel, parked several doors up the street, and waited. That way I'd see her when she came in. I got a swing programme on the radio and puffed a cigarette. People passed, glanced at me, then turned to stare with hard hostility when they saw I was a Negro. It was a rebbish neighbourhood, poor white; I'd have felt much better parked in Beverly Hills.
After a while I became conscious of somebody watching me. I looked around, didn't see anyone. Then I noticed that I was parked in front of a rooming house. Someone inside, maybe the landlady, had noticed the car, and several faces were peering furtively around the corners of the curtains in the front room. It made me nervous. I knew if I stayed there for any length of time they'd call the police. Any Negro in the neighbourhood after dark was a 'suspicious person.' So I pulled up beyond the hotel and watched the entrance through the rear-view mirror.
It seemed as if I'd been there for hours. I glanced at my watch. It was only eight-thirty. I got out, walked across the street, and took another gander at the second-storey front. Both rooms were still dark. For a moment I debated whether to call again, decided against it. I knew there wasn't any use trying to get by the desk. If I went up there and told the guy who owned the voice I'd talked to over the phone that I wanted to see Madge Perkins in 202, he was liable to shoot me on sight or drop dead of heart failure.
Suddenly I decided to give it up, go over, and take Alice out to Lawson's lecture, and afterwards take her to the Down Beat. Madge wasn't worth the effort, I thought. The whole idea of going to bed with her to get even with Kelly and Mac and the other peckerwoods out at the yard seemed silly now. She wasn't nothing but trouble any way you looked at it, I told myself; and I'd always figured myself too smart to let the white folks catch me out there on their own hunting-grounds.
I mashed the starter and drove out Figueroa, thinking about what a fool I'd been to go down there looking for Madge in the first place. Nobody but a pure and simple chump would skip a date with a chick like Alice for an off- chance shot at a tramp like Madge. I was feeling so good about it I'd forgotten all about the row I'd had with Alice the night before. My mind had jumped back to the good times we'd had together, and I felt relieved and kind of half-way clever, as if I'd gotten out of a trap the white folks had set for me.
