room, an elegant room, at elegant Harvard, friends of theirs
from home, their room, all students studying to be the future
of their country, and I was bleeding anyway and so I spread
my legs for him, not knowing of course that it was because I
loved her. I stayed with him over and over, for months, a night
here, an afternoon there, though I came to hate him, a purely
physical aversion to his clumsy, boring fuck: I didn’t want
him to touch me but I had him fuck me anyway, too polite to
say no for one thing, not knowing how to get out of it, and
wanting her, not knowing it. I got pregnant and had an
35
abortion and she went home. Nothing like pregnancy to make
the man disappear. It decided her. The years of exiled youth
ended. She went home. Like everyone else in the world I was
terrified, it would have been easier right then to be an outcast
hero and have a little black baby whom I could love to death
without having to say why and I would have felt brave, brave:
and no one would have hurt that child: but Emmy looked at
me a certain way all the time now, hate, simple, pure, and I
had the abortion, the hate was hard as a rock, diamond,
shredding the light. She got so quiet I could have died. She left,
but I was the deserter. I didn’t care too much. By the time
mother died everyone was a stranger anyway, and after that I
was a too-cold child with a too-cold heart. I have stayed that
way. Everything gets taken away and everyone eventually
weeps and laughs and understands. Why lie?
36
The great thing is to be
something— that is, in one way or another,
with life; and I chose the form of my
saturation.
Henry James
*
Have you ever seen the Lower East Side of New York in the
summer? The sidewalks are boiling cement, almost molten,
steaming, a spread of heat scorching human feet, the heat like
the pure blue of the pure flame, pure heat saddled with city
dirt and city smell and especially the old urine of the hundreds
of near-dead junkies hanging nearly skeletal in the shadows of
doorways and crouched under the stinking stairwells of
tenements in which the hot, dead air never moves.
The sun burns. It burns like in Africa. It is in the center of
the sky, huge and burning. No clouds can cover it. It comes
through them, a haze of heat. It gets bigger every day. It is a
foul yellow fire, sulfur at the edges. It hangs and burns. It
