“He tried his best. You can’t deny that. There’s lots of other lawyers who wouldn’t’ve touched this case with a ten-foot pole. They know what it is like in Toronto with a racial case. Mr. Berginstein tried his best. And I think it is rather ungrateful of you, Henry, to say that nobody is interested in your welfare or your well-being. It is really selfish.” What Agatha was really telling Henry, this afternoon, was that the case had fallen through: he had paid Mr. Berginstein his fees (actually Agatha had paid it with her own money, since Henry had none, and was still unemployed); the case was erased from the memory of the policemen involved, and from their files; the reporter had destroyed his notebook with the yellow notes, and it was best for Henry to admit and acknowledge defeat. But Henry refused to see it that way. It was his body that was bruised.
“Welfare? Well-being?” he shouted at her. “Is that all you could say? But I say that the lawyers in this goddamn place don’t have no morals.”
“That is your opinion,” Agatha said. “You are entitled to your opinion.”
“Fuck my opinion! I am talking the truth. That ain’ no goddamn opinion. That is the goddamn truth.”
“That is your opinion. You are entitled to it. I am entitled to mine. Mr. Berginstein is entitled to his.”
“Fuck Mr. Berginstein, Berweinstein, Berg-whoever-the-hell-he-is!” He was trying to tidy his mind, and control his anger. But he was already too overwrought with the fear of failure. “All Jews are bastards, anyway!”
When the words struck her, Agatha fell dumb. There was a change of colour in her cheeks, which registered not so much hate as shock. And then, swiftly as the repercussion of his hate hit her, so swiftly did she recover from it. She pulled herself together, almost making a visible, physical action, and she looked at him with a searing coldness, and said, “I am a Jew too. You fucked this Jew, remember? Would you call me a bastard Jew, after that?”
“Oh, you’re different.”
“How am I different?”
“Oh shit, woman, you’re different!”
“But I am a Jew, Henry.”
“Well, hell, ain’t you ever said nigger? Nigger bastard? Not once? Even in your mind? And you still know me? Haven’t you? Goddamn woman, I’m talking to you! When did Jews stop saying nasty things about niggers, when they get up there together in Forest Hill?”
“You’re missing the point, Henry. You are always missing the point.” She said this with great scorn. She said it also with the superiority of what she herself would have called (had she been writing a paper or discussing this present problem in a seminar) “the sophistication characteristic of a higher civilization.” And as she saw how her words hurt him, she lessened or tried to lessen the injury by adding, “Whenever you’re losing in an argument, you always have to resort to abuses and, and, and raising your voice and abusing everybody who isn’t a precious negro …”
“Not negro! Black!”
“I said negro. They’re negroes!”
“And goddamn you, woman, I say black. I goddamn say you ain’ calling my people negroes. Not in my goddamn room, not in my goddamn presence!”
“Negroes!”
“Black, goddammit!”
“Negroes, they’re negroes, they’re negroes, and you are a goddamn no-good, unemployed poor-ass negro!”
The moment the last word escaped her lips was the exact moment the slap landed on her jaw. He was shaking. She was shaking. Immediately afterward, he realized he was silly to hit her; and all sorts of images started to crowd his brain. He saw more cops beating him up; he saw other cops, cops from the southern United States, driving him far out of town in the night, and cutting out his balls; he saw himself hanging from a tree; he saw Agatha’s father with a gun in his hand, with the muzzle pointing at his penis. But all these terrors, all these frights did nothing to stop the propulsion of his hand. His hand contained more terror than those fears. And his hand continued to strike her, left and right, plax-plax-plax! in a kind of warlike African hitting of stick upon wood, a savage rhythm, plax-plax-plax-plaxxxx-plax! the slapping and the frustration from the slapping because she did not cry. She did not weep, did not make a sound. The coldness in her eyes said what had to be said.
He stopped slapping her, and he started to shake her, trying to shake up some retaliation in her. But she was superior to him in her apprehension of nonviolence. He wanted her to do something: if only she would cry, or hit him back, bite him, kick him, call him a negro, a nigger or a shit, but do some goddamn thing, something. And she cheated him out of this victory: she continued sitting on the bed, watching him, and this watching became more devastating than blows. The coldness was in her eyes. When he saw she would not react he put his arms round her, and he kissed her, and it was then that his lips tasted the salt of her tears; and he allowed his beaten arms and then his head and finally his whole body to fall down, until he was weeping like a child in her lap. She placed her hands on his head and on his neck, and soothed him, and told him, “I love you, Henry, God, I love you.” It was a simple expression of his punishment; and of his incarceration. And the more he wept. And while he wept, Agatha was taking off her clothes.
Bernice had just switched off the vacuum cleaner. And immediately the house became uncomfortably quiet. She didn’t imagine that the machine was so noisy. She switched it on again to find out for herself; and she discovered that while it was working and fuming and buzzing over the rugs and the carpets in the seven downstairs rooms, she couldn’t hear the cars passing
