36
O
n Sacré-CÅur's hilltop, Ben watched the sun set in an immolation of orange and scarlet. The sky tempered into calm blues and violets, then darkened to an endless depth of black, clearing out room for the moon. A current pulsed through him. It made him edgy. Restlessness bloated up. He couldn't control it. He ached for release. Ben looked down at the city. Lights blinked against the skyline. Corners and grooves brooded with shadows. He was off from the club tonight and glad. He was sick of Chez LeRoi. Sick of jazz and champagne and being asked about Harlem and treated like an enlightened savage. He was sick of not being able to write.
He had to get out of Montmartre tonight.
Le Jardin des Tuilleries was quiet, but not empty. Couples promenaded. Elderly folks assembled on some benches, their conversations dotted by tinkles of laughter. A full-bodied moon loitered in the sky, shining like a freshly minted coin.
Men pervaded the orchard, each one standing by a tree as if it was an island he'd claimed. There were delegates from every class of Parisian society: rich men in Oxford suits; middle-class men in everyday office suits; workmen in heavy, soiled boots. Mostly young men, but a few who were older or old. Ben's dark skin rendered him almost invisible under the thick tent of branches, but he received many winks and loose nods and many loose, knowing smiles as he roved the orchard's gallery of men.
“
Venez-vous ici, mon Africain,
” one said as Ben passed.
He rambled deeper into the orchard. The men grew sparser, but two to an island instead of one. He smelled reefer, sniffed around to detect the source. Someone reached out, pulled him onto an island, and inserted a mouth onto his in a swelling kiss. Ben squirmed and resisted, and then didn't. The man's mustache scraped his upper lip. Ben was about to be subsumed when he felt his pants being undone, a hand slithering in. The shock woke him. He backed away.
“
Pourquoi vous vous arrêtez?
” the man said.
“
Je m'excuse. Je dois aller,
” Ben said, and fled the orchard.
He needed release. The urgency propelled him toward the boardinghouse, but he had to press through the anarchy of the Place Pigalle. He wound around prostitutes who mixed with the urchins and the criminals and the bourgeois tourists who came to Montmartre to ogle. He passed a brasserie where a brawl had enticed an audience who watched from outside through the picture window, commenting and cheering and taking bets on the outcome.
A man on the corner near the boardinghouse sold cocaine and reefer. Madame Gautier was forever shooing him away, but his product was popular and he feared the loss of his livelihood more than he did a sniping old woman. Ben wanted reefer, but that would delay getting back to the room, a delay that posed the hazard of him descending into madness right there on the street.
His hand shook as he inserted the key. He opened the room door. Baby Back and Clifford Treadwell sat on the bed, glasses in their hands, a bottle of cognac tottering between them on the grandma quilt. Both were fully clothed, although Baby Back's shoes were off.
“Look, Baby Back,” Clifford said. “Your cousin's here!”
The two laughed. It was indiscreet, pitched high enough to shatter glass. Ben idled in the doorway. He couldn't talk. He couldn't take his eyes off Clifford. The door remained open.
“Uh-oh,” Clifford said to Baby Back, “looks like your cousin's gone dumb. He's lost the use of his mouth.”
“Believe me,” Baby Back said, “he
knows
how to use that mouth!”
They laughed again, the obscene laughter of drunkards. Except they weren't drunk. The cognac bottle was almost full.
Ben closed the door. “Thought you left Paris.”
“I did. Millicent and I went to Marseille. And then I left her there. I think
high and dry
is how we say it back home. And now I'm here again. With you two cousins.”
Ben hadn't entered any farther into the room. What he'd walked in on infuriated him. Its tacit intimacy infuriated him. Clifford's smugness and Baby Back's shoeless feet and the cognac spilling on the precious grandma quilt infuriated him. Not a raucous fury. Rather, it collected in a tight whorl as quiet as a hum.
“Have a drink,” Clifford said. He looked around. “Is there another glass?”
“No!” Baby Back shouted.
They laughed that intemperate laugh again. It compelled Ben toward the bed. When he got close, he saw Clifford's feet were shoeless as well.
“Get out,” he said, his volume low, a whisper, deadly. “Get the fuck out.”
The cohorts' laughter ceased. Baby Back sipped his drink. Clifford rose, located his shoes, put them on, and then exited sans a good-bye.
Neither Ben nor Baby Back moved.
“Did you fuck him?” Ben said.
Baby Back's head swiveled toward him, his face a dagger. “You got eyes, Ben.”
“I ain't talking about now. Did you fuck him when we was on the ship?”
At last. The questionâthe accusationâwas out in the world after incubating for months.
Baby Back finished off his cognac, shrugged. “Yeah. I did. You fucked Angeline. I fucked Clifford. So we're Even Stephen. How do you say that in your high-and-mighty French?”
He poured more cognac, raised it in a toast.
Ben walked out.
The dealer was still on the corner and now he
did
buy reefer, went to the Place Pigalle, and smoked it openly. No one gave a damn. Good reefer. Did its job quickly, sharpened his senses and numbed him at the same time. A crowd snaked through the Place Pigalle. Ben allowed it to carry him along. The reefer made people and things and sounds seem like impressions. His mouth and throat dried up. Everything in him felt dry. He smoked more to prevent diminishment of his high. He scorned ebb, desired only flow. The fresh injection of reefer waded through his body and found his dick. He was of a mind to return to Le Jardin des Tuilleries. But something caught his eye. Some
one
.
A young colored man swished through the crowd. He wore white pants, white shoes, and white jacket with blue vertical stripes. His backside swung like a pendulum. He moved with purpose, head high, nose needling the air as he headed east of the Place Pigalle, toward the Boulevard de Clichy. Ben wasn't attracted, but he was fascinated. He followed the pendulum hips up the Boulevard de Clichy and then down a short brick side street lined with rundown houses. Young men milled about on the steps of some. Hawks on the lookout, primed to catch prey. They noticed the two colored men instantly.
“
Regardez-vous! Des nègres!
”
“Come,
mon cher.
Come to my room and show me
une nuit sauvage!
”
“
Non!
Come to
my
room. Let me see if it is true what they say about you.”
“Come to
my
room. I have jungle records from America. And I will not charge you. At least not much!”
Pendulum Hips made a spectacle of his voyage down the street. He played to the audience, lagged his walk, swerved his hips harder. But as he flaunted himself at the French boys, Ben realized it was
he
receiving the attention. They looked directly at Ben as they tossed their propositions. Pendulum Hips was merely the sideshow but didn't know it. He stopped performing when he reached the dead end of the street. He entered a building and vanished.
Ben followed.
The handwritten paper sign glued to the wall next to the staircase read
MON CLUB.
An arrow pointed down. As Ben traveled down the ramshackle steps, piano licks wandered up. He reached the bottom step and found himself in a basement lit with harsh, dim bulbs. A long wood board supported by cinderblocks stood at one end, stocked so heavy with booze it bowed in the middle. A piano player and a girl singer occupied the other end. She wore a leopard-print caftan with a matching turban and she sang a torchy song in raspy French. Florid makeup highlighted an angular jaw and a pronounced Adam's apple.
Two dozen men clothed in the hand-me-down suits of clerks and office workers occupied Mon Club. Some talked and laughed in groups. A few couples stood apart, groping, kissing. Two men in a corner snorted cocaine from a small metal tray they held between them. Wallflowers, drinks and cigarettes in hand, evaluated the action and strategized their opportunity to hop in.
Ben watched the show from his roost on the bottom step. He spotted Pendulum Hips with two men. They were nudging in close, grating against him, while he closed his eyes and submitted.
Ben headed to the bar. While en route almost every face scrutinized him. The guys playing with Pendulum Hips did, too. Ben received a few tart spanks on his backside and at least one pinch.
“
Un Africain.
”
“
Très exotique.
”
“
Très sensuel
.”
The bartender cast a lewd smile and waived payment for the drink. Ben faced Pendulum Hips's admirers, lifted his glass in a toast. They promptly deserted their plaything, who opened his eyes, perplexed to find them gone.
“
Moi, je m'appelle François,
” the one on Ben's left said. He couldn't have been over thirty, but his hair was completely silver. “
Et vous?
”
“
Moi, c'est
Ben.”
The one on his rightâa very tall, robustly built blondâgrunted something in a guttural tongue.
“His name is Dietrich,” François said. “From Berlin. He speaks only German.”
Dietrich inspected Ben's backside, then stepped right up in front of him, grazed his cheek with his fingernail, the graze long and ungentle. A smile, not unlike the bartender's, prowled on his lips as he looked down at Ben from his substantial height. He grunted again.
“He says you need another drink,” François interpreted. “He will buy it for you.”
Dietrich left them.
The silence between François and Ben might have been awkward if not for the reefer stirring through him. It walled off his bashfulness, even in the face of François's dogged stare and curl of lips that he moistened every few moments with a decadent gloss of his tongue.
“Dietrich's visiting from Berlin?” Ben asked. “You guys are friends?”
“He is my lover. He lives here, but he refuses to learn French.”
“Sounds familiar.”
Something was happening. Mon Club's shadows purred. Men were leaving the lighted areas in twos and disappearing into the dark, then reemerging, sometimes with their partner, most times alone, sometimes with a different partner than the one with whom they'd disappeared. The disappearance screamed urgency, heated impatience, but the reemergence dawdled with the lazy indifference of a yawn.
Dietrich rejoined them with Ben's drink. He downed it. Cheap, drab champagne without the crackle of the stuff LeRoi Jasper served. Dietrich bought him another. And then another. And another. They dallied on the outskirts of the basement's overspilling shadows.
Ben lifted reefer from his pocket, lit it, shared it with his new gentleman friends. Reefer made them playful. Lips and cheeks brushed, hands wound their way to private places. A coy rendition of the heaven taking place in the shadows.
Dietrich grunted.
“He says he wants to go to Harlem, in America,” François said. “He wonders if you have been there.”
“No.
Jamais,
” Ben said. “But I've always wanted to. I hear they have parties every night and everyone sings the blues.”
More champagne. More translation to and from German. More couples purring in the shadows accompanied by the chanteuse's French rendition of “I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight.” Ben perspired, rubbed his cold champagne glass across his forehead to cool off. He smoked more reefer.
“You two were talking to that other Negro,” he said. “Well, not
talking
exactly.
Alors,
what happened?”
François slipped an arm around his waist. His thumb skidded airily up and down Ben's side. “We like African
men,
not girls. He would have sufficed, but since
you
are here . . .”
As if Negroes were interchangeable. What was the word for
interchangeable
in French? He didn't know. What he
did
know was that this roomâthese men, this Frenchman, this German, that leering bartender, these shadowsâinflamed him. Ignited the craving in him. In this room craving didn't frustrate because the means of fulfillment was available, his for the taking. All he had to do was be here, be present, want it, allow it. It excited him. The danger. The escapade of instant intimacy. But something else, too. In a few moments he would step into the shadows where this Frenchman and this German would have their greedy way with him. And he would let them. Not simply for the sake of release; not just because he was lonely or because the loss of Baby Back's touch had left him bereft.
He would step into the shadows because he was curious.
Mon Club overflowed. A continuous cavalcade of men tramped down the basement stairs. The temperature warmed, making the air closer, mustier. A collective odor of bodies swamped the room. Not only couples in the shadows now, but threesomes and quartets. More champagne. More groans as chests quivered out of shirts and trousers puddled at men's feet. François still held Ben about the waist as the groaning in the shadows intensified, as the temperature rose tenfold.
“
Mon beau Africain,
” François whispered, “do not think. Allow.”