Rising with a weird cry, Bill flung the chapter at the wall. It hit with a crack, the yellow pages flying over the floor.
“Lesser, you tryin to fuck up my mind and confuse me. I read all about that formalism jazz in the library and it’s bullshit. You tryin to kill off my natural writin by pretendin you are interested in the fuckn form of it though the truth of it is you afraid of what I am goin to write in my book, which is that the blacks have to murder you white MF’s for cripplin our lives.” He then cried out, “Oh, what a hypocrite shitass I am to ask a Jew ofay for advice how to express
my
soul work. Just in readin it you spoil what it says. I ought to be hung on a hook till some kind brother cuts off my white balls.”
Lesser, having witnessed this or something similar before, hurried from the room.
Ten minutes later he pulled a hamburger in a frying pan off the flame and shut the gas. Lacing on his shoes he trotted down the stairs back to Bill’s.
The black was sitting naked at his table, his head bent over his manuscript. He had on his glasses yet read as though blind. His bulky body, reflecting the ceiling light, looked like a monument cut out of rock.
Lesser, in astonishment, asked himself: self-mortification or cooling off the heated self? Maybe he compares his flesh to his black creation on paper? Or is he mysteriously asserting the power of his blackness?
“Bill,” he said with emotion, “there’s more to it than I told you.”
“I’m quittin my writin,” the black said, looking up gently. “It’s no fault of you, Lesser, so don’t worry yourself about it. I have decided it’s no gig for a man and rots your body bones. It eats my heart. I know what I got to do so why don’t I do it? I got to move my broke ass to get to the true action. I got to help my sufferin black brothers.”
“Art is action, don’t give it up, Bill.”
“Action is my action.”
“Forget what I said and write the way you have to.”
“I got to move on.”
Bill glanced at the door, then at a window, as though trying to determine his future direction.
“What more have you got to say that you didn’t tell me?”
“This,” said Lesser, as though he had been everywhere and there was only one place left to go. “Irene and I are in love and we’re talking about getting married when I’ve got my book done. We thought you wouldn’t care one way or the other because you had more or less broken off with her. You said so to both of us. I wish I’d told you this before.”
Bill, as he reflected, began to believe. A sad and terrifying groan, a sustained tormented lament as though erupting from a crack in the earth, rose from his bowels.
“She’s my true bitch. I taught her all she knows. She couldn’t even fuck before I taught her.”
He rose and hit his head against the wall until his broken glasses fell to the floor. His head bounced with crack and thud until the pictures on the wall were bloodied. Lesser, in anguished horror, grabbed Bill’s arms to make him stop. The black twisted out of his grasp, caught him in a headlock and with a grunt slammed his head into the wall. Lesser went down on his knees, clutching his head in blinding pain. Blood flowed into his eyes. Bill, grabbing him under the arms, lifted him, and dragged him to the window.
Lesser, coming to, grasped both sides of the window
frame, pushing back with terrified force, as the black, his veins bulging, shoved forward with savage strength. The window broke and a jagged section of glass, after a day or a week, crashed on the cement of the alley below. Lesser saw himself hurtling down, his brains dashed all over. What a sorry fate for a writer. What a mad sorry fate for his book. In the sky above the desolate rooftops the moon poured a shroud of light into the oppressive clouds surrounding it. Below, a distant red light gleamed in the thick dark. The moon slowly turned black. All the night of the universe concentrated itself into a painful cube in Lesser’s head.
Crying out, he jammed his heel down on Willie’s bare foot. The black gasped, momentarily loosening his grip. Lesser twisted out of his sweaty armlock and they grappled, wrestled around the room, overturning the table, the typewriter crashing to the floor. The lamp fell, light rising eerily from below. They circled each other like lit shadows. Willie’s eyes blazed, his breath rang like struck metal. They grunted as they fought, uttering animal noises, Willie limping, Lesser struggling to maneuver himself to the door. They caught each other again, the black pulling, Lesser shoving him off. They broke, grabbed, and were once more locked together, head to bloodied head.
“You trick me, Jewprick, got me writin so deep you stole my bitch away.”
“Let’s stop and talk or we’re dead men.”
“What’s wrong is I forgot to go on hatin you, whiteshit. Now I hate you till your death.”
Neither let go, Lesser trying to force Willie away from the window, as the black, with his tense bulk, legs set back to avoid Lesser’s shoe, again inched him towards the broken glass.
The door shot open: Levenspiel staring in gross disbelief.
He waved both arms. “You dirty sons of bitches, I’ll get a court order.”
They jumped apart. Willie, scooping up some clothes, ducked around the overturned table and behind the astonished landlord vanished from the room.
Lesser sat on the floor wiping his face with his shirttail, then lay on his back, his chest heaving, breathing through his mouth.
Levenspiel, holding his hairy hand to his heart, looked down at Lesser’s blood-smeared face and spoke to him as to a sick relative. “My God, Lesser, look what you have done to yourself. You’re your worst enemy, bringing a naked nigger into this house. If you don’t take my advice and move out you’ll wake up one morning playing a banjo in your grave.”
Lesser twice telephoned Irene as he washed. No one answered. He combed his hair over the wound on his head, changed his bloodstained shirt and hurried in a cab to her house.
When he arrived Willie had been and was gone. She was still agonized. He had come without shoes, had pulled a pair of sneakers out of one of the cartons Irene had packed, laced them on, washed, soaped his bloody bulging forehead. They had talked bitterly. He was bruised, breathless, enraged, his eyes violent. He had left her with a black eye and swollen mouth. She wept profusely, resentfully when Lesser appeared. Irene went into the bathroom to cry, flushed the bowl and came out crying. She was barefoot, had on a black brassière and half-slip, her hair piled on her head, clasped in a wooden barrette. Her mouth was crooked, her left eye black, both eyes wet and reddened from crying. Her earrings clinked crazily as she moved.
“I begged you to let me tell him,” she sobbed angrily. “Why the hell didn’t you at least say you were going to?”
“There was no chance, it came up suddenly.”
“Shit, there was no chance. It’s your goddamn pride.
You had to be the one to tell him. It’s your profession to tell everybody everything. You couldn’t wait.”
“I waited,” said Lesser. “I wait. I waited too damn long for you to tell him. You’re crazy if you think he was about to leave you. It would have gone on like this for years. I had to do something.”
“I know Willie. I know he wasn’t happy with me any more. I know him.”
“Who are you concerned about, him or me?”
“I told you I love you. I’m concerned about Willie.”
“He tried to shove me out of his fucking window.”
She wrung her hands.
“Levenspiel broke it up.”
They held each other.
Lesser said he had read Willie’s chapter and it wasn’t working out. “I told him that and yet I felt I hadn’t told him anything. I had to go down and say how else I was involved in his life. That’s when he flipped. I’m sorry he hit you.”
“He called me filthy names,” Irene said. “He said he couldn’t stand the sight of me. That I had hurt his blackness. He belted me in the eye and left. Then he came back for his cartons, slapped me across the mouth and left again. I locked myself in the bathroom. This is the third black eye he’s given me.”
Crying again, Irene went into the toilet and the bowl flushed.
“Willie doesn’t like things taken out of his hands, especially by whites. He cursed you and said we had betrayed and degraded him. I told him that what had happened between him and me wasn’t all my fault. Then he said he was giving up his writing. I felt terrible. That was when he hit me. This all turned out exactly the opposite of what I was hoping. I hoped he would still feel affection for me when we broke up. I wanted him to remember whatever happy times we’d had, not to leave hating me.”
“Don’t cry,” said Lesser.
“I wish you had let me tell him.”
“I wish you had.”
“Are you sure you’re right about his chapter? Is it that bad?”
“If I’m not I’m wrong about a lot of other things. It’s a first draft, so what if he has to make changes?”
“I don’t know what he’ll do if he gives up writing. It makes me sick to think of it.”
Lesser didn’t know either.
“I just can’t believe it,” Irene said. “It isn’t natural. The thought must frighten him. I’m frightened and I’m also frightened for you.”
“Why for me?”
“I wouldn’t want you to be hurt by anyone, Harry.”
“Nobody’ll hurt me.” He hoped nobody would.
“Couldn’t you stay with me for a while?—I mean live here?”
“I have my work to get on with. All my things, books, notes, manuscripts are at home. I’m close to the end of the book.”
“Harry,” Irene said insistently, “Harry, they could easily get at you in that creepy empty tenement. Willie’s friends are very loyal to him. They could hide in the hall or on the stairs and wait until you came out. They couldn’t do that here. The elevator man watches. If he saw any strangers hanging around he’d call the cops.”
“Anybody who’s out to get me can get me, elevator man or no elevator man,” Lesser said gloomily. “They could jump me in the street at night. They could drop a brick on my head from the next-door roof—”
“All right, stop. Then how are you going to live in the same building with Willie?”
“I don’t think he’ll stay there now that the landlord has found his place again. But if he does and he thinks things over he’ll know I felt good will to him. If we meet I hope we can get to talking like civilized beings. If we can’t we’re in trouble.”
“Harry,” said Irene, “let’s get married and move either to a different neighborhood or some other city.”
“That’s what we’ll do,” said Lesser. “As soon as the book is out of the way.”
Irene was crying again.
Suppose he were to marry her and leave the house, abandoning it to Willie? But if he moved out Willie would have little use of it. Once Lesser had gone the wreckers would descend like vultures on a corpse.
Lesser hopped off the Third Avenue bus and hurried along Thirty-first, hugging the curb so he could watch the roofs ahead and duck if a hunk of iron came flying at him.
At the door he hesitated, momentarily afraid to go up the badly lit stairs. A million stairs, five hundred dreary floors, Lesser living at the top. He had visions of a pack of rats, or wild dogs; or a horde of blacks descending as he tries to go up. His head is riddled with bullets; his brains are eaten by carnivorous birds. There are other fearful thoughts. Enough or I’ll soon be afraid to breathe. He went up two steps at a time. Lesser pushed open the fire door on the fourth floor, listened intently, holding his breath. He heard waves softly hitting the beaches, shut the door with a relieved laugh and trotted quickly up to his floor.
At his door the wound on his head pained as though struck a hammer blow. He felt death had seized him by the hair. I can’t believe it, I have nothing worth stealing. But his snap lock lay on the floor sawed in
two. The door had been jimmied open. Crying out angrily, flailing both arms against evil, Lesser stepped into his flat and switched on the light. With a groan of lamentation he ran from room to room, searched his study closet blindly, stumbled into the living room and frantically hunted through masses of old manuscript pages, poured over piles of torn books and broken records. In the bathroom, after looking into the tub and letting out a prolonged tormented sad cry, the writer, on the edge of insane, fainted.
Here’s this tiny accursed island.
The war canoe touches the wet shore and the three missionaries, tucking in striped paddles and holding up the skirts of their robes, hop onto the sand and beach the long bark.
The drowsy air is stirred by whispering voices, insects buzzing, muted strings, a flute in the lonely forest, woman singing or sobbing somewhere.
The Headman Minister, in voluminous black robe with leopard epaulets and hood, and the two missionaries in white robes, wearing black masks, wander from room to room of the long hut, uncovering hidden stores. They find the wrecked man’s everything:
Dutch cheese, dried meat, rice, nails, carpenter’s saw, jug of rum, cornbread, compasses, ink and paper.