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  !Click Song

  A Novel

  John A. Williams

  To Nancy Burnett Williams

  and to David Justin Williams

  To Lori

  and to Adam,

  to Dennis and Millicent and to Margo Carolyn,

  to Gregory and Lucia and to John Gregory

  These clicks … are amongst the oldest sounds in language …

  —Gerald Massey

  A Book of the Beginnings, Vol. II

  In my native village … there is a song we always sing … it’s called The Click Song by the English because they cannot say !CLICK !CLOCK !CWLUNG

  —Miriam Makeba

  THE CUSP

  Yat, yat yot.

  Her words were pinched through a throat decomposing to fat, cooled by sips from a spritzer.

  She’s nervous, I think. Why?

  Mafia East Side restaurant, stiff white tablecloths, waiters like black cats touched with white prowling the aisles with ash trays, wine, hot plates, menus, food, glancing at us.

  Is that nigger doing it to Ms. Gullian? Just who is that nigger?

  Yot, yot, yat, continues Maureen Gullian. She is my editor. We are lunching to discuss my novel Unmarked Graves, the fifth her company is to publish.

  She is still talking, rapidly and nervously, but her words are like a Mexican bark painting, filled with colors and foliage too casual not to be ordered; words like the soundless sounds of birds in those paintings, whose heads are tilted upward in song or perhaps warning, for those paintings contain in meshing colors the hard horrors of the soul.

  Yat, yot, yat.

  All I can say, my stomach dropping, is No! I didn’t hear!

  Yes! This morning!

  Up! The glasses and plates shake, tilt, fall over. The brightly colored nymphs who adorn the walls seem to lose their shyness; they stare at me. Real heads swing around. The soldiers in their penguin suits freeze warily, look to Ms. Gullian for a sign. Ms. Gullian—strange—looks relieved as I walk quickly past the soldiers. What am I doing? This is like rushing out of myself. I am out in the sun under which I once loved to walk, along Fifth Avenue, light in the head and heavy in the joint from drinking martinis.

  My haste (perhaps it is the napkin that has fallen and tugs at my ankles) sends signals before me. People are staring. What kind of expression is on my face to make them look at me so? Am I a perpetrator of a crime, a murder, a mugging, a bombing here in midtown? Their eyes seem to ask Why is that nigger walking so fast?

  I do not really know. I beat the traffic sprawled in the roadway like a hacked-up serpent. But it has noise, rumbles, bawls, sweat, pants; it has the soul of incipient rust and knows it.

  I lurch under the canopy into two doormen dressed in blue. The building is the Triomphe. It was where Sandra Queensbury lived until she died five years ago, she of the quick hands and quicker tongue; she of the old days, the dispenser of secrets and ugly little wisdoms.

  The doormen converge on me.

  Who do you wish to see?

  Cummings. Paul Cummings. Kaminsky. His wife, I mean. She’s here?

  Cummings. No Kaminsky. He’s—well. His wife is up there. Your name?

  One in strategic retreat, backing to the callbox. The other stands his guard, legs spread, hoping I will not razor-shorten him by eight inches.

  Once again? Your name?

  Cato Caldwell Douglass. It means nothing to them. He calls it up empty of its rhythms. He is surprised at the response. The blocker slides aside, murmuring, First elevator on your right, twelfth floor.

  Up the wood-paneled, brass-trimmed lift and out along the carpets, which are the color of day-old blood. The bell. The door opens. We stare. It’s been a long time. She has that delightful, secretly wicked look middle-aged New York women possess.

  Cate, Cate, oh, Cate.

  Embraces, kisses.

  I didn’t think you’d—

  We go in and sit down. The sun is bright upon the white walls.

  Kids okay? We never even saw the kids.

  She nods.

  Why?

  She shrugs. Allis okay?

  Yes. Can I call her? Allis is home today finishing up a proposal for work.

  She points toward where the phone must be. I walk through the rooms. He had reverted to the old Paul between relationships, the Paul of gooseneck lamps bent down over typewriters.

  Allis is shocked. Oh, she says. Oh dear. Oh, honey.

  Be home soon. Wait. Betsy.

  She has come up behind me and takes the phone. A helluva time to say hello—again—Allis.

  They talk. Betsy’s voice is soft. I stroll through the rooms and ask again, Why?

  “Hell, I’d never do that,” Paul said.

  It was one of those afternoons in the classroom. Professor Bark had seemed troubled and sad. “It’s something to think about. You’re writers or would-be writers. Consider then: your first work. It’s a big novel. Technically it’s advanced. It becomes a tremendous literary and financial success. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wants to buy the book for a lot of money. Would you then commit suicide like Ross Lockridge?”

  He was pacing quickly and lightly, whirling himself about and pacing again. None of us, I was sure, saw the shadows; all would be smooth. Bark stopped in front of me and looked at me. He appeared to be surprised to see me in his class. What is that nigger doing here?

  “Read Raintree County and think about what happened to the author. Think about yourselves. Imagine—success!”

  Over beer Paul said, “There must have been something wrong with Lockridge, don’t you think?”

  “Like what?”

  “How the hell do I know? But Christ. To do what he did when he did it. Hemingway would never do a thing like that. Hell, I’d never do a thing like that.”

  Betsy is off the phone, picking her way back through the apartment she once lived in with Paul. I remember when they moved there.

  Was he sick, cancer or something?

  Her look for a moment is bleaker than it should be. Don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t have left him.

  What the hell, I say.

  Her eyes, dark gray, widen. I must say I’m a little surprised to see you here, though.

  I turn. I don’t know why, either, I say. But I think we were real friends for a very long time. Maybe, in spite of everything, I’m the only one he had.

  She sighs. Yes, that’s true. He thought of you a lot and often wanted to close the gap, but something always stopped him. Well, it was between you and him.

  What?

  Everything.

  Naw. I just knew him a long time and he didn’t always love me for my luck, and I can’t say that I loved him for his because it wasn’t that and he knew it and knew I knew it too.

  That upset him.

  It should have.

  “Say, what made you send your poems to WCW and not to someone like Langston Hughes?” The smile / sneer.

  We sit in silence, Betsy and I, remembering different things.

  I say, You don’t have to worry about money or anything.

  No. He was making lots.

  I thought he was.

  She frowns. You know I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t let him do that with the kids. You understand.

  No. I don’t understand at all. After not seeing him or you for years, he called two days ago. I was in Denver doing a reading. Allis told him how pleased she was to hear from him. He said he’d call back, but we looked him up—

  Unlisted, Betsy says—

  —
I got back yesterday, lunched with my editor, or started to, today, just now. She told me. So, Betsy, I don’t know anything.

  He became very Orthodox. Wanted us to convert.

  Maybe just a reaction.

  Overreaction.

  When he stopped being a WASP, I say, he became a good writer, and wrote out of his own skin.

  A couple of times, she says without looking at me.

  He was sure you’d convert, I say.

  I never told him I would.

  I think, He was so sure that she would …

  We’re silent until she says, You want anything, a book, a pen?

  No, there’s nothing, Betsy.

  Please look around. You ever thought of suicide?

  Sure. You?

  Before the kids. Before Paul, sometimes.

  Why?

  It seemed too much to bear, is about the only way I can put it.

  But you didn’t.

  Read Hamlet’s soliloquy too often. Made sense. Why didn’t you?

  They don’t approve of suicide over there. I smile at the look she gives me. She follows me through the apartment. I got things to do, Betsy. And I don’t want to make it easy for the opposition.

  Stopping, I say, I don’t think there’s anything I want, Betsy.

  He’d want you to have something of his.

  Thirty years of knowing ain’t bad.

  I guess not. I keep forgetting that it was so long. Will you come to the service tomorrow?

  Yes, we’ll come. Where?

  Gutterman’s, Sixty-sixth and Broadway. Nine-thirty. His father’ll do the service.

  The good Rabbi Kaminsky.

  Yes.

  You never met him?

  No.

  I say to the walls, the discarded corduroy pants and Brooks Brothers shirts, to the rows of mangled McCreedy & Schreiber desert boots, the shelves of books, his all in a row, mine all in a row, the photos of Betsy and the kids, the framed citations, including the National Book Award, the stained coffee mugs, and say to his ex-wife: We were exactly the same age.

  She nods, says nothing.

  There is no paper in his typewriter. I say, Maybe he shouldn’t have loved Hemingway so much, the Compleat American Thing so much.

  Well, she says, one wants to belong, if one can. Ironic. Hemingway didn’t seem to like Jews.

  No. Well, I’ve got to go, Betsy. You’re okay?

  I’m all right. See you tomorrow. Love to Allis, Glenn and Mack.

  Glenn’s traveling, I say. We’re at the door.

  You must be very flattered to have a son who’s also a writer.

  Yeah. See you, then.

  G’bye, Cate. Thanks.

  I am walking or at least moving toward home. It’s not Paul’s death that steers me along this dogshit-covered trail through the Park. I just wish to be alone to think of this business of dying, of being here one moment and gone the next, like swirls of mist, almost as nothing but a passing dampness dried by a flash of sunlight. Nothing more. Nothing else, really. Things live and things die every minute and who knows of them? But I knew Paul; I thought I knew him very well.

  Tonight’s television news, obits in the morning papers, the lingering reminiscences in the monthly publications, black-boxed in the Authors Guild Bulletin, noted in the PEN Newsletter, and it would be over, except for his books and what he said in them, the accumulation of his fifty-five years. And there would be those theses turned into biographies, perhaps after a decent interval, of which there were in publishing, these days, fewer and fewer.

  Shalom, friend; ẹkurole, Paul, son, father, brother; ẹkurole and shalom, bigot, liberal, hero, coward. Writer. Liar.

  BEGINNINGS

  1

  His blue eyes twinkled slightly, and he extended his hand. “Paul Cummings.”

  “Cato Douglass.” (Cato Caldwell Douglass. At home and in the marines they called me C.C.)

  He was tall, tending toward gaunt, in his rumpled Eisenhower jacket, and his face was sharp with angles. He studied me; for a fraction of a second he seemed anxious and the next vaguely arrogant. I had met people like him before, the other, white marines, who chatted with you (seemingly secure in the knowledge that, even though you were a marine too, you were not quite like them) when their northbound ships stopped at our atoll, and then went away, leaving us to man our antiaircraft guns against Zeros that no longer came that far south. We had had our combat and had been written up in the magazines back home; we’d disgrace no one.

  He rocked slightly and ran his hand through light brown hair that was longer than most men were wearing it.

  He did not remember me, but I’d seen him in my Survey of Western Literature class. The hall teemed with people. Students answered the roll for friends who were cutting, and the instructor peering out over the mob, composed mainly of veterans, accepted any voice as proof of presence. I couldn’t cut; I was the only black person in the class.

  We talked of the branches we’d served in, our wives, the university—tentative touchings to see which kind of a relationship, if any, would work.

  “This Professor Bark’s supposed to be a pretty good writer.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Poetry?”

  “Short stories. Mostly for A.M.”

  “Ummm,” I said. I didn’t know what A.M. was.

  He sensed that and said, “Atlantic Monthly,” without making me feel like a fool. “Are you a poet?”

  “I write some but—”

  “I do a lot of it myself,” he said, treading confidently over my words. “But I think I’m ready for fiction.”

  A coed with honey-colored hair, and skin the complexion of unfrothed cream, walked briskly by, her buns rolling and swelling in fetching movements.

  Paul’s eyes followed her with a nonchalant lust. “We dreamed of women like that, right? I never saw anything like that in two years in Europe.”

  I wondered what his wife looked like and I wondered about him. I’d never known a white man who even implicitly was willing to share with a black man both women and career.

  After that first class—in which Bark spattered the awkward silence with the question “Why do you want to be writers?” an asking that made us turn to the windows and look past each other until he, eyes filmed over with amusement, his tone barely hopeful, then asked, “Would Some One Care To Read?” while Paul, to my surprise, looked straight past him in those large, almost unbearable silences, and then, as if pushing upward against wet snow (pushing, I now know, against the historicity of the situation), I raised my hand and read—Paul and I began our afterclass beer routine.

  I read the long poem about Gittens of our regiment, who, under those lean, breeze-blown palm trees and glaring white sand beaches lapped by blue-green tongues of the sea, went madder in that incongruous paradise, under which three thousand Japanese bodies were buried, earlier and more quietly than the rest of us. Not wanting him to be sectioned-eight in a fleet hospital back on Guadalcanal, we did not turn him in. He was not violent. About once a week he said plaintively, “I’m going home,” and loped to the beach and dove into the sea to begin his ten-thousand-mile swim to Philadelphia. We would coax him out. Once he did not say anything, so we did not see him go, and never saw him again.

  “Good story in that poem,” Paul said. A sneer, I thought, lurked on the edges of his smile. “Probably a better story than a poem.”

  But I was still bathed by Bark’s glance (Heyyyy, who’s this nigger?) and nod, still elated that after I’d read, broken the ice, the class had come clamoring after, hands raised like the spears of a medieval mob.

  Paul did not volunteer to read, though he had material.

  My wife, Catherine, did not really share my elation. Her smiles were filled with pride, and she embraced me as if performing a ritual. Great, I thought. Paul’s jealous and Cat yet doesn’t know what it’s all about.

  When she met Paul and Janice (who looked like the coed who had passed us in the hall the day of Bark’s first class) s
he expressed reservations about them. And that is what she called them, Them, or Those People. She seemed to think that they were leading me somewhere or interfering with our life.

  It was very late in the semester when Paul read, and I was impressed by his vocabulary and by the very force so filled with assurance with which he read. He had talked a lot about this story. But I was made uncomfortable by it. It was a tale of a tough soldier and a tender whore. Hemingway lurked behind every adjectiveless sentence. I winced when the class, one by one, implacable as a giant amoeba, began to devour him whole. Paul had held forth throughout the semester, offering extensive and exuberant criticism of everyone’s work (some of it quite good), buttressed by the statements or works of a multitude of writers whose names hovered always at the ready on his lips. Now he was forced to defend every image, metaphor, period and comma—even concept—like a trapped dog. When the class was at last finished with him, and Paul, slumped low in his chair, rapping his teeth with a pencil, his ears a bright red, gave a loud sigh, Bark offered his comments, sewed Paul back up and wiped away the blood.

  I had been promised by Paul’s attitude that he was always, at all times, producing nothing short of literary dynamite. It had been, in fact, a small, damp firecracker. Over our beer several times I caught his eye just as it had finished some secret peremptory glance at me. What had I perceived about him, his work, was what the glance asked.

  I had discovered something; rediscovered something; and as we sat there, he rather subdued and I patient and, yes, patronizing, I thought back to my boyhood in my home town, specifically of mornings, springing from Tim Hannon’s milk wagon into the daybreaking cool, a metal six-bottle carrier gripped in my hand, the smell of fresh milk, Tim’s fat-man sweat and warming horseflesh in my nostrils, when I entered buildings with contempt that once I had held in awe because of their sturdy brick façades and cream-colored trim; they were in the white section of town. For years passing them along a proscribed trail I had a souring resentment of the residents. That had passed when I first went inside. The carpets were dirty and spotted and they stank; the walls needed plastering where they were not already stained beyond repainting back to a respectable color, and there was always a strangely lackluster commingling of cooking smells and the odors of fat old dogs and cats. Invariably I set the bottles upon swollen roaches and beads of ratshit, holding my breath until I got back outside, where, at least, the buildings looked good.