“Do you have a lot of money?”
We laughed. I said, “Enough for a Sunday afternoon.”
“Well, I broke into Jimmy’s piggy bank. Let’s go next door. They used to know me there.”
“Oh?”
“Part of the glory of being a model. But I never wanted to bug you with that side of it. Come on. It’s cold, to be fighting these streets.”
“At your service, child.”
And so we walked down the steps, and entered the Russian Tea Room. We hadn’t chosen a bad hour, in spite of the fact that it was Sunday. The people heading for a matinee were paying their checks and leaving, and the evening people would not be arriving for a while.
And it was true that they knew her here. It was “Miss Miller” this, and “Miss Miller” that, all the way from the checkroom to our table. But I had the feeling that they really liked her, that she had given them some reason to respect her, that they respected each other.
We sat down, facing each other.
“You’re famous, child.”
“Others might not put it so nicely, but, yes”—she grinned—“I’ve had my day.”
“I have a feeling—your day is just beginning.”
For that was the way she looked. There is a moment in a man’s life, a woman’s life, when all, all that is the person seems to come together for the first time, when all of the warring, disparate elements—the chin, the nose, the eye-brow, the set of the head, the look in the eye—form, for the first time, a coherent composition. Julia was beginning to look like Julia.
It is true that, as a child preacher, she had been quite unforgettable; but she had looked like no one then, she had simply been the disquieting illustration of a mystery. She had been unforgettable precisely because, at that moment, as a child and as a preacher, she had not belonged to herself, nor had the remotest idea who she was. She had then been at the mercy of a force she had had no way of understanding. That was why I, for example, had wished to be able to turn my eyes away from the inevitable spectacle of her dreadful fall from grace, had hoped not to be present, still less summoned, at the hour her trumpet sounded.
Now something had happened to her, that was unmistakable, and, out of what had been fragmented, out of what had been left her, she had begun to create herself. I am sure that Julia did not put it that way to Julia: but I was welcome because she trusted what she saw in my eyes.
“Well. Where shall we begin?”
“Oh. I don’t know. I’ve just come back. I don’t know where I am. I’m not sure I know where I’ve been.”
“Africa?”
“Maybe. Ill tell you one thing: the people running around saying they discovered Africa are all completely mad.” She laughed, that holy-roller urchin’s laugh. “I think Africa might have discovered them—to drive them mad—but—ain’t nobody ever discovered Africa.”
The waitress came, and took our drink orders, inquiring as to Miss Miller’s health, and treating me with the deference due Miss Miller’s escort.
“How long were you there—I mean,” and I laughed, “wherever you were?”
“Oh. Since I last saw you. About two years. But—putting it that way doesn’t really make any sense—you know what I mean? It was some other kind of time.”
I watched her. “No. I don’t know what you mean. What do you mean?”
“Well—look. I was in a city called Abidjan. They call it a city. And it’s on the west coast of Africa. But it’s not really in Africa—Africa is in it, and driving it crazy.” Watching my face, she laughed again, and said, “Yes. I think it drove me a little crazy, too.”
“I never really understood,” I said carefully, “what you were doing there—why you went—”
She looked down. Then she picked up my pack of cigarettes, and lit one. “Well. Let’s say I thought it might be more cool—and more fair—to lay some questions on Africa that I didn’t want to lay on you.” She looked down again. “You’re not history.”
“I concede that. But—you’ve lost me.” She gave me a look.” As concerns the particular detail, I mean. You’ll never lose me.”
“It’s hard,” she said, “to tell the truth. Partly because you don’t know it. Partly because you’re afraid—”
“Afraid that you do know it—?”
I don’t know why her face made me put it to her that way. Perhaps I was reading my mind.
The waitress came with our Bloody Marys, and we ordered something to eat.
Julia raised her glass, and I raised mine, and we bowed to each other.
“Do you know why,” she asked, “a Bloody Mary is called a Bloody Mary? Instead of, for example”—we both laughed—”a Bloody Virginia, for example? Or a Bloody Julia?”
Luckily, the Russian Tea Room was fairly sparsely populated at that moment, or we might have been asked to leave. As it was, heads turned, wondering what had so cracked us up.
“No,” I said finally. “And I don’t want to find out.”
“Well,” she said, “that means that you do know why.” She sipped her Bloody Mary. “That’s part of what I began to learn—in Timbuktu.” She put out her cigarette. “That’s why no one has ever discovered Africa. They don’t dare.”
She picked up another cigarette, looking at once very young and very weary. I picked up my lighter, and lit her cigarette: a reflex, created, partly, by the surroundings. I knew that she didn’t really want another cigarette. But she inhaled, and blew the smoke carefully, above my head.
It is astounding to behold—endure—a beauty to which you are forever and inexorably connected, and which will never, never, never belong, submit, to you. It shakes one mightily to confront the vulnerability before which stone and steel give way.
For the girl before me longed to belong to someone. It was the depth of her longing which altered the nature of the transaction, which demolished the expected, the habitual terms. She had been frightened too deeply to be easily frightened again, had endured possession long before dreaming of love. This gave her, cruelly, an intimidating freedom: who would dare attempt to possess her?
This, too, she had begun to learn during her curious pilgrimage. “He was a very nice man. I never learned enough, you know, about his world. Maybe I never will. But, you know, he came up through the church schools, and was sent to France, and Switzerland, to study. I niet him at some U.N. function. I was there, you know, with all my glamor on. He seemed to look through all that, straight on down to me. I had the feeling that he could never be fooled.
“And he was so black. Not just physically black—he was that, too, but really black, black in a way I’d never encountered. He was old enough to be my father—and—I guess—that made him beautiful in my eyes.”
She broke a hard roll, carefully, as she said this, and swallowed a mouthful of her beef Stroganoff. I watched her, not knowing what to say: she was not, for example, confessing to an act of infidelity.
“He was married, of course, and had children my age, in school. A girl, and a boy—there were younger children I met later, over there. But the boy and the girl were very nice to me. I don’t know what I expected, but I hadn’t expected that. They seemed amused, too, as though I were one of the packages their father loved to bring home from his travels. I had the feeling that they were telling me not to worry about them—they were used to it.”
She laughed and sipped her wine, looking around the restaurant. I was beginning to be more and more fascinated by a story which included me, and which, yet, held me outside.
“He wanted me to come with him, to Africa. I said, I couldn’t—he told me I was lying, I was dreaming. There was nothing holding me here.”
Again she paused, and looked at me—not exactly as though she feared she might be hurting me: she acknowledged this likelihood with a wry pursing of the lips. She looked at me as though she wondered if I understood, or could help her understand. Her story locked me out at the same time that it locked me in—with her. She was talking to me about something which
was happening to us.
This was the strangest and most grueling sign of respect anyone had given me, in all my life.
“And, so, I had to think about it. I knew what was holding me here.”
She reached out, and put one hand in mine, for a moment.
“I would have liked to be able to have said—to myself—that it was you. But I would have been lying—to myself, and to you, and I love you too much for that.”
She dropped my hand, and nibbled at her rice. The restaurant was full, but not yet inundated, we had, for the moment, a haven.
“I said before—you’re not history. You couldn’t undo it. I couldn’t lay it on you. Sometimes, you walk out of one trap, into another. I think I thought that he was history. Because he reminded me of my father. And because he was black, black in a way my father never was.” And she smiled. “Perhaps I thought that he could undo it.”
She took off her turban, abruptly, and dropped it on her seat, beside her. I saw her coarse, beautiful, half-Spanish, half-kinky hair. She had piled it all up, under the turban, knotted in a bun at the top of her head. So one saw the fine lines in her high forehead, and around her eyes. She was beginning to look like Julia: the price she would pay was beginning to show.
“Anyway—finally—I went on over there.”
She paused, and picked up her wineglass, looking at me over the wine.
“There were lots of things I wanted to say to you then, but I couldn’t. I wanted to ask you to take care of everything over here—while I tried to find out what I had to find out—over there.” Then she smiled. It was a smile that made me know that she was a part of me, forever; and, precisely because she was a part of me, she was part of a mystery I would never unlock.
“I couldn’t say anything to you, really, because we were hurting too much. But I knew that you would do it, anyway. I knew”—and she sipped her wine—”that you had your brother, and you knew that I had mine. So I wasn’t afraid.”
She put her wineglass down.
“I said I wouldn’t go unless I had a way of making a living over there. I said I wasn’t cut out to be nobody’s concubine.” She laughed, it was the most unexpected sound, it rang through the place, and people turned, and smiled. “Of course, there are any number of ways of being a concubine—as he knew, and as I was about to find out.”
She looked down at the table as though she were looking into a well, looking for something which she had, mistakenly, dropped into the bottom of a well. “He knew the one thing I didn’t really know—he knew how much I trusted him.”
I looked around the restaurant, wishing, really, to flee, and not from Julia—with her; and this made me wonder about all my relationships, until this moment, and to come. I chewed on whatever it was, a chicken Kiev, I think, and looked around me at a setting which was, abruptly, hideously, brutally foreign.
But no more foreign, really, than any setting becomes the moment one is compelled to examine, decipher, and make demands of it: no more foreign, certainly, than the European outposts jutting, like rotting teeth, out of the jaws of West Africa. If teeth rot, it is because their host, the body, gives them nearly no nourishment. The explicit or exotic European outposts of North America do not, for the moment, appear to lack vitamins, and yet, they do bring uneasily to mind the notion of a mystery imposed on a dilemma: details ripped from their context manifest a sinister and relentless incoherence. All of the details of the room in which we sat once were part of a life elsewhere; a communal, a tribal life, still going on, no doubt, elsewhere, but certainly not, as far as the senses are able to report, here.
“I had a position working for one of the airlines. I have to call it a position, because it damn sure wasn’t a job, I was sort of in charge of the VIPs who didn’t speak French.” She laughed. “They didn’t speak much English, either, but I got by on guesswork, and flattery. And I actually learned some Dutch, French, and German, and, who knows, it may all come in handy one day.
“But my friend, there, once I was there, began to be more and more important to me. He understood something. He was the only person who did—well, the only male. But, in the beginning, I didn’t know any women at all.
“A black girl in Africa, who wasn’t born in Africa, and who has never seen Africa, is a very strange creature for herself, and for everyone who meets her. I don’t know which comes first, or which is worse. They don’t know who they are meeting. You don’t know who they are meeting, either—you may have thought you did, but now, you know you don’t—and you don’t know who they are either. You may have thought you did, but you don’t. You don’t know a damn thing about any single day they’ve spent on earth. You go through the village, or the villages, but you don’t really see them—Hollywood threw acid in both your eyes before you were seven years old. You’re blind, that’s the first thing you realize is that you’re blind. Later you begin to see—something. And, then, you begin to see why you couldn’t see. But, at first—damn, you know more about the Mississippi cracker, even though you hate him and you know he hates you. And then”—looking up at me, with those eyes—”you see how people try to hold on to what they know, no matter how ugly it is. It’s better,” and she laughed, “than nothing!”
She finished her Stroganoff, wiped her lips carefully with her napkin, and picked up her wine.
“But maybe what’s been happening to you all your life will keep happening to you in Africa, too—why not? Everything has happened there already, you just weren’t present. Like, you don’t know what tribe produced you, and you don’t even know what that means, but the people watching you, in Africa, they know. They don’t even have to think about it—they know. And are they remembering what they last did to you, or what you last did to them?
“The old man, my friend, didn’t think that any of that would matter very much, in Africa, in what he called the ‘long’ future. But he expects me to live to about a hundred, and that’s in what I guess he would call the ‘short’ future. So—I began to see that I would not be able to understand anything that anyone was saying to me unless I began to hear—to trust—another language.” She frowned and smiled, her forehead as tense as music. “But you cannot hear another language, unless you’ve heard it already. And you certainly didn’t want to hear it, the first time!”
I looked around the place again. The evening people were beginning to arrive. They had dressed to be seen, they were dressed to be “out.” I don’t know why, but, almost for the first time, or for the first time so sharply, I found their procession moving. They all seemed, vaguely, like refugees. Many of them were refugees, or had so begun their lives in America. In one way, they were certainly more at home in America than Julia or I could claim to be; and yet, in another way, in a way that Julia and I were not, they were homeless. I wondered how much this had to do with what one remembered of home, with how much one could carry out, or with how much had to be left behind. And left behind, after all, how, and in what hands, or even, come to think of it, where? Does anyone dare remember? Is it possible? If she had not been stricken still and dumb by her last sight of the flaming city, perhaps Lot’s wife could tell us—perhaps, indeed, she does. But memory cannot be a pillar of salt, standing watch over a dead sea: we need a new vocabulary.
Julia, too, looked over at the people, couples, families, being led to their tables. It was a Sunday, and it seemed to me, therefore, that family was more in evidence than usual. Grandmothers, plump, with brooches on the ample bosoms, hair rinsed silver or blue, made up with a discretion which, yet, owed something to television, and their daughters, or daughters-in-law, smooth, polished to a high gloss, hair artfully free, and tumbling. The winter air had stung the skin, quite beautifully, to life, and their eyes glowed with the pleasures of safety. The men were proprietary, with a muted Sunday cheerfulness, but seemed to be very proud of their families, very solicitous of their children. I had once envied these people, or so I had thought. I didn’t anymore, but it was nice to watch them in a setting in which we did
not seem to menace each other. They, also, glanced casually at Julia and me, seeming to feel a similar ease and relief.
I watched a grandmother, a delicately boned lady, with auburn-and-silver hair, cut short. She was wearing a copper-colored two-piece suit, very smart, an emerald brooch, and matching earrings. She had to have been extremely beautiful when young, with that kind of fragile, breathless, wide-eyed beauty one associates, for some reason, with Vienna. On one hand, she wore a wedding ring; the other hand was bare. There was no one at the table who could have been her husband; she was with her daughter, or her son, and her grandchildren.
Well, suddenly I saw her, as she might have been, years ago, in, let us say, Vienna; saw the nervous, bony hands, the wide mouth, the big, dark eyes, the simple, tasteful outfit she would have been wearing then—somewhere in Vienna, in an office, in a room, in a restaurant. I could not hear what she was saying, but her eyes conveyed her inability to believe that she had been marked for death, and was now about to be carried away, to die. I could not hear what she was saying because no one could hear what she was saying. Her jewelry was taken from her, and thrown into a box. Someone who did not look unkind stripped her of her simple, tasteful outfit, and took her shoes. Then someone signaled, pushed, or pulled her, and she took her place in line, and followed everybody—the way one follows the airport guide, not too unlike the way one follows the waitress to the table. With the whole world refusing to listen, or to watch, she arrived, naked, at Golgotha.
She did not remember it. Perhaps the wedding band remembered, flashing briefly now, as she reached across the table to ruffle one of her grandchildren’s hair. Perhaps dreams were her testimony, perhaps terrors were her proof, perhaps one eyelid twitched violently at certain subway stops, and she took long baths because she was unable to step under a shower: this proves the deep and endless effect of the event, but may or may not be due to what we call memory.
I wonder, more and more, about what we call memory. The burden—the role—of memory is to clarify the event, to make it useful, even, to make it bearable. But memory is, also, what the imagination makes, or has made, of the event, and, the more dreadful the event, the more likely it is that the memory will distort, or efface it. It is, thus, perfectly possible—indeed, it is common—to act on the genuine results of the event, at the same time that the memory manufactures quite another one, an event totally unrelated to the visible and uncontrollable effects in one’s life. This may be why we appear to learn absolutely nothing from experience, or may, in other words, account for our incoherence: memory does not require that we reconstitute the event, but that we justify it.