And yet—the wallet will, one day, be empty, the money spent, God knows where. Happiness goes.
Ah, thinks Arthur, standing at the window, listening to the pork chops, the onions, and Jimmy, but to have it!—if only for just one time! And he smiles—scratches his chest, sips his drink, and smiles. And anyway, something in him knows that something, nevertheless, something, however the deal goes down, something, as the disaster of your happiness strikes the sewers, like the last note of a song, or the look in your mama’s or your daddy’s eyes, something, something, remains forever, and changes the air we breathe.
Happiness is humiliating, terrifying: what is one to do later? It has to become later before one sees that the question is vain, before one ceases to ask this question, but one is always afraid that later will be too late. Too late: so Arthur, now, stands at the window, knowing perfectly well that, in a moment, he will go behind the halfhearted partition, grab Jimmy by those two dimples just above his ass, growl, and bite, into the nape of his neck, sniffing the hair there, just like a cat, cup both his hands under Jimmy’s prick, and grind Jimmy’s behind against his own prick, playfully, while Jimmy protests—playfully—and lets the onions burn while he turns and takes Arthur in his arms: too late. The pork chops, too, may burn, unless Jimmy, as he often does, exhibits great presence of mind, and turns down the one flame, while both calming, and surrendering to the other Motherfucker. Ain’t you heard about food? You skinnier than that mule Abraham Lincoln promised us. Your brother see you now, he’d have my ass. Sit down and eat. I ain’t going nowhere. Without you. And you damn sure ain’t going no place without me, unless you going on stumps. Or crutches. And I ain’t going to buy you no crutches.
Jimmy laughs, and Arthur laughs: bewildered by his happiness, and, quiet as he hopes to keep it, terrified. He cannot believe that Jimmy loves him, cannot imagine what there is in him to love.
Ah. What is he doing on the floor in a basement of that historical city? That city built on the principle that he would have the grace to live, and, certainly, to die, somewhere outside the gates?
Perhaps I must now do what I have most feared to do: surrender my brother to Jimmy, give Jimmy’s piano the ultimate solo: which must also now, be taken as the bridge.
So: Arthur walks through the halfhearted partition, and, man, he bites me on the neck. He starts fooling around with me. I don’t mind that, in fact, I dig that, but my hands are all slippery with grease and onions, and I can’t move for a minute.
He turns me around and he kisses me, long enough for the chops to start burning. So I push him away, and I try to laugh, and I turn the pork chops over. I can feel him watching me. I’m happy, but I’m scared, too. I don’t know why. Well. I do know why, in a way. Those eyes, your brother’s eyes, are asking something of me which no one has ever asked before, something, maybe, which no one will ever ask again. You hope you can answer the question you see. You hope you can give what is asked of you. It’s the most important thing in the world, the only thing in the world, to be able to do that. What you can do hardly matters, if you can’t do that.
Now, sometimes, when I try to talk about Arthur, I feel like a freak. And, for whatever it’s worth, I guess I am a freak. But, dig it, baby, when I held your brother in my arms, when he had his arms around me, I didn’t feel like a freak then. Even when people started talking about us, the way they did, you remember, I really did not give a shit. I was only hurt because Arthur was hurt. But I will tell Great God Almighty, baby: I was in love with your brother.
It’s only since he left us, and I’ve been so alone and so unhappy, that all the other moral shit, what the world calls moral, started fucking with my mind. Like, why are you like this instead of like that? Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know? I know this: the question wouldn’t even come up if I wasn’t so alone, and so scared, wouldn’t come up, I mean, in my own mind. I’m scared, and I’d like to be safe, and nobody likes being despised. And, quiet as it’s kept, you can’t bear for anyone you love to be despised. I can’t break faith with Arthur, I can’t ride and hide away somewhere, and treat my love, and let the world treat my lover, like shit. I really cannot do that. And the world doesn’t have any morality. Look at the world. What the world calls morality is nothing but the dream of safety. That’s how the world gets to be so fucking moral. The only way to know that you are safe is to see somebody else in danger—otherwise you can’t be sure you’re safe.
Look. I’ve been walking up and down my room, up and down my room, walking these streets, and driving these roads. And I miss my buddy, my lover, your brother, like there ain’t no language for it. So then you listen to the world, and you hear that consolation—ah! everybody knows I’m Jimmy Miller, and everybody knows I was tight with the late, great, Arthur Montana. Don’t none of these mothers know shit, man. They don’t know. They cannot afford to know. In the Book of Job, Job calls these cats “miserable comforters,” and Job was right. They want you to believe that it’s “psychological”—that we are psychological. What a crock of shit. If that was true, how could we sing, how could we know that the music comes from us, we build our bridge into eternity, we are the song we sing?
Jimmy’s voice stops, then starts again:
The song does not belong to the singer. The singer is found by the song. Ain’t no singer, anywhere, ever made up a song—that is not possible. He hears something. I really believe, at the bottom of my balls, baby, that something hears him, something says, come here! and jumps on him just exactly like you jump on a piano or a sax or a violin or a drum and you make it sing the song you hear: and you love it, and you take care of it, better than you take care of yourself, can you dig it? but you don’t have no mercy on it. You can’t have mercy! That sound you hear, that sound you try to pitch with the utmost precision—and did you hear me? Wow!—is the sound of millions and millions and, who knows, now, listening, where life is, where is death?
I know. Maybe I sound this way because I can’t tease your brother no more, or look him in the eye, can’t watch him walk on stage, or into a room, will never, never, never again, grease his ashy elbows, and his spiky knees, never, again, have to find a way to tell him you really don’t hardly have no buns, man, and, so, you can’t buy these pants, because they make you look like you don’t have no ass. He was such a tired, black Puritan, your brother. He’d turn, and look at me, you know, like he was Ezekiel, or Saint Paul, or Isaiah—those desert cats didn’t have no ass, either, and they didn’t have no Jimmy to go down on them.
Sometimes I thought he hated me for the way—the ways, all the ways, I loved him. I couldn’t hide it, where was I to hide it? Every inch of Arthur was sacred to me.
And I mean: sacred.
I will testify that, to all the gods of the desert, and, when they have choked my throat with sand, the song that I have heard and learned to trust, my friend, at your brother’s knee, will still be ringing.
And will bring water back to the desert, that’s what the song is supposed to do, and that’s what my soul is a witness is about.
Think about where you would have had to go, to put those five unrelated words together, and make of the connection, a song.
Well. The sermon does not belong to the preacher. He, too, is a kind of talking drum. The man who tells the story isn’t making up a story. He’s listening to us, and can only give back, to us, what he hears: from us.
Like, it’s absolute bullshit, you know, when they are defending how they make their money—which is, also, exactly how they betray their children, and how their children are lost: when people are defending how they fuck, and get fucked, without kisses, and even without Vaseline: they are compelled to tell the people only what the people wish to hear.
Dig it: that means that they are better than the people to whom they tell nothing but lies.
So, now, you have become a liar, and everybody returns the favor you did them—sends back the elevator, as the French would put it—and tells you only what you want to hear.
/> Arthur got hurt, trapped, lost, somewhere in there. I had to deal with some of his old friends, lovers, leeches, from Paris to London to Amsterdam, to Copenhagen: all Arthur wanted was for the people he respected to respect him—the people who had made the music, from God knows who, to Satchmo, Mr. Jelly-Lord, Bessie, Mahalia, Miles, Ray, Trane, his daddy, and you, too, motherfucker, you! It was only when he got scared about what they might think of what he’d done to their song—our song—that he really started to be uptight about our love.
That wasn’t no easy scene, our love, but we did hang in there, baby, for almost fourteen years.
• • •
Arthur: is leaning on the bar of the London pub, alone. The pub is fairly crowded.
He is the only black person there, but gives off a reassuring accent: and everyone is distantly polite to their baffling, unpredicted, but indisputably American cousin.
Facing him, in the wall facing him, on the other side of the bar, is a small, brown, wooden service door, a door which swings, lightly, but remarkably, each time one of the staff enters, or exits, to accomplish this or that. He has been fascinated by the door, or has been thoughtlessly mesmerized by the door, for more than an hour: and, during this time—he does not realize this—he has moved only to lift his glass, or to order another whisky, or to light his cigarette. He does not realize how his long, black, silent immobility immobilizes the patrons of the London pub: who, whether or not they know it, are not accustomed to being ignored. To be ignored involves waiting to be recognized, or, as they might, once, have wistfully put it, discovered.
Jimmy is now thirty-five years old, Arthur is thirty-nine: and Jimmy and Arthur have, indeed, spent fourteen years together. I agree that this does not seem possible: but with or without our agreement, time passes, just like that.
Boy,
you sure took
me
for
one big ride.
He had sung that, as an encore, on the Paris music hall stage, for Jimmy, who had not been there. He had played his own piano, he had not, after all, been bad, not as far, in any case, as his audience had been able to hear. He had been drunk, stoned, in a state of fury and anguish and panic, and had certainly not, as far as he had heard himself, been good.
He had been certain that Jimmy was ashamed of him, and should have been ashamed of. him, and that that was the reason that Jimmy had not been there.
Yet the people—that void beyond him—roared. He was imprisoned, blinded, by the light, and had completely lost the sense of humor which had been his key to
boy,
don’t get too lost
in all I say.
He had always handled it as a funky, light, blues-ballad; now, last night, he couldn’t handle it at all, managing to get through it without entirely losing the beat—that is to say, the meaning—standing up, and bowing, and getting the fuck off that stage, pouring out saltwater, a flood of saltwater, from his eyes and his prick, in the toilet.
but, at the time,
I, really,
felt that way.
Now, he does not know what he feels, and a tremendous weight seems to gather, in his chest, and between his shoulder blades.
He wonders what I, his brother, Hall: what I think of him, really. He wonders if Paul, his father, is dead, in the grave, because he was ashamed of his son. And, at the very same moment that he knows that he knows better, he also knows that he does not know, will never be released from the judgment, or the terror, in his own eyes. For he knows that it is he, and only he, who so relentlessly demands the judgment, assembles the paraphernalia of the Judgment Day, selects the judges, demands that the trumpet sound. He wants to state his case, and be released from the judgment: but he can be released from the judgment only by dropping the case.
Lord knows,
I’ve got to stop believing
in all your lies,
but anguish is real, and has massive consequences. It is true that our judgment flatters the world’s indifference, and makes of us accomplices to our doom: but to apprehend this, and change it, demands a larger apprehension of our song.
For, in fact, at this moment in Arthur’s life, Jimmy has packed his bags, in the Paris hotel, has wearily, sternly, dried his weeping eyes, has called the desk to wake him in the morning and to have a cab ready to take him to the airport, where he will take the plane for London. He regrets the lover’s quarrel of the night before, but now, intends merely to get back to his lover and travel with him to New York: and the book he opens, after he has poured himself a drink and stretched out on the bed, is not Lamentations. He is a little worried, true, but one is always worried by the conundrums of the space to be conquered in order to be joined with the conundrum of one’s lover. He has not the remotest thought of judgment, judges, or trumpets. In fact, to tell the truth, Jimmy simply misses Arthur, and wants Arthur in his arms; gets a mild hard-on, and shifts his weight in bed, still reading. He is reading, as one always does at such moments, something by Agatha Christie, and will have got to the end of it before realizing that he has read it before: Jimmy claims that he has read, in his life, exactly one Agatha Christie novel, but that he has read it about eighty-seven times.
And Ruth and I are waiting for them in New York, Ruth deciding what to feed them, Julia, who will do the actual shopping, writing down these decisions as Ruth delivers them over the phone. I just want to get some sleep before the two voyaging monsters come in, because I certainly won’t get much sleep once they have come in, and the kids—more accurately, Tony: Odessa is too young—wondering what their uncles will have brought them.
Arthur leans on the bar. He has begun to be aware that others in the pub are aware of him. He is aware, that is, suddenly, of his notoriety, of himself as a famous singer, standing, drinking alone, in some obscure London pub. In fact, it may or may not be obscure, he doesn’t know. He simply wandered in, sometime ago.
He walked from Piccadilly, and now, he knows where he is. He is not far from his hotel.
He is aware of his notoriety in another way: a pair of Irish eyes—he is certain that they are Irish—are staring at him, have been staring at him, from a table in a far corner of the room.
It cannot be said—tonight—that Arthur is tempted by, or is able to respond to, the astoundingly open confession, or the hope, or the plea, in those eyes. On another night, yes, in this city, or in other cities, yes: but promises can be made with the body as sacred as those made in speech, and Arthur has, according to Arthur, defaulted too often on these promises. So he straightens his shoulders, seeing himself, or, rather, his attire. We do not change very much, really, and so Arthur is wearing black boots, old black corduroy trousers, a gray turtleneck sweater, and a pea jacket. And his thinning hair is just beginning to be sprinkled with salt.
He has a moment of panic as he straightens, for he has one of the bad habits of a star, or at least, of a star so beleaguered and improbable, which is to wander about with no identification and no cash.
Both delicately and courageously, he plunges into his pea jacket, relieved to discover his wallet, passport, traveler’s checks, and, the Lord alone knows how, some English pounds.
The fact of the English pounds is due, entirely, he realizes, to Jimmy, and he smiles as he takes a five-pound note out of his wallet.
He is aware of the unsmiling Irish eyes at the far corner of the room, is aware of the other eyes on him, and he wants to get away from here, suddenly, away from these people, these eyes, this death. For, it is death, the human need to which one can find no way of responding, the need incapable of recognizing itself.
And then, again, something hits him, lightly, in the chest, and between the shoulder blades. He leans, lightly, on the bar, holding onto his five-pound note. He thinks that it must be gas, indigestion, he will go to the toilet, as soon as he pays his bill.
He pays his bill, but his hands are shaking, he puts his change in his pockets just any old way, and crosses the room. The toilet is at the
far end of the room, through a narrow door, and down a flight of steps.
The journey across the room is the longest journey he has ever forced himself to make. He starts down the steps, and the steps rise up, striking him in the chest again, pounding between his shoulder blades, throwing him down on his back, staring down at him from the ceiling, just above his head.
I had a dream the other night. Jimmy and Julia and Arthur and me were standing on a country porch. It was raining, but we were sheltered from the rain. It fell before us, like a curtain. We could see outside this curtain, but nobody could see us.
It was as though we had all been sitting in the house, talking, or playing cards, or playing music, and someone had said, Oh, children! Come, look here! Look, over yonder!
And so, in my dream, Julia, who has been sitting in the house, writing a poem, puts the poem in the belt at her waist—a heavy belt, I remember it from somewhere, but I don’t have time to ask her anything—and Jimmy, who has been cutting Arthur’s hair with some big, cruel, golden scissors, and Arthur, who has been sort of weaving the hair as it falls to the floor into something he wants to give Jimmy, and me, I, Hall, who seems to have been chopping wood, so that we can have a fire tonight, all go running to the porch. I have the feeling that it might have been Paul’s voice, but it might have been Ruth’s voice: she is somewhere in this dream, either holding my elbow, a little bit behind me, or talking to Florence.