His host — whom he did not really know very well — was nowhere in sight. To the right of them were three rooms, the first of which was piled high with wraps and overcoats.
The horn of Charlie Parker, coming over the hi-fi, dominated all the voices in the room.
“Put your coat down,” he told Leona, “and I’ll try to find out if I know anybody in this joint.”
“Oh,” she said, “I’m sure you know them all.”
“Go on, now,” he said, smiling, and pushing her gently into the room, “do like I tell you.”
While she was putting away her coat — and powdering her nose, probably — he remembered that he had promised to call Vivaldo. He wandered through the house, looking for a relatively isolated telephone, and found one in the kitchen.
He dialed Vivaldo’s number.
“Hello, baby. How’re you?”
“Oh, all right, I guess. What’s happening? I thought you were going to call me sooner. I’d just about given you up.”
“Well, I only just made it up here.” He dropped his voice, for a couple had entered the kitchen, a blonde girl with a disarrayed Dutch bob and a tall Negro. The girl leaned against the sink, the boy stood before her, rubbing his hands slowly along the outside of her thighs. They barely glanced at Rufus. “A whole lot of elegant squares around, you dig?”
“Yeah,” said Vivaldo. There was a pause. “You think it’s worthwhile making it up there?”
“Well, hell, I don’t know. If you got something better to do—”
“Jane’s here,” Vivaldo said, quickly. Rufus realized that Jane was probably lying on the bed, listening.
“Oh, you got your grandmother with you, you don’t need nothing up here then.” He did not like Jane, who was somewhat older than Vivaldo, with prematurely gray hair. “Ain’t nothing up here old enough for you.”
“That’s enough, you bastard.” He heard Jane’s voice and Vivaldo’s, murmuring; he could not make out what was being said. Then Vivaldo’s voice was at his ear again. “I think I’ll skip it.”
“I guess you better. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Maybe I’ll come by your pad—?”
“Okay. Don’t let grandma wear you out now; they tell me women get real ferocious when they get as old as she is.”
“They can’t get too ferocious for me, dad!”
Rufus laughed. “You better quit trying to compete with me. You ain’t never going to make it. So long.”
“So long.”
He hung up, smiling, and went to find Leona. She stood helplessly in the foyer, watching the host and hostess saying good night to several people.
“Think I’d deserted you?”
“No. I knew you wouldn’t do that.”
He smiled at her and touched her on the chin with his fist. The host turned away from the door and came over to them.
“You kids go on inside and get yourselves a drink,” he said. “Go on in and get with it.” He was a big, handsome, expansive man, older and more ruthless than he looked, who had fought his way to the top in show business via several of the rougher professions, including boxing and pimping. He owed his present eminence more to his vitality and his looks than he did to his voice, and he knew it. He was not the kind of man who fooled himself and Rufus liked him because he was rough and good-natured and generous. But Rufus was also a little afraid of him; there was that about him, in spite of his charm, which did not encourage intimacy. He was a great success with women, whom he treated with a large, affectionate contempt, and he was now on his fourth wife.
He took Leona and Rufus by the arm and walked them to the edge of the party. “We might have us some real doings if these squares ever get out of here,” he said. “Stick around.”
“How does it feel to be respectable?” Rufus grinned.
“Shit. I been respectable all my life. It’s these respectable motherfuckers been doing all the dirt. They been stealing the colored folks blind, man. And niggers helping them do it.” He laughed. “You know, every time they give me one of them great big checks I think to myself, they just giving me back a little bit of what they been stealing all these years, you know what I mean?” He clapped Rufus on the back. “See that Little Eva has a good time.”
The crowd was already thinning, most of the squares were beginning to drift away. Once they were gone, the party would change character and become very pleasant and quiet and private. The lights would go down, the music become softer, the talk more sporadic and more sincere. Somebody might sing or play the piano. They might swap stories of the laughs they’d had, gigs they’d played, riffs they remembered, or the trouble they’d seen. Somebody might break out with some pot and pass it slowly around, like the pipe of peace. Somebody, curled on a rug in a far corner of the room, would begin to snore. Whoever danced would dance more languorously, holding tight. The shadows of the room would be alive. Toward the very end, as morning and the brutal sounds of the city began their invasion through the wide French doors, somebody would go into the kitchen and break out with some coffee. Then they would raid the icebox and go home. The host and hostess would finally make it between their sheets and stay in bed all day.
From time to time Rufus found himself glancing upward at the silver ball in the ceiling, always just failing to find himself and Leona reflected there.
“Let’s go out to the balcony,” he said to her.
She held out her glass. “Freshen my drink first?” Her eyes were now very bright and mischievous and she looked like a little girl.
He walked to the table and poured two very powerful drinks. He went back to her. “Ready?”
She took her glass and they stepped through the French doors.
“Don’t let Little Eva catch cold!” the host called.
He called back. “She may burn, baby, but she sure won’t freeze!”
Directly before and beneath them stretched the lights of the Jersey shore. He seemed, from where he stood, to hear a faint murmur coming from the water.
When a child he had lived on the eastern edge of Harlem, a block from the Harlem River. He and other children had waded into the water from the garbage-heavy bank or dived from occasional rotting promontories. One summer a boy had drowned there. From the stoop of his house Rufus had watched as a small group of people crossed Park Avenue, beneath the heavy shadow of the railroad tracks, and come into the sun, one man in the middle, the boy’s father, carrying the boy’s unbelievably heavy, covered weight. He had never forgotten the bend of the man’s shoulders or the stunned angle of his head. A great screaming began from the other end of the block and the boy’s mother, her head tied up, wearing her bathrobe, stumbling like a drunken woman, began running toward the silent people.
He threw back his shoulders, as though he were casting off a burden, and walked to the edge of the balcony where Leona stood. She was staring up the river, toward the George Washington Bridge.
“It’s real beautiful,” she said, “it’s just so beautiful.”
“You seem to like New York,” he said.
She turned and looked at him and sipped her drink. “Oh, I do. Can I trouble you for a cigarette now?”
He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her, then lit one for himself. “How’re you making it up here?”
“Oh, I’m doing just fine,” she said. “I’m waiting tables in a restaurant way downtown, near Wall Street, that’s a real pretty part of town, and I’m rooming with two other girls”—they couldn’t go to her place, anyway! — “and, oh, I’m doing just fine.” And she looked up at him with her sad-sweet, poor-white smile.