Dram said that to lure a horse, I mustn’t chase it.
I cursed like Odell when I came back from plunging the toilet. It was my party. Hayden, Father Paul, and I were not feeling the same and everyone knew it. Cello and Dram weren’t there to commiserate with me. They had come to smile at me. They’d come to expel me from the thirty-thousand-feet club. They’d known it from the get-go: I could not fuck in their league. I got them drunk and offered to call a taxi. Dram could come back for the Mercedes.
I’d never known Cello to drink in order to blot herself out. Back in the bad times, I would have dwelled on her pride, her capacity for duplicity. I would have felt sophisticated analyzing her actions. But I was through fixating on the slave mistress and slave master instead of on myself. If Dram said he was cool to drive, who was I to argue that there was no traffic at that time of night.
* * *
“It’s not eating. It’s called quality control,” Dad said.
* * *
The days were getting longer. In the Tiergarten, the chestnut trees were black while the sky behind them resumed that glazed blue of Nabokov’s evenings. In the bushes someone played a plaintive sax. I could hear an artificial waterfall and smell the wet cement. I wanted the middle-aged black man with the middle-aged white woman whom I passed to know that I approved. I smiled at the cute black girl holding hands with the white boy whom I came across next. I was in favor of things working out for others.
The first thing I did when I got back to my room was to light a cigarette. Then I took off my shoes. Often I threw away my socks. I noticed the coffee things on the table where I’d left them the day before, intending to clean up when I got back that night. The milk was sour, my half-finished cup had gone filmy. My room made me a detective on a case, surveying how the missing person had left things.
Brown and sweaty in Central Europe, I dug in the Schrebergärten as though to find clues. I sat with a book in the café; I went upstairs and opened a book across my stomach. I came back to the café, usually rinsing and then taking Lotte’s place when she left for the day. The nearest shops were some distance and she liked to get to them when people were going home from work, just to be among them, to remember that she was alive because she knew how to steal, pick pockets.
“Ah, the sweet Berlin air,” she said. “You should have been here in 1937.”
From Lotte’s table, I could see the green fender with the white splotch. I crossed the street to make sure it was Manfred’s Deux Chevaux parked behind the brewery. In no time, I was losing it on the other side of the building, bursting into the architecture firm on the ground floor, answering their German in English and they my German in English. Manfred, yes. A guy in a blue shirt said he bought that rickshaw from him the last time Manfred was in Berlin with his guru, N. I. Rosen-Montag.
* * *
I took the giant train that was passing like a chapter of history through Berlin, stopping at Bahnhof Zoo long enough to pick me up. The train was thick with black youth sleeping since Moscow and every compartment was full. I sat up in a seat the whole way to Paris. I was still young enough for the point of travel to be what I was willing to put myself through.
But I was also older. I tried to check into a fancy hotel that didn’t want me. One of the reasons I lived in bohemia was that I was allowed to. The second fancy hotel let me have a small room. The trip had been so uncomfortable I deserved a nice hotel. I also wanted to make the right impression on Duallo when he came over.
He didn’t come over. “Il n’est pas ici,” female voices at two numbers informed.
His école was somewhere in the north of Paris. Then I wandered through Saint-Denis. I returned to his suburb in the morning. I went up and down a market of stalls and tables, but noticed only the huge number of leather belts for sale.
I’d read about the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the oldest Gothic structure in Europe. Berlin could never have had anything like this. The Gothic cathedral was a twelfth-century rebuilding of one of Charlemagne’s churches. Inside, centuries of kings and queens. I imagined their slabs of maiden marble white leapfrogging around the ambulatory. The white basilica had two towers until lightning zapped one of them, but it seemed to be crouching on both elbows nevertheless.
The doors opened and without warning three columns of black people started into the forecourt. The basilica was big, the numbers of black parishioners who kept emerging said so. Some had on the immigrant’s version of Sunday best; some women wore bright pagnes under sweaters draped across their shoulders. The handful of priests stood out, white and white-haired. Children stalked their own shadows between the stripes cast by the railings. The congregation was still leaving the basilica as those ahead spread into the street and farther market stalls, young men, too, leading a Catholic army. They were all black, not a European war veteran among them. Out of feudal portals, on the site of martyrdom, late twentieth-century France was going off to lunch at mamamuso’s or headed to cabines to make transcontinental calls.
I couldn’t face the train and made for Charles de Gaulle. I was a scruffy black man with little luggage asking for a one-way ticket.
I was not paying attention. There was a mop-haired boy in the street as the tanks rolled by.
I was so into myself that it was a day or two before I caught up with what was happening in China. I’d not understood what Alma and the others were talking about, but I’d not asked either.
What had been the problem? We both liked Menzel and Fab 5 Freddy.
* * *
We were downtown, looking at Christmas lights, and Dad said Jehovah knew not to promise that parking would be any better in the Heavenly City.
It made us nervous to go anywhere together as a family.
* * *
I’d been stoned constantly since my birthday. I hung on long enough to talk to Dad and Mom. Solomon had even called — more of Francesca’s influence. Then I hung up and blew my brains out on that rare commodity in Europe, marijuana. Bags was loosening me up for an Irish air cargo deal. It was working. East Germans were taking chances, escaping across the Hungarian border into Austria, and suddenly Bags indicated a willingness to have sex with my mouth again, just like that.
I turned him down. His calculation moved me. I said I’d stake him. I regretted both decisions immediately. But that was why I was in West Berlin, to make stupid decisions. I was starring in a romance or a thriller, but at the same time I could get up and turn it off at any moment. I was in control. Lament was just a social key. Some things were expected, such as being blue on the anniversary of meeting him.
If I put down my mask I could admit that I’d got what I wanted — footsteps full of meaning: b) I’d stayed away too long and lost him and a) I threw him onto my futon and spent the rest of the night trying to lose my fears.
The music of blue went well with being stoned. Odell was keeping it Curtis Mayfield/Marvin Gaye. Huey Newton’s murder settled heavily over the ChiChi. The black men weren’t going to give him up just because his shit had gone wrong. For them, he had been the Man when they needed him to be. Violence is not the issue, policies are, one session man said, as though quoting a line from a song.