“What do you want to do there, huh, baby?” Sally asked, pushing his hand away from her breast, and then circling out of his arms like a dancer, and looping her arm through Jesse’s.
“I want to tear that slit of yours clear up to your throat,” Buddwing said drunkenly.
Tina giggled and said, “He wants to tear off a piece, Sally, that’s what he wants to do.”
“Yeah, you tear my dress, you bastard, and you’ll pay for it,” Sally said, and then they went down to the apartment.
They tore off her dress, of course.
The three of them, Jesse and Tina and Buddwing, tore her dress to shreds while Sally stood giggling and coaxing and tormenting in the center of the living room. And then they wrapped her naked in the beaded drapes they had pulled from the ceiling, and dragged her into the bedroom where they all fell laughing onto the bed. As the edges of the fine high drunk were turned back by their increasing animal awareness, as their naked bodies emerged and gleamed triumphant through the alcohol maze and the clouded stupor, as the smell of sex enveloped them with its strong and fiercely clinging perfume, as their arms and legs and mouths and hips took on a driving power of their own, almost sentient, moving with a predetermined will as deep as a race memory, until what they were doing finally replaced the alcohol and made them as high and as heady as their earlier drunk had made them — through it all, Buddwing felt himself intricately involved and yet curiously apart. There was something enormously threatening about what was happening. He and Jesse never once touched in the ensuing tangle of bodies and mouths, but he was consciously aware of his friend, though only as an embodiment of L.J. and Beethoven and Red Vest, and not as himself, not as Jesse Salem who had a Mexican girl back in San Antonio. The fear of homosexuality dissipated in the stronger glare of their wildly heterosexual performance, and yet he felt threatened in an oddly obscure way, as though all this frantic activity were a screen for something deeper inside him which he was about to lose. It was this knowledge of impending loss that was threatening, he realized, and not what they were actually doing. He felt as if this conglomerate act, this immodest, immoral, and probably unlawful act, were the culmination of a phase of his life, a clearly defined section of his life that had been building steadily and irrevocably toward this confused climax. And therein lay the threat, a threat to the very fabric of his existence, a threat to the core of whatever knowledge he possessed of himself and of the world thus far. He knew that nothing would ever be the same once he left this apartment, once he disentangled himself from Jesse and the two girls. There was enormous security in this bed in this room because whatever they did they were dong together, blameless, anonymous, in their miniature gang structure. The unknown lay beyond this room, down those steps, somewhere outside. He clung to his companions, he held Tina fast to him, he crushed his lips to Sally’s mouth, he felt Jesse’s reassuring nearness. He did not want to lose them. He held them close because he was holding life itself. But his mind could not escape the knowledge that this would end soon, perhaps too soon, and there was sadness in the certainty that from now on, and possibly forever, he would have to walk alone.
He left Jesse and the girls at four in the afternoon.
They said goodbye to each other without any real sense of loss. If they avoided each other’s eyes, it was not because they felt any real guilt for what they had done, but only because their excesses seemed somehow pointless.
He knew exactly where he wanted to go.
10
The park outside New York University was a miniature of the large park in which he had awakened this morning, and he entered it now with a pleased feeling of correctness. His life, he felt, was somehow starting anew, and there was something unexplainably fitting about this repetition, as though the fresh beginning were not really totally unexpected, but rather an extension of what was already there. He found a bench in the sun, and he sat on it with the rather complacent air of a man who knows exactly what is going to happen next and is prepared for it.
Grace was going to happen next.
He spread his arms along the back of the bench and faced the college. The Washington Arch and Fifth Avenue were behind him and to his left. He could feel the strong afternoon rays touching his head and shoulders, and he wished he could turn his face to them, but he knew that Grace would come down the front steps of the school soon, and he wanted to see her when she did. In his mind, he acted out a little pantomime, Grace appearing suddenly with her books on her arms, wearing sweater and skirt and going to a bench at the other end of the park; he rising and going to sit beside her. He smiled in anticipation, and listened to the sounds of life around him.
Somewhere behind him, two men were playing chess; they were old men, judging from the sounds of their voices. “J’adoube,” one of them said, and the other answered, “You’re always adoube-ing. Keep your goddamn hands off the pieces!” A folk singer with a guitar — he sounded colored but Buddwing wasn’t sure — began singing “Greensleeves” in a gently keening voice, and overhead an airplane droned a noisy counterpoint. Students with Saturday classes sat on the benches chatting, filling the air with a pleasant buzz. He could feel the city behind him and around him, pulsing with life. He sat in sun-stained brilliance, the nucleus of a city teeming with millions, and for a moment he was completely alone and private, sitting in sun-enclosed secrecy as the city went its busy way, unaware. In secret silence, he could feel a sense of true identity slowly and tentatively seeping into muscle and bone, with the same penetrating force as the sun that touched his shoulders, spreading, warming, lulling.
His grandfather had died in the dead of winter; he had often thought of the old man as being lowered into a cruelly cold and stubborn, unreceptive earth.
As he sat in the sun, two overlapping memories seemed to enter his mind in swift succession, each rushing in its haste for recognition, one more frightening than the other, and yet neither as frightening as he knew they should be. The first concerned the death of his grandfather and the second
He frowned because the second memory seemed to concern the death of his grandfather as well, and yet he knew it was impossible for his grandfather to have died twice. His grandfather had died once and forever on January twelfth; the date was firmly fixed in his memory because it had been two days after his sixteenth birthday. The wake had been held in Harlem on a bleak and dreary day, the sky a uniform unbroken metallic gray across the tops of the Second Avenue tenements. The funeral parlor was on the ground floor of one of those tenements.
Well, that day, he thought. There was something wrong about that day.
The thing that was wrong about that day was the fact that his grandfather was dead and lying in a coffin — that was what was wrong; that was all that was wrong. But that in itself was not frightening — why had he thought it was frightening? He could, in fact, visualize the old man with his white hair against the white satin of the coffin, his eyes closed, his waxen hands clasped gently over the prayer beads on his chest. He could remember the funeral parlor in vivid detail, the banks of flowers heaped around the coffin and on the floor, the permeating perfume, the rows of folding wooden chairs. Grandma sat on one of the chairs in a black dress with a dazed expression on her face, accepting the condolences of the mourners. His grandfather did not look at all like himself; there was something strange and different about his face. But there was nothing frightening about this memory of the funeral parlor; there was instead a gentle tender whispering aura about the scene as he pictured it in his mind.