She sat down and Feldman nodded toward her drink. “That’s yours,” he said. “That’s for you.”
“Thanks,” she said absently, but made no effort to drink it. Feldman raised his own glass and touched hers encouragingly in some mute toast. She continued to stare at him blankly.
“Look,” he said, “I’m bad at this. I don’t know what to say to you.”
She smiled, but said nothing.
“I want you to understand,” he went on stiffly, “I’m not trying to be funny with you.”
“Better not,” she said.
“I know,” Feldman said. “That girl behind the bar said she’d throw me out of here.”
“Rose could do it,” the girl said. “I could do it.”
“Anyone can do it,” Feldman said glumly. “Look, do you want me to go? Do you want to forget about it?”
“No,” she said, “Just be nice is all. What’s the matter with you, Jack?”
“I’m dying.” He had not meant to say it. It was out of his mouth before he could do anything about it. He thought of telling her a lie, of expanding his statement to something not so preposterously silly: that he was dying of boredom, of love for her, of fear for his job. Anything with more reason behind it than simply death. It occurred to him that dying was essentially ludicrous. In any real context it was out of place. It was not merely unwelcome; it was unthinkable. Then he realized that this was what he had meant to say all along. He had no interest in the girl; his body had played tricks on him, had made him believe for a moment that it was still strong. What he wanted now was to expose it. It was his enemy. Its sexlessness was a good joke on it. He could tell her that.
“I’m dying,” he said again. “I don’t know what to do.” He could no longer hear himself speaking. The words tumbled out of his mouth in an impotent rage. He wondered absently if he was crying. “The doctor told me I’m supposed to die, only I don’t do it, do you see?”
“Go to a different doctor,” the girl said.
She joked with him. It was impossible that she didn’t understand. He held the worm in his jaws. It was in his stomach, in the hollows of his armpits. Pieces of it stoppered his ears. “No, no. I’m really dying. There have been tests. Everything.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. You don’t know what it’s like.”
“You married?”
“Yes.”
“Got kids, I suppose, and a family?”
“Yes.”
“They know about this?”
He nodded.
“Don’t care, probably, right? Hey,” she said, “look at me sitting and talking to you like this. You ain’t got something contagious, have you?”
“No,” he said. “Where are you going?” The girl was standing. “No, don’t go. Please sit down.”
“I’m sorry for your trouble, mister. Thanks for the drink.”
“Have another. There’s a whole bottle.”
She was looking down at him. He wondered if she really meant to go, whether her standing up was merely a form, a confused deference to death. She leaned toward him unexpectedly. “What is it, mister?” she said. She came to his side of the booth and sat down. “What is it, mister? Do you want to kiss me?” He was sure he had not heard her correctly. She repeated her question. She was smiling. He saw now that she had made a decision, had determined to cheat him. He didn’t care.
“Yes,” he answered weakly. “Would you kiss me?”
“Sure,” she said, her voice level, flat. Her eyes were nowhere. She sat closer. He put his hand on her warm thighs. They were hard and thin. She put one arm around Feldman and ground her lips against his. Her kid was staring at them. Feldman could taste the girl’s breath. It was foul. He put his hand inside the girl’s skirt and touched her thighs. He felt nothing inside himself. There was no urgency. The girl, incorrectly gauging Feldman’s responses, took his hand in one of hers and began to squeeze it. She held his wrist. Her hands, as Feldman had known they would be, were powerful. She dug her nails into his wrist. He could not get free. He tried to pull his wrist away. “Stop it,” he said. “Stop it, you’re hurting me.”
“See?” she said. “I’ll break your wrist.”
Under the table he kicked at her. She let go of him.
“You son of a bitch, I’ll break your face for that.” She started to scratch him. He struck her wildly and she began to cry. The little boy had rushed over and was pulling at Feldman’s suit jacket. The woman behind the bar came over with a billy club she had taken from some hiding place, and began to hit Feldman on his neck and chest. The girl recovered and pulled him from the booth. She sat on his chest, her legs straddling his body as a jockey rides a horse, thighs spread wide, knees up. Her body was exposed to him. He smelled her cunt. He saw it. They beat him until he was unconscious.
The men from the factories lifted him from the floor where he lay and carried him into the street. It was dark now. Under the lamplight they marched with him. Children ran behind and chanted strange songs. He heard the voices even in his sleep, and dreamed that he was an Egyptian king awaking in the underworld. About him were the treasures, the artifacts with which his people mocked his death. He was betrayed, forsaken. He screamed he was not dead and for answer heard their laughter as they retreated through the dark passage.
Before he died Feldman awoke in an alley. The pains in his stomach were more severe than ever. He knew he was dying. On his torn jacket was a note, scribbled in an angry hand: STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN, it said.
He thought of the doctor’s somber face telling him more than a year ago that he was going to die. He thought of his family and the way they looked at him, delicately anticipating in his every sudden move something breaking inside himself, and of the admiration in all their eyes, and the unmasked hope that it would never come to this for them, but that if it should, if it ever should, it would come with grace. But nothing came gracefully — not to heroes.
In the alley, before the dawn, by the waiting garbage, by the coffee grounds in their cups of wasted orange hemispheres, by the torn packages of frozen fish, by the greased, ripped labels of hollow cans, by the cold and hardened fat, by the jagged scraps of flesh around the nibbled bones, and the coagulated blood of cow and lamb, Feldman saw the cunt one last time and raised himself and crawled in the darkness toward a fence to sit upright against it. He tugged at his jacket to straighten it, tugged at the note appended to him like a price tag: STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN. He did not have the strength to pull the tag from his jacket. Smiling, he thought sadly of the dying hero.
ON A FIELD, RAMPANT
Long before he began to wonder about it in any important way, he felt the weight of it, the familiar tug of it against his chest as he moved forward, its heavy, gentle arc as it swung, pendent, from the golden chain about his throat. In bed he felt it like a warm hand pressing against his heart.
What surprised him later was that he had never questioned it, that it had always seemed a quite natural extension of his own body. It had not occurred to him to take it off even in the bath. He could recall lying back in the warm water, somnolent and comfortable, just conscious of its dull glint beneath the surface. Though he enjoyed the subtle shift of its weight in the water, its slow, careful displacements as he moved in the bath, he didn’t really think about it, even as a toy. When he stood and reached for the towel hanging from the curtainless rod above the tub, the medallion, like a metal moon, would catch the light of the electric bulb, and sifting it in its complex corrugated surfaces, throw off thick rings of bright yellow which seemed to sear themselves into his outstretched, upraised hands.