The Essential Ellison Part 26

And he looks at me.

I look back at him.

"Hmmmpf, " he snorts. "Try and find a little human compa.s.sion."

And he walks off, crosses La Brea at the corner, turns left onto Melrose, and disappears.

I'm still standing there, staring at where he'd been, when Michael comes over, having served the pimp and his staff. It had been three minutes; three minutes tops.

"What was that all about?" he asks.

I think I focused on him.

"On the other hand, " I say, "there are some guys who are strictly no G.o.d d.a.m.ned good for a woman."

Michael nods with satisfaction and hands me a frankfurter. Light on the mustard, pleasantly devoid of relish.

VITROUBLEWITH WOMEN.

"So either the writer avoids writing any d.a.m.ned thing that might affront, or gets past a kind of universal knee-jerk Liberalism and cops to the truth that we are all pretty much alike, male and female, black and white, young and old, ugly and lovely. Pretty much alike in our ownership of human emotions, needs, drives, failings."

Introduction to "Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time," STRANGE WINE, Harper & Row, 1978 Through the years, Harlan has garnered an undeserved reputation for depicting females from a chauvinistic, unsympathetic viewpoint. Such gossip might be traced to equally faulty speculations on his personal life, since a close examination of his stories, even the early ones, reveals no more anti-female bias than can be found among most of the popular writers of the same period-and usually a good deal less.

When he concentrates on relationships between men and women, Harlan sometimes deals with aspects of fear peculiar to the masculine gender. But, as we have seen, fear in all its forms is a major concern of his literary output, and he should be deemed a courageous writer for examining it as carefully as he has.

So watch his women closely. Can you find a sympathetic portrayal of even one who dotes on the role of subdued female? Or one who truly relishes the victimization of the male because she finds it a feminine prerogative?

Each of the following selections works with s.e.x and s.e.xual attraction, but their similarities aren't nearly so fascinating as their range of differences. A man wrote them, but he didn't do so strictly for men, or for women. He wrote them to remind us of what we already know-that s.e.x can be either a prison or a paradise.

If one gets what one wants, who's to judge the true value of that satisfaction? "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" (1958) concerns the end of the world and a man who, aware of the approaching oblivion, seeks s.e.xual fulfillment with a woman. Harlan proposes the story as an attempt to say " everything is relative," and even the role-bound American milieu of its time cannot hide the irony of its cautious but carefully sharpened double edge.

"Valerie" (1972) brings the drama of desire much closer to home. Harlan takes a vivid instance from his own life of when he was gulled, used, exploited and shown in no uncertain terms the inevitability of our being trapped again and again into both that paradise and that prison. It is a caveat, an expose of our inherent vulnerability.

Both "The Other Eye of Polyphemus" (1977) and "All the Birds Come Home to Roost" (1979) feature imagery that is erotic. Neither story, however, is actually about s.e.x. What we have instead is s.e.x as a particular manifestation of fear. The opening sentence of "Polyphemus" says the protagonist "might as easily have been a woman," which clarifies for us immediately that this story is not concerned with gender-influenced fear but with something far more frightening. Its harsh view of compa.s.sion is kept from total brutality by a strange but convincing approach to selfishness as a healthy measure of balance.

"Birds"-anch.o.r.ed as it is, yet again, to events Harlan has lived-utilizes a fantasy common to all of us: who has not imagined having another go at a past romantic liaison? As Harlan takes this notion and diverts it into a disconcerting and literal cul-de-sac, it is once again fear-at first glance appearing to come from an exterior direction-that is revealed to be nesting right up there in the attic of the mind.

Together these pieces offer a compelling example of Harlan's ability to look at s.e.x as a human action which exposes the personalities behind it. The mechanics are limited by mere biology; the import is limited merely by the human mind, of which the imagination is the only limit.

"No, kiddo, I'm just a slave of love like you."

Introduction to "How's the Night Life on Cissalda?," SHATTERDAY, Houghton Mifflin, 1980 The Very Last Day of a Good Woman Finally, he knew the world was going to end. It had grown in certainty with terrible slowness. His was not a perfect talent, but rather, a gem with many small flaws in it. Had he been able to see the future clearly, had he not been a partial clairvoyant, his life might not have come to what it had. His hunger would not have been what it was. Yet the brief, fogged glimpses were molded together, and he knew the Earth was about to end. By the same rude certainty that told him it was going to end, he knew it was not self-deception-it was not merely his death. It was the final irrevocable finish of his world, with every life upon it. This he saw in a shattered fragment of clarity, and he knew it would come in two weeks, on a Thursday night.

His name was Arthur Fulbright, and he wanted a woman.

How strange or odd. To know the future. To know it in that most peculiar of fashions: not as a unified whole, as a superimposed something on the image of now, but in bits and s.n.a.t.c.hes, in fits and starts. In humming, deliberate quickness-a truck will come around the corner in a moment-that made him-Native Dancer will win-almost a denizen of two worlds-the train will leave ten minutes early- he saw the future through a gla.s.s darkly-you will find your other cuff link in the medicine cabinet-and was hardly aware of what this power promised.

For years, a soft, brown shambling man all hummed words and gentle glances, living with his widowed mother in an eight-room house set about with honeysuckle and sweet pea. For years, working in a job of unidentifiable type and station; for years returning to the house and the comforting pastel of Mother.

Years that held little change, little activity, little of note or importance. Yet good years, and silent.

Then Mother had died. Sighing in the night, she had slowed down like a phonograph, like the old crank phonograph covered under a white sheet in the attic, and had died. Life had played its melody for her, and just as naturally had trembled to an unsatisfactory end.

For Arthur it had meant changes.

Now, no more the nights of sound sleep, the evenings of quiet discussion and backgammon or whist, the afternoons of lunch prepared in time for a return to the office, the mornings with cinnamon toast and orange juice ready. Now it was a single-lane highway that he would travel alone.

Learning to eat in restaurants, learning where the fresh linens were kept, sending his clothes out to be mended and cleaned.

And most of all, coming to realize in the six years since Mother's death, that he could see the future once in a while. It was in no way alarming, nor even-after living with it so long-surprising. The word terrifying, in connection with his sight of the future, would never have occurred to him; and had he not seen that night of flame and death, the end of the world, the power would never have troubled him.

But he did see it, and it made a difference.

Because now that he was about to die, now that he had two weeks and no more, he had to find a purpose. There had to be a reason to die without regret. Yet here he sat, in the high-backed wing chair in the darkened living room, with the empty eight-room house around him, and there was no purpose. He had not considered his own demise; Mother's going had been hard enough to reconcile, but he had known it would come some day (though the ramifications of her death had never dawned on him).His own death was something else.

"How can a man come to thirty-nine years, and have nothing?" he asked himself. "How can it be?"

It was true, of course. He had nothing. No talent, no mark to leave on affairs, no wake, no purpose.

And with the tallying of his lacks, he came to the most important one of all. The one marking him as not yet a man, no matter what he thought. The lack of a woman. He was a virgin; he had never had a woman.

With two weeks left on Earth, Arthur Fulbright knew what he wanted, more than anything, more than fame or wealth or position. His desire for his last days on Earth was a simple one, an uncluttered one.

Arthur Fulbright wanted a woman.

There had been a little money. Mother had left over two thousand dollars in cash and savings bonds. He had been able to put away two thousand in his own account. That made four thousand dollars, and it became very important, but not till later.

The idea of buying a woman came to him after many other considerations. The first attempt was with a young woman of his acquaintance, who worked as a steno-typist in the office, in the billing section.

"Jackie," he asked her, having pa.s.sed time with her on occasion, "would you-uh-how would you like to go to a-uh-show with me tonight...or something?"

She stared at him curiously, seeing a cipher; but having mentally relegated the evening to smoking a little gra.s.s and washing her hair with a girl friend, accepted.

That evening she doubled her fist and gave him such a blow beneath his rib cage, that his eyes watered and his side hurt for almost an hour.

The next day he avoided the girl with the blonde, twirled ponytail who was browsing in the HISTORICAL NOVELS section of the Public Library. He had had a glimpse often enough-of the future-to know what this one meant. She was married, despondent, and did not wear her ring out of hostility for her husband. He saw himself in an unpleasant situation involving the girl, the librarian, and the library guard. He avoided the library.

As the week wore through, as Arthur realized he had never developed the techniques other men used to snare girls, he knew his time was running out. As he walked the streets late at night, pa.s.sing few people, but still people who were soon to perish in a flaming death, he knew his time was slipping away with terrible swiftness.

Now it was no mere desire. Now it was a drive, an urge within him that obsessed his thoughts, that motivated him as nothing else in life ever had. And he cursed Mother for her fine, old Southern ways, for her white flesh that had bound him in umbilical impotence. Her never-demanding, always-pleasant ways, that had made it so simple to live on in a pastel world of strifeless, effortless complacency.

To die a-flaming with the rest of the world...empty.

The streets were chill, and the lamp posts had wavering, unearthly halos about them. From far off came the sound of a car horn, lost in the darkness; and a truck, its diesel gut rumbling, shifting into gear as a stop light changed, then coughing away. The pavement had the sick pallor of rotting flesh, and the stars were lost in inkiness on a moonless night. He bunched himself tightly inside his topcoat, and bent into the vague, leaf-picking breeze slanting toward him. A dog howled briefly somewhere, and a door slammed on another block. Abruptly, he was ultrasensitive to these sounds, and wanted to be joined to them, inside with the love and humor of a home. But had he been a pariah, a criminal, a leper, he could not have been more alone. He hated the philosophy of his culture that allowed men like himself to mature without direction, without hope, without love. All of which he needed so desperately.

At the intersection, halfway down the block, a girl emerged from shadows, her heels tock-tock-tocking rhythmically on the sidewalk, then the street, as she stepped across, and went her way.

He was cutting across the lawn of a house, and converging on her from right angles before he realized what he was doing, what his intentions were. By then, his momentum had carried him.

Rape.

The word flowered in his mind like a hot-house flower, with blood-red petals, grew to monstrous proportions, and withered, black at the edges, even as he scooted briskly, head down and hands in coat pockets, toward their point of intersection.

Could he do it? Could he carry it off? She was young and beautiful, desirable, he knew. She would have to be. He would take her down on the gra.s.s; and she would not scream, but would be pliant and acquiescent. She had to be.

He raced ahead to the spot where she would meet him, and he lay down on the moist, brown earth, inside the cover of bushes, waiting for her. In the distance he could hear her heels counting off the steps till he was upon her.

Then, even as his desire ate at him, other pictures came. A twisted, half-naked body lying in the street, a mob of men screaming and brandishing a rope, a picture of Mother, her face ashen and transfigured with horror. He crammed his eyes shut, and pressed his cheek to the ground. It was the all-mother, consoling him. He was the child who had done wrong, and his need was great. The all-mother comforted him, directed him, caressed him with propriety and deep devotion. He lay there as the girl clacked past.

The heat in his face died away, and it was the day of the end, before he fully returned to sanity and a sense of awareness.

He had escaped b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, perhaps at the cost of his soul.

It was, it was, indeed. The day it would happen. He had several glimpses that day, so shocking, so brilliant in his mind, that they reaffirmed his knowledge of the coming of the event. Today it would come. Today the world would spark and burn.

One vision showed great buildings, steel and concrete, flashing like magnesium flares, burning as though they were crepe paper. The sun was dull-looking, as though it might have been an eye that someone had gouged out. The sidewalks ran like b.u.t.ter; and charred, smoldering shapes lay in the gutters and on the rooftops. It was hideous, and it was now.

He knew his time was up.

Then the idea of the money came to him. He withdrew every cent. Every penny of the four thousand dollars; the vice president of the bank had a peculiar expression on his face, and he asked if everything was all right. Arthur answered him with an epigram, and the vice president was unhappy.

All that day at the office-of course he went to work, he would not have known any other way to spend that last day of all days-he was on edge. He continually turned at his desk to stare out the window, waiting for the blood-red glaze that would paint the sky. But it did not come.

Shortly after the coffee break that afternoon, he found the sensation of nausea growing in him. He went to the men's room and locked himself in one of the cubicles. He sat down on the toilet with its top closed, and held his head in his hands.

A glimpse was coming to him.

Another glimpse, vaguely connected to the ones of the holocaust, but now-like a strip of film running backward-he saw himself entering a bar.

There were words in twisting neon outside, and repeated again on the small dark-gla.s.s window. The words said: THE NITE OWL. He saw himself in his blue suit, and he knew the money was in his pocket.

There was a woman at the bar.

Her hair was faintly auburn in the dim light of the bar. She sat on the bar stool, her long legs gracefully crossed, revealing a laced edge of slip. Her face was held at an odd angle, half-up toward the concealed streamer of light over the bar mirror. He could see the dark eyes and the heavy makeup that somehow did not detract from the sharp, unrelieved lines of her face. It was a hard face, but the lips were full, and not thinned. She was staring at nothing.

Then, as abruptly as it had come, the vision pa.s.sed, and his mouth was filled with the slippery vileness of nausea.

He got to his feet and flipped open the toilet. Then he was thoroughly sick, but not messy.

Afterward, he went back to the office and found the yellow pages of the phone book. He turned to "Bars" and ran his finger down the column till he came to "The Nite Owl" on Morrison and 58th Streets.

He went home especially to freshen up...to get into his blue suit.

She was there. The long legs in the same position, the edge of slip showing, the head at that strange angle, the hair and eyes as he had seen them.

It was almost as though he was reliving a dramatic part he had once played; he walked up to her, and slid onto the empty stool. "May I, may I buy you a drink, Miss?"

She only acknowledged his presence and his question with a half-nod and soft grunt. He motioned to the black-tied bartender and said, "I'd like a gla.s.s of ginger ale. Give the young lady whatever she, uh, she wants please."

The woman quirked an eyebrow and mumbled, "Bourbon and water, Ned." The bartender moved away. They sat silently till he returned with the drinks. Then the girl said, "Thanks." Arthur nodded, and moved the gla.s.s around in its own circle of moisture. "I like ginger ale. Never really got to like alcohol, I guess. You don't mind?"

Then she turned, and stared at him. She was really quite attractive, with little lines in her neck, around her mouth and eyes. "Why the h.e.l.l should I care if you drink ginger ale? You could drink goat's milk and I couldn't care less." She turned back.

Arthur hurriedly answered, "Oh, I didn't mean any offense. I was only-"

"Forget it."

"But I-"

She looked at him with vehemence. "Look Mac, you on the make, or what? You got a pitch? Come on, it's late."

Now, confronted with it, Arthur found himself terrified. He wanted to cry. It wasn't the way he had thought it would be. His throat had a choke lost in it. "I-I, why I-"

"Oh, Jeezus, wouldn't 'cha know it. A freak. My luck, always my luck." She bolted the rest of her drink and slid off the stool. She smoothed the miniskirt over her thighs and backside as she moved toward the door of the bar.

Arthur felt panic rising in him. This was the last chance, and it was important, terribly important! He spun on the stool and called after her, "Miss-"

She stopped and turned. "Yeah?"

"I thought we might, uh, could I speak to you?"

She seemed to sense his difficulty, and a wise look came across her features. She came back and stopped very close to him. "What now, what is it?"

"Are you, uh, are you do, doing anything this evening?"

Her sly look became businesslike. "It'll cost you fifteen. You got that much?"

Arthur was petrified. He could not answer. But as though it realized the time had come for action, his hand dipped into his jacket pocket and came up with the four thousand dollars. Eight five hundred dollar bills, crackling and fresh. He held them out for her to see, then the hand returned them to the pocket. The hand was the businessman, himself merely the bystander.

"Wow," she murmured, her eyes bright. "You're not as bad as I thought, fella. You got a place?"

They went to the big, silent house, and he undressed in the bathroom, for it was the first time, and he held a granite chunk of fear in his chest.

When it was over, and he lay there warm and happy, she rose from the bed and moved to his jacket. He stared at her, and there was a strange feeling in him. He knew it for what it was, for he had felt a distant relative to it, in his feelings for Mother. Arthur Fulbright knew love, of a sort, and he watched her as she fished out the bills.

"Jesus," she murmured, touching the money reverently.

"Take it," he said softly.

"What? How much?"

"All of it. It doesn't mean anything." Then he added, as if it was the highest compliment he could summon: "You are a very good woman."