Read Online Another Country by James Baldwin - Free Book Online Page A

wish I could undo it.”
    “Well, you can’t. So please start trying to forget it.”
    Rufus thought, But it’s not possible to forget anybody you were that hung up on, who was that hung up on you. You can’t forget anything that hurt so badly, went so deep, and changed the world forever. It’s not possible to forget anybody you’ve destroyed.
    He took a great swallow of his bourbon, holding it in his mouth, then allowing it to trickle down his throat. He would never be able to forget Leona’s pale, startled eyes, her sweet smile, her plaintive drawl, her thin, insatiable body.
    He choked slightly, put down his drink, and ground out his cigarette in the spilling ashtray.
    “I bet you won’t believe this,” he said, “but I loved Leona. I did.”
    “Oh,” said Vivaldo, “believe you! Of course I believe you. That’s what all the bleeding was about.”
    He got up and turned the record over. Then there was silence, except for the voice of Bessie Smith.
    When my bed get empty, make me feel awful mean and blue,
    “Oh, sing it, Bessie,” Vivaldo muttered.
    My springs is getting rusty, sleeping single like I do.
    Rufus picked up his drink and finished it.
    “Did you ever have the feeling,” he asked, “that a woman was eating you up? I mean— no matter what she was like or what else she was doing— that that’s what she was really doing?”
    “Yes,” said Vivaldo.
    Rufus stood. He walked up and down.
    “She can’t help it. And you can’t help it. And there you are.” He paused. “Of course, with Leona and me— there was lots of other things, too—”
    Then there was a long silence. They listened to Bessie.
    “Have you ever wished you were queer?” Rufus asked, suddenly.
    Vivaldo smiled, looking into his glass. “I used to think maybe I was. Hell, I think I even wished I was.” He laughed. “But I’m not. So I’m stuck.”
    Rufus walked to Vivaldo’s window. “So you been all up and down that street, too,” he said.
    “We’ve all been up the same streets. There aren’t a hell of a lot of streets. Only, we’ve been taught to lie so much, about so many things, that we hardly ever know where we are.”
    Rufus said nothing. He walked up and down.
    Vivaldo said, “Maybe you should stay here, Rufus, for a couple of days, until you decide what you want to do.”
    “I don’t want to bug you, Vivaldo.”
    Vivaldo picked up Rufus’ empty glass and paused in the archway which led into his kitchen. “You can lie here in the mornings and look at my ceiling. It’s full of cracks, it makes all kinds of pictures. Maybe it’ll tell you things it hasn’t told me. I’ll fix us another drink.”
    Again he felt that he was smothering. “Thanks, Vivaldo.”
    Vivaldo dragged his ice out and poured two drinks. He came back into the room. “Here. To all the things we don’t know.”
    They drank.
    “You had me worried,” said Vivaldo. “I’m glad you’re back.”
    “I’m glad to see you,” said Rufus.
    “Your sister left me a phone number to call in case I saw you. It’s the lady who lives next door to you. I guess maybe I should call her now.”
    “No,” said Rufus, after a moment, “it’s too late. I’ll go on up there in the morning.” And this thought, the thought of seeing his parents and his sister in the morning, checked and chilled him. He sat down again in the easy chair and leaned back with his hands over his eyes.
    “Rufus,” Leona had said— time and again— “ain’t nothing wrong in being colored.”
    Sometimes, when she said this, he simply looked at her coldly, from a great distance, as though he wondered what on earth she was trying to say. His look seemed to accuse her of ignorance and indifference. And, as she watched his face, her eyes became more despairing than ever but at the same time filled with some immense sexual secret which tormented her.
    He had put off going back to work until he began to be afraid to go to work.
    Sometimes, when she said that there