Chapter Seven
Cameron leaned back, reading the last sentence. He smiled and then immediately frowned. Looking around the apartment with its four rickety chairs and Formica-covered table, he wondered where all that effort expended in becoming a success had gone. He had grasped the brass ring, and in America, had clambered up the greasy pole. All he had needed was a wide pair of shoulders on which to stand. He had found two. That thought brought his mind around to his cousin Fran.
I need to give her a call, he thought, stretching his lower back.
Inside the refrigerator was an almost empty packet of sliced ham, the crusty end of a loaf of bread and a half-empty bottle of Coke. Not French cuisine, but it would have to do. He sat on the couch, with its uneven lumps, thinking of the three-story home on the acre and a half lot that he had given up when he resigned from the presidency of Prince George's Community College. His first novel, This Time the Fire, had lived in that odd world of acclaim and huge sales. Called "important" and "ground-breaking," it had cascaded into the intellectual public's consciousness. He knew of no black person, outside a narrow circle of scholars, who had read the book, but it was seen as an important black work. There had been the cover of Time and the usual mid-level literary prizes. The big ones, however—the Pulitzer, the National, etc.—had eluded him, and he wondered why. Could it be that he was not dangerous enough? But then, he considered who was winning, and thought, What could now be safer than writing a feminist or gay novel? That is the new orthodoxy.
In some ways, there was nothing to fight against. All the intellectuals agreed on the social issues. Those who did not agree were dismissed as bigoted, rightwing crazies. What was a cynic to do? He hated having his voice added to the litany of ills that oppressed groups faced, but what else was publishable except maybe badly-written pornography that everyone sneered at and surreptitiously read? How many bits of gray again? The Victorians, with all their repressions, had done it better and more dangerously. Western liberalism, with its Judeo-Christian underpinning, was vigorously anti-sex. American puritanism, Romanesque in its prudery, was liberalism at its contemporary worst. Hypocrisy is the enemy of truth, and impotence is the result. Get more guns, those always-spurting phalluses that never failed. Just jam another round in the chamber. Push it in, jack it, point and fire. No psychic stress. Always ready. The target didn't matter. In the droning age, the target doesn't even know.
He had pursued The Dream, and he had won, immigrant made good. The 5400-square-foot home in Philadelphia had been his first proof. So why did he give up that statement the Jews had made a century ago? The house, a stone—Wissahickon schist—behemoth with gabled windows that suggested Poe and Hawthorne, was the prize. The Jews, that other group of dispersed souls, trapped within Philadelphia's city limits by the prejudice of the goyim, had built those homes. City Line Avenue was their border, the macadam divider from the Main Line, the land of old names, well-kept lawns, Bryn Mawr and a cricket club. Cricket, for God's sake! Hadn't those freemasons in 1776 got rid of that? No Negroes or Jews allowed, so Negroes stayed in West Philly, along with the Jews who, in Overbrook Farms, built the most magnificent houses they could. That way, those across the road on the Main Line could see they were coming.
This country is built on strangulation, Cameron thought, searching for the last of the Scotch.
It was next to the bed that used to be a temple where vestal virgins were sacrificed. Now, new gods had come, and he feared being the sacrifice. His mind shifted to Jo-Anne. What in her background drove her out of her community to a white man who may or may not be gay, but who didn't seem to give a damn with whom she slept?
Impotent in his own way. And Jo-Anne with her desperate sex that makes you feel like the world is on fire. Every lover's dream. For the first hour. The loud, pre-orgasmic moans that, in that first hour, sound real, then sort of seem to be imitations of themselves. She's great to think about, to joke with other guys about, but hell to actually do. Interminable, never-ending passion. Perhaps. What do women mean when they reject screwing, instead wanting to make love? Certainly not Jo-Anne's frenzied need to be in contact with something she thinks of as real, Cameron thought.
He drank from the bottle. The buzz was coming, and he turned the light off, returning to lie on the couch. He adjusted his body to approximate his angles to the couch's lumps and rested his head on the arm rest. Jo-Anne was fun, and he was being unfair to her. A product of that new, black, rich class, she had gone to Brown and then Harvard Law School.
A white man was practically a necessity since they increasingly seem to find salvation in saving the oppressed black woman or in hitching their wagon to rising stars, he thought.
Jo-Anne had been a rising star. She left Harvard with half a chip on her shoulder. Not certain if it was a black chip or a feminist chip, she headed to Washington to be near power. That meant Congress or the White House. Her father secured her an appointment in HUD, and that had been the beginning. The HUD appointment lasted fifteen months, and then, she had attached herself to a New Jersey senator whose wife couldn't resist the compliant, black lawyer. It was a merry go round. Obama had truly liberated her. Finally deciding that blackness trumped feminism, she left the senator (really his wife), going to Iowa as soon as Obama announced. That Harvard accent could kill, and when Obama won, she was one of those in the front, freezing during the inauguration, crying tears of joy. Clifford, her husband, cried, too. Why not? He had gambled and won the sweepstakes.
Cameron chuckled as a stray thought floated, featherlike, through his mind. Could he have loved Jo-Anne if they had met when she was single? Could their blackness have combined? He snickered.
Naah. Too much testosterone, and I am no savior. And I sure couldn't unravel her daddy issues, so why try?
Feeling both frightened and perverse, he bent forward and shoved his finger up his anus, immediately encountering the round bulge that was the black man's curse. Proud of the big dicks, scared of the enlarged prostate. Having confirmed that the curse was still with him, he washed his hands. Surgery was not possible because of the hemophilia. Von Willebrand's disease (it would be a German), the inability to form blood clots. No one could tell him for sure if he had had it all his life, but with the many cuts and bruises he had acquired as a boy in Barbados with no ill effects, he must have developed it later. The thought of hemophilia brought his mind around to Toni, whom he had met while teaching a course at Columbia. Toni was a rarity. She was French and had been in the last stages of breaking up with him when he was diagnosed with the disease. In a moment of rare, though poisonous, honesty, she had said, "Payback for the way you treat women." He had felt the rage that must have been always there, and staring at that white, unlined neck, had seen the knife sliding across it, leaving a thin, red line before the head fell off. The strangest thought occurred to him: the headless horseman.
Not a bad image given the fury with which she rode me.
He giggled, sat up, guzzled Scotch and placed the bottle on the floor.
What time is it?
The images in the air were of hobgoblins and sprites, and he reached out, trying to touch them. Suddenly, his arms fell.
"Jo-Anne," he mumbled.
The hobgoblins and sprites came from the air and entered his head. He snored.
