A Horse’s Head

7. Melanie

The girl was Nefertiti, the girl was Cleopatra as she must have really looked, the girl was colored, her skin as brown as nicotine, her eyes glowing and glinting and black, her hair cropped tight to her skull, huge golden earrings dangling, mouth full and parted in a beautiful wicked smile over great white sparkling teeth, the better to eat you with my dear, he had written sonnets about girls like this.

There was behind her the insinuating beat of a funky jazz tune, Thelonious Monk or Hampton Hawes, there was behind her the smoky greyness of a room indifferent to skin, the insistent clink and clash of whiskied ice and laughter, the off-key humming of a sinewy blonde in a purple dress, the fingersnapping click of a lean dark Negro in a dark blue suit, there was behind her the aroma of bodies, the aroma of perfume. And — also behind her, also seeming to rise from far behind her where lions roared to the velvet night and Kilimanjaro rose in misty splendor — rising from far behind her like mist itself, and undetected by her as she stood in smiling welcome in the doorway, one long brown slender arm resting on the door jamb, was a scent as comforting as a continent, he had written sonnets about girls like this.

“Well, come on in, honey, do,” she said, and turned her back and went into the room.

He followed her in, immediately closing and locking the door behind him, shutting out the menace of Freddie and Lou, shutting out the menace of the sharpshooting K and the smokestacking Kruger, the memory of Merilee, the promise of whatever secret the jacket would reveal. He enclosed himself in a warm protective cocoon and watched the girl’s lovely sinuous behind in the tight Pucci dress as she walked across the room ahead of him. She turned a small pirouette, lifted one hand in introduction, wrist bent, and announced, “The cat downstairs. He can’t sleep.”

“Give the man a drink,” someone said, and Mullaney thought Here we go again.

“Is that a bullet hole in your shirt?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “How can you tell?”

“When you’ve seen one bullet hole,” she said, “you’ve seen them all. Sit down and tell me how you got it.”

He sat in an easy chair near the window where the borough of Queens winked its nighttime sky against the greater Friday glow of Manhattan, and the girl sat on the arm of the chair with her thigh in its Pucci silk tight against his arm, and the scent rising again from her, strong and intoxicating; he did not need the drink someone pressed into his hand.

“I was cleaning my revolver...” he started.

“Oh, you were cleaning your revolver,” the girl said.

“Yes, and it went off.”

“You must be more careful,” the girl said. “Are the fuzz after you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered honestly.

“I thought they might be. The reason I thought they might be is because the person who lives downstairs is an old lady of seventy years of age who can hardly walk because of her arthritis, and not a man in a pretty yellow shirt with a bullet hole in it.”

“If you knew I wasn’t the lady downstairs, why’d you let me in?”

“I’m partial to blue eyes.”

“My eyes are brown.”

“That’s why I let you in.”

“But you said...”

“I’m drunk, who knows what I’m saying?”

“What’s your name?”

“Rose.”

“Really? My mother’s name was...”

“No.”

“It’s not Rose?”

“No. It’s Abigail.”

“All right, why’d you let me in, Abigail?”

“Don’t call me Abigail. My name is Melanie.”

“Is it really?”

“Absolutely. Melanie is from the Greek, it means black.”

“But is it your name?”

“I just said so, didn’t I?”

“You also said it was Rose and Abigail.”

“That’s right, it’s Melanie Rose Abigail. Do you like that name?”

“I like it.”

“Which one?”

“All of them.”

“I like Melanie best.”

“Why’d you let me in the apartment, Melanie?”

“I didn’t want the fuzz to get you, that’s right, call me Melanie, say Melanie. I don’t like the fuzz to get anybody, not even murderers. Are you a murderer?”

“No, Melanie.”

“Then why are the fuzz after you?”

“Because they think I look suspicious.”

“You do look suspicious.”

“That’s because I’m a gambler, and also because I have a bullet hole in my shirt.”

“No. It’s because you have the look of a man who is searching for something, and Mother always taught me to regard such a man with suspicion and doubt.”

“Is that how you regard me?”

“Yes. Who put the hole in your shirt?”

“A man named K.”

“Who is a lousy shot.”

“I don’t think he was trying to hit me.”

“Then why did he shoot at you?”

“To scare me.”

“Did he?”

“No.”

“What are you searching for?”

“Half a million dollars.”

“Will you settle for a clean shirt that doesn’t have a bullet hole in it?”

“Do you have one?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“If you have one, I’ll settle for it. For the time being.”

“Oh my, what will the man want next?” Melanie said, and rolled her eyes. She extended her hand to him. “Come,” she said.

“Where?”

“To where I may have a shirt or two laying around.”

“Which is where?”

“Questions, questions. Don’t you trust me?”

“The police arc in the building. Should I trust you?”

“Honey, who are you going to trust? When the fuzz come busting in here, which they will most certainly do if they’re already in the building, do you want them to find a suspicious-looking man with a bullet hole in his pretty yellow shirt, or do you want them to find a contented-looking man in a white shirt and a silk rep tie and perhaps a jacket that is still hanging in the closet of my bedroom that used to belong to a bass guitar player I kicked out last month, though not of your color? Would you like them to find a fellow whose pants look like they shrunk up three sizes too small for him, or would you like them to find a well-dressed Ivy League type in nice pleatless slacks made for my bass guitar player friend at Chipp’s, now which is it you prefer, and how can you afford not to trust me?”

“I trust you,” Mullaney said.

“That’s fine,” Melanie answered, “because I have never trusted a white man in my entire life.”

“Then why are you helping me?”

“It’s the blue eyes that get me,” Melanie said. “Also, I like gamblers.”

“They’re brown.”

“Yes, but I’m drunk.”

“Which is probably the only reason you’re helping me.”

“No. I don’t like you to look so suspicious. I want you to look contented, man, contented.”

“How will we manage that?” Mullaney asked.

“I have never kissed a man who did not look extremely contented afterwards.”

“Oh, do you plan to kiss me?” Mullaney asked.

“I plan to swallow you alive,” Melanie said.

He felt very well-dressed in his pleatless trousers and vented jacket, wearing the white shirt and gold and black silk-rep tie Melanie had provided, very collegiate, although he had never dressed like this when he was attending City College from 1949 to 1951, and again from 1954 to 1956, after he had served his two-year stint in the Army. He missed the old maroon sweater he used to wear religiously to classes in those days, and he also missed what the sweater represented, an attitude he had tried to recapture when he began taking the gamble a year ago, an attitude exemplified by the sweater, which was theadbare at the elbows and beginning to unravel at the cuffs, exemplified too by the fact that he owned only one key and even that didn’t open anything he really possessed, it was to the lock of his mother Rose’s apartment. He missed the maroon sweater and the reckless who-gives-a-damn attitude he had worn all through college, the knowledge that he would not be called upon for any responsibilities deeper than having his assignments in on time, or wearing a rubber when he screwed some hapless girl from Hunter. These Ivy League garments were very chic and very well-tailored, but they did not come anywhere near being as debonair as his maroon sweater.

He missed his jasmine shirt, too, which had been a gift from Irene on his thirty-eighth birthday, and which he had cherished over the interceding year and a half, almost two years. The maroon sweater had disappeared a long time ago, gone the way of all shabby sweaters and attitudes, and now the jasmine shirt had a bullet hole in it, and it too had been replaced with a bass guitar player’s excellently tailored threads, and Melanie had promised to swallow him alive.

The suspense was killing him.

The suspense at first was compounded of two equal parts: the possibility that Freddie and Lou might at any moment knock on the apartment door, and the further possibility that Melanie might at any moment swallow him alive. There was something very strange about Melanie in that she had told him she did not trust any white man (he believed her) and yet she would not let him out of her sight, would not let go of his hand, would not stop rubbing her long sinuous cat’s body against him at every opportunity. He was beginning to suspect that she was naked beneath the clinging Pucci silk, and the notion of exploring this darkest heart, the possibility of being swallowed alive by a race and an intelligence that went back millenniums, consumed as it were by someone or something that simultaneously hated him and desired him was tantalizing and terribly exciting. But conversely, and contradictorily, and contrarily, he was terrified that she would indeed envelop him in her blackness, completely enclose him in the centuries-old vastness of her mother womb, absorb him, cause him to disappear from view entirely, swallow him alive exactly as she had promised.

Adding to the suspense was the advancing hour. He had crashed the party at perhaps twenty minutes past midnight, and it was now ten minutes past one, with still no sign of the diligent Freddie and Lou. This was a large apartment building, of course, and it could be assumed that if they were knocking on every door it would take them quite a while to work their way around to Melanie’s apartment, by which time she might already have feasted upon him and drunk his blood. Or, worse fate, Freddie and Lou might break in on the moment of climax, catch them in delicto, as it were, adding Indecent Exposure to their charges, or perhaps Disorderly Conduct, or perhaps extraditing him to Alabama and slapping him with a retroactive charge of Miscegenation, there were all sorts of possibilities to the law now that he was a fugitive.

By this time, many of Melanie’s guests, both black and white (the white ones puzzled him since he couldn’t understand why someone who didn’t trust white men would have three white men and two white women among her Friday-night party guests), were beginning to say their farewells and go off into the night to pursue their separate desires. He knew for certain now that Melanie was naked beneath the silk. He touched her breast and saw the nipple rise against the fabric and then she pulled away from him and smiled in wicked encouragement, and he saw desire and hatred mingled again on her face and wanted to love her and simultaneously wanted to destroy her, it was all very confusing.

In one moment, he hoped that Freddie and Lou would arrive quickly, revolvers drawn, handcuffs waiting, to carry him away from this dangerous, hateful cannibal who would most surely destroy him. But in the next moment, he devoutly wished that they would never find him, that he could take this exciting, beautiful, passionate and wanton woman, ravage her repeatedly, hate her, love her, possess her, be possessed by her, merge with her, become one with her, become some vaguely defined beige mixture of arms and legs and lips, settle the entire civil-rights movement there on her bed without assistance from Martin Luther King or anyone, thrash out the hate and leave only the love, and yet knowing this was impossible because too much of it was compounded in hate. Suspensefully, Melanie took his hand between her own two hands, palms full and cushioned and moist, and brought them to her mouth and nibbled at his fingers while he watched the clock. Help me Freddie and Lou, he thought, why is there never a cop around when you need one?

He noticed a rather fat and frizzled Negro woman sitting in an easy chair near the record player, moving her crossed leg in time to the music, so that her sandaled foot tapped out the beat on thin air. The woman was perhaps fifty or fifty-five, and she was wearing a black muu muu, white pearls around her throat, hair cut just like Melanie’s, in close tight African style. She kept beating her foot on the air as though she were squashing white missionaries and Belgian nuns, her skin very black, her teeth very white, her black eyes darting around the room as the number of guests dwindled, until finally it was a quarter-to-two, and the only people in the room were Melanie, the very black and menacing woman in the muu muu, and he himself, Andrew Mullaney.

It occurred to him along about then that Freddie and Lou were not going to find him this night, and so he began resigning himself to the pleasurably hateful fate of making love to Melanie. Suspense being a delicate thing at best, however, he realized that whereas Freddie and Lou were no longer a qualifying element, the large woman in the muu muu definitely was. He wondered if she was planning to spend the night, and then wondered how he could delicately ask about her.

Melanie saved him the trouble by saying, “I don’t think you’ve met my mother.”

“I don’t think I have,” Mullaney said. “Pleasure.”

“The white man is a horse’s ass,” Melanie’s mother said, not meaning anything personal.

“Don’t mind her,” Melanie said. “Would you help me take out the garbage?”

“The white man is fit for taking out the garbage,” Melanie’s mother said.

“Don’t mind her,” Melanie said. “The incinerator is down the hall.”

“The white man is fit for the incinerator,” Melanie’s mother said, which sent a shiver up Mullaney’s spine.

They gathered up the bags of garbage in the kitchen, and carried them to the front door. At the door, Melanie said, “Why don’t you go to sleep, Mother,” and Mother simply replied, I’m not sleepy.”

“Very well,” Melanie said, and sighed, and opened the door. She preceded Mullaney down the empty hallway toward the small incinerator room. He pulled open the furnace door for her, and she dropped the bags of garbage down the chute. Below, somewhere in the bowels of the building, there was the sense if not the actual sound and smell of licking flames, a hidden well of fire destroying the waste of a metropolis. He released the handle, and the door banged back into place. Below, the building throbbed with consuming fire, a dull steady roar that vibrated into the soles of his feet and shuddered through the length of his body.

“Kiss me,” Melanie said.

This is the gamble, he thought as he took her into his arms. This is why I took the gamble a year ago, I took it for this moment in this room, this girl in my arms here and now, I have written sonnets about girls like this. I took the gamble so that I could make love to women in the stacks of the New York Public Library, I took the gamble so that I could make love to women in incinerator rooms, black or white, yellow or red, lowering her to the floor and raising the Pucci silk up over her brown thighs and reaching his hand into the thick tangled black hair suddenly revealed, the pink wet wonder of her parting to receive him, “I hate you,” she said, “Yes,” he said, “love me,” and she wrapped her long legs around him. He reached for the top of her dress, lowered it off her shoulders and kissed the dark nipples against the dark skin, “I hate you,” she said again, “Love me,” he said, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” her teeth clamped into his lips, he could taste blood, he thought She will kill me, and thought This is the gamble, and remembered he had once very long ago when he was a soldier made love, no, had not made love, had laid, had humped, had fucked a Negro prostitute in a curbside crib while his buddy waited outside for his turn, and had not considered it a gamble. And had later told Irene that he had once laid a colored girl, and she had said, “How lucky you arc,” and he had not known whether or not she was kidding. Here and now, here with the fires of hell burning in the building below, here with a girl who repeated over and over again as he moved inside her, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” he wondered about the gamble for the first time in a year, and came without her. “I hate you,” she said, with excellent reason this time.

He told her he was sorry, which he truly was, and which he thought was a gentlemanly and certainly American thing to admit, as she pulled her dress down over her long brown legs, and stood up. She said his apology was accepted, but that nonetheless he had been an inadequate and disappointing partner, whereas she had been hoping for someone with skill and virtuosity enough to perform on Ferris wheels, for example.

“I would be willing to do it on a roller coaster!” he shouted in defense, and then lowered his voice because it was, after all, the wee small hours of the morning, whispering, “I’m truly sorry, Melanie.”

Yes, she said, but you must admit there is something about the white man that can only engender hatred and distrust, dusting off her Pucci dress, and tucking her breasts back into the bodice. The white man has been taking for centuries and centuries, she said, and he doesn’t know how to give, you see, nor even how to accept graciously. The white man (he was beginning to feel as if he’d been captured by the Sioux) knows only how to grab and grab and grab — which is why you have that look on your face that Mother always warned me about — but he doesn’t know what he really wants or even why the hell he’s grabbing. The white man is a User and a Taker and a Grabber, and he will continue to Use and Take and Grab until there’s nothing left for him to feast upon but his own entrails, which he will devour like a hyena, did you know that hyenas eat their own intestines?

“No, I did not know that,” Mullaney said, amazed and repulsed.

It is a little known fact, Melanie said, but true. You must not think I’m angry at you, or would harbor any ill feelings toward you, or seek any revenge other than not permitting you to spend the night in my apartment, which would be impossible with Mother here, anyway. She despises the white man, as you may have gathered. I, on the other hand, like the white man, I really do. As a group, that is. And whereas it’s true that I’ve never met one individually or singly of whom I could be fond, this doesn’t mean I don’t like them as a group. I am, for example, keenly disappointed in you personally, but this needn’t warp my judgment of the group as a whole, do you understand? In fact, I suppose I should be grateful to you for proving to me once again just how undependable the white man really is, as an individual of course. Trust him, let him have his way with you, and what does he do once again but leave you with empty promises, though I wouldn’t march on Washington for something as trivial as this, still I think you know what I mean. Now I suppose you think I’m going to ask you to give me back those clothes you’re wearing, send you out into the night wearing your own flimsy yellow shirt with the bullet hole in it, but no, I’m not the type to seek revenge or to harbor any ill feelings, as I’ve already told you. I like the white man, I do. So you can keep the clothes because they once belonged to a Negro who is ten times the man you are, though I don’t wish to offend you or even cause you any embarrassment. But perhaps they’ll remind you as you go through life that you once took a little colored girl in an incinerator room, grabbed her and took her and used her, and left her not hating you, certainly not hating you, but nonetheless feeling a very keen disappointment in you, which I should have been prepared to expect. But grateful to you nonetheless for ascertaining it once again to my satisfaction. I am, in fact, extremely satisfied. Your performance was exactly what I expected, and therefore I am satisfied with my disappointment, do you understand what I’m saying?

“Oh, of course,” Mullaney said, relieved.

“Well, good then,” Melanie said, and offered her hand and said, “Good luck, I hope the fuzz don’t get you, I take the pill.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I take the pill, don’t worry, and I hope the fuzz don’t get you.”

“Thank you,” Mullaney said.

The fuzz were waiting for him outside the building.

In fact, Freddie, or Lou, or perhaps both of them, hit him on the head with a blackjack or some similar weapon or weapons.