How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired

A Bouquet of Lilacs Sparkling with Rain

TAP, TAP, tap, on the door. Very discreet.

“Can we come in?”

“If you’re bringing cold hard coin of the realm— otherwise, keep walking.”

“We’re bringing flowers.”

There’s a girlish burst of laughter and the two of them come in, each carrying a bouquet. Bouba has been sleeping for several hours, legs pressed against his chest, in the fetal position. Valery Miller makes a beeline for the couch with a big bouquet of lilacs sparkling with rain. Miz Literature puts her flowers in a vase and the vase in a corner of the window ledge. She watches me type for a moment. Valery Miller is wearing a green and yellow Sonia Delaunay — style dress.

“What are you writing?”

“A novel.”

“A novel!”

“Fantasies, really.”

“Fantasies!”

In the Western world the word “fantasy” is the next most powerful thing after the atom bomb.

Outside, a fine slanting rain is falling. Not enough to cool the air.

Valery Miller seems right at home here, standing by the window, gazing at the Cross. Even that lousy Cross looks a little more human when it’s being looked at by Valery. She has a heart-stopping kind of beauty. As long as she is of this world, the atom bombs will not fall. Even the bomb will be kind to her.

Miz Literature is not bad either. But Valery Miller is an event. She moves naturally through the room. As if her beauty was an everyday occurrence. It’s like having Mount Vesuvius in your own house. Beelzebub upstairs can go take a walk.

Miz Literature inspects my books.

“You don’t have many women authors.”

She says it nicely, but that kind of comment can hide the most wrathful condemnation.

“I have Marguerite Yourcenar.”

Yourcenar, it seems, does not get me off the hook.

Too suspect. I don’t have Colette or Virginia Woolf (unforgivable!), not even Marie-Claire Blais.

“I have some Erica Jong poems.”

“Really!”

Valery’s face lights up. Vesuvius in eruption. Valery illustrated a Jong collection last year. As fate would have it, the book is on the table.

Cheek to cheek in a flash-frozen tango, eyes closed, in one voice, they scream out the poem “Sylvia Plath Is Alive in Argentina”:

Not dead.

Oh sisters, Alvarez lied.

Miz Literature needs a little drink to go on. She pours herself a good hit of wine and it’s bottoms up and the poem resumes. Valery waits like a sprinter in the blocks for the 440.

& she sits playing chess

with Diane Arbus.

And with raised glasses:

A regular girls’ dormitory

down there

in Argentina.

The girls are gone. I am alone in the dark. I didn’t see the night close in. A crescent moon like a hat beyond the Cross. Automobile lights in the rain. Wet pavement. House lights flash on as office lights go out. I feel depressed. A kind of stylized depression.

Bouba is some specimen, lying there with his mouth wide open, and a bouquet of lilacs between his crossed arms.

A regular black dormitory, out there, with those girls!