Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [42]
Delmore and Clem were different. Younger than Dwight, they were part of the first bookish generation of American writers. They were writer-intellectuals in a sense that Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald—and the generation before them—were not. Not even Joyce was an intellectual to the degree that they were.
It worried me, this bookishness of theirs. I was afraid I would never be able to keep up with it. I didn’t have the patience to spend whole days reading. I was too restless. And I was too much attracted to the world. I read only for what I needed to know, or what gave me pleasure; I never read out of any abstract hunger for knowledge. Also, I was suspicious of bookishness.
When Dwight came back, he announced that Dinamita had drums in her belly.
In the end, though, the Park Plaza disappointed me—not that night, but sometime later. I had often admired a girl there—her name, of course, was Carmen. She was the best female dancer in the place. She was Cuban, with chinky eyes and a jutting ass that looked hard as a rock.
She had a cruel, sullen face that never changed expression as she went through an apparently endless series of improvisations. Like any other young American male, I assumed that she knew more about sex or was closer to it than I was. She could dance so well, I thought, because she could direct her sexuality wherever she pleased.
I desired her, the way you have a desire to go on a safari, or to the South Seas. I desired her as you sometimes hunger for a Mexican dinner that will burn your mouth. I thought of her as a test that I would have liked to pass. Also, she was more authentically other than any woman I had ever known.
With one exception, the girls I had slept with had been typically American. The exception was a Japanese girl in a geisha house in Tokyo. But though she was even more foreign to me than Carmen, I didn’t find her exciting. She was beyond my understanding. I didn’t know what moved her. It was as if I was trying to speak Japanese like the naval officers who came to the geisha houses with phrase books.
But I thought I knew something about Carmen. I thought that she too had drums in her belly, that her life was a strong rhythm. I believed I could learn from her, that I could warm my hands over her flames. It was unlikely, though, because I had nothing to offer her. Those cruel slanting eyes of hers passed right over me. I was so pale to her as to be invisible.
And then one night this all changed. I had come to the Park Plaza with a group. I was their guide, the aficionado. I was with a girl named Sandra, a model, a cover girl in fact. We had taken a table and I was going to the bar to get pitchers of beer when Carmen came up to me and said, Dance with me.
I was so surprised that I gave her a stupid answer. I’m not a dancer like you, I said. I can’t dance with you. I was referring to the fact that there was a strict hierarchy in the Park Plaza. You asked a girl to dance only if you were as good as she was. No good dancer would ever accept an invitation from anyone who was not recognized. There was no allowance for sentiment.
Of course I felt that this was true of sex too. I could no more sleep with Carmen than I could dance with her. I don’t know what I thought she could do, but I imagined that she was more serious about it, more concentrated than I could ever be. I was afraid of being exposed as a sexual imposter, or something like that. At the same time I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to see whether I could get down to the elemental.
So I took her in my arms and started dancing. I had taken about three steps when she said, Let’s get out of here. Without a moment’s hesitation, I abandoned Sandra and my friends. We went out and got a cab, and I gave the cabbie my address.
I hate that music, Carmen said, leaning back in the cab. She spoke English almost without an accent, except that she bit off her words.
You hate it?