Another Country Read Online Free

may burn, baby, but she sure won’t freeze!”
    Directly before and beneath them stretched the lights of the Jersey shore. He seemed, from where he stood, to hear a faint murmur coming from the water.
    When a child he had lived on the eastern edge of Harlem, a block from the Harlem River. He and other children had waded into the water from the garbage-heavy bank or dived from occasional rotting promontories. One summer a boy had drowned there. From the stoop of his house Rufus had watched as a small group of people crossed Park Avenue, beneath the heavy shadow of the railroad tracks, and come into the sun, one man in the middle, the boy’s father, carrying the boy’s unbelievably heavy, covered weight. He had never forgotten the bend of the man’s shoulders or the stunned angle of his head. A great screaming began from the other end of the block and the boy’s mother, her head tied up, wearing her bathrobe, stumbling like a drunken woman, began running toward the silent people.
    He threw back his shoulders, as though he were casting off a burden, and walked to the edge of the balcony where Leona stood. She was staring up the river, toward the George Washington Bridge.
    “It’s real beautiful,” she said, “it’s just so beautiful.”
    “You seem to like New York,” he said.
    She turned and looked at him and sipped her drink. “Oh, I do. Can I trouble you for a cigarette now?”
    He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her, then lit one for himself. “How’re you making it up here?”
    “Oh, I’m doing just fine,” she said. “I’m waiting tables in a restaurant way downtown, near Wall Street, that’s a real pretty part of town, and I’m rooming with two other girls”— they couldn’t go to her place, anyway!— “and, oh, I’m doing just fine.” And she looked up at him with her sad-sweet, poor-white smile.
    Again something warned him to stop, to leave this poor little girl alone; and at the same time the fact that he thought of her as a poor little girl caused him to smile with real affection, and he said, “You’ve got a lot of guts, Leona.”
    “Got to, the way I look at it,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’ll just give up. But— how do you give up?”
    She looked so lost and comical that he laughed out loud and, after a moment, she laughed too.
    “If my husband could see me now,” and she giggled, “my, my, my!”
    “Why, what would your husband say?” he asked her.
    “Why— I don’t know.” But her laugh didn’t come this time. She looked at him as though she were slowly coming out of a dream. “Say— do you think I could have another drink?”
    “Sure, Leona,” and he took her glass and their hands and their bodies touched for a moment. She dropped her eyes. “Be right back,” he said, and dropped back into the room, in which the lights now were dim. Someone was playing the piano.
    “Say, man, how you coming with Eva?” the host asked.
    “Fine, fine, we lushing it up.”
    “That ain’t nowhere. Blast Little Eva with some pot. Let her get her kicks.”
    “I’ll see to it that she gets her kicks,” he said.
    “Old Rufus left her out there digging the Empire State building, man,” said the young saxophonist, and laughed.
    “Give me some of that,” Rufus said, and somebody handed him a stick and he took a few drags.
    “Keep it, man. It’s choice.”
    He made a couple of drinks and stood in the room for a moment, finishing the pot and digging the piano. He felt fine, clean, on top of everything, and he had a mild buzz on when he got back to the balcony.
    “Is everybody gone home?” she asked, anxiously. “It’s so quiet in there.”
    “No,” he said, “they just sitting around.” She seemed prettier suddenly, and softer, and the river lights fell behind her like a curtain. This curtain seemed to move as she moved, heavy and priceless and dazzling. “I didn’t know,” he said, “that you were a princess.”
    He gave her her drink and their hands