He moved about in her mind; his fingers were still touching her hands. What a strong body and well-shaped face he had. Funny about men’s faces ... they were usually either too weakly perfect—movie-hero-like—or too homely, but Starling’s was in between. And he had a curious quality—not humble but sort of sadly and smilingly erect. What was it, anyway?
During the next two days she treated her family with a greater degree of merry friendliness, and they began faintly to hope that she was coming around to their ways of thinking. In reality, they had ceased to matter much to her, all except her mother, for whom she still felt a weak and troubled compassion. Poor, hard-working, patient, stupid ma. But what on earth could be done to help her?
Propped up against the pillows on her bed, Blanche had written an account of the Vanderin party. With more confident emotions now, fortified by Oppendorf’s praise, and with a little, dizzy ache in her head, her fingers had passed less laboriously over the paper. Her sketch was pointedly humorous and disrespectful, and stuck its tongue out at the different men and women who had attended the party. They might be celebrities and all that, but most of them hadn’t acted and talked much different from the business men and chorines whom she had met at other affairs. She enjoyed the task of good-naturedly attacking them—it was like revenging her own undeserved obscurity.
Her sketch was full of lines such as: “She was fat, and when she did the Charleston with a little skinny fellow, why he looked just like a frightened kid,” and “The negroes and whites, all except the loving couples, they acted like they were trying too hard to be happy together,” and “The party was a good excuse for necking, but they all could have done it much better alone,” and “They introduced him as a poet, but when he started to talk to you, why then you got more uncertain about it, and when he was through talking you were just sure that something must be wrong.”
When she met Starling, on Saturday night, she was in a facetious and tiptoeing mood. Hot doggie, life was perking up again. As they rode in a taxicab down to Margaret’s studio, she showed him the sketch, and he laughed loudly over it.
“You know, the trouble between colored and white people at parties is that they’re both acting up to each other,” he said. “The whites are doing their darnedest to be tolerant and, well, cordial, and the colored people are always a little uncomfortable. They act self-conscious, you know, or too wild, and why? They’re all trying to put their best foot forward, and show that they belong there.”
“But how about all the loving pairs I saw at Vanderin’s?” she asked. “They sure didn’t seem to mind it much.”
He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. Of course, she didn’t know that in eight cases out of ten—perhaps more—these pairs had nothing but a passing lust for each other. And what if they did?—that part of it was all right. There was no earthly reason why they shouldn’t want each other’s bodies, unless they were too cruel or sneering about it. God, sex could be a wild, clean, naked, beautiful thing, and people were always hurling mud and denunciations at it, or slinking with it behind closed doors, damn them. But he didn’t want just a flitting affair with Blanche ... he was sure of that now. He had been afraid that the encouragement of night, and the highballs, and the party, might have caused him to throw a false radiance around this girl—he had done the same thing before, though never so severely. But now he realized that his feelings for her were made of more solid stuff—realized it just after he had finished reading her sketch. He liked her upstanding, inquiring, impertinent spirit, and the unaffected smiles and moués that appeared on her face, and the sturdy and yet soft freshness of her body.
Hell was probably facing him. He was a negro, yes, and proud of it, but suppose it caused him to lose this woman? He would almost hate it, then—this streak of black blood which he had always flaunted so defiantly. He wasn’t like other men of his kind—cringing about it, and claiming to be entirely white, and fawning before every white woman they met. Stupid lily-snatchers! Not he! Yet he was sorely tempted to flee to this lie, in Blanche’s case. If he confessed, then all of his hopes and longings might be shot to pieces. He could picture her in his mind, recoiling from him against her will, summoning pleasant and compassionate smiles, trying to soothe the wound caused by her sorrowful determination never to see him again.
Puzzled by his frowning silence, she said: “What’s the matter, Eric?”