Free Dancing in the Dark by Caryl Phillips Page A

a present. He had not meant to anger his friend.
    Ada looks around the spacious apartment at 107 West 132nd Street and she hopes that George will appreciate it. Afternoon light streams in through the large undraped windows and a perturbed Ada convinces herself that this is a good place for her to begin to make a home for herself and George. Bert and Lottie have already moved out of Marshall’s Hotel, and Ada has now decided that she and George will follow them uptown to Harlem. Somewhat reluctantly George has agreed to marry her, but Ada remains optimistic for she understands the seasonal changes that can quickly, and unpredictably, affect the spirits of men. She knows that George will still keep a room at Marshall’s, although he will not tell her, but Ada is determined and she will simply pretend that she knows nothing about George’s room, and she will quietly absorb the humiliation and wait patiently until the wind changes direction.
    The girl waits for him by the stage door, a slender nymph whose young body looks like it could never support the weight of an overcoat. As he approaches the girl steps forward to block his path and George stops.
    “It’s your child, Mr. Walker. I’m asking you, please, you have to do something to help me.”
    George looks rapidly about himself. “Not here,” he hisses. “Not here where people can see.”
    The girl touches his arm, her top lip quivering and water in her eyes. “Mr. Walker, I know you’re serious with the dancing lady. Everybody knows that. I seen you together with her and Iain’t fixing to make things difficult for anybody. But it’s your child, Mr. Walker and I need me some help.”
    George looks at the girl, who has at least shown the good sense to steer clear of Marshall’s. He remembers her, and the disturbing cesarean zip that marks her stomach. He will help her, but she will have to wait until after the weekend. Between now and then he is occupied with plans for his wedding.
    Bert soon learns to walk the twenty paces from his door to Metheney’s Bar. At first people try to talk to him for he is, the pastor aside, the best-known colored man in the neighborhood. However, they soon recognize that he is not a talking man and so they let him be. Metheney’s is a place for men who are serious about their drinking and their solitude. This is not a place for playing numbers, nor is it a place for bragging, or cursing, or womanizing. In Metheney’s, king alcohol makes no man sing. A man comes to Metheney’s to be by himself, and none more so than Mr. Williams, who sits on an undersized wooden chair at a small brown table in the far corner. There is just one chair, to prevent people from making a mistake, and as he leans forward light from the street spills over Mr. Williams’s hunched shoulders and splashes down onto the table and into his tumbler of whiskey. The barman is both tall and broad, with a roll of fat at the back of his neck. He scratches at his stubbled face, dragging a finger, like a plump brown matchstick, across his cheek and down toward the apex of his chin. Later, when Metheney wakes up and comes down to replace him, the barman will go to his rooming house, but only after he has visited the barbershop and encouraged the man to scrape off the fur with a dull razor. He will leave Mr. Williams alone, but he will make sure that the man’s glass is full before he steps out and onto Seventh Avenue. Right now he watches the local celebrity, who always sits by himself. SometimesMr. Williams brings in one of his seemingly endless supply of books to read, but most of the time he just sits and smokes cigarette after cigarette, his noble head clouded in tobacco. At the end of the day Bert needs time to think about what he is doing. He needs time to consider and reconsider everything that he has done, and to turn his short life over in his mind and think and drink and drink and think for there is nobody with whom he cares to talk. Not George. Not Mother.