Free Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin Page B

from Mme. Clothilde and also produced the waiter, whose jacket was less spotless, seen in closeup, than it had seemed from a distance. It also officially announced our presence in the dining room to Jacques and Guillaume and must have definitely increased, in the eyes of the boys they were talking to, a certain tigerish intensity of affection.
    â€œWe’ll eat quickly and go,” said Giovanni. “After all, I have to work tonight.”
    â€œDid you meet Guillaume here?” I asked him.
    He grimaced, looking down. “No. That is a long story.” He grinned. “No, I did not meet him here. I met him”—he laughed—“in a cinema!” We both laughed. “
C’était un film du far west
,
avec Gary Cooper.
” This seemed terribly funny, too; we kept laughing until the waiter came with our bottle of white wine.
    â€œWell,” said Giovanni, sipping the wine, his eyes damp, “after the last gun shot had been fired and all the music came up to celebrate the triumph of goodness and I came up the aisle, I bumped into this man—Guillaume—and I excused myself and walked into the lobby. Then here he came, after me, with a long story about leaving his scarf in
my
seat because, it appeared, he had been sitting
behind
me, you understand, with his coat and his scarf on the seat
before
him and when I sat down I pulled his scarf down with me. Well, I told him I didn’t work for the cinema and I told him what he could do with his scarf—but I did not really get angry because he made me want to laugh. He said that all the people who worked for the cinema were thieves and he was sure that they would keep it if they so much as laid eyes on it, and it was very expensive, and a gift from his mother and—oh, I assure you, not even Garbo ever gave such a performance. So I went back and of course there was no scarf there and when I told him this it seemed he would fall dead right there in the lobby. And by this time, you understand, everybody thought we were together and I didn’t know whether to kick him or the people who were looking at us; but he was very well dressed, of course, and I was not and so I thought, well, we had better get out of this lobby. So we went to a cafe and sat on the terrace and when he had got over his grief about the scarf and what his mother would say and so on and so on, he asked me to have supper with him. Well, naturally, I said no; I had certainly had enough of him by that time, but the only way I could prevent another scene, right there on the terrace, was to promise to have supper with him a few days later—I did not intend to go,” he said,with a shy grin, “but when the day came, I had not eaten for a long time and I was very hungry.” He looked at me and I saw in his face again something which I have fleetingly seen there during these hours: under his beauty and his bravado, terror, and a terrible desire to please; dreadfully, dreadfully moving, and it made me want, in anguish, to reach out and comfort him.
    Our oysters came and we began to eat. Giovanni sat in the sun, his black hair gathering to itself the yellow glow of the wine and the many dull colors of the oyster where the sun struck it.
    â€œWell”—with his mouth turned down—“dinner was awful, of course, since he can make scenes in his apartment, too. But by this time I knew he owned a bar and was a French citizen. I am not and I had no job and no
carte de travail
. So I saw that he could be useful if I could only find some way to make him keep his hands off me. I did not, I must say”—this with that look at me—“altogether succeed in remaining untouched by him; he has more hands than an octopus, and no dignity whatever,
but
”—grimly throwing down another oyster and refilling our glasses of wine—“I
do
now have a
carte de travail
and I have a job. Which pays very well,” he grinned. “It