Goodbye Without Leaving Read Online Free PDF Page B

it’s in this neighborhood. Shall we go there and hang out?”
    I suddenly felt drunk and giddy. I felt I was losing my balance. “Let’s go for a little walk,” I said. “I need some air.”
    It was a wet spring night. The streets of Johnny’s neighborhood were glazed with mist. We walked past shops full of Ukrainian blouses and Russian jam, and shops that sold books about nutrition and peace. Girls with long, flowing hair ambled next to skinny boys who wore blue jeans and patchouli oil. The air was full of the smell of exhaust, of rain, of that salty smell of the river that reminds you that Manhattan is an island.
    â€œI believe I have to kiss you,” Johnny said. He walked me over to a doorway, held me by the shoulders and kissed me on the lips.
    I hadn’t kissed anyone in years. I was mesmerized. My knees felt like syrup.
    â€œLet’s go to my house and take our clothes off,” Johnny said.
    â€œThen you won’t have any respect for me,” I said.
    â€œTo hell with that,” Johnny said. “I’m going to marry you.”

9
    He followed me to Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore. He booked us into a nice hotel in each place, stayed the night with me and insisted on my having a proper breakfast with hot cereal and an egg. He wrote letters and sent flowers. Ivy and Grace suggested that I marry him at once.
    â€œYou lucky duck,” Ivy said. “Cute, good job.”
    I hung my head in shame. How could I be so ungrateful? Why did I not see that I was a lucky duck? Ivy and Grace waited for the day when their savings accounts hit a magic number and they could quit the tour, marry their boyfriends and begin their lives. I dreaded the day when I would have to leave Ruby and end mine. What was wrong with me?
    Then it was summer. Ruby and Vernon went home to New Orleans—they did not tour in the summer. I flopped down in the tiny bedroom of the apartment I shared with Mary Abbott and did nothing. I was so tired my bones hurt. I tried to think of something to do but the only thing I could come up with was to introduce Johnny to my parents. After all, it was a done thing. The trap had been set and I was in it. It was only a question of time.
    When they saw Johnny, all was forgiven. It no longer mattered that I had almost killed my mother by almost giving to a journalist from a national magazine an interview about traveling with an all-black act. It no longer mattered that I had left graduate school to run around the United States of America with a bunch of colored people for two years. Of course, the final ignominy was that nothing I did made it better. It was simply Johnny who set things straight. My parents were delighted with him and, in the months to follow, did everything they could, short of tying me up with string and delivering me to a justice of the peace, to get me to marry him.
    Everyone wanted me to get married, even Doo-Wah, whom I ran into at a dingy secondhand record store.
    â€œYou marry that guy,” Wah said. “He’s real smart. If I ever get into trouble, I’ll hire him as my attorney.”
    â€œIf you ever get in trouble, Wah, little fish will fall from the sky as rain.”
    â€œYou listen to your old friend,” Wah said. “Do it to it.”
    But I did not want to be in love with Johnny. I figured that when you fall in love with a lawyer, you end up marrying him. And is not being a Shakette an unseemly profession for a lawyer’s wife? At the end of the summer Johnny proposed. I turned him down.
    â€œGet realistic,” he said. “You can’t be a Shakette forever.”
    â€œYou love me because I’m a Shakette,” I said. “And I love me because I’m a Shakette.”
    There was nothing he could say to this. While not entirely true, it was not entirely untrue. Furthermore, I had not yet had enough.
    I went back on tour in the autumn and Johnny pestered me by letter and