Summary
Book 2, Chapter 1
Eric sits naked in his rented Parisian garden in the bright, warm sun. He has been living here with Yves for two years, and tomorrow he goes back to New York. At first Yves mentioned nothing about New York but then they talk about it and he says he will go and make his future there as well. Eric tells him he will hate it there, but Yves smiles and says he can make it.
Yves sighs that he ought to go tell his “whore of a mother” (186) that he will never see her anymore. During WWII, she ran a bar and seduced Germans during the Occupation, and told Yves this was how she supported them. She still runs the bar but he ran away at fifteen and only occasionally sees her. Eric went with Yves once and liked her, but Yves never brought him again.
Yves is swimming and he is full of energy, and begs Eric to come in. Eric is contemplative and Yves asks why he is so troubled about going to New York. Eric sighs that it is a troubling place. He tells Yves he will miss him, as Yves is not coming right away, and Yves laughs that Eric will be busy and he’ll be there before he knows it.
Yves asks about his friends and Eric wonders if he ever really was friends with Vivaldo or Richard or Cass. And Rufus is dead, and Cass sent him the news, he remembers, and he is struck by the thought that Rufus was his only real friend but made him suffer. At least he really knew Eric, though, and there is something about Yves that reminds him of Rufus.
The news about Rufus had come on a rainy day and he was already feeling gloomy when he read the news that Rufus died by his own hand. It has taken a long time for Eric to admit that Yves had stirred him because he reminded him of Rufus.
His thoughts move to his upbringing as a rich boy in Alabama, with “cold white people and the warm, black people” (194), then back to Rufus. He wonders if he really loved him or if it had been guilt or shame or nostalgia.
Eric and Yves go into the house and Eric throws himself on the bed. The new script is sitting there on the plain wooden table. Yves steps out for a minute and Eric gets into the shower. He is alone with his body and the water and many painful things rise to his consciousness. He remembers his “fantasies of love” that “soured imperceptibly into fantasies of violence and humiliation” (197).
He remembers his family’s Black cook, Grace, and her husband Henry, a handyman, who was the first father figure Eric had and the first man Eric saw cry; it was also the first time Eric felt a man hold him and knew there was something right about it. In his youth, everything about him seemed wrong to his family and to people in the town, especially his racial attitudes. He was friends with a Black boy named LeRoy who was just a year older than him at seventeen, and it was with LeRoy that he had his first sexual encounter. He had no name for what happened and did not know why what they were doing was wrong because it hurt no one else. It was the beginning of his becoming a man.
Madame Belet, a local woman who cooks for Yves and Eric, comes by and makes a chicken. The men eat as they have for the last two years, sitting at the window before the sea. Yves says he will be sad to leave here since he has been so happy, and that he found out something important here—that he was not meant to be “a street boy forever” (208) and could have real love. He reflects on how he has been with many horrible people and it is a wonder he is not a complete savage; he never thought he could truly make love (not just have sex) to a man before Eric. Eric wonders why he did not just use women poorly instead of men, and Yves shrugs it was easier with men. There were women, yes, but he could not stand them.
As they talk Eric looks at Yves and thinks of how he is losing “the adolescent, poverty-stricken harshness” (210) and is becoming a man—a man who might not need Eric one day as he does now. Despair washes over him. When Yves is gone, Eric will “drop back into chaos” (210). He thinks of all the men who used him and is hurt, confused, and frustrated. He knows that in the eyes of other Americans, "His life, passions, trials, loves, were, at worst, filth, and, at best, disease in the eyes of the world, and crimes in the eyes of his countrymen” (212).
The men are quiet and lovingly embrace each other. They remember the night they met. Eric was having a difficult evening and was walking around the boulevard when he heard Beethoven playing. It was Yves, who was walking with a small portable radio. He followed him and said he had to hear the rest of the concerto. They talked and had a drink and Yves was wary but could tell Eric only wanted to talk, not take advantage of him. Eric proved he was a decent person, and though Yves was silent, he was regarding Eric seriously and fighting “some curious war of his own” and “coming to some decision of his own” (219). They got a hotel room and before settling in, ventured out into the lovely evening again. They fell in love with each other and have been together ever since.
They go to bed together and have sex, drawn-out as if they both do not want it to end. Eric does not want to get out of bed even for a second. The sun comes up and Eric wonders if Yves will hate New York or maybe even hate him.
Chapter 2
It has been eight days and Eric is in New York. The goodbye was painful and potent, and Eric wonders if he made the right choice in coming back. But it is time, he tells himself.
New York is strange and barbarous and the loneliness is overwhelming even though there are people everywhere. The young people, the men most of all, seem blighted.
Eric has not yet written his parents that he is home but he phones Cass. They talk briefly and she invites him over.
At their place, they embrace and he hears Bessie Smith singing; the voice seems to conjure his past. Eric looks at her and notices she looks more brittle, and realizes they are all growing old. Cass pours them drinks and asks Eric about Paris. He tells her he was happy there and laughs that a man with psychic powers told him to come home because he would be a big star. He wishes he could tell her about Yves but does not.
He gets up the courage to ask about Rufus as he was at the end, and she grimly tells him about Leona and what happened, and how Rufus did seem to love her and she loved him. Eric is shocked about all this, and he pictures Rufus’s face in his mind and then his body hurtling down into the water. He shudders.
The afternoon deepens and Bessie Smith continues to croon. Eric has a feeling that he will lose Yves here in the city and he begins to sweat.
Richard comes down, “very handsome and boyish and big” (239). He greets Eric warmly and asks about Paris, saying when he visited he could not stand the French and they were ugly and phony. Eric politely disagrees. He asks what Richard is doing, but realizes he does not even care; he has only tolerated Richard for Cass. He wonders what Yves would think of them.
Suddenly the couple’s two children, Paul and Michael, burst in. They are bloodied and Cass becomes frantic. Paul, the older boy, says they were attacked by a group of “colored” boys for no reason. The parents calm the boys down and send them upstairs, then argue. Richard tells Eric angrily that he wishes the Black kids would just take it out on each other. He wants to move but Cass won’t let him, and Cass retorts that if they found a place to go to that wasn’t a literary colony then she would want to. Richard bitterly says Cass hates writers who actually succeed, and prefers failures like Vivaldo. His tone is savage and Cass is shaken, then angry.
They apologize to Eric and say they will not be going out this evening. Eric leaves and goes to the jazz club on his own. It is a dank, small, hot place and he arrives between sets. He sits alone, feeling like a stranger and wishing he did not come, when he sees Vivaldo and Ida arrive. She is staggering in her beauty and allure. To his surprise he notes that her earrings are fashioned out of cufflinks he once gave Rufus. Vivaldo looks more “radiant than he ever had been, and less boyish” (249), and his “startled, sniffing, maverick quality was gone” (249).
When Vivaldo sees Eric, he is overcome with enthusiasm and throws himself on him in an embrace. He introduces him to Ida, who tells him elegantly that she has heard a lot about him. Ida gets them a table in the back, and says they better take it since she’s never sung in public before and the club is doing her a favor.
Ida’s time comes and she gets on stage. Someone in the crowd whispers loudly that it is Rufus’s sister. Ida’s voice is not amazing, but she has presence and an astonishing sense of self that comes across to everyone. Eric can tell why Vivaldo loves her. She is on her way, people realize; she “had started” (254) along her road.
She and the musicians play off each other. Eric watches Vivaldo look jealously at one of them. Ida sings a song she dedicates to her brother. The crowd is less than willing to go along with her mourning since they do not know her, but they admire her gumption nonetheless. The applause is odd, as it is “not quite unwilling, not quite free; wary, rather, in recognition of a force not quite to be trusted but certainly to be watched” (256).
After the show, Eric and Ida talk about Rufus for a bit, and she says he was nicer than her and “it doesn’t pay too much to be nice in this world” (257). At the bar, they run into Ellis, who compliments Ida and Vivaldo and smugly assures Vivaldo he can make something of himself. The air is confusing and ugly, and Eric is uncomfortable. They introduce him to Ellis, and Ellis says he knows his name. When Ellis asks about Cass and Richard not being there, Eric hesitantly tells them the truth about the kids. Ida suggests it must have been in some sort of retaliation.
They leave the bar to get a drink elsewhere and Eric views the park, which he has not seen for many years, with distaste. His life rises like bile in his throat and he feels like he despises himself.
Ellis and Eric fall into stride together while Vivaldo and Ida do as well, fighting viciously. Ellis and Eric politely talk about Eric’s living abroad. When they come back together, Ellis says he can help Ida.
Ellis leaves them money to buy drinks and says he has to get home to his wife. He looks at Vivaldo and says perhaps one day he won’t hate him as much, and Vivaldo should not blame him for things not being as he wants when he should learn how to get them himself.
Vivaldo stands up and says he is calling Cass. Left alone, Eric and Ida talk about Rufus. She is bitter and cruel about Leona, and says there is “nothing like a Southern white person, especially a Southern woman, when she gets her hooks into a Negro man” (265). She hopes she and Eric will be friends, and asks what he did in Paris. He says he tried to grow up.
Vivaldo comes back and says the kids are fine though Cass is still a little distraught. The tension between Ida and Vivaldo is still intense, and Vivaldo says, after she goes to the bathroom, that he wishes they could spend more time together but Eric better leave them alone. Eric understands. Vivaldo assures him he cares a lot about him but that sometimes Ida just gets to him. They bid goodbye.
Eric steps out into the night and the people passing him look strange, but one day he “might be one of them” (267)—just not yet.
Analysis
In this section, we finally meet Eric, whom we learned from the section on Rufus was once Rufus’s lover, is an actor, and currently lives in Paris. More of the puzzle pieces come together now, and it is clear that Eric had strong feelings for Rufus and that the pain of their complicated friendship and Eric’s unrequited feelings led him to seek refuge in Paris. There, not only did he meet Yves and embark upon a nurturing, respectful, and loving relationship, but he also confronted many of his own issues. This does not mean he has it all figured out and has no room to grow as a person—he has plenty left to ponder once he is back in New York, including his feelings for Vivaldo and why he has an affair with Cass—but he is certainly further along than the other characters on the path to self-awareness. W. Lawrence Hogue writes that Eric, as well as the rest of the characters, have to “find one's self in the midst of social forces, of suffering and pain, in the void of his unknown self, and within the web of ambiguity, darkness, and paradox,” and that is what Eric has done/is doing.
One of the main things Eric confronts while in Paris is his welter of emotions for Rufus. He knows that “Rufus made him suffer, but Rufus had dared to know him” (192). He contrasts this with his other friends, and wonders if they are truly friends at all. He is also honest enough with himself to admit that part of the reason he is attracted to Yves is because Yves “had so stirred his heart, stirred it in a way he had almost forgotten it could be stirred… because it [Yves] reminded him, somehow, somewhere, of Rufus” (193).
And the biggest epiphany Eric has is that “part of Rufus’s great power over him had to do with the past which Eric had buried in some deep, dark place was connected with himself, in Alabama, when he wasn’t nothing but a child; with the cold white people and the warm, black people, warm at least for him” (193-94). Eric allows himself to confront, painfully and confusedly, how he felt both strong paternal and masculine love and affection from the Black handyman, Henry, and how his first sexual encounter was with a Black boy, LeRoy. The obvious nature of his sexuality as well as “the extreme unpopularity of his racial attitudes” (200) marked him as an outcast, so it is no wonder that these early moments of closeness loomed so large in his psyche, and may have led him to seek comfort and connection with a Black man like Rufus. It was his time with LeRoy that “worked in Eric an eternal, healing transformation” (206), and even though it was “many years… before he could begin to accept what he, that day, in those arms, with the stream whispering in his ear, discovered; and yet that day was the beginning of his life as a man” (206).
Eric is not thrilled about returning to New York, but also is self-aware enough to know “It was time. In order not to lose all he had gained, he had to moved forward and risk it all” (229-230). The city that greets him is unnerving in the “note of despair, of buried despair” (230), and the sense that “left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness” (230). Cass agrees with him that it is “getting uglier all the time” (231), and when he walks through the familiar park, “the melancholy and distaste which weighed him down increased” (260). He cannot help but feel that “His life, his entire life, rose to his throat like bile” (261). By the time his first evening out with friends is over, he can only think that he has to get back to his apartment because “It was the safest place to be, it was the only place to be” (267).
All of the characters must move through the slough of despondence. Hogue suggests that Baldwin’s perspective is that “Suffering brings self-knowledge, self-higher consciousness.” Eric is willing to engage with his buried traumas and desires, and so, “Confronting the darkness, the unknown, the foreignness within himself, Eric achieves a perspective on life, outside the rules and mores of society, that allows him to persevere in life's troubles, demanding a new act of creation, which can save him. He is ready to exist in and cope with the desperate ambiguities of life, the danger, the paradox, the pain and suffering, the frustration, realizing that his homosexual desire is one of many obstacles he has to contend with.” He develops and refines his sense of self, which Cass says she so admires. All of this does not mean Eric’s life is perfect; as mentioned previously, he still finds the city alienating, he still has to come to terms with his heterosexual desire for Cass, he falls in love with Vivaldo, and he worries about what will happen when Yves comes home. But Eric, “through risk and struggle, has come to admit and accept that he has complex, unpredictable, diverse desires, that he has many selves.”
