The Last Worthless Evening by Andre Dubus

loudly, his waist bending, straightening, bending, his upper arms pressed tightly against his sides, while his hands with drink and cigarette trembled beneath his face. Now I could not look away from that face. Nor could I touch him. All my life I have seen girls and boys and women cry, but until last night the only man I had seen cry—really cry, not damp eyes at a movie’s end or when a man is talking with love about one of his children—was Daddy the night his brother died. I was fourteen then, and all I could do was sit across the room and watch him convulse in his chair, trying to keep his palms over his face, but his neck writhed away from them, his arms fell to his heart, his belly, and pressed them. Yet I have seen my mother and aunts and sisters and you crying at some pain of the heart, even keening, and still able to walk, to move from one room to another, even to the kitchen to boil water and make coffee or tea, even to speak with coherence—broken by sobs, yes, but still coherence. Yet I’ve never seen a man do that. Willie’s face was both younger and older than he was. His control of it while listening to Percy was gone, and with that control something else was gone too, as if the flow of tears and the wet moaning— oh oh aah —as he both fought and surrendered to crying, were taking from him all the strength he had developed in his twenty-five years on earth: not only the strength to be resilient, but to be humorous too, and gentle. He had the face of a brokenhearted child. Yet at the same time he looked old: old as the infirm look, finished, done in by something as inexorable as nature.
    Then I was touching him, and it was my flesh that closed the short space between us while my mind held back, bound by its inertia, by its wish that none of this from the seventeenth century until 1961 had ever happened in America, by its sad desire to be no part of it, to have seen and heard none of it since my birth in 1936, and by its conviction that the pigmentation I was born with was, against my strongest will, responsible for every tear falling from his face, every moan he could not contain, every quick and terrible motion of his arms and head and stomach and chest, so that he looked like a man fighting for his life against an enemy neither visible nor large: some preternatural opponent clawing and biting the skin and bone that covered Willie’s heart. But my flesh ignored my mind. It dropped my cigarette, and my left hand and arm slid across Willie’s back, drawing my body to his, my hand pushing itself between his left arm and side, and though I did not weep but only watched his face, my body moved as though it wept with him, for I held him so tightly, and my torso rocked back and forth, and my waist bent and straightened, and pulled my face down and up.
    â€œAll of you,” he said. His eyes were closed. I watched their lids, and his open mouth that still held tears, but his voice was more dry now. Then abruptly he looked at me. I was startled out of the silence our bodies had given my mind, and I could feel it gathering itself again to pull me away from Willie, to make again that space between our shoulders and sides and arms so I would stand alone and become under the night sky of Japan the apotheosis of slave traders and owners and the Klan and murderers and Negro-beaters and those who inflict their torment economically, or with the tongue, or with silence, and eyes that look at a Negro as if he were not even a tree or rain but only air. So I held him more tightly. My squeeze made him gasp, and with his sound my brain emptied, was pure, clean, primordial, and Willie’s eyes changed: their bright anguish softened, and they focused on my face, and I felt, I knew , Camille, that suddenly he saw not a white man but me.
    â€œI have to tell Jimmy,” he said. He stopped to breathe: a deep breath, then another. If all his tears had not been spent, he would have cried