Performing Composure at the Wrong Altitude

Himes wanted to meet outdoors. He suggested Grant’s Tomb, which I thought was a joke until he gave me the cross streets and a time. Hemingway countered with a bar on Amsterdam Avenue, a place he claimed to have visited in 1944 though the math made that unlikely given his movements that year. They compromised on a bench in Riverside Park, near 125th Street, facing the Hudson. It was March and too cold for sitting outside, but neither of them was the kind of man who admitted to being cold.

I arrived first. The bench was wooden, green paint flaking to show the gray underneath. A jogger passed. Then a woman pushing a stroller with no child in it — just groceries. The river was the color of old pennies.

Hemingway arrived on foot from the south, wearing a heavy coat that didn’t suit the neighborhood. He sat on the far end of the bench and looked at the water the way he looked at everything: as though it might be worth describing but probably wasn’t.

Himes came from the east. He was thinner than I expected, and his eyes moved faster than the rest of his face, cataloging the park, the bench, Hemingway, me, in a continuous sweep that had nothing to do with anxiety and everything to do with a lifelong habit of tracking the geometry of a space. Who was near, what was between you and the exit, which direction trouble would come from if it came.

“You’re the one writing the thing,” Himes said to me.

“I am.”

“And he’s the other half.” He jerked his chin toward Hemingway. “The iceberg man.”

Hemingway didn’t react to this. He crossed one leg over the other and said, “Tell me about the con.”

“It’s small,” I said. “The con itself is small. A Korean War veteran, back in Harlem, running some kind of hustle — I’m thinking numbers, or maybe selling something that doesn’t exist. A property scheme. Something where the marks hand over money for a thing they’ll never see.”

“Every con is that,” Himes said. “You’re describing the mechanism. I want to know the smell of it. Who’s he conning? What block? What time of year? Is it summer, is it hot, are people outside? Because a con in Harlem in July is a different animal than a con in Harlem in January. In July, everyone’s on the stoop, everyone’s watching, the whole block is a witness. You have to work in the open. In January, people are inside, and you can do things in hallways.”

“Summer,” I said. “1953.”

“Good. Korea’s just done. The armistice. And this man is back.” Himes was looking at the river now. “He’s back, and Harlem is going on without him, the way Harlem always goes on. Harlem doesn’t wait for you. Harlem doesn’t care where you’ve been. You come back and the block has rearranged itself — somebody’s dead, somebody’s moved uptown, there’s a new preacher and a new numbers runner and the grocery on the corner sells different cigarettes. The city replaced you before you finished leaving.”

“That’s not specific to Harlem,” Hemingway said.

Himes looked at him. It was a long look, and there was something in it that I didn’t know how to read — not hostility, not dismissal, but a measurement. “It is specific to Harlem. Every place has its own way of forgetting people. Paris forgot your people over drinks. Harlem forgets you between the third floor and the street.”

I expected Hemingway to push back. He didn’t. He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and said, “The veteran. What’s wrong with him.”

“Wrong with him how?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with him. What broke. Because something broke — you said Korea, and Korea broke everyone who went. Not the way the first war broke people, not cleanly. Korea broke people in a dirty, confused way, because nobody could explain what it was for. My war — the first one, the real one — at least you could say you went to Italy or you went to France and the words meant something. Korea was a place nobody in America could find on a map, and the men who came back from it had been damaged by something they couldn’t name, in a place they couldn’t explain, for reasons their own government kept changing.”

This was the most I’d heard him say at once. Himes was listening with his head tilted, the way a man listens when someone is saying something he partly agrees with and partly wants to tear apart.

“The wound isn’t the story,” Himes said. “That’s where you and I are going to fight. You want the wound to be the thing underneath — the iceberg below the waterline, the thing the man never talks about but the reader feels. The omission. The great Hemingway silence.”

“It works.”

“It works for your people. Your expatriates in their cafes, drinking and not saying what hurts. You know why it works? Because they have the luxury of silence. Jake Barnes can sit in a cafe in Pamplona and not talk about his wound because everyone around him already knows. The whole social apparatus of that novel is built on a shared understanding that they’ve all been damaged and nobody needs to explain it. They perform composure together. It’s a group activity.”

Hemingway’s jaw tightened. I could see it — a small motion, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t watching for it. “That’s not luxury. That’s discipline.”

“Call it what you want. My man doesn’t have it. A Black veteran back in Harlem in 1953 — he can’t afford your silence. Silence in Harlem is suspicious. Silence means you’re planning something, or you’re hiding something, or you’re about to do something crazy. If he walks around not talking about Korea, people don’t think, oh, how noble, how restrained. They think he’s dangerous. Or they think he’s soft. Either way, the neighborhood makes a judgment, and the judgment has consequences.”

“So he talks,” Hemingway said. He said it flatly, like a man conceding a point of terrain.

“He performs. That’s different from talking. He tells stories — war stories, the kind that have a punchline, the kind you can tell at a bar. He’s got three or four of them, polished smooth. The one about the sergeant who couldn’t read a map. The one about the rations that were three years expired. Funny stories. He tells them well. And every time he tells one, he’s building a wall between what actually happened and what the block needs to hear.”

I was writing in my notebook, fast. “So the war stories are the con too,” I said. “He’s running two cons — the actual hustle, the money scheme, whatever it is. And the hustle of being a normal veteran with normal memories.”

“Three cons,” Himes said. “He’s also conning himself.”

Hemingway stood up. For a second I thought he was leaving, but he was just stretching, rolling his shoulders the way a man does when he’s been sitting still and his body objects to it. He walked three steps toward the railing, looked at the river, came back.

“The stories he tells at the bar,” Hemingway said. “Those are important. Because the stories you tell are the shape of the wound. You choose what to make funny, and the choosing reveals what you can’t make funny. The sergeant who couldn’t read a map — that’s a comedy. But what happened after the sergeant couldn’t read the map, where they ended up because the map was wrong, who died in the place they weren’t supposed to be — that’s the silence. Not my silence. His silence. His specific, earned silence. And if you write it right, the reader hears the funny story and feels the ground shift underneath it.”

“That’s your iceberg,” I said.

“That’s anyone’s iceberg. Chester wants to say it’s a white man’s technique. It isn’t. It’s gravity. You put a heavy thing under a light thing and the light thing vibrates.”

Himes made a sound — half laugh, half dismissal. “You’re describing physics. I’m describing Harlem. There’s a difference. In Harlem, the heavy thing under the light thing isn’t hidden — it’s right there, on the surface, and people step over it. The absurdity isn’t that nobody knows. The absurdity is that everybody knows and the machinery keeps running anyway. A man comes back from a war with something wrong behind his eyes, and his landlord still wants the rent. His girl still wants him to take her dancing. The numbers runner on the corner still expects him to play his dollar. The war is irrelevant to Harlem’s economy. Harlem’s economy is an engine that runs on people’s need, and need doesn’t stop for trauma.”

“So the con,” I said. “The actual, literal con he’s running. How does it connect?”

“The con is how he stays in the machinery,” Himes said. “It’s not about money — or it is about money, the way everything in Harlem is about money, which is to say it’s about survival, which is to say it’s about staying in place. If he stops hustling, he stops existing. The block absorbs him. He becomes another man on a bench. No address, no stake, no place in the order of things. The con keeps him visible. It keeps him in the game.”

“But the con is also absurd,” I said. “That’s what I want from your side of it. The spiraling, Himes-style absurdity where one small lie requires a bigger lie, which requires a performance, which requires a prop, which collapses — and the collapse itself is both catastrophic and hilarious.”

“Don’t plan the comedy,” Himes said. “Comedy happens when the plan fails. You build the plan, you make it precise, you give this man a scheme with moving parts, and then you break one part and watch the whole thing stagger. The comedy is in the staggering. Not in the joke.”

“And the damage underneath,” Hemingway said, sitting back down. “The staggering isn’t only comic. It’s also the way the war surfaces. Under pressure, the con falls apart, and what comes through the cracks isn’t just panic or improvisation — it’s the thing he’s been keeping down. A reflex. A way of moving. A sentence he says that doesn’t belong in the conversation, that comes from somewhere else.”

“A flashback?” I asked.

“No.” Hemingway said it with the firmness of a man who has been misrepresented on this point for sixty years. “Not a flashback. A flashback is a device. I mean a leak. The war leaks into the present the way water leaks through a ceiling — you don’t see the pipe that broke, you see the stain. The stain is in the wrong room. You can’t explain it. You just know the building has a problem.”

Himes was nodding. Slowly, grudgingly, the way a man nods when he’s been handed an image he wishes he’d thought of first.

“The stain in the wrong room,” Himes said. “All right. That I can use. Because the con — the day-to-day hustle, the scheme, the performance of being a man who has it together — that’s the building. It’s the structure he’s erected to keep the weather out. And the war is the weather. And the stain appears at the worst possible moment, in front of the wrong person, during the part of the con where he can least afford to look broken.”

“Who’s the wrong person?” I asked.

They both went quiet. This was the first silence that felt like a real silence — not a pause for effect, not a thinking space, but a moment where neither of them had the answer and neither wanted to say so.

“A woman,” Hemingway said, finally. “There has to be a woman.”

“Because you need a witness,” Himes said. “Not a love interest. A witness. Someone who sees the stain and doesn’t look away.”

“She could be both.”

“She could. But if she’s a love interest first and a witness second, the story becomes about the romance, and the romance excuses the damage. It prettifies it. He’s broken, but love heals. That’s sentimental. That’s beneath both of us.”

“I wasn’t going to —”

“You were going to. Every story you wrote about a woman, she was the wound or she was the salve. Brett Ashley was both, and that was your best trick, and it was still a trick. I want a woman who is neither. A woman who has her own hustle, her own problems, her own reasons for being in the room when his con falls apart. She doesn’t save him. She doesn’t break him. She’s just there, and because she’s there, the moment has a witness, and a witnessed failure is a different species than a private one.”

Hemingway looked at his hands. He turned them over, palms up, as if checking for something. Then he put them on his knees.

“You’re right about Brett,” he said. “I used her. The whole novel used her. She was the thing the men circled, and the circling was the point, and I told myself that made her central, but it made her a function.”

I had never heard him concede this. I don’t think it had been said in his presence before, at least not in a way he’d accepted. Himes didn’t gloat. He just moved on, the way you move past a door that’s finally opened after you’ve been pushing on it.

“The woman sees the stain,” Himes said. “The moment the con breaks, the moment the carefully built structure shows the water damage — she’s there. And what she does with what she sees is not the story’s to decide. She might walk away. She might stay. She might use it against him, because people in Harlem use what they know, that’s how you survive. The point is that the damage has been witnessed, and witnessed damage can’t be stuffed back behind the wall.”

“Does the con succeed?” I asked. “In the end. Does he pull it off?”

Hemingway looked at the river. “That doesn’t matter.”

“It matters,” Himes said. “Of course it matters. Money matters. The rent matters. Whether this man eats next week matters. You can afford to say ‘that doesn’t matter’ because your characters had trust funds and Parisian cafes. My characters have landlords.”

“I meant that it doesn’t matter for the story’s purpose. Whether the con succeeds or fails, the man is the same man afterward. He’s still carrying the thing he won’t name.”

“But he’s carrying it with or without twelve dollars in his pocket, and the twelve dollars changes everything about how the carrying feels.”

This was where they stuck. They stayed stuck on it. Hemingway believed the material outcome of the con was irrelevant to the emotional architecture — the con was a surface, and what mattered was the current beneath it. Himes believed the material outcome was the emotional architecture — that you can’t separate a man’s interior life from whether he can pay his rent, that poverty and trauma aren’t parallel tracks but the same track, and pretending otherwise is a luxury that only a certain kind of writer can afford.

I didn’t resolve it. I sat between them on that bench in Riverside Park while the March wind came off the Hudson and a plastic bag blew across the path and caught on a bush and hung there, flapping. Neither of them helped me. Neither of them was supposed to.

“The title,” Himes said, abruptly. “What are you calling it?”

I hadn’t decided. I said so.

“Don’t call it anything with ‘war’ in it,” Hemingway said. “The war is what he doesn’t talk about. The title should be what he does talk about. The hustle. The game. The tally.”

“Tally,” Himes repeated. He tasted the word the way he tasted everything — with suspicion and appetite in equal measure. “As in keeping count.”

“As in keeping count of what you’re owed,” I said. “Or what you owe.”

“Or what was taken,” Hemingway said, and then he stood up and buttoned his coat and walked south along the river path without saying goodbye, which I later realized was the most Hemingway thing he could have done — ending on a sentence that did all the work and leaving before anyone could dilute it.

Himes stayed. He watched Hemingway go, and I could see him composing something in his head — a sentence, a judgment, an image. Whatever it was, he kept it.

“He’s right about the leak,” Himes said. “I’ll give him the leak. But the building is mine. The neighborhood, the block, the stoop, the landlord, the numbers runner, the woman who sees. That’s Harlem. That’s mine. And Harlem is not a metaphor for psychological damage. Harlem is a place where people live and cheat and get cheated and go to church on Sunday and run a con on Monday and none of it contradicts. Your man, the veteran — he’s not unusual. He’s not special. He’s one of eight hundred men on that block who came back from somewhere with something wrong, and most of them are doing exactly what he’s doing: performing the self they need to be so the street doesn’t eat them alive.”

“So what makes him worth a story?”

Himes stood up. He brushed nothing off his coat. “The moment the performance fails,” he said. “Every man on that block is performing. Your man is the one whose performance, on one particular day, in front of one particular witness, cracks. That’s it. That’s the entire story. Everything else — the con, the war, the money, the woman — is just the weather that was blowing when the crack appeared.”

He left. I sat on the bench and watched the river, which was still the color of old pennies, and the plastic bag, which was still caught on the bush. A tugboat moved north, pushing something I couldn’t identify. The bench was cold under me. I had a notebook full of things that didn’t add up to a plan, because plans weren’t what these two men had given me. They’d given me a man on a block, performing himself, carrying an unnamed weight, running a hustle that was both absurd and essential, and somewhere in the middle of it, the weight would surface through the performance like water through a bad ceiling, and someone would see it, and what happened after that would be the part I had to write alone.