“I love you,” Eric said. He said it soft in the telephone and he knew that he was repeating himself, but now it did not matter. “You know I love you and I love you so much it hurts to say it the way things are. I can’t sleep. I can’t take any more pills. I haven’t even talked to another girl since last week and I don’t know if I can ever talk to another girl.”

“I hate you, Eric,” she said.

Now there was nothing more to repeat. “I won’t call again,” he said. “It was rotten of me to do this anyway.”

“Eric?”

“What?”

“You can come for tonight. I don’t want anything beyond tonight.”

“I don’t want to use you. I swear to God I don’t want to just use you.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t sleep.”

II

MARGOT PAYNE HAD BEEN very bright in school and had never learned to dance. As a child, the brightness and the sense of superiority which she began to feel over the other, less intelligent, black children in her Cleveland school had not lost her many friends, but neither had it gained her any. And the dancing, which was never really important to her, had not mattered until she was much older, and until the other children became aware of her intellectual superiority and began to resent her because of it. Then the dancing became all at once very important to her. Margot’s parents were very proud of her because of the reports, but secretly they worried over her integration in the community. They urged her to dance. And her mother, a cautious, sharp woman, counseled her in little nighttime bedroom sessions about black men and how important it was for a black woman of high intelligence to make it as imperceptible as possible, because they would resent it and her for having it.