by Danzy Senna
“Half German and half black.”
“German and black? How’d that happen?”
“Well, her dad was a GI in World War Two.”
Greta nodded, and whispered to me, “Tell him my father liberated the Jews!”
“Her father,” I said, slightly annoyed, “liberated the Jews. That’s where he met her mother.”
“Liberated the Jews? How old is she?”
“Forty. She’s in her forties.”
“Forty-three,” she corrected.
“Forty-three.”
“What about friends your age?”
I wanted to tell him about Andrew—how I’d sort of gotten off to a bad start in the ciy, how I hadn’t really found a world that felt right in this cold new place. But he’d only say, “I told you so,” and besides, Greta was watching me.
“What’s he saying about me?”
I jabbered into the phone. “Anyway, she’s great. You’d really love her. Interesting. Smart. Funny—”
“And tell him how I found you a place to live.”
“She found me a place—”
Just then a recorded Arabic voice cut into the phone line. My father shouted over it that his calling card was running out of money. He was about to be disconnected. “Love you, baby! I’ll be in touch soon. Inshallah.”
AT HOULIHAN’S THAT NIGHT, Greta asked me questions about my family. She wanted to know if I got along with them.
“I do and I don’t. I always wished they were different, growing up. More like the families on television. I used to say to them, ‘Why can’t we be a real family?’ And they’d all laugh—my brother included—because I was the only one who didn’t think we were real. They were having a grand old time. But to me—well, they always seemed made-up. Like a great idea that only works on paper. Pretty crazy, huh?”
“Not at all. They sound insane.”
I bristled. I was allowed to talk badly about them, but nobody else was. “No they’re not. They’re really not. They’re just a little—out of it. You know, they believe children should be given complete freedom. And sometimes I wished they’d given me a little more, well, structure. It’s like, they were the kind of parents who don’t give you a reason to leave home. And everybody has to leave home, you know?”
“Of course you do! And from the sounds of it, they wouldn’t notice you were gone. I mean, you could be dead for all they know.”
“Well, I’m not dead. And I wish you wouldn’t worry so much.”
“I know, I know. Of course you’re not dead. You’re a big girl, brimming with life and possibility, the golden love child of those wonderfully zany sixties parents who still speak to each other! It’s a story of inspiration!”
She was bellowing, her eyes fixed on a spot over my shoulder as if she were addressing somebody behind me.
Now she lowered her gaze on me and said quietly, “But that’s not the whole story, is it? That’s just the propaganda they made you swallow, like a spoonful of castor oil every day, because it made them feel noble. But the truth is, they don’t give a hoot what happens to you. They only care about themselves.”
I stared into my drink. A malaise slid through me, then was gone.
When I looked up, she was smiling at me through shining eyes. “You know what? Fuck ‘em: your parents and mine, both. They can fall off the edge of the earth for all I care. Because we’ve got each other. Right?”
I looked at her in silence. Bilious. That was the word. Greta was a bilious woman. I’d seen glimmers of it before, but not like this. She was coming into focus, like Andrew had that night. I remembered something Lola had said to me. We were lying on our backs in the foothills, watching the sky and making a list called “Never.” All the things we would never do. Let’s never get married. Let’s never get fat. Let’s never sleep with a married man. Let’s never stop being students, even after we graduate. Let’s never get dull-eyed and ironic. Let’s never get stuck in a rut—or trapped in a life we didn’t choose. Let’s never grow bitter.
There was dandruff on Greta’s shoulders. Lots of it. For some reason it disgusted me, and I had to look away. An idea crossed my mind: Tomorrow I would call Lola’s parents in Montclair, New Jersey, and find out her latest contact info in Africa. I would call her long-distance from work and talk to her on the company dime. Surely she was coming home soon. Maybe she would stop in New York on her way to the West Coast and stay a few days, with me, in Vera’s apartment. It was hard to picture her there. It didn’t matter. We wouldn’t spend much time in the apartment. We’d do what real New Yorkers do, and eat out every night, and afterward we’d go to the East Village and hang out in bars with people our age. The thought cheered me and I managed a smile at Greta. She smiled back.
13
I CALLED LOLA’S HOME the next afternoon. Her father answered the phone. He was friendly enough, but told me Lola was unreachable, en route to South Africa to stay with friends in Durban. He wouldn’t know her contact information for another week. He asked me questions about myself. How was the new job? How was life in the real world? But I could hear a sports game on in the background and suspected he was just being polite. I asked him to tell Lola to write or call me, and he promised he would, but he sounded distracted, and I wasn’t sure he really would.
Later that day I got good news: Rula Maven assigned me a real story—not the usual blather I’d been writing, but a profile of an artist. He was, she said, “young, hip, totally inscrutable,” and she wanted me to interview him for the arts section. His name was Ivers Greene. She handed me the file and then breezed off down the hall, telling me to get her something by next Tuesday.
I flipped through the file, looking for something tangible—a photo of the artist, or biographical details about him—but I found only glossy reproductions of his work. They were snapshots, photographs of utterly unremarkable people doing utterly unremarkable things. People waiting in line at a bank. People talking on cellular phones in their cars in traffic. People eating at McDonald’s. People on the subway.
I stared at the pictures and looked for patterns, auras, referents, the way I’d learned to do in my college art history survey. And, after a while, what struck me was that the people in the pictures had been caught in the most unattractive angles possible. They appeared ghoulish. A businessman eating a piece of McDonald’s apple pie had been transformed by the camera angle into a piglet, his nostrils turned up as he shoved the food into his mouth. A woman talking on her cell phone was laughing, and while she may have been attractive in real life, in the split second that the shutter had snapped, she appeared as wrinkled and hunched and contorted as a witch. The photos were the duds that would have been discarded by another photographer, the ones that would have never been allowed in the family album. This artist had not only salvaged these images, but he’d blown them up, put them in a fancy gallery, and transformed them into art.
And then there was the doodle. He’d scribbled into the corner of each photo with a Magic Marker. It was a creature—what appeared to be half monkey, half poodle. It had the long arms and potbelly of an orangutan, with the pointed nose and curly pom-pom ears and Afro puffs of a well-groomed poodle. The creature was an observer at the edge of each photo—grinning wickedly at the subject. In some, it was well hidden. In the bank photograph, I had to search to find it perched on the shoulder of one of the distant tellers. In others, it was literally just a shadow, its profile like a finger puppet against a lit wall.
“Howdy doody,” a voice said.
It was Greta standing in the door. I felt a prickle of irritation at the sight of her.
“Houlihan’s?”
I shook my head, relieved, for once, to have an excuse. “Can’t. Not tonight. I’m wiped out. Besides, I’ve got this assignment.”
She came inside and looked at my desk. “Whatcha lookin’ at?”
She picked up a journal. It was open to a reproduction of Greene’s photographs. “They call this shit art? I could have done this myself wi
th my disposable Fuji.”
“I think that might be the point.” I stood and began to gather my things together to go home.
“Whatever,” she said, holding a picture out in front of her. “This guy’s got a good thing going. We’re in the wrong racket, baby. So what’s he look like?” She was still flipping through the journal. “Ivers? What kinda name is that?”
“Beats me.”
“I’m gonna guess he looks like Elton John: squat faggot with a toupee.” She tossed the journal at me. “You like Elton John?”
I shrugged. “He’s all right.”
“I love him,” she said matter-of-factly.
We started out of the office together.
“And anybody who says they don’t like him is a liar.”
She grabbed my arm as we stepped into the empty elevator, and began to sing aloud, “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you.”
She sang to me, off-tune, the whole ride down, and when the doors opened into the lobby, Ward Anderson—the silver-haired publisher of the magazine—stood on the other side holding a cup of coffee. He frowned at us and I was about to say hello, but Greta pulled me past him, spitting laughter into her hand all the way through the revolving doors.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said when we were outside. She’d been rude, and I had looked rude by association. My cheeks were burning. “I wanted to at least say a proper hello.”
She rolled her eyes. I hadn’t noticed it before, but her affect—the way she moved and huffed and even giggled sometimes—was like an adolescent, not a woman her age. Now she crossed her arms, sulkily, and looked away toward traffic. “Oh please,” she said. “They’re not gonna rescind your scholarship just ‘cause you didn’t say a ‘proper hello,’ as you put it. But you’re right. Next time let’s stop and curtsey to our benefactor.”
“That wasn’t my point.” I wondered for the first time if it was bad for my reputation at work to be seen around so much with Greta. Did that sort of thing—whom you ate your lunch with, whom you stepped off the elevator with—matter?
She turned to face me, and I was surprised at how distressed she looked. “Forgive me? Please?”
I didn’t want to continue the conversation. “Of course. It’s no big deal.”
She grabbed my hand. “I would never do anything, intentionally, to jeopardize your fellowship. I’m really sorry.” She chewed her lip as she watched my face.
I pulled my hand away and stuck it in my pocket. “Don’t mind me. I’m just PMSing. Really. I get like this the week before.”
“Just like me!”
She was smiling wide now, but her eyes had stayed serious, anxious, as they searched my face for signs that we were okay.
We started toward the subway station together. She chattered beside me about premenstrual syndrome—remedies I should buy. “No, scratch that. Don’t spend a dime. I’ll bring them into work for you tomorrow.”
I was quiet beside her, imagining my evening alone: A little supper. A glass of wine. Curled up on the sofa, playing old seventies records from Vera’s collection, doing prep work on the Ivers Greene article. Maybe a bath before bed. It took me a moment to realize I was eager to get back there, to the solitude and privacy of that sublet. Anywhere could start to feel like home if you slept there enough nights.
14
A FEW DAYS LATER, I went off to meet Ivers Greene. It was late in the afternoon. The sky over Chelsea was blank, white as an untouched canvas. The air was icy and still and hurt my lungs. I’d only spoken to his dealer, a haughty fellow named Georgio who had suggested a coffee shop called Les Deux Gamins. I found the place and paused out front to stare in the window. I didn’t know exactly who to look for. An artist? The place was cluttered with men who could have fit the bill, all vaguely asexual, the women hard, thin, chain-smoking thirty-somethings dressed in black.
I remembered what Greta had said. Elton John. I settled on a pale squat man with a mop of brown hair, wearing a black turtleneck and horn-rimmed glasses. He sat smoking, flipping through a newspaper, occasionally glancing up at the door as if he were waiting for somebody. I went inside and started toward his table. But just before I got there, from the back of the café came a bang and clatter. I turned to see the bathroom door fly open. A man stumbled out, cursing. He was not much older than me, dark chocolate skin with tiny exclamation-point dreadlocks poking out of his head. He stared for a beat at the people in the café who had looked up to see what the racket was. “Damn lock,” he said, and sauntered over to the table just next to Elton John and slid into a seat. I stood between the two tables, unsure now which was the artist. Only when I glanced down at the black man’s table did it become clear. He’d begun to draw a sketch on the napkin beside his coffee cup. It was of his table neighbor. In the sketch, he’d exaggerated the man’s simian features so that he looked more ape than human.
I watched him for a moment as he filled in the lines of the drawing with a charcoal pencil, then I cleared my throat. “Ivers Greene?” He glanced up, but his eyes darted quickly away from my face down to the drawing on the table. I extended my hand and told him my name. “I’m the reporter from the magazine.”
He shifted around in his seat, twisted a dread, stared down at his work. “Oh, hey, yeah. The article.”
I sat down across from him and took off my coat. “I hope you weren’t waiting long.”
“Naw, just a few minutes.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Who picked this place anyway?”
“Your dealer.”
He scoffed under his breath. “Fucker. I hate this scene. I hate Chelsea. He knows that.” He stood up from the table, nearly knocking over the chair he’d been in, and handed the man next to him the sketch he’d done, saying, simply, “Here.” While the man stared at it with flared nostrils, Ivers dug into his jeans pocket and threw a grimy five-dollar bill onto the table to pay for his coffee.
I picked up his five, put down my own, tore off the bottom of the check, careful not to meet the eyes of the man beside me who was still staring at the sketch on the napkin.
Out on the street, Ivers leaned against a lamppost, watching me with bored, petulant eyes.
I handed him his filthy bill. “This is on the magazine.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
He looked pleased as he shoved the money back in his pocket. “We’re rich and free,” he said. “Let’s go to Harlem.”
UPTOWN, Ivers kept changing his mind about where he wanted to go for the interview. I followed two paces behind him as we zigzagged along 125th Street. First he wanted to go to Sylvia’s, the world-famous purveyor of soul food. Then, when we were only half a block away, he changed his mind and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, explaining that, no, he didn’t want to go there after all. He’d forgotten that he hated that place. Before I could ask why, he pointed at a Jamaican greasy spoon across the street and, without warning, began to jaywalk across the thoroughfare, calling back to me over his shoulder, “C’mon!”
When I reached him on the other side, he was staring in through the steamed glass of Evelyn’s Jamaican Jerk. I peered in, too. People sat hunched over tiny tables, eating chicken and roti off styrofoam plates. “Looks good,” I said, based on nothing more than the speed with which the people were shoveling the food into their open mouths and the smell of spices that drifted out when somebody opened the door.
But Ivers shook his head. “Yuck,” he said, staring wistfully up and down the block. He squinted at something far in the distance. “Of course, Roylstons,” and started down the block in the direction we’d come from.
126TH STREET. Roylstons Bar and Lounge. The place was sprinkled with customers—men with bulbous noses and bloodshot eyes. Gerald LeVert was playing, and a couple grooved on the dance floor slowly, pressed against each other. The man’s hand kept moving down over the woman’s ample behind. Each time she would laugh, with her head thrown back, and push his mitts back up to her wai
st.
Ivers and I sat at the bar, sipping white wine with ice cubes floating in the glasses and picking at a bowl of stale popcorn.
“Tell me about the poodle-monkey.”
“Poodle-monkey?”
“The creature. The one in all your photographs.”
“Oh, you must mean Menchu.”
“Okay, Menchu.”
“He’s not a poodle-monkey, though I could see why you might think that. He’s—well, let’s just say he doesn’t like labels.”
“Um, okay. What does he represent to you? Why is he in all the pictures?”
Ivers looked at me, perfectly serious. “He isn’t in all the pictures. He’s only in some of them. In others, you can only see his shadow. The thing is this: Sometimes when I brought him along for the shoot he’d get all weird and shy, refuse to get in the picture. So I’d have to shoot his shadow. That’s Menchu for you.”
“You talk about Menchu as if he’s real,” I said in my reporter’s voice.
Ivers stared back at me, dull-eyed, not cracking the slightest smile. The waitress came to give us refills. She was a pretty, plum brown girl with elaborate ribbons of multicolored hair piled on top of her head. She cut her eyes at me and addressed only Ivers when she took our orders.
When she was gone, I forged on with the interview. “Okay. Let’s see. Do you agree with the writer Joel Zedman, who wrote of your last show, ‘Ivers Greene shows us humanity in its most ghoulish light…. His paintings are a clarion warning to us at the end of the century.’ And if you do agree with him, I guess I’m wondering what are you warning us about?”
Ivers didn’t appear to be listening. He was frowning at my face so intently that I thought there was something on it. I wiped at my cheek, then the other, rubbed my nose, but there was nothing there.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Yeah.”
He whispered it. “Are you a quadroon?”