by Calvin Baker
“Do you think it’s wrong,” she asked, seeing the look on my face as I registered the words of the song, “for white people to say ‘nigger’? Even when they’re quoting black people saying nigger?”
“We can express whatever we wish,” I said, realizing I was wasting my time, “as long as we understand what we are expressing.”
“I agree,” she said, missing the nuance of what I had said, and continued singing.
I excused myself to go downstairs, telling her I was tired and ready to leave. “We can share a cab back downtown if you like. But why don’t you stay if you’re having fun?”
She nodded, her face finally registering the situation. Before I descended the stairs I saw her start to dance with a thugged-out guy, who looked like he had just been released from Rikers that morning. I sighed with relief to be free of her and headed downstairs, stopping in the bathroom before leaving.
When I came out of the bathroom she was standing near the door, waiting.
“I’m sorry.” Her pretty face looked up at me. “I hope I didn’t upset you.”
“Everything is fine,” I told her. “It’s late.”
“You’re a real gentleman,” she said, “I like that.” She pressed her sweaty body against me and wrapped her arms around my neck. “I like you.”
Upstairs we could hear the thump of feet on the terrace, dancing to Biggie Smalls. Downstairs our mouths had closed upon each other’s, and she trembled in my arms, letting loose a yelp of startling, primal ferocity, as the kiss grew in intensity.
We were both drunk by then and rode back to my place together, making out in the cab, where her cries of passion intensified, her entire body purring beneath me, like a crouching predator. She freed her breasts, which were full in the warm air, stoking the hunger that had throbbed between us all night.
“Take me,” she commanded, when we reached my apartment. “Do whatever you want.”
Seeing her in the context of my apartment made me realize what a mistake I had made. She was bland, with nothing special about her I could discern, because there was nothing special about her that she had discovered. She was simply part of a certain group at a certain moment, a way of speaking and dressing and looking at the world that was expensively purchased, but less than it wished to seem. Brands and references instead of personality. I did not want to be the kind of person who used other people for their bodies. Her skin crawled with sex, though, and the dull desire I’d felt when I first saw her renewed itself. I was not entirely reconciled to the idea of taking her to bed, and was even vaguely ashamed of knowing what I did and wanting to fuck her anyway. As I tried to decide what to do she coiled herself around me, and I smelled her truffled perfume and salted sweetness, my mind revving until I was sober again with the sudden thought that I did not want her. It was the bone of her hips that when I touched them flooded me with the overwhelming sense she was not my woman. My lust fled.
Her presence in my apartment began to fill me with sadness, and I could not adequately explain to myself how she had come to be there, as I searched for a decent way to bring the matter to a close.
“Take me,” she commanded again.
“We should not.”
“I thought you wanted me.”
“I did. I do.”
“Fuck me in the ass,” she breathed.
I had no rational objection to what any two consenting adults did with one another, and believed firmly in the universal right to introduce any direct object in any prepositional relation to whatever indirect object so desired. I simply did not want her, and cringed at myself for trying to steal a handful of passion with someone I did not love. Take me. Do what you want. I do not care who you are, I just want to get off. Not: Take me. I am yours. Do what you want. Just be careful what you do to me. I am yours.
As she reached for me in the billowing darkness we started making out again, the booze and loneliness telling me to be satisfied with the woman in my bed. The voice inside telling me there is no broken blessing like when who is in your arms is not in your heart, and the better part of disgrace too.
“Let’s stop.” I pulled away.
“Why not just enjoy ourselves?” she asked.
I did not know what to tell her without sounding like a prude. It felt foolish and awkward already, and I issued a limp apology. The bridge of want between us had drawn back completely, as I traced her hips and derrière wistfully beneath the thin fabric of her shorts, knowing what desire there was between us was only the pettiest of lusts; and not the self revealing its true hunger and true generosity that I craved. Not that I was above lust. It was only that if I was to have lust alone I wanted it at least to be the ungovernable lust that would plunge me to the bottom of all wanting.
“You’re not going to give me your black cock, baby?” I thought I heard her say. I chose to hear, You’re not going to call me a black car, baby?
“You’ll have to get a yellow cab on the street.”
“What?” she asked sharply.
“I thought you asked me to call you a car.” Some people belong to you, and you to them—as relatives, lovers, friends, or only kindred passengers enjoying a romp below decks when the ship is in the middle of the ocean and land infinitely far away. You realize how unnatural it is to be there adrift, but the crossing, the defying of what is natural, is what people do, and the holding each other is what delivers you back to the harmony of yourself.
There are people who do not belong to you as well, but sometimes your inborn sense of orientation is dampened, or you think to ignore it. I handed her the rest of her clothes.
“I’ll take the subway,” she said.
“It is too late.”
“Then I’ll go down, and wait on the street.” She stormed angrily out of the apartment into the hall, looking thwarted and humiliated.
I followed her to the elevator, and rode down with her to the lobby. I had brought her home through some fault in my instinct I was nonetheless responsible to. She refused to meet my eye, and when we reached the street she began walking away in the pale morning light. I went after her, wondering how I found myself in such a situation, until she stopped at last, and a taxi pulled up to the curb.
“Goodnight,” I told her, as she ducked in. “Get home safely.”
She glowered a moment, refusing to speak, and radiating a look of utter contempt as she closed the door.
I went to the deli for breakfast, hoping Mr. Lee might be there to make light of my troubles. He had not arrived yet, no doubt he was home with his family. I took my egg sandwich and ate as I walked the deserted morning streets back to my apartment, empty but for the pigeons in their nooks, seagulls fishing over the river, and, high above them, a pair of red-tailed hawks, arcing and diving together upon their prey.
16
I was surprised when she tried to reach me the next day, and did not answer her call. I did not know what to say to her, and preferred to forget the entire encounter. I was nagged only by the question of what we owe those with whom we have shared intimate space, even if it’s haphazard or ill-advised. Minutes later, she sent a text saying she wished to apologize, and I told her it was not necessary. When she called again I relented, thinking she deserved the opportunity to be heard and unburden herself. The feeling of closure and possibility of atonement.
I had an appointment near Union Square that afternoon, and offered to meet for an early evening drink, thinking it better to handle the matter face to face. She agreed, and asked to meet at the Boathouse in Central Park, at six thirty.
It was eleven o’clock already, and my head pulsed with a self-reproaching hangover, making it impossible to concentrate and get any work done. I browbeat myself to the gym, and afterward went to meet my former editor, Bea, for coffee.
Bea was seated in a booth near the window when I arrived. Her white hair fashionably cut, her dark eyes awake and focused as ever. She looked older than I last remembered, but radiated the same keen presence that struck me each time I saw h
er. It was an alertness that inspired confidence in whomever she gave her attention to, not merely in her but in a world that could produce such a magnificent person. It was reassuring just to be near her.
She saw me enter, and waved me over to the same table we had sat at when we first met, where she had appraised each new arrival, weighing their merits and defects without seeming judgment, like some wise, ancient elder who had seen all the spectrum of experience. The conversation that first evening went on into the small hours, as we discussed the best of what had been written and said, thought and acted upon. I was twenty-eight at the time, working as a stringer for the Associated Press, and more than a career opportunity it seemed to me the chance to learn from someone I respected.
She had dedicated herself to the same long conversation I joined that night since the sixties, and had never wavered in her seriousness of purpose or way of being, even if that way of being was esteemed differently in the current moment. It was right, I thought, the one, true way, even if by the time I met her it was already clear New York was in the depths of a gilded nadir, from which her kind of questioning, or seeking, had been banished. She wanted to speak “truth to power.” It seemed quaint, now. And I saw her for the old hippie she was, the product of another time. Still I respected her as much as anyone I had ever met, because I had learned more from her than I had in my entire educational experience up until the moment we met, loved her in the unique way we love those we admire in our youth, when I thought if civilization ever needed to be remade from the first brick, hers was the hand I would want on the compass.
I knew she was dedicated to a cause she was too old to know had been vanquished, a fact that made me appreciate sitting there again that much more, because even if it was untenable it had been a beautiful, well-meaning vision, from a different time in America, and as a young man it had spoken to me as the only wisdom I needed. She was, I finally realized the day I quit and stunned her into a taciturn silence, my intellectual mother figure.
“So?” Bea asked, her gentle, unassuming voice carefully calibrated to a point midway between professional and personal familiarity. “How are you?”
“Everything is fine,” I said.
“Really and truly?” She looked appraisingly at the remnant signs of my hangover. I felt naked and ashamed.
“Yes. I just had a late night.”
“You should enjoy your youth.” She nodded and waved it off, as we eventually came to what was on her mind, an assignment somewhere awful I had once been before.
“Not on your life,” I answered, without thinking to soften it. I had kept abreast of the story, but I did not wish to go back. Witnessing such things did not prevent slavery, or the last war, or the next one; to say nothing of the genocides that did not affect the interests of anyone with the power to stop them. No one was interested in political murder, let alone the soul murder that happened every day. Nothing I had ever done and nothing I could ever do would prevent the massacre she wanted me to report from continuing. The only people who would read such a report in any case were those already constitutionally against such things, and they had no power. Nor did I, so it would only make me suffer, which is what I told her.
She was not the kind of person you refused lightly. I had never heard anyone tell her no, in fact, unless it was someone with something to hide. But she merely smiled at me indulgently so that I immediately understood my own foolishness.
“You’re in pain,” she nodded, “and world weary. I suppose I should have known. I feel horrible about what happened.”
“Things happen all the time. Life moves on,” I said.
“Yes and other platitudes.” She held me in her eye a moment, then closed her eyelids in sympathy, as a car passed on the street blasting music loud enough to come through the windows. “Why do people listen to that?” she asked.
“It connects with them,” I answered.
“Don’t they know they are just selling every kind of falsehood?”
“They would say they are winning at America.”
“A lie is a lie. All that talent, all that energy. People like that are supposed to be leaders, if I may comment on it. But maybe I’m too old to understand.” She turned her thoughts back to the assignment.
I wanted to say yes, and I needed the work, but I simply could not bring myself to agree. I respected her, but felt then she only saw a portion of what we were talking about, and because of that a chasm opened between us, and also another, between what I knew and what I could say.
“Why is it—?” I stopped, on the verge of saying what I should not. I still respected her, even if she didn’t understand how utterly narrow her worldview ultimately was. “Why is it—?” I began and stopped again. “Why have you only ever assigned me certain topics?” I broached it anyway.
She nodded, with a slow intake of breath. “I had never thought about it in that way. I thought you were doing what you were interested in.”
“Not to the exclusion of other concerns,” I replied. “At the moment I’m bored by politics. I’m bored explaining things to people who think they know everything, when all they’ve ever done is sit behind a desk in school or an office.” I stopped, realizing I was answering with a negative. Telling her what I didn’t want to do, because I knew only that satisfaction was not available to me in that realm.
“So what are you interested in?” she challenged.
“Art. If someone makes art of politics I will engage it. But only as art, not as some politically correct mission. What I need to know about politics I know. What I need to know about art seems bottomless.”
“How do you propose to go about that?”
“I realize it sounds foolish. But do you know why I’m sitting here right now? It’s because some teacher made me read Oedipus when I was twelve or thirteen, and first learning to read in that way that gives more complex pleasure than story. But the strange and liberating way of seeing that challenges you to look at something foreign beyond what you believe you already know, until it dawns on you: I am that.”
“You’re Oedipus?”
“No, but I read Sophocles: A man unknown to himself, bright, angry, outcast, and blessed gets singled out by the gods for a trial no one should endure, and others could not withstand, or think they could not. Abandonment. Guilt. Shame. Loss. Exile. Friendlessness. Poverty. Blindness. Yet he endures, he endures, through the devotion of the one person who loves him in this world. Not for what he is, but for who he is. That is the only thing between him and death. This is what the gods have devised as his challenge, to know and accept who he truly is—beyond mother, beyond father, beyond status or civilization. Only after he has proven he can endure such a journey do they allow him grace.
“I read that and thought, yes, yes. That’s the story of my life. All of it. And also how to live it. I accept.”
Bea had been nodding, but shook her head slowly. “Life finds us wherever we are, even those behind desks. It’s fine to close a chapter in your life, though. You are at the crossroads now, which I can see hurts in the way everything that makes us human hurts. So never mind work. You will come back to that or not. Tell me how you are in your life.”
I recounted the past few months, and she nodded empathetically, asking whether I was dating.
“No. I’m not ready for that.”
An inscrutable expression crossed her face. “No. You are not even within your own self again yet, which, of course, can never be the self that was.”
“I am moving ahead.”
“Good,” she replied, finishing her salad, “so long as you understand the contents of your heart, if you’ll forgive the advice.”
“Bea, I’m sorry. You know I take anything you say seriously. I’m fine.”
“Well, I’m sure you will find your sense of equipoise again.”
“The film went well at least,” I offered.
“I mean the kind of peace that comes from within. Managing pain is not the same as being free of it. Just because yo
u don’t want to peer to the bottom of darkness doesn’t make it disappear. It only makes us unaware of our course through it, which everyone who would do anything, as you implied, has to thread. But there I go, giving advice again . . . ” Her voice trailed off. “I should get back to the office. Call if you change your mind, or if there is anything you need. You know that, I hope.”
“I do, and I don’t take it for granted.” I thanked her for the coffee, and the advice, and the feeling of understanding her friendship always inspired even when we disagreed.
It was six o’clock then, and my head hummed with the restored sense of possibility that comes from being in the company of those who see us, as I left to catch the train uptown to meet Anna.
At Grand Central the subway lurched to a halt in the tunnel, due to track construction, and remained there as six thirty struck and passed. There was no reception in the tunnel, leaving me unable to inform her I would be late.
The woman next to me saw me fidgeting, and gave a compassionate smile. She was reading a book of poetry, which led me to smile back at her, as she brushed a strand of red-dyed hair from her eyes.
I tried to make out the cover of the book she was reading, but the script was Cyrillic. It looked somehow familiar, though, and I asked what it was. “Pushkin,” she answered. That made me happy. “I once knew a girl in college who read Onegin to me in the original so I could hear its music.”
“An opera, or a chamber suite?” she asked; then, seeing the contemplation on my brow, “Was it a great love affair, or more ephemeral?”
“A love affair.”
“You haven’t had your great one yet.” I grew self-conscious. I did not have a type, but she fit neatly within my template of attraction. If not for the previous night I might have allowed myself to take it as a sign.
However, I knew better than to allow myself to get excited about someone I met on the subway. That would only open the door to trouble. People have agendas, or worse, they do not know their own agendas.