The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  He stops and looks around the cramped room as though awaiting applause.

  Everybody is quiet. Marc looks pleased, perhaps imagining he has so impressed us that we are too awestruck to answer. I cannot speak for anybody else, but I am silent because I am considering whether to ask my doctor for a hearing test: I do not believe I could possibly have heard all this nonsense right. Marc will never write any of this down, and this is where his block disserves him: it seems to have made him reckless, for the fact that nothing he says will be recorded in some permanent medium will allow him, if ever asked, to deny his words, to insist his argument was misinterpreted, or to claim to have been engaging in mere speculation. Marriage as unconstitutional! I wonder if the White House is privy to this mad theory, if it is one of the tales that Stuart has passed along—assuming that it is Stuart who is trying to sabotage him, for I have yet to track him down. I wonder how it would play in the press. (Not that I would ever talk to a reporter, but Marc has enemies. For instance, I could tell Dana Worth about Marc’s idea, and she would have no compunction about sharing it with as many journalists as she and Alison can find in their digital pocket planners.)

  Marc continues.

  “I do not say that private institutions, such as religious organizations, cannot, if they so choose, continue to perform their quaint ceremonies and announce to the faithful that this or that couple, of whatever description, is married in the sight of their particular God. But that is just an exercise of their basic religious freedom, guaranteed by the First Amendment. The point is that the state should not be involved in any way, whether by licensing these so-called marriages, or by granting particular state benefits to those who enter into them, or by purporting to decide in the place of these private institutions how and whether the marriages end. Griswold tells us that reproduction is not the state’s business. Therefore, marriage is not the state’s business.”

  Ben Montoya, the great liberal, winks at me, a bemused grin on his face. He is Marc’s occasional sparring partner, for they are very much on opposite sides of such decisions as Roe v. Wade. (Marc would say he is personally pro-choice but believes the state has the authority to disagree.) Tonight, however, Ben does not argue with Marc. Neither does Lynda Wyatt, although she is standing right next to him. Lynda in her day has taught both family law and constitutional law and thus might be able to correct a few of Marc’s errors, but she is looking down at the sea-green carpet. I have never understood this effect that Marc has on people. Kwame Kennerly, who has given much of his considerable energy to encouraging marriage among the young African American men of the inner city, most of whom seem to have forgotten how it is done, looks furious. On the other hand, he remains a relative newcomer to the town of Elm Harbor, still building his political base, and is not quite ready to challenge a representative of the hated and envied university, especially one who raises so much money for Democratic candidates. Dr. Young looks troubled, but not intimidated. He shakes his head a few times, his fleshy lips pursed in disapproval. He does not say a word. I have the impression that he is biding his time, letting Marc punch himself out: the rope-a-dope. As for me, well, I would not dream of opening my mouth; so I content myself with wishing Dana were here to shut Marc up. Norm Wyatt alone has the impertinence to roll his eyes in open disbelief, but he feels about the law faculty roughly the same way that Kimmer does.

  “Now, if you apply my theory to same-sex marriage—” Marc hurries on, but Shirley wisely chooses this moment to announce that dinner is served.

  Marc’s audience happily deserts him, to his apparent puzzlement, because his hands are still waving even when most of the guests have turned toward the table. Shirley points out our various seats. Before sitting down, I take a moment to glance out the sliding glass doors, past her balcony, down to the beach and the gently throbbing surf, and I wonder whether Kimmer and I, too, should have sacrificed space for this gorgeous proximity.

  I am seated in the middle of one of the long sides of the table, squeezed between Dr. Young on my right and Dahlia Hadley on my left. Across from me is Dean Lynda, flanked by Kwame Kennerly on one side and an empty chair for Lem Carlyle on the other.

  “The cops give you that black eye?” Kwame Kennerly inquires without any preamble, tipping his head away from me as though to get a better view. I wonder if this tale will ever go away.

  “No.”

  “So who did?”

  “Somebody else,” I mutter, rudely. Truly my father’s son tonight.

  Kwame is undeterred. “Not the cops? You sure?”

  “I’m sure, Kwame. I was there when it happened.”

  Irony gets me nowhere. “I heard you got arrested.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “They didn’t pull their guns on you?” Blinking furiously.

  “Nobody pulled any guns.”

  Kwame Kennerly strokes his small beard as he works out his next move. He is not to be put off by a little impudence. I may be the son of the late and hated Oliver Garland, but I am also a black man who might have been beaten by the cops; besides, the story is too juicy to ignore. Dean Lynda is listening with more than half an ear.

  “But you did have some trouble with the police, right? White police?”

  “It was all a misunderstanding,” I sigh. “I was mugged, I called in an alarm, and when they came they just thought I was the mugger instead of the muggee. But I showed them my university ID and then they apologized and let me go.”

  “City police?”

  “Campus police.”

  “I knew it. That’s what they do.” He does not wait for my answer. “A black man in the middle of the campus, right? Two blocks from the law school, where you work. If you were white, there would never have been any misunderstanding.”

  I do not waste time wondering where Kwame got the details of my encounter, because getting the details is his job. I do, however, waste time arguing with him, even though his analysis is precisely correct. “I wasn’t walking, I was . . .” I hesitate and glance at my dean, but there is nowhere to go except forward. “I was climbing on the scaffolding outside the library. You can see why they were suspicious.”

  “But on your own campus, right?” he persists, nodding his bearded head as if he sees it every day, which I suppose he does.

  “Yes.”

  “And the muggers were white. If the police got there and you were fighting with the muggers, they would still think you were the bad guy.”

  “I guess they might.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about!” he exclaims to Lynda Wyatt, perhaps picking up on some earlier argument.

  “I know, I know,” my dean says hastily.

  “It’s his own campus, but it’s a white campus! See, this is the main thing the police are for in a town like this one—keeping us in our place.”

  “Mmmm,” says Dean Lynda, eating fast.

  “Black men are an endangered species in this country.” He pronounces it like a quote from an encyclopedia, then points his finger at me as the number-one exhibit. “No matter who their fathers are.”

  The mashed potatoes are coming in our direction, and Kwame has to pause to spoon a healthy portion onto his plate. He adds some gravy from a small tureen, then leaps nimbly back onto the track.

  “It’s open season on our young men!”

  “I’m not so young,” I interrupt, struggling for a light tone.

  “But you’re still lucky to be alive. No, I mean it. We all know what the police can do.” Still nodding with vigor. He turns back to Dean Lynda. “See what I mean?”

  “Oh, yes. And we’re all very glad you weren’t hurt, Talcott.” She smiles with every sign of genuine concern. I realize that they are both thinking about a case in the neighboring all-white town of Canner’s Point two years ago, just about the time Kwame Kennerly arrived in Elm Harbor. A black teenager was shot to death by two police officers when he exited his stolen car with his hands in the air after a fifteen-minute chase ended with a crash into a c
onvenience store.

  But that was different, I want to say in the Judge’s voice, biting my tongue just in time, because the Judge would be mostly wrong.

  “Everything worked out fine,” I tell Kwame instead, wishing he would stop.

  “You should let me handle it.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I mean, I could call the commissioner, okay? This kind of harassment happens to be an important issue right now. The mayor is very concerned.”

  The last thing I need: some kind of official investigation. I cannot afford to become an issue. Not only would it be just the kind of thing that might tilt the scale back from Kimmer to Marc—See? We told you her husband is unstable!—but, worse, it might uncover much that I am not ready to reveal.

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “I think the commissioner should look into it,” Kwame says stubbornly.

  “No, thank you,” I repeat, “and, besides, I told you, they were campus police, not city.”

  “I know that. But the commissioner is in charge of both. It’s in the state law.”

  Right. And the university has to obey the city zoning laws too, but it doesn’t when it doesn’t want to.

  “I just want to put it behind me,” I tell Kwame, deliberately turning away to talk to the enchanting Dahlia Hadley. In his clumsy race-baiting, Kwame actually means well, and, worse, he is beginning to make sense. Shirley, at the far end of the table, notices the tension and frowns, for she loves controversy at her dinners as long as it does not get personal.

  Dahlia seems more serene than the last time I saw her, perhaps because she and Marc have calculated that the little incident outside the library can only help his chances for the nomination. Marc comes from money—lots of money. One of his great-aunts was supposedly half a Vanderbilt or Rockefeller or something—the rumors vary—and a state park is named after his long-dead Uncle Edmund, whose charity was legendary. Marc has grown accustomed to getting what he wants.

  “I’m glad you weren’t seriously hurt,” Dahlia murmurs in her syrupy voice.

  “Thanks.”

  “You have to take care of yourself, Talcott. Your family needs you.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “They need you to defend a pawn.”

  My eyes widen. There is an epiphany in every paranoid fantasy, a moment when the truth suddenly blazes whitely around you: yes, the world is united, and, yes, everybody is on the other side.

  “What did you say?” My voice is tight, almost a gasp.

  Dahlia cringes. “I . . . I said they need you to depend upon.”

  I realize I am sweating. I cover my eyes for a moment. “Oh. Okay. Sorry. I guess . . . I guess I misheard you.”

  “I guess you did.”

  “I’m sorry, Dahlia.”

  Dahlia draws back a few inches, as though I have made an indecent proposition. Her face remains hard and offended as she says sternly, “I think perhaps you need more rest than you are getting, Talcott.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . to raise my voice.”

  “You seem tired. You should not be so swift to anger,” she adds helpfully, then turns to her left to chat with Norm Wyatt.

  When I look up toward the far end of the table, my former friend Marc Hadley is glaring at me.

  (II)

  THROUGH MOST OF THE MEAL, almost everybody around me seems to find somebody else far more interesting to talk to. Lynda Wyatt, whose conceit is that she can charm anybody into anything, seems to have her hands full with Kwame Kennerly, and Dahlia Hadley, who has not said another word to me since I raised my voice to her, is arguing historic preservation with Lynda’s husband, Norm. (She’s pro-, he’s anti-.) Marc Hadley is instructing Shirley on the finer points of separation of church and state, about which she has written and he has not. Lemaster and Julia Carlyle, both slim and pert, finally arrived, their daughter’s recital having gone well; seated on opposite sides of the table, the two of them have eyes, as usual, mainly for each other. I have tried to say a word to Lem, usually a sparkling conversationalist, but he has responded with little more than grunts, as though he cannot bear talking to me; and I wonder anew whether his changed attitude is my imagination, or whether my stock around the law school has really fallen so far, so fast.

  But Dr. Young, who earlier prayed over the food with no pretense of ecumenism, has decided to bend my ear about the murder of Freeman Bishop, which has not come up in our counseling sessions. He has been relating a rather long story about a lynching that his granddaddy told him about, back in Georgia around about nineteen-ought-six, in which a black preacher was burned with a hot coal all over his arms and legs and then shot in the back of the head when he refused to talk about his efforts to organize the mill workers.

  “You see,” says Dr. Young, rolling into his theme, “Satan never changes. That is his great weakness. That is where the believer has the advantage over him, praise God. Satan is a creature of habit. He is clever but he is not intelligent. Satan is always the same, and his subjects, those souls who are lost to him, always behave the same. If Hitler marched the Jews off to the extermination camps, you can be sure that some other wicked leader, in times out of mind, slaughtered the innocents because they were different. You see leaders today, all over the world, doing it again! Black, white, yellow, brown, people of every color slaughtering people of every color! Because Satan is always the same. Always! Satan is stupid. Clever, you see, but not intelligent, praise God. This is God’s gift to us, requiring Satan to remain stupid. Why is Satan stupid? So that, if we are alert, we can recognize him. By his signs shall we know him! For Satan, stupid Satan, always attacks us in the same ways. If the old methods fail, he can think of nothing new, praise God. So he just goes on to attack somebody else. He attacks us with sexual desire and other temptations that distract the body. He attacks us with drink and drugs and other temptations that addle the brain. He attacks us with racial hatred and love of money and other temptations that distort the soul.”

  Dr. Young’s sermon is louder now, and the whole table is paying attention, even Marc, who cannot stand to have the attention of a room focused on anybody but himself.

  “You see, then, what Satan does. He attacks the body. He attacks the brain. He attacks the soul. Body, mind, and soul—those are the only parts of the human being that Satan understands how to attack, praise God. If you guard them from Satan, you are safe. If you guard your body, you are guarding the temple of the Lord, for you are made in God’s image. If you guard your mind, you are guarding the toolhouse of the Lord, for God works his will here on earth through mortal human beings. And if you guard your spirit, you are guarding the storehouse of the Lord, for God fills our souls with his power to help us to do his work on earth.”

  Marc Hadley, author of the famous Chapter Three, can stand this no longer. He interrupts.

  “Morris . . .” he begins.

  “Dr. Young is fine,” says Dr. Young equably.

  “Dr. Young”—it burns Marc to address him this way when his doctorate is surely in divinity, probably from some unknown seminary—“first, let me tell you that my wife and I are freethinkers. We are religious skeptics,” he translates unnecessarily. Most of the table is watching Marc, but I am watching Dahlia, whose small mouth curls in distaste just before she turns to gaze out the window toward the surf. I wonder whether she is mad at her husband for entering into the argument in the first place, or for his use of we, while neglecting to mention that she is a very serious Roman Catholic who takes her son to mass every Sunday. “We are not atheists,” Marc presses on, “because there is no proof that God does not exist, but we are skeptical of the truth claims of all religions, because there is no proof that God does. Or that Satan does. Second—”

  “Well, let us deal with the first first.” The pastor smiles. “You know, a very great thinker named Martin Buber once wrote that there are no atheists, because the atheist has to struggle with God every day. Maybe that is why the Scripture
tells us, ‘The fool has said in his heart there is no God.’”

  “I don’t remember that in Buber,” says Marc Hadley, who hates to be told anything he does not already know.

  “It was in Between Man and Man,” Lemaster Carlyle, the onetime divinity student, intervenes quietly, taking the whole table by surprise. “A marvelous book. People who have read I and Thou and think they know Buber have not even scratched the surface.” A dig at poor Marc, something of an insider’s sport around the law school.

  Dr. Young points a gray finger at Lem. “You are right, Professor Carlyle, but you are also wrong. The important question is not whether or not you have read Buber, nor is the important question which Buber you have read. The important question is whether you know what the stakes are. When I was at Harvard getting my doctorate, I had a philosophy professor, an atheist, who used to remind us what religion was all about: ‘It is not your mind that God wants,’ he used to say, ‘but your soul.’ Because God invented the human mind, but enters that mind through the human heart. My professor used to say, ‘God does not want you to read the Bible and say, What a beautiful book! He wants you to read the Bible and say, Hallelujah, I believe!’”