Your Face in Mine: A Novel

by Jess Row

  I’ve never in my life been attracted to a black woman. Not at all. Not ever. You could call it simple socialization: that in those defining years, thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, the bodies I saw, the faces I saw, were white girls, skinny white girls, by any historical standard—the standard being somewhere between Molly Ringwald and Kate Moss. Girls whose breasts disappeared in the palm of your hand, whose hips, whose asses, described a gentle curve, a suggestion of something, you could say, more than the thing itself.

  And that’s still my type, if I have a type. Not long after my dinner at Martin’s, not more than a few days, I found one of the sites I look at when I need to remind myself to jerk off—which I’ve had to, ever since the accident—and nothing worked. So I crawled into bed, with half a hard-on, read a chapter of a Paul Bowles novel I’d had on my night table for months, and finally smoked the end of a joint I’d kept in the freezer since Christmas, a last-ditch effort at deriving some sense of pleasure from the world. It happened quickly after that: I could describe, in my mind’s eye, every part of Robin, the shape of her kneecap, the frictionless skin at the very base of the thigh, the taste of her as I put my mouth between her legs. I came explosively.

  And is it really so surprising? I asked myself a few moments later, after I’d tossed away the tissue and pulled up the sheet, my heart still pulsing away as it did, does, after sex, the real kind. How else is there to say it: Martin has everything I want, everything anyone wants, even if he took the strangest, technically impossible, route to get there. Of course I look at his beautiful wife—his poised, put-together, self-assured, hyperconfident Doctor Mom—and want to fuck her, to bend her over, to shove her up against a wall. Lust is circumstantial and unfair. I’m not sorry. We know enough now, adults that we are, evolved people, not to have to apologize for our fantasies. Of course it occurs to me now that I wasn’t ever attracted to black women partly because no one ever would have wanted me to be, because it’s inconvenient, unsightly, because the image it brings to mind, let’s just say it, is the master and the slave, Sally Hemings and President Jefferson. Lust is circumstantial and politically inconvenient. So is love, for that matter. When Wendy I were first together, one friend said to me, in a drunk late-night overseas phone call, I never thought you were the Suzie Wong type. Another said, how long have you had yellow fever?

  So since my night with Rina—two weeks ago, and we’ve had dinner twice since, like any old friends stranded without much companionship, the tension broken, thank god—I’ve tried not to worry about Robin. People have crushes, I’ve been thinking, and that’s what it is; why make it sound more profound, more ominous, than that? What’s going to happen, in any case? I’m in love with you, and by the way, your husband’s really a white man, so what’s the difference, anyway? She’s the Pat Robertson of the black family. And a shrink. Let her set the boundaries. Take notes. Make it all on the record. And move on, and maybe try not to see her again.

  —

  Don’t sit down, Robin says, when I open the door to her office. I’ll just be a second. She’s already changed into Lycra pants, track shoes, and a fleece pullover; now she’s slipping in contact lenses, using a compact mirror and one long, delicate pinkie. Her nails are very short, I’m noticing, with a dark plum-colored polish, almost black. You okay with walking? she asks. I always walk at lunchtime. First, because I sit all day. Second, because there’s no decent food around the hospital. That’s what happens when you tear down a neighborhood. Fancy MRIs, world-class surgery, but you have to walk a mile for a decent sandwich.

  As long as you give me a head start.

  Don’t worry. I don’t power-walk with company. Just like to get out of my doctor drag and be a civilian again.

  Her building isn’t the hospital itself but one of its many satellites—the Hopkins Hospital, since I lived here, having become a city within a city, taking up a twenty-block square above Oldtown and Butchers Hill. The view from her window takes in the entire horseshoe of the harbor, from Canton to Federal Hill, with Patterson Park on one periphery and Camden Yards on the other, and stretching out to the tankers dotting the gray-green Chesapeake three miles away. The accumulated brightness of it all—the window, the sunburst-patterned rug, the enormous Jacob Lawrence prints above her desk, the clutter of toys and blocks and tiny plastic chairs around my feet—is making me a little dizzy.

  I always tell people not to sit down, she says, because otherwise they try to be polite and break one of the little people chairs. It’s not a kindergarten class where the parents come in for conferences. In here it’s me and the kids only. I do consulting with the grown-ups next door.

  What kinds of cases do you handle?

  What kinds of kids? Every kind. I get referrals from all directions. Schools. CFS. Primary-care doctors. Juvenile Justice. The courts. Adoption agencies. Homeless shelters. All the way from mild adjustment issues to full-on psychosis. There aren’t enough child psychs in this world to let me be picky. She directs me to the door, waves to her assistant, and we’re in the elevator on our way down. Like this morning, she says, two appointments. Just to give you a sense of the range. First one, hyperactive mom, lives in one of the new Ritz-Carlton condos over near the Domino’s sign. She works in D.C., has a nanny seven to seven. Single, Dad’s already remarried and lives in Spain. Wants to know whether Jacob—he’s three and a half—needs Ritalin because he keeps breaking his toys. That’s number one. Number two, she’s eleven, six foster families, raped by an older foster brother two years ago, prematurely pubescent, getting in trouble hanging out with boys after school. She’s a candidate for early pregnancy for sure.

  It’s pretty much the whole demographic slice.

  You know who I don’t see? The suburban middle class. I mean, obviously, given where I work. But my kids break high and low. Because that’s who lives in Baltimore these days. You’ve got profoundly wealthy people in Guilford, old-line Wasp money in Roland Park, yuppies of all kinds around the harbor, and then profoundly, profoundly poor people, black, brown, beige, and white, too, of course, everywhere else. What you don’t have are teachers, nurses, firemen, shopkeepers, managers, what have you. They live in the county. And, of course, they don’t get to see a mental-health professional more than once or twice in their lives, because their HMOs don’t cover us. Medicaid, yes. The prisons, yes. Rich people, yes. Baltimore is like a big donut with the middle shot out.

  We’ve come out on the corner of Wolfe and Orleans and now turn down North Broadway, a broad avenue of neat brick row houses that descends slowly to Fell’s Point. You like Broadway Market? she asks. It’s soft-shell season, you know. Or we could go to Bertha’s, but I think it’s overrated. Or the brick-oven pizza place.

  No, the Market’s fine.

  I like eating standing up. Don’t know why. Some people can’t take it. But again, I’m sitting all day. Standing up and reading the newspaper and listening to adults talk. Between work and home I get a little starved for conversation, as you can see. So listen, what was it you wanted to ask me? You must have questions.

  Oh, I say, you’re answering them. Mostly I just need background. Who you are, what you think about the life you lead.

  Nothing about how I met Martin? That kind of thing?

  Of course. That, too.

  And you’re not going to ask for my take on black entrepreneurship?

  Definitely.

  She bursts into laughter. I’m just giving you a hard time, she says. Listen, I could rattle off opinions for hours, so let me get some hard facts out of the way before I forget. About Martin, first off. We met in church. He probably told you that. And it was the first time I’d been to church in about three years; I was there for my friend Kara’s daughter’s baptism. He, at that time, was quite the faithful churchgoer, and my god, a single man, looking like him, with a job, with a wardrobe, and without a mother in law—there were crowds. It was like the Google IPO. But our eyes met, la, la, la, we clicked, it all happened fast. It was very efficient. Sma
ll wedding, up on Martha’s Vineyard. You have to keep it small when there’s no family on one side.

  So you wouldn’t describe yourself as very religious?

  Are you talking about in a black context or a larger context?

  Is it different?

  Of course it’s different. The black community still treats the church as central. You can’t be black, in a certain sense, without a relationship to the church. An appreciation for it. I’ve got that. But if you’re talking about a deep, personal, everyday, transcendent need for prayer and reflection, an immersion in the Bible, I mean, faith, then no. I’m culturally Baptist the way lots of Jews are culturally Jewish. It’s imperative to me that the kids are raised in the church. Not because I’m so convinced of the moral edification it offers, but because it grounds them in the community and the tradition. It’s all about integrity and wholeness for me, not Jesus and Jehovah. Maybe you got a sense of that the other day.

  I did.

  You should come again. You’d be welcome, you know.

  I will. It’s on my list.

  She laughs again.

  What, you don’t make lists?

  My whole life is lists. It’s just that there’s something so earnest about you, Kelly. You want to understand. You’re like one of those skinny college kids in plaid shirts in 1961, listening to Mingus or Smokey Robinson or something and trying to be hip. Can I be honest here? I keep thinking I’m being played. That’s my cynical, heard-it-all, twenty-first-century reaction. It’s like you’ve been in a bubble the last, oh, thirty years of your life.

  I don’t want anything from you, I would so desperately like to tell her, to reassure her, just an hour of polite conversation, for now, and in the long term, perhaps, your forgiveness, your acknowledgment that none of this was my idea. The problem is that I’m trying too hard to do a good job. I’m trying so sincerely to be fake. And now I’m stuck.

  So, I say, in your view, there’s just no excuse, anymore, for a naïve perspective, an innocent question?

  There would be if you came from, say, Sri Lanka. Or Mars.

  Then the white observer, the interlocutor, is in kind of an impossible bind, right? If I’m cynical and worldly I get called out for making assumptions and appropriating a black perspective. If I’m innocent and careful I get called out for false naiveté. Not much wiggle room, is there?

  We come to the corner of North Broadway and Baltimore. Here the grassy median gives way to a cluster of trees, a small plaza, benches, now filled with dog walkers, neighborhood wanderers, residents in scrubs uncoiling in the unfamiliar sunlight. Underneath the trees there’s a small, improbable statue, hardly more than life-sized: a muttonchopped man in a frock coat, turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt style. LATROBE inscribed on the marble behind him. Baltimore is full of these unexpected, anonymous tokens of a forgotten civic life.

  Oh, Kelly, she says, and turns to look me full in the face for the first time. Are you really asking me, a black woman, about wiggle room?

  Then I’m just supposed to stay frustrated?

  Something like that.

  The light still isn’t changing; I wonder for a moment if it’s broken, if we should just leap across, but of course what’s really happening is time is growing elastic, stretching out like taffy, in the course of an awkward, unexpectedly terrible, somehow ruined, encounter.

  You know what amazed me about Martin, when we met? she asks. That he could talk to anybody. I mean, that should be my forte. But Martin is a true genius at giving people the benefit of the doubt. It must come from a business background. To him anyone is a potential customer. Or investor, or partner, or something. But that’s not the point, really, because that makes it sound mercenary, and it’s not. He has the rare gift of turning self-interest into something that’s almost like a Christian virtue.

  Whereas you?

  Whereas I just carry around baggage, I guess. I mean, you wouldn’t know it, would you? I am the epitome of a black upwardly mobile female blah, blah, blah. But as it turns out I can’t hold a conversation with a white person for more than five minutes on the subject of race. Maybe those two things go together.

  Finally the light turns green, and she sprints across, lock-legged, stalking fury and frustration. I follow two steps behind, and not until halfway down to Pratt does she give me a sideways look. Sorry, she says. I’m upset. I’m uncomfortable. It’s no excuse for acting like a baby.

  Something has passed between us, I’m just beginning to realize, in that half-block, that fifty yards of uneven and rutted city pavement. Her face, uncomposed, is trying to regain control of itself. In a different age, in a Victorian novel, I would say, my dear lady, and touch her elbow, or offer her a handkerchief. I have the urge to be gallant and rise above it all. But we live in an age allergic to suppositions. The pause we’re in now is the one where she’s expected to say, These cases are really getting to me, I need a vacation, or, I had some bad news before we left the office, or, My allergies are acting up and my sinuses are killing me. She’s not going to offer an explanation; I know that much. We’ve passed beyond social lies. Where we’ve arrived, on the other hand, is an open question.

  It seems to me, for a moment, that Martin’s decision—that Martin’s real existence, the real fake black man that he is—has, subtly, indefinably, already seeped into the world around us. That we are living in an ersatz twenty-first century.

  You know I spent every weekend down here? I say. Fell’s Point was my stomping grounds. The best record store in Baltimore was two blocks that way. Reptilian Records. I spent every spare dollar I had in that place. Between that and the Salvation Army and the vintage store down on Aliceanna and Charm City Coffee down on Thames—that was the circuit. And Jimmy’s. That was the only place we could afford to eat.

  Mom and Dad didn’t give you much of an allowance?

  I wasn’t really into capitalism. I used to wear a button that said Property is theft. Which is easy to say, of course, when your basic needs are all paid for. But at least I was consistent. I don’t think I owned a single new piece of clothing until I went to college.

  Saved your parents a lot of money.

  In theory, but all of it was poured back into music in the end. That was the property I cared about. Drums, cases, cymbals, sticks, gas for when we went on tour. It was a pretty expensive hobby.

  What kind of a band were you in?

  I’d have to know your point of reference. Ever heard Fugazi?

  Fu-what?

  Helmet? Jesus Lizard? Jawbox?

  I had a roommate at Spelman who was into the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction.

  Okay. Well, we were like Jane’s Addiction without the funk, and the falsetto voices, and all that L.A. druggie attitude.

  But all Jane’s Addiction was was funk, and falsetto—

  I think I’d have to play it for you. We had a lot of dissonance, a lot of noise, but still songs, in the end. We were political and artsy. And for a while we actually had a following. Put out three EPs and one LP. Toured all around the East Coast.

  This was all in high school? Any chance of a reunion?

  None, I say, keeping my breathing steady, because our singer—his name was Alan—he died of a drug overdose. In 1994.

  An overdose?

  The nonaccidental kind. He’d already been hospitalized once for depression. A classic late-adolescence bipolar shift.

  That must have been devastating. And it was here? No wonder you never wanted to come back.

  It was all too convenient, really. Because my parents moved away. With that, and Alan’s death, I fell into this groove of thinking I didn’t belong anywhere. Right around that time I was getting fluent in Chinese, and all my energy was wrapped up in that, and hanging out with kids from Amherst who’d gone to prep school in Switzerland—it was just easy to think I was some kind of cosmopolite, some Salman Rushdie character, on the run, a homeland that doesn’t want me back. I mean, not literally, but—

  No
, I understand what you mean. Kind of. I read Imaginary Homelands, too, and it kind of sounded awesome. Like the fatwa was the perfect excuse. Everybody wants a fatwa from their parents at a certain age.

  Well, my parents had nothing to do with it.

  That can’t quite be true.

  No, really. Their emotional lives are just barely above room temperature. Some parents of only children are like that. You must know what I’m talking about. I mean, they can get into the act when they have to. When the accident happened, they were there, after a fashion. Because, literally, I had nowhere else to turn. Our friends were wonderful friends, but it takes more than a good friend to help out in that kind of catastrophe. And in the larger sense, I mean, all those years we were in Baltimore, my parents were just so much on the periphery of my experience. And they knew it. They couldn’t control what was happening to me. Baltimore was way too much for them to handle. New Paltz is exactly their speed. My mom practically runs the library—she volunteers nearly every day. The highlight of their week is singing in the Unitarian Church choir. The truth is, they find parenthood exhausting, and I’m just me, not some kind of train wreck. They made it extremely easy for me to feel like an orphan—a cultural orphan.

  I hear you.

  You do?

  Does that surprise you? Do you even know where I’m from?

  Here, I thought. Was I wrong?

  I was born here, she says. In my grandparents’ house, while they were still alive. But we left when I was two. Then Champaign-Urbana, where my dad went to grad school. He a civil bureaucrat; he did fiscal planning, bond issues, that kind of thing. He got to like small towns. College towns. Places where the voters weren’t too dumb to pay for a first-class sewer system or a new gym floor before the old one wore out. First Gambier, Ohio. That was middle school. Then Bennington. You’re looking at the valedictorian of North Bennington High School, class of 1994.