Current Affairs

by Raskin, Barbara;

  A white woman in a black city has got to accept her punishment. Even though I didn’t commit the original crime or even very many subsequent ones, I’ve got to take some shit for the sake of history. It’s the old Calvinist tradition. Guilty by virtue of original sin, further compounded by additional insults.

  On the second floor the detective leads me into a small bare office where he sits down, completely filling the round desk chair parked beside a table. Then he hands over a little white name card with a gold police-department emblem embossed on it.

  “I’m Lieutenant Bo Culver. Where was your car when it was stolen?”

  I sit down in the only other chair.

  “In Georgetown. In a driveway on Reservoir Road. Between Thirty-eighth and Thirty-ninth.”

  I watch impatience travel across his face.

  “Maybe you should be over at the Second Precinct,” he says with genuine boredom.

  “But I live here,” I protest.

  “Where?”

  “Adams Mill Road.”

  “What kinda car was it?”

  “A Ford Escort.”

  “You drive an Escort?”

  His surprise is a backhanded compliment.

  We both smile.

  “Even on my salary I can put a lady in a better car than that,” he says.

  I laugh.

  Now at least our problem is on the table.

  Upper-middle-class white lady meets black police officer. Lots of shit going down. Lots of history. Even though my silent collaboration with his joke betrayed a few feminist principles, I’ve made a little peace with this guy. I’ve acknowledged that my white man hasn’t done all that well by me, which means that I, the White European Woman, haven’t done all that well for myself. This acknowledgment also produces a slight sexual ripple that doesn’t hurt my case.

  Long pause.

  Now my tongue, shy and heavy, remains grounded.

  I look above Lieutenant Culver’s head at a framed photograph of Marion Barry, Washington’s once-promising black mayor, a sixties radical who lost his innocence amidst the fast-track vices of the eighties. Marion Barry is the man whose former wife, current mistress and best friend all served concurrent prison sentences without adversely affecting his reelection to a third term. This is a man who chases women, gets drunk in public, runs with drug dealers and gives the finger to The Washington Post even after eleven of his top aides have been convicted on corruption charges.

  Marion Barry is the man who threw the political World Series.

  When Lieutenant Culver looks up I immediately lower my gaze.

  I certainly do not want to appear critical of our mayor.

  Washington whites keep their anger about Marion Barry to themselves. The white tom-toms beat only at night. The white minority only whisper jokes about D.C.’s Mayor-for-Life in the privacy of their homes, and then only among trusted friends. I certainly do not want to discuss the rise and fall of the District’s mayor with Lieutenant Culver at this time.

  White liberal lady keeps her mouth shut.

  But this detective ain’t dumb.

  “Yep, ol’ Marion,” he says with a slow smile. “Doesn’t know which side he’s fighting on. Keeps getting caught behind enemy lines in the war on drugs. In our war on thugs.”

  “Well,” I say with a shrug, “you know what they say about power.”

  I hope he doesn’t, since I feel sorry about the mayor; I once liked Barry a lot and even worked for him back in 1978, when he was bucking the white establishment and the black bourgeoisie.

  “Yeah, well.” Now the detective shrugs. “You want to get your car back, I need to get some information, okay?”

  I give him my name, my address and my telephone, driver’s license, car-registration and license-plate numbers. He inscribes all of them in a grade school-like notebook and then puts down his pencil.

  “Took you quite a while to get over here,” he says. “You got enough other cars you didn’t need this one very bad or what?”

  I giggle.

  But he’s serious.

  “Why didn’t you report this last night, Ms.… Myers? Whose house were you visiting when you got ripped off?”

  Idly he eyes my bod while waiting for an answer.

  I make a move to get out of my chair.

  “Whoa. Waidaminute. Siddown.”

  I sink back down again.

  “You got a special friend, Ms. Myers?”

  “What?”

  “You got a boyfriend you were maybe visiting last night?”

  High indignation: “Of course not!”

  “So then what were you doing in Georgetown?”

  “God,” I murmur, with heavy disgust. “I was over at my brother-in-law’s house.”

  Lieutenant Culver frowns.

  “Let’s get real,” he says. “We can save a lotta time. Your husband know you were over there? Visiting your brother-in-law?”

  “He was there with me,” I say, choking with anger.

  Then Lieutenant Culver begins to question me. He wants to know the whole scenario, plus a lot of details. I have to tell him how I went out to the airport to pick up my sister. As soon as I mention Shay by name, Lieutenant Culver gets even more interested.

  “Shay?” he repeats. “Shay Karavan? That’s your sister?”

  I nod reluctantly.

  Impressed, he looks me over again.

  “Well, now that you mention it, I do see some family resemblance. Yup. Two good-looking sisters.”

  I blush and smile.

  “She’s a foxy lady, Shay Karavan. A real tough cookie.”

  Then he makes me go through the whole thing from the moment we arrived at Christopher’s until we discovered the car missing from his driveway. Of course, I omit any mention of the papers and simply say Shay’s luggage was in the backseat. Lieutenant Culver also knows who Barney Yellen is. When he learns Shay was once married to Barney, Lieutenant Culver really gets turned on. He asks when and how long they were married. He asks if I know what Barney’s working on at the present time. He asks me if it’s common for Shay’s first husband to visit her second husband.

  I give him some inane answers. I feel hot and disheveled.

  Uneasy. Endangered.

  “What she bring in on the plane this time?” Lieutenant Culver asks. “More MIAs?”

  I shake my head and try to adjust my attitude so as to produce an appropriate smile.

  “Still,” he muses, looking at his watch, “it’s almost eighteen hours since you lost your car. You don’t look like a procrastinating kind of lady to me.”

  Briefly I consider calling Eli and asking him to come over to the police station. But instead I try to steady myself with a mental mantra: Be cool, be cool, be cool. Act like Shay. Think what she’d do. Think how she’d protect herself and throw everyone else to the wolves. Be cool. Be cruel.

  The detective is on a fishing expedition. I know he’s thinking drugs. He is suspicious about everyone—my husband, my sister, both my brothers-in-law, me. At least he’s heard of my shelter, which gives me a couple brownie points. A Home Away from Home has a good rep. But Lieutenant Culver seems a bit too conversant with Barney’s notorious past. I do not think this is to my advantage.

  It’s always hard to tell if Barney is good or bad for the Jews.

  SNAPSHOT

  This is a picture of Barney from the Minneapolis Tribune when he was on trial in his hometown of Chicago. Barney is your basic American bad boy, a radical who observes no party lines. As a left-wing folk hero, he embodies certain movement campaigns and confrontations that make him greater than the sum of his own private experiences. Having fulfilled the mythic requirements for becoming a movement symbol—organizer in Chicago, Mississippi Delta voter-registration worker, conspiracy defendant in Chicago, law student at Berkeley and storefront lawyer in D.C.—he has achieved a limited immortality. His is a name people use as a code word for a 1960s kind of commitment. For women, Barney’s name also evokes images of old
-style druggy nights and lewd love. Because Barney loves women, women instinctively gravitate toward him.

  I cannot believe the turn this interview has taken. I also cannot regain control of it. For the next half hour I continue answering questions. I end up telling Lieutenant Culver more about myself and my family than I’d ever want anyone to know. He’s not dumb. He knows how to question a suspect. And that’s what I’ve become.

  A suspect.

  When he’s done interrogating me, Lieutenant Culver stands up.

  “Okay, I’m going to put out a stolen-car bulletin. But don’t get your hopes up. We lose quite a few cars every day here in the District. Anything else you wanna tell me, Ms. Myers?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he leads me out into the hall. I have to walk quickly to keep up with him because he’s light on his feet and moves the mountain of his body with surprising grace. He’s heavy but somehow weightless. So are his moves. All his moves are relaxed.

  Deliberately lazy.

  But effective.

  Suggestive.

  Back on the first floor he gives the people behind the counter a look that says “shape up.” They do. All five of them are sitting or standing sort of at attention as I leave.

  Then I hurry back up V Street toward Eighteenth.

  Walking through the ghetto areas of Adams-Morgan is always an adventure in not seeing anything either too sad or too threatening. Here’s what I don’t see:

  • Skinny run-down row houses, their front stairs splashed with tired children baking like cookies in the sun.

  • Weary women sprawled across their front stoops, soaking up the overheated scene like soft absorbent sponges.

  • Teenagers, splattered up against the fenders of rusted-out cars, listening to music leak out of boom boxes balanced atop the stove-hot car hoods.

  Near the Reed School playground, I lean against a stop sign while I fix the strap of my sandal. Every sign in Adams-Morgan has the word ‘’war” written in under STOP. It’s what the old hippies still like to do—go around ordering people to stop making wars.

  The steaming heat is a thick presence all around me. There is a gamy jungle smell, spawned by the heat, spicing the air. The humidity is an insistent throbbing presence beating like a drum. Our weather is on the warpath.

  By the time I reach home at six o’clock, I am exhausted, but my kitchen looks like a downtown disco during happy hour. Eli, Shay, Mickey, Barney, Barney’s slinky girlfriend, Victoria Lang, and sweet little Amelia are drifting about drinking wine, beer, vodka with grapefruit juice, Scotch, champagne and decaffeinated A & W root beer, respectively. Everyone is dressed for tropical temperatures in cotton shorts, shirts and sandals. I am quickly informed that Barney and Victoria took Amelia to the zoo before bringing her here to deposit with Shay.

  My small Sony radio has been switched to Shay’s favorite FM hard-rock station, which is playing “Sexual Healing.” I wonder if someone called in and requested that tune for me and Eli. Every time the rhythm kicks in, Shay twitches her tail and does a little bump and grind in front of my double-sized restaurant stove, where she is making a big mess with a couple of eggs.

  Shay always likes a loud sound track when she plays her indoor scenes.

  I sit down at the table and pull Amelia up on my lap. She is dressed in a too-small striped T-shirt and dusty white shorts that push her palm-sized tummy above the elasticized waistband. Near the back door is the little yellow flowered suitcase that accompanies Amelia every time she makes a move somewhere new.

  “Want a cold beer?” Eli asks, coming over to give me a peck on the cheek.

  I nod and smile at my husband, who looks quite attractive in his cutoff Levi’s and a sweat-dampened T-shirt that Marge sent him for his birthday. The shirt says: HUG A SWEDE.

  While scrambling eggs for Amelia’s supper, Shay is regaling everyone with Hollywood gossip garnered last month at the Cannes Film Festival where she has Class-A hotel reservations (probably comped) for the rest of her life. Her fast-track chatter is meant to impress Victoria, who is languidly sipping champagne from a Redskins beer mug. Victoria is thirtysomething, a good-looking blonde wearing a one-piece denim sunsuit with a bib that doesn’t quite cover the fleshy side folds of her breasts. She is a feature writer for the Style section of The Washington Post, which stirs Shay’s competitive feelings. Predictably, Victoria appears unaffected by Shay’s performance. Shay experiences Victoria’s indifference as a challenge.

  So she begins to escalate, telling nastier stories in greater detail at a faster pace.

  “Did you know Peter Bogdanovich just married Dorothy Stratten’s kid sister? You know, Star 80? That Playboy bunny who was doing Bogdanovich and got murdered by her husband when she asked for a divorce? Don’t you think it’s weird? Him marrying her sister? Also I heard Tom Hayden is just furious at Jane for apologizing to those Vietnam vets the way she did. It’s going to be splitsville there soon. And Debra Winger’s dating her old flame, that governor from Nebraska who’s a senator now …”

  My sister Scheherazade is playing tag with herself.

  Dad always used to say Shay was like the heavyweight boxer who knocked himself out while alone in the ring.

  When Mickey Teardash sits down between me and Victoria at the table, Shay gets even more hyper. Honing her instinct for malice, she mockingly catalogs the items Bess Myerson was caught shoplifting from a small-town department store near the state penitentiary where she was visiting her lover.

  “Flashlight batteries. Six bottles of nail polish. Five pairs of earrings! Gimme a break!”

  Then she names some of the celebrities expected to be in Atlanta. Mort Zuckerman has rented a gym and invited all the superstars like Jane Pauley and Judy Woodruff and Diane Sawyer to work out with him in the mornings. The Hollywood bratpackers, led by Ally Sheedy, who’s become Jane Fonda’s political protégée, are also scheduled to make appearances.

  I watch in petrified silence as my sister the love junkie starts to go nuts. She is desperate for a reaction. Any sort of reaction, any response to her performance. But nobody is reacting and she is becoming hysterical. She can’t stop. Mickey is clearly suffering from her off-key performance. Superbly uncomfortable, he has begun poking Amelia in the tummy with a rigid forefinger, giving her a few seconds after each poke to try to catch his finger. Her squeals of excitement start to voice-over Shay’s performance.

  Barney is also edgy. He is embarrassed both for and about Shay in front of Vicky. He is drinking fast. He is drinking up a storm. Seldom does Barney have an excuse as good as this event to get roaring drunk.

  “Amelia,” Barney calls out in the singsong voice he always uses with her, “tell Auntie Nattie what you saw at the zoo.”

  Amelia immediately turns shy in response to this clichéd approach. I squeeze her a little and change the subject.

  “What have you been learning at nursery school, honey?” I ask.

  “Blue and puple,” she answers solemnly, turning her bright little face upward like a spotlight.

  This drives Shay crazy.

  Already flushed from the strain of her floor show, she whirls around, squealing with delight.

  “But you know all your colors,” she trills. “You’re even learning your alphabet.”

  Amelia stares at her grandmother. “Jimmy don’t know puple. Asley don’t know lellow,” she says.

  “Oh, aren’t you a nice little girl?”

  Shay smiles emphatically to reinforce Amelia’s social conscience while flashing Barney a coded look regarding the miseducation of gifted children.

  “See? That’s why I think she should go to the Montessori school,” she says in a preachy voice.

  Already half-drunk, Barney is ready for a fight.

  “Jesus. A private nursery for thirty-eight hundred dollars a year?”

  On principle, Barney abhors private education. He and Shay battled about Steven’s schooling for twelve years and now both seem ready and eager to start again.

/>   But suddenly the contents of the frying pan begin to smoke and Shay rushes back to the stove to scoop the scrambled eggs onto a dish before addressing herself to the toaster oven. Right away she begins messing around with the light-dark dial. Always frantically impatient, Shay tends to undercook foods and tan, rather than toast, bread. Finally she brings the plate to the table.

  Automatically, I begin spooning eggs into Amelia’s cherry-red mouth.

  That’s when Barney adopts a more adversarial posture.

  “Hey,” he begins. “I was thinking that just because the damn hard copy of the interview is lost doesn’t mean the story’s dead. Eli, you’ve got great connections inside the bureaucracy. You should be able to spring loose another copy. I don’t think we should just let this story die on us. Losing Nat’s car was a bad break, but we shouldn’t deep-six the whole story.”

  “Listen,” Eli says in his down-country voice, “releasing that story’s not going to change anything. The whole Iran-contra exposé hasn’t had any real impact on the public. People don’t care anymore.”

  “I do,” Barney snorts.

  “You’re not people.”

  “Hey,” Barney growls at Eli.

  The Scotch has painted his nose pink and illuminated the broken veins in his shallow cheeks.

  “You can break all the scandals you want and provide all the necessary evidence, but it’s not gonna matter,” Eli continues. “The people love Ronnie Reagan; that’s the bottom line. That’s why Dukakis is modeling himself after him. Anyway, I’m off to cover the convention starting tomorrow. I’m the only one from my bureau going, so I’m out of this mess.”

  “We could still give the story to someone over at the Post,” Barney insists. “Vicky knows all the good guys there. We’ll just decide who to give it to and let them spring it.”

  “Sure,” Victoria says, nodding. “We can give it to Carioca. He’d kill for it.”

  But then Mickey Teardash stands up.

  “Look,” he says. “What’s the net result of releasing this story? Who’s gonna gain what from it and what’s it gonna cost?”