by Zadie Smith
• • •
The rest of the day was torture, and the next, and the flight was torture, the walk through the airport, with my phone a grenade in my back pocket. It didn’t go off. When I walked into the London house everything was as before, only happier. The children were well settled—at least, we didn’t hear from them—the last album was well received. Photographs of Lamin and Aimee together, both looking beautiful—back at Jay’s birthday, from the concert—were in all the gossip rags and were more successful, in their way, than the album itself. And the baby had its debut. The world was not especially curious about logistics, as it turned out, and the papers considered her delightful. It seemed logical to everyone that Aimee should be able to procure a baby as easily as she might order a limited-edition handbag from Japan. Sitting in Aimee’s trailer one day during a video shoot, eating lunch with Mary-Beth, personal assistant number two, I tentatively introduced the topic, hoping to wheedle some information out of her, but I needn’t have been so careful, Mary-Beth was more than happy to tell me, I got the whole story, a contract had been drawn up by one of the entertainment lawyers, a few days after Aimee met the baby, and Mary-Beth had been there to see it signed. She was delighted at this evidence of her own importance and what it suggested about my position in the hierarchy. She took out her phone and flipped through the pictures of Sankofa, her parents and Aimee smiling together, and in among them, I noticed, was a screenshot of the contract itself. When she went to the bathroom and left her phone in front of me I e-mailed the screenshot to myself. A two-page document. A monumental amount of money, in local terms. We spent about the same on household flowers in a year. When I brought this fact to Granger, my last ally, he surprised me by considering it a noble case of “putting your money where your mouth is,” and spoke so tenderly about the baby that everything I had to say sounded monstrous and unfeeling in comparison. I saw that rational conversation wasn’t possible. The baby cast a spell. Granger was just as much in love with Kofi, as we called her, as everybody else who came near her, and God knows she was easy to love, nobody was immune, certainly not me. Aimee was besotted: she could spend an hour or two just sitting with the child on her knee, staring down at her, without doing anything else, and knowing Aimee’s relationship with time, its value and scarcity to her, we all understood what a mighty measure of love this represented. The baby redeemed all kinds of deadening situations—long meetings with the accountants, tedious dress fittings, PR-strategy brainstorm sessions—she changed the color of a day simply by means of her presence in the corner of whichever room, on the knee of Estelle or rocking in a Moses basket on a stand, chuckling, gurgling, crying, untarnished, fresh and new. The first chance we got we’d all crowd around her. Men and women, of all ages and races, but all of us with a certain amount of time racked up in Aimee’s team, from worn old battle-horses like Judy, to middle-rankers like me, to young kids straight out of college. We all worshipped at the altar of the baby. The baby was starting from the beginning, the baby was uncompromised, the baby wasn’t hustling, the baby needn’t fake Aimee’s signature on four thousand headshots heading for South Korea, the baby didn’t have to generate meaning out of the broken shards of this and that, the baby was not nostalgic, the baby had no memories and no regrets, it did not need a chemical skin peel, it did not have a phone, it had no one to e-mail, truly time was on its side. Whatever happened afterward, it wasn’t out of any lack of love for the baby. The baby was surrounded by love. It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.
Eight
In that last month of working for Aimee—just before she fired me, in fact—we did a mini-European tour, starting with a show in Berlin, not a concert, a show of her photographs. These were photos of photos, images appropriated and rephotographed; she had taken the idea from Richard Prince—an old friend from the old days—and added nothing to it except the fact that she, Aimee, was doing it. Still, one of the most respected galleries in Berlin was more than happy to host her “work.” All the photos were of dancers—she thought of herself first and foremost as a dancer and identified deeply with them—but I did all the research and it was Judy who had taken most of the photos, as whenever the time came to go to the studio and rephotograph the photographs there was always something else that had to be done: meet-and-greets in Tokyo, the “designing” of a new perfume, sometimes even the recording of an actual song. We rephotographed Baryshnikov and Nureyev, Pavlova, Fred Astaire, Isadora Duncan, Gregory Hines, Martha Graham, Savion Glover, Michael Jackson. I argued for Jackson. Aimee didn’t want him, he wasn’t her idea of an artist, but catching her in a harried moment I managed to convince her, while Judy lobbied for “a woman of color.” She was worried about under-representation, she often was, which meant really that she was worried about what others might perceive as an under-representation, and whenever we had these conversations I had the eerie sensation of viewing myself as really being one of these things, not a person at all but a sort of object—without which a certain mathematical series of other objects is not complete—or not even an object but a kind of conceptual veil, a moral fig-leaf, protecting such-and-such a person from such-and-such a critique, and rarely thought of except when in this role. It didn’t offend me, especially: I was interested in the experience, it was like being fictional. I thought of Jeni LeGon.
I got my chance during a car ride over the border between Luxembourg—where Aimee had gone to do a little press—and Germany. I took out my phone and googled LeGon and Aimee looked over the images distractedly—she was texting simultaneously on her own phone—while I talked as quickly as I could of LeGon as person, actress, dancer, symbol, trying to keep a hold of her wavering attention, and suddenly she nodded decisively at a picture of LeGon and Bojangles together, of LeGon standing, dancing, in a pose of kinetic joy, and Bojangles kneeling at her feet, pointing at her, and she said, “Yes, that one, I like it, yes, I like the reversal, man on his knees, woman in control.” Once I had that “yes,” I could at least start on the research for what would appear as text in the catalog, and a few days later Judy took the photo, slightly at an angle, missing parts of the frame, for Aimee had asked that they all be rephotographed this way, as if “the photographer was dancing herself.” As far as these things go, it was the most successful piece in the show. And I was glad of the chance to rediscover LeGon. Researching her, often alone, often late at night, in a series of European hotel rooms, I realized how much I had fantasized about her as a child, how fundamentally naïve I had been about almost every aspect of her life. I’d imagined, for example, a whole narrative of friendship and respect between LeGon and the people she worked with, the dancers and the directors, or I’d wanted to believe that friendship and respect could have existed, in the same spirit of childish optimism that makes a little girl want to believe her parents are deeply in love. But Astaire never spoke to LeGon on set, in his mind she not only played a maid, she was in actuality little different from the help, and it was the same with most of the directors, they didn’t really see her and rarely hired her, not for anything except maid parts, and soon enough even these roles dried up, and not until she got to France did she begin to “feel like a person.” When I learned all of this I was in Paris myself, sitting in the sunshine, in front of the Odéon theater, trying to read the information off the sun-blanched screen of my phone, drinking a Campari, checking the time compulsively. I watched the twelve hours Aimee had allotted for Paris disappearing, minute by minute, almost faster than I could experience them, and soon the cab would come, and then an airstrip would fall away beneath me, and onwards we would go, to another twelve hours in another beautiful, unknowable city—Madrid. I thought of all the singers and dancers and trumpet players and sculptors and scribblers who had claimed to feel like people, finally, here, in Paris, no longer shadows but people in their own right, an effect that possibly required more than twelve hours to take effect, and I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a
person. The umbrella I sat under gave no shade, the ice had melted in my drink. My own shadow was huge and knife-like under the table. It seemed to stretch halfway across the square and to point at the stately white house on the corner, which took up most of the block and outside of which a guide at that moment held up a little flag and began announcing a series of names, some known to me, some new: Thomas Paine, E. M. Cioran, Camille Desmoulins, Sylvia Beach . . . A small circle of elderly American tourists stood around, nodding, sweating. I looked back at my phone. And so it was in Paris—I tapped this sentence out with my thumb—that LeGon began to feel like a person. Which meant—I did not write this part down—that the person Tracey had imitated so perfectly all those years ago, the girl we’d watch dance with Eddie Cantor, kicking her legs, shaking her head—that was not really a person at all, that was only a shadow. Even her lovely name, which we’d both so envied, even that was unreal, in reality she was the daughter of Hector and Harriet Ligon, migrated from Georgia, descendants of sharecroppers, while the other LeGon, the one we thought we knew—that happy-go-lucky hoofer—she was a fictional being, born of a typo, whom Louella Parsons dreamed up one day when she misspelled “Ligon” in her syndicated gossip column in the LA Examiner.
Nine
The grenade went off finally on Labor Day. We were in New York, a few days away from leaving for London, with a plan to meet Lamin there, his British visa finalized. It was foully hot: the rancid sewer air could prompt a smile between two strangers in the street as they passed each other: can you believe we live here? It was like bile, and it was the scent of Mulberry Street that afternoon. I had my hand to my mouth as I walked, a prophetic gesture: by the time I reached the corner of Broome I’d been fired. It was Judy who sent the text—and the dozen like it that followed—all of which were as stuffed with personal invective as they would have been had Aimee written them herself. I was a whore and a traitor, a fucking this and a fucking that. Even Aimee’s personal outrage could be outsourced to a secondary party.
A little light-headed, woozy, I got as far as Crosby and sat down on the front step of Housing Works, on the vintage-clothes side. Every question sprouted more questions: where will I live and what will I do and where are my books and where are my clothes and what is my visa status? I wasn’t so much angry with Fern as annoyed at myself for not better predicting the timing. I should have been waiting for it: didn’t I know exactly how he was feeling? I could reconstruct his experience. Working on Lamin’s visa paperwork, buying Lamin’s air ticket, organizing Lamin’s departure and arrival, his pickups and his drop-offs, enduring the e-mails back and forth between him and Judy at every stage of this planning, devoting all time and energy to somebody else’s existence, to somebody else’s desires and needs and requirements. It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers—women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance. Fern must have sent a hundred e-mails about Lamin these past few weeks. How could he resist sending the one that would blow up my life?
My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own. I stopped looking at it and focused instead on a very tall brother in the window of Housing Works, he had tremendous high-arched eyebrows and was holding up a series of dresses against his thick frame, stepping into a pair of roomy high heels. Spotting me, he smiled, sucked in his stomach, did a little turn and bowed. I don’t know why or how but the sight of him galvanized me. I stood up and hailed a taxi. Some questions were answered quickly. All the stuff I had in New York was in boxes on the sidewalk outside the West 10th Street apartment and the locks had already been changed. My visa status was linked to my employer: I had thirty days to leave the country. Where to stay took longer. I’d never really paid for anything in New York: I lived on Aimee, ate with Aimee, went out with Aimee, and the news my phone brought me of the price of a single night in a Manhattan hotel made me feel like Rip Van Winkle waking from his hundred-year sleep. Sitting on the front steps of West 10th, I tried to think of alternatives, friends, acquaintances, connections. All links were weak and led anyway back to Aimee. I considered an impossibility: walking in an easterly direction down this street till it met, in some sentimental dream, the west end of Sidmouth Road, where my mother would answer the door and lead me to her spare box-room, half buried in books. Where else? Where next? I had no coordinates. Unhailed cabs went by, one after the other, and fancy ladies with their little dogs. This being Manhattan, nobody paused to watch what must have looked like a staged reenactment: a weeping woman, sat on a step, under that Lazarus plaque, huddled by boxes, far from home.
• • •
I remembered James and Darryl. I’d met them both back sometime in March, it was on a Sunday night—my night off—I’d traveled uptown alone to see the Alvin Ailey dancers, and in the theater got talking to my seat mates, two gentlemen New Yorkers in their late fifties, a couple, one white and one black. James was English, tall and bald with a lugubrious voice and a very jolly laugh, still dressed for a pleasant pub lunch in some Oxfordshire hamlet—though he had lived here many years—and Darryl was American, with a gray-tipped Afro, mole-ish eyes behind glasses, and trousers with frayed hems and paint spattered on them, like a student artist. He knew so much about what was happening on stage, the history of each piece, of New York ballet in general and Alvin Ailey in particular, that at first I thought he must be a choreographer or an ex-dancer himself. In fact, they were both writers, funny and full of insight, I enjoyed their whispered opinions concerning the uses and limits of “cultural nationalism” in dance, and I, who had no opinions about dance, only wonderment, amused them, too, clapping after every light change and leaping to my feet as soon as the curtain fell. “It’s nice to see Revelations with someone who hasn’t seen it fifty times,” noted Darryl, and afterward they invited me for a drink in the hotel bar next door, and told a long and dramatic story of a house they’d bought, in Harlem, an Edith Wharton–era wreck, which they were doing up with their life savings. Hence the paint. To me it was an obviously heroic effort but one of their neighbors, a woman in her eighties, disapproved, both of James and Darryl, and the fast-paced gentrification of the neighborhood: she liked to shout at them in the street and push religious materials through the letterbox. James did an excellent physical impression of this lady, and I laughed too much and finished a second Martini. It was such a relief to be out with people who did not care about Aimee and did not want anything from me. “And one afternoon,” said Darryl, “I was walking alone, James was somewhere else, and she leaps out of the shadows, grabs my arm and says: But I can help you get away from him. You don’t need a master, you can be free—let me help you! She could have been going door to door, stumping for Barack, but no: her thing was James enslaving me. She was offering me my own personal underground railway. Smuggle me up into Spanish Harlem!” I had seen them occasionally since, on my free Sunday nights in the city. I watched them chip away at plaster to reveal original cornices, and fake porphyry by flicking specks of paint at a dark pink wall. Each time I visited I was moved: how happy they were together, after so many years! I didn’t have many other models of that idea. Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either. I liked them both so much, though I couldn’t really call them more than acquaintances. But I thought of them now. And when I sent a cautious text from the steps of West 10th, the response was immediate, characteristically generous: by dinner time I was at their table, eating better food than I’d ever come close to at Aimee’s. Flavorsome, fat-filled, pan-fried food. A bed had been made for me in one of the several spare rooms and I found they were like fondly prejudiced parents: however I told my tale of woe they refused to consider any part of it my fault. In their view I should be the angry one, all the blame was Aimee’s, none of it was mine, and I went to my beautiful wood-paneled room comforted by this rose-tinted vision.
I wasn’t angry until Judy sent th
e non-disclosure contract over, the next morning. I looked at a PDF of a piece of paper I must have signed, aged twenty-three, though I couldn’t remember ever doing so. Within its inflexible terms the things that came out of my mouth did not belong to me any longer, not my ideas or opinions or feelings, not even my memories. They were all hers. Everything that had happened in my life in the past decade belonged to her. Rage rose up in me instantaneously: I wanted to burn her house down. But everything you need to burn somebody’s house down these days is already in your hand. It was all in my hand—I didn’t even need to get out of bed. I set up an anonymous account, chose the gossip site she hated most, wrote an e-mail containing everything I knew about little Sankofa, attached the photo of her “adoption certificate,” pressed send. Satisfied, I went down to breakfast, expecting, I suppose, my hero’s welcome. But when I told my friends what I’d done—and what I thought it meant—James’s face turned as grave as the medieval St. Maurice statue in the hall, and Darryl took off his glasses, sat down and blinked at the pinewood dining table. He told me he hoped I understood how much, in a short time, he and James had come to love me—it was because they loved me they could tell me the truth—and that the only thing my e-mail signified was that I was still very young.
Ten
They camped outside Aimee’s brownstone. Two days later—to my shame—they were knocking on James and Darryl’s door. But that part was Judy’s doing, a blind item: illicit affair, “vengeful ex-employee” . . . Judy came from a different era, when blind items stayed blind and you could control the story. They had my name within a few hours, and soon after my location, God knows how. Maybe Tracey is right: maybe we are tracked at all times through our phones. I stayed in bed, while James brought up cups of tea and opened and shut the door to a persistent reporter and Darryl and I watched the tide turn on my laptop in real time as the day went on. Without doing anything different, without taking any action at all, I went from Judy’s tawdry, jealous minion to The People’s bold whistleblower, all in a few hours. Refresh, refresh. Addictive. My mother called and before I could even ask her how she was she said: “Alan showed me on the computer, and I think it was a really brave act. You know, you’ve always been a bit cowardly, I don’t mean cowardly—a bit timid. It’s my fault, I overprotected you, probably, mollycoddled you. This is the first really brave thing I’ve seen you do and I’m very proud!” Who was Alan? Her speech sounded slurry and not quite her own, more fake-posh than I’d ever heard it. I asked in a light way about her health. She gave nothing away—she’d had a little cold, but it had passed—and though I knew for a fact she was lying to me she sounded so adamant it felt like the truth. I promised her I’d come to visit her the moment I was back in England and she said, “Yes, yes, of course you will,” with far less conviction than she’d said everything else.