• SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1984 •
Allbright, Moses. Allen, LaDonna. Bates, Jamal. I knew every name by heart, intoned each one to myself as I walked down the hall, but when I entered the room and told the class my name, no one wrote it down. A smile twitched my lips, and I repeated my name. No response. Was I really here? Would they notice if I turned around and walked out? I sat down and began calling out names. Beaton, Andre. Cummings, T. J. I paused to match faces with names, but no one looked me in the eye, and by the name Dalrymple, Daryl, I was in a panic that I would never teach these students anything. From the back of the room, I heard baby noises vibrating the air with longing and wonder. I looked up and met the baby’s gaze. His bright black eyes were fastened on me. He strained forward in his mother’s lap, one hand opening and closing like a summons. McDonald, Roland. Now the baby was responding to each name by clapping on the desk and letting out loud peals of delight. Washburn, Angela. Head bowed shyly, she spoke into the baby’s ear, quieting him. I watched them for four or five seconds, catching myself in a bad habit of staring too long at intimate moments in public places. The baby reached for her ear and my heart swelled. I repeated the name: “Angela Washburn.”
“Here,” she whispered.
“Thank you,” I replied.
I HAD LIVED IN HYDE PARK on Chicago’s South Side for ten years, having arrived as an avid eighteen-year-old, certain that literary fame and an exalted life of the mind awaited me, but I had never been south of Sixty-second Street before I began teaching at Martin Luther King State, a primarily black commuter college at Ninety-ffth and King Drive. Now, three mornings a week, I assailed the safe borders of my life and drove deep into the dark heart of south Chicago, past boarded-up storefronts, abandoned movie houses, and gutted, skeletal apartment buildings, past dealers in doorways and addicts swaying down the middle of the street in search of a morning fix; after fifteen blocks the desolation gradually gave way to supermarkets, hardware stores, used-car lots, small lawns, and bungalows. But in my nightmares my car stalled or ran out of gas before Seventy-ffth Street and a gang of black men closed in on me. “Let me go!” I shouted, holding my textbook, a bible of grammatical rules, high above my head. “I have important work to do! I’m teaching subject-verb agreement today!”
SIXTY-THIRD AND MARTIN LUTHER KING Drive. Sixty-fourth and King Drive. Sixty-ffth and King Drive.
“More education don’t hurt anybody.”
The second time I taught my class we went over exercises from the textbook. Each student read a faulty sentence out loud and then revised it. Their voices were wooden and uncertain, every face blank. Only the baby, reaching toward me like a castaway on a raft, seemed to truly recognize me.
“More education don’t hurt nobody,” said the student, Tanya Toney. She looked doubtful. “Man,” she sighed, “that don’t sound right neither.”
I asked if anyone could revise the sentence correctly. A few hands went up.
“More education doesn’t hurt anybody,” said a woman in the front row.
“Yes,” I said. “The faulty agreement is between the subject and verb, not between the verb and object. Does everyone understand?”
The baby’s head tilted and tottered like a gyroscope.
Look, we’re all in this together, I wanted to say. Can we agree on that? I’m probably unqualified for this job. I know very little about English grammar. I only memorized these rules last night. I’ve never been south of Sixty-second Street. So we’ll learn all these rules together. Is that a fair agreement? We’ll learn all about subjects and verbs, nouns and pronouns. We’ll memorize every irregular verb. All two hundred of them! Then we can really begin to understand each other!
AT THE END OF THE SUMMER, I moved out of the graduate-student apartment building where I had lived for six years and into a small one-bedroom apartment nearby. My new next-door neighbor was a blind man named Raymond. For years I had seen him walking around the neighborhood, his head raised and his white cane pointing to the ground in front of him like a divining rod. I always marveled that he knew exactly where he was going.
Two weeks after I moved in, Raymond and I approached the building at the same time. “You’re my new neighbor, aren’t you?” he asked, as I held the door open for him. How did he know me? My footsteps? An odor? I raised my elbow and buried my nose in my armpit. I’d passed him a number of times but had never thought of introducing myself. What would I have said? Excuse me, you don’t know me, but I see you all the time.
Raymond cheerfully invited me into his apartment for a beer. I had never imagined a blind person as being happy. Then I reminded myself that I had twenty-twenty vision and was miserable.
I told Raymond about my class.
“Did you study linguistics?” he asked.
“No, divinity.”
“Are you religious?”
“Not especially.”
He looked puzzled. “Did something happen?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” I said and laughed. “Religious belief isn’t a requirement for divinity school.” That’s the same explanation I had given my mother when I enrolled and she worried I was converting. The answer had never completely satisfied her. At my graduation, she had said, “So now what am I supposed to call you? Doctor? Father? Reverend?”
“What was your specialty?” Raymond said.
“Religion and literature.” I explained that I had analyzed similar modes of address to lovers and to God in metaphysical poetry. Then I told him that I had sent out more than fifty job queries but hadn’t landed a single interview. That’s why I was teaching basic English, part-time, at Martin Luther King State.
“Do you believe in the soul?” he asked hopefully.
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Are you in love?”
“Yes. With a lesbian who lives two thousand miles away.”
Raymond laughed. “You’re in sad shape, brother.”
Rachel had recently completed her dissertation too, but with a PhD from the Stanford English Department and a sexier topic than mine—Colonizing Desire: Constructions of Sexuality in the Works of Caribbean Women Writers—she had received multiple job offers and had decided to accept a two-year postdoctoral position at Stanford because she had fallen in love with Lucinda, the woman she hoped to spend her life with, but it was all very complicated. Not only was Rachel’s lover married, but she also happened to be Rachel’s thesis adviser. Lucinda was coming up for tenure in the fall, and she didn’t want to compromise her chances by leaving her husband for a former student, so she and Rachel were keeping their relationship secret for another year. I was the only person who knew about them.
“What about you?” I replied. “What kind of shape are you in?”
“I’m religious. I believe in the soul. I’m not in love.”
He appeared to be in his midtwenties.
“Have you ever been?”
He shook his head, and I felt a little bad. Maybe I wouldn’t have asked him something so personal if he could see me. (But what I really wanted to know, the question I was dying to ask, was how he walked around the neighborhood. Was it an extrasensory feat? In the black world behind his eyelids, did he see the streets of the neighborhood like veins of light on a radar screen?)
Just before I left, Raymond said he thought we were going to be great friends.
“Why do you think that?” I asked him
He smiled with his lips pressed together. “Because I don’t think you have any friends,” he said. Then held his fist to his mouth, trying to suppress a laugh.
“I’m glad to be such a source of amusement to you.”
But he was right. After six years of graduate school, I had formed no close attachments. Every woman I had slept with I had met in Regenstein; after a time, the relationships had begun to feel as transient and anonymous as prison dalliances. My emotional lifelines were my weekly phone calls with Sarah and Rachel.
As I moved to leave, Raymond asked if he could see my face.
“What?” I asked dumbly, though I knew exactly what he meant.
“Like this.” He placed his fingertips on my forehead, as if anointing me. With exquisite slowness, he drew his fingertips down my face, tracing eyebrows, nose, lips. My skin was burning, my muscles drawn tight. Our faces were inches apart. His mouth was half open, his eyeballs off target, like the eyes of someone looking through the dark side of a one-way window. I couldn’t fathom the reverence in his face. “Relax,” he whispered. I placed my hands over his. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really have to go.”
“CAN ANYBODY TELL ME WHICH verb ending is used with all singular nouns and third-person-singular pronouns?”
A man in the front row raised his hand. He was the shape and coppery brown color of a Bosc pear.
“Say your name,” he demanded.
“Excuse me?”
“Your name. How you say it?”
“Shapiro.”
“Spell that.”
He was glowering, but when I wrote my name on the board, he smiled with recognition. He had no upper teeth, only a ridge of shiny brown gum.
“Hey, man, you Eye-talian?”
“Italian? Me? No.”
He looked disappointed, as if he were sure he had had the right answer to a question.
“Damn if I didn’t think you was Eye-talian. Where y’all from, then?”
“You mean my family?”
“Right. What country they from?”
“The Ukraine.”
“Where’s that at?”
“Beyond the Pale.”
His name was Daryl Dalrymple. When his turn came, he read, “John and Mary asks a lot of questions.” He puzzled over the sentence, rubbing his brow, pressing down on his thighs. Then he looked up at me and winked conspiratorially.
“Don’t see nothing wrong with this sentence, Shapiro.”
I asked him what the subject was in the sentence.
“John and Mary.”
“The verb?”
“Asks.”
“Is the subject singular or plural?”
“Plural.”
“So how do you get the verb to agree with the subject?”
“Plural! John and Mary asks a lot of questions. Damn,” he said with a laugh, “you asks a lot of questions.”
I explained the rule.
“You saying, a singular subject got an ‘s’ on the verb, but a plural subject ain’t got no ‘s’?”
“Exactly.”
“Goddamn,” he sighed.
Finally it was Angela Washburn’s turn to read. I looked in her direction and called her name. The baby cooed like a pigeon under the roof of an old house. She whispered in his ear for a few seconds before responding to me. I leaned forward, longing to hear her words.
“Tom like to read, but I loves to dance.”
I said something to her about the first-person singular. The baby laid his head against her breast and closed his eyes, as if the secret firequency between us had gone dead.
THAT NIGHT IN BED I REPEATED TO MYSELF: “I loves to dance. . . . I love to dance.” Only one letter separated us. I love, you love, he loves, we love. I marveled at the way the verb opened up like a daylily. How easily I love blossomed into we love! Conjugating the verb over and over, I experienced a sensation of movement, like a widening echo, a journey outward. But after a time the motion of the verb transported me to my nightmare world: Sixty-third and King Drive, Sixty-fourth and King Drive, Sixty-ffth and King Drive. I thought of the bombed-out buildings, the elevated tracks blocking the sun like a twenty-four-hour eclipse, and I realized that I loves won’t flower overnight into I love. That “s” was as solidly planted as an old tree root.
ONE NIGHT RAYMOND CAME to my apartment and questioned me about love.
“A man and woman are secret lovers for forty years,” he said. “They see each other only two times a month, when they spend the afternoon in a hotel room in a strange city. But they write to each other every day. Some of the letters are extremely erotic, but mainly they chronicle births, deaths, marriages, business deals, the sweetness and bitterness of longing. The man’s view of life is especially black. He complains that everyone is after his money. He hates his wife and business partners, can’t communicate with his children, mistrusts everyone except his lover. He tells her that she is the only person he has ever loved, the only thing that is decent, beautiful, and true in his life. The woman is also very unhappy, tied to a marriage that is emotionally and spiritually dead. Now here is the question: Why don’t the two lovers ever get married?”
I said, “Maybe he’s afraid she’ll ask for lots of money and be like all the rest.”
“No. In fact, in his letters he pleads with her to accept money. He tells her she is the only person he’s ever wanted to share his money with.”
“Well, perhaps she doesn’t want to leave her husband and cause her family pain.”
“Possibly—but what is a couple of years of pain in return for many more years of happiness?”
“I have no idea, Raymond.”
“I think the two lovers liked things just the way they were. If they were married, they would have lost the element of imagination. They could have loved each other every night, but they’d have lost the chance to imagine loving each other every night.”
“Where did you hear this story?”
“From my grandmother. We discovered her love letters after she died. I always thought her story would be a great movie, but who would be interested in a movie like that in this day and age?”
“You go to the movies?”
Raymond smiled cagily, as if this was the question he had been maneuvering me to all along. “Every day.”
THE NEXT AFTERNOON I shadowed Raymond around the neighborhood. I knew he had never been in love, I knew he believed in the soul, but I didn’t know how he got from the library to the liquor store to the supermarket. There had to be more to it than simply memorizing every street. He had to know their system— how the streets conjugated, the irregular forms of a route—as if the neighborhood were his secret language. Walking in his footsteps, I thought of the dull syntax of my own life, of the six years I walked the same route between my graduate-student apartment building and a library cell every day. I wouldn’t see other streets in the neighborhood for weeks. I wouldn’t go beyond the borders of the neighborhood itself for months. How could I have let that happen? At an intersection, waiting for the light to change, Raymond and I were brushed up against each other in the middle of a crowd of people. I knew he was going home, and I recited to myself, Fifty-sixth and Stony Island . . . Fifty-sixth and Cornell . . . Cornell and Fifty-ffth . . . Cornell and Fifty-fourth. . . . He turned and looked up at me. “Seth?” I held my breath and kept silent, as if I were hiding in a closet with someone else’s love letters or diary. The light changed and I went my own way.
IN LATE SEPTEMBER, Rachel’s mother was diagnosed with liver cancer and given approximately two months to live. Rachel moved back across the bay to her mother’s house in Berkeley to care for her and help both of them come to some type of peace about their relationship. It was even more difficult for her and Lucinda to regularly call each other, so Rachel called me every night. Rachel had never come out to her mother, and she was in a quandary about whether to introduce her mother to Lucinda, as her lover, before her mother died.
“Why is it so difficult?” I asked her. “Your mother wouldn’t be judgmental.”
“I know she wouldn’t, but she’d have all these theories about why I’m gay, and I know we’d just end up arguing.”
“So maybe you’re doing the right thing.”
Her mother still thought we were a couple—she kept a photograph of Rachel and me at our college commencement on her bedroom bureau. For Rachel, it had been a convenient ruse, a way to keep her mother from trespassing too far into her emotional life.
“She keeps asking me to go to her lunatic therapist with her.”
“The one who does regression therapy?”
“Yes. She thinks that if the therapist can regress us back to the time when I was an infant and she was a young mother, we’ll be able to emotionally reconnect.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“No. I told her it wouldn’t help because I didn’t believe in it.” Rachel started crying. “Why am I such a bitch? She’s dying. Why can’t I do that for her? I mean, wouldn’t you do something like that with your mother if she were dying?”
“Rachel, you’re not a bitch. If my mother dies a prolonged death, I only hope I can be half as gracious and generous as you are to your mother.”
She began crying again. “Oh, Seth, I miss you.”
“I was thinking of coming out to visit for Thanksgiving. That might be a nice last Thanksgiving for your mother. Just the three of us. You, me, and her.”
“Yes, I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”
“‘IF YOU PRACTICE THE PIANO REGULAR, you will soon be able to play real music.’”
Angela Washburn stared at her book. The baby stared at me. His blunt, fleshy arm moved back and forth like a wand. I imagined he was inviting me to enter their aura of intimacy. I beamed back a reply in stealth: I love, you love, he loves, we love. . . .
“If one practice the piano regular, one will soon be able to play real music.”
She didn’t even look up to see how I would respond to her answer. I explained that the sentence was wrong because of the adverb and not the pronoun. “Do you understand, Angela? ‘Regular’ is an adverb because it modifies ‘practice.’ So there should be an ‘l-y’ at the end of the word.” I repeated this rule as ardently as if I were reciting Keats. The baby reached for me, but she pulled down his arm as if drawing a shade.
MOST DAYS RAYMOND AND I had lunch at Sol’s, a neighborhood deli run assembly line fashion by ten or twelve Vietnamese. They labored at a furious pace, swabbing rolls with mustard and mayonnaise, slicing pickles and tomatoes, slapping meats and cheeses onto bread, shouting in loud bursts of Vietnamese.
Only Raymond slowed them down. When he came tapping through the door, they eyed one another as if he were the strangest sight they had seen in this strange land. Otherwise, their only connection to the world beyond the counter was through the items on Sol’s menu. “You chop livah! You hot dog!” the workers shouted out as customers proceeded through the line. I always ordered juice, because the word allowed me a sense of connection with Sol’s Vietnamese.
“You jew-is!” the juice worker would shout at me.
“Damn right!” I always shouted back. “And what about it?”
“Ya, ya,” he’d reply, with a huge smile, “you jew-is!”
TWO OR THREE AFTERNOONS A WEEK I went to a movie with Raymond. I felt sinful, but weekday afternoons were the best time to go to the movies with a blind person. The theaters were nearly empty, so Raymond and I could talk without annoying people, although the first few times I succeeded in annoying Raymond. I described everything—reaction shots, scenery, camera angles. He sighed, fidgeted, then shouted, “I know Meryl Streep looks sad. I’m not deaf too, you know!” The three other people in the theater all turned to look at us as I slid down in my seat.
Eventually my technique improved. At a revival house, we went to see a Hitchcock double feature: Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train. With my lips an inch from his ear, I drew Raymond into the world of visual echoes, light and shadows, murderous hands. In Shadow of a Doubt, when young Charlie moved her hand down the banister to show Uncle Charlie she is wearing the ring that link him to his crimes, Raymond gripped my forearm as I described the exchange of looks between them. I had never known anyone to get so worked up at the movies.
At the end of Strangers on a Train, Raymond said, “I just love Bruno Anthony’s voice. I could come here every day and listen to him seduce Guy Haines.”
“Seduce him?”
“Of course. Couldn’t you tell that Bruno is in love with him?”
“Raymond, Bruno is a psychopath! He murders an innocent woman for thrills.”
“No,” he declared happily, “he murders for love.”
RACHEL’S MOTHER WANTED TO BE CREMATED, her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. But Rachel couldn’t bear the thought of her body going up in flames, and she had secretly bought a burial plot for her mother.
“I know it’s a really bad thing to do,” she said to me during one of our nightly calls. “I mean, it is her body, and I’m not honoring her beliefs, but I want to be able to visit her in a cemetery, to know she’s in a physical place.”
“It’s a Jewish thing, and you’re more Jewish than your mother.”
“I kept thinking of your story ‘Two by Two.’ The impulse to be buried among family is so powerful, so true.”
I had actually been thinking the same thing. A couple of months before, I had driven by a cemetery and was overcome with dread: What if I lived out my days in Chicago and was buried here, alone, far from my family? I tried to laugh it off, but after nearly ten years in Chicago I still didn’t feel at home. I missed my family. I missed the East. My life had stalled out. Twisting the phone cord around my finger, I looked around my apartment. I had bought everything secondhand: my toast-colored sofa, the faux-wood desk, the industrial-looking metal bookshelves. I had described the decor of my apartment to Sarah as “graduate-student emeritus.” Would I ever get out of here?
“Seth, I’m sorry I overreacted to that story you wrote back in college. That was a very confusing time for me, and the story made me feel so exposed.”
“Who knew all that tension was really about sex?”
“I did,” she replied. “But I just didn’t know how to name it.”
THE NEWSPAPER SAYS THAT on the average person a college diploma is worth two hundred thousand dollars more than a person who has no college diploma. On the other hand, by the list of jobs, you are basing whether or not to go to college, is a incomplete list.
I spent hours studying Angela Washburn’s language, as if her blurred grammatical patterns and derailed subordinate and independent clauses were a map to her soul. On her paper I wrote lengthy comments about her faulty comparisons, with the weary heart of someone floating a message in a bottle. One day, though, she showed up at my office, her paper in her hand, her other arm holding the baby.
“This ain’t so good, is it?”
Good or bad. Right or wrong. Black or white. Don’t think this way, Angela, I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her I regarded these grammatical rules as a prism refracting her iridescent intelligence.
I asked her where her subjects were.
“My what?”
“Your subjects. Where are your subjects in this sentence?”
She stared at her paper, searching for her subjects; her baby stared at me, his head tilting and swaying, his eyes bright with wonder. Finally she answered, “They everywhere.”
I laughed. “They sure are.”
The baby bleated with delight and clapped his hands on my desk.
Angela, as if embarrassed by the excitement, looked down at her paper and smiled shyly. She read another sentence: “The most problem and hurt is knowing and hoping the future one want do not exist after college.”
I asked her what the main emotions were in this sentence.
She gave me a searching look, like someone hearing news she can’t quite believe. “Hurt and hope.”
“Yes! Excellent! Do you see what the problem is then?”
“My sister, she went to college, but she can’t get no job.”
Ask her what her sister does now, I told myself. Ask her about her hurts and hopes. Tell her you hurt yourself by walking the same insular route every day for six years, building your routine into a wall, and now you hope to learn a way out.
Instead, I asked her about her gerunds.
“My what?”
“‘Knowing’ and ‘hoping’ are your gerunds. The problem is that you attach them to the same complement and thereby cancel out your meaning.”
She gave me a bruised look, then turned her eyes away.
ANGELA WAS NOT IN CLASS THE NEXT DAY.
Daryl Dalrymple, as always, was sitting in the middle of the front row. “What’s your rap today, Shapiro?”
“Irregular verbs.” He extended his hand so I could lay a little skin on him. “All right,” he said.
I asked Daryl to read the first sentence of his composition. He faced the class and recited, “I was born and breaded in the South.”
A number of students laughed.
“Damn right I was,” he said. “In Meridian, Mississippi.”
“After your mama breaded you, how she fit your big butt in the frying pan?”
Now everybody laughed.
“Y’all saying something ’bout my mama?” Daryl challenged the class.
“What’s the infinitive form of the verb?” I interjected.
“Breed,” someone answered.
“Right,” I said, relieved. “To breed.”
“Breed!” a woman repeated incredulously. Her name was Yvette Woolfolk. More moralist than grammarian, she said, “You know, I read in this Alex Haley book how they used to breed black folks like they was horses. That’s how their birth records were kept. Like they was horses!”
“That’s right, that’s right,” someone responded. Then there was a chorus of “yeahs” and “amens.”
I wasn’t aware of how red my face had become until one of the students said, “Hey, man, why you look so guilty?”
“You don’t look beyond pale now, Shapiro,” Daryl said.
RACHEL’S MOTHER DIED TWO days before Thanksgiving. I arrived the next day and we went to the funeral together. Rachel kept close to me, holding my hand during the service at the synagogue, leaning against me for support as the rabbi chanted Kaddish at the grave. Most of Rachel’s relatives presumed I was her boyfriend. How long had I known Rachel? Where was I staying? At Joan’s house? How nice that Rachel doesn’t have to be alone. How long was I planning on staying?
Some of Rachel’s childhood and graduate-school friends had come to the funeral. I knew that Lucinda was among the mourners and kept trying to figure out who she was. I was fabbergasted when Rachel finally did introduce me to her. She was slight and plain, scholarly looking, her eyes large behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. This was the woman Rachel wanted to spend her life with? The woman she pined for night after night?
After the services, everyone gathered at Joan’s house. Rachel’s relatives had brought enough food to feed an army of Cossacks— bagels, rye breads, and seeded rolls, mounds of lox and sturgeon, platters layered with cold cuts, bowls of fruit salad, and plenty of vodka and scotch. Throughout the afternoon and evening, I was keenly aware of Rachel and Lucinda. Rachel didn’t act any differently with her than with her other friends—no extralong glances, no surreptitious hand squeezes—and I marveled at how well they pulled off this difficult act. At one point I noticed Rachel go into her bedroom; Lucinda followed a couple of minutes later. I kept looking at my watch: five, ten, then twenty minutes. I occupied myself by drinking scotch. I had seen Rachel kiss and hold hands with some of her girlfriends, she had told me the most graphic details of her sex life, and it never bothered me, but imagining Rachel and Lucinda lying next to each other on the bed, holding and comforting each other, was deeply unsettling. It shattered the illusion I had maintained that I had become the most important person in her life again.
After all the guests had left, Rachel and I collapsed into her childhood bed together, our arms around each other. I asked her if she had told her mom about Lucinda before she died. Rachel’s eyes welled up with tears.
“No, and now I regret that I didn’t.”
“You don’t have anything to regret, sweetie,” I said.
“I actually did go with her to see her dumb therapist.”
Rachel told me how the therapist had tried to regress them by instructing Rachel to lie down on Joan’s lap as her mother read her The Runaway Bunny. Rachel and I both laughed. Then Rachel began crying again.
“The fucking thing was actually effective,” she said. “I felt loved and safe. I didn’t want to get up.”
I had never felt so close to her, not when we had read Tolstoy to each other in bed every night as undergraduates, not when we went on our yearly vacations, staying up all night and discussing sex. I held her tightly as she cried, feeling an electric intimacy. How could she not be feeling the same thing? She kissed me good night, told me she loved me, and turned over to go to sleep. Thirty minutes later we were still wide awake; we had probably changed positions about fifty times, as if we were trying to figure out a secret handshake.
“What are you thinking about?” Rachel finally asked.
“About everything.”
“Are you thinking you want to make love?”
“Yes. Are you?”
She studied me in the dim light and kissed me.
“You know I’m in a relationship,” she said.
“Is that a yes?”
We kissed again; I ran my finger over her nightshirt, lightly grazing her nipple. She shuddered and squeezed my ass, then she hiked her legs up and removed her panties. “Seth, baby,” she said, “put your mouth on me.” My tongue traced only two or three arabesques before she came, bucking convulsively. Oh, Lord, how different this was from our nights together in Chicago, when I would kiss her all over her body—and not just in the usual places but on the arch of her foot, the rim of her ear, the back of her knee— feeling as if I were trying every light switch in a darkened house, all to no avail. Perhaps Lucinda, or some other woman, had found the light in her body; perhaps her body was buzzing with booze, longing, death, and reunion. She lifted herself on top of me.
“Do you have any protection?” I asked.
“No,” she said, and began to ride me.
We locked into a powerful rhythm, our bodies moving back and forth in unison. I spent myself explosively, copiously.
The next morning at ten we were awakened by one ring of the phone.
“That’s Lucinda’s signal,” Rachel explained.
I ran my tongue up and down the nape of her neck, pressing close so she could feel my yearning.
“Wait fifteen or twenty minutes,” I said.
“No, I have to call her right back. She’ll wonder if I don’t.”
“Tell her you were in the shower.”
“We don’t lie to each other.”
I watched Rachel rise from the bed, enjoyed a brief glimpse of her beautifully arched back and rounded bottom before she covered herself with a robe and went into the kitchen to call Lucinda. I felt the pang of loneliness that sometimes struck me when I woke alone in my own bed. I waited for thirty minutes before I gave up hope that she was coming back.
The day was busy with appointments with bankers, lawyers, realtors. In the evening we went through all of Joan’s belongings— diaries, bundles of old letters, photographs, childhood dolls and drawings. We discussed everything except the fact that we had become lovers again. The night before, I had dreamed of flooded plains, of lakes and rivers breaching their banks. Could this be a sign that she was pregnant? I wanted to tell her about my dream, wanted to ask her if she too thought it was a sign, if she was trying to become pregnant, perhaps acting on some impulse to beat back death by creating life. I had so many questions for her: Was last night going to change anything between us, especially if she was pregnant? Was it about us, about how intensely close we had become over the last two months, speaking for hours on the phone every night? Or was she simply consummating with me all the pent-up ardor she felt for Lucinda? Now that we were lovers again, I had become thoroughly self-conscious, totally strategic, aware of everything I couldn’t say.
When we went to bed that night, I cupped her breast. Rachel removed my hand and repositioned it on her belly. She said that she just wanted me to hold her.
“Did you tell Lucinda about us this morning?” I asked.
“Tell her what?”
“That we made love.”
“No.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
“I don’t know.”
I had an erection that wouldn’t go down. I kept shifting positions. I wanted to keep holding her, but the blood in my penis wouldn’t ebb. Finally, Rachel said, “Let me help.” She sat up beside me, put her hand inside my underpants, and began pumping away. She didn’t kiss me or lie next to me. Occasionally she smiled at me; once she yawned. This was an act of kindness, not love, something only someone like her could do for me—a close friend, a woman, a former lover. I suddenly felt isolated from her, isolated by muscles and blood, isolated by this reminder that our relationship had its limits. Cleaning myself off in the bathroom, I had to fight to keep from bursting into tears. When I returned to bed, Rachel leaned into me. I squeezed her hand, then rolled over to the far side of the bed.
The phone woke us at eight the next morning, ringing three times before Rachel answered it. From the sound of her voice— surprised, then soft and affectionate—I knew it was Lucinda on the other end. I went into the kitchen. For two hours I drank coffee and read the paper. Maybe Lucinda was ending the relationship. Maybe she was telling Rachel that she couldn’t go on with the secrecy and adultery, not to mention the unprofessional nature of their relationship. Yes, Lucinda was ending the relationship, Rachel would be pregnant, and I would move from Chicago to California, and we would get married. I’d stay home with the baby, become a house husband. I was considering names for our child when Rachel finally came into the kitchen. I knew from one look at her face that none of this would come true. “What’s going on?” I asked. Rachel said that Lucinda had told her husband about their affair.
“What’s going to happen now?”
“They’re going to separate.”
“I suppose that’s good news for you.”
Rachel gave me a pained smile. “We’ll still have to keep things secret until after Lucinda comes up for tenure,” she said. “It’s going to be difficult.”
“So, did you tell her about us?”
“Why do you keep asking me that?” she snapped.
“I thought you didn’t like lying to her,” I replied.
I LEFT THE NEXT DAY. Looking out the window of the plane, I watched the topography of the country change like a time-lapse film of a flower blooming: The coastline and green hills became the Rockies, which leveled out to the Great Plains. My spirit gradually deflated as I gazed for hours at the patterned farmland of the Midwest and then at the tracts of suburbia. When my plane banged down on the runway in Chicago, it felt like a knock to my soul. Just as the shuttle van from the airport deposited me in front of my building, I saw Raymond coming out the door with his white cane.
“Raymond. Hi.”
When he heard my voice he turned around. “Oh, hi, Seth. Did you go visit Rachel for Thanksgiving?”
“Well, her mother died. So I ended up going for a funeral.”
“Oh, my condolences. But I’m sure Rachel was glad to have you with her.”
“I don’t know. Rachel and I slept with each other. Now I’m very mixed up.”
“I thought she had a serious girlfriend.”
“She did. She does.”
“So now she’s a lapsed lesbian?” Raymond laughed. He was the closest thing I had to a best friend in Chicago, but he always thought my problems were hilarious.
“The sex was amazing. Better than any sex we used to have when she was my girlfriend.”
“You want me to feel bad for you about this?”
“No, but I mean how do you explain that?”
“Do you know what Tennessee Williams said when he was asked about his sexuality?”
“No. What?”
Raymond smiled naughtily, then said in his best Blanche DuBois voice, “I’ve always been rather fexible.”
THE NEXT AFTERNOON RAYMOND KNOCKED on my door and asked me if I wanted to go to the revival house and see a John Wayne Western called The Searchers. I agreed to go when he said I wouldn’t have to annotate the movie for him. “I’ve seen it dozens of times,” he told me. “You’ll love it.”
Not long into the movie, John Wayne’s brother and sister-in-law are massacred and their two young daughters kidnapped by Indians. John Wayne and some other cowboys go off to look for the girls. They find one of them raped and murdered and spend five years searching for the other one. Eventually they find her— she has grown up into Natalie Wood—during a raid on a Comanche camp. John Wayne raises his hand to kill her because she has become a wife of the Indian chief, but then he has a change of heart and rides home with her on his horse.
I thought the movie was fine, but I didn’t love it, and I didn’t share my opinion because I knew Raymond, who had spent the movie leaning forward in his seat and holding his fist to his mouth, was strongly moved. I wasn’t in the mood to hear him explain everything I had failed to notice.
Afterward, we went next door for a beer.
“Isn’t that a beautiful story?” Raymond said.
“Beautiful? Raymond, John Wayne spent five years on his horse looking for Natalie Wood, and then he almost scalped her because she was fucking an Indian.”
“But at the last moment he was transformed by love.”
“Oh, now you’re going to tell me that John Wayne really wants to sleep with his teenaged niece?”
“No,” he replied, with a lascivious laugh. “He wants to sleep with his sister-in-law.”
I recalled a subtle exchange of looks between John Wayne and the sister-in-law, and I knew that Raymond was right. How many times did he have to see the movie to catch that?
“Seth,” Raymond continued, “couldn’t you see how ill at ease in the world John Wayne is? How he isolates himself from love and caring? But when he discovers Natalie Wood, he realizes his capacity for nurturing and love. She’s his best half and he finally becomes a whole person. That’s why it’s a beautiful story.”
“Raymond, sometimes I wonder if you and I see the same movies.”
“We see the same movies, Seth, but sometimes I wonder if you have any imagination.”
“I have imagination, but I also know something about real life.”
Raymond smiled beatifically. “You’re really threatened by me, aren’t you?”
“What are you talking about?” I exploded.
“You always have to claim you know more about life just because you’re sighted.”
“Jesus, Raymond, who said anything about sight? I just think that sometimes you romanticize life. That story you told me about your grandmother, for instance. I think if you knew anything about the way people really love, you would know that your grandmother and her lover must have endured great pain. Two people who love each other don’t keep apart just because they’d rather imagine being together. I’ll tell you why your grandmother and her lover stayed together for so many years. Because the alternative was probably nothing—no romance, no intensity, nothing. And even if the price is extreme pain, most people would rather have pain than nothing.”
“That’s just your interpretation.”
“No, that’s my experience! Look, Raymond, I once had a relationship with a married woman. My lover was unhappy in her marriage, just like your grandmother. I pleaded with her to leave her husband for me, but she didn’t want to think of herself as the type of woman who would leave her husband for another man. But you know something? The more painful things were between us, the more inflamed our loving became. I remember one afternoon toward the end. We had been making love for hours in the July heat. Our bodies were plastered together with sweat. At that point the pain was realer than the love. But looking at our feet, I felt oddly detached. I realized we could end the relationship right then and spare ourselves more agony, but I didn’t. We couldn’t. And do you know why? Because the alternative would have been nothing. All she would have had was her bad marriage. And what would I have had? Nothing.”
Raymond drew back.
“Why did you tell me that story?”
“What do you mean? You told me a story about love, and I told you one. That’s all.”
Actually, the story was mostly made up. My affair with the married woman had lasted less than a week, but I had embellished it because I always felt so outmatched by Raymond in our discussions about love and movies.
“I’ll tell you why. Because you’re so insecure. So you have to tell me all about your sweaty sexual adventures. But let me tell you something. I really feel sorry for you if this is the view of love your experience has given you.”
SIXTY-THIRD AND KING DRIVE . Sixty-fourth and King Drive. Sixty-ffth and King Drive.
For three blocks I frantically pressed down on the gas pedal, but my car only sputtered and wheezed until the life completely drained out of it at Sixty-ffth and King Drive. It was an arctic Chicago morning in December. Far down the deserted street, I could see the swaying lights of a bus. The windshield of my car was beginning to ice over. I bundled up in my coat and ran across the street to a coffee shop. The place was crowded and noisy; everyone stared furtively at the white boy wearing a necktie with cheeks the color of a Red Delicious apple. I called the emergency road service from the pay phone, then squeezed into the only free space at the counter. A man a few seats down from me tipped his cap and smiled as if I were an old, familiar friend. I stared straight ahead. On the wall facing me were portraits of a honey-haired, blue-eyed Jesus and an airbrushed Martin Luther King gazing out as if heaven were just beyond the horizon. Between the two pictures was a hand-printed sign warning the patrons not to curse when ladies were present.
The only lady present was a stout, fireckled, cinnamon-colored woman working behind the counter. Her style was more Sunday-school teacher than waitress, and she wielded her coffeepot like a Bible.
“Who was it lived in the land of Uz?” she asked the men at the counter, the pot poised above their heads.
They all stared down into their plates.
“You, Brother Jackson!” she said. “Don’t you know?”
Mr. Jackson looked warily at the raised pot.
“Noah?” he ventured.
“No, it wasn’t no Noah,” she said, thumping the pot on the counter. “It was Job, a man of blameless and upright life.”
She worked her way down the counter, pouring coffee and posing questions.
“How many criminals was crucified alongside of Jesus?”
“Two,” said one of the men. “One on his left, the other on his right.”
“That’s better,” she said. “That’s better.”
“What kind of easy questions y’all asking this morning, Sister Broadnax?” another man said. “Ask him what was the names of them two criminals.”
“What names?” she replied, her eyes narrowing.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
“Well, what was they?” she demanded impatiently.
“Leroy and Marvin.”
The whole counter exploded in laughter. I smiled into my coffee, having become invisible, except to the man three seats away, who had been staring at me from the moment I sat down. When the seat beside me became free, he moved over and sat down on it. I was suddenly enveloped in an odor of oil and sweat. His face was sprinkled with white stubble, his down vest and overalls spotted with dark, shiny stains.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning.”
“Your name is Seth, right?”
“Yes. . . .”
“You don’t remember me. My daughter introduced us at the graduation last spring.”
“Yes, now I remember. You’re Naomi Freeman’s father. I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”
“Well, I’m not wearing my Sunday best today. I just got off work. The cold’s froze up everybody’s boilers. I don’t usually work nights, but folks has to have heat. Oh, Mrs. Broadnax,” he said to the woman behind the counter, “this boy here went to the divinity school with my daughter.”
“You a preacher?” she asked me.
“Well, not exactly. . . .”
“You don’t have a church?”
“No.”
“Don’t worry, honey. You still young. You’ll get yourself a church soon enough.”
There were some scattered amens from the men at the counter.
“We all belong to the Zion Baptist Church,” Mr. Freeman explained. “Mrs. Broadnax is a deacon. She keeps us honest every morning.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
She held the pot above my head. “More coffee, Reverend?”
RAYMOND AND IAGREED NOT TO go to the movies anymore. “We’re both too emotional for it,” he said. He was over at my apartment, and I volunteered to go down the block for some beer.
“Rachel called just after you left,” Raymond said when I got back.
My heart jumped; I hadn’t heard from her since I had left California, close to a month ago. “Do you mind if I call her back?”
“Of course not.”
I went into the bedroom and called her.
“You never told me Raymond was gay,” she said.
“Raymond? Gay? Are you sure?”
“Of course he is, Seth.”
“Did he tell you he was?”
“No, but I can just tell.”
“Are you sure?”
“Seth, sweetie, he may be blind, but you’re deaf.”
I told her I’d call her back later. I knew that she was right, had probably known it all along, but hadn’t been able to assimilate the fact into my world. Perhaps Raymond was right: I didn’t have any imagination, certainly not the type of imagination I needed to negotiate my way through life.
I returned to the living room. “Raymond,” I said, laughing, “Rachel thinks you’re gay.”
“Well, she ought to know, shouldn’t she?” He crossed his legs and smiled.
“How come you never told me?”
“I thought you knew.”
“How was I supposed to know?” Then, in exasperation, I added, “How do you know? You’ve never had sex!”
Raymond laughed, tried to say something, but was overcome with more laughter.
“What’s so amusing?” I asked.
“‘How do I know?’ What is that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve had sex. You haven’t. I mean, Rachel didn’t know she was a lesbian until she slept with me.”
“Well, that explains it then,” he replied, collapsing into another paroxysm of laughter.
“Raymond. Shut up. Stop laughing at me.”
“Seth, how do you know that I’ve never had sex anyway?”
“Because you told me you’ve never been in love.”
“So? Have you been in love with every person you’ve had sex with?”
“Well, have you had sex?”
“You know, this is beginning to feel like a cross-examination. I don’t know why it even matters.”
“Because you’ve been dishonest with me.”
“When?”
“When you told me you’ve never been in love. You knew I was talking about women.”
He posture suddenly turned rigid.
“No, Seth. You were talking about blind people. You couldn’t imagine a blind person as sexual. I’m sorry if you think I was being dishonest. But I really don’t think I’m responsible for your ignorance.”
He swigged the last of his beer, then found his way to the door, leaving me alone.
I DIDN’T TALK WITH RAYMOND FOR WEEKS. He didn’t knock on my door; I didn’t knock on his. When we both approached the building at the same time, I held the door open for him and he went by without a word. One day I walked past Sol’s and noticed him sitting at a table by the window. He was eating salami on rye. I stared at him until I was dizzy with hunger.
I placed my order and proceeded through the line. In front of me a schoolboy, barely able to see over the counter, was testing the vocabulary of Sol’s Vietnamese.
“Jap,” he said experimentally.
“You chili dog!”
“Jap! Jap!” he said more boldly.
“You grape pop!”
“Kung-fu!” he shouted, and leapt into a martial arts stance, drawing one hand behind his head and waving the other in front of him as if he were casting a spell.
I ordered a root beer, but the juice man was so happy to see me that he called out, “Ya, jew-is!”
Raymond, his chin stained with mustard, stood up abruptly, grabbed his cane, and angrily beat his way out, leaving a half-eaten sandwich. The Vietnamese watched him with open-mouthed amazement.
ANGELA WASHBURN WAS NOT THE ONLY mother in the class, and all the other mothers banded together when one of the men, Tazama Sun, declared in a paper that landlords had the right not to rent apartments to women with children. “If I owned a building,” he said, “I wouldn’t allow no childrens. They noisy. They destroy the property. A man have a right to protect his investment.” Tazama Sun had slanted eyes, a pencil-line mustache, and was partial to leather jackets and gold chains. I guessed he was in his early forties.
“Do you have childrens?” one of the women asked.
“Hell, no. What do I want with babies?”
“I know about men like you,” Yvette Woolfolk said, her arms crossed high on her chest. “You the type I warn my daughter about. Y’all go crazy if you suspect your lady even looking at another man, but when she’s pregnant with your baby, you out the door, yes you are.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” some of the other mothers chimed in.
Another woman objected. “Don’t say all mens is like that. I been married twenty years to the sweetest man before Jesus.”
“I didn’t say all of them,” Yvette Woolfolk replied. “Just ones like Tarzan.”
Tazama Sun smiled and rocked back in his chair, tracing the line of his mustache with a thumb and forefinger.
Then one of the women looked at me. “How about you? How you treat your wife?”
I said that I wasn’t married.
“But you so polite!”
“He real quiet, though.”
“I bet he has himself lots of lady friends.”
“How about it, Shapiro,” Daryl said. “How many lady friends you have?”
I could feel my face turning bright red. Angela Washburn embraced her baby tightly and buried her face in his neck. I wanted to move to the back of the room, sit in the empty chair next to them, and tell her that I was in pain too.
“He so quiet,” Daryl said, “you can hear a rat piss on cotton. But some ladies like that. Yes, they do. They like that a real lot.”
I WAS EATING LUNCH at Sol’s when something outside excited all the Vietnamese. They raced out to the sidewalk for a better look. Through the window I saw Raymond jerking his head around like an angry and frightened marionette. I left my lunch and went outside. The Vietnamese were laughing uproariously. The laughter agitated Raymond even more. He was cursing and swinging his cane violently around his feet like an erratic compass needle. Pedestrians stepped around him. Realizing he had momentarily lost the language to find his way home, I walked over to him. “Raymond,” I said. He twisted around, his face in a commotion of fright and relief. We were silent for some seconds, all the words we could say to each other standing like a wall between us. Then, in my most intimate voice, I said, “Fifty-sixth and Stony Island. Fifty-sixth and Cornell. Cornell and Fifty-ffth. Cornell and Fifty-fourth. . . .”
AFTER BEING ABSENT FOR A WEEK, Angela Washburn and her baby were waiting outside my office.
“My baby been sick,” she said. She paused, then added, “Ain’t no one else I can leave him with.”
The baby was resting on her shoulder, his eyes rheumy. I resisted an impulse to reach out and stroke his cheek.
“Is he better now?”
She looked me in the eye. “He all right,” she said softly.
In my office, she read from a new composition. “Last winter after my baby was born we almost froze is the reason we got us a new apartment.” The baby reached out to me. His fingers, centimeters from my nose, plied the air as if he were practicing piano scales.
I was on the verge of asking if they were warmer this winter. Is there no one else to stay with? Are you all alone, Angela? Is it just you and the baby? My palms were moist, and I could feel the blood rising in my neck, heating up my face. “Your trouble is caused by a faulty predicate. The linking verb ‘to be’ forms a sort of equation.”
The baby wailed like a siren, his eyes screwed tightly shut, his forehead wrinkled from the strain. Don’t cry, don’t cry, I wanted to say, but these were not my words. Angela bounced him lightly on her lap, whispering in his ear, “Be cool, sugar. Be cool.” When he didn’t quiet down, she searched around in her purse, coming up empty-handed.
“I left his bottle in the car.”
“You can leave him here if you want to get it.”
She gave me a frantic, flustered look.
“Really. I can watch him.”
She sat the baby down in the chair and went out. His wails became even louder. I waved and smiled at him, but to no avail. His face was a miniature portrait of agony and grief. I couldn’t resist any longer. I got down on my knees and brought my face close to his. His cries ebbed, like a balloon slowly expelling air. His back eyelashes were matted with tears. He stared at me with glistening, wondrous, slightly crossed eyes as the huge, complex landscape of my face loomed in front of him. He reached out and grabbed my nose, the sweet fingers of his other hand brushing over my features with a spidery grace, as he emitted breathy, satisfied sounds. I closed my eyes and the world changed tenses: I was keenly aware of living in the present, aware of every inch of my face, of every follicle and cell, of being defined, shaped, loved. I heard his mother’s footsteps coming down the hall. I knew I should open my eyes and stand up. But I didn’t move a muscle. Even when I knew she was standing in the doorway, watching her baby hold my face in his hands.