Chapter 3

March 1999

Atlanta was in the grip of a warm March day when my father and I arrived for his first book signing. As we drove along the congested highways to the hotel, I opened the car windows and shrugged off my jacket. Calvin was asleep in the passenger seat, and had been for some time. This was a relief. I did not want to talk anymore.

The hotel was the type of place that maintains a careful balance between luxury and purpose. This was a place that catered to business travelers, but only those who could recognize the cut of a Black Label suit at a glance. The lobby was an expanse of plush carpeting and cut glass, and workers lingered in unobtrusive silence, watching the faces of guests, providing what was needed before the guests even knew what they wanted. Classical music emanated from hidden speakers, and I could hear the far-off clink of drinks being poured into heavy glasses from the hotel bar. It was midday, but business travelers who spent more time in Town Cars than in their own vehicles were entitled to a Grey Goose or two to take the edge off between meetings.

Walking through the hotel, I marveled at how different Atlanta was from any place I’d been before. There were so many black people of all different types. Black women cleaned the bathrooms and checked into the hotel with full sets of Louis Vuitton luggage and diamonds covering their fingers. The bellboys were black; and the bartenders, too, were black. While I waited with Calvin to check in, I noticed that the man in front of me looked familiar, and it took me a few moments to realize that the man was a regular in television commercials.

It was the first place I had been where I wasn’t both middle class and a minority. Growing up in Evanston, we were the only black family in our neighborhood, and Maren and I were among the few black students at our private school. After we moved to Durham, black faces were more commonplace, but so many of them worked only in service jobs, and they only lived in certain parts of the city. The nicer hotels there were filled with white parents coming to visit their kids at Duke, or white people visiting the area for Research Triangle jobs.

Being in Atlanta and seeing so many people who were like me—educated, middle class and black—both pleased and depressed me. There was a place for a black middle class, but there weren’t enough places like it.

Because I joined the trip at the last minute, I had to share a room with Calvin. As we unpacked, I wondered at how quiet he was.

“Are you nervous?” I had decided to make an effort to be nice. After all, I was here for a reason. I wasn’t sure what that reason was, but I didn’t want the trip to be a rerun of all my other interactions with my father: arguments that escalated until neither of us could hear the other over the din of hurt feelings and misunderstanding.

Calvin nodded. “This is my first real book tour. Just that the publisher sent me out here says a lot. Sometimes…” Calvin stopped and looked down. I waited. After a long moment, he cleared his throat.

“Sometimes I’m not sure I can do it.”

I didn’t respond. Calvin had never expressed any doubt about his writing before; or, at least, not to me. I had always disdained my father’s talent as frivolous. His first book was published a few months before I left for college. There had been a large party at our house, and I still cringed at the memory. I was not proud of the person I was that night. I mocked the book and refused to read even a sentence of it. I slept with my father’s girlfriend out of spite. I embarrassed Calvin by drawing him into a fight in front of the guests. Then, I tried to justify my actions. The book was called Jesus Wore Khakis. The girlfriend, Arnetta, was a willing participant. The fight was inevitable after my father disappointed me again and again. I was only seventeen. My mother was dead. The excuses went on, but they didn’t change a thing. They didn’t relieve the guilt and the shame.

The worst thing was that I never apologized to Calvin. I couldn’t take any of it back, but I could have apologized.

The problem now was that I didn’t know how to say I was sorry in a way that would mean something. Too much time had passed. And I wasn’t sure whether I was sorry for Calvin or for myself.

I sat down in the bed, a pair of jeans folded on my lap. I looked up at my father, who still looked down at the floor.

“The publishers think you can do it. They wouldn’t spend money on a tour, even a small one, if they didn’t think you were good enough.” I offered this to make him feel better, to make that look disappear from his face. I wasn’t quite ready to take on the burden of Calvin’s insecurities. I had enough of my own.

“I think you can do it, too.”

Calvin looked up and offered me a small smile. I nodded, stood up and went back to unpacking my duffle bag.

* * *

The book signing was at an independent bookstore, Reeds, in Buckhead. The store stood alone on a corner in a building that looked like it might have housed a restaurant in some previous incarnation. The brick looked aged and settled, and the large plate-glass windows revealed the brightness of the store and its cozy furnishings in the disappearing dusk. It was the kind of bookstore I liked, small and easy to move around in, the kind of store that I knew would soon be swallowed up by Barnes and Noble or Borders. There were still a couple of stores like Reeds near Duke, because the campus community could support quaint anachronisms around its immediate borders. But Reeds had no Duke, and I felt an anticipatory nostalgia as I approached the doors.

Calvin’s signing was set for seven o’clock. We had arrived thirty minutes early. He spent the ride over chattering about trivialities (sports, television shows, books he’d read) while I tried to keep up by uttering reactions and nodding when necessary. I knew he was nervous about reading from his novel. When we pulled into the parking lot, I realized that my own stomach was in knots.

Posters in front of the store’s glass doors featured a photo I had never seen. In the picture, my father looked like a stranger. He wore a goatee and a dark jacket over an open-collared dress shirt. He wore glasses, the same ones he wore now, but they were perched at the end of his nose in a way that was not conducive to actually seeing through them. The Calvin on the poster looked serious and thoughtful, as if he were a real writer. I shook my head. My father, with a book deal and this mini-tour, was a real writer.

Calvin beamed at me as we entered the front of the store.

“That photo came out great. I had a professional shoot it.”

I thought the photo was somewhat contrived. “You looked different in it. Good,” I added.

We went to the back of the store, where piles of Calvin’s book were presented in artful stacks and twenty chairs were arranged in a semi-circle. Looking at the title of the book, I realized that Calvin had never told me what the book was about. Of course, I’d never asked. While he chatted with the woman in charge of events for the store, I slipped one of the books out of a pile and looked closely at the cover.

It was called Save Me. On the cover was a picture that I recognized. A little boy, about four years old, stood in front of a church. He wore overalls and a sweet smile full of adoration for whomever stood behind the camera. His hair was shorn close to his head and he wore thick glasses that looked comically large for his plump face. The photo was in black and white, and part of the boy’s face was lost in the shadows. Still, there was optimism in the smile, the optimism of a four-year-old who still believes in magic.

The photo had been one of my grandmother’s favorites. It had held the place of honor on her bedroom dresser. She’d once told me that it was her favorite photo of her little boy. Of Calvin. She’d called him her little boy, even though Calvin was in his thirties and a father at the time, even though he no longer believed in magic. She’d told me this while she was in the hospital after her first stroke. I had wondered if she were losing track of time. Months later, she was dead of yet another, more serious stroke, and I didn’t go to her funeral.

Now, looking at the picture, I realized how much I had never asked her, mostly because I didn’t want to admit I was interested in what Calvin was like as a boy, before he failed me as a father.

I looked up to make sure Calvin was still engaged, then turned my back and read the inside cover. I shivered as I read the book’s description. It was a memoir. The story begins with Calvin’s childhood in rural North Carolina, where he is raised by his mother and never gets to know his father. The story moves to Chicago, where Calvin marries and has two children, Ellison and a girl named Maren. But the marriage doesn’t work, and the memoir details the pain of the divorce and his efforts to make a new life for himself.

I slammed the book shut, my cheeks burning. There was more to the cover description, but I did not want to see the description of how his ex-wife died in a car accident. I did not want to see how Calvin struggled to connect with his estranged children. I did not want this book to exist.

The memoir is a cruel medium. It requires complete revelation and abandon, something I was never comfortable with. It doesn’t allow for privacy, for secrets. And what family doesn’t have secrets it wants to keep hidden? I supposed it would be fine if Calvin chose to reveal all about his own life, but our lives are inevitably tied to the lives of others. What about our desires? Do we have a say? Are we not as important as my father’s desire to lay his soul bare to the world?

An autobiography is something different, because it’s about influential, important, famous or infamous people whose lives have somehow impacted the culture. We want to know about those people so we can understand how our culture has been changed. How did this person come to be a part of all of our lives to some degree? And what does this person’s fame or influence say about the rest of us?

But who cares about Calvin Emory, besides, of course, Calvin himself? Has he impacted the culture? I know the memoir is meant to be more personal and intimate, but that’s exactly the problem. There’s no such thing as intimacy between one person and the world of readers, and even if there were, one should have the right to choose that intimacy. I didn’t have a choice. Maren didn’t have a choice. Only Calvin chose, apparently without regard to how we might feel about it.

The least he could have done is ask. Undoubtedly, I would have said no and he would have done it anyway. But the right thing to do would be to ask before revealing our family to the world. It wasn’t a family to be particularly proud of, in my opinion, and I’d just as soon not have everyone know all about the way my father abandoned Maren and me, my mother’s death, my conflicts with Calvin. Among other things. In fact, I couldn’t think of one thing about our family worth sharing, not one thing I wouldn’t feel ashamed for a stranger to know about us.

Being a father meant sometimes sacrificing your own desires for your children. Didn’t it? Why couldn’t he do that, just once? And why couldn’t I stop expecting it from him, when he’d made it clear that he was never going to be the kind of father I wanted him to be?

Calvin had wandered off and I stuck the book back into the pile. I slumped into a chair, my foot tapping, my teeth clenched. I averted my eyes from the stacks of my father’s books. Calvin had used our lives, without asking, for his book. He got to tell his side of the story. And seeing it on paper would mean reliving it all again.

I made a sudden move out of my chair. I thought I heard my father calling me as I walked out of the store.

* * *

“It’s not fair.”

I sat on the bed closest to the window. I had not turned on any lights when I got back to the hotel room. I watched the darkness take control of the skyline for a brief moment before the city of Atlanta realized what was happening and began to flick on lights. In offices, houses, other hotel rooms, no one was willing to let the darkness be. I wore a watch, but I didn’t look at it when Calvin walked in.

“Ellison? Why are you sitting in the dark?”

I could hear him shuffle into the room and feel along the wall for the switch. He found it. The yellow bulbs burned the dark away, but I didn’t turn from the window. Now all I saw was my own reflection, and my father behind me. He stood with his arms folded. I couldn’t read the expression on my own face.

“It’s not fair. It’s not yours.”

I hated the whine in my voice. I knew I sounded like a child. But I couldn’t help what I felt. It wasn’t fair. He needed to know. He needed to admit it.

“What’s not fair? What’s not mine?” There was annoyance in his voice. How dare he be annoyed?

“The story. It’s our life. It’s my life. Not yours.” My words clipped short.

I turned then. His face was wan in the cheap glow. His arms were still folded, defiant against my questions.

“The book? The one you never asked me about, the one you haven’t even read? Who are you to tell me what to write?”

Calvin stepped toward me as he spoke, his forearms tight. I almost wished he would hit me. Then I could hate him.

I stood. He was close enough for me to smell his breath. Apples and alcohol, probably some kind of designer martini. I glanced at the clock and his eyes followed mine. It was 2:17 A.M. A sheepish look floated across his face, then disappeared. I gave him a nasty smile.

“Tell me, does Calvin finally find true love in the end? Does he reunite with his children? Do they all live happily ever after?”

He backed away and slumped down onto the nearest bed. I stood over him, my fists clenched.

“Ours lives are stories, Ellison. And it’s my story, too. I don’t have to apologize for that.” He lay back on the bed, his hands covering his face. “It’s too late to have this conversation. Can we talk about it tomorrow?”

I watched him for a few moments. His breathing grew deep and regular. I wanted to feel angry enough to put my fists to his face. I wanted to feel enough rage to put a pillow over his face and feel him squirm under my grip. I wanted him to hurt. I wanted him to care.

I grabbed my duffle and stuffed in my things. Our lives are stories. That was the problem. It wasn’t just a story, not to me. It was my life.

* * *

Calvin on Ellison’s birthright:

My son, Ellison, has always been hostile about my writing. Like everyone I grew up with, he seems skeptical of the idea that writing could be a career. Or maybe he’s just skeptical of me.

I don’t think he knows that I’m not the only writer in the family. His mother, Vanessa, was also a writer at one time. I think she turned to television because people always told her how articulate and beautiful she was, so it seemed like a natural fit. But I always thought she was a good writer, too. No one else ever said anything about her stories, though, so I can’t blame her for going into television instead of writing. Hell, maybe I was wrong—I’m not an expert. But she wrote these small, self-contained stories that told me so much about her, the way she thought, what she feared.

She stopped writing long before we broke up, and she put all her stories in a box in a closet. When I moved out, I had an impulse to take them with me. A little piece of her would always stay with me, and she would never even know. My favorite story was called “R.S.V.P.” I don’t think she would mind that I’m including it here.

* * *

R.S.V.P.

By Vanessa Emory

The invitation to Tate’s engagement party was just like her: sophisticated, elegant, perfect. Her perfect parents requested my presence at their perfect party thrown at a perfect hotel in Palm Beach. The thick cream paper, the embossed lettering, the smooth script—it all rose up from my coffee table, accusing me. You are not good enough, it said. You will never be good enough.

After ten years of being Tate’s friend, I was tired of coming in second, tired of sitting back while Tate and everyone else assumed that she was more important than me. I loved Tate. I hated Tate.

Now, she was getting married to Paul Newcomb, senior aide to Senator Michael Miles, a man who would have been voted Most Likely to Launch a Successful Political Career if people voted on such things. Tate’s parents loved him. Tate loved him. The sight of his self-satisfied smile made me nauseous.

I filled out the response card. The words I wrote looked as if I had written them with my left hand. I felt as if I were going to a funeral. I wanted to be the type of person who would put everything aside and just be happy for Tate. I was the type of person who checked the boxes, licked the envelope and sealed it.

I pretended to love Tate. I was too much of a coward to admit I hated her. I walked to the mailbox, set the envelope inside. I raised the red flag on the side of the mailbox and went back inside.

* * *

This character was so much like Vanessa. She hated coming in second to anyone, probably because it so seldom happened. She always wanted to be the smartest, the most beautiful, the most successful woman around, and she would go to great lengths to get what she wanted. This character is consumed by what she thinks is her failure to be better than her best friend, and I have always suspected that feelings like those motivated Vanessa to succeed.

I see this in my son as well. Ellison has all these ideas about how life should go, how his family should be, how he should be. He can’t face coming in second, just like his mother—that’s not how things are supposed to be. When Vanessa died, it was the worst kind of blow a perfectionist like Ellison could endure. How can you have a perfect family without a mother?

—From Save Me: A Memoir by Calvin Emory