Eye to Eye (9 page)

“Sorry,” I say. “It's slow connecting.”

“Admit it,” says Ronnie. “You poured yourself another glass of wine.”

“You'll never know and I'll never tell.”

I Google Burning Spear Press and click on the first entry.

“So?” Ronnie asks.

I take a big sip and try to break the news gently.

There's nothing neo-Garvey about Burning Spear, nothing “fight the power.” The only thing vaguely African about the Web site is a red, green and gold cocktail napkin, on which sits a gigantic martini glass with a “spear” of olives resting inside, and “burning” flames around two figures, male and female, framed in the background. At the top of the page the words “Burning Spear Press” appear in scripted lettering, with “Fire for the Rest of Us,” beneath it. To the side of the main image are bullets on recent releases, authors, press, etc. The usual. And when I look more closely at the page, I see that Burning Spear Press, is “the new, hip, ethnic imprint.” Their covers are mainly cartoon figures with hands angled jauntily on hips and purses dangling from the crooks of their silhouetted arms. If male writers were subjected to marketing like this, then their books would all have Amstel light bottles and Rogaine in shadow on the covers.

“Doris?”

“Good news first?”

Ronnie groans. “I don't like the sound of that.”

“The circulation is huge. It looks like most of the books are done in print runs of the tens of thousands. Which, might I add, having had a print run of five hundred on my poetry collection, is no small feat.”

“Quit beating around the bush, Doris.”

“Wellllllllllll. It's an African-American imprint.”

Silence.

“An African-American imprint? Tell me, I beg you, that they're branching out into literary fiction.”

I scroll down the “About Us” page.

“Kind of. It looks like they're going to do one literary, or as they're saying ‘adventurous' novel every other month. Seems they did one last month.
Murder on the South African Express.
I think I saw that book. It looked like a real book.”

I don't tell Ronnie that by “real book” I simply mean hardback book, that the cover showed a woman in what could only be described as a dashiki minidress boarding a train, leopard-print luggage case in hand.

“I have to get to the library.”

“The good news is they're publishing your book. Don't lose sight of that.”

I peruse the other recent offerings.
Brown Sugar and Maple Syrup, Grooving with Mr. Thang,
and
Catcher of the Fly
(with a decidedly non-Salinger cover). I have to concede that some of the covers are quite clever, and it looks like
Catcher of the Fly
was reviewed favorably in both
People
and
Time
magazines, and a Barnes & Noble notable book. So regardless of the covers, what's going on between the pages is evidently interesting. The most important part.

“Some good reviews on one of these. And don't forget the zillions of copies. Oh, and look, believe it or not, even though the publisher is in New York, looks like Burning Spear has an office in my fair city. And for the record, presses can mean anything these days. Pam Anderson gets published by the same folks who put out Gish Jen. Burning Spear could be radical chic. Maybe you can get them to fly you out here, make sure your cover is normal and everything.”

“Do publishers do that?”

“Big publishers might. For all I know, my poems were published by the Keebler elves, but you know how poetry goes. We practically pay them to put us into the world, and as much money as I've spent on contests to get that stupid collection out there, ready for ridicule by Georgia teens, I might as well have self-published. Would have been cheaper. No matter what happens, no matter how you feel when you do find Burning Spear Press, repeat after me: published is better than not published. Big press is better than obscure.”

“You'll have to add one more chant to the chain—black Doris is better than white Doris.”

“Whaddayamean?” I ask. “I already feel my next-door neighbor would prefer a black Doris to a white Doris, so don't toy with my emotions.”

Ronnie explains that, demographically speaking, white Doris doesn't make much sense to potential readers. That editors aren't even sure that they believe in white Doris.

“So I'm like the Easter Bunny? Or Santa Claus? Why doesn't white Doris make any sense? You know that I'm going to have a full-out existential crisis when I get off the phone.”

“Yeah, well, I think I'm going to have a full-out literary identity crisis when I find the Web page for Burning Spear Press.”

“Published is better than not published,” I repeat. “Published is better than not published. Black
and
white Doris agree.”

 

I hang up the phone and decide, after closing down my computer, that it's best that I didn't get to discuss my Zach interaction with Ronnie. She tends to side with Zach anytime I'm being irrational and prideful. But the mental image of some tattooed, pierced, twenty-two-year-old swooping in on my ambition-free ex-boyfriend? Me no like. I can just imagine them, smoking cigarettes, and her twenty-two-year-old take on his situation:
that's really cool, man, I think it's cool you want to open your own theater. Why be part of the system? Let's make love and eat shitty twenty-nine-cent ramen on your decade-old futon. Coooooool.
The image is enough to convince me that I'm going to have to venture to the one place I never thought I'd be looking for men: the Internet.

By the sound of Stevie Wonder through the walls, I know that Toni is home, so I decide to seek out her expert advice on the subject and attempt to further forge a friendship. I take my half-opened bottle of wine, since it's the only one I have left, and knock on the door like some sad charity case.

“Doris,” she says excitedly, a half-opened bottle of wine on her own coffee table. “Fellow single woman fighting the good fight. Have I found an activity for the two of us.”

“Is it low cal?” I ask. “I think I'm taking up obesity as a hobby.”

Toni has her computer open, and is clearly online and drunk typing.

“I'm losing it, Doris. I know I've been AWOL, but something terrible has happened.” She falls back into the couch cushions and lets out a sigh that lets me know “terrible” is code for “wonderful, but problematic.”

“First off, no judging,” she says. I like this rule, since it excuses me from all behavior with Zach, so I nod in mock-solemn approval. “Okay, so I went out with this horrible fascist who liked white, thirty-two-year-old Toni. His profile says the only ethnicities that he'll date are white and Asian, and he's looking only at women who are at least two years younger and two inches shorter than he is. I mean, his profile is loathsome. I was all fired up to make out with him and then tell him he had biracial cooties and go home and write three paragraphs about it.”

I know exactly where this is going. “But you liked him,” I interrupt.

“More than like. I still half hate him, but aside from the profile, he has yet to say anything really fucked up, and I can't see that he's racist in daily life, but I know that he is crazy with the race thing because I read his profile and we even talked about it. He said that he ‘just knows what he finds attractive,' which was clearly me.”

“So he just doesn't know what he finds attractive. He needs your help.”

“I'm the one who needs help. I need an intervention.”

“What's his name?”

“Tino,” she replied. “Can you even believe that? Big hairy Italian. He's not my type at all. But when we talk, it's like we were pods on the same spaceship. We like the same books, same movies, we crack each other up. We even went to the same stupid church camp in New Jersey when we were teenagers, but two years apart. I think my body is against me.”

I pour the dregs of my wine bottle into the glass.

“Or it knows more than you do.”

Toni shakes her head defiantly. “Never. We've been on five dates in the past two weeks, so I must take immediate action. You and me, we're going speed dating. Copelands. Tomorrow. He must be replaced.”

Like living in Los Angeles and having passionate affairs with pool boys, speed dating is something that I knew about only from my favorite source of trashy information—the television. On television, speed dating looked like a fast, acceptable way to meet a veritable bounty of professional men. The news magazine special that I'd seen on speed dating showed a large room, dimly lit, with white tablecloths checkerboarded in half-empty wineglasses. The clientele were all thirty-and forty-something, laughing urbanely over no-doubt literate conversation.

Speed dating in Atlanta—the nontelevised version—I was soon to learn, was something altogether different.

 

The next night, Toni stopped by my apartment looking equal parts glamorous and jittery. She was nicely put together in the official Atlanta spring/fall uniform of sweater twinset in a bright yellow pastel, dark denim jeans, low sandals with an open toe, übercoiffed hair and manicured nails. Fashion wise, Atlanta is like if you crossed L.A. with a Lily Pulitzer warehouse. Coiffed, conservative and colorful. Very done and very
matching.
“I know, I know,” she says, gesturing at the outfit. “But I don't like to scare the lawyers. Sometimes the loud prints make them skittish, and I wasn't kidding, I need to find a replacement, fast.”

I, however, am dressed in my very own version of “Langsdale chic,” a carefully honed homage to years of shopping in the rural Midwest, meaning a mismatch of Target, thrift stores and the occasional online Bluefly purchase. Today it's an Isaac Mizrahi button-down white shirt, cuffed jeans from the Salvation Army, and my all-time-favorite shoes, Marc Jacobs's take on ruby slippers, a delicate Mary Jane with an agony-inducing heel, but well worth the punishment. Funky, yet feminine. Furthermore, I worked to get my general appearance city-ready—tweezed my eyebrows; polished and filed my chipped, uneven nails; spent thirty-five minutes with Miss Clairol changing my roots from dull silver to nutmeg; and the evening before I even used whitening strips on my coffee-dyed teeth. If I didn't feel unstoppably gorgeous, at the very least I felt presentable. In Langsdale this would have been “supermodel”; in Atlanta, it was “average.”

Toni drove, and I tried hard to pretend that I wasn't fearful for my life. Unlike Langsdale, where the speed limit rarely tops forty-five, or New York, where public transportation is the de facto mode of travel, residents of Atlanta are
drivers.
The first time I rode in a car with Antonia, truly, I feared for my life. In Atlanta, a speed limit of fifty-five means seventy for all but the far right lane, and seventy was about as fast as my Toyota could handle. I stayed out of the far left lane unless passing one of those confused and/or passive-aggressive souls who drive the speed limit. Toni's BMW, however, was made to go eighty, ninety, even ninety-five. These are all speeds at which my Toyota would no doubt begin to shake uncontrollably, lose bolts and hubcaps along the way. But Toni was also a true Atlantan in that driving the actual car was secondary to all the other activities she engaged in behind the wheel. She rarely signaled, fiddled with the CD player, answered the phone, and then cursed the poor souls driving around her for not being able to read her mind when she crossed three lanes in three seconds to make her exit. From what I've seen of Atlanta drivers, it's as though the turn signal were simply a decorative touch or design flaw. Psychic driving, I told Ronnie.

As we're moving, Toni flips down the visor and applies a final round of lip gloss and mascara. I try to ignore that the speedometer reads seventy-eight and concentrate on the evening ahead. “Okay, don't kill me, but I had sex with Tino.”

“When?” I ask. “Since yesterday?”

“Since two hours ago. And it was great. I can't date him, Doris. Tino and Toni? Think about it, we sound like pizza-bites. It would never work. If you hear me saying I'm going to do it again, you must say no. And it's undermining my project. Now I have to write an entire chapter on ‘sleeping with the enemy.'”

“But what if he's not the enemy?” I say. “What if he really likes you?”

Finally, finally, she puts the visor back up and looks at the road. Speed: eighty-six.

“Change the subject,” she insists. “I need you to change the subject. Have you ever dated online?”

“No, but I worked on my profile today. I'm trying to do what you said, sound witty and light, not bitter and desperate.”

“Good,” she replies. “And dumb. Believe me, the more I misspell, the more I hear back. Did I tell you how many misspellings were in my first e-mail to Tino?”

“No,” I say, “I'm just excited to meet professional men. My ex, Zach, God bless him, I was the only one with a car, the only one with a job, the only one who seemed anxious to get out of Langsdale, Indiana. He's still there, dating some tadpole of a female.”