“For my ‘daughter’s hand in marriage,’” Dr. Wei said bemusedly. “Which one?”
“Of your daughters?” Olu frowned.
“Of her hands. The one with the ring would appear to be taken—”
“I knew you would do this! I
knew
it,” Ling seethed. “And it’s not your decision! I’ve already said yes. I
told
you.” She turned to face Olu. Let go.
Olu, ungripped, felt his stomach turn over. Dr. Wei smoothed his hair down and said, “Well. I see.” Ling stood abruptly and left the room, crying, her small shoulders shaking. A door slammed somewhere.
Then Dr. Wei laughed—rather shockingly, warmly, a rich and deep sound in the space Ling had left. He took off his glasses and wiped them off, tearing. More rumbles of laughter then, smiling, he spoke. “I’m laughing at myself. I should have known this was coming. Ling’s mother always said you were friends. ‘They’re just friends.’ For fifteen years? No, I didn’t think so.” Another rumble. “So often one knows, without seeing, the truth.” He put on his glasses, looking closely at Olu. Smoothed down his hair again. “Olu, yes?”
“Yes.”
“I knew an Olu. Oluwalekun Abayomi.” He pronounced the name perfectly. “Nigerian. As you’d know. Top of our class at UPitt by a long shot. It’s not that I’m racist. Far from it.”
“Sir—”
“Please.” He nodded, as if agreeing with himself to continue and crossed his legs, crossing his hands on his knees. “It is true that you don’t have my blessing. And won’t have. But not for the reasons that you may suspect. Certainly not the reasons that she does. That Ling does.” He glanced at the hallway down which she had stormed. Olu shifted, too, but to settle in, listening, lulled by the cadence, the professorial tone. Odd how this happened, even now in his thirties, this defaulting to Student at the first sign of Teacher. “When I was in grad school in Pittsburgh—fine city—I befriended a fair number of Africans. Men. All of them men, unsurprisingly. Engineering. Just grown-up boys playing with toys.” Sipped his tea. “They’d come from all over, some wealthy, some destitute, but all of them brilliant, pure genius, those five. The hardest-working men in our cohort, I tell you. All bafflingly good at the math.” Smoothed his hair. “Americans call Asians the ‘model minority.’ At one point this may have been true. Recent past. But now it’s the Africans. I see it in the classroom. Asians are through. We got fat—no, don’t laugh. You never saw overweight Asians, not young ones, not back when we came, when the girls were still young. I see them all over now, Koreans, Chinese, on the train, on the campus. It’s the beginning of the end. A fat Asian child can win a spelling bee maybe, but a science fair? No. It’s the Africans now. I’m serious. You’re laughing.”
But Olu couldn’t help it.
Dr. Wei started also, his deep, bossed gong laugh. “I say this to say that I admire the culture, your culture, its respect for education above all. Every African man I have
ever
encountered in an academic setting excelled, barring none. I haven’t met a single lazy African student, or a fat one for that matter, in forty years here. I know it sounds crazy, we laugh, but believe me. I teach undergraduates. I see it every day. African immigrants are the future of the academy. And the Indians.” He paused here to finish his tea.
While Olu sat, smiling, an odder thing still: to be enjoying Dr. Wei’s conversation. Ling had always reviled him as arrogant, unyielding, charming to a point and indifferent beyond. She’d never gone home for vacation in college, finding overseas community service work to do instead. She’d skipped her sister’s wedding so as not to see her father, and ignored the man’s calls when they came, twice a year, the one—September second—for an off-key “Happy Birthday,” the other Chinese New Year for “Kung Hei Fat Choy.” Olu knew better than to probe, and he didn’t, for fifteen years almost had never once asked:
honey, why don’t we drive out to Newton to see them?
or
what did he do to you?
Never once asked. And Ling didn’t either: what had happened to his father, why they’d never been to Ghana (they’d been everywhere else), why he’d balked only recently at an e-mail from Fola inviting them for dinner on Christmas? Instead, they hung there between them, in Allston, New Haven, now a ten-minute walk from where Olu once lived: all the questions and heartbreaks, unanswered, untreated, just left there to dry in the silence and sun.
So Olu was shocked now to find himself smiling, at ease with this man whom Ling hated so much. There was something even appealing about Dr. Wei’s manner, the efforts of the fastidious mathematician to make friends. As smug as he seemed, the hair smoothing betrayed him: Dr. Wei was self-conscious, of what was unclear. Perhaps of the accent that coated his consonants, a threat to the facile delivery, the
r
’s? Perhaps of the slightness of build, further slighted by nearness to Olu’s own wide-chested frame? Perhaps of the sadness alive in his pupils, as present as laugh lines around his bright eyes? Or of something else, dark, Olu couldn’t see what, but could sense that this man was no stranger to shame. And was opening his mouth to say “Interesting” or suchlike when Dr. Wei smoothed down his hair and went on.
“You know, I never understood the dysfunctions of Africa. The greed of the leaders, disease, civil war. Still dying of
malaria
in the twenty-first century, still hacking and raping, cutting genitals
off? Young children and nuns slitting throats with machetes, those girls in the Congo, this thing in Sudan? As a young man in China, I assumed it was ignorance. Intellectual incapacity, inferiority perhaps. Needless to say I was wrong, as I’ve noted. When I came here I saw I was wrong. Fair enough. But the backwardness persists even now, and why is that? When African men are so bright? as we’ve said. And the women, too, don’t get me wrong, I’m not sexist. But why is that place still so backward? I ask. And you know what I think? No respect for the family. The fathers don’t honor their children or wives. The Olu I knew, Oluwalekun Abayomi? Had two bastard children plus three by the wife. A brain without equal but no moral backbone.
That’s
why you have the child soldier, the rape. How can you value another man’s daughter, or son, when you don’t even value your own?”
Olu was silent, too startled to speak.
“You can’t.” Dr. Wei opened his hands: QED. “Your mother, for example.
Ms
. Savage. Not
Mrs.
With a different last name than yours. Sai. Is that right? I’m
assuming
—and it is just an assumption, I acknowledge—that your father left your mother to raise you alone?”
Olu sat, frozen, too angry to move.
“Exactly. And there’s your example. Your father. The father is always the example.” He paused. “Now you may say, ‘No, no, I’m not like my father—’”
“No,” Olu mumbled.
“And that’s what you
think
, but—”
“I’m just like my father. I’m
proud
to be like him.” Just barely a whisper through Olu’s clenched teeth. Dr. Wei, caught off guard, tipped his head and looked at Olu—who, hands and chest trembling, looked steadily back. Said, “He’s a surgeon like I am, the best in his field,” and the rest in an outpour, one soft seething rush: “The problem isn’t Ling wants to marry an African. It’s not that she’s marrying
me
, and she will. No, the problem is
you
, Dr. Wei.
Your
example.
You’re
the example of what they don’t want. Both of them, Ling and Lee-Ann, and why is that? Why aren’t there pictures of them in your place? What was it, ‘the father is always the example’? Both of your daughters prefer something else.”
Ling appeared now in her coat, holding Olu’s.
Aaaaaaa-men.
“Lacrimosa,” the choral climax.
Dr. Wei cleared his throat, but before he could speak Ling grabbed Olu and left. Out the door, just like that.
• • •
Then laughing together, a flute and a cello, the car windows open to birds and a breeze.
“You were there the whole time?”
“I was listening from the bathroom. Lee-Ann was on speaker. I love you so much.” She was crying. “Let’s get married. Tonight. Go to Vegas.”
“Right now?”
“It’s been fourteen years, fuck it, why not? Have we ever been to Nevada? Wait, where’s the Grand Canyon?”
“Arizona.”
“Go to Logan,” she said, and he did.
• • •
Then the Little White Wedding Chapel six hours later.
Ling-and-Olu in Vegas.
Of all places.
• • •
Now she wakes herself up with her tossing and turning. “Hey,” she says groggily, rubbing her eyes. She peers at him sitting in scrubs in the chair and assumes that he’s sliding his shoes off, or on. “Coming or going?”
Caught. “Going,” he lies. He puts down her T-shirt, embarrassed, and stands. He goes to the bedside and kisses her softly. Says, “Go back to sleep,” and she does.
• • •
He goes to the bathroom and closes the door. He sits on the toilet seat, taut from the lie. The mirror in front of him shows him a face, raw and ashen, eyes red from the thing, and the cold, and a phone peeking out from his little scrubs pocket. He pulls this out, sighing, and dials.
3.
And what was it this time that bade her from bed to the closet, the coat and the short coat-length dress, to the street, to the gray of the soon-coming snow, to the cab, to the Village, and (back) to his bed?
What was it this time? Insomnia? A nightmare?
Was midnight already uptown when she left: just the man and his pug hurrying home saw her go, turned their heads as she passed in the thigh-length fur coat. (She does this, has always done this since Everything Changed, these little scenes from the movie she shoots in her head: frazzled lead enters frame, looking right, looking left, spots the taxi, leaps in, and zips off in the night.) She didn’t zip. She rode slowly through Saturday traffic, the streets of New York clogged with seekers of love, to the old stately home of her old stately lover where Taiwo got out, paused to look at the snow. Downward it danced through the black and the quiet, the yellow-gold lamplight, and onto the ground where some stuck and some melted, a funny thing, really, that something so soft could remain, could endure.
And pausing looked down the short block at the windows—some black and some gold, after midnight downtown—as she’d done as a child driving home in the Volvo, her hands pressed against the cold glass in the back. Those houses had seemed so impressive, imposing, set back from the road on low slopes or with gates, Brookline brick with black shutters or Tudors with turrets, ten bedrooms at least as compared to their five. But it wasn’t this grandeur that dazzled her mute. What bewitched her was all those warm windows. The glow. All those warm, wealthy people she peered at inside, with their dining rooms yellowed by chandelier light or their bedrooms turned amber against the night darkness, against the outsideness. The families implied. For though they, too, lived there—
her
family, in Brookline, not five or ten minutes from where she now passed—she had never once felt what she saw in those windows, that warm-yellow-glowing-inside-ness of home.
Even in the beginning, before things went pear-shaped (before Kehinde came in from the car without sound, up the stairs, down the hall, to her room where she’d been watching, where she was waiting in the windowsill, sat down, and wept), there was the sense in her house of an ongoing effort, of an upswing midmotion, a thing being built:
A Successful Family
, with the six of them involved in the effort, all, striving for the common goal, as yet unreached. They were unfinished, in rehearsal, a production in progress, each performing his role with an affected aplomb, and with the stress of performance ever-present for all as a soft sort of sound in the background. A hum.
There was “him,” straining daily to perform the Provider, and Fola’s star turn as Suburban Housewife, and Olu’s as fastidious-cum-favored First Son; the Artist, gifted, awkward; and the Baby. Then she. Determined to deliver a flawless performance, to fly from the stage chased by thunderous applause, Darling Daughter of champions, elementary school standout, the brightest of pupils in bright-eyed class pictures. No one asked her to do this. Not him, never Fola. No one mapped their joint progress toward the one goal—were they there yet? had they made it? had they
become
a Successful Family—but she knew to keep going, to keep striving, by the hum.
The families in the windows were Successful Families already, had finished the heavy lifting generations ago, were not building or straining or making an effort; the goal had been reached. They could rest now, calm down. At night, through their windows, she saw them there, finished, with silence between them in place of the hum, placid familyness captured in paint above mantels, with feet up on cushions, at rest and at home.
But how could she answer when Fola would ask her, about to start laughing, perpetually amused, “What are you always staring at back there, my darling?”
“The houses.”
“The houses? You have a house of your own.”
But not a home
was the difference she saw even then, peering in from the car, from outside, as they passed—and saw now as she paused on the sidewalk outside. Lighting a cigarette. The cliché.
But not a home.
“Is it you?”
He had cracked the door open at the top of the stoop to look down at the sidewalk. At first she didn’t turn. She stared down his block at his neighbors’ lit windows, thinking partially of how she looked to him. Short white fur coat. “For God’s sake, it’s freezing out. What are you looking at?” He followed her gaze down the block. Now she turned.
And there he was, lovely and solid and ruffled in sweatpants and sweater, an incongruous scarf.
“It is I,” she said, blowing out smoke with a flourish. “Did you miss me?”
With aching. “Come here.”
And she went.
• • •
What was it this time, at midnight, near sleeping, that bade her to rise, to get dressed, and to go? When she
knows
, she thinks now, that to go is to start the thing over right back where they ended it last?
She rides in the cab with her head on the window, her coat rather flattened for its hours on the floor, looking out at the Hudson, New Jersey in lights, feeling light-headed, empty, an odd sort of calm. And remembers now: midnight, alone in her room, having gone to sleep early, the rare weekend off, bolting up in the bed in the dark barely breathing, then crying for no reason at all.
She forgot.
It happened so quickly—this moment on waking, the tears which began without cause and then stopped—that she didn’t remember, not two minutes later, and not until now, what had woken her up. It wasn’t the insomnia, her lifelong companion, nor the “feelings of emptiness,” as Dr. Hass says (a misnomer, says Taiwo: there is just the one feeling, only one way to
be
empty, only one way to feel it). It was something entirely different, what she felt before going and remembers (too late) as she makes her way home, those forgotten few seconds of some bizarre sorrow, intense beyond reason, a force field of grief. Yes. This is what woke her. A force field of sorrow. But how can she answer Dr. Hass, who will sigh, “So we saw him . . . ,” Monday morning on Central Park West, with the trees out the window all dressed up in snow, bare brown branches like legs in a short white fur coat, with the gesture, ceremonial, that goes with the sigh: the raising of the glasses (which may well be fake, Taiwo thinks, fashion glasses, a therapist prop) from the tip of her nose to the top of her head. “Did he call you?”
“No.”
“But you saw him.”
“Yes.”
“It was you who called him.”
“I didn’t call. I just went.”
Further sighing. Furious scribbling. “Spent the night.”
“Early morning.”
“Let’s start with our decision. Do we know why we went?”
And what can she say to this? Why did “we” see him?
We felt our very being rushing out of us like breath
and longed to touch and be touched, to make contact,
and did.
We missed our father.
• • •
“You said?”
The cab driver peers through his rear view at Taiwo, who stirs, caught off guard, lifts her head off the glass. “I’m sorry?”
“You said something.” The driver is Ghanaian. She can tell by his accent. “‘I missed my father,’ you said.”
“I did?” Taiwo flushes. The driver nods, smiles. Their eyes meet in the mirror, and she sees him react: looking quickly away and then back, at her eyes, as one caught doing something he should but can’t stop.
“W-where are y-you from?” he stammers shyly. “What are you?” But means what they all mean. What are your eyes?
“I don’t know.”
“You sound English.”
“I studied in England.”
“Me, I’m from—”
“Ghana. I know. I could tell.”
“
Ey!
How did you know that?”
“My mother’s Nigerian.”
“Bella naija!”
He beams. “And this father you missed?”
“Did I say that?”
“You must have been thinking out loud.”
“Did I think that?” She’s smiling. Her BlackBerry rings.
“It’s your father!” He’s laughing, glancing back through the mirror.
She fumbles for the phone in the bag at her feet. It stops ringing. She finds it. “It’s my brother.” She’s frowning. She puts down the phone and leans back and is quiet. The radio plays softly, Wagadu-Gu, “Sweet Mother,” the merry Sierra Leonean Afro-pop hit. The driver stops laughing now, focused on the road again, knowing as cab drivers do when to stop, when the moment is over, how to exit a scene: keep one’s eyes on the road, turn the radio up.
Taiwo rests her head on the glass, out of habit, the phone in her fingers, “O. Sai” on the screen. She is glad that she missed him, she thinks (donning armor), does not need a lecture this time of the night, Olu’s five-minute speech about Sai family glory, what Others Must Think of Them,
oh the shame
.
No.
What would he know about shame, Perfect Olu, as clean cut and taut as the other once was, with his cold little life in cold Boston, his girlfriend, their cold-white apartment, white smiles on the walls,
Ling-and-Olu do good in warm weather
, two robots, degree-getting, grant-winning, good-doing androids,
a picture of perfection, New Immigrant Perfection, of cowardice rewarded, she thinks (readied bow), an old habit, this, bad one, to attack her attackers or whomever she perceives to be planning attack, right or wrong, noting all of their flaws in her mind, in this manner discrediting them). What would he know?
Yes.
If one had just stayed on that carousel, amassing gold rings, seated, smiling, and safe, going round and round, living the same four years over, at Milton, Yale, med school, a life on repeat—(1) compete for acceptance to elite institution, (2) get accepted, (3) work hard, (4) do well, then start back at (1) four years later—then
yes
, one might lecture on “shame.” Might call her a “failure” for withdrawing from law school, condemn her as “reckless,” “disappointment to Mom,” the final blow to the production,
Successful Family
in shambles, curtains closed, theater shuttered forever. But how? How can
he
know what it is to be stared at and talked about; worse, not to care, to give in to it? He who knows nothing of hot things, of wrong things, of loss, failure, passion, lust, sorrow, or love? When even she can’t explain it, to Dr. Hass, to herself, doesn’t know where it comes from, the ravenous urge to be swallowed, digested, to pass through a body only to drag oneself back to the mouth of the beast?
Olu can’t.
So he lies there, mute, riddled with arrowheads, the fastidious-
cum
-favored-
cum
-fallen First Son, as she leans her head back on the cab seat, defended and spent by the act of resenting her brother.
It brings her no comfort, this felling of Olu. Instead, as she draws her mind closer to look, she sees
her
face, not Olu’s, her body, not his, pierced with sharp flint-knapped stone, bleeding out in the snow.
“No?” says the driver.
“I’m sorry?” says Taiwo.
The driver frowns, worried. “You just told me, ‘No!’”
“I meant no, don’t take 96th,” Taiwo lies quickly, dismayed by this new habit of thinking aloud. “If you exit at 125th it’ll be faster. Just go up to Amsterdam, right, and we’re there.”
“You got it,” says the driver. He glances at Taiwo.
She stares out the window, at blood in the snow.
• • •
And how had
this
happened?
The death of Darling Daughter. The brightest of pupils, who never looked out, who had spent half her life with her head in a book, learning Latin roots, spewing right answers. Alone. She had never been close to a man, not since Kehinde; her efforts to make or keep friends came to naught: there was always the issue of beauty between them, as envy in women, desire in men, indistinguishable in the end, lust and envy, co-original, the flower and leaf of the same twisted root. Regardless, when the press learned, they made it sound natural: a tale old as time, beauty, power, and sex, dean of law school in love tryst with editor of
Law Review
,
BEAUTY AND THE DEAN
! in “Page Six,” and the rest. And it was, in a way; it
was
natural, that it happened, that Girl in a city that adulates blondes should find Boy (fifty-two, former blond turned to silver-and-gold) in a city that adulates youth. The press didn’t say this. They said that Dean Rudd, born Rudinsky, the fund-raising whiz kid uptown, charming lawyer-turned-scholar with old money wife (noted
New York Times
food critic Lexi Choate-Rudd), one-time Marshall scholar, White House fellow, intern to Carter, special assistant to Clinton, the crown Prince of Gifts, had at last lost his titular Golden Boy glow and would step down at once, move downtown.
Curtains closed.
Dr. Hass, the psychotherapist appointed by the school to calm hypercompetitive postteens on the eve of exams, found it natural, too, albeit a good deal more interesting than the eating and anxiety disorders
du jour
. This is why, Taiwo has long since suspected, Dr. Hass had insisted they continue pro bono after the scandal erupted and Taiwo withdrew, with her Columbia Student Medical Insurance Plan abruptly canceled—and continues still now over a year and a half later, insistent that they finish, that they “see the work through.” With the thinly veiled references to quitting and abandoning. A valiant exemplar of how not to do both, Clara Hass, with her buzz cut and tortoiseshell frames and the voice of a DJ of late-night soft rock. Further tales: “father hunger,” “Electra Complex,” perfectly natural.
But nary a word about nature.
As if the thing could be accounted for by psychology, sociology, but not biology, given the different age and race, not by nature. By the
basics
of nature, senseless baseness of nature, instant-basic attraction, lust, visceral reactions, the thing that simply happens at times between humans as between animals crossing paths in the forest (or jungle): the one sees the other or catches its scent and is drawn as by magnet to mount it, to mate. The press didn’t consider this. Dr. Hass doesn’t believe this. That Taiwo, with no history whatsoever with older men, simply entered a room and saw
this
older man, this Dean Rudd, and he her, and it simply began.