• • •
“Dean, this is Taiwo.”
The assistant, Marissa.
The interview, March, winter dying outside, with the trees on the quad sprouting shy pinkish blossoms despite the loud protest of sharp, howling wind: female lead enters frame and stops short at the door at the edge of a carpet of mustards and wines—so much different then, younger, determined, believing, just back to New York after three years at Oxford, the god of Approval still fat on its altar—and stands, looking in from the threshold.
Feels tension.
In blue velvet blazer and dress-cum-dashiki, the tongue-in-cheek dress code, half devil-may-care, quarter Yoruba priestess, quarter prim British schoolgirl, her upsweep of locks dripping tendrils, high heels, with that feeling of conquest she still sometimes gets before entering rooms in which points must be won, in which men must be smiled at and women impressed, prey and predator both, stretching forelegs and jaw. Stopping short, with Marissa, both jarred by the tension, the male lead’s expression, the way he just stares.
He didn’t stop staring. Marissa was blushing, the nature of the reaction plain even to her. “Well, I’ll leave you two to it,” she said without irony.
One caught doing something he should but can’t stop. “M-Miss Sai,” he said, coughing. “Come in. Please. Excuse me.” He cleared his throat twice. “Marissa, thank you.”
Marissa left.
Taiwo entered.
Walking slowly across the carpet between the doorway and the armchair, red leather, across from his desk. Repelled and drawn, both, as if pulled by a current, resisting a current, undone by his stare, azure blue in the shadow of inky-black lashes, a see-through stare, seeing through. Seen through, she sat.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said, sitting also. They didn’t shake hands, as if knowing
not yet
. “I was hoping to see you in person, to meet you. After reading your essay.” He held up her file. “I can’t remember the last time I read something like this.” He shook his head, laughed. “You write too well to be a lawyer.”
Unsure where to look—at his eyes, at his smile, at his finger on the folder, at the light in his hair, making silver-gold glitter—she looked at her hands. She said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t be silly. Thank
you
.” How he laughed. “The only thing I wanted to ask at this meeting is whether you’re certain that law school’s for you? Not Columbia Law. We’d be honored to have you. But law school in general. I know what you wrote. About your mother’s decision to give up on law school, to sacrifice all for the sake of her children.”
“It wasn’t as bad as all that. Did I write that?”
“In glorious prose, yes, you did, Taiwo Sai.” With the light from the window behind him between them. “May I ask where it comes from, your last name?”
“You may.” With the light in her eyes, in his laughter. “From Ghana.”
“Your parents are from Ghana?”
“My father was, yes.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. Hearing
was
, thinking death. “And your mother?”
“Less sorry than you are, I think.”
And began. Out of nowhere: this ease and this banter, as if they were peers, friends for years and now more: how they laughed and then stopped, half-smiles staining their lips from the laughing, then blushed at each other, and knew. They spoke for an hour politely, pro forma (the usual thing, her unusual past, the twin brother the artist in London, how impressive, a Rhodes, how outstanding, the Latin and Greek), and she spun the tale lightly and loosely as always, a story told well about somebody else, without detail or heat, “I did this,” “I did that,” with great flair but no feeling, no truth past the facts—and he listened intently, the azure eyes burning with knowing that nothing was being revealed, that the facts were a coat with the truth there beneath it, bare skin to be accessed at some other time.
• • •
Some other time.
Raining, November, on Barrow.
Both bashful, the fact of it baffling somehow, what the dean of the school and a student had
done
quite apart from the blushing and knowing they would.
They’d come from a function at his townhouse on Park, where he’d asked her and three other students along, 1L standouts already in early November, to explain to alumni why they’d chosen the school. After, he’d taken them all down to dinner at Indochine, the five of them squeezed in a booth, with the three others babbling on eagerly and ably, well pleased with their spring rolls and litchi martinis, and Taiwo squeezed next to him watching him charm with his arm on the banquette behind her. Cologne. It wasn’t that she found him so physically attractive—though he was, in his way, for his weight class so to speak, with the lean sort of body of a middle-aged runner, all the tautness intact in the arms and the legs, less the torso, not tall, five foot ten at the outside, a very good frame for a very good suit, with a nose sloping down to a cup of a mouth, a hook nose, pointy chin, heart-shaped mouth, narrow cheeks. Rather, she found him magnetic. A presence. He’d pass in Greene Hall, and she’d feel him go by in a rippling of air. A light tugging sensation. Eyes tugged, she’d turn, see him. “Miss Sai,” he’d say, smile.
After the dinner the others went clubbing, with cold rain just starting and she begging off, “I’m too tired, maybe next time,” and he saying quietly, “At least let me hail you a cab,” but no cabs. They walked some, together, moving closer and closer, as two people do when it’s starting to rain, halfway looking for cabs, halfway looking for excuses. Down Lafayette, over to Washington Square Park.
“I lived here,” she said as they passed Hayden Hall.
“So did I.”
Taiwo objected, “You never went to NYU. It was Yale, then Yale Law School, then the Marshall, then the White House.”
“All that from Wikipedia?”
“Your intro tonight.”
“Of course.” He was blushing. “I grew up in the Village. When the Village was the Village still, Jewish and black.” He reached for her hand, less a pass than punctuation. Without looking.
“The band’s back together.” She laughed. She held up their hands, interlocked, and let go. The rain picking up as they crossed through the park. “From the Village to the Upper East Side,
non é male
.”
“My parents-in-law gave us that house after school. A wedding gift.” He chuckled. “I hate it.”
“Your house?”
“Well, my wife’s house more precisely; my house is still here. Little two-bed on Barrow. My mother never sold it. A consummate pothead, never held down a job more than three or four months, waiting tables in diners, but bought the apartment, may God bless her soul. Grew her own grass, smoked it three times a day. It was calm in that house. Kissed my first girl just there.” He pointed to a bench. “Lena Freeman.”
“Nice Jewish girl?”
“Member of the Black Panther Party in fact. We met at a protest right here by the fountain.”
“Your first kiss was a black girl?”
“A woman. Twenty-eight.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“You’re lying.”
“I was, yes. Pretended I was a student at Columbia Law School.”
“Look at you now, kid!” She hit his arm, playful. “It’s a bit past your bedtime, no, speaking of home?”
He didn’t stop laughing. “Yes. Lexi’s in Napa. I should call you a car service. Let’s get inside.”
• • •
Whereon they ran the short distance to Barrow Street, up the three flights to the silence and darkness where feeling for light switch and shaking off jacket, they shifted positions and bumped, chest to chest.
• • •
Presently, they were kissing as one does in darkness in foyers still dripping from running through rain: with one’s hands and the other’s removing wet clothes with an urgent choreography learned without words. Postfinale they lay in his mother’s old bedroom, the downpour a soundtrack, both nude, on their backs, and he took her arm, steel brown in moonlight, and kissed it. “I love how you smell.”
“Like Lena Freeman?” And laughed.
He propped himself up now. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Now,
that
would impress me.”
“For the first time tonight?” Feigning shock. “You mean to tell me that my speech didn’t impress you? ‘The Gift Is the Giving’? My outfit? Okay. The bow tie was rich. Another gift from the in-laws.”
“A bow for the house?”
Laughing harder, “
Touché
.” He leaned on his elbow to face her more squarely. With sadness, “You’re thinking I lost it somewhere. That I once had a freedom, a vision, had Lena, a Black Panther girlfriend, a Jew-fro, a fire, had this sense of the world and myself, burning in it, this burning desire to change things somehow, that I went off to school and met Lexi, got married, cashed in, married up, lost the heat, lost the fire, that I’m looking for something, a spark, inspiration, that you’re Lena incarnate, you think. But you’re wrong. I’ve never met anyone like you, not Lena, not anyone, anywhere.”
“Impressive,” she said.
“Besides, there’s your hair. Hers was”—gesturing—“bigger. A cloud. A constellation.”
“An Afro.”
“A world. Yours isn’t”—touching her dreadlocks—“horizontal.”
“You don’t like my white-girl hair?”
“Don’t like your
what
?”
“My dreadlocks. My white-girl hair.”
Laughing, always laughing, “Aren’t dreadlocks Jamaican? Afrocentric at least? Do people still say that? Afrocentric?”
“Yes. White people.”
“I adore you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Then help me,” he said. “I want to. I want to know you.”
“You can’t. I’m a student. You’re married.”
He was quiet. After a moment, “I know.” He lay down beside her, to face her less squarely. For minutes neither spoke. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
Taiwo was thinking—for the first time in hours, not reacting but
thinking
—that there had been some mistake, that if casting young women to play the puss/pupil to a professor whose wife was away tasting wine, one should look for a student better suited to scandal (or to the Village or Napa or the Upper East Side), one of the very pretty pill addicts with whom she’d gone to high school, for example, hair tussled, black eyeliner smeared, and not her, an overachiever only playing at temptress, an ex-goody-two-shoes in bad girl footwear. It was a show, the vintage dresses and American Spirits, the rapid-fire wit and implied sex appeal, with learned lines and sharp costumes and dull supporting actors; she was playing at sex but knew nothing of love. There was the Thing That Had Happened in Lagos, and after, the countless encounters with lustful male friends, but not this, never passion (moreover, admiration), the show come to life, manifest, turned to flesh. But what could she say?
I don’t know what I’m doing?
And how could she answer Dean Rudd when he turned, touched her cheek, found it wet, and said, “Taiwo, don’t cry,” and assorted sweet nothings along the same lines?
She left the bed abruptly and went to the bathroom. She didn’t turn the light on. She stood at the mirror. And here she was: naked and seeking approval, the doer of homework and earner of praise ever desperate to win back her erstwhile Darlingness dazzling the judges, whoever they were. With the body, as always, a stranger post-coitus, the long, lanky limbs and congenital tone,
a good body
, she’d heard, though she didn’t believe it, or couldn’t quite see it, not least after sex. Now it looked functional, a thing, instrumental. A means to an end, though she didn’t know which. She thought of her sister, who longed for this body. Half laughed at the irony, at how these things worked: that she, Taiwo, had inherited and maintained with no effort the model-esque figure that Sadie so craved—and from Fola, who, frightened by the baby’s low birth weight, had overfed Sadie and babied her sick. (The disorder. Unmentioned. Though all of them saw it. If only she could, she’d have said, “Sadie, here, take my body, I don’t want it. I never even liked it. It’s not like I asked for it.”) Luck of the draw. A cow born in India or Gary, Indiana. Who was to be faulted? The deified cow? And yet she was. Faulted. Was wanted, and faulted, or felt so, and still went on seeking the want. She thought of Dr. Hass in hemp scarf, chunky turquoise. “You don’t have to impress me,” she’d recently said, leaning back in the armchair to lift up the glasses and stare at her client, a strange gentle stare.
“Of course I don’t,” Taiwo had quipped, laughing hoarsely, the sound of the laughter false even to her, in her ears, as she’d shifted, unnerved by the comment, eyes trained out the window. “I already have. You treat me for free, no?”
“I do,” Dr. Hass said. “And why would I do such a thing, do we think? Your unique family background? Your remarkable accomplishments? Your formidable intelligence? Your stunning good looks?”
Taiwo laughed again, but it hurt her to do so. She shrugged, rubbed her elbow. “You got me,” she said. She looked at the clock, built-in bookshelf, O’Keeffe print.
Cup of Silver Ginger
. Out the window again. A word was taking shape on the tip of her tongue but the tears got there first and she swallowed them both. “Time is up.” Stood.
“I care.” Remained seated.
“I know,” she said, leaving, and meant it.
A fraud
.
The word came, belated, and floated before her, a shape in the mirror, a tint to the light. She reached out a finger to touch her reflection, her eyes glowing back at her, strange in the dark (an inheritance, the color, from the Scottish great-grandmother), tracing her lips, conch-shell pink, on the glass. “Taiwo, don’t cry,” she said, softly, in mimicry. She laughed at the sound of it, dropping her hand. What was there to cry about? The same thing as always. The crushing disbelief in the truth of their love.
She returned to the bedroom and stood in the doorway (in armor) and looked at him, noting the flaws. The torso less taut than the arms and the legs with a thinning of hair near the crown of his head. A better cast woman would have asked at this juncture if the man found it strange to be here in this house, in his mother’s old room (albeit remodeled completely, a childhood apartment turned bachelor pad), but it didn’t occur to her, was vaguely familiar, a son in the bed of his mother. Instead, she found her damp purse by the bed where she’d dropped it and went to the windowsill, steel brown, and sat. “Do you mind if I smoke?”