Authors: Jess Row
Finally the light turns green, and she sprints across, lock-legged, stalking fury and frustration. I follow two steps behind, and not until halfway down to Pratt does she give me a sideways look. Sorry, she says. I’m upset. I’m uncomfortable. It’s no excuse for acting like a baby.
Something has passed between us, I’m just beginning to realize, in that half-block, that fifty yards of uneven and rutted city pavement. Her face, uncomposed, is trying to regain control of itself. In a different age, in a Victorian novel, I would say,
my dear lady,
and touch her elbow, or offer her a handkerchief. I have the urge to be gallant and rise above it all. But we live in an age allergic to suppositions. The pause we’re in now is the one where she’s expected to say,
These cases are really getting to me, I need a vacation,
or,
I had some bad news before we left the office,
or,
My allergies are acting up and my sinuses are killing me.
She’s not going to offer an explanation; I know that much. We’ve passed beyond social lies. Where we’ve arrived, on the other hand, is an open question.
It seems to me, for a moment, that Martin’s decision—that Martin’s real existence, the real fake black man that he is—has, subtly, indefinably, already seeped into the world around us. That we are living in an ersatz twenty-first century.
You know I spent every weekend down here? I say. Fell’s Point was my stomping grounds. The best record store in Baltimore was two blocks that way. Reptilian Records. I spent every spare dollar I had in that place. Between that and the Salvation Army and the vintage store down on Aliceanna and Charm City Coffee down on Thames—that was the circuit. And Jimmy’s. That was the only place we could afford to eat.
Mom and Dad didn’t give you much of an allowance?
I wasn’t really into capitalism. I used to wear a button that said
Property is theft
.
Which is easy to say, of course, when your basic needs are all paid for. But at least I was consistent. I don’t think I owned a single new piece of clothing until I went to college.
Saved your parents a lot of money.
In theory, but all of it was poured back into music in the end.
That
was the property I cared about. Drums, cases, cymbals, sticks, gas for when we went on tour. It was a pretty expensive hobby.
What kind of a band were you in?
I’d have to know your point of reference. Ever heard Fugazi?
Fu-what?
Helmet? Jesus Lizard? Jawbox?
I had a roommate at Spelman who was into the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane’s Addiction.
Okay. Well, we were like Jane’s Addiction without the funk, and the falsetto voices, and all that L.A. druggie attitude.
But all Jane’s Addiction
was
was funk, and falsetto—
I think I’d have to play it for you. We had a lot of dissonance, a lot of noise, but still
songs
, in the end. We were political and artsy. And for a while we actually had a following. Put out three EPs and one LP. Toured all around the East Coast.
This was all in high school? Any chance of a reunion?
None, I say, keeping my breathing steady, because our singer—his name was Alan—he died of a drug overdose. In 1994.
An overdose?
The nonaccidental kind. He’d already been hospitalized once for depression. A classic late-adolescence bipolar shift.
That must have been devastating. And it was here? No wonder you never wanted to come back.
It was all too convenient, really. Because my parents moved away. With that, and Alan’s death, I fell into this groove of thinking I didn’t belong anywhere. Right around that time I was getting fluent in Chinese, and all my energy was wrapped up in that, and hanging out with kids from Amherst who’d gone to prep school in Switzerland—it was just easy to think I was some kind of cosmopolite, some Salman Rushdie character, on the run, a homeland that doesn’t want me back. I mean, not literally, but—
No, I understand what you mean. Kind of. I read
Imaginary Homelands
,
too, and it kind of sounded awesome. Like the fatwa was the perfect excuse. Everybody wants a fatwa from their parents at a certain age.
Well, my parents had nothing to do with it.
That can’t quite be true.
No, really. Their emotional lives are just barely above room temperature. Some parents of only children are like that. You must know what I’m talking about. I mean, they can get into the act when they have to. When the accident happened, they were there, after a fashion. Because, literally, I had nowhere else to turn. Our friends were wonderful friends, but it takes more than a good friend to help out in that kind of catastrophe. And in the larger sense, I mean, all those years we were in Baltimore, my parents were just so much on the periphery of my experience. And they knew it. They couldn’t control what was happening to me. Baltimore was way too much for them to handle. New Paltz is exactly their speed. My mom practically runs the library—she volunteers nearly every day. The highlight of their week is singing in the Unitarian
Church choir. The truth is, they find parenthood exhausting, and I’m just me, not some kind of train wreck. They made it extremely easy for me to feel like an orphan—a cultural orphan.
I hear you.
You do?
Does that surprise you? Do you even know where I’m from?
Here, I thought. Was I wrong?
I was born here, she says. In my grandparents’ house, while they were still alive. But we left when I was two. Then Champaign-Urbana, where my dad went to grad school. He a civil bureaucrat; he did fiscal planning, bond issues, that kind of thing. He got to like small towns. College towns. Places where the voters weren’t too dumb to pay for a first-class sewer system or a new gym floor before the old one wore out. First Gambier, Ohio. That was middle school. Then Bennington. You’re looking at the valedictorian of North Bennington High School, class of 1994.
Bennington.
No kidding.
My dad loves sweater vests, Vivaldi, and
Wall Street Week
. Does that surprise you? He likes to talk about Mom’s ancestors who fought in the Revolution. The
American
Revolution. Of course, there’s more to it than that. Before I was born, in the Sixties, he lived in New York and drove a cab and played trombone. He was a Manhattan School of Music dropout, a free-jazz cat. Albert Ayler, Noah Howard, Malachi Favors, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders—he was up there with all those guys. Then, so the story goes, he got into an argument outside a club with some black nationalists, not the Panthers but some splinter group, undisciplined, who said the trombone was a bourgeois instrument only fit for Dixie parades. It wound up with one of them grabbing his bone and beating him over the head with it. He woke up in the hospital. Two weeks later he’d moved back in with his parents and enrolled at Morgan State in accounting.
A one-eighty-degree turn.
He’s not the demonstrative type, she says, but when I told him I was going to Spelman he actually broke down and cried. Why, he said, why, why, when you could go anywhere? Why
now
?
And what did you say?
Because I wanted a vacation, she says. I wanted to see how it felt not to be one of two or three. I mean, I shouldn’t complain. My mother didn’t miss a beat. She did my hair right, every day, made sure we read Hughes and Dunbar and
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. She found the nearest church with a decent gospel service and got us there at least once a month. And in the summer we were in Oak Bluffs from the minute school got out. It was her parents’ house, and their money that paid for college, too, so Dad actually didn’t have much say in the matter. Of course, afterward I went to Cornell for med school. But he still doesn’t understand Spelman, and doesn’t understand why I want Sherry and Tamika to go there. To him blackness just isn’t a useful category. He’d rather talk about Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.
Dignity
, that’s what he cares about. I tell him, Marcus Aurelius was George Washington’s favorite writer, and I’ll bet he liked to read him sitting at his desk in Mount Vernon and looking out over the slaves’ backs bent over in the fields.
We’ve come down to the flatland, the ragged end of Fell’s Point, even now dotted with derelict storefronts and shifty, dusty bodegas, shoe stores whose window displays haven’t changed in twenty years. It’s as if there’s a law in Baltimore that gentrification can’t extend more than five blocks in any one direction: a poor city with a pox, an acne spray, of gentility. Chugging past us, though it’s lunchtime, is a school bus filled to the brim, little faces with bright yellow polo shirts squashed against the windows. Girls and boys just a year or so older than Meimei. Kindergarteners. A field trip, is my first thought, but then I remember seeing a headline in the
Sun
about cutbacks and reductions
making kindergarten part-time. They look—is it possible for five-year-olds to look?—weary, and resigned.
You know what I’ve been thinking about? I say to her. The future. The world’s future. I mean, you have to ask yourself, is this world we live in, is this Baltimore, sustainable? I’m taking for granted that in fifty years this spot will be underwater. You have to accept that part. But in the
larger
sense, I mean, look around you, can you see anything that isn’t some kind of danger sign, some kind of warning?
You really want to know my answer? It’s embarrassing.
Of course I want to know.
Well, she says, it’s Martin. Martin is what gives me hope. I mean, look, I’m a suburban girl. I would never have come back here without him. What I was saying earlier—he has such tremendous confidence. And vision. You know what he says about Baltimore? Have you heard him on this topic? The great thing about a city like Baltimore is that you can get lost here. No one’s paying attention. Where did life begin? It began in the tide pools. The places where things wash up and just
sit
and get forgotten. That’s what cities are like. We see the donut-hole economy, the collapse of the middle class, the radical disparities of wealth, and he just sees windows, windows, windows of opportunity. I don’t even know what they are. I probably don’t
want
to know. People talk about the gray economy; well, I know that what he does is gray. But I trust him. He says,
the twenty-first century is all about informal networks.
All I say is, don’t sell drugs. Don’t sell drugs, don’t sell guns, and don’t sell human beings. But intellectual property? Patents? Copyrights? Proprietary information? I could give a damn. If it comes down to asymmetrical economic warfare, I’m all for it.
The small ax.
Trust a white boy to know his Bob Marley. Yeah. The small ax.
A dusty red Camry festooned with bumper stickers pulls alongside us and slows down—practically, it seems, at my elbow.
U.S. Out of Iraq Now. I Love My Country, but We Should See Other People. Nader/LaDuke
2000. I Was at Woodstock and I Vote.
Some people just can’t keep their clichés to themselves, I’m about to say, when I glimpse Mort Kepler through the glass, putting a hairy elbow over the passenger headrest and twisting his head, owl-like, to stare at me. As we walk toward the car—too late to change directions, too late to say
excuse me
and sprint over—he leans over and rolls down the window.
Kelly! Thought you’d have left town by now.
Good to see you, Mort. How’s things?
Figuring out just how far I can stretch my Social Security.
He has a mad grin affixed to his face, a rictus of a smile.
Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?
Robin Wilkinson. Mort Kepler.
Gamely, she reaches through the window to shake his hand. Big fan, she says. Sorry you lost your show. I’m sure it’s only temporary, right? You’ll be back soon somewhere.
Well, he says, still smiling, your friend here didn’t make it easy for me. Not to be rude or anything. Just so you know who you’re associating with.
Nice to see you, Mort, I say, taking Robin’s elbow. And we leave him there, blocking traffic, his emergency blinkers on. Do me a favor, I tell her, don’t look back for a minute. Ignore him.
He was really hostile. I’m surprised.
Did you ever
actually
listen to his show?
A few times. He struck me as a sort of sweet crackpot type. I always pictured him with a beard, for some reason.
Do you ever notice how easy it is for people his age to be angry, and intrusive, and
cruel
, and act like they’re doing you a favor? Or, alternatively, like it’s all your fault?
Well, it was the We Generation.
The Me Generation, you mean.
No, the We Generation. As in,
we did everything right and you guys came along and screwed it up
.
As if we voted for Reagan.
She tosses me a smile, sideways, as if to say, this is fun. Too bad we can’t be friends.
We’re crossing the street now to enter Broadway Market, with all its attendant smells, the fresh-roasted coffees, the deli meats, Old Bay, Belgian fries, fresh bluefish and dolphin and skate. I remember, out of nowhere, Adele Patinkin, who I dated for a few months at Amherst, and how we used to go to the Kosher Kitchen every Saturday night for havdalah, the end of Shabbat service, and how a painted box of spices went hand to hand around the room, everyone getting a whiff of cloves and cinnamon, nutmeg and cardamom. Reawakening to the world. Food, it seems to me, and the smell of food, is the world’s great consolation prize, its way of saying,
things can’t possibly be so bad
. I fall into step after Robin, who looks from side to side, grinning, nearly licking her parted lips, flooded with voracious and well-earned desire, who has forgotten me entirely, for the moment, and I realize that I’ll have to come up with some excuse for having no appetite at all, for needing to leave, abruptly, for needing to sit in my car for fifteen minutes before I can drive, waiting for my starved hands to stop shaking.
Out of sight, behind the forsythias at the far end of Paul and Noreen Phillips’s front lawn, the children are singing “Human Nature.” There must be fifteen of them, in a crowd of forty adults, and for the length of the party they’ve been out in the grass, unattended, with a separate buffet and drinks table, playing hide-and-seek, having somersault contests, dance contests, cheerleading demonstrations. Sherry and Tamika among them, of course, almost shoulder to shoulder, clearly sisters, with identical coils of spaghetti braids that never come loose, no matter how vigorously they roll on the grass. Now the whole crowd has disappeared into the gloaming, the pastel May twilight, and snatches of warbly harmony come floating across the grass:
Reaching out to touch a stranger
Electric eyes are everywhere
—I’ve been trying to remember the first time I ever saw his face, Marshall Haber is saying. It wasn’t at the convention. Before that. It must have been in some TV interview, because he was talking. Sitting down and talking. No idea what he was saying, but you could just tell from his manner, his posture, that he had something going on. You
could tell by the way he folded his hands in his lap.
Control.
No unnecessary movements. Right? And this is when he wasn’t even a senator yet.
Yeah, that’s what people always say, Lee says. The aura and all that.
I’m sitting at the edge of the patio, facing out, fallen into shadow. It’s the moment at a party where the detritus of paper plates and napkins accumulates on every surface, second or third drinks are in hand, and everyone over the age of twenty-five is sitting down and unlikely to rise anytime soon. Ten minutes ago Martin and Robin and I were sitting here in a tight circle, eating shrimp and grits, but she took a call from work and disappeared, and the Brain Trust filtered in, overfed, almost limping with the extra weight, everyone shaking my hand, Paul even slapping me on the shoulder.
You
again? Where’s your notebook? Is this on the record?
I wouldn’t call it an aura, Lee says. That makes me think of a halo, you know? It wasn’t that he was trying out for sainthood. You didn’t get an MLK vibe. Not a Jesse vibe. That’s the thing: he was already
beyond
that. People called it post-racial; it wasn’t post-racial. It was post–
race as an issue
. There’s a crucial difference there. It was, like, say you call up a lawyer because you need to hire a lawyer, and then you walk into his office, and he’s black. Didn’t sound black on the phone, didn’t see a picture, no warning, and then he’s right there, and he gives you this look, you know, he sees you’re off guard, and his look says,
you got a problem with that?
Not in an aggressive way. In an informative way, an appraising way. Like,
is this going to be a problem?
That’s what he was like, those first few years. After the speech.
Hello, America, I’m going to be your next president. I’m the best man for the job. I happen to be black. You got a problem with that?
I got a problem with the phrase
happen to be
,
Marshall says.
Okay. Okay. That’s your job. His job was to use the language of the moment. And white people, excuse me, Kelly, but white people, dominant-paradigm people, they
love
to say,
he happens to be from
Mexico. She happens to be a lesbian. They happen to be part of a polygamous macrobiotic cult
. Because it makes it all random and unintentional.
I happened to fall down and break my ankle.
It all seems so
unfair
that way. You don’t have to draw any connections, just look at what’s in front of you.
We’re all the same
.
God just happened to hit you with the ugly stick.
You know what I’m tired of? Paul says. I’m tired of interpreting
the meaning of Obama
.
Shouldn’t we be over that by now, now that it’s a done deal? A president should not mean, but be.
The Obama era. The Obama years.
Keep your powder dry and your drones in the air.
Bet he contemplated using a drone on John Boehner once or twice. Or Grover Norquist. Or Scalia.
Clarence Thomas. Silent but deadly. Shit, Thomas
is
the drone. The stealth bomber of the white right.
Y’all bringing me down, Paul says. You hear that singing? None of these kids were even
thought
of when that song was on the radio. For them it’s ancient history. It might as well be the Beatles. Or Elvis.
Don’t you know kids don’t listen to the radio anymore? Marshall says. For them it’s all about
Glee
and
American Idol
. They like a song, they pick it up. Doesn’t matter if it’s from yesterday or 1930. I like that. It’s an eclectic era. Take what you want, the rest is dross.
It’s because the music they’re putting out today is crap, Lee says.
All the Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé stuff, with the Auto-Tune and the electric beats, all that fizzy special-effects nonsense.
That’s not fair to Beyoncé, Martin says. She’s the real thing. She’s a throwback.
Says the man who listens to Joni Mitchell. Paul leans over and looks at me. Kelly, has he told you about that? Better make sure you get it down on the record so he can’t deny it later. First time he picked me up in his car, what was he playing?
Blue.
Thought I was going to shit my pants. Seriously, that was some country stuff. So country it was like, not
even twentieth-century, like,
medieval
.
Like there should be recorders and harpsichords on it. And he tried to get off telling me it was Robin’s tape.
It was.
I don’t care if it was Jesus Christ’s tape, I would have tossed it out the window after two bars.
Plenty of people think Joni Mitchell’s cool, Marshall says. Herbie did a whole album of her songs. Ain’t you ever heard
Mingus
?
Yeah, I heard Mingus.
No,
Mingus,
her album, you ignoramus. That’s some whacked-out Seventies material on there. Cassandra Wilson’s early stuff comes right out of
Mingus
.
Problem is, Martin intones, Paul, all due respect, you don’t know your musical history.
But back to Obama—
Seriously?
Yes,
Paul
, Martin says. Seriously. Let him finish.
Before I was so rudely interrupted by Michael Jackson and the henchmen of pop-culture distraction, Marshall says, let me just say that what Obama is
not
is a proxy. He doesn’t carry the bag. Not for the white liberal establishment, not for Israel, not for Charlie Rangel or Tavis Smiley.
He carried the bag pretty damn well for Goldman Sachs. Or he let Geithner carry it.
Then he sicced Elizabeth Warren on Geithner’s ass, Paul. It’s that
Team of Rivals
theory you were telling me about.
Martin scratches his chin.
You ever read those Joseph Campbell books,
The Masks of God
? he says. Robin hooked me up with those when we were first going out. It’s totally fascinating stuff. Anyway. Somewhere in there, Campbell says that the earliest kind of kings in prehistory, in the very early Egyptian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian states, were sacrificial kings, that is, they
were put to death by the people and ceremonially buried in order to appease the gods.
I don’t like where this is going, Lee says.
Okay. Okay. I’m extrapolating a little. But get this. Obama’s just an extremely, extremely smart guy. An intellectual overachiever before he was a political overachiever. And he’s also, just to put it mildly, a hybrid. A mongrel. A cobbled-together person who’s
chosen
his categories all the way along. You got me? That kind of person is always going to be a natural skeptic.
A master of the mask.
Yeah, but here’s the thing. A skeptic is not a cynic. Not necessarily. So Obama, he understands something about the essential nature of being president that the rest of us don’t. Being president means being at the center of a circle whose radius is infinite. You’re the center of an incalculably complex system. Responsible for everything, in control over almost nothing. Now most presidents are essentially just showboats who are very good at projecting leadership and pretending to have a hand on the helm. They sleep well at night. Dubya was one of those. So was Reagan. So was JFK. And then there are the really deep political minds, the Machiavellians. LBJ. Clinton. But Obama is something else again, because he understands the symbolic role of the president is a
tragic
role. That puts him in a different category.
Lincoln.
Yes. And not because he’s freeing any slaves or even because he’s the first black et cetera. Because he wears that mask. He has that look all the time, a kind of noble dread. He’s a sacrificial king, the still center of the churning world. Call him whatever you want, but he’s older than old school. He’s the most
primal
president we’ve had in my lifetime. And the thing is, it’s all contrived. It’s constructed. And we’re okay with that. It’s artificial
and
sacred.
Do I feel, or is it just my hyperattentiveness, that there’s a palpable shift in the room, a feeling that someone’s just gone too far? Not that
Martin’s wrong; that he’s too literally right, too eager to spell it out. There’s a kind of malicious energy in his voice:
I know you too well. I know you better than you know yourselves.
Lee purses his lips and nods. Marshall takes out his BlackBerry and absently spins the wheel with his thumb.
That’s some deep material you got there, Paul says. Kelly, you sure you ain’t writing a book on this guy? ’Cause I think fifteen thousand words isn’t going to cut it.
Martin avoids my look, dusts off his lap, and stands, collecting napkins and cups. Gentlemen, on that note, I have to run off and find my wife, he says. You should do the same. Don’t let them get lonely.
They’re not lonely. They just don’t want to listen to us.
So listen to them for a change.
What, Marshall says, they’re paying you now? Must be nice. He’s getting up, too, and now everyone does, stretching, loosening collars and belts. Got to get the kids to bed, he says. Soccer starts at eight tomorrow. No sleeping in these days.
Coffee in a paper cup and muffin crumbs in your lap. That’s Sunday brunch in my house.
Tell me about it.
And I leave them there, as I have to, before they notice and ask the inevitable question,
do you have kids, Kelly?
I wouldn’t do that to them. It’s kindness, I’m thinking, slipping away, toward the kitchen where the women’s high voices ring out. Not to make them apologize for their lives without meaning it. I never would have been able to apologize for mine.
• • •
P
eter Joseph, it was explained to me, used to be on the board of the Urban League with Martin, and also had a fellowship with the Greater Baltimore Commission the same year as Robin; he’s a venture
capitalist who made his money on the West Coast—an early investor in Yahoo!—and who now is developing a biotech startup in Harbor East. The party is for Renée Jackson, a City Council candidate with bigger plans. What plans? I asked, and Martin said, national plans. We added a House seat to Baltimore City in the last redistricting.
Isn’t that a bit of a stretch, from not even being elected to the City Council?
Watch her, he said. Watch and learn. We shook hands with her as we came in, all together, and then she disappeared into a crowd, every head angled toward her. Short, slim, very erect, in a navy Hillary-style pantsuit, her hair swept back and folded into a sort of a crest—my god, I said under my breath, she’s younger than I am, not even thirty, maybe.
She’s an Iraq vet, Robin told me, handing me a glass of white. There’s serious political traction there. Great family, too. Her dad’s a pastor; he was up on the dais when you came to church with us.
Yeah. Martin pointed him out.
And her mom’s some kind of an heiress from Atlanta. Real estate money. They’re a Spelman family, too. In fact, I interviewed her. Not that it made any difference. She has a law degree, too. Finished her service working in-house at the Pentagon. Seriously, she’s someone to know.
So why aren’t you in there, pressing the flesh?
Robin doesn’t need anyone’s favors, Martin said, in my other ear. I hadn’t noticed, but they were flanking me, providing security. She
dispenses
favors. The second-highest-ranking black woman in the whole Hopkins system. One of these days she’s going to cash in and work in administration.
What he means is, Robin said, in his rich fantasy life, I’m going to sit behind a desk, push paper, and pull down something in the high six figures. In reality, it’ll be a cold day in July.
As she was speaking she laid her hand on my forearm, a purely affectionate, nominal gesture, but in the flutter of a heartbeat I felt Martin’s
eyes angling downward, noting, noticing, as he noticed everything. And the envelope surrounding us, the membrane of convivial warmth, broke in an instant.
There’s food, right? I asked. Sorry to be so abrupt, but I’m starving. Something about Sundays—I always feel as if I don’t eat enough the rest of the week.
Is there food? Are you kidding? Robin laughed at me, her teeth—not blindingly white, not iridescent, but perfectly proportioned, stainless, neatly arranged—on full display. I don’t know where
you
come from, she says, but among black people a party from five to eight means serious food. Didn’t you see the Melba’s catering truck? Noreen doesn’t mess around. She’s from South Carolina. Low-country food.
Shrimp and grits?
Like you’ve never had it before. Go eat. She waved at me. We’ll catch up with you later.
• • •
J
ust after I’ve dumped my plate in the garbage a little girl darts across my path, a blur of pigtails and blue satin, thigh height, poking a smartphone screen. She’s half, I can see that in a second, all Chinese features around the eyes and the mouth, but with an extra broadness in the nose and warm peach tones in her skin. Tall for her age, too. The one time we visited Wudeng with Meimei people came up to us on the street and said,
so tall
.
So fair
.
So tall.
Though Meimei was really particularly neither. And one old woman, a shopkeeper, said, American-born Chinese girls always have enormous breasts. Too much milk! Don’t give her milk. Give her tofu
.
We all laughed.