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.”