“I like it.”
“That’s all that matters. Don’t you just hate when you buy a new phone number book and you have to copy all those dang-blasted numbers from one to the other? I hate it even though I hire someone else to do it for me. My damn toenails need trimming, again. I am glad to see you’re not wearing that red T-shirt anymore. It was beginning to smell.”
“It smelled before I put it on.”
“I read in the paper about some massive recycling campaign at your college,” Ted said. He waved to someone he knew on the street, but they failed to recognize him since he was in a Buick and with me.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
We were on our way to a drugstore so Ted could buy condoms. “Jane prefers that I take care of these matters,” he’d said when he asked me for the ride. Now he was looking in his wallet. “Just seeing if I have any cash with me. I don’t. Do you have any? May I have a ten?”
“Do you mean borrow?”
“No, I mean have. I’m pretty sure I’ll forget to pay you back.”
I gave him a ten.
“Do you prefer latex or lambskin?”
“I don’t know.”
“Some of them feel like you’ve slipped your puppy into a garbage bag. So many choices, too. These rubber companies try to make you feel insecure and guilty. Guilty if you don’t buy the one ‘for her pleasure.’ Our pleasure is pretty much taken for granted. I suppose the fact that we’re buying them at all establishes that as a given. Do you have any?”
“No.”
“Give me some more money,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’m going to buy you some. My treat.”
“It’s my money.”
“Nonetheless.”
And so Ted bought me a box of condoms that I embarrassedly shoved into my jacket pocket. He sat there reading over his box as we drove home, saying a couple of times, “Amazing things.”
As is inevitably the case, someone from my former life showed up and recognized me. It was a guy with whom I’d gone to high school. I could remember his face and I didn’t recognize his name and this apparently offended and angered him. When he said his name, which still I can’t recall, it sounded like a name that one might remember and it was that strange notion and feeling to which I attended — that a name sounded rememberable. He became insulted. He went back to DuBois Hall and apparently told all the freshmen there what a loser I had been in high school, and suddenly college was very much even more like high school. He told them that as far as he knew I was a dropout and had been in a sex scandal with a white teacher and he wondered how I’d gotten into Morehouse. He told them it was probably because I used to live with Ted Turner and was probably his houseboy toy or something. And so I was shunned more or less. Not a new experience, but disappointing nevertheless. Eugene Talbert heard all the stories, but focused on the part about Ted. He came right out with it.
“I heard you lived with Ted Turner.”
I said nothing. I was sitting in the cafeteria and had not yet picked up my ham sandwich.
“How rich is he?” He sat down across from me.
“I’m trying to eat.”
“Take me to his house,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because he’s so fucking rich. I just want to see what that kind of money looks like.”
I took a bite and stared at him.
“I have a fascination with wealth.”
He didn’t want to meet Ted because he was smart or dumb or because he was quirky or successful, but because he had money. The little bullied fellow shrank in front of me.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Aren’t we friends?” he asked.
I studied his face and saw nothing but face. “No,” I said.
“But you stood up for me.”
“My mistake. Then I didn’t know you well enough to like you or not like you. Now I know you well enough. I’m glad you made it into the fraternity. You belong there.”
“So, you won’t take me.”
“No, I won’t take you.”
“You’re not Omega material. I can see that now.”
I nodded.
“You’re just a white man’s toy,” he said. As he said it he reached over to pick up a plastic bottle that had been left on a table and slip it into his book bag. “You’re not black enough to be an Omega.”
I nodded. “I’ll see you around, Eugene.” I wrapped my sandwich in a napkin and walked away wondering if I might have any virtuous feeling from my show of restraint. I can’t say that I was completely unaffected by his attack. An attack always feels like an attack, and I had to wonder if he was uttering some truth besides my not being Omega material.
Everett talked on and on about a thing being self-identical, but failed at any turn to make a drop of sense. He laughed over his assertion that contingency was necessary for the existence of necessary truth and laughed harder as he blabbed on about truth as a “pliable vacuum of manipulated fragments of no whole entity.” The Spelman student who had said Everett might be attractive if not for his extra weight was staring devotedly at him. I watched her follow him with her eyes around the room. As always, in an attempt to understand something, I raised my hand.
“Yes?” he said. “Mr. Poitier.”
“I’m sorry, but are you saying that a thing cannot exist without its opposite also existing?”
“I don’t know,” he said and looked truly puzzled. “Am I?”
“Is there an opposite to existence?” My question felt unbelievably stupid in my mouth.
“Precisely,” he said. “Dismissed.” Even though we were only halfway through the period.
As we walked out, the woman whom I had been watching walked after me. “Mr. Poitier,” she said.
“Hello, Ms. Larkin,” I said. That was all I knew of her name as Everett always called us Ms. and Mr.
“I liked your question,” she said.
“I’m glad you did. I don’t know what I asked him and I certainly don’t know what was ‘precisely’ about it. Tell me, do you know what he’s talking about?”
“Not a word. Isn’t he fabulous?”
“I guess.” I looked at Ms. Larkin’s soft features. Her red hair was pulled back tight. I noticed for the first time that she looked white, but that was true of many black people. I assumed she was black because she was attending Spelman. I felt stupid even wondering about it.
We walked toward the student center, not talking. I was thinking about class and then I realized I was thinking about class, though I was hard pressed to know what I was thinking about the class. I did know that somehow I felt as if I had been tricked into thinking that existence was a thing instead of an attribute, and then I wondered why I was thinking like that.
“Well,” Ms. Larkin said as we reached the doors of the center. She said “well” as if we’d actually had a conversation.
“What is your first name?” I asked.
“Maggie.”
“I’m Not Sidney.”
“I know,” she said. “Everyone knows.” She pulled open the door. “See you Thursday morning.”
That everyone knows was deadly. It cut through me. Yet I was not sure that she meant any harm by saying it. I had the sense, or at least wanted to think, that she was merely stating a fact, albeit a disheartening, if not disturbing fact.
I came across Professor Everett having coffee in the commons. He invited me to sit down and so I did.
“You’re distressed,” he said.
“I don’t know if I’d say distressed.”
“You don’t have to. I can see that you’re in a deep distression.”