She had been a little reluctant when out of nowhere I proposed going out on a date. But I hadn’t been willing to let her wiggle out. With Richard’s departure Marie-Anne had acquired even greater import in my life, and I wanted to make sure things were shored up between us.
“I talked to Richard today.”
“How is he? Dirty old man. ”
“Was he ever dirty toward you?”
“Why are you talking in the past tense?”
“He left. For Israel.”
“For. Ever?”
“Yeah. What do you think about that?”
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “He wasn’t happy here.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Just, you know.” She cleared her throat, sliding her ballet flat over a spot of ice. “He was always so active. So unsettled.”
“Something wrong with that?”
“Nothing wrong with it,” she said. “Just shows a kind of unhappiness.”
“Maybe he was unhappy.”
“He had everything. Yet even then he was always taking up some cause. Maybe if he wasn’t suing everyone all the time he would be more settled. Act his age.”
I was antagonized on his behalf. In Richard’s willingness to eschew a settled life for one where he pursued giant class-actions against companies that defrauded their investors, I had always seen a sort of grizzled Robin Hood. Instead of arrows he launched complaints. Instead of sheriffs he annoyed CEOs. Maybe all of it had been a fruitless endeavor on his part; but it showed a willingness to align himself with those who lacked something.
One by one the houses around us turned down the lights. I decided not to tell Marie-Anne any more about Richard. I had thought that by telling her I would be able to cry out a little sorrow. But she didn’t understand why Richard mattered. Men like him were rare. Today’s man either pursued outright domination or opted for complete submission. Few offered their own slaughter in the game of bluff that produced justice. Marie-Anne had little sympathy for anyone who took risks on behalf of strangers and unknowns.
After dinner we went to Bishop’s Collar. The bar was empty and quiet. We ordered a pint. Marie-Anne said she remembered something for work and needed to write down a note. She picked up a napkin and sent me off to find a pen. I made my way over to a new bartender, a bald, bearded fellow with tattoos of dragons and griffins. There was a pen in his front pocket, one of those where you could click five different colors. “Can we borrow that for a second?” I gestured in Marie-Anne’s direction with my head.
“Yeah, sure, buddy,” he said and handed it over. Then he grasped my wrist rather firmly and looked into my eyes. “Just make sure your mom returns it before leaving. First day at my job and I already lost my other pen.”
“My mom?” I glanced back at Marie-Anne. “You think that woman is my mother? How could someone who looks like me come from someone who looks like her?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Your daddy was black?”
“You nailed it,” I said and returned to Marie-Anne.
She smiled. “What did that guy say?”
“Nothing. Just that we should feel comfortable keeping the pen.”
“How nice of him.” She raised a thumbs-up in the direction of the bar and proceeded writing.
Her note had something to do with the wording for a pitch she had been playing around with. “All these technical words like unmanned aerial vehicles sound so terrible during a presentation,” she said. “I want to come up with something better to use when I’m just sitting with someone. Any ideas?”
“How about birds?”
“Birds?”
“Yeah. Just birds. That’s all flying things are, right?”
“That’s good,” she said absentmindedly, as if she’d forgotten she’d asked for my input. “But I need something a little more descriptive.”
We drank another round and headed home. The bartender tried to glare at me on the way out, but Marie-Anne positioned herself in between me and him. At our apartment building I noticed a new security guard stepping behind the front desk. She wore the uniform of the new owners of the building. Her arrival reminded me of Marlon’s absence. But what would I have gained with his presence?
Once upstairs, I went to the kitchen. Marie-Anne was still thinking about work and went to the living room and put on the news. She was following the conversation about protests in a far-off West Asian country. Through the kitchen doorway I stared at her, absorbed.
I stood on one foot, the other raised and scraping the rough surface of the fridge. “I want children,” I declared.
Marie-Anne turned to me, pulling her red hair back in a ponytail. “You know I can’t, baby,” she said. “It’s too risky.”
“We can manage the risks. Medicine today. ”
“I am rotten,” she said. “I don’t want to pass this rot to our kids.”
“What you have isn’t genetic. It won’t be passed on.”
“I don’t want to make them.”
A flame passed over my body. It wasn’t some misogynist insurrection caused by the way Marie-Anne made herself master over my virility. I, along with an entire generation of men, had ceded that sort of authority a long time ago. My rage had another locus, namely myself. Marie-Anne had become spooked about children only after her own relationship with her mother broke down, and the reason for the breakdown was me. Had I been less effete, less frail, more tangible, more of a presence, Marie-Anne would’ve never had to suffer her familial gulf, and without that trauma she would be busy reproducing, tightening her relationship with her tribe by expanding it, weaving herself into it in the manner matriarchs did. In that wave I would’ve been swept along as well. From her matriarchy my patriarchy would have arisen.
“But I really want to. ”
“Why?”
“Because I need to feel like a part of the land. This land. For. Ever.”
She looked at me like I’d thrown pie at her or smeared her face with cake. “You don’t need children for that. I can get you a flag pin.”
“You don’t understand. ” I synthesized a syllogism about roots, and putting them down, and children, and a clan, and creating a colony, and being an American patriarch from whom many generations emerged; not an average man, but a stud, like the sort Secretariat was, or his father, Bold Ruler, who was sired by a champion called Nasrullah. Something about bloodlines. But nothing like that came out. Nothing came out at all.
“I understand just fine,” she said. “You’ve been stuck at home for months and it’s making you disconnected from all the working citizens. But don’t worry about that.” She came and threw her arm around me. “No one can ever question your connection to this country. Because your wife is one of the people keeping the country free and safe and strong.”
Despite my anger with her, despite her deft redirect of my feelings, I softened. I remembered the Fourth of July barbecues in Charleston. The smell of charcoal and ribs and people sitting around discussing their favorite president, as if each one was an avatar of the same eternal god, one sent to us every four years to allow us to access infinity in a more intimate manner. Someone who might serve as an intercessor between the vagaries of human life and the transcendent ideals that stretched themselves over the Republic. Some of the political stories people told at the barbecues had an anti-Northern tilt. Some of them even came off pro-slavery (“It would have faded away on its own like in Latin America”). But the Quinn family’s conception of the Civil War, which they referred to as the War of Northern Aggression, was something that came straight out of American history, and so it had always been palatable, even nice. In a way, that I was connected to the losing side of the Civil War was better than being on the side of the victors, because the losers were forgotten, and the ones who were forgotten were, in a way, more authentic, colored as they were by defeat. They had more in common with me, I who was descended of races that had been defeated as well.