In the end it was very simple: I packed up and took a taxi in the middle of the morning, when everyone was asleep. That was the last I ever saw of Seymour. I went and knocked on this girl’s door. Carolina. We’d met at a party; she’d made it clear that she’d give me the time of day whenever I asked for it.
Come in, she said, I was just about to do some peyote. Want to come?
Three days later I woke up in a field, soaking wet. It was just before dawn. Half in, half out of my sleeping bag, my hands spread out on the grass, drenched in dew, smelling of clover. My backpack was gone. My money was gone. I knew that immediately. Seymour was gone. And this is what it was: we know where we’re going, we know where we’re from. We live in Babylon, we’re going to our fatherland.
I picked up my arms, I swear to god, I looked at my hands, in the dawn light, you know, the blue light turning to daylight, and I saw myself getting darker, saw my skin turning brown, all but the palms of the hands, and I knew, I knew, swear to fucking god, that I was emerging, all wet, as what I was always meant to be. I had no fear. I stood up and started walking. I went back to Baltimore; I got my savings out from all the places I’d stored it, the rafters, the basement, safe-deposit boxes, dummy accounts. I did what Seymour told me to do. Found the right lawyer. Put on a golf shirt and flew down to the Caymans with a big fat cashier’s check. And then when I got back to Baltimore I opened the Yellow Pages, and looked up plastic surgery.
23
Six weeks ago, when we met the first time, when I handed her the tacky laser-printed business card I’d just made—Kelly Thorndike, Freelance Journalist—Robin made a quick notation on her phone and said, I get an interview, too, right? Want to set one up? My schedule’s pretty full.
Mine’s not, I said. Send me a time.
Done, she said, and the next day her assistant emailed me a date at the beginning of May. Lunch 12:45-1:50. I wrote it down on a Post-it and stuck it on the window next to my desk, and nearly every day for weeks I wanted to call her and suggest another time, tell her I’m traveling, that my deadline was moved up — to find a polite and neutral way to cancel. I am not a practiced liar. I am not an actor. With Martin there as my alibi the whole enterprise makes sense; without him Robin and I will just be two people, two adults, out for lunch, in the ordinary everyday world. Two adults with some business to discuss, some matter at hand, but not without a mild frisson of companionable attraction, a little lighthearted flirtation. Nothing is more terrifying for a conspirator, I’m realizing, than the temptation to relax.
Let me put it another way.
Part of getting past the first stages of grieving, my therapist told me, is learning to surprise yourself again. In a traumatic event, your senses shut down. Taste, smell, temperature — you forget to wear a hat when it’s five below. Bite into a piece of sushi and it’s like eating a sponge. Then, gradually, it all comes back, but it’s different. There’s a reset button. Like pregnancy. Or chemotherapy. Ever seen someone whose hair has all grown back a different color?
I’ve never in my life been attracted to a black woman. Not at all. Not ever. You could call it simple socialization: that in those defining years, thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, the bodies I saw, the faces I saw, were white girls, skinny white girls, by any historical standard — the standard being somewhere between Molly Ringwald and Kate Moss. Girls whose breasts disappeared in the palm of your hand, whose hips, whose asses, described a gentle curve, a suggestion of something, you could say, more than the thing itself.
And that’s still my type, if I have a type. Not long after my dinner at Martin’s, not more than a few days, I found one of the sites I look at when I need to remind myself to jerk off — which I’ve had to, ever since the accident — and nothing worked. So I crawled into bed, with half a hard-on, read a chapter of a Paul Bowles novel I’d had on my night table for months, and finally smoked the end of a joint I’d kept in the freezer since Christmas, a last-ditch effort at deriving some sense of pleasure from the world. It happened quickly after that: I could describe, in my mind’s eye, every part of Robin, the shape of her kneecap, the frictionless skin at the very base of the thigh, the taste of her as I put my mouth between her legs. I came explosively.
And is it really so surprising? I asked myself a few moments later, after I’d tossed away the tissue and pulled up the sheet, my heart still pulsing away as it did, does, after sex, the real kind. How else is there to say it: Martin has everything I want, everything anyone wants, even if he took the strangest, technically impossible, route to get there. Of course I look at his beautiful wife — his poised, put-together, self-assured, hyperconfident Doctor Mom — and want to fuck her, to bend her over, to shove her up against a wall. Lust is circumstantial and unfair. I’m not sorry. We know enough now, adults that we are, evolved people, not to have to apologize for our fantasies. Of course it occurs to me now that I wasn’t ever attracted to black women partly because no one ever would have wanted me to be, because it’s inconvenient, unsightly, because the image it brings to mind, let’s just say it, is the master and the slave, Sally Hemings and President Jefferson. Lust is circumstantial and politically inconvenient. So is love, for that matter. When Wendy I were first together, one friend said to me, in a drunk late-night overseas phone call, I never thought you were the Suzie Wong type. Another said, how long have you had yellow fever?
So since my night with Rina — two weeks ago, and we’ve had dinner twice since, like any old friends stranded without much companionship, the tension broken, thank god — I’ve tried not to worry about Robin. People have crushes, I’ve been thinking, and that’s what it is; why make it sound more profound, more ominous, than that? What’s going to happen, in any case? I’m in love with you, and by the way, your husband’s really a white man, so what’s the difference, anyway? She’s the Pat Robertson of the black family. And a shrink. Let her set the boundaries. Take notes. Make it all on the record. And move on, and maybe try not to see her again.
—
Don’t sit down, Robin says, when I open the door to her office. I’ll just be a second. She’s already changed into Lycra pants, track shoes, and a fleece pullover; now she’s slipping in contact lenses, using a compact mirror and one long, delicate pinkie. Her nails are very short, I’m noticing, with a dark plum-colored polish, almost black. You okay with walking? she asks. I always walk at lunchtime. First, because I sit all day. Second, because there’s no decent food around the hospital. That’s what happens when you tear down a neighborhood. Fancy MRIs, world-class surgery, but you have to walk a mile for a decent sandwich.
As long as you give me a head start.
Don’t worry. I don’t power-walk with company. Just like to get out of my doctor drag and be a civilian again.
Her building isn’t the hospital itself but one of its many satellites — the Hopkins Hospital, since I lived here, having become a city within a city, taking up a twenty-block square above Oldtown and Butchers Hill. The view from her window takes in the entire horseshoe of the harbor, from Canton to Federal Hill, with Patterson Park on one periphery and Camden Yards on the other, and stretching out to the tankers dotting the gray-green Chesapeake three miles away. The accumulated brightness of it all — the window, the sunburst-patterned rug, the enormous Jacob Lawrence prints above her desk, the clutter of toys and blocks and tiny plastic chairs around my feet — is making me a little dizzy.