Linden Hills

by Gloria Naylor

  He knew he just had to do something, and as a last resort, he called his friend Maxwell. He admired Maxwell’s total control of any situation. They were the only two black men on the tenth floor at GM, and Maxwell’s office was even closer to the executive director’s than his. Xavier had watched him closely at board meetings, regional conferences, and even in the executive washroom, for the fine seam that held him together, but it was invisible. He knew that might be easy enough to cover up in a boardroom but never in the bathroom. Maxwell could sit in his huge, glass-enclosed office without a hair or paper clip out of place. Xavier had been proud when Maxwell befriended him because it showed that he had proven himself. He became Xavier’s mentor in office and latrine politics, and Xavier valued his advice, which all boiled down to a constant maxim: “Keep it all inside and when it just has to come out, you decide where and how much.” So he had to be extremely careful when he made that phone call. How could you retain the respect of a man who was able to sever a sprig of parsley from its stem as easily as some people cut the meat from around a T-bone, if you were in a panic over some woman? No, just drop by for a quick drink, a chance to shoot the breeze about the latest Mailer essay in Penthouse, and just maybe he could find the courage to bring up what might be one of the most important issues of his life.

  Just as Xavier saw the silvery Stingray pull into Third Crescent Drive, his aunt came into the living room.

  “Xavier, the Tilson boy and his friend are cleaning out the garage. And when they’re through you’re going to have to pay them, because I’m going out now.”

  “Who?” Xavier had been looking for the perfect spot in the room to position himself. Now, just where and how would he be sitting if there were only something trivial on his mind?

  “The Tilson boy, Xavier—Lester.” Mrs. Donnell pulled on her coat impatiently. “I need all that junk out of the garage, and I don’t have time to stay here and watch them. Millicent and her whole brood up and decided that they’re going to fly in from Cincinnati to spend Christmas with us, and I’ve got to run out and buy them gifts. So just check up on them and pay them when they’re through. Fifteen apiece should be enough.”

  “The garage? Look, I have company coming over and I can’t be running out there every two seconds; can’t they do it another time? I don’t want those guys messing around my Porsche.”

  “No, they can’t. And how are they going to hurt that car, it’s buried under a padded quilt!”

  Since his aunt had refused to install a heating system in the garage, Xavier kept his Porsche under a down-filled tarpaulin to protect the engine from extreme changes in temperature.

  “Well, they might throw a box or something on it without thinking. Do you know what it costs to get a scratch or dent out of that hood?”

  Mrs. Donnell buttoned up her leather gloves. “Look, I’m not going to stand here and argue with you. I have a million things to do this afternoon, and then I have to rush back here to get to Lycentia Parker’s wake tonight since you refused to go and pay your respects for the family.”

  “Why should I go when you hated her guts, and I didn’t even know her?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Young man, you have a lot to learn, but have it your way. I’m going outside and tell them to go away, and later on you can get out there and clear it out yourself, but it has to be done today. Millicent is coming in tomorrow afternoon and she’d just love to see that we live in a pigsty. Not that it would matter to you, but I hope you know that all that rubbish in the garage is a fire hazard and you might just wake up one night and find it and your precious Porsche in flames. Then what would you—”

  “All right, all right. Just tell them to be careful, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, I thought so.” She headed for the back door. “And don’t let them in here on my carpet, because they’ll be full of grime. Pay them in the kitchen.”

  Xavier watched her retreating back, making his daily wish for the speedy appearance of the day when the house would be all his while conveniently forgetting that it could only dawn after the night of her death. He rushed back to the front window and peered anxiously through the Venetian blinds. He took a deep breath to compose himself as Maxwell’s car finally pulled up to the curb. Now Roxanne was rising to torment him through her brother at a time when he needed all of his faculties together. He sat down and waited for the doorbell to ring.

  Maxwell Smyth turned off the engine of his Stingray with a smooth forty-five-degree turn of his wrist, waited exactly three seconds, and pulled out the ignition key. When he swung his long legs over the low door frame, his silk scarf was arranged around his neck so that the wind could disarray the gold fringe just enough to let it stray casually on the brown and tan tweed of his open jacket, which complemented his light wool pants and matching brown turtleneck. He neither shivered nor hurried in the December air. His tropical gait in the frigid wind was as awe-inspiring as a magician breathing under water. But Maxwell’s powers lay in the micro-thin weave of his thermal long-johns and in his knowledge that slow, deep breaths raise the body temperature without noticeably altering the rhythm of the chest. To even the most careful observer, this man seemed to have made the very elements disappear, while it was no more than the psychological sleight-of-hand that he used to make his blackness disappear.

  Maxwell had discovered long ago that he doubled the odds of finishing first if he didn’t carry the weight of that milligram of pigment in his skin. There was no feasible reason why it should have slowed him down since in mass it weighed so little, and even that was consistently distributed over his six-foot frame. But the handicap had been set centuries before it was his turn at the gate. And since he knew no tract of ground but the planet earth and no competition but the human race, he had to use the rules as written and find a way to turn a consequence into an inconsequence in his struggle to reach the finish line as a man.

  He lucked onto the magic formula for this very early in life by being blessed with an uncommon spelling of a very common name. He remembered the slate-blue eyes of his first grade teacher flying back to his small dark face when she handed him a name tag reading MAXWELL SMITH and he told her no—S-M-Y-T-H, and this time the eyes actually focused him into existence. Whether it was impatience, embarrassment, or faint amusement, it was still recognition. For that moment, he counted because he had upset an assumption. And Maxwell Smyth learned to drag that moment out by not aiding the clumsy attempts of receptionists, clerks, and arrogant booking agents as they grappled with reordering their ingrained expectations of his name and his being. He relished the feelings of power and control as his blackness momentarily diminished in front of their faces—an ordinary name had turned into the extraordinary and taken its owner with it in the transformation.

  The trick was now to juggle other feats that would continually minimize his handicap to nothing more than a nervous tic. In college he found that his blackness began to disappear behind his straight A average, and his reputation for never sweating or getting cold. He trained himself to survive on three hours of sleep while never appearing tired during classes, heading the student government, editing the school newspaper and the yearbook. Always immaculate and controlled, he kept them all wondering how it was done, so there was little time to think about who was doing it. His twenty-one-hour days even gave him time to socialize, and although most of his friends were white, that wasn’t a conscious choice on his part. Maxwell neither courted nor shunned the other black students; he liked to think of himself as gravitating toward humans who shared his inner temperament, and anyone—black or otherwise—who he thought wanted to be around him because of something as inconsequential as the pigment of his skin he dismissed as shallow. So the black women he wanted to date found him strange and the white women strangely comforting.

  He tackled General Motors in the same way he had the campus of Dartmouth, quietly disappearing behind his extraordinary record as regional sales representative, business manager, vice president for consumer affairs,
and finally assistant to the executive director. But the stakes were a lot higher there, with no room for error; any break in his stride, any telltale mannerism or slip of the tongue might shatter the illusion he was standing behind. Because Maxwell knew they would never have dreamed of allowing a black man next to the executive director, it had to be the best man. And this delicate balancing of reality demanded perfect control over his work and his subordinates. He allowed nothing to happen at the office that didn’t put him at the best advantage or that he couldn’t manipulate to make it seem so. He weighed the decision of whether or not to smile at his secretary with the same gravity as that with which he considered the advisability of a new line of sedans.

  There was never any danger of his breaking down: sanity lies in consistency. And Maxwell retained his mental health by exercising the same type of control over every aspect of his being. Since he couldn’t manipulate the weather outside his home, he adjusted his body accordingly; but once inside his carefully appointed duplex, an elaborate series of humidifiers and thermostats enabled him to determine the exact conditions under which he would eat, sleep, or sit. He found the erratic rhythms and temperatures that normally accompany sex a problem, so he rarely slept with a woman. He didn’t consider it a great deprivation because before he was even thirty, an erection had become almost as difficult to achieve as an orgasm, and hence he would save himself the trouble until he was married and just had to. In short, his entire life became a race against the natural—and he was winning.

  The pinnacle of his success lay in his French-tiled blue and white bathroom. It was one of the most beautiful rooms in his home, with Italian marble fixtures: an imported toilet and matching bidet that sat on a plush white carpet. Lemonweed and wintergreen flourished in the windows and in tiered chrome planters that hooked on the shower rod. Over the towel racks he’d installed a hidden speaker that was connected to his stereo system. The only thing his bathroom lacked was toilet paper, which he kept in the closet and brought out for rare guests since he never needed it. Through a careful selection of solids and liquids, he was able to control not only the moment but the exact nature of the matter that had to bring him daily to the blue and white tiled room. His stomach and intestines were purified by large quantities of spring water and camomile tea. He found variety in clear juices—apple, strained cranberry, and, on rare occasions, small sips of Chardonnay, preferably from the vineyards of Pouilly, where no yeast was added to the fermentation. He learned that the very tips of broccoli florets, asparagus, and even parsley moved less noticeably through his system than the stems. Young animal flesh—baby scallops, calves’ liver, and breasts of squab were the purest to digest. This was supplemented with dried kelp from the waters around New Zealand, ground bone meal, and wheat germ. He would have put a forkful of cabbage, a slice of onion, or a single bean into his mouth with the same enthusiasm as a tablespoon of cyanide. Because when Maxwell sat each morning, on his Italian marble—his head erect, his ankles disappearing into the thick carpet, and his fingers drumming the tempo of a violin quartet on his knees with his eyes closed, before moving straight to the bidet, where he was sprayed with perfumed and sudsy water, and then on to the shower—except for the fact that he was totally naked, those first five minutes could have taken place on the seat of a theater or concert hall, with absolutely no clues to tip off even the nearest party about his true nature.

  After the success of this daily ritual, Maxwell was more than ready for any challenge at General Motors. And when he made his way into the lobby, up in the elevators, and past the file clerks, stenographers, and small offices of his subordinates, he drew the inevitable mixture of awe, envy, and hatred that is the lot of exceptional achievers. And, of course, he was misunderstood. He would have found the comments that he was trying to be white totally bizarre. Being white was the furthest thing from his mind, since he spent every waking moment trying to be no color at all. The charges of “ball-buster” or “slave-driver” were only levied because he required from his staff what he was willing to give himself. But he might have been faintly pleased had he overhead a frequent whisper in the typing pool, “Ya know, Smyth acts like his—don’t smell”—because it didn’t. And having conquered the last frontier, there was nothing that stood between Maxwell and the ultimate finish line but time. When the executive chair became vacant, the board of trustees wouldn’t think twice about giving the best man the job. And that’s the only kind of man he was.

  Xavier heard the first set of chimes and decided to let the bell ring again before he answered. But Maxwell had no intention of ringing twice. After one depression of exactly two seconds, he stood there calmly waiting for the door to be opened. He knew he was expected, made sure he had been heard, and so the only logical sequence would now be admittance into the house. Xavier sat nervously in the lengthening silence, finally realizing that Maxwell wasn’t going to ring again. If he opened it now, he needed some excuse for not answering immediately, but if he waited much longer he gambled on Maxwell’s leaving. It was a play of wills on each side of the oak door, and Maxwell won out.

  “Hey, sorry I took so long. I was upstairs when you first rang and I was waiting for the second ring to be sure that it was the bell.”

  “No sweat, mon ami.” Maxwell’s scarf glided off and was held out to Xavier. “What’s shakin’?”

  His greeting told Xavier that he considered this a very intimate visit because he was willing to engage in French and ghetto dialect, the two pet passions he reserved for close friends. He walked toward the couch, intently surveying the room. The few times Maxwell had been there before he had glanced around, seeming to sniff the air in case some new addition or omission might call for him to realign his opinion of Xavier.

  “Can I fix you a drink?”

  “If you have Chardonnay—with just a kiss of a chill.”

  Xavier shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it’s cold.”

  He poured himself a double shot of bourbon and Maxwell allowed him to talk about the weather, car repairs, and the company’s annual meeting for what he deemed an appropriate amount of time, and then choosing a place in the conversation where he knew Xavier would least expect it—“So what really brings me here, mon copain? I know about the cold; I’ve just driven through it with my rebuilt carburetor after interrupting the outline for my brilliant presentation for the spring convention, but what I still don’t know is why?” He leaned back on the velvet cushions and smiled, enjoying the flicker of consternation in Xavier’s eyes. He had heard the suppressed panic in his voice over the phone and a true curiosity had brought him out of his house to see what could be so important that Xavier had to try so hard to make it sound trivial.

  “Well, I thought it might be nice to have you over. Except for a few hurried lunches at work, we never really get a chance to relax and just be friends.”

  Maxwell knew that Xavier fully understood that sparing the time to lunch with a subordinate at work was an act of friendship, so he remained silent and waited for a real answer to his question.

  Xavier took a deep swallow of his bourbon. “And, uh, I wanted a little feedback on some longer-range plans. The thought had occurred to me that I might want to start to think about thinking about marrying Roxanne Tilson.”

  “Sacré Dieu, blood. Why?”

  Xavier panicked; that wasn’t what he had really meant to say and now he didn’t have a ready answer that would retain Maxwell’s respect. How many times had he heard him say that love was for teenagers and fools? He sought desperately for a reply, wishing that he smoked. “I know this may sound bizarre”—he took another swallow of his drink—“but there are times when she reminds me of Eleanor Roosevelt.”

  Maxwell frowned and thought a moment. “Well, my cleaning lady bears a striking resemblance to Indira Gandhi, but that’s no reason for me to drag her down to City Hall. Are you sure that’s the only reason?”

  “There’s nothing to be sure or unsure about.” Xavier got up and went over to the bar. “I
t was just an idea I thought about playing with, that’s all. And she was just one of the many women who came to mind. To be honest, she’s not even a serious contender. I mean, the real issue is whether or not this is the time for me to settle down. But I’m not too sure that I should rush into anything, you know?”

  “Oh, I know perfectly well what you mean. A decision like that is loaded with disaster—even if you could find ‘a serious contender,’ as you put it. And I don’t hold out much hope for your doing that.”

  “Really?”

  Maxwell shook his head and sighed, turning his wineglass gently between his fingers. “Now, let’s be reasonable. I know that, for whatever reasons, you’re only into black women. I’m not knocking it, mind you. But you’re going to have to face some hard, cold facts: there just aren’t enough decent ones to choose from. They’re either out there on welfare and waiting to bring you a string of somebody else’s kids to support, or they’ve become so prominent that they’re brainwashed into thinking that you aren’t good enough for them. The few who just might be up to your standards, who’ve distinguished themselves in the world, are into white men. Name me one black woman who’s making a name for herself in the arts or entertainment and I’ll name you two who have white husbands. Don’t we see it every day in the magazines and newspapers, or right downtown? The best and the brightest are going that way, so what’s left for you? The Roxanne Tilsons of this world.”

  Xavier winced. “I don’t really see anything wrong with her,” he mumbled.

  “Well now, of course she’s been to the right schools—Welles-ley, wasn’t it? And you’re from the same neighborhood—even though she’s up there on the border, it’s still Linden Hills.”

  “Of course.” Xavier’s voice was slightly impatient. “How could I have even looked at her if that wasn’t the case?”