by Jess Row
I hear you.
You do?
Does that surprise you? Do you even know where I’m from?
Here, I thought. Was I wrong?
I was born here, she says. In my grandparents’ house, while they were still alive. But we left when I was two. Then Champaign-Urbana, where my dad went to grad school. He a civil bureaucrat; he did fiscal planning, bond issues, that kind of thing. He got to like small towns. College towns. Places where the voters weren’t too dumb to pay for a first-class sewer system or a new gym floor before the old one wore out. First Gambier, Ohio. That was middle school. Then Bennington. You’re looking at the valedictorian of North Bennington High School, class of 1994.
Bennington. No kidding.
My dad loves sweater vests, Vivaldi, and Wall Street Week. Does that surprise you? He likes to talk about Mom’s ancestors who fought in the Revolution. The American Revolution. Of course, there’s more to it than that. Before I was born, in the Sixties, he lived in New York and drove a cab and played trombone. He was a Manhattan School of Music dropout, a free-jazz cat. Albert Ayler, Noah Howard, Malachi Favors, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders—he was up there with all those guys. Then, so the story goes, he got into an argument outside a club with some black nationalists, not the Panthers but some splinter group, undisciplined, who said the trombone was a bourgeois instrument only fit for Dixie parades. It wound up with one of them grabbing his bone and beating him over the head with it. He woke up in the hospital. Two weeks later he’d moved back in with his parents and enrolled at Morgan State in accounting.
A one-eighty-degree turn.
He’s not the demonstrative type, she says, but when I told him I was going to Spelman he actually broke down and cried. Why, he said, why, why, when you could go anywhere? Why now?
And what did you say?
Because I wanted a vacation, she says. I wanted to see how it felt not to be one of two or three. I mean, I shouldn’t complain. My mother didn’t miss a beat. She did my hair right, every day, made sure we read Hughes and Dunbar and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. She found the nearest church with a decent gospel service and got us there at least once a month. And in the summer we were in Oak Bluffs from the minute school got out. It was her parents’ house, and their money that paid for college, too, so Dad actually didn’t have much say in the matter. Of course, afterward I went to Cornell for med school. But he still doesn’t understand Spelman, and doesn’t understand why I want Sherry and Tamika to go there. To him blackness just isn’t a useful category. He’d rather talk about Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. Dignity, that’s what he cares about. I tell him, Marcus Aurelius was George Washington’s favorite writer, and I’ll bet he liked to read him sitting at his desk in Mount Vernon and looking out over the slaves’ backs bent over in the fields.
We’ve come down to the flatland, the ragged end of Fell’s Point, even now dotted with derelict storefronts and shifty, dusty bodegas, shoe stores whose window displays haven’t changed in twenty years. It’s as if there’s a law in Baltimore that gentrification can’t extend more than five blocks in any one direction: a poor city with a pox, an acne spray, of gentility. Chugging past us, though it’s lunchtime, is a school bus filled to the brim, little faces with bright yellow polo shirts squashed against the windows. Girls and boys just a year or so older than Meimei. Kindergarteners. A field trip, is my first thought, but then I remember seeing a headline in the Sun about cutbacks and reductions making kindergarten part-time. They look—is it possible for five-year-olds to look?—weary, and resigned.
You know what I’ve been thinking about? I say to her. The future. The world’s future. I mean, you have to ask yourself, is this world we live in, is this Baltimore, sustainable? I’m taking for granted that in fifty years this spot will be underwater. You have to accept that part. But in the larger sense, I mean, look around you, can you see anything that isn’t some kind of danger sign, some kind of warning?
You really want to know my answer? It’s embarrassing.
Of course I want to know.
Well, she says, it’s Martin. Martin is what gives me hope. I mean, look, I’m a suburban girl. I would never have come back here without him. What I was saying earlier—he has such tremendous confidence. And vision. You know what he says about Baltimore? Have you heard him on this topic? The great thing about a city like Baltimore is that you can get lost here. No one’s paying attention. Where did life begin? It began in the tide pools. The places where things wash up and just sit and get forgotten. That’s what cities are like. We see the donut-hole economy, the collapse of the middle class, the radical disparities of wealth, and he just sees windows, windows, windows of opportunity. I don’t even know what they are. I probably don’t want to know. People talk about the gray economy; well, I know that what he does is gray. But I trust him. He says, the twenty-first century is all about informal networks. All I say is, don’t sell drugs. Don’t sell drugs, don’t sell guns, and don’t sell human beings. But intellectual property? Patents? Copyrights? Proprietary information? I could give a damn. If it comes down to asymmetrical economic warfare, I’m all for it.
The small ax.
Trust a white boy to know his Bob Marley. Yeah. The small ax.
A dusty red Camry festooned with bumper stickers pulls alongside us and slows down—practically, it seems, at my elbow. U.S. Out of Iraq Now. I Love My Country, but We Should See Other People. Nader/LaDuke 2000. I Was at Woodstock and I Vote. Some people just can’t keep their clichés to themselves, I’m about to say, when I glimpse Mort Kepler through the glass, putting a hairy elbow over the passenger headrest and twisting his head, owl-like, to stare at me. As we walk toward the car—too late to change directions, too late to say excuse me and sprint over—he leans over and rolls down the window.
Kelly! Thought you’d have left town by now.
Good to see you, Mort. How’s things?
Figuring out just how far I can stretch my Social Security.
He has a mad grin affixed to his face, a rictus of a smile.
Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?
Robin Wilkinson. Mort Kepler.
Gamely, she reaches through the window to shake his hand. Big fan, she says. Sorry you lost your show. I’m sure it’s only temporary, right? You’ll be back soon somewhere.
Well, he says, still smiling, your friend here didn’t make it easy for me. Not to be rude or anything. Just so you know who you’re associating with.
Nice to see you, Mort, I say, taking Robin’s elbow. And we leave him there, blocking traffic, his emergency blinkers on. Do me a favor, I tell her, don’t look back for a minute. Ignore him.
He was really hostile. I’m surprised.
Did you ever actually listen to his show?
A few times. He struck me as a sort of sweet crackpot type. I always pictured him with a beard, for some reason.
Do you ever notice how easy it is for people his age to be angry, and intrusive, and cruel, and act like they’re doing you a favor? Or, alternatively, like it’s all your fault?
Well, it was the We Generation.
The Me Generation, you mean.
No, the We Generation. As in, we did everything right and you guys came along and screwed it up. As if we voted for Reagan.
She tosses me a smile, sideways, as if to say, this is fun. Too bad we can’t be friends.
We’re crossing the street now to enter Broadway Market, with all its attendant smells, the fresh-roasted coffees, the deli meats, Old Bay, Belgian fries, fresh bluefish and dolphin and skate. I remember, out of nowhere, Adele Patinkin, who I dated for a few months at Amherst, and how we used to go to the Kosher Kitchen every Saturday night for havdalah, the end of Shabbat service, and how a painted box of spices went hand to hand around the room, everyone getting a whiff of cloves and cinnamon, nutmeg and cardamom. Reawakening to the world. Food, it seems to me,
and the smell of food, is the world’s great consolation prize, its way of saying, things can’t possibly be so bad. I fall into step after Robin, who looks from side to side, grinning, nearly licking her parted lips, flooded with voracious and well-earned desire, who has forgotten me entirely, for the moment, and I realize that I’ll have to come up with some excuse for having no appetite at all, for needing to leave, abruptly, for needing to sit in my car for fifteen minutes before I can drive, waiting for my starved hands to stop shaking.
24.
Out of sight, behind the forsythias at the far end of Paul and Noreen Phillips’s front lawn, the children are singing “Human Nature.” There must be fifteen of them, in a crowd of forty adults, and for the length of the party they’ve been out in the grass, unattended, with a separate buffet and drinks table, playing hide-and-seek, having somersault contests, dance contests, cheerleading demonstrations. Sherry and Tamika among them, of course, almost shoulder to shoulder, clearly sisters, with identical coils of spaghetti braids that never come loose, no matter how vigorously they roll on the grass. Now the whole crowd has disappeared into the gloaming, the pastel May twilight, and snatches of warbly harmony come floating across the grass:
Reaching out to touch a stranger
Electric eyes are everywhere
—I’ve been trying to remember the first time I ever saw his face, Marshall Haber is saying. It wasn’t at the convention. Before that. It must have been in some TV interview, because he was talking. Sitting down and talking. No idea what he was saying, but you could just tell from his manner, his posture, that he had something going on. You could tell by the way he folded his hands in his lap. Control. No unnecessary movements. Right? And this is when he wasn’t even a senator yet.
Yeah, that’s what people always say, Lee says. The aura and all that.
I’m sitting at the edge of the patio, facing out, fallen into shadow. It’s the moment at a party where the detritus of paper plates and napkins accumulates on every surface, second or third drinks are in hand, and everyone over the age of twenty-five is sitting down and unlikely to rise anytime soon. Ten minutes ago Martin and Robin and I were sitting here in a tight circle, eating shrimp and grits, but she took a call from work and disappeared, and the Brain Trust filtered in, overfed, almost limping with the extra weight, everyone shaking my hand, Paul even slapping me on the shoulder. You again? Where’s your notebook? Is this on the record?
I wouldn’t call it an aura, Lee says. That makes me think of a halo, you know? It wasn’t that he was trying out for sainthood. You didn’t get an MLK vibe. Not a Jesse vibe. That’s the thing: he was already beyond that. People called it post-racial; it wasn’t post-racial. It was post–race as an issue. There’s a crucial difference there. It was, like, say you call up a lawyer because you need to hire a lawyer, and then you walk into his office, and he’s black. Didn’t sound black on the phone, didn’t see a picture, no warning, and then he’s right there, and he gives you this look, you know, he sees you’re off guard, and his look says, you got a problem with that? Not in an aggressive way. In an informative way, an appraising way. Like, is this going to be a problem? That’s what he was like, those first few years. After the speech. Hello, America, I’m going to be your next president. I’m the best man for the job. I happen to be black. You got a problem with that?
I got a problem with the phrase happen to be, Marshall says.
Okay. Okay. That’s your job. His job was to use the language of the moment. And white people, excuse me, Kelly, but white people, dominant-paradigm people, they love to say, he happens to be from Mexico. She happens to be a lesbian. They happen to be part of a polygamous macrobiotic cult. Because it makes it all random and unintentional. I happened to fall down and break my ankle. It all seems so unfair that way. You don’t have to draw any connections, just look at what’s in front of you. We’re all the same. God just happened to hit you with the ugly stick.
You know what I’m tired of? Paul says. I’m tired of interpreting the meaning of Obama. Shouldn’t we be over that by now, now that it’s a done deal? A president should not mean, but be.
The Obama era. The Obama years.
Keep your powder dry and your drones in the air.
Bet he contemplated using a drone on John Boehner once or twice. Or Grover Norquist. Or Scalia.
Clarence Thomas. Silent but deadly. Shit, Thomas is the drone. The stealth bomber of the white right.
Y’all bringing me down, Paul says. You hear that singing? None of these kids were even thought of when that song was on the radio. For them it’s ancient history. It might as well be the Beatles. Or Elvis.
Don’t you know kids don’t listen to the radio anymore? Marshall says. For them it’s all about Glee and American Idol. They like a song, they pick it up. Doesn’t matter if it’s from yesterday or 1930. I like that. It’s an eclectic era. Take what you want, the rest is dross.
It’s because the music they’re putting out today is crap, Lee says. All the Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé stuff, with the Auto-Tune and the electric beats, all that fizzy special-effects nonsense.
That’s not fair to Beyoncé, Martin says. She’s the real thing. She’s a throwback.
Says the man who listens to Joni Mitchell. Paul leans over and looks at me. Kelly, has he told you about that? Better make sure you get it down on the record so he can’t deny it later. First time he picked me up in his car, what was he playing? Blue. Thought I was going to shit my pants. Seriously, that was some country stuff. So country it was like, not even twentieth-century, like, medieval. Like there should be recorders and harpsichords on it. And he tried to get off telling me it was Robin’s tape.
It was.
I don’t care if it was Jesus Christ’s tape, I would have tossed it out the window after two bars.
Plenty of people think Joni Mitchell’s cool, Marshall says. Herbie did a whole album of her songs. Ain’t you ever heard Mingus?
Yeah, I heard Mingus.
No, Mingus, her album, you ignoramus. That’s some whacked-out Seventies material on there. Cassandra Wilson’s early stuff comes right out of Mingus.
Problem is, Martin intones, Paul, all due respect, you don’t know your musical history.
But back to Obama—
Seriously?
Yes, Paul, Martin says. Seriously. Let him finish.
Before I was so rudely interrupted by Michael Jackson and the henchmen of pop-culture distraction, Marshall says, let me just say that what Obama is not is a proxy. He doesn’t carry the bag. Not for the white liberal establishment, not for Israel, not for Charlie Rangel or Tavis Smiley.
He carried the bag pretty damn well for Goldman Sachs. Or he let Geithner carry it.
Then he sicced Elizabeth Warren on Geithner’s ass, Paul. It’s that Team of Rivals theory you were telling me about.
Martin scratches his chin.
You ever read those Joseph Campbell books, The Masks of God? he says. Robin hooked me up with those when we were first going out. It’s totally fascinating stuff. Anyway. Somewhere in there, Campbell says that the earliest kind of kings in prehistory, in the very early Egyptian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian states, were sacrificial kings, that is, they were put to death by the people and ceremonially buried in order to appease the gods.
I don’t like where this is going, Lee says.
Okay. Okay. I’m extrapolating a little. But get this. Obama’s just an extremely, extremely smart guy. An intellectual overachiever before he was a political overachiever. And he’s also, just to put it mildly, a hybrid. A mongrel. A cobbled-together person who’s chosen his categories all the way along. You got me? That kind of person is always going to be a natural skeptic.
A master of the mask.
Yeah, but here’s the thing. A skeptic is not a cynic. Not necessarily. So Obama, he understands something about the essential nature of being president that the
rest of us don’t. Being president means being at the center of a circle whose radius is infinite. You’re the center of an incalculably complex system. Responsible for everything, in control over almost nothing. Now most presidents are essentially just showboats who are very good at projecting leadership and pretending to have a hand on the helm. They sleep well at night. Dubya was one of those. So was Reagan. So was JFK. And then there are the really deep political minds, the Machiavellians. LBJ. Clinton. But Obama is something else again, because he understands the symbolic role of the president is a tragic role. That puts him in a different category.
Lincoln.
Yes. And not because he’s freeing any slaves or even because he’s the first black et cetera. Because he wears that mask. He has that look all the time, a kind of noble dread. He’s a sacrificial king, the still center of the churning world. Call him whatever you want, but he’s older than old school. He’s the most primal president we’ve had in my lifetime. And the thing is, it’s all contrived. It’s constructed. And we’re okay with that. It’s artificial and sacred.
Do I feel, or is it just my hyperattentiveness, that there’s a palpable shift in the room, a feeling that someone’s just gone too far? Not that Martin’s wrong; that he’s too literally right, too eager to spell it out. There’s a kind of malicious energy in his voice: I know you too well. I know you better than you know yourselves. Lee purses his lips and nods. Marshall takes out his BlackBerry and absently spins the wheel with his thumb.
That’s some deep material you got there, Paul says. Kelly, you sure you ain’t writing a book on this guy? ’Cause I think fifteen thousand words isn’t going to cut it.
Martin avoids my look, dusts off his lap, and stands, collecting napkins and cups. Gentlemen, on that note, I have to run off and find my wife, he says. You should do the same. Don’t let them get lonely.
