Your Face in Mine: A Novel

by Jess Row

  He’s been following me, squinting, mouthing the words.

  I knew it, he says. You’re one of those fucking turnaround artists. You’re Neutron Jack. Look, am I fired? Just tell me now.

  Of course you’re not fired. You’re promoted.

  To what?

  Director of outreach.

  No more committees? None of them?

  Network policy is that we have to have a standard governance structure.

  Do you have any idea what you’re doing? he says. You’re from here, right? Didn’t you ever listen to BCC at all, as a person?

  I listened to my own music. I was just a kid. Never turned on the radio.

  Yeah, he says, addressing the ceiling, that’s just like them. Bring in a PD who’s never turned on the radio.

  He looks at me with pure, piggish hatred, and I have the words right on my tongue, prepared, a whole speech: Make me the scapegoat, make me the bad guy. Shoot the messenger. Just do the right thing and decide to keep your station, all right? I’ve been practicing in the shower, behind the wheel, for weeks, ever since I received my copy of the report. No station should be allowed to die, not even the little ones, the redundant ones, with two hours of bluegrass during the afternoon rush before the news comes on. It’s a community station; it’s the principle of the thing; it’s a public resource, never mind if point-five percent of the public is ever listening. It’s salvageable. There are good people here. I look through my partition window at Barbara, her silver hair wound up in a long nested braid: a maniacally effective accountant, a chain smoker, a lover of Mel Tormé and Bobby Darin. I look back at Mort, and the words turn to sawdust in my mouth.

  We’ll talk more later, I say. Take a deep breath.

  What, he says, turning around in the doorway, so that Barbara and half the office can hear, is BCC too big to fail?

  —

  The Baltimore I know runs on a north-south axis along three parallel streets, Charles, Calvert, and St. Paul. Beginning at the city line, the anonymous ranch-house suburbs of Towson give way to the ring of neighborhoods where I lived out my adolescence: Mount Washington, Roland Park, Homeland. There is the bizarre Art Deco cathedral of Mary Our Queen and the Masons’ Boumi Temple and the enormous empty St. Mary’s Seminary, and then farther down the anonymous, faceless stone and brick mansions of Guilford, then the Johns Hopkins main campus, cut off from the streets by a forested median on St. Paul Street and the lacrosse stadium on University Parkway. Until this point the city is really not a city so much as an agglomeration of villages, leafy, prosperous-seeming, and carefully composed. At 33rd Street, which leads east only a few blocks to Memorial Stadium, Baltimore proper begins, first as a long corridor of row houses broken by large avenues, then the canyon formed by Interstate 83 as it cuts southeast just below Penn Station; below that, Mount Royal, clustered around the Washington memorial obelisk, and finally the gleaming steel-and-glass bank buildings just before the Inner Harbor and its shopping arcades and Camden Yards, the new baseball stadium, which to me still looks like an architect’s drawing or a hologram.

  I moved here when I was twelve and left for college at eighteen, and when college was over there was China, and Wendy, and then graduate school, and Meimei, and WBUR, and in the space of fifteen years I came back only five or six times, each time only when I couldn’t possibly avoid it. I did everything I could not to come home for longer than a week; and then finally—just before I married Wendy—my parents retired and moved to New Paltz, and I thought, briefly, that I would never have to see the city again.

  Not because I hated Baltimore, not at all, but because, as one of my friends put it, it was a place to be from, not a place to belong to. When I arrived at Amherst I realized within five minutes that it was pointless to try to explain to a girl from Rye, New Hampshire, what it meant to go to an illegal warehouse show on North Avenue, or why it mattered that my sweater came from Don’s Discount in Fell’s Point, or why I had a collection of Polish saint cards taped to my wall, since I wasn’t even Catholic. I felt, for the first time, provincial. Everyone had a hometown, a story, a past, and it could matter if you wanted it to—if, for example, you lived at 88th and Park Avenue, and your father was the director of the Guggenheim—or not, and I chose, as nearly all of us chose, not. I wanted to be denatured, detached, to luxuriate in my cocoon and emerge an utterly different butterfly. Everyone I knew from home had done the same. To be fair, we weren’t exactly locals, to begin with: mostly our parents were academics, teachers, lawyers, scientists, who’d made a life here more or less arbitrarily; whose concerns were global, and who viewed Baltimore and its problems with generic concern, not civic pride. When I saw my friends at Thanksgivings and Christmases it was as if years, not months, had passed, and we stayed mostly in one another’s houses, as if the city might not want to take us back.

  By then I’d lost touch with Martin completely. I last saw him, I’m remembering now, on February 12, 1993, the day of Alan’s funeral, and that was the first time in months—the band had broken up, and he had all but disappeared, barely even coming to school. I assumed that his life had gone on, as all of our lives did; I assumed he’d disappeared into this new and large and atomized world. It never occurred to me that he might have stayed in Baltimore.

  —

  I met somebody, I tell Wendy, in the car, on Charles Street, coasting through one green light after another. An old friend.

  How old?

  High school. He’s changed, though. I wouldn’t have recognized him.

  That always happens.

  No, I’m about to say, you don’t understand, but I stop myself.

  Anyway, what was he like back in the old days?

  That’s the problem. I don’t really remember.

  What do you mean, you don’t remember?

  I mean he wasn’t that memorable, honestly. I mean, individually. We were in a band together, we played music together. And we hung out. But everyone hung out.

  Hung out, she says. I’ve always hated that expression. It reminds me of laundry.

  It’s a bad habit, probably, talking to your dead wife, but I do it without thinking, as unconsciously as talking to myself. And perhaps it really is just talking to myself. The Wendy of my imagination is more voluble than the real Wendy ever was, more inclined to keep the conversation going. But she is still there. It sounds absurd, but there is another voice, another presence; it answers me, I don’t tell it what to say. You could call it my unconscious, but if that’s the case, my unconscious is much more capacious than I ever thought it could be. And it speaks better Chinese.

  It couldn’t possibly have been the way I remember, I’ve been telling myself. Martin couldn’t really have had surgery. Changed his hair, put on makeup, had his skin dyed, maybe. It ends there. The rest was an illusion, drag, a fetishistic thing, maybe. Online I searched for racial reassignment and found articles on passing, on Michael Jackson, on Jewish nose jobs, on eyelid surgery in Korea—more or less what one would expect. It doesn’t exist. It isn’t something people do. There would be an outcry; there would be public discussion. Like cloning, like stem cell research: the technology couldn’t just develop out of nowhere. You can’t develop a new category of human beings without anyone noticing. Martin, I want to say, is a little unhinged, maybe. Mildly delusional. Or living in some alternate universe, aesthetically, intellectually. It’s a great question mark, and that’s why I’m going downtown, now, to have lunch with a question mark. This is the story I tell myself.

  Tell me about him, Wendy says. Just open your mouth and talk. Maybe that’ll help.

  He was just this guy I knew. He was tall, rail-thin, absurdly thin, super-pale, not a great complexion. Always wore T-shirts that hung off his frame awkwardly, and he walked with a bit of a stoop. I remember that. Baggy black jeans, Doc Martens, a bicycle-chain bracelet on his right wrist. We always complained that it hit the bass strings when he played, but he said he liked the effect, it was, like, industrial. You don’t know what
that means, do you? You don’t know what any of this means.

  Don’t worry about me. Just talk.

  We were called L’Arc-en-Ciel. The French word for rainbow. Didn’t I ever tell you this before? It sounded kind of badass if you didn’t know what it meant, at least that was the theory. We never recorded anything—anything that made it to vinyl or a CD, anyway. And then a Japanese band came along and stole the name. So there’s no trace of us anymore. It was Alan’s thing, really, mostly his idea, and he wrote the songs, which were sort of like Jesus Lizard crossed with Devo. Lots of big thumping guitars and high, piercing keyboards. When we played people stood fifteen or twenty feet back and frequently covered their ears, which we took as a compliment. Martin auditioned with “Blitzkrieg Bop,” then a Primus song, and then something by Steely Dan, to show he could really play. He was good. You know how hard it is to find a good bass player? It was me on the drums, Martin on bass, Alan on guitars and keyboards and vocals and everything else. His band, though it wasn’t as if anyone played any solos. We thought nothing was worse than the Grateful Dead—the endless noodling, the blissed-out girls spinning in circles. Alan said, we want to sound like a heart attack. We want to sound like a 3-D nightmare.

  Okay. Okay. Enough about the band.

  What else? I ask. What else can I say? He went to my high school—Willow, the Willow School, a private, progressive school, whatever that meant, it was just as much of an anorexia factory as the rest of them—in name only. Never had much of a presence there. No clubs. No plays. Didn’t even really hang out with us in school much. Frankly, I don’t even know if he graduated, either. Martin Lipkin—who were his parents? Where was he from? Blank, blank, blank.

  A single memory: we dropped him off one night, after a late show, at a row house somewhere off Guilford, a neighborhood I’d never been to before. No one I knew lived that far south; and as I remember it, not just the one house but the whole block was dark, not a lit window anywhere. This your place? Alan asked. Yeah, Martin said, home sweet home, and we waited—polite, well-brought-up children that we were—till he’d used his key and disappeared inside.

  How is it, I ask Wendy, that we can spend so much time with people, and know nothing about them? I mean, we were a serious band, for a high school band. We practiced twice a week, Fridays and Sundays. We played shows in Annapolis and D.C. and Harrisburg. It ought to be criminal, how casual we are with our friends, at that age.

  You were young. You weren’t thinking for the long term. You don’t think, when you’re a teenager, that anyone ever goes away, do you? Every friend is a friend for life.

  I roll to a stop at the corner of St. Paul and Cathedral, and look over at my reflection in a storefront window: an ordinary face, I guess you could say, relatively dark-featured, with a close-trimmed beard and thick eyebrows, the gift of my Portuguese great-grandparents. An unremarkable, unhandsome, inoffensive face. A white face. I should add that now. It would never have made the list before. There are so many parts of myself that I can change, that I have changed, but who spends much time assessing the givens? An unremarkable face of a man alone in his unremarkable car, who, if one observed closely, could be seen talking to himself out loud—not to a speakerphone, not to a Bluetooth headset, to the air.

  I shouldn’t have come, I say to Wendy. I should never have moved back here. It was a terrible mistake.

  Did you have another choice?

  I should have been driving.

  Silence. I could snap my fingers and hear it echo: my mind, for a moment, a deserted room.

  5.

  Aegeos, the restaurant Martin suggested, is in the prime spot—first floor, water side, nearest the Aquarium—in the Harborplace shopping complex where Phelps Seafood used to be. In truth, I haven’t been to Harborplace in so many years that I hardly remember what goes where. Locals, by and large, avoid it. Fundamentally it’s just a mall with expensive, inconvenient parking, unless you’re downtown for some better reason, like jury duty. But of course that’s not the reason: to go there is to be reminded, if you’re at least as old as I am, that at one time the city’s very existence seemed to depend on two long glass-and-brown-brick sheds filled with potted ferns, neon handwriting, and shiny baubles from The Limited, La Sweaterie, and The Nature Company. This was before crack, before AIDS, before the final Beth Steel shutdown, three recessions ago—as if Baltimore has ever come out of recession in my lifetime—and yet year after year the tourists spill across its tiled plazas in waves, buying Don’t Bother Me, I’m Crabby aprons and twelve-dollar salads, blueberry-flavored popcorn and ships in bottles, and their money, as far as I can tell, gets flushed into the oily water of the harbor, or rather onto the balance sheets of multinationals, leaving not a trace. Of course, now the Inner Harbor has metastasized: where there were once grain piers and hulking warehouses, from Fort McHenry to Canton, you find gleaming condo high-rises, marinas, and office towers. But Harborplace itself hasn’t changed; in fact, it’s become a little tired, almost seedy. Half the interior shop spaces are walled off with paperboard murals: New Shops & Entertainment Coming Soon! To walk in here, I’m thinking, is to look at the future in a developer’s mind, circa 1978, and to watch the police cars circle the perimeter along Light and Eager Streets, in case Baltimore itself spills in.

  Martin is sitting at a window table already—this is the kind of day I’m having—with a salmon-colored legal pad in front of him, looking out over the harbor, which today has a kind of low-wattage electric sheen, and talking into his BlackBerry as I sit down. Tell him that’s clever, he’s saying, and turns to me and mouths sorry—it’s clever as a negotiating tactic, but we don’t do things that way. You’re talking about a currency that lost thirty-five percent of its—yeah. Right. Sheila has the routing number. You don’t even have to call HSBC. Just take care of it and email me the confirmation. Got it. Okay. Later. You’re not late, he says to me, I’m early. And I apologize. I should have waited at the bar. It’s an unfair advantage, sitting down first.

  Advantage for what?

  He opens his arms wide, so that I can see, at either end of the wingspan of his taupe suit, an immaculate French cuff with an onyx period for a cuff link. You’re right, he says. You’re absolutely right. I just, you know, I think like a businessman. Instinctively. Like you think like a reporter.

  I’m not a reporter.

  For good?

  Never was. There’s no money in it.

  He snorts and rubs the corner of his eye with his pinkie, as if bothered by a contact lens or a sudden itch. You work in the nonprofit realm, he says. There’s no money in any of it, is there? Wouldn’t you like to jump ship to corporate, ultimately?

  Corporate radio? I thought it was all run by computers now.

  What about, say, MSNBC?

  Why is it, I always want to ask, that strangers assume I’m just waiting for my chance to move to the big time, that promised media-land of fame, wall-to-wall exposure, the news zippers, the endless symphony of dings, bleeps, swooshes, texts, pings, updates, alerts? No one wants a job to keep anymore: I get that. We’re all free agents. But do I, in particular, look like I want to be on that treadmill, do I have that look of perpetual dissatisfaction, the hungry one, the up-and-comer? No. It’s become a default, I suppose, an assumption, the question that always has to follow what do you do?

  No, I say, look, I mean, public radio is different. It’s a mission. It’s about what you want out of your life, I guess you could say. Nobody does it for the money. Really it’s a kind of self-flattery, when you get right down to it. But whatever—I fell into it because I need a steady job. It beats pumping gas.

  Or working for Fox News.

  Right, I say, with a weak laugh. As if that were an option.

  It occurs to me that this would be the place where I could clarify what it means to be on the programming side, the administrative side, of radio. But, on the other hand, I’m just enough of an operator not to. It’s an old habit, this self-promotion that dares not
speak its name. That’s how you get into Amherst with an A average.

  So what, you just wanted a promotion? That’s what this is about, moving back to Baltimore, taking this job?

  His BlackBerry buzzes, conveniently, and he checks the screen before shutting it off. I find myself staring, for no good reason, at his ears: perfectly ordinary, like all ears, fascinatingly shell-shaped, overly detailed, a kind of virtuosic molding of cartilage with no obvious rationale. Why do we have earlobes, for example? To be tugged, tickled, pierced? I remember nothing about Martin’s ears other than they seemed a little too large for his head, and that he was always tucking his chin-length bangs behind them, especially on the right side. These are the same ears, presumably, only the color has changed.

  He’s done it; it’s real. Here, in the soft mood lighting of an expensive restaurant, and the high, flat light of the sky over the water, in public, framed by two potted olive trees and a trellis of fake grapes, he is inarguable; there are no cracks, no fissures; he is unquestionably a black man. All at once I feel an intense, pressurized pain in my sinuses, my forehead, eye sockets, across the bridge of my nose: as if my own face has become inflatable and is about to lift off.

  You okay? he asks. Hey. Kelly. Look at me. You need a Tylenol or something?

  No. I’m all right. Already the pain is receding; I wet my napkin, rub it across my forehead, and it’s gone, just as fast as it came.

  Thought you were having a panic attack there or something. He laughs, a deep, reverberating belly laugh. Heck, I knew you NPR people don’t like to talk money, but this is something else.

  No, I say, really, it’s not about money at all, Martin. I came here because I needed to start over. So to speak. I needed something; this was what came up. I was grieving. That’s how it is. Sometimes you have to make quick decisions.

  Was it a mistake, coming back to the old town? Too many memories, something like that?

  I don’t remember nearly as much as I ought to.