Your Face in Mine: A Novel

by Jess Row

  In any case, it was all over fast, because he waited too long. AZT was around; the triple cocktail was nearly on the market; but by the time he bothered to see a doctor he had the full-blown disease and it was too late to start. In a couple of months he lost nearly twenty pounds; then he got pneumonia, in November, November of 1994, and died on New Year’s Day, 1995. He’d only been diagnosed—what was it?—a year and a half.

  And who was I? Who was I, then, the day I became an orphan?

  I have to stop. That’s a story for another day.

  13.

  Martin switches the wipers to low against a mild drizzle, a fine mist, brackish with road salt; the residue crusts along the sides of the windshield. Gray-green, featureless April, the woods lining the highway dissolved in fog. Through the car’s open vents I can smell the otherworldly scent of thawing earth.

  Didn’t you ever meet my father?

  No. I’m sure I didn’t.

  Short guy, in tennis whites? You sure? Thinning hair, combed back? Gold stud in the right ear? You never came inside the house, not once?

  Tennis whites?

  He wore them all the time. They were the closest thing he had to a uniform. He was inordinately proud of his legs.

  A moment passes. I’m growing aware, every time he stops speaking, of the particular qualities of silence inside this car. A cushioned, baffled, carefully engineered silence. The engine a low vibration more felt than heard. It’s just new enough to have a new-leather smell, like a shoe store, but there are other, more prominent smells: Aftershave. French roast coffee. Dry cleaning? Is there a discernible smell from the plastic-wrapped package just behind my shoulder—the pressing iron, the steam, the sleek fabric itself exhaling? A teasing childish voice, asking, how did this, and this, and this, come to be?

  Maybe, I say, maybe I should start by saying this: I was really shocked to know about your father. That you never told anyone.

  He drains his coffee cup and thunks it back into the cup holder, emphatically.

  Are you wondering what to say? he asks. Don’t say anything. Did I give you a chance to care? Is it your fault you never knew what nobody knew? Of course not. He was a gay man in the Seventies and Eighties. Before anybody knew better. He didn’t want anyone to pity him. Pity us, he always said. The catastrophe is general.

  Not general to you.

  Do you want me to say something I don’t feel?

  His BlackBerry, attached to his belt, buzzes and cheeps, a ringtone meant to sound like late-summer crickets. After four rings, as if coming out of a daze, he takes it out, silences it, and tosses it across the dashboard.

  Listen, he says, maybe the way to put it is like this. My childhood—this whole story—it’s like its own crazy little bubble, right? An ectoplasm unto itself. That’s how Dad wanted it. And I understood him, and I followed the pattern. At first it was just out of shame. Later, toward the end, it was respect. You know the movie Amadeus? The part where Mozart dies, and they throw his body into the pauper’s grave, the unmarked grave, and shake a little lime over it, not even a coffin? Dad loved that. Do that, he said. So I did. As close as you could get in the twentieth century. I kept his anonymity. I kept our big secret, whatever it was, exactly. But that’s not the same thing as love. And it’s not the same thing as grief, either. You could call it a habit of extreme privacy. Which I’m trying to break. Slowly.

  I think about Robin—how can I not?—Tamika, Sherry, his house and its shiny, unplumbable surfaces, its granite and tile.

  Whatever happened to Willie?

  To Willie? You really want to know? It all ended in a fight over Legos. We still saw each other, that first year after I left Shabazz. I still ate at his house once or twice a month. Still needed it, to recharge my batteries. And his mother insisted. Stay friends, she always said. No reason you can’t stay friends. She bought us toys to play with together. With what money I don’t know. What was she thinking, buying toys that two little boys always have to share? I wanted to take the castle home to my house to play with, Willie said no, it’s my castle, I shoved him, he shoved me, I cracked my head on the coffee table. That was it. Don’t ever let them tell you only girls are bitter in their grudges. We never talked again. And after that, magically, my old neighborhood—that whole world—sealed itself off from me. When I was home, away from school, I was inside the house. Alone again. How was I supposed to know what a mistake that was?

  There was no other way, was there?

  Of course there was. At that point Dad wouldn’t have stopped me from hanging out in the neighborhood. He didn’t care. It was all me; I couldn’t make it work. Not psychologically. It was too much of a break. After I left Shabazz it was as if my whole life was outside the neighborhood. That car ride to Roland Park was like my oxygen line. I was like some fragile plant that can survive only at one elevation. Who was there to tell me that it would take me twenty years to find the name for my unhappiness? That I had had everything I needed, and failed to recognize it, and thrown it away? It was a matter of starting from scratch.

  But there’s a thousand ways of starting from scratch. Is that what you’re saying? That this all was a form of rebel—

  I’m not saying anything. I’m posing a question. An obvious question. Was it me, or was it him? Did my father, effectively, make Martin Lipkin into Martin Wilkinson? Can your white father make you a black man? Or could I have been anybody?

  I check the time signature on the recorder: one hour and fifty-three minutes. Is that all? A day, a week?

  This is making you uncomfortable, isn’t it?

  What do you mean?

  Oh, come on, Kelly. Your knee’s jiggling.

  He flicks on the emergency lights and slows the car, easing us off to the side, over the bassoon tones of the rumble strip and into the scabby grass. Across the drainage ditch a fallow cornfield stretches to a hazy, soapy horizon. To our left, the highway divider is an impenetrable thatch of overgrown oaks: the westbound traffic audible but not visible. The Northeast Corridor and its abandoned outdoors.

  Let me tell you something that happened when I first got to Bangkok, he says. Silpa’s office was staffed by trannies. All different stages. It’s common there. Some of them do a little work-for-surgery arrangement. And I was a little freaked out by them. I mean, anyone would be, if you’re used to the ordinary, heterosexual world. So Silpa introduced me to Suki. His private secretary. You’ll meet her—she’s the best. She took me into an examining room and took everything off. Look at me, she said. Really look. Take all the time you want. It’s okay. It’s just hair and skin. It won’t bite you.

  And?

  Well? I looked. I checked her out. I couldn’t tell; she seemed one hundred percent. Her face—her breasts—down below—the whole package. I would never have known. It was complete. She was Silpa’s best advertisement.

  So what’s your point?

  You know what she said to me? I don’t ever think about being a man. As far as I’m concerned, I never was one. I looked her in the face, and I just had to accept it. I had to buy it! So this is what I’m saying: what do I have to show you, Kelly?

  To convince me it’s real? I believe it’s real. How could I not?

  To believe it was always real. I’m not talking about etiology. I’m not talking about cause. We can speculate about the circumstances all we want—later. Right now I’m just talking about the fact of the phenomenon. I was a black boy in a white boy’s body. I was a black man in a white man’s body. Can you accept that, Kelly? Can you really believe it’s possible, when it comes down to it? I need to know. Before we go any further, I need to know.

  I believe you.

  No, see that’s not the same. You believe it because I’m saying it. I’m not asking you to accept the words. I’m asking you to accept the thing itself. The possibility that—

  Yeah, I get it. You don’t have to repeat yourself.

  Which means it could happen to anybody. It could be latent in anybody. It could be latent in
you.

  What would be the chances of that?

  You think it’s some kind of genetic freak that so many kids go to liberal-arts colleges, you know, Bennington, Santa Cruz, and come out as lesbians, and then a few years later they’re getting the hormone shots and beginning to transition? You think environment and suggestion has no effect at all? Either it’s a fad, a style thing, which is bullshit, or it’s present in a much higher percentage of the population than we realize. Given the technology, the resources, the access, a change in social approval, it could be ten percent. Seriously. There’s research. And if one, why not the other? You have to turn the whole logic around. Not who are you now, but who would you most like to be? What is the ultimate form of you? You follow me?

  I close my eyes.

  Martin, I say, what you’re really asking me to say is, you’re not a freak. You’re not a monster. You are, authentically, who you say you are. You are, one hundred percent, the black man Martin Wilkinson, the man I met at Mondawmin Mall, what was it, six weeks ago? You are that man. No one else. No matter what the explanation happens to be, in the end. Is that what you want me to say?

  His eyes are shining.

  Yeah, he says. I guess that’s it.

  Then the answer is yes. See? I don’t even have to think about it. If you hadn’t introduced yourself I would never have known. Isn’t that enough? You could have gone on living your life. You chose.

  I did. I put my faith in you.

  And so what do I have to do, then, to demonstrate that I was worth it?

  When I know for sure, he says, I’ll tell you.

  —

  We drive for ten more minutes in silence, and turn off the interstate onto Route 193, the suburban strip outside the old city, passing three intersections, each interchangeable with the last: Wendy’s, Best Buy, Starbucks, Walmart, Target, HomeGoods, Bed Bath & Beyond. Since moving to Baltimore I haven’t once needed to go to a mall, or any store larger than a supermarket, though in Cambridge, with a household of three, we were forever searching out some bargain outside the city on a gray February Sunday, placating Meimei with food-court egg rolls and new DVDs. In a little more than a year I’ve forgotten how to drive these four-lane roads, with cars stacked up in the dedicated turn lanes, the traffic signals signaling seven different movements at once. It’s as disorienting as a pinball machine. I used to be the expert, the director, the choreographer of our American existence. And now, it seems to me, having stopped growing—shrinking, in fact, as I get older—I need nothing from this America. No economy-sized pallets of paper towels. No Little Mermaid bathing suits. I have failed to burgeon.

  I look over at Martin, the very essence of calm behind the wheel, eyes on every mirror, checking his watch. Which of us is the visitor, I want to know, which of us has given up his claim? Instead, I clear my throat and ask: how long are you going to be?

  Are you on a schedule? I thought you had all afternoon.

  Just for my information.

  Maybe an hour and a half. These legislative lunches never run too long.

  And what is it you’re legislating?

  Import-export stuff. Tax exemptions. Inspection issues at the port. I come down here every six months. All part of the job.

  We’ll have to talk more about that. The job. I still don’t really grasp it.

  Is it relevant? I mean, for this? For the story?

  Maybe indirectly.

  I’m an open book, he says. For you. For now. Ask away.

  14.

  During my dissertation-writing years, in my late twenties, I traveled so often between Beijing and Taipei and Tokyo and Cambridge that I coined my own term for jet lag: the gray hour. Three in the afternoon, the day after you’ve arrived, when the last of the morning’s adrenaline has leached away, and, in the middle of teaching a class, driving on the highway, picking up a child from daycare, the daylight turns into a gluey fog, your eyes loosen in their sockets, and your stomach begins to burn its leftover acids: because it’s three in the morning, of course, according to your circadian clock. Your fuels are spent; your body hardens into clay.

  I park on Duke of Gloucester Street, just south of the statehouse, planning to walk downhill to the harbor market for lunch, but when I get out of the car I feel that same unmistakable lurching sensation, my clothes chafing, my shoulders about to give way, as if I’ve carried two bags of bowling balls up a long flight of stairs. The gray hour. I associate it with a satchel full of unread journals and the taste of the cheap jasmine tea I carried with me everywhere in a jar. On the next block there is a sign for a bookstore-café, the Wickett Arms, with hand-chiseled letters on what appears to be a blackened shield. I cross through the front space, an ordinary-looking room, and enter the café through an open grate in the rear. It’s a brick vault, a former prison, with chains dangling from the walls between the fair-trade posters and framed burlap sacks from Costa Rica and Ethiopia. From the teenage girl at the counter I order a double red-eye—having never been able to stand the syrupy texture of straight espresso—and wait for it in front of the pastry case, not trusting myself to sit down and get back up again. Then, waiting for it to cool, still wary of a comfortable chair, I wander back through the shelves, looking for the African American section, and take down a copy of The Souls of Black Folk.

  I read Du Bois in high school, in AP American history, and then later on in a class at Amherst called “The Concept of an American Minority.” I’m remembering, now, something very particular: his description of his newborn son, who lived only a few days.

  How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa had molded into his features! I held him in my arms, after we had sped far away to our Southern home—held him, and glanced at the hot red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a hundred hills, and felt a vague unrest. Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?

  No more evil omens, no more vague unrest.

  The body you want, not the body you have.

  I could write a brochure.

  Fuck, I think. I am writing his brochure.

  On the same note, who would I want to be? How far does it extend? Could I be, for example, Takeshi Kitano? I’ve always loved Takeshi Kitano. Something about the weariness in his eyes, and his utterly still face. Or, simply, better looking. Given the chance, I might choose to be handsomer. Better bone structure. A slightly larger penis. From what point do I begin to empathize with Martin? Or does this stretch and distort the very idea of empathy, the powers of the imagination? I have no idea what it would be like to want to be a woman. In my life I’ve known two transsexuals: Donald Hathaway, who was two years below me at Amherst, and who became Dani my senior year, and Trish Holland, at WBUR, who called herself a boydyke, wore three-piece suits, and resembled a thinner Leonardo DiCaprio with dark hair. In neither case did I ever feel I had to understand them. There is a point where analogies end. Acceptance has to precede analogy. Acceptance is not equivalence.

  Acceptance is not enough.

  I sip the coffee, now in its proper state, just short of scalding, and with a rush of tingling energy, take out my pen and notebook—a reporter’s notebook, which I bought weeks ago and haven’t used at all, except to note the dates and lengths of our interviews—and write out a line from the Tao Te Ching:

  Know the white,

  Stay with the black,

  This is the pattern of Heaven.

  —

  When I was first learning Chinese in college, enraptured by each new character, I used to write famous quotations on little slips of paper and carry them around in my pockets, like fortune-cookie fortunes. At parties, after the third or fourth beer, I would distribute them to friends—girls, especially—making up meanings as I went along. It was one last failed attempt to cultivate an aura of eccentric co
ol. Later, however, in China, my ability to quote famous proverbs from memory made me a minor celebrity. In restaurants, at official banquets, people would crowd around my table to listen to the laowai who could recite Confucius and Zhu Xi. Wendy hated it. They’re treating you like a monkey, she said. You’re supposed to meditate on these things, not broadcast them like songs on the radio.

  But, I persisted once, what if I find them relevant to the situation?

  They’re never relevant to the situation. They’re timeless. It’s different. You’re distorting them. You think you’re becoming Chinese, and you’re not. You’re becoming a parrot.

  What would she think of all this? I won’t ask myself this question, I’ve decided. Why should she, in particular, be my tribunal on matters of race? She hated to talk about it. Generalizations of any kind drove her to tears. Once, in a squabble over the remote, I forced her to watch ten minutes of Chappelle’s Show, some inane skit about white men wearing grass skirts and Latinos playing bongo drums, and she went into the bathroom and vomited. No one I’ve ever met took the ideal of a colorblind society more literally. In one of her college essays—one I edited, though she hardly needed it—she wrote, the idea of e pluribus unum means that all labels are deceptive. We could even say they are lies. Skin color, religion, and nationality are all beside the point, which is that human beings are individuals.