ECLIPSE

by Richard North Patterson

  “Not stop. Pause.”

  He angled his head to indicate the gathering. “In ten minutes the eclipse will be upon us; in another ten I will send them home. But now is not the moment for me to show fear. Please, Marissa, do not make me afraid.”

  He held her gaze for one more moment. Then he took a cigarette lighter from his pocket and snapped it once, then twice more. When it did not light, he took out another. As this one produced a flame, Bobby laughed softly.

  “Always prepare,” he said. He straightened, standing taller, and walked toward the crowd and into the lengthening shadow of the eclipse.

  7

  AT SEA RANCH, PIERCE GLANCED AT HIS WATCH AGAIN.

  It was just after midnight. In the deep black surrounding him, unfiltered by city lights, he imagined the darkness moving toward Goro. Then, as vividly, he recalled the night his relationship to Marissa proved as complex as he had begun to sense it was.

  THAT EVENING HAD begun no differently than others. The two of them emerged from class, debating a classmate’s story that she liked and he disdained. “I call it ‘ennui fiction,’” he said as they reached the sidewalk, “where the main character wakes up, discovers his hair dryer doesn’t work, perceives that as a metaphor, and decides not to leave his apartment—”

  “I thought it was sensitive.”

  “What about ‘enervated’? If the guy in that story came to life, you wouldn’t give him a nanosecond.” Pierce turned to her. “So where are we going to dinner? Stories that go nowhere make me hungry.”

  Marissa considered this. “I don’t feel like being waited on,” she said. “Tonight I feel more like pizza from a box.”

  “Fine with me,” Pierce responded on impulse. “Let’s go to your place and order one.”

  Marissa scrutinized him in the dark, then gave what passed for a careless shrug. “Only if you like anchovies,” she answered.

  They stopped at a corner store for a bottle of cabernet, then drove to her walk-up in a venerable three-story building. When she opened her door, hesitating for just a moment, Pierce followed her into a cramped efficiency apartment. Its contents—a fold-out couch, chair, desk, bookshelf, and kitchen table—included only modest clues to her life: a photograph of Bobby, another of a pleasant-faced black woman Pierce took to be her mother, and, to his surprise, a black-and-white poster of a perspiring Michael Jordan. “Do you like basketball?” he asked.

  “Nope,” she answered crisply. “That’s only there ‘cause Michael’s hot. What else do you like on your pizza?”

  AFTER DINNER THEY sat facing each other on the couch, Pierce at one end, Marissa at the other, still sipping the spicy red wine. “So I’m waiting for your story,” he said.

  She sipped from her glass, eyeing Pierce over the rim. “You’ve read them all, thank you. There aren’t any more.”

  He smiled at this deliberate misunderstanding. “Of your life.”

  Her wary expression deepened. “Why does it matter?”

  Though his smile lingered, Damon chose to meet her gaze with new directness. “Friends talk about lot of things, I always thought.”

  “We do talk.”

  “Rarely about you. For example, all you’ve said about your parents is that he’s Jewish and an academic, and she’s an African-American social worker. My guess is they’re divorced, though I don’t even know that much.”

  She seemed to study him more closely. “Oh,” she said softly, “I think you know a lot. Sometimes when you look at me I can see your mind at work. And I wonder why.”

  Feeling caught out, Pierce covered this with a shrug. “When I like someone I want to know them. Tell me, how did your parents meet?”

  After a moment she gave an almost imperceptible nod, suggesting both acquiescence and reluctance. “They were civil rights workers in Mississippi,” she began, “during the Freedom Summer of 1964. My mom describes it as a time of idealism and change—both of them were from the North, and they’d stepped into this place so alien and filled with hate she began to worry they might not get out alive. Every moment took on an immediacy, she tells me—when they made love, it was not only the best time, but maybe the last time.” Marissa’s smile was knowing, as though she had perceived the ending of the story before her parents. “So at the end of the summer they celebrated their survival by getting married, two people who saw themselves as symbols of the new order. My existence is an accident of history—the country’s, and theirs.”

  Though she spoke easily enough, a slightly caustic undertone suggested that affecting detachment was the carapace for far more complex feelings. “Were you born down South?” Pierce asked.

  “In New Orleans—my father was getting his doctorate at Tulane.” Marissa paused. “The hospital had been integrated, and I was one of the first overtly biracial babies the place had ever seen. Years later my mama told me that on my birth certificate—next to the box for my mother’s race, ‘Negro,’ and my father’s, ‘Caucasian’—was the handwritten notation ‘Is this correct?’ She insisted they couldn’t raise me in such a place.”

  The last sentence contained a quiet irony, an awareness that questions of identity and race were not so easily escaped. “So that’s when they moved to Cleveland?” Pierce asked.

  “Uh-huh. My father landed a job as an assistant professor, my mother as a caseworker for the county. They chose to live in a suburb noted for its public schools—which translated into ‘lots of Jews, not many blacks.’ That’s where I discovered, without quite knowing it, that the bewilderment on my birth certificate extended to my Jewish grandmother.”

  “How so?”

  Marissa stretched her legs in front of her, her feet nearly touching Pierce’s, a hint that she was feeling more comfortable and, perhaps, even enjoying this relief from the solitude she seemed to carry with her. “Grandma Ruth would hug my father, but never Mom. And when she was just with my mother, she’d never look at her, even when they were talking.

  “Now I realize we scared her. Her parents had fled Russia after most of the Jews in their village were slaughtered by Russian soldiers. Her first memories were of that story.” Marissa’s voice softened. “What that taught her was a fear of standing out—that being different could be fatal. Not only were Mama and I different, but we marked her as different, the Jew whose granddaughter was black. But all I knew then was that she never kissed me.”

  She said this in a tone of remembered puzzlement, but no self-pity. “If she’s anything like my grandparents,” Pierce ventured, “she could never acknowledge any of that.”

  “Of course not. The nearest we ever came was when I was twelve. For Christmas, of all things—which my mother insisted on celebrating—Grandma Ruth gave me Anne Frank’s diary with a card saying, ‘You must read this.’

  “So I did. For some time afterward I woke up terrified that they were coming for me. Only I didn’t know who they were, or whether they would kill me for being Jewish or black. What I really didn’t know, I guess, was who I was supposed to be.”

  Pierce absorbed this. “One thing about my childhood,” he remarked. “I always knew who I was supposed to be. Sometimes to a fault.”

  Marissa cupped the glass in her hand. “My mama tried to tell me I was ‘special’—to be proud of my heritage, Jewish and black. But the message I’d begun to absorb was that I didn’t get to choose. When we did The Wizard of Oz in sixth grade, I was the Wicked Witch of the West, a black girl in a very black dress. It made me feel uncomfortable—by then my dance teacher had told me that black women’s bodies weren’t well suited for ballet.” Marissa paused, looking down, and her dispassionate tone became tinged with self-contempt. “But not as uncomfortable as realizing that I wanted Grandma Ruth to come see the play instead of Mama. I had a crush on the Jewish boy who played the scarecrow, and didn’t want him to think of me as black. When my mother came up to hug me, I folded my arms and looked away.”

  Pierce squirmed inside. “You were a kid, Marissa.”

  She looked
up at him. “What I’d begun to feel, and believe today, is that there’s a need hardwired in the human species to define itself in relation to some lesser, dismissible race. That’s why Bobby’s people are so disposable—Luandians dismiss the Asari as an inferior ethnic group; Westerners dismiss them because they’re black. But back then I blamed only myself for that.”

  Pierce searched for common ground—perhaps one of Sean Pierce’s many stories of being disdained as an Irish Catholic. But the comparison struck him as superficial: he had never been confused about who he was; nor did merely entering a room set him apart.

  Marissa’s voice broke through his thoughts. “Do you know what I remember most from that time?” she told him. “When my mother showed me a sepia-tinted photograph of an ancient black woman and told me it was my great-grandmother, a slave. She meant it as a history lesson. But all I felt was this terrible shame.”

  She stopped there, pensive. “Where was your father in all this?” Pierce asked.

  Her downward gaze persisted. At last she answered, “He’s the part I struggle with. All the reasons I didn’t tell my parents how confused I was came from suspicions about their marriage that turned out to be true.

  “Their relationship had stopped being an act of glorious defiance. More and more my father spent time with whites, my mother with blacks. When I was small, I used to crawl into bed between them, holding their hands like I was some sort of human bridge.” She paused again, then looked up at Pierce. “Sometimes I look back at myself as a girl of nine or ten, and it’s like I’m someone else. That’s the person I feel sad for.”

  Pierce felt them coming closer to truths that had eluded him. “Is your dad the man in your short story?”

  The smile at one corner of her mouth did not change her eyes. “More or less. But there’s one scene I’ll never write.”

  Unwilling to push her, Pierce settled into silence. For a long time, Marissa contemplated her wineglass. “I was twelve,” she said abruptly. “My mom was visiting her sister and her new baby. It was late at night, and I guess he figured I’d sleep right through. Instead my Anne Frank paranoia turned into a nightmare of men in uniforms breaking into my room—some black, some white. I was so afraid I wanted to find my father.

  “My bedroom was at the top of the stairs. When I cracked open the door, I heard voices.” Marissa sipped her wine, as though reflecting back. “The light in the alcove was dim, but I could see them clearly enough. My father, kissing a woman who had slipped in through the door, running his hands all over her body.

  “She was young and slender—not at all like my full-figured mother—and very white. They turned and started up the stairs, smiling at each other. I closed the door as softly as I could, so they wouldn’t see or hear me. Then I pressed my back against the door, listening until I heard the door to my parents’ bedroom close as softly as I’d closed mine.”

  Pierce remained silent until she looked up at him again. “That’s all,” she said. “Were you expecting more?”

  “I was just wondering if you ever confronted him. Or told your mother.”

  “Neither. As time went on I discovered that my father had constant affairs, typically with graduate students, young women who reinforced his need to feel his own magnetism. All of them were white.” Her tone became cool. “To him my mother wasn’t a person—just part of an image he once had of himself. Having me was the sacrifice he made to keep her before realizing he didn’t want either one of us. Eventually he got so blatant that even Mama couldn’t take it.

  “After the divorce he moved to a condominium, where everyone was white and everything was symmetrical. When I visited on weekends it felt like I was trapped in a Fisher-Price village on Astroturf. I hated it. I hated the women he saw. Most of all, I hated him.” Pierce saw her jawline tighten, and slivers of anger entered her voice. “When I told him I didn’t want to come there anymore, he accused me of being an anti-Semite. He was so completely solipsistic that he looked at his own daughter and saw nothing but an angry black woman filled with all the rage my mother had never shown, all because she was too patient, too caretaking, too concerned with how I’d feel. And he never, ever saw her. So I rejected him, all of him, with all the fury I could muster.”

  Abruptly she fell silent, caught in the emotions of her narrative, yet perhaps regretting that she had taken it so far. To lighten the moment, Damon said laconically, “You should have put that part in the story.”

  To his surprise, Marissa gave a rueful laugh. “That part’s mine. At least it was until now.”

  Though nothing in her tone underscored the last remark, it suggested that she had not fully revealed herself to Bobby Okari. But all Pierce said was “I guess things got better.”

  “Not for a while. I’d just started high school, where there were blacks mixed in with whites. And I was remote and angry all at once—the white kids found me intimidating; blacks thought I was ‘snobby.’ For a while I slipped back and forth between them, trying on attitudes and not fitting in anywhere. Then my father’s example gave me direction.”

  “Which was?”

  Marissa looked at him with renewed directness. “Sleeping with black guys. I didn’t stop until I realized people were laughing at me, white and black, and that my reasons were no better than my father’s. So I pulled myself out of it and hid behind a veneer of toughness. My own solitude became the safest place I knew.”

  “And that’s when you started writing.”

  Her teeth flashed briefly. “How did you ever guess?”

  “Sheer brilliance. Plus the fact that feeling different from everyone around me was what got me started.”

  She gave him an ironic look. “You felt special. I felt different. It’s taken some time to separate myself from the identity laid out for me by other people and sort out who I was meant to be.”

  Pierce reached for the wine bottle, helping himself to another half glass. “Is that what Luandia’s about?”

  “I think so.” She gave him a keen look. “Just to clear something up for you, I was drawn to Luandia before I met Bobby. Over a year ago I went with a human rights group to Waro, the major city. The services were collapsing; the roads were congested; there were piles of garbage in the street; the power failed for hours on end. But there was a vitality I’d never seen before.” She began to speak swiftly, passionately. “I was scared and enthralled and thought the people were amazing—filled with energy, directness, and the will to survive. Suddenly I felt that anything was possible for me there, that I could have an impact way bigger than anything I could accomplish here. Now I can’t wait to go back.”

  Pierce did not analyze his impulse to object. “Then you were a foreigner who knew she was coming back here. From the sound of Bobby’s plans, the next time coming back won’t be so simple.”

  Marissa shrugged. “Then I’ll have to become Luandian, won’t I.”

  Pierce sipped his wine. “I wonder if fitting in will really be that easy.”

  Marissa bit her lip, lending her expression a stubborn cast. “In America I’m already twice a minority. Granted, less than half of me is black—Mama tells me there’s at least one slave owner in the family tree. But for everyone except blacks I’m black. So I’ve chosen to embrace that. I can’t be white, and don’t want to be.”

  “And I can only be me, Marissa—an Irish Catholic with as open a heart as I can manage. That has to be enough.”

  Perhaps it was the wine, Pierce realized, that had made him say more than he should, or the sense that his time with Marissa was running out. She looked down again, seeming to draw a breath, then met his eyes with an expression of deep gravity. “For who?”

  “Maybe for you.”

  She held his gaze, head slightly tilted, as though she were replaying his tone of voice. Then she said, “It can’t be, Damon. It just can’t.”

  The quiet insistence in her voice hinted at an inner struggle. With equal quiet, he answered, “I’m not your father. Or Bobby Okari. What matters
to me is that I see you as you are.”

  Her eyes and body froze. “That’s pretty condescending.”

  “Is it? I thought part of respecting someone was speaking honestly. That’s what we’ve been doing.” He softened his tone again. “Do you talk this way to Bobby?”

  “I don’t need to,” she snapped. “I already feel stupid for saying this stuff to you. How much dumber would it be for me to whine to Bobby about adolescent angst or my parents’ crummy marriage? For him I’m what he sees right now—and yes, that is enough.”

  “For who?” Pierce shot back. “Didn’t you say your mother was too concerned with others’ needs to speak out for herself? Or do you need Bobby to see you as someone too consumed by higher causes to bother him with herself?”

  “That’s completely unfair.” Marissa stood, trembling with anger. “Damn you, Damon, for drawing me out and then turning that back against me. I gave you credit for being sensitive, when all you are is manipulative.”

  Standing to face her, Pierce felt himself flush. “All I’ve done was listen to you and, because you matter, challenge you. I think you know the difference. That’s one of the reasons tonight happened the way it has. You can say anything to me you need to say, and that you don’t say in the stories Bobby never reads.” He lowered his voice again. “I care about you, Marissa. But then you’ve known that for a while.”

  Slowly the stiffness left her posture, and then she looked into his face. “What I know is that we’re different. You’re a poor boy from Boston who’s grabbing what America has to offer you—a partnership in a corporate firm and the money to buy a Victorian in Pacific Heights, fill the cellar with fine wine, and have enough left over for liberal causes. It’s only human for that to appeal to you. But I’m going where I can help people in a way that I think matters. The life you’re headed for would be slow death to me.”

  “And yet you’ve imagined it,” Pierce said softly. “Can you tell me you love Bobby as much as the cause he stands for?”

  To his surprise, Marissa said nothing. Nor, despite her stricken expression, could she seem to look away.