As Lie Is to Grin

by Simeon Marsalis

  Chapter 1

  There was a family of deer grazing in the neighbors’ yard. The leaves had nearly vanished. Dried and rust-colored remnants still stuck to some branches. I watched the seasons change from our living room window. Doris rolled out of her room at 5:45 p.m. and put the water to boil, before grabbing a plastic bottle of marinara sauce from the fridge. I picked up the newspaper from the table. She didn’t get it often, but since America was considering a black presidential candidate, she had been buying New York’s Times, Post, and Daily News. I flipped through articles—“Memorial Dedicated at African Burial Ground,” “Feds Waited Weeks to Warn on Tainted Meat,” “Sean Bell’s Fiancée Cheers New Sobriety Test for Cops”—without any intention. Toward the end of the classifieds, I saw a funny little ad. The typeface was gothic and declared “Daily Planet Writer’s Workshop.” The listed phone number was 1-800-WRITING, and no credits were transferable to or from any nationally accredited high school or university.

  “May I take writing classes?”

  “That depends on what it costs.”

  “May I use your computer?”

  “Yes.” Doris didn’t move. I walked toward her room. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To your room.”

  “What did I tell you about going into my room?”

  “But you’re cooking.”

  “So wait. What is the hurry?”

  I stopped in the hallway. “Can I just—”

  “Sit down!” Then she spoke to herself. “These disrespectful fucking men. Not only do I have to cook, but I have to be a computer, and it all has to happen at once? You try to raise them right, treat them with respect, but no matter what, they always come back to you, ungrateful boys.”

  After finishing her dinner, Doris got her computer and placed it in front of me. I went to www.dailypworkshop.com. The program had four tiers—Beginning, Building, Mature, and Novelist. You had to take three months of classes in the first two tiers (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction), and four months in the second two. Three months cost $349.99 in the first two, $449.99 for the second two. All of this I showed to my aunt on the screen. She said she would pay for nine months of classes, before reminding me that we were to have visitors this evening. I finished the pasta. I cleaned the living room as the sun was descending. She went into the garage and came back upstairs after an hour. The bell rang.

  The night was thick. From the porch light, I could make out a middle-aged couple through the gate. Worry in the wife’s soul hung over each slight movement, from the way she smiled, timidly, to the way she clenched and let go of her husband’s hand. I invited them into the living room, where my mother sat staring through the back window. As we approached, her eyes remained transfixed on some point beyond the glass. She said, “You have not been truthful with each other,” turning to face them.

  “How did you know?”

  To which my aunt replied, “We know these things,” as she turned back to the window. Every slight movement was an act she performed until the end of each session, when Doris opened the garage to a patch of flowers—carnations, catchfly, lilies, and scarlet sage.

  “How do they grow without light?” her patients would ask.

  “That is the miracle,” she would say. “I go out to the forest by the highway, and I find the strongest wildflowers. The plants live in the garage during the winter with insufficient light.” In truth, she packed boxes of flowers in green cartons from the florist and arranged them before we were to receive her patients. Doris always referenced “this little patch of meadow, in this little patch of wood,” where she supposedly spent most of her weekends, digging up flowers that could grow strong anywhere. She told me, “They usually don’t believe it. That does not matter. The flowers give them hope in this country where there is none.”

  october 8, 2010

  The front page of the school paper announced, “University Receives 146 Million . . . Our faculty’s success in attracting a record amount of research funding is a strong measure of the University’s significant advance over the last decade . . . Award amounts have grown 96% since 2000 when sponsored awards were $75 million.” I passed advertisements for Stowe’s ski resort to “Students Can’t Mask Joy for Latino Heritage Month . . . Students who participated in the mask making said they came away with broadened horizons and paint-stained clothes.” One remarked that mask making was a fun way to get into someone else’s culture. I stopped on page 7, at “New UVM Magazine Gaining Popularity Among Dissatisfied Artists,” looking at a picture of a brown-haired woman sitting on a porch with a pen in her mouth. It was the same pose I had seen the man in the gray suit strike. I suffered the distinct feeling that my mind was colluding with the paper to mock me. I folded the newspaper, put it in my bag, and gathered the rest of my things to go downtown.

  It was Mark’s friend Jimmy’s sometimes girlfriend Emma’s birthday party. We sat in the Vietnamese restaurant at a long table with two handles of whiskey and ginger ale. I sipped at my cup and tried not to watch my fellow students too closely. Eight people ordered the number 7; Luke got number 3 (pepper next to it for spicy), because he always ate crabs with extra hot sauce on the Chesapeake. He had on a Washington Nationals baseball cap. It reminded me of Jean Toomer, whose upbringing in the District of Columbia had shaped one of the great works of Modernist literature. Had it not been for that book, I would never have chosen to start writing that damned novel. The soups arrived. Matt, with two noodles drooping from the side of his lips, began barking, so other patrons turned to look at us. Jimmy slammed a glass bottle on the plastic place mat designed to look like bamboo. His eyes were beginning to glass over. Each young man drank the whiskey as the bowls of soup came out, except for Matt. He put his pinkies at the outside of his eyes, flattening them to tight ovals while staring at the Vietnamese woman who was serving our food, which caused me to drink more. I stood up abruptly and left, feeling as if I were floating. I saw myself flying, spreading giant wings, and appearing at Delilah’s door, so drunk that she put me to bed. The dream played out in my brain: Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway is deserted. It is the night. I begin to walk, and as I do, an Army recruitment office, a bank, and a fast-food restaurant pass on a conveyor belt to my left. I stare forward at the saplings on the Parkway, still bare. The night extends through the lenses of lightbulbs, twenty feet apart and dangling from silver fingers that protrude from beneath the tarred concrete. As I look into the tinted windows of a police car, the tip of my cigarette appears like a tiny furnace. All around there is a ringing. It was 4:30 a.m. I tried to sleep, although I was nervous that the nightmares from last year were beginning again.

  october 17, 2010

  I woke up with an erection and someone’s used bath towel on my face in the living room of the Rib Shack. I rinsed my mouth out with soap and water, and checked my eyes in the bathroom mirror before leaving the house. The mornings had become significantly colder than the afternoons, and I knew I was not prepared for winter. On the way up Pearl Street, I heard chanting from one block over. I turned to get closer to the noise and saw the outline of a husky bearded man with giant black headphones on, steadily rapping while thrusting his hands into the air. I watched him become small in the distance. At the cafeteria behind Billings Hall, there was a giant cardboard trifold headed with the word Sodexo. All of the options—the fresh greens, carrots, meats all salmonella-free—littered the blue background of the foldout. The lunch attendant stood in front of the display, with her burgundy uniform and black paper hat, waiting to swipe students’ dining cards so they could ingest tons of processed American beef. The cafeteria was filled with light. The ceiling was Plexiglas and divided into eight raised panels that formed an octagonal pyramid. Though the windows at floor level were foggy with years of halfhearted maintenance, I sat next to them, facing a path and a small green. Outside, I saw Jimmy walking with Delilah. They were talking and smiling. He put his hand around her
waist. As they disappeared from my periphery and I craned my neck to watch them, I had the sudden urge to walk in the opposite direction. I left the tray on the table and went toward Old Mill (1825, 1882), bypassing the Annex (1995) and the extension of the Royall Tyler Theatre (1915) while reading the architecture page to turn my brain from what it had just seen. None was designed before 1802—eleven years after the school’s founding, when the institution had been more a high school for the children of wealthy Vermont landowners than a university. As I was looking at the dates of buildings, the novelty of American history became apparent, so I tried to find out what had occurred during the year of each building’s construction. In 1825, the first American fraternity was founded; in 1882, New York was lit by electricity; in 1915, the United States reestablished diplomatic relations with Mexico; in 1995, Mississippi ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to outlaw slavery.

  None of the events seemed to be related. I arrived at my dorm room and the lights were out. Nothing was on Gary’s side, and his bed had been stripped of its sheets. My eyes shut.

  october 18, 2010

  I lay in bed and gazed out the window. The earth felt as if it were waiting. For what, I did not know. There were two students walking in different directions, next to the green. They smiled at each other. I could not hear their conversation, but their hand movements seemed to indicate that they would meet again, later that night. I got out of bed for the first time all day.

  On the steps of the library, there was a man with sunglasses on, though it was dark. “I am the reckoning,” he said. “I am the Lord of Light, and through me, all things are made small.” He drank from the cup in his hand and projected again: “I am the Lord of Change.” Most students walked by him; a few listened and chuckled with their friends. “I am the Lord and before me all things are infinitesimal.” I faced the statue that resembled a dead and mutilated tree and walked on, trying not to be taken in by his madness.

  Between Cook Physical Sciences and Wills Hall two seven-foot figures in black cloaks marched toward me. I stopped, realizing they were sculptures, then looked past them to the brick faces of the central campus dorms. Three cop cruisers were parked between Buckham and Chittenden (McKim, Mead & White). A small woman with brown hair cried in a blond man’s arms just forty yards from me. Students bunched in groups outside the dorm. I did not wish to involve myself in the misfortune of others, so I continued to press forward, passing the Fleming Museum (McKim, Mead & White). My eyes rested on the three sculptures that appeared to be pyramids, just before the entrance. Moving to their right, that angle changing my perception of the shapes, I could see that the smallest installation was not a pyramid but half of a pointed oval, the flat side of which was on the ground. A raised spine ran down the center of it, affecting the same shape as the other two structures at certain vantage points. The day was haunted. I turned downtown and the police lights did not stop flashing until I crossed onto University Place. My nose was beginning to run. I knocked hard at Delilah’s front door.

  “Hello?” She had on a red sweater; the hood was drawn up, and there were bags under her eyes. I kissed her, pressing the mucus beneath my nostrils into her face, touching her ears with my hands. She withdrew. “You’re cold.”

  “Can I come in?” Delilah left the door open and glided back into her room. She lay down on the bed and grabbed the glass of red wine she had been drinking, opening her computer again to watch an episode of Law & Order. I unfastened my jeans and closed her laptop. I asked, “Who is he?” We both knew that I was referring to Jimmy.

  “What?”

  “Tell me who he is,” I said, as I wiped my nose and started to pull the sweater from her warm body.

  “No.” She turned over with her bra still on. I fussed with the straps; she slapped at my hands.

  “I’m tired of slipping in between the mattress and the floor. At least sleep over in my room one time.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You won’t, or you can’t?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “You live in the dorms.”

  “Well, sleep with me over at the Rib Shack.”

  “That’s not your house.” She moved to the other side of the bed.

  “I have a room there.” I didn’t reach for her.

  She shrugged, opened the laptop, went to the bathroom, and turned on the water. I waited at the edge of the bed. She came out, hair in pins, and then walked to the kitchen, returning with more wine. Her left hand was on my stomach; my right hand was between her legs. I found myself staring around Delilah’s room before dawn, taking the little things I saw in the night as some indication of who Delilah was. There was the dream catcher and an electronic gramophone with a record by the Funky Meters on top of it. There was a poster above her bed of an American football player wearing a University of Southern California Trojans jersey. On the adjacent wall there was a helmet, and pink goggles that hung above boots. A green snowboard rested beneath them. How did she learn to snowboard in the south? There were little things that I did not know about her, which made me realize that I had not taken a serious interest in Delilah. I tried to remember more of what she had told me about herself, but was distracted by the thought of a story Jean Toomer had written in Cane, called “Blood Burning Moon,” about a black man (Tom) who killed a white man (Bob) over his continued dalliance with a young black woman (Louisa) whom Tom hoped to marry. It ended with Tom’s hanging by lynch mob. What gave the story life were the horrible questions that went unasked by the narrator. Why had Louisa chosen to continue seeing Bob, why wasn’t Tom given a fair trial, what did Tom truly desire? I linked that story to my life, Bob to Jimmy, though I knew it was absurd to see connections because the stories were separated by eighty-seven years (2010–1923) and reality. I turned over, propped up on my elbow, stared at Delilah’s back and the light from her window. Behind the glass, standing on the corner of Pearl Street and South Union, reading a newspaper, was the man in the gray suit. He cast his eyes down, an action I could perceive although we were a great distance from each other. Delilah grunted, so I sat still, propped up like that, until the man returned my stare. He made a gesture toward the paper, closed it, then—

  “How long have you been staring at me?” Delilah interrupted.

  “I haven’t been staring at you.”

  “David, I can see your reflection in the window.” I tried to catch her eyes in the pane, but I could not. “Maybe you should go.”

  “Why?”

  “You are acting weird.”

  Until then, I had not realized this night was Delilah’s goodbye. I got out of the bed and started putting on my things. She went to sleep again. I turned the bottom lock on the front door. Soon I was facing due east, staring straight up Main Street. The sun began to rise. Night became dawn. Little birds began to tweet. It reminded me of the time I went to Melody’s school with the letter. Now I turned right, into the athletic campus, and stopped between two dorms. No one was outside, so I sat in the little amphitheater between Millis and Austin Halls, twenty yards from the footpath, and stared out at the Green Mountains of Vermont.

  Chapter 2

  My legs were starting to stretch out. My knees and ankles ached some mornings. As I rubbed my joints for twenty minutes I stared at the fly netting that covered up the holes in the screen—sometimes pushing in, so it hurt, calming the pain with words. I touched the notebook Aunt Doris had gotten me. On the first two pages, I had written down some facts about the genius novelist Jean Toomer, separated by dashes. There was a brief biography of his life before the publication of Cane. “Looked white—Born 1894 though no record exists—Plessy v. Ferguson 1896—Grandson of P. B. S. Pinchback, governor of Louisiana, black, reconstruction, moved to Washington, D.C.—Father left—Moved to New Rochelle 1906—attended five different colleges 1915–1919—Cane published 1923.” Two more entries follo
wed the list: information written on June 9, 2006, that was about sand crabs; the other on December 8, 2006, that resembled a frantic apology on Orwell’s 1984.

  The act of journaling bothered me. When was the present? I couldn’t carry the notebook around and write things as they happened. I had an idea to go back and re-create the past a month, two months after the fact, but when the date would come to write, I could not remember what, of significance, had transpired in those earlier days. I put the journal in the dresser beneath my socks and walked to the kitchen, where my aunt had already prepared breakfast. “What are you doing today?”

  “Hanging out with Meat.” I sat at the table.

  “Always with that damned Meat.”

  “He’s my only friend here.”

  “You don’t need friends if that is the only one you could find.”

  “Why do you hate Meat?”

  “He’s vulgar.”

  “All the boys I know are vulgar.”

  “So what about girls?”

  “What about them?” At this point, I was shoveling the eggs into my mouth.

  “Why can’t you be friends with a girl?”

  “Do I look gay to you?”

  “Any man who is friends with women is gay? That sounds backward to me.”