As Lie Is to Grin

by Simeon Marsalis

  “Can we see the church?” She inhaled her cigarette by the screen door in the living room.

  “Some rich white man bought it, tore it down, and built a corny house on the land.”

  “Why is it corny?”

  “Because it looks like every other rich white person’s house, in any beach town on Long Island.” She went on to explain the difference between the black aesthetic and the white aesthetic, always beginning after emancipation. She said, “The difference is the way we see the world. Their Lost Generation was our Renaissance.” Then she would go on about Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston, switching to Louis Armstrong or Bessie Smith. All the historical figures, our black cultural superheroes, fought a decisive battle to redefine American culture, but they had lost, or so it appeared to Doris. “That cultural loss can be sensed in everything,” she said, “from the music we listen to, to the way our houses are built.” One time I pointed at a house; “White,” she said. A black man walked out. She said, “Still white.”

  “How can a black person’s house be white?”

  “The people do not determine the color of the house; the architect does. Take Osgood Mason or Van Vechten, for example . . .” Even a discussion about this town’s architecture could lead her to refer to some white figure from the 1920s who aided in the death or creation of the Harlem Renaissance. She never told these stories about race when a couple was visiting for a healing. Often they were rich. I could tell by their cars. Often they were distraught, and Doris read these couples by the things they carried, the things they said, and the things they felt but would not express. Her philosophy could be learned, but at a cost. It was all in the books she’d read.

  “All books,” she said, “do two things. They open and close certain valves of understanding. If you read a math book, you learn that one plus one equals two. You get the system of numbers, thus opening your mind to a new world of understanding. Nevertheless, it does something else. Every time you see the markings, one plus one equals two, you recognize it within the context of a mathematical system. The numbers no longer have infinite meanings—just the ones humans have assigned them. Now you are closed off to the world of questions about numbers, like: What does it mean if I say one is not a whole number?”

  The fact that Doris lived two minutes from a beach yet never stepped foot in the water was an example she used to prove her existential point: “I know what I should fear in the water, and I can’t unknow it. Although, to know is not important, nor is not to know, but to be comfortable in your ignorance is.” She spoke to me like an adult, and there was not a question she would answer untruthfully, except the ones involving my mother.

  october 30, 2009

  I was becoming upset with the propensity my fiction had of seeming as if a white man had written it, and as I composed Chapter Five I recognized that all the episodes in my incomplete novel suffered from the same type of inauthenticity. Everything Doris did conformed to some stereotype that I had not meant to convey when I first sat down to write the story. She was too strange, too wise—a favorable rewriting of my mother. I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that the sentences were a product of something inside me that was appropriating blackness. I knew it to be true, and I could not divorce this revelation from my research into Jean Toomer’s identity. The train doors shut at Thirty-fourth Street. I had gotten off at Penn Station, ridden up to 125th Street on the A train, as I was used to doing, then boarded the downtown D, which I did not usually do, so I missed the Fifty-ninth Street stop. The reason to continue seeing Melody no longer made sense to me. I was being carried forward by habit. I left my seat, bypassing three women who wore red face paint and pointed ears, to view the subway map at the other end of the car. I followed the orange D line until it reconnected with the A, C, and B at West Fourth Street. I noticed the small green patch above that bordered the words “Washington Square Park.” The train pulled forward, and I was driven off balance. I stumbled back, noticing that the map resembled two lovers embracing: she is above him. Her eyes are Pelham Bay Park, in the Bronx. His lips are parted in Brooklyn, at Newtown Creek. We stopped moving. Through the window, I saw “Baal” written against the black subway wall.

  I exited the station at West Eighth Street, heading north, and stood on a traffic island, watching small plane lights appear in the darkness behind One World Trade Center. I heard pieces of conversation: “Tonight?” “That’s crazy.” “Memphis.” The sounds were layered atop car horns and an ambulance in the distance. At the corner of West Tenth Street and Avenue of the Americas, there was a maroon castle. It had spires and stained-glass windows—I mistook it for a church. The gate was black, and between the iron bars I saw the same Akan symbol as in Harlem. I continued east on West Tenth, stopping at four different gates on the north side of the block to look at the adinkra that continued to appear. On Fifth Avenue, doormen replaced the iron bars; the low residential buildings became ten-story Art Deco edifices. I looked right and left until Washington Mews, seeing the arch in Washington Square Park. There were two sculptures of George Washington on either side. It imitated France’s national monument, the Arc de Triomphe, which had been appropriated from the Roman Empire. Feelings of patriotism did not move me. My shadow appeared under the streetlamps as I approached them, disappearing as I moved on to the next. Near West Fourth Street, a security guard escorted two young men out of a bar named the Fat Black Pussycat. The smaller one put his leather coat on, smoothing the left sleeve, before saying, “Fuck this fucking place anyway.” They continued east, and I went west to catch the A to Columbus Circle. Melody opened the door for me.

  “You didn’t want to go out on Halloween?”

  “Halloween is for children.” She was upset. “I’m surprised your mother let you come out.” Rick was not there. We went to her room. She had been working with watercolor again and kept referring to the giant purple orbs on her canvases as “the universal.” It was not well defined, but she wouldn’t work with one concept for too long. I had heard nothing about photography since she had abandoned the instant camera in late September.

  “The universal what?”

  “Oneness as representation.” I attributed her current state of aggression to the problems she was trying to solve in her work, which seemed topical now. “How come I never see you writing?”

  I lay on her bed. “I’m not writing anymore.” Every ten minutes she nudged my leg, alerting me to the passing time.

  “This would all be different if we could see each other on the weekdays.”

  I rolled over, put the covers around my shoulders.

  “Can I meet your mother?” The pitch of her voice gave the words a threatening tone.

  october 31, 2009

  I woke up from a dream I could not remember and was upset with Melody. She was still asleep on her side. I got up and roamed into the living room. Everything was quiet. I turned on the light, then continued around the apartment, past the kitchen, toward Rick’s bedroom. Something was calling me inside. I went into the closet with the jackets in different patterns and colors to see if he had hidden something there. I searched the room for some clue as to what I was looking for, when it became apparent that this blind search was some strange metaphor for my life. Instead of continuing, I went to the bookshelf next to his door and read some titles. There were books of poetry, art, and Zen, which made me chuckle. It was a less imposing collection than Doris’s. It felt wrong to open the books, so I ran my fingers over all the spines before going back to Melody’s room. She was coming out of the bathroom. “You are a chronic sleepwalker.”

  “I know.”

  She kissed me. “I’m going on some fancy school trip to Quebec for two and a half weeks.”

  “When?”

  “Friday.” She put her right hand under my shirt, “Can I meet your mother when I get back?” Then she pushed me onto the bed.

  “This is a strange time to ask me that.�
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  “I know, but I just thought of it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m fine with maybe.”

  She unzipped my pants, taking my penis, no stiffer than a bag of water, holding the head inside her mouth, maintaining eye contact with me, and for the first time I began to feel something like remorse for the lie I had been telling. “I don’t think it’s going to get hard right now.”

  “What’s wrong?” It was softened by my desire to continue lying.

  “Nothing.” My eyes began to water.

  “This hasn’t happened before.”

  “I know that.”

  “You can tell me anything. You understand that, right?”

  “I know that.” I could feel her reaching out to hug me, but I went to the closet where my clothes lay in a pile and began to dress.

  “Are you going to say something?”

  “I’ll see you before you leave.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “Yes.” We kissed each other. She was licking and biting my lip, and I had the desire to push her, or yell, or show her how angry these small affections made me, but I closed my eyes, smiled once or twice, then walked to the A train.

  november 7, 2009

  I was standing on West Tenth Street looking at the building I had seen last weekend, with the Akan symbol in its gate. In the atrium, there was an exhibit, showing the different institutions that had existed on this corner beginning in 1833, when the land grounded a fire lookout tower. The architects Calvert Vaux and Frederick Clarke Withers billed the city $360,000 for the erection of a courthouse and market in the Victorian Gothic style in 1876. The Jefferson Market Courthouse reached its height of fame in 1906, when Harry K. Thaw was formally charged with the murder of the renowned architect Stanford White. By 1929, it had become a detention center for women. It wasn’t until 1961, when the community activists Margot Gayle and Philip Wittenberg decided the lot would best be used as a public library and garden, that the building became what it was then, the Jefferson Market Library. I walked down the stairs to the reference room where the brick buttresses retained the slightest hint of its history as a gallows. Although not designed as a library, it was more suited to house books than the haphazard interior of the Countee Cullen. It made me want to go to school in a place with façades such as these, in a far-off place. I headed upstairs to the second floor, stopping to note the intricacy of the stained-glass windows, advancing into the main room while wondering about this Victorian Gothic style, how works of architecture were classified. I found a reference book from the early 2000s that covered the discipline’s development from 4000 b.c.e. through 1990 c.e. First, I looked for “gates” in the index, but the subject did not have one corresponding section. I focused on the section labeled “American Neo-classicism,” which began with a passage about Calvert Vaux, the man who had designed this building. He also designed Central Park with the help of Frederick Law Olmsted, which was then built on top of slave burial grounds and the city’s first settlement of free blacks. First was the architect Henry Hobson Richardson, then his trusted disciple, Stanford White, the man who had appeared in the atrium’s exhibit. I read on, believing the connections between the building and the book would lead me to an understanding about the sign that was in the gate.

  White was the son of a Shakespearean scholar. At eighteen, he became principal assistant to Richardson, a post he would man for six years before traveling to Europe to study classical architecture. He returned to the United States and joined the firm of Charles Follen McKim and William Rutherford Meade. One of the major projects the firm designed was the old Madison Square Garden (1889, Italian Revival) on Twenty-sixth Street. It was yellow and white, and made of terra-cotta bricks. There were two separate auditoriums, a garden, and a nude statue of Diana, the Roman goddess of childbirth. It was said that Stanford White had fashioned an apartment beneath the observation tower. In the center of the living room, attached to the thirty-foot ceiling, was a velvet swing, which White would use, after a bout of coitus, to push his female partners so high that their faces could kiss the ceiling. One of these young women was the fourteen-year-old Evelyn Nesbit, who had worked as a live model for artists and photographers around the city. Her image became so ubiquitous that, although she had been born to a poor Pennsylvania family and taken advantage of in her youth, she catapulted to fame and notoriety, rising high enough in social standing to marry Harry Kendall Thaw, heir to a Coca-Cola and railroad fortune. On the night of June 25, 1906, Stanford White attended a play, Mam’zelle Champagne, with his son, in the Madison Square Garden he had designed seventeen years prior, just a staircase away from the velvet swing. Also in attendance were Thaw and his wife, Nesbit. As the chorus began to sing the popular song “I Could Love a Million Girls,” Harry K. Thaw left his wife’s side and walked within two feet of Stanford White. When the heir raised his pistol, onlookers heard him say, “You have ruined my wife.” He pulled the trigger three times, separating the right half of White’s face from his head. What caused Thaw to kill White is ultimately unknowable, though the court deemed he had suffered a temporary bout of insanity. The final sentence of this lengthy section read, “Stanford White’s son hopes he is remembered for his masterpieces such as the Four Chimneys Estate in New Rochelle or the Arch in Washington Square Park.”

  I put down the book and wondered why such a large section was devoted to the smut trial of a minor American architect. I thought, all history books rely on the overinflated legacy of privileged men. After that, I tried to figure out if Mam’zelle Champagne was a minstrelized version of a play called Mademoiselle Champagne, but the search engine on the library’s computer gave me no matching results. I put the book back in its place and walked to the A train at West Fourth Street, passing the gate outside again, knowing I had not found what I was searching for.

  november 14, 2009

  Rick came to the door. “How are you feeling, Davy Crockett?” He had called me last week. Melody was still away in Montreal. He came across more somberly on the phone than in person. The two of us were supposed to meet at his house at 3:00. I knew I would not make it to the writer’s workshop this week, again. “I thought we could go out to eat.”

  I shrugged. “Great.”

  We ascended Broadway, passed the Starbucks, and entered Lincoln Square Pavilion—an outdoor atrium for the City Ballet, Opera House, and Philharmonic.

  “Thelonious Monk lived on San Juan Hill. The jazz guy. It was a family type of neighborhood. My father lived somewhere over there,” he said, pointing to the Library of the Performing Arts. “Palimpsest, right?”

  I looked around at the buildings—the concert venues, Juilliard, and a rusted sculpture, and did not feel this place was a palimpsest: the black history left no trace; Lincoln Square was a premeditated act of erasure. We continued around the pavilion, made a right on Sixty-fifth Street back to Broadway, passing the Century 21 on Sixty-sixth before stopping at a Japanese restaurant on Sixty-ninth, where he said he used to take Melody’s mother. We sat in a booth by the window. I was wondering if Jean Toomer had ever visited Stanford White’s Four Chimneys Estate. White’s murder had occurred fewer than twelve months before Nina Pinchback had moved to New Rochelle with her new husband and teenage son, Jean.

  “Wow. Deep in thought.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I can tell you are dealing with a lot.” I had not been focusing on Rick because my head was still in the library, but as I came to, I could see he was withholding something from me.

  “We are alike, you and me,” Rick said.

  “What is this about, Mr. Gilbert?”

  “I want to tell you a story about my father. He was a serious man. He taught me all about Robert Moses and housing discrimination and how difficult it must have been for black Americans. Never once did he mention his mother or father. He would warn me—don’t let your family demons become your own.”
Rick broke our gaze, trying to sense whether Melody had told me about his father or not. “This is not where I wanted to start.”

  “Start what?”

  “Our conversation.” He sighed and looked off. “Melody told me about your issues, and before you get upset—”

  “What issues?”

  “With your mother. You know, we’ve got off on the wrong foot here. I say we eat our food and talk when we are done eating.” Then, after dinner, he said, “You’re going to be so blown away by this surprise, I’m not going to ruin it. Let’s put our headphones on so that I cannot ruin it.” Before I could respond, the little red buds were in his ears. We boarded the A train, which moved past Fulton Street and continued into a tunnel, then Brooklyn, and got off at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, transferring to the G to Clinton-Washington. He was wearing his headphones the whole time. Rick walked up to a brownstone and descended the short flight of stairs to the lower apartment. He tapped on the brick next to the doorbell three times, to show me it was hollow, before pulling the block out and dropping the key into his hand.

  The apartment was simple; the front door opened to a living room, followed by a bedroom and a kitchen. All of the walls were painted cream. There were boxes stacked next to a sofa near the entrance. Though no one seemed to live there, its bareness reminded me of Rick’s. “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think it’s an apartment.” He took off the headphones and grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “I had some guys clean it up, and now—just think of it as a safe house. You don’t have to take the key, but you know where it is. You get it.” Like it was a joke, or something passing by the lens of a camera—did you catch it?

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you need help.”