The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  I looked for solace anywhere I could find it. I latched on to the fact that my uncle had never once said or implied that I was damned because I was gay. I was damned because I didn’t accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. And while this may appear to be a distinction without a difference—I was damned either way—perhaps it meant that, in my uncle’s eyes, my homosexuality wouldn’t keep me from heaven. Maybe, then, he knew this about himself as well, that, whatever he may once have felt for J.P., this feeling could sit alongside his faith and not trouble it. Maybe he could be himself before the Lord, if not before the rest of us.

  Or maybe there was no solace to be found. Maybe he was so worried about my soul because he still worried about his own. Did he carry with him, like a cancer, what he had once felt for that baby-faced soldier? Did my uncle worry that he too had committed crimes that would keep him from the kingdom of God?

  In the years since my uncle’s death, my life has come more and more to resemble his. And yet the commonality I now feel most urgently isn’t the name we share, or even the presumed if unacknowledged bond of our homosexuality. Rather, it’s our experience of being single. Like him, I’m a bachelor, and with the birth of my nephew, and then my niece, I became a bachelor uncle as well.

  And what I’ve found is that history repeats itself. The silence of one generation carries over too easily to the next. I finally came out to my brother and sister-in-law ten years after my parents had asked me not to, but the topic has rarely come up again. In an email, my brother wrote that he doesn’t approve of my “lifestyle,” but he understands it. My sister-in-law has been better, inquiring once or twice over the years about my romantic life. As for my niece and nephew, we’ve never officially had “the conversation,” though surely they know. How could they not, when the signs are so much more legible than they were in my uncle’s day?

  My niece and I, in particular, seem to have a tacit understanding. In a recent exchange of texts, she mentioned how much she liked Chick-fil-A. I told her I loved their chicken but hated their politics. She wrote, “Oh yeah, the whole homophobic thing. I’m weak, and eat there anyway. The fact that they’re closed on Sundays is a bummer. I boycott them on Sundays.” She continued, “My gay friends eat there too. I’ll just assume it’s okay.” This casual reference to her gay friends from a girl raised in the same religious climate I fled so long ago—that’s the most promising bit of indirection my family has ever produced.

  But this indirection is possible only because I occupy the same position as my uncle: the mysteriously single adult. Absent the provocation of a shunned partner, why spoil Thanksgiving dinner with explicit declarations, with demands for respect? I dated off and on (more off than on), but I was never very good at it. Maybe I got too late a start, having been closeted in the years when you get your first practice in merging and compromise. Maybe my independence had become too entrenched, my autonomy too comfortable. Or maybe I simply never met the right guy in the right moment. Whatever the reason, the most I was able to muster with someone would be a few weeks, or, in a handful of cases, a few months.

  Eventually, though, I came to appreciate the freedom and opportunity that a single life afforded. I could do what I wanted, when I wanted. I loved not being responsible to another person. I came to cherish, even to hoard, my time alone. A friend might ask what I was going to do on the weekend. “Sit quietly,” I would say.

  And then, just when I had everything figured out, I met R., and everything changed. My much-cherished private time felt like a waste of time. My quiet nights at home felt suddenly lonely. I fell quickly in love with R., and, remarkably, he fell in love with me. We made it almost three years, until a job took him to New York, and our attempts at a commuting relationship failed. He understood this failure sooner than I did, and when he ended things, I was devastated. And in the aftermath, I was adrift. I had forgotten how to be single. I had forgotten how to appreciate the advantages of an uncoupled life, the freedom, the comfort, the ease. And in those difficult days, I turned once again to my uncle’s memory.

  I remembered that question he had asked: Would you ever want to bring someone home to meet the family? And I heard again the longing in his voice, but now I was sure that the longing was on my behalf. Whatever he had missed, whatever he had given up, this was what he wanted for me. And I had failed him, had squandered the opportunities my proudly gay life afforded. Yes, I had met the person I wanted to bring home. I had met the person I wanted my family to know. But these things never happened, first because of my parents’ prohibition against speech and proximity and my cowardly submission to it, and then simply because lost opportunities are lost forever.

  After my mother died, and as my father was, some ten years later, making the moves I’m sure he wished he could have made earlier, he said, “Tell me about R.” He knew of him only because I had stopped spending Christmas with my family. If R. wasn’t welcome, I said, then neither was I. But after a couple of years of this, my father worked up his courage, and he broke his own rule. “Tell me about R.” Not exactly an invitation to a homestay, but perhaps a prelude to it. Of course, R. and I had broken up not long before this, and, my heart broken, this was the last thing I wanted to talk about. Doors open, and then they shut again.

  But in the years that followed, my father would occasionally summon his courage and ask me if I was seeing anybody. I appreciated his efforts—they had cost him a great deal, and were motivated only by love—but the answer was always no. I had settled back into my singledom, learned again to value its rhythms. I had created a life that felt full, one that could fairly be described as promiscuous, though the promiscuity was more social than sexual. There are the friends I dine with, the friends I vacation with, and, yes, the friends I sleep with. And there are also those friends—a smaller number, surely—who provide that thing we hope to find in a lifelong partner: the ability to be my truest self, with no fear of abandonment. Call it a division of labor if you will, but that makes it sound like more work than it is. Maybe it’s a division of love. It’s what can happen in that space outside, the space my uncle inhabited.

  In that respect, and despite whatever differences he felt between us, my life looks not unlike my uncle’s. I’ve never been to war, and he never marched in a gay pride parade, but we’ve both been bachelors. In those days after his death, snooping through his photographs, I tried to turn my bachelor uncle into my gay uncle. At the time, that was what I needed: an antecedent, a version of myself that sat securely at the heart of our family. And there’s a good chance I found it. I still think that photo of my uncle with J.P. tells the truth—or, at least, a truth. And I can’t help but mourn the life he couldn’t bring himself to live. I mourn his lost opportunities, his lost loves.

  But then I catch myself. Would he want my pity any more than I want it from those who view my single life as half a life? Would he even recognize himself in the story I’ve made for him, the story of a gay man who kept his heart a secret? Would he reach across the silence, and the years, to claim me as one of his own, a queer misfit on that Island of Misfit Toys?

  I’ll never have the answers to these questions. So, not knowing in what ways he might claim me, I choose to claim him. For however much I needed a gay pride uncle, it was the closeted uncle whose example still guides me—the uncle who had, for over fifty years, and at whatever cost, carved out a space of possibility, carved out a life. In a world where the social pressures toward coupling can feel even greater than the pressures toward heterosexuality, I need his example, and his name, now more than ever.

  THOMAS CHATTERTON WILLIAMS

  Black and Blue and Blond

  FROM The Virginia Quarterly Review

  In 1517, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so that they might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines.
To that odd variant on the species philanthropist we owe an infinitude of things.

  —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell”

  But any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.

  —Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans

  Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through.

  —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

  There is a millennia-old philosophical experiment that has perplexed minds as fine and diverse as those of Socrates, Plutarch, and John Locke. It’s called Theseus’s Paradox (or the Ship of Theseus), and the premise is this: The mythical founding-king of Athens kept a thirty-oar ship docked in the Athenian harbor. The vessel was preserved in a seaworthy state through the continual replacement of old timber planks with new ones, piecemeal, until the question inevitably arose: after all of the original planks have been replaced by new and different planks, is it still, in fact, the same ship?

  For some time now, a recurring vision has put me in mind of Theseus and those shuffling pieces of wood. Only it’s people I see and not boats: a lineage of people distending over time. At the end of the line, there is a teenage boy with fair skin and blond hair and probably light eyes, seated at a café table somewhere in Europe. It is fifty or sixty years into the future. And this boy, gathered with his friends, is glibly remarking—in the dispassionate tone of one of my old white Catholic-school classmates claiming to have Cherokee or Iroquois blood—that as improbable as it would seem to look at him, apparently he had black ancestors once upon a time in America. He says it all so matter-of-factly, with no visceral aspect to the telling. I imagine his friends’ vague surprise, perhaps a raised eyebrow or two or perhaps not even that—and if I want to torture myself, I can detect an ironic smirk or giggle. Then, to my horror, I see the conversation grow not ugly or embittered or anything like that but simply pass on, giving way to other lesser matters, plans for the weekend or questions about the menu perhaps. And then it’s over. Just like that, in one casual exchange, I see a history, a struggle, a whole vibrant and populated world collapse without a trace. I see an entirely different ship.

  I met my wife in a bar off of the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad, in Paris. That was almost five years ago. At the time I was at the end of my twenties and in the middle of one of the only legitimate bachelor phases I’ve enjoyed as an adult. Otherwise, there had been a series of more or less monogamous relationships of varying lengths: a frivolous year surfing couches with a Gujarati girl from Toronto; a poignant stint in Buenos Aires with an elegant black girl from Virginia; eight perfect then imperfect and seemingly inexorable years with a Nigerian-Italian chef from uptown Manhattan (with an interlude of six intensely felt months in college with my French TA, an exchange student from Nancy); and four turbulent teenage years with my first love, someone LL Cool J could easily describe as an around-the-way girl, from Plainfield, New Jersey. But on that clear January night, in a warm bar overlooking the frigid canal, there was no one else, and I was accountable solely to myself.

  Valentine came with a mutual friend, sat down catty-corner to me, and—who knows how these things actually work—something in her bearing triggered a powerful response. I found her insouciant pout and mane of curls flowing over the old fur coat she was bundled in exotic. We hardly spoke, but before I left, I gave her my email address on the chance she found herself in New York, where I was living at the time. Two months later, while there on a reporting assignment, Valentine wrote me, and we met a few days later for a drink. That was when I discovered that she was funny and not really insouciant at all, just shy about her English. It turned out we had a lot in common. I saw her a second time a month later in New York and then again on a work trip to Paris two months after that. Summer had just begun, and we fell in love extremely fast. When it was time to go home, she asked me to change my itinerary and join her in Corsica for a week. I did, and when it was really time to leave, she promised to visit me that August in New York. A few days after she landed, I proposed on a rooftop in Brooklyn, overlooking the Empire State Building and the orange Manhattan sky.

  In retrospect, it had been a very long time by then since I’d thought of myself as having any kind of type. It wasn’t a conscious decision; it was simply the more I’d studied at large universities, the more I’d traveled and lived in big cities, the more women I’d encountered at home and away—which is just to say the more I’d ventured from my own backyard and projected myself into the world—the more I found myself unwilling to preemptively cordon off any of it. And yet—however naive this could seem now—I had somehow always also taken for granted that when the time came to have them, my children would, like me, be black.

  A year ago to the day that I write this, Valentine’s water broke after a late dinner. In a daze of elation, we did what we’d planned for weeks and woke our brother-in-law, who gamely drove us from our apartment in the northern ninth arrondissement to the maternité, all the way on Paris’s southern edge. At two in the morning we had the streets practically to ourselves, and the route he took—down the hill from our apartment, beneath the greened copper and gold of the opera house and through the splendor of the Louvre’s courtyard, with its pyramids of glass and meticulous gardens, over the River Seine, with Notre Dame rising in the distance on one side and the Palais Royal and the Eiffel Tower shimmering on the other, and down the wide, leafy Boulevards Saint-Germain and Raspail, into Montparnasse, through that neon intersection of cafés from the pages of A Moveable Feast—was unspeakably gorgeous. I am not permanently awake to Paris’s beauty or even its strangeness, but that night, watching the city flit by my window, it did strike me that such a place—both glorious and fundamentally not mine—would be my daughter’s hometown.

  Another twenty-four hours elapsed before Marlow arrived. When Valentine finally went into labor, even I was delirious with fatigue and not so much standing by her side as levitating there, sustained by raw emotion alone and thinking incoherently at best. On the fourth or fifth push, I caught a snippet of the doctor’s rapid-fire French: “Something, something, something, tête dorée . . .” It took a minute before my sluggish mind registered and sorted the sounds, and then it hit me that she was looking at my daughter’s head and reporting back that it was blond. The rest is the usual blur. I caught sight of a tray of placenta, heard a brand-new scream, and nearly fainted. The nurses whisked away my daughter, the doctor saw to my wife, and I was left to wander the empty corridor until I found the men’s room, where I shut myself and wept, like all the other newborns on the floor—a saline cascade of joy and exhaustion, terror and awe mingling together and flooding out of me in unremitting sobs. When, finally, I’d washed my face and returned to meet my beautiful, healthy child, she squinted open a pair of inky-blue irises that I knew even then would lighten considerably but never turn brown. For this precious little being grasping for milk and breath, I felt the first throb of what has been every minute since then the sincerest love I know. An hour or so after that, when Valentine and the baby were back in their room for the night, I fell into a taxi, my own eyes absentmindedly retracing that awfully pretty route. For the first time I can remember, I thought of Theseus’s ship.

  I realize now that this vision of the boy from the future I’ve had in my head for the past year traces itself much further back into the past. It must necessarily stretch back at least to 1971, in San Diego, where my father, who was—having been born in 1937 in Jim Crow Texas—the grandson of a woman wed to a man born before the Emancipation Proclamation, met my mother, the native-Californian product of European immigrants from places as diverse as Austria-Hungary, Germany, England, and France. This unlikely courtship came all of four years after the Loving v. Virginia verdict repealed antimiscegenation laws throughout the country. In ways that are perhaps still impossible for me to fully appreciate, their romance amounted to a radical political act, th
ough now, some four decades on, it seems a lot less like any form of defiance than like what all successful marriages fundamentally must be: the obvious and undeniable joining of two people who love and understand each other enormously.

  But that’s not the beginning either. This trajectory I now find myself on no more starts in San Diego than in Paris. Not since it is extremely safe to assume that my father, with his freckles, with his mother’s Irish maiden name, and with his skin a shade of brown between polished teak and red clay, did not arrive from African shores alone. As James Baldwin, perspicacious as ever, noted of his travels around precisely the kind of segregated southern towns my father would instantly recognize as home, the line between “whites” and “coloreds” in America has always been traversed and logically imprecise: “The prohibition . . . of the social mingling [revealing] the extent of the sexual amalgamation.” There were (and still are) “girls the color of honey, men nearly the color of chalk, hair like silk, hair like cotton, hair like wire, eyes blue, gray, green, hazel, black, like the gypsy’s, brown like the Arab’s, narrow nostrils, thin, wide lips, thin lips, every conceivable variation struck along incredible gamuts.” Indeed, to be black (or white) for any significant amount of time in America is fundamentally to occupy a position on the mongrel spectrum—strict binaries have always failed spectacularly to contain this elementary truth.