A Gate at the Stairs (26 page)

“Yeah. Kind of an Irish one: over beer. I am drinking beer.”

“When we were in France, the French customs officials looked at us in a bewildered way. ‘But look,’ they said, as if they were pointing out something we had failed to notice. ‘You are white and your son is black—how can this be?’ As if it defied science or as if we had never regarded our own skin color before. And I had to say in English, and in anger, ‘This is what an American family looks like!’”

“The rest of the world doesn’t understand the ungovernable diversity of this country.”

“Diversity made even more extreme by capitalism.”

“And by Karl Rove. I was once in a restaurant and saw Karl Rove sitting across the room. For five minutes I thought:
I could take this steak knife and walk over there and change history. Right now
.”

“And?”

“Well, as you can see I chose to stay a free woman. Would anyone care for a timbale?”

“Is there meat in them?”

“Oh, stop already with the meat. She’s become an actual member of PETA.”

“Not yet.”

“No. That’s good. Though I give them ten years and you watch: they’ll win the Nobel Peace Prize. Last year I gave them fifteen years, but I think the climate is changing very quickly in their favor. The rationale will be that humane treatment of animals can only mean more humane treatment of people.”

“I have a problem with these animal rights people.”

“Yeah, me, too. They instantly start comparing animals to black people. They say, ‘We did the same thing to black people.’ And you say, ‘But they were people.’ And they say, ‘Yes, we know that now, but that’s not what they were saying then.’ And you say, ‘Well, many people were saying it then. And no one now, that I know of, is saying a cow is a person.’”

“A species-ist!”

“There are Austrians saying that chimpanzees are people.”

“And don’t get me started with the primate research. There is such eagerness to lump black people with apes. Beasts of any kind.”

“That’s done even to the Jews.”

“Well, Austrians …”

“What do you mean, ‘even’?”

“I mean nothing. I meant even chickens. I’ve heard the PETA people compare what goes on with chickens to what went on with the Jews.”

“Well, how else are you going to make them sit still in their nests and do your taxes if you don’t cut their legs off?”

“Your sense of humor is too dark.”

“Don’t say ‘dark.’ It’s racist.”

“Have you noticed that when people say ‘I’m not racist’ you instantly know they are?”

“It’s like those completely unself-aware men who say, ‘I am not sexist,’ and you want to say, ‘Darling! Of course you are!’”

“I wish people would get it straight and say ‘birth parent’ and not ‘biological parent.’ Everybody’s biological.”

“That’s in part what’s too bad about everybody.”

“And I don’t like the use of the word
adoption
for animals. The humane societies use it all the time, but it’s confusing to chldren who are adopted.”

“I once heard I. B. Singer speak of the holocaust of chickens.”

“And now there’s that other one, Peter Singer.”

“Are you sure you don’t mean Pete Seeger?”

“The ethicist who says kill the deformed babies but don’t eat meat.”

“Oh, he’s a horse’s patoot.”

I had seen a horse’s patoot. I had seen plenty of them, and the large swatch of tail that like a creature unto itself swept the flies away.

“Too many Singers.”

“Now we’re back to Sarah Vaughan. Yes. I’ll have a timbale.”

I’d seen a crock. I’d seen a horse’s patoot. It was a timbale that I’d never seen.

“Too many Sarahs.”

“No such thing!”

“Too many timbales. Please! Have another one.”

“There’s the argument that people are so cruel to one another that until we take care of that we’ll never get square with animals.”

“And then, as I was saying, there’s the argument that humanitarian practices with animals will cause us to improve our relationship with people. We’ll say, ‘Wait a minute: We don’t even do this to animals. Why are we doing it to people?’”

“Sometimes it doesn’t matter where you begin.”

“Is that really what the moral ethicists are saying now?”

“I don’t know about them all. My field is actually dairy science.”

“Their argument is that unless an animal is expressing all his native animalness, he is being cruelly used and his life is unworthy. You would think that would then cause them to see death as a mercy. But the death is not the issue. It’s the life.”

“I would think the actual killing is the issue—how is it to be done?”

And here I thought I heard Sarah’s voice. “How to kill chickens: Enough to feed the planet? I mean, have we learned nothing from the Holocaust? Can’t we just round them up and gas them?”

More laughter all around. “That would express the Jewishness of the chickens—or do I mean the chickenness of the Jews?”

“That’s why we got Israel, baby. We’re not chicken anymore.”

“This is such bullshit. Even humans don’t get to express the fullness of their native humanness. You think the homeless person sleeping in his windowless car is expressing his humanness? And yet everyone breezes by and carries on. It makes bullshit of our finest intentions.”

I had seen bullshit. I had seen chickens run after it and eat it warm.

“All I know is, gee whiz, you water your plant! A plant you would water! A deformed child no?”

“Would anyone like some water? Is your wine OK?”

“No, it’s not OK! I need another one!”

“I thought we were supposed to be talking about interracial families.”

“Sonya won’t stay on subject.”

I had once seen a comedy sketch in which a host chloroformed a dinner guest to keep him from saying one more word.

“Everything’s genetic! It seems there’s a gene for everything! Sad but true, or maybe not so sad.”

“Or maybe not so true.”

“All I know is that our son has the jock gene. And he is adopted—obviously. Not one person in our extended family has this gene. We go to all his games and he’s like a Greek god out there, and we are in the stands looking like the peanut vendors.”

I could hear Edward’s voice. Proximity to science and scientists and academics had caused him to speak in a kind of mimicry of professors. He would use the phrase
if you will
. A lot. “Let’s call it recombinant rehydration, if you will.” And Sarah’s voice would pounce. “Edward. Let me give you a pointer: Lose the
if you wills.”

There was a long pause. “I would rather throw sand in my eyes.”

Some merriness. Most of the voices I never really recognized.

“Just kidding.”

“What melting pot? It doesn’t really melt all the stuff you put in the pot. There is DWB, driving while black, and there’s DWJ, driving while Jewish. Guess which gets you pulled over and searched?”

“I’m not that well read on the subject.”

“Perhaps you are not that well read.”

“Anyone who’s read all of Proust plus
The Man Without Qualities
is bound to be missing a few other titles.”

“I’m sure.”

“You know those automobile window shades to prevent baby sunburn? Did we need one? Of course! But he argued no—Edward, you did! You argued with me!”

“Because she’s not white?”

“Here is my security system: me. A black man in the house. It scares away everyone.”

The soft weight of feet on the carpeted steps. I looked up from my place on the floor with Mary-Emma. A woman appeared in the doorway, brown, tall, slender, her hair in neatly braided dreads, her head looked like a pot of vines, her figure stylishly offset with dark and bright. No one said “Mama” and ran to her. Not one child claimed her. Only two even looked up. Edward appeared behind her and touched her arm and she turned. Then they both receded, stepped back, disappeared.

At the end of the night, when the parents came up to fetch the kids, several asked their children how the evening had gone and the kids said “awesome” or “sucky”—there was no middle ground, nothing that wasn’t a thrill or a debacle. I loved the way the black women grabbed their boys and pulled them close. I loved the white dads carrying their black daughters up high. Only Mary-Emma with her little smile said nothing at all as one by one the children left her room. Downstairs, I heard Sarah’s voice alone with Edward in the kitchen.

“You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones—and now you want to have sex?”

Was I hearing things? Was this the grassroots whimpering of an important social movement, or was it a small, deep madness? If two things fell in the forest and made the same sound, which was the tree?

I picked up Mary-Emma. With a clean wipe I dabbed at some chocolate near her mouth. “Go hug your mama,” I said, putting her back down and sending her dashing into the kitchen to interrupt them.

I called “Good night” and slipped out the door. Out of politeness I left quickly to go live my life. I had not ridden my Suzuki but still put my hair in a scarf, as if I had. I was a
sharmoota
, with a
hijab
tied not properly, under the chin, but—a concession, the middle ground—behind, at the nape of my neck, like Grace Kelly in
The Country Girl
. Or was it
Rear Window?
I walked and walked and then, as in my recurrent dreams where I was flying but only a few inches off the ground, unambitiously but still airborne, I began slightly to run. On my way, I broke off a blossoming stem from a neighbor’s crab-apple tree and through the moist April night I made a brisk, hot beeline toward Reynaldo’s. I would put the stem in water when I got to his place.

But when I got there something was wrong. There was no light coming from his windows. I climbed the stairs and tapped on his door. Uneasiness coursed through me, and finding the door unlocked, I slowly turned the knob and went in. I found him sitting in what had become an emptied darkened apartment, in the middle of the floor, with his laptop blazing its light up at him. It reminded me of the aluminum foil we would put on my mother’s old album covers in order to catch the sun in summer and burn the pallor from our faces. All the other furnishings were gone. Everything—the bed, the xylophone, the table. On the wall was a single poster, white letters on black:
A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but a laughter more terrible than any sadness …
I knew it was from the opening page of
White Fang
, a book I had read in seventh grade. I had never seen this hanging in his room before, though maybe now it simply stood out, being the only thing there besides Reynaldo himself and his laptop. He slammed the laptop cover down and looked up at me, or at least toward me. He was sitting on his prayer rug, which was facing east. I remember when I had thought it was a yoga mat, like my brother’s. I kicked off my shoes at the door, as he sometimes liked me to do, but I was not relaxed: my jackhammering heart was rising to my throat. The thought occurred to me that so much vibration might loosen my fillings.

“Hello,” he said, unsmilingly and as if from a great bleak distance. He flashed the light from a key chain my way, then lay it on the floor where it was our only illumination. He glanced at my face and then away. There was a cup of tea on the floor beside him, and he picked it up and drank from it while looking at the wall. I had seen this exact same expression and movement before—where? (Edward. I’d seen it in him the very first day I met him.) In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love—the death of a man’s trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper. There was the sacredness, immersion, intrusion, and violence to the ordinary that preceded romantic love, and then there was Haughty Fatigue, the stripper, who stole it away.

“What’s going on?” I asked. There was nothing to put the crab-apple branch in or on, and so I just stood there holding it. In its droop I could see it already beginning to fail, an aspect of flowers I had studied in paintings of them.

“I’m moving to London,” he said. “I’ve had the xylophone sent to your apartment. It should show up there in a few days. Mary-Emma can play it there. And you, too, of course.”

Was the Jack London poster a clue? A code? Everything had grown strange. Things between us were dissolving like an ice cube in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared. Thus would the whole world end, I’d been told.

“I’m not part of a cell,” he said.

“That never crossed my mind.” Though now it did. He had accepted some assignment. That must have been it. There was some manipulative mullah in his life—rumors abounded of quiet recruitment everywhere, though these were whispered and sometimes whispered as jokes. “Why London?”

“The English are simultaneously critical and stiffly uncomplaining—a stage Americans bypassed altogether, having gone from a dullard’s stoicism to a neurotic’s whining in less than half a century.”

“That is such a bullshit answer.”

“I’m part of an Islamic charity for Afghan children. That is all. They think I’m part of a cell. I’m not. If anyone asks you, if they question you when I’m gone, please tell them that I’m not.”

There was no room in this conversation for “What about us?” The conversational space had suddenly filled with other creatures. Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

“You are Brazilian. What kind of cell would you be part of? A bikini wax cell?” I had once found a copy of a lingerie catalog in his pile of newspapers. When I picked it up and looked closely, the address label bore my own name. On one of the few occasions I’d had him over he had apparently taken it from my apartment, unbeknownst to me, perhaps to look at the bosomy models. Now that he was apparently leaving for London, all kinds of things I had refused to think about for very long came blowing back as if by dusty gusts aimed to tear up the eyes.