A Hope in the Unseen (49 page)

“Yeah. So … are you gonna tell me who it is or make me guess?”

“It’s Hezekiah Walker and the Love Fellowship Crusade Choir. The song is called ‘I’ll Fly Away.’”

“I’ll Fly Away,” Rob says, nodding meaningfully as he turns to go. “It’s, you know, great.”

The door slams, and Cedric leans back in his chair, bemused, shaking his freshly shaven head. Rob has actually been borrowing some of Cedric’s CDs lately, and Cedric is developing a passing interest in Alanis Morissette, one of Rob’s favorites. Crazy.

April, he decides as he cranks Hezekiah a notch, is turning out to be his best month, even if it’s only one week old. He’s still daydreaming about his Friday night out with Chiniqua. Meanwhile, all’s well with Zayd, who beat him last night in Supernintendo, on Cedric’s TV, at that. Word is out that the marquee musical act for spring weekend in two weeks is the Fugees, so they joyously blasted the group’s music in honor of the announcement and talked until late, first in Cedric’s room and then in Zayd’s. The fact that Zayd got their first CD last year, when they were unknown, combined with Cedric’s casual aside last winter that he thought the group’s curious mix of hip-hop and soul and rock was at best “derivative,” gives Zayd bragging rights on having discovered them first. He’s crowing over this small victory, something that would have irritated Cedric a few months back. But not so much
anymore, Cedric muses, closing psychology for today and stretching some kinks out of his lower back. That Zayd gets straight A’s and has pretty fair musical tastes doesn’t intimidate Cedric anymore.

Everything seems to be getting easier. He recalls last semester, when whatever the other kids said or did, the way they acted and addressed him—or, for that matter, ignored him—felt like some form of slight. A judgment on his unworthiness. Cedric’s not sure what, specifically, has changed, but actions and words, in the dorm or the cafeteria or the classroom, seem to carry less weight, less personal charge.

With dinnertime approaching on this Wednesday night, he picks up the phone near Rob’s unkempt bed, dial’s Zayd’s number, and soon they’re scarfing lasagna at a long table in the VeeDub.

Talk shifts to girls, and Cedric is delighted to finally have something to offer. Not wanting to disclose much about Chiniqua, even to Zayd, for fear everyone in the unit will be gabbing about it, he mentions another girl who’s caught his attention, an Asian girl from psychology lab named Anna, who’s “really fine,” he tells Zayd. “I’ve talked with her a few times and I’m thinking about asking her out,” he continues excitedly, before an admonition from Bishop Long suddenly echoes through his conscience. Searching for rebuttals on such issues, Cedric experiments with a head-on assault: “I don’t know Zayd, you might say, she has one of those Coke bottle bodies.” He gets a whoop from across the table.

Zayd, after suggesting various romantic tacks, brings up his own dilemma. He’s met a girl—“smart as hell,” cute, confident, blonde. “This one I really like. She’s different.”

Cedric puts down his fork, pauses thoughtfully, and takes a deliberative sip of Sprite. “This may be the one, Zayd. The one that’s worth going slow, real slow, with. You know my advice. Don’t try to sleep with her. Go out five, maybe six times, before you even think about it. Let a real relationship form, real respect, first. By then, you may find out that she’s the one and you’ll want to wait even longer.”

Zayd smiles, and they high five above the dirty plates, hands meeting in the middle. “You may be right this time, C. Yeah, you may be right.”

Spring, of course, is the season most suited to college life—to the budding senses of emerging adults, to the carefree promise of growth, to the far-from-home feeling of being unbound. Especially in universities of the north, where winters can come hard, the fit is so neat that it’s even possible to believe that sun and warmth and soft grass possess transformative powers.

And Brown, in the mid-April lull between midterms and finals, is bursting with flora on the freshly cut main green and students convinced that they are, finally, at their best.

The university’s officially designated party weekend, with at least one big-name musical act, starts on Thursday, April 18, with the following Friday beginning the reading period for final exams. But Spring Weekend also draws townies from Providence, along with kids from colleges in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and other states along the East Coast, a crushing crowd of foreigners that alters Brown’s social character. Instead, it’s this weekend, April 12 and 13, that many students consider the true pinnacle of Brown partying, a weekend when all quarters of the university seem to be working furiously to entertain themselves, turning the campus into a vast progressive dinner party, with each house on the street serving a different dish.

At lunch after Friday calculus, Cedric picks at his macaroni and cheese with one hand and, with the other, a pile of 3-by-5-inch squares of colored paper: little, shove-in-your-pocket fliers that campus groups make to advertise events. Today the table is blanketed, making for good lunchtime reading.

The gays and lesbians are staging a weekend of parties, culminating in the “Vote Queer, Eat Dinner” fete on Sunday evening, called a town meeting, for “TNT, LGBTA, BITE, QUEST, Hi-T with Q, SORT, B’GLALA, RUQUS, and all other queer folks” to party and elect officers.

The Students of Caribbean Ancestry call one and all to their SOCA Cookup ’96, because, a pink flier boasts, “Dis Food Nice!” while a nearby yellow flier shouts: “Celebrate Latino History Month with this Semester’s LAST SPANISH HOUSE FIESTA!!! … Salsa! Merengue! Cumbia! Free Sangria, Beer and NON-ALCS!”

A white flier trumpets “A CAPPELLOOZA II,” an a cappella
competition that Cedric knows lots of kids in the unit will be going to—Zayd’s roommate, John Frank, will be singing with the Brown Derbies. Under it, a pale yellow one about tonight’s Brown University Chamber Ensemble at Alumnae Hall. There are plenty more—bashes, Friday and Saturday, by fraternities and feminists and anyone else you can imagine—that Cedric glances at and dismisses as he rises with his tray.

The multicultural miasma, with its fixation on group identity and loyalty and authenticity, still unsettles him, though not quite as much as when he arrived last fall. Back then, he saw it solely in centrifugal terms, as something designed to distill and separate rather than unite. Now he knows it’s more complicated. Walking back to the dorm, he thinks again of his date with Chiniqua, of them talking about Keith Sweat and laughing and reminiscing. There is an almost irresistible comfort to being with your own, being able to share what’s common and familiar, to be with someone who really understands. Through high school, he spent so much energy trying to get away from people like him, and now he sometimes feels the opposite urge, the urge to finds others who are at least somewhat like him, which is really all the gays or the Latinos or the Asians are seeking. This morning, Chiniqua mentioned a blowout party tomorrow night at Harambee and Cedric considers, as he has ten times today, whether to go. He calls forth, also for the tenth time today, his one-line rebuttal: I didn’t come to Brown to be with only black people. I’ve already done that.

Rob’s in the room, and they talk amiably, still a welcome change after the long months of strife. Rob says he’s staying in tonight—or at least has committed to—considering that he still “feels completely whipped” from “Funknight” at the Underground, Brown’s studentrun club. Cedric knows why Rob is mentioning the Underground. Last night, Cedric almost went with the regular Thursday night delegation from the unit. It was all very natural. Rob asked him to come along. Cedric said sure, and Rob nodded like it was no big deal, even though both of them knew it was. The Underground, especially on Thursdays, has been the unit’s most regular haunt. Cedric has been asked to go dozens of times. He’s always demurred and later heard stories of drunkenness and wild dancing. In one way or another, he’s
let people know, starting around September, that it’s the last place someone who doesn’t drink and doesn’t dance (at least not in public) would want to be—precisely the sort of place, in fact, that Bishop Long and his mother have spent two decades warning him about.

Such warnings ultimately made their last stand in the line that formed last night outside the door of the dark, noisy subterranean cave, a line in which Cedric was standing—the last of six kids from the hall—and then suddenly wasn’t.

“You were there, right behind me,” Zeina Mobassaleh told him at breakfast this morning. “Then I turned around and you’d vanished.”

The whole thing, already lore across the hall, was just plain embarrassing. Cedric, grateful Rob didn’t directly razz him about it, rises to get a piece of Wrigley’s spearmint gum from his desk and looks out the window, thinking it all through again and realizing how his stern, righteous solitude of last semester must have just looked like terror to everyone else, like someone afraid to join the world. Afraid, afraid of what?

Rob sends off some scatological e-mail to a high school friend at the University of Massachusetts and, swiveling in his desk chair, rosy with delight from his missive, asks Cedric if he’s going to go to the “Sexual Assault and Spring Weekend” dorm outreach in a few days. “’Cause, you know, it could be pretty interesting, how, without even knowing it, you can get into a bad situation.”

He’s just making conversation, but Cedric, desperate to shore up the miserable image of how he fled from the nightclub line, reaches for a cold bucket of rectitude, one of those discussion enders Barbara used to summon when dangerous issues arose.

“I think it’s really simple with sex assault or whatever. It’s like AIDS. You have sex one time, you can get AIDS, so you just don’t do it. Same with sex assault: you don’t try having sex, you won’t have to worry about something like that happening.”

Rob looks at him, clearly befuddled. “But, you can’t go through life not trying anything. What’s the point of that?” And Cedric, feeling suddenly transparent, folds with a glum, “Whatever.”

His real response, for what it’s worth, comes later that night, when Molly Olsen (the fast-morphing, once-bald modern dancer) knocks on
his door, asking him to come with her to the Underground to see some local comedians. He shrugs. He’s got nothing better to do, he says. It ends up being a cinch this time to just stroll in, so much easier than last night when he could feel all those kids from the unit wondering if he’d pull it off. He sits down at a table with her and his tall glass of ginger ale, dead center in a room filled mostly with white kids drinking watery beer, and waits for some expected discomfort to fade. Or rather, to arrive. After a few minutes and a second ginger ale, though, he realizes that nothing untoward is bound to happen, that, instead, he feels loose and sort of relaxed here with the always provocative Molly. And, soon enough, he’s laughing at the comedians with everyone else, having completely forgotten to consider how he must look.

J
ust after noon on Saturday, Cedric rolls into a column of sunlight that has crept onto his pillow and stirs awake. Lying in bed, barely conscious, he tries to remember the swift-flowing sensations from the night before. After a few minutes, he settles on a hazy recollection of himself, sitting in the smoky nightclub, feet cleaving to the beer-sticky floor, head back, mouth foolishly open in a hoot, drunk coeds all around.

He snaps upright, trying to shake the image away. After a moment, he’s surprised to find his thoughts racing backward to an in-class writing assignment on his first day of school last fall—a first-person autobiography in Wheelock’s class. He started it: “Who is Cedric? I am a very ambitious and very religious person … ,” but, sitting here, it seems to have been written with someone else’s hand, someone he barely knows. Looking down at the hands resting on his thighs, he raises his palms to cover his eyes. “Who is Cedric?” he murmurs. “Who is Cedric?”

An hour later, he’s walking briskly down an extension of Thayer Street, where the fashionable shops give way to low-rent housing, and then cuts left toward a working-class section of town. He needs to get away from the university, to clear his head, to get his bearings.

He has ventured a few times before to this part of Providence, just beyond Helaine’s office and the Georgian brick homes of professors:
fifteen or so square blocks of turn-of-the-century row houses and squat apartments, broken by clusters of sole proprietorships, jewelers, drugstores, and barbers, in buildings charging modest rent. It’s urban and threadbare and a little grimy. And, as he walks, he feels solemn but grounded, a little like he used to feel strolling Martin Luther King Avenue in Washington.

Just past a fenced park where some homeless men are splayed on wrought-iron chairs, is a boxy brick building, the Salvation Army’s local headquarters. Cedric ducks into the store, lingering at the trash can full of scratched snow skis, then the one with tennis rackets, before losing himself in aisles of men’s overcoats and plaid sport jackets, picking through them expertly. Eventually he emerges onto the street in a beige wool overcoat with a high, turned-up collar (a real ’70s Superfly number, he thinks, for only $15) and struts eastward toward a few shops clustered around a pizza joint with some outdoor tables. The sun, spotty until now, breaks clear, so he buys a ginger ale and sits in the empty row of tables. Turning left, he catches his reflection in the plate glass window. “My God, I look like my father,” he murmurs. The resemblance is unmistakable—especially in the coat—to the way Gilliam used to look, all slender and stylish, when Cedric was a kid.

The visage is both alluring and unnerving, but he indulges it, thinking of what Gilliam might be looking like these days (back at Lorton after a good long drink of freedom) and how difficult it will be to find solid work when he gets out, whenever that will be. He’ll have to start a business or something, Cedric decides, because who would hire him? “I wouldn’t,” he mumbles to himself, and laughs hoarsely. He abandoned me at the start and then did it again and again, Cedric reflects, trying, with little success, to muster his customary rage on the subject. He wonders, instead, if his father is still doing drugs (Barbara once said there are plenty of drugs in jail) and whether the drugs make him sick.