Eye to Eye (16 page)

What can I say? I was used to all that by then.

Even Doris, Earl's biggest fan, was, at first, not into Earl. He looked odd to us. We were bicoastal city chicks who had little experience with dudes who looked and talked like Earl. And I think that's why Doris and I are close, despite our differences. Talking is the thing. Even if you don't want to hear it, even if it hurts you, makes you sick to your stomach to hear it, talking is good medicine. Nasty going down, but you feel so much better later. True to form, Doris, later, when I was still running from Earl, kept talking to me, telling me I was a dummy for holding his accent and ZZ-Top beard against him. Bita and I, though: we don't always talk the way we should. When she met Earl, I knew she liked him, sure, but we never talked about the complications.

When Bita met Earl, she parked the car (which is a be-yatch at LAX) and met us down at baggage claim, where she gave me a hug, held my face and said that I looked fantastic. When she turned to Earl, he took off his hat and extended his hand. He knew Bita was my only other dear friend in the world besides Doris. He wanted to make a good impression, even though all he did was be himself. “Hey,” he said, and when Earl says, “hey,” it sounds more like “haaay,” all long and drawn out. “I'm pleased to meet you, Miss Bita,” he said, grinning and killing me, at least, with those dimples. She went to Earl and gave him a big hug, and when she pulled away, he put his hat back on. He blushed and was happy, I could tell, that she was so warm, what Earl would call “down home.” She looked at me and then looked at Earl and said, “I like him.”

It was only earlier, when I still lived in Indiana and Bita hadn't met Earl, that she seemed a wee bit dubious, thought I was being like one of those women who traipses off to some island and gets enamored with one of the locals and gets it in her mind to bring him back home with her. After she met him, though, she said it was something about the eyes, the way he really looked at her, the gesture of taking off his hat and calling her Miss Bita, that charmed the hell out of her. And when I worried, at first, about how hard living with Earl in L.A. would be, what the naysayers would say and all that insecure bullshit, she said, “Ron, only a man and woman really knows what goes on between them.”

“Also, only a man and a man and a woman and a woman knows what goes on between them,” I said, out of habit.

“Jesus. What grad school has done to you,” Bita admonished. “Have we got everyone down now? All the combinations covered?”

Very true what Bita said about two people being the only ones who know what the deal is. Now, Doris and Bita think Earl and I are perfect together, but for me, there's that Lady Macbeth spot I just can't rub off.

So the moral of my meandering fairy tale and Shakespearean digression is unclear, even to myself, except that I'm dreading tutoring Ian today. Still, he's making me feel like a kid in the schoolyard, and like a kid in the schoolyard, I don't think Ian can grasp the subtleties of the whole goings-on between a man-woman business. He'll just want to give me shit about Earl. We've had a little more than a week off because of his family's vacation, and the last time I was at the “crib,” as Ian calls it, I was there with Earl just to pick up my car. Even Maricela seemed glad that I was removing my unsightly junk heap from the premises.

Today, she buzzes me in like always, and I find Ian in the study, farther down the hall from the entertainment room with the gigantic TV. I've brought Toni Morrison's
Jazz,
Salinger's
Catcher in the Rye,
which they're apparently not asking kids to read anymore, and
White Boy Shuffle
by Paul Beatty, because I think that it'll strike some kind of chord with Ian. It's funny and smart-ass, a book on identity. It's contemporary, so Ian won't, I hope, complain about the other two books. When I enter the room, it's eerie. Ian is sitting at the table with pen and paper, all ready to work.
The Bluest Eye
is cracked open and laying face down. Ian looks at me with no expression I can read, and so I sit down across from him at the table.

“Okay, man. What's up?” I say. I remember his satanical grin when I last saw him, when he met Earl, and I'm waiting for him to fuck with me in some way or another.

Ian shakes his head and holds him palms up. “Nothing. Nothing's up.”

“All right, then. I brought some books that I think you'll like. There's one classic,
Catcher in the Rye,
another Morrison,
Jazz,
and this guy, Paul Beatty.” I hold up the books as I tell Ian about them, and his eyes linger on
White Boy Shuffle.
When I put it down, he slides it over so he can take a look at it. Paul Beatty's black. I see Ian linger over that detail when he spots the author's photo at the back of the book.

“We're reading a lot of books by black people,” Ian says after a moment.

I'm not sure what Ian means by that comment, so I say nothing and organize the study guide notes I made up for him. We'll read
Catcher in the Rye
after Morrison, my little gift to Ian. How can he complain about a kid who leaves school because he thinks it sucks?

“I mean, like a
lot
of books,” Ian repeats, and crosses his arms so that his hands are tucked under his armpits. He's wearing a brown Run-D.M.C. T-shirt. Cool, I have to admit. I wouldn't mind wearing it myself.

I stop organizing my notes and place my hands carefully on top of the table. Here we go. “Is this troubling to you in some way, Ian? Do you have something you'd like to say to me?”

“Maybe,” Ian replies. “But I don't want to break your achy-breaky heart,” he says, the corner of his lip turned up. He must have spent the whole week thinking of that one, but I play it off.

“Am I supposed to get what you're talking about?” I speak slowly, patiently. I don't have the energy for any showdowns with Ian today.

“Isn't that what guys like that listen to? That country crap?”

He means Earl, I know, but I want him to say everything he means to say. “Guys like what?”

“That guy the other day. Your
boyfriend?
” Ian says it like he still can't quite believe it.

“Yeah? So? He's my boyfriend. Your point is?”

“My point is that you're all into this black stuff and you're dating
him.
”

“Again, your point is?”

Ian props his legs up on his chair and rests his head on his knees. “You're just totally random,” he says and picks at a hole in his expensive jeans. “You sound like my
grandmother
most of the time, and then every once in a while you'll get all ghetto on me.”

I let the whole ghetto thing pass. Everybody is saying that now: ghetto booty, ghetto fabulous, and not just black folks, either. There's a whole lesson/discussion in that phenomenon, if you ask me. But Bita would just say,
What has grad school done to you?
Still, I get all teacher on him, not ghetto. “So people are complicated, Ian. There are all different kinds of people, right? Every black person you see hasn't wandered off the set of some ridiculous video on heavy MTV rotation. I don't kick it with my bitches and hos. I'm not busting caps in people's asses. And no, contrary to nearly every black film that comes out these days, I don't work in a beauty shop
or
a barbershop. I read books, and I write books, which, I'm sure, you think is a very white thing to do.”

Ian shrugs.

“Anything else about me or my life you'd like to critique?”

Ian shakes his head, but then says, “Is he for real, talking like that? Only dudes on TV talk like that. Dudes on TV who talk like that don't end up with chicks like you.”

“And what is a chick like me?”

“Insane?” Ian quips. “You know what I mean.”

“Well, anyway, according to your paper, what we see on TV isn't real, is it? And what about you, Mr. Hip-Hop? Have you ever thought about how absurd someone in the so-called ghetto would think you are, with your four-million-dollar house and NWA on your iPod?” This is getting mean, but Ian started it. That's what I'll say when the Bernsteins toss me out on my ass once and for all.
Ian started it.
I'm so mature.

“Whatever. Music is universal. It's for everybody. It's about how it makes you feel.”

I put my elbow on the table, and rest my chin on my hand. “But people? It's not about how people make each other feel?”

Ian says nothing. He picks up
White Boy Shuffle
and flips the pages over and over. I have an epiphany that weeks and weeks more of this is just not going to work. Maybe Ian, in all of his sixteen-year-old tenacity and stubbornness can do it, but all of a sudden I'm thirty-one and exhausted. I reach out and take the book from Ian, lay it all out on the line. “Look, Ian. If you've seen enough bullshit Hollywood movies, you know that there's always the movie where the black person comes in and shows all the clueless white folks how to change, how to really see things in their lives, and all of that horseshit. Well, this ain't that movie. You need to get a good grade in your lit class because your parents want you to, A—and B, you just should. You should pay attention in class, pay attention to literature, because I promise you, it helps you to make sense of the junk we all have to go through before we live our crazy lives and die. So you and I, let's just stop it. Let's make it easy on ourselves. You and I both know that you are smart enough to pass the class in your sleep—if you actually gave a shit.”

Ian picks at his nails, which are metallic blue today, and then says, “In
The Bluest Eye?
Morrison was looking at how hard life is, how life grounded those people down, but that there's, like, I dunno, some hope still. Kind of. Like, you can just get all fucked up and stay that way or climb out of it. And Pecola's like a, like a…” Ian looked around his huge study. “She's like a symbol of how the whole black and white thing and being poor messes with people. And that's how work songs and hip-hop are. Like that.”

This
is why teaching is so damn cool sometimes. The cobwebs get cleared out and wheels get to turning. “What do you mean when you say, ‘Like that'?”

Ian picks up
The Bluest Eye
and flips through the pages. “I guess…I guess I mean that without work songs or hip-hop, people would have really fucking freaked out.”

I want to ask Ian what he means by “freaked out.” I want him to be more specific about “people.” But that would be really, really pushing it. I've had my breakthrough moment today, my moment where Annie Sullivan spells out
W-A-T-E-R
in Helen Keller's hand and Helen Keller finally gets it. Okay, maybe not that dramatic, but damn near. Pretty damn near.

“Good, Ian. Those are very cool connections to make. Let's get started on Salinger.”

“Fine,” Ian argues. “I'm going to get a Coke. You want one?”

“Diet, please.”

Ian heads for the kitchen, but then turns around. “That dude's bike was cool, by the way. Sa-weet.”

“Earl. His name is Earl.”

“Right,” Ian says, rolling his eyes.

That dude. There's a voice in my head, but I try to push it out.
Hey, Ronnie. When Ian talked about Earl, you were embarrassed, just a little bit, weren't you? No, I wasn't. Shut up. Oh yes, you were. But embarrassed for who? Earl or yourself? What? Why would I be embarrassed about myself? Come on, now. I'm talking to you, don't you hear me talking to you? No, I don't hear you. Shut up, shut up, shut up!

 

It's rare, but sometimes I catch the Bernsteins on my way out. Mrs. Bernstein arrives as I'm packing up my stuff. They've never been anything but polite and nice to me, desperate for someone to help their kid actually learn something in school. And I get the sense that they understand precisely what a pain in the ass their kid can be, because they give him as much shit as he shovels out to them. In
my
house when I was growing up, if I
ever
talked to my parents the way Ian talked to his parents, I would have had a hand across my face and a foot up my ass, but they call that child abuse now.

Both the Bernsteins are writers for television, but I try not to hold that against them. They work on the same show together, some tug-on-your-heartstrings drama about a poor teenage brother and sister from Kansas, who happen to be perfect-looking in that boring, Hollywood kind of way, who happen to be homophobic, but get dropped on the doorstep of their gay uncle who happens to be loaded and living in Malibu. I watched it once and howled with laughter.

“Veronica,” Mrs. Berstein says, putting her briefcase down on the table in the study. “I saw your car outside. We've not seen you in a while.” She smiles a genuine smile and takes my hand in a half hold, half shake. She was an older woman in Hollywood who looked great. Everything about her face looked natural and nonfrozen. She was skinny in that rail-thin, vein-y way that women who don't eat sometimes get, but at least she hadn't crossed over to the dark side, the land of plastic faces. She was lanky like Ian and had wild brown hair that surrounded her face in tight curls, and green eyes. Ian's eyes.