Lookaway, Lookaway (57 page)

That was her mother’s rule: 20%. “One in five whitefolk are no good, baby,” she always said. “Now that means four in five are all right, and you gotta remember that in your dealings.” George W. Bush’s approval rating after he wrecked the country, 23%. The Urban League did a study on employment discrimination when whites were interviewing; they sent in the most qualified, perfectly dressed and well-presented blacks as well as very unqualified, intentionally bad-at-interviewing whites to see how often the whites got hired anyway.
Twenty percent
of the time, the lackluster white person got the job. One in five—that’s the mischief proportion in American society and, if you look for it, you see that number repeat itself
a lot.

So, yes, when solicited for an opinion, Dorrie was unhappy to see it play out, the rise and fall of the Johnston clan, she really was. But like most African-Americans, she was loaded up like a pack mule with the history of people darker than they were light in North America; sometimes she didn’t feel the burden, sometimes it weighed her down and brought her to a stop. Didn’t change how she dealt with people; it certainly didn’t change her game plan to sweet-talk some of Charlotte’s
fine
-looking white women into bed neither—but that burden was there, just reach around and feel for it; it never goes anywhere. The Jourdains had been through the storms, had waded through the high turbulent waters, and though it was a shame a little bit of rain finally fell on the Johnston Family, it wasn’t like white people hadn’t made it exciting for her folks through the centuries as well.

*   *   *

And yet, c’mon now, the Johnstons were Dorrie’s Designated Crazy Whitefolks—for a while there, she was virtually in the family. And having been away from their orbit, she couldn’t help missing them, worrying on their behalf.

Late one night, three
A.M.
–late, coming home from a romantic evening, Dorrie drove down Providence Road and sadly beheld the old Johnston place she would now never enter again, and then she turned on Wendover Road to cruise by the huge overgrown one-block wilderness where Gaston Jarvis built his mansion. You couldn’t see his house from the street, thanks to the wall, and beyond that, the giant oaks and leafy maples, but she saw the gate was open, so she turned in, inching up the driveway, aiming her car and its headlights toward the house. She realized that she might alarm whoever was still inside, if they were awake, so she cut her headlights and waited for her eyes to adjust. The lawn was a wild tangle, Gaston Jarvis’s Porsche was under a tarpaulin, there were no lights or signs of life; around the side was Duke Johnston’s Mercedes. So it’s true, she thought, they’re squatting in Uncle Gaston’s house while he is away in some Swiss clinic drying out. She put her car in neutral and rolled backward to the street, heading on her way home, feeling a chill from the lonely old house.

Dorrie had heard from Josh a lot of the drama surrounding all the fireworks with Uncle Gaston. Back in January 2009, Norma drove by the Johnston house and saw the moving vans, Jerene out in the yard supervising. Norma learned that weekend there would be a yard sale. A
yard sale
—Jerene Johnston selling her end tables and lamps, her chrome kitchen items and decorative glassware, out there for God and everybody to see in a
yard,
taking 50 cents for something worth $50 just to get rid of it … Dorrie couldn’t imagine it. Jerene’s following through with this indignity made Dorrie admire the woman even more, but at the same time, that spectacle, the false cheer, the rolled-up sleeves, the sadness in the eyes, would have been heartbreaking to behold.

Norma must have thought so too. She sped to Gaston’s house and roused him and must have given him a hell of an ultimatum.
You go over there this instant and write those dear people a check that wouldn’t even dent your smallest checking account. Does family mean nothing at all to you?
Norma had a backup threat, Josh recounted. Norma had a sister, widowed, retired in Arizona who had asked her to come out to live. She would do it. She would pack her bags and go, leaving the Cordelia Florabloom enterprise to founder and Gaston to go to hell. And Josh heard that Gaston pulled out his checkbook and said,
You’re right, Norma
. He wrote her a check for the plane fare and said,
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Be careful around the cactus, and watch out for rattlesnakes.

And Norma left. At some point, even Norma had had enough abuse and neglect. She stopped by the Johnston house, rooms empty of furniture,
FOR SALE
sign in the yard, Jerene and Duke camping out more or less, and said her goodbyes. There were long hugs and expressions of mutual sympathy. What could any of them do? Gaston was who he was. And Norma left for Scottsdale.

Dorrie’s conquest of 2009, Hazel Moultrie, head of the English Department at UNC Charlotte, didn’t last too long (she was separated from her husband of thirty years, but still closeted, didn’t want to tell her teenage kids). Hazel offered a shaft of clarifying light. As Dorrie recounted the adventures of Gaston Jarvis—Hazel loved literary gossip—they discussed how Norma had a potentially successful lawsuit if she wanted to sue for some of the Cordelia books’ profits, since she virtually produced them. As they cuddled, Hazel added, “And I’m glad Miss Norma wised up. Now we await the day you will wise up.”

“Me?”

“Why are you micromanaging the social life of Joshua Johnston? It’s like you’re his minder, like you’re hauling Benjy Compson around in a cart all day making sure he doesn’t get into trouble. I’d let that go, sugar. See to your own happiness.” Then Hazel pulled her closer as if Hazel herself constituted that future happiness, which Dorrie knew even then was not the case.

It troubled Dorrie. With what passion she scrambled and arranged on Josh’s behalf, paying to get rid of Calvin, stationing herself nightly beside him at the laptop to condemn or approve Josh’s online entanglements, trying to head off the ridiculous Nonso at the pass, so—for what?—she could have Josh, platonically, all to herself? Because Dorrie knew best what would make Josh happy? What made it easy to take a step back was that Nonso
did
bring his skinny black ass over from Nigeria for that program at Johnson C. Smith, he
did
move in with Joshua, and they did seem, actually … happy.

Oh it was pretty impossible not to like Nonso, he was a walking feel-good African smile, festive in his dashikis and kofi hat, spewing naïve declarations of love and friendship (“If you love Joshua, then I have to, sister, love you. You are already very much my so very good friend!”). But Dorrie didn’t relent for a long time.

Nonso, she surmised, having scammed Josh for money back in Nigeria, was now over here to clean him out completely. When Nonso went back to visit his folks, with money given to him by Josh, Dorrie predicted he wouldn’t come back. But he did, and on his own dime. It may have started as a Nigerian online scam—Dorrie refused to believe otherwise—but clearly Nonso decided Josh was the (relatively) rich white man for him. Dorrie was hard on Josh throughout, comparing Nonso’s importation to some kind of late-in-the-game slavery operation; when Nonso flew back from Lagos and they met him at Douglas International, Dorrie asked, “So, how was your Middle Passage?”

Snide, snarky, full of invective and rants … at some point she heard and saw herself and remedied the situation by a retreat into her own career and life, which, by the way, had been languishing. The women who ran their website service had sunk into conventional lesbian drama—breakups, an office love triangle, a counselor-conciliator brought in, mandatory sessions were required of everyone, all to make sure the employees could “support” and “nurture” each other,
When I hear you say you can’t work with T.J. what I’m hearing is that you still feel hurt and wish to communicate your pain back to Mare, that your personhood is not being respected,
blah blah blah. Working there had passed through tiresome and landed smack into torturous.

There was an assistant curator opening at Charlotte’s Afro-American Cultural Center which was being refashioned as the Harvey Gantt Center, named for the accomplished black architect and mayor of Charlotte, the two-time Democratic standard-bearer nominated to run against the Devil himself, Senator Jesse Helms. The Gantt Center was part of the uptown renaissance, near the new branch of the Mint and the Bechtler, in a dazzling new building by the Freelon Group, the go-to architects for high-end African-American cultural projects. It was time to get in the forefront of things she cared about, so she applied for the job and she needed some letters of recommendation. Jerene Johnston, as an art trustee, would be a good recommender. It had been a year since she’d laid eyes on her fantasy sugar mama.

Jerene was still Dorrie’s ideal. Exuding will, she was a distillation of rich-white-lady force who could eat her social inferiors for hors d’oeuvres and probably took no notice of anyone younger or anyone black, let alone younger and black and gay. Yes ma’am, Dorrie marveled, the upkeep it took to be Mrs. J. To speak like she did, hold herself with that carriage, to look like she went to bed and got up the next morning with every hair in place, makeup perfect. Dorrie was doing well to wipe the sleep out of her eyes. Tank tops or T-shirts, no bra (and not much need for one), worn-through jeans, everything loose and comfortable, ratty Converse sneakers, hair cut close to the scalp not for politics’ sake but for convenience. But just imagine such an unfashionable jeans-and-T-shirt tomboy forcing Mrs. J. to the bed in her pearls and fashionable Burberry trench coat, clutching that Kate Spade purse, Dorrie removing one suede pump after the other and throwing them across the room.
And just what do you presume to do, young lady?
Mrs. J. would ask. Would Jerene Johnston suddenly fear she was dealing with some ghetto-girl banger who was going to take her purse and her credit cards?
Hell
no. Mrs. J. could stare down a drug lord of a Colombian cartel. She’d know what Dorrie had in mind, the day Dorrie followed her up to her plush, rich-lady’s bedroom.
I’m gonna rock your world, Mrs. J. If you haven’t had an orgasm to date, prepare to have one because you’re not getting out of this bed until I make it happen.
And Mrs. Johnston in this oft-returned-to fantasy would fix Dorrie with that squinty, steely look and ever so slightly relinquish some of that power, relax her grip on the reins, and say,
All right. But it better be a good one. I’ve got to be uptown at the new Mint in three hours.

What needled Dorrie was that the Jerene-fantasy was not absolutely one hundred percent remotely out of the range of things that happen in this world! Dorrie had been with enough older, charming, dazzling white society women—all married, married, married—to know that there were certain women, long out of the bedroom-business thanks to age-dwindled husbands, women who were susceptible, curious, maybe always bisexual but deprived of appropriate circumstances and venues for it to find expression. And when Dorrie was on her game, really, who could resist her?

Jerene surpised Dorrie with an earnest hug, and they adjourned to the conference room at the Mint Museum. Some ancient white docent, not a hundred pounds, brought in a silver tea service.

“How’s Mr. Johnston doing?” Dorrie dutifully asked first.

“He’s out of the wheelchair, which pleases him. Using a walker now, sometimes just the cane.”

In 2009, Jerene and Duke moved away from atop Providence Road and rented a unit in an upper-middle-class condo development Annie found, on the south edge of Charlotte. It was one of those lavish two-hundred-unit housing tracts that bankrupted their owners in the downturn. Where once investors hoped to make $450,000 a unit, they were settling for $220,000, and then, more desperate still, they started renting the units. Annie, who would go bankrupt herself later in the year, smelled a bargain and directed her parents to rent a place until they knew their next move. Dorrie and Josh went out there once. It was a ghost development, three-quarters of the units unsold, no cars in driveways, no lights on in windows. They had bulldozed away an old-growth Piedmont forest and an ecologically valuable stretch of what is known as Piedmont Prairie; in place of that, each unit had a spindly just-planted sapling, and the entrance drive boasted a line of the so-common-as-to-be-vulgar Bradford pear trees, none of the landscaping well attended or groomed. It never stopped looking just built. Josh described it as like being in one of those evacuated Chernobyl towns—all it needed was a loudspeaker playing staticky Russian martial music echoing between the empty condo units. Three weeks later, Duke Johnston had a stroke, paralyzing the left side of his body and slurring his speech.

“And his speech,” Jerene reported brightly, “is a lot better. We can understand what he says most of the time. What is not better is the depression. We still are trying to find a medicine that won’t knock him out, sleeping away each day.”

Dorrie smiled sympathetically, a little surprised at Jerene’s frankness. She couldn’t imagine Duke Johnston so reduced and unhappy. Dorrie always thought of Annie as the ultimate daddy’s girl, exhibit A for the Elektra complex. But soon after his stroke, Annie cleared out for Berkeley, getting in the master’s-doctorate program there in History. Dorrie decided that Annie couldn’t stand to see her father debilitated so she just removed herself geographically. Dorrie didn’t quite judge her for it, because she didn’t want to see Duke Johnston that way either.

Dorrie asked after Bo and Kate.

Jerene was brisk. “Same as ever. Bo is running for something, Clerk of the Office of the Presbyterian General Assembly, something like that. Spending a lot of time in Kentucky. Kate’s still in Honduras, serving the heathens or some such.”

Dorrie knew they lived apart. “Well,” Dorrie said, enjoying her cup of tea, feeling civilized again, “I’d like to see Kate sometime when she passes back through on a visit.”

“I don’t think she’ll be coming back,” Jerene said without inflection.