The Emperor of Ocean Park (46 page)

Yet my life continues. Onward and upward, one might say, given my father’s emphasis on the word
excelsior.
At Oldie earlier this morning I sat through a brief and respectful session with two quiet investigators from the FBI, this time in connection with my wife’s background check. Kimmer, interviewed twice, is excited. She thinks the portents may yet be favorable if, as she puts it, we stay on the same page. Over breakfast, she rehearsed me carefully in what to say and what to omit. She wants nothing more about the
arrangements
on the official record. I was too
worn out to argue, and, besides, I really do want her to get what she wants. So I followed the script.

“We’ve known each other a long time, Talcott,” says Dr. Young now, leaning forward to fold his hands on his immaculate desk. His office in the basement of the church is cramped and airless, the heating vent noisy. I am sweating. Dr. Young is not. His tie is perfectly knotted, his shirt crisp and fresh, although it is late afternoon. “How many years is it?”

“Since the time the boys made a fool of me.”

He chuckles. “They didn’t make a fool of you, Talcott. A man can only make a fool of himself. All they did was treat you like they treat every other outsider. And”—he holds up a pudgy hand to forestall my interruption—“and, you can be sure, I gave them a difficult time for it. You know what we teach in the program. Understanding that every human being we meet, white or black or brown or yellow, rich or poor or in between, police officer or pusher, whether he helps us or hurts us, every person we meet is made in the image of God, and it is our task, therefore, to seek that image in each encounter.”

“I think I’ve heard this one before, Dr. Young.” My turn to smile.

“I know, I’m a bit of a broken record. But you see how it is with the boys.”

“I do,” I tell him, and, at this moment, I would rather talk about the boys in his Faith Life Skills program than almost anything else, although, at some point, we need to talk about . . . well, about my marriage. I am trying to be patient and calm, as Kimmer, desperate worry in her eyes, keeps urging me. And Dr. Young, in his jovial, evangelical way, is helping. His reminder about the boys in his Faith Life Skills program helps, too.

“We’ve made some progress,” the pastor murmurs, and I am not sure, at first, if he is talking about me or the boys. He leans toward me once more, his brown eyes blazing. “But, you understand, Talcott, all that these young men have learned from the world is mistrust. You know how many of them ever see their fathers? About one out of ten. You know how many of them have brothers or best friends who deal drugs? About nine out of ten. Half have been arrested. Some have been to prison. Not one has held a real job for more than a few months. They have no idea what a job is. They think the boss is dissing them when he tells them what to do. They think customers are a pain in the rear. They have no education to speak of. The schools have failed them. Welfare has trapped their mothers, but what else are their mothers to
do? So the boys fight back. They hate white people, and they’re scared of them too. Successful black people”—he points a pudgy finger at my chest—“they also hate, but they do not fear. They hate the whole world, Talcott, for leaving them behind and leaving their mothers behind and leaving their mothers’ mothers behind. How are they to see God in others? They do not even see God in themselves.”

“I believe you’ve mentioned this before.”

Morris Young nods, satisfied. His face relaxes once more into its usual expression of quiet serenity. I have known him for about six years, since he invited me to talk to some of the young black men in his program for at-risk kids. I prepared a half-hour lecture about some of the heroes of the civil rights movement. It was a disaster. The younger boys dozed off; the pre-adolescents whispered behind their hands; the older teens, burdened with gold and attitude, were ostentatiously bored. Not a single one of them seemed remotely interested in anything beyond his own immediate experience. When the time mercifully ran out, Dr. Young shook his head and said,
Welcome to the real world.
A few months later, I persuaded my colleague Lemaster Carlyle, the former prosecutor, to speak to the same boys about the criminal justice system. I stood in the back and watched him engage them on everything from the way the jury looks at them
(They’ll vote you guilty in two minutes if you walk into the courtroom the same way you walked in here)
to how to avoid getting shot by police
(Just saying “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and keeping your hands where he can see them will do a lot more to keep you alive than “Get out of my face,” even if he’s in your face).
I would not say Lem’s performance was spellbinding, but the young men warmed to him as they never did to me. Since that time, I have spoken to the boys at least twice each year; Lem Carlyle, star of the nightly network news, only once more. But he is the one they remember.

Yes, okay, I am envious.

Now, sitting in the church basement, I exchange more pleasantries with Dr. Young and wait for him to get around to the point. He has been appropriately consoling about the loss of my father and about the death of Freeman Bishop, whom he knew for my family pastor, as he seems to know every fact about every African American in the city. He has asked after my wife and my son, and I have asked after his wife and three daughters, the eldest of whom is a first-year law student at the state university. I have always admired Dr. Young for not asking my help to get his daughter into our law school, and for the way he politely
but firmly rebuffed the offer I made without his asking.
The Lord has given Patricia certain talents, and she will go as far as her talent and achievements take her, praise the Lord,
was all he said.

We turned her down.

“So,” murmurs the good reverend, “I suppose we should get back to your fight with your wife.”

“Please.”

“You would agree, would you not, Talcott, that what you did was unwise?”

“Yes.”

“A woman in your hotel room,” he murmurs.

“I realize it was a mistake. I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”

He nods. “You know, Talcott, I know a man, a good Christian man, a pastor, a lifelong friend, who is never alone with a woman other than his wife. Not for a moment. If he is on a trip, he insists that a man pick him up from the airport. If he has to counsel a female parishioner, he always has his wife or a female deacon present. Always. That way, there is never even the hint of scandal.”

I try not to smile. “I don’t think that would work in my part of the world. People would call it sex discrimination.”

“A strange part of the world.” He seems about to say more, then decides not to pursue the point. “But, as I say, it is easy to understand your wife’s anger, isn’t it? You have hurt her, Talcott, you have hurt her reputation . . . .”

Suddenly I cannot contain myself. “Her reputation! She’s the one who has affairs, not me! She has no right to get angry just because . . . just because people
think
I had one!”

“Talcott, Talcott. Anger is not a right. It is an emotion. It flows from our fear or our pain, of which we broken creatures possess a surfeit. Your wife’s sins, her weaknesses, give you no right to impose further pain upon her. You are her
husband,
Talcott.” He folds his hands and hunches over his desk, and I reciprocate, drawing closer. “You know, Talcott, I have asked you for quite a few favors on behalf of the boys, and you have always been more than generous.”

I grimace. One of the favors was to accompany the boys, along with three or four other adults, on a trip to the beach, an event that confirmed my utter lack of influence over them. Another was to persuade my famous student Lionel Eldridge, the onetime basketball star known as Sweet Nellie, to talk to the boys last spring. I have been paying for
that one ever since, for Lionel seems to think, having done me a good turn, he no longer needs to finish his seminar paper . . . from last spring.

“Thank you, Dr. Young, but it was the least I could do.”

“You’re storing up treasures in Heaven, praise God. You’re a good man, and the Lord has important work for you.”

I nod, saying nothing. Although every believing Christian understands that God guides our steps, fewer and fewer emphasize the point. A God working actively in the world makes us uneasy. We tend to like our God distant and a bit malleable, ready to bend to every new human idea. A God with a will of his own is too scary, and, besides, he might get in the way of our satisfaction of immediate desire. Or so my father wrote someplace or other.

“But this next favor . . . well, this is a favor I want you to do for yourself.” Dr. Young leans back in his creaky chair once more. “You see, Talcott, when you first came to me for counseling, you said you thought your wife was having an affair. You wanted her to come for counseling with you, she refused, you finally came alone. Remember that? And yet, praise the Lord, the two of you are still together, and you, Talcott, you personally are committed to staying with your wife until you are parted by death, just as the Scriptures instruct.”

“Yes.”

“Or unless
she
leaves
you.”

I swallow. “Yes.”

“You are one flesh, Talcott, you and your wife. That is Christian marriage.”

“I know.”

“So perhaps it is time you found it in your heart to forgive her.”

“Forgive her for . . .”

“For her transgressions against you, Talcott. Real or imagined.”

An unexpected shot. And he is grinning as he fires it. “What do you . . . when you say
imagined,
are you implying that I . . . uh . . .”

He folds his plump hands in his lap and swivels his chair, this way, that way. “Talcott, you came to me in the summer and said your wife was having an affair with a coworker. But, as far as I can tell, you have no actual evidence.”

“Not evidence that would stand up in a court of law, but . . . well . . . a husband just knows these things . . . .”

“Talcott, Talcott. Listen. You have told me she often works late. You have told me she often is not at her desk when you call, sometimes for hours. She goes out of town a lot with her boss, and she seems to have
lots of meetings with him when they travel. Why is it impossible, Talcott, that she is simply a hardworking lawyer, devoted to her job and trusted by her boss? If a man worked the same hours at the same firm and did the same things, would you, Talcott, assume that he was having an affair with the boss?”

I hate being hemmed in this way, but Dr. Young is an expert. “You’re forgetting those furtive telephone calls . . . .”

“No, Talcott, I have not forgotten. You say you will be eating dinner or lying in bed and the phone will ring and your wife will answer it and she will say, ‘Sorry, Jerry, I can’t talk now.’ And when you ask her what that was all about, she will say something like, ‘Oh, I just didn’t want to interrupt our time together.’”

“Exactly.”

“One interpretation is that she and Jerry—or whoever was really on the other end of the line—are, indeed, engaging in an adulterous relationship. Another, however, is that she is simply telling you the truth. She does not want to ruin what precious time she has with you and your boy by getting into an extended telephone conversation.”

I shake my head, certain it cannot be this simple, yet suddenly assailed by doubts. “I . . . you would have to know Kimmer. The kind of person she is. She’s totally devoted to her work. She wouldn’t hesitate to interrupt our time at home for a business call.”

“Talcott, Talcott.” Smiling in that avuncular way of his. “Perhaps your wife senses in your marriage the same strains as you do. Perhaps she thinks she is partly to blame, the way she works. Perhaps she is trying, in her own way, to fix it.”

“I don’t know . . . .”

“And there is the point, Talcott.” Pouncing like an experienced litigator. “There is my very point. You don’t know!” Excited now, he leans across the desk, no easy feat for a man of his bulk. “You don’t know for sure she is running around with her boss. You don’t know for sure if she has had
any
extramarital affair. Except the one, of course.”

“Which one?”

“A little over a decade ago, Talcott, in Washington, D.C. When she was married to André. I mean the affair she had with you.”

I blink. This shot hit me, as it was supposed to do. They say that Dr. Young boxed when he was in the Army, back in the fifties, and I can believe it, for he has the boxer’s mind, the ability to weave and jab and jab and weave until, finally, he lands a straight right.

“I . . . I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Maybe you are just assuming that your wife will do to you with someone else what the two of you did to her first husband.”

Another blow lands! I reel into the ropes, memories tumbling through my mind at a dizzying pace. Kimmer and I dated during our first year in law school, and then she broke up with me over the summer because she found one of our classmates more interesting. We dated during our third year in law school, but she broke up with me three months before graduation, again for another student, although not the same one. In Washington, she spent two years dating me along with two other men, and then she pared the number to two, of which I was not one. A year later, she married one of the finalists, André Conway, formerly Artis, a production assistant at a television station, with dreams of becoming a big documentary filmmaker. By then, I, too, had moved on. My new girlfriend, Melody Merriman, a journalist and member of the darker nation, expected to marry me. I suppose I expected to marry her. Then, a little more than a year into her marriage, Kimmer began a torrid extramarital affair . . . with me. Kimmer left Artis-André, I left Melody, scandal ensued, and when Stuart Land called a few months later to ask if I was interested in teaching yet, I decided to leave a law practice I loved in a city I hated. My father was delighted, but I was never sure I wanted to be a professor: I probably fled to Elm Harbor as much to escape the Gold Coast gossip mills as because of my desire for the academic life. But I also had the hope that Kimmer would follow me, demonstrating through this affirmative act on her part a commitment to our future.