Father of the Rain (16 page)

Julie clears her throat dramatically. Since Mallory, she’s the closest thing I’ve had to a sister. We’ve shared an apartment for four years. Even the way she holds up her glass now, crooked, as if she doesn’t care if it spills a little, is familiar to me. “I think we all know that Daley’s name will soon be in textbooks, so this may be our last evening with her as a humble mortal. Anthropology professors at Berkeley rarely fade away.”

“But they do get washed away,” Dan said. Last year one of them jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“She’ll have Jonathan to hold her back.” Julie looks down into her glass. The sentimental part is coming. “I just want to say how impossibly proud I am of you, Daley. You’ve been working toward this moment from the day I met you. And here it is.” Her big smile rearranges everything else on her face. Even her hair shifts. She has the most amazing ability to reveal her emotions without embarrassment. She cried when I got the call from Berkeley about the job. I’d never seen anyone actually cry for joy in real life. And there Julie was, crying for mine. “I wish you, as my father used to say to me every night”—her smile twists suddenly and her voice frays—”the sun, the moon, and the stars. You deserve them all.” I glance at Jonathan then. I can’t help it. We have a joke about how often Julie mentions her father. But he won’t meet my eye. He probably doesn’t think we should enjoy an inside joke about Julie at this moment.

Nico says he will miss eavesdropping on my conferences. “You wouldn’t believe the things her students tell her. It’s like sharing an office with Sigmund Freud.” He’s not comfortable speaking to a group, even this small group around Jonathan’s table. It makes me wonder how he gets through his lecture classes. “But the real testament to your character, Daley, is that you got the best job of all of us and nobody even resents you for it.”

“I do,” Jonathan and Dan say at the same time.

Kira says she wishes me the best but will not raise a glass because of the ritual’s patriarchal roots. The concept of toasting, she
explains, evolved from the custom of flavoring drinks with spiced toast, and when the toast ran out, she says, a woman’s name would be called out to flavor the drink. “Yet another example of men attempting to consume women,” she says. Dan pretends to slit his wrists with the cake knife, which he often does around Kira.

When it’s Jonathan’s turn, the room gets quiet. People tend to listen to Jonathan a little more closely. When I accused him once of having this effect, he said that white people in academia always have to pretend they’re listening to the black man. He pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket, glances at it in silence, then stuffs it back. He turns to me and speaks quietly. “I wrote down some things. I even had a quote by Bronislaw Malinowski for you.” He laughs. “But what I really want to say is that I just feel so glad that, that somehow,” he rubs his finger on the tablecloth, “you showed up in my life. I didn’t expect that. As you know.” He smiles. He tips his glass over to tap mine. “Here’s to you and me and our unanticipated future.” I’m surprised by the emotion in his voice. He’s usually so controlled in public. I put my arm around his neck and he pulls me tight against him. I feel how fast his heart is beating and I think, briefly, the smallest pulse of a fear, that I am not worthy of that heart.

It’s true that Dan introduced us by accident. Nadine Gordimer came to campus for a reading last fall, and there was a reception afterward at the chancellor’s house. It was crowded, everyone hoping for a closer look at the writer, who was tucked away in some alcove at the back. Dan and I were at the buffet table when he saw a woman he was interested in across the room.

“We gotta get over there,” he said, and yanked me smack into Jonathan. A few cubes of cheese from my plate bounced off his shirt.

“Oh, shit, she’s leaving,” Dan said, and since he knew Jonathan from a writing class, he introduced us.

I’d noticed him before, the lean body, short dreads, round glasses, angular face.

“You still writing?” Dan asked him.

“Just my dissertation.”

“On what?” I asked.

“Hegel and Gramsci, supposedly.”

“Not going well?”

“I’d rather be writing stories.”

“You should,” Dan said. “You were good. That story you wrote about the two boys and their dying uncle. I can still remember whole sentences of it.”

We picked at the food. The room was hot. I told Jonathan I’d thought he was one of those precocious seniors who took graduate courses. He laughed and said he was thirty. I didn’t believe him.

“Let me see your license,” I said.

“I don’t have one.”

“What do you mean?” Dan asked. “It get taken away?”

“No, man,” he said, irritated. “I grew up in the city. Never needed one.”

“Shit. Really?”

“True. And my cousin just dropped off this truck she doesn’t need at my apartment, and I can’t even use it.”

“You’ve gotta get taught,” Dan said.

“I know it.”

People were still squeezing in the front door. An old boyfriend was at the other end of the table, debating whether to come over. I needed to get out of there. “I’ll teach you,” I said, and handed him the keys to my Datsun.

It was late afternoon, the third week of September. The day had been warm, but now the sun was low and the trees on the chancellor’s street shook out a cool breeze. In the car I helped him adjust the seat. He needed to put it all the way back. “I’m nervous,” he said, before he turned the key in the ignition. I couldn’t believe
how beautiful he was. “I really don’t want to crack up your car.”

But he knew what he was doing. He just went very slowly. A line of cars grew behind us. I directed him out of town onto a back road, but still cars were behind us. He didn’t seem to notice. Every time a car approached from the opposite direction he veered off onto the gravel shoulder and I shut my eyes. He slowly moved the car back onto the road after the line of cars had honked passed. He drove in a straight line. He didn’t seem ready to make turns. Occasionally I’d offer up a tip I remembered from driver’s ed, but mostly there was silence between us. And then, eleven miles out of town, he asked if I liked to sing.

Thursdays were the only afternoon we both had free. We met at the car and we drove and we sang. The first song, that first day, was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” It took us the next three Thursdays to exhaust our repertoire of Beatles songs. Singing helped the driving. He went a little faster. Fewer cars trailed behind us. He began to argue with some of my driving suggestions. We came to a stop sign and I waited for him to slow, and when he didn’t I screamed for him to stop but we sailed through it anyway. I called him Mr. Magoo after that. He retaliated, saying I reminded him of Tweety Bird.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been called worse cartoon characters.”

“Like what?”

“My brother calls me Hermey.”

I didn’t think he’d get it but he said, within seconds, “The dentist?” and he looked at me. “I see that.” He kept looking and laughing. “I definitely see that.”

When we were through with the Beatles, he suggested Elton John.

“Which song of Elton’s do you think crossed over to the black community?” he asked. It was the first time he’d mentioned his race. It felt strangely intimate, and I wanted to get it right.

“‘Benny and the Jets,’” I said.

“Exactly,” he said, with a little smile. “We had no idea what the hell it was about, but, man, we loved that song.” Then he started pounding out the beat on the steering wheel.

“Watch the road, Magoo.”

“You watch the road. I’m on drums.” He made the intro noises and we sang, right on the same beat, “
Hey, kids
.” Then he sang “
walking in the ghetto
” while I sang “
talk about the weather
,” and we looked at each other and cracked up. Jonathan’s smile felt like the full sun on my bare skin.

After Elton, he launched into “Thunder Road.” And then we sang every Springsteen song we could think of, the fun ones like “Rosalita” and “Cadillac Ranch” and the mournful ones like “Independence Day” and “Nebraska.” When we ran out of Bruce, we were driving through a small town surrounded by open fields and I started to sing “Little ditty ‘bout Jack and Diane” without really realizing it, and he screamed “No!” and stopped the car in the middle of the road.

“Why?”

“That song is too fucking white.”

“Every song we’ve sung so far is white.”

“I know, but—”

“The Beatles and Springsteen are absolutely fine, but John Mellencamp is out?” I felt myself blushing for having made such a blunder. I worried that it had revealed everything to him: my father, Myrtle Street, Ashing—everything I’d worked so carefully to cleanse myself of.

He grinned. “I switch-hit, don’t I? Shit, they talk about double consciousness, but I’ve got triple, quadruple—I’ve got origami consciousness. But I can’t sing that song. People get lynched in towns like that.”

I couldn’t fake it when he wanted to sing songs by groups like Cameo and the Whispers. I didn’t even know the choruses of those songs.

“This is tragic. Where’d you grow up, under a rock?”

“Pretty much.”

We settled on Marvin Gaye.

He told me he grew up in Philadelphia with four brothers, that his mother was a nurse from Georgia, that his father had come to Philly from Trinidad as a boy and had died from a heart attack when Jonathan was fifteen, that his mother had never remarried, that he had a friend from college named Stella who did improv in comedy clubs. I pictured it: the wooden stage, the confident voice, the room erupting. I knew I couldn’t compete with that.

I told him about my fieldwork in Mexico, twelve months in a village in the Sierra Juarez northeast of Oaxaca, and how the children I’d gone to study ran away from me for the first three months. When I did get close enough to observe their play, I found that the villain in many of their imagined stories, someone they called the See-through Demon, was me.

Once we passed an accident, a car on its side in a gully and three police cars and a fire truck along the shoulder. Jonathan drove slowly by.

“My mother was hit by a car,” I said. It felt like something he should know.

“When?”

“Nine years ago. She died.”

“Right away?”

“Yup.”

I saw his hand flinch on the steering wheel, lift off, and plant right back down again, all in less than a second. It gave me hope, that tiny impulse to touch me that he’d checked.

Sometimes Jonathan would see an animal out of the corner of his eye and stop the car. A fox cutting across a field, a porcupine at the base of a tree. Once we saw a long wide V of Canada geese drop down into a small farm pond all at once, forcing up a great white
fan of water. We rolled down the windows and heard all their honking and wing smacking. It was dusk. Jonathan kept binoculars in my glove compartment by then, so we took turns looking at their long dark necks and prim white chinstraps, laughing at how loud and rowdy they were at the start of their long road trip.

When we got back on the road, we passed a sign that said
STRATHAM
2
MILES
. “I’ve read about that place,” he said. “It’s the Knights’ headquarters.”

“The Knights?”

He looked to see if I was seriously asking. I was. “The Klan,” he said. “Not the place you want to be stopped driving a white girl’s car without a license.” The road was empty and he made a wide U-turn.

Just a few miles out of Ann Arbor, and it was a different world for Jonathan.

We never did anything together after driving. We said goodbye on the street. In the car, while he watched the road, I watched him: his severe profile, the heavy ledge of his brow, the taut muscles of his jaw, and then when he turned unexpectedly, laughing at one of my nervous quips, that smile, his cheeks suddenly boyish. Sitting beside him in my car was becoming a form of torture.

“You’ve got to just kiss him yourself, Daley,” Julie said. “Anyone can see that he’s crazy about you.” But she didn’t know what she was talking about. We’d run into him once on campus, talked awkwardly, that was it.

I couldn’t make the first move. I never had and I never would. She thought I was anachronistic. She proudly claimed that she made the first move in every serious relationship she’d ever had. Men are the tortoises of love, she often said. But my interest and attraction felt too strong. In the car I had to rein in everything: my hands, my
questions, my fascination. Sometimes it felt like there was a part of me inside him that I ached to get to.

There was a general store on our route, the only store in a tiny town that we often passed through. One day in early December, he said he was thirsty and pulled into a parking spot. We’d never gotten out of the car during our drives before, not even for animal sightings. An old couple sat on stools behind the counter, and there were several men in the aisles, one lifting out a six-pack from the cooler, another at the magazine stand. Everybody seemed to be talking at once until they saw us and stopped. It reminded me of walking into the kitchen when my father and Catherine weren’t expecting me. The same suspicious glares. Before I knew what I was doing I’d taken Jonathan’s hand. It was the first time we’d touched, though I’d longed for weeks to put my hand on his thigh as he drove, longed to kiss the side of his long neck, had already imagined, I admit it, straddling him, my back against the steering wheel. It was such a relief to touch him, to feel him squeeze my hand with his. We picked out cookies and sodas and I let go reluctantly when we had to pay.

“You did not have to do that,” he said when we walked to the car. “I didn’t need your protection in there.” He slammed the door.

I was stunned by his anger. I thought we’d get back in the car and laugh. I thought he might kiss me. My whole body was still straining toward his. I felt like he’d already touched me everywhere, the way his hand had felt in mine.

He started the car, put it in reverse without a word. I did not explain how to turn going backwards, and didn’t need to. Before we went into the general store we’d been singing “O-o-h, child, things are gonna get easier,” but now we drove back toward Ann Arbor in silence. I wanted
your
protection, I thought to myself. The man with the six-pack had scared me. But I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what was the truth. For the first time in my life I’d made the first move. My hand had gone out to his and he had taken it and now he was
angry at me. I felt like a child. I wanted him to get out of my car so I could cry and cry. I watched the road signs.
ANN ARBOR
12
MILES
;
ANN ARBOR
9
MILES
. And then he turned down a road we’d never taken before. I hadn’t seen a sign, didn’t know how he knew it. It bumped along for over a mile, a dirt road with huge ruts and a rise of grass in the middle that scraped the bottom of my car. I thought maybe he was going to drop me off down here as a punishment, make me find my way back. His profile looked particularly harsh then, the jaw working, shifting. The road ended at a lake. The sun had gone behind the tall trees and the still water reflected the purple dusk plushly, like fabric. We stayed in the car and did not look at each other.