Your Face in Mine (11 page)

I mean, the point is, it was a family. Not in the nuclear sense; in the original sense. The elastic sense. No matter what time of day, somebody would be home, the TV would be on, and something would be on the stove. No one once questioned my being there. I could go on for hours. I remember that house better than my own. The orange shag rug in the living room. Herbs in pots around the windowsills. There was an enormous Ali–Frazier poster hanging up in the hall, and another one in the dining room—Ali knocking out Sonny Liston. And a couple of Benin masks, the ones with the enormous foreheads and tiny eyes. We used to do our homework at the dining table, and Willie would go up to the masks and pretend they were whispering the answers in his ear.

My father was relieved by this arrangement. To say the least. I would call him from their phone, and say, I’m staying at Willie’s till bedtime, and he would say, good, because there’s nothing in the fridge. His mother—Rashida was her name—she even cut my hair, you believe that? The barber’s chair was right there, next to the sink; you tilted your head back for shampooing and then swung right around to the mirror on the opposite wall. I wanted it cut super-close, just like Willie’s, and she did her best. Kind of a Roman style, is how it came out, slicked down with pomade. Wish I had a picture. That was how I wore my hair all those years. Christ, I mean, you have to understand, I must have had dinner
there two or three nights a week. How else can I explain it? It wasn’t just that I was happy. It was that I felt human, as if for the first time. Let me refine that statement. I felt part of the human world. And so when Willie told me it was okay, because I would turn black one day, too, I wanted to believe him. Part of me did believe him.

So that’s the story of my happy childhood on Greenmount Ave. An accidentally happy childhood. Until I got shot.

There’s still a trace of a scar. It was a graze, a flesh wound. Walking home from school. Guy opened up on his girlfriend right across the sidewalk, in broad daylight; killed her, her new boyfriend, I guess he was, and Dwayne Pierce. Dwayne was in third grade with me. I got caught with a ricochet. My leg was a bloody mess, but I didn’t feel anything. Passed out and woke up in the hospital. After that a social worker came to visit. I’ve no idea why. Maybe the school thought I was too much of a liability, too easy a target? In any case, I was moved in the middle of the year to Roland Park Elementary. Dad objected, believe me. It meant he had to drive me to school. One school is as good as another, he kept saying. A boy should be able to walk to school.

Should I move on? Should I skip ahead, a little? Somehow this seems like the place to do it. My father had AIDS. He died of AIDS. In secret, of course. The way he did everything. It was Enrique, most likely, that gave it to him. Enrique died from it, too, back in Honduras, after he left us. But it could have been any number of people. After Big Love, when we moved back to the city, we went through a time when there was a new guy around the house every month or so. He bragged, in the end, that he never once used a condom with a man. He may have been delusional.

In any case, it was all over fast, because he waited too long. AZT was around; the triple cocktail was nearly on the market; but by the time he
bothered to see a doctor he had the full-blown disease and it was too late to start. In a couple of months he lost nearly twenty pounds; then he got pneumonia, in November, November of 1994, and died on New Year’s Day, 1995. He’d only been diagnosed—what was it?—a year and a half.

And who was I? Who was I, then, the day I became an orphan?

I have to stop. That’s a story for another day.

Martin switches the wipers to low against a mild drizzle, a fine mist, brackish with road salt; the residue crusts along the sides of the windshield. Gray-green, featureless April, the woods lining the highway dissolved in fog. Through the car’s open vents I can smell the otherworldly scent of thawing earth.

Didn’t you ever
meet
my father?

No. I’m sure I didn’t.

Short guy, in tennis whites? You sure? Thinning hair, combed back? Gold stud in the right ear? You never came inside the house, not once?

Tennis whites?

He wore them all the time. They were the closest thing he had to a uniform. He was inordinately proud of his legs.

A moment passes. I’m growing aware, every time he stops speaking, of the particular qualities of silence inside this car. A cushioned, baffled, carefully engineered silence. The engine a low vibration more felt than heard. It’s just new enough to have a new-leather smell, like a shoe store, but there are other, more prominent smells: Aftershave. French roast coffee. Dry cleaning? Is there a discernible smell from the plastic-wrapped package just behind my shoulder—the pressing iron, the
steam, the sleek fabric itself exhaling? A teasing childish voice, asking,
how did this, and this, and this, come to be
?

Maybe, I say, maybe I should start by saying this: I was really shocked to know about your father. That you never told anyone.

He drains his coffee cup and thunks it back into the cup holder, emphatically.

Are you wondering what to say? he asks. Don’t say anything. Did I give you a chance to care? Is it your fault you never knew what
nobody
knew? Of course not. He was a gay man in the Seventies and Eighties. Before anybody knew better. He didn’t want anyone to pity him. Pity us, he always said. The catastrophe is general.

Not general to you.

Do you want me to say something I don’t feel?

His BlackBerry, attached to his belt, buzzes and cheeps, a ringtone meant to sound like late-summer crickets. After four rings, as if coming out of a daze, he takes it out, silences it, and tosses it across the dashboard.

Listen, he says, maybe the way to put it is like this. My childhood—this whole story—it’s like its own crazy little bubble, right? An ectoplasm unto itself. That’s how Dad wanted it. And I understood him, and I followed the pattern. At first it was just out of shame. Later, toward the end, it was respect. You know the movie
Amadeus
? The part where Mozart dies, and they throw his body into the pauper’s grave, the unmarked grave, and shake a little lime over it, not even a coffin? Dad loved that. Do
that
, he said. So I did. As close as you could get in the twentieth century. I kept his anonymity. I kept our big secret, whatever it was, exactly. But that’s not the same thing as love. And it’s not the same thing as grief, either. You could call it a habit of extreme privacy. Which I’m trying to break.
Slowly.

I think about Robin—how can I not?—Tamika, Sherry, his house and its shiny, unplumbable surfaces, its granite and tile.

Whatever happened to Willie?

To Willie? You really want to know? It all ended in a fight over Legos. We still saw each other, that first year after I left Shabazz. I still ate at his house once or twice a month. Still needed it, to recharge my batteries. And his mother insisted. Stay friends, she always said. No reason you can’t stay friends. She bought us toys to play with together. With what money I don’t know. What was she thinking, buying toys that two little boys always have to share? I wanted to take the castle home to my house to play with, Willie said no, it’s
my
castle, I shoved him, he shoved me, I cracked my head on the coffee table. That was it. Don’t ever let them tell you only girls are bitter in their grudges. We never talked again. And after that, magically, my old neighborhood—that whole world—sealed itself off from me. When I was home, away from school, I was inside the house. Alone again. How was I supposed to know what a mistake that was?

There was no other way, was there?

Of course there was. At that point Dad wouldn’t have stopped me from hanging out in the neighborhood.
He
didn’t care. It was all me; I couldn’t make it work. Not psychologically. It was too much of a break. After I left Shabazz it was as if my whole life was outside the neighborhood. That car ride to Roland Park was like my oxygen line. I was like some fragile plant that can survive only at one elevation. Who was there to tell me that it would take me twenty years to find the name for my unhappiness? That I had
had
everything I needed, and failed to recognize it, and thrown it away? It was a matter of starting from scratch.

But there’s a thousand ways of starting from scratch. Is that what you’re saying? That this all was a form of rebel—

I’m not
saying
anything. I’m posing a question. An obvious question. Was it me, or was it him? Did my father, effectively, make Martin Lipkin into Martin Wilkinson? Can your white father make you a black man? Or could I have been anybody?

I check the time signature on the recorder: one hour and fifty-three minutes. Is that all? A day, a week?

This is making you uncomfortable, isn’t it?

What do you mean?

Oh, come on, Kelly. Your knee’s jiggling.

He flicks on the emergency lights and slows the car, easing us off to the side, over the bassoon tones of the rumble strip and into the scabby grass. Across the drainage ditch a fallow cornfield stretches to a hazy, soapy horizon. To our left, the highway divider is an impenetrable thatch of overgrown oaks: the westbound traffic audible but not visible. The Northeast Corridor and its abandoned outdoors.

Let me tell you something that happened when I first got to Bangkok, he says. Silpa’s office was staffed by trannies. All different stages. It’s common there. Some of them do a little work-for-surgery arrangement. And I was a little freaked out by them. I mean, anyone would be, if you’re used to the ordinary, heterosexual world. So Silpa introduced me to Suki. His private secretary. You’ll meet her—she’s the best. She took me into an examining room and took everything off. Look at me, she said. Really
look
. Take all the time you want. It’s okay. It’s just hair and skin. It won’t bite you.

And?

Well? I looked. I checked her out. I couldn’t tell; she seemed one hundred percent. Her face—her breasts—down below—the whole package. I would never have known. It was complete. She was Silpa’s best advertisement.

So what’s your point?

You know what she said to me?
I don’t ever think about being a man. As far as I’m concerned, I never was one.
I looked her in the face, and I just had to accept it. I had to buy it! So this is what I’m saying: what do I have to show you, Kelly?

To convince me it’s real? I believe it’s real. How could I not?

To believe it was
always
real. I’m not talking about etiology. I’m not talking about
cause
. We can speculate about the circumstances all we want—later. Right now I’m just talking about the fact of the phenomenon. I was a black boy in a white boy’s body. I was a black
man
in a white man’s body. Can you accept that, Kelly? Can you really believe it’s possible, when it comes down to it? I need to know. Before we go any further, I need to know.

I believe you.

No, see that’s not the same. You
believe
it because I’m
saying
it. I’m not asking you to accept the words. I’m asking you to accept the thing itself. The possibility that—

Yeah, I get it. You don’t have to repeat yourself.

Which means it could happen to anybody. It could be latent in anybody. It could be latent in you.

What would be the chances of that?

You think it’s some kind of genetic freak that so many kids go to liberal-arts colleges, you know, Bennington, Santa Cruz, and come out as lesbians, and then a few years later they’re getting the hormone shots and beginning to transition? You think environment and suggestion has
no effect at all
? Either it’s a fad, a style thing, which is bullshit, or it’s present in a much higher percentage of the population than we realize. Given the technology, the resources, the access, a change in social approval, it could be ten percent. Seriously. There’s research. And if one, why not the other? You have to turn the whole logic around. Not who are you
now
, but who would you most like to be? What is the ultimate form of you? You follow me?

I close my eyes.

Martin, I say, what you’re really asking me to say is, you’re not a freak. You’re not a monster. You are, authentically, who you say you are. You are, one hundred percent, the black man Martin Wilkinson, the man I met at Mondawmin Mall, what was it, six weeks ago? You
are
that man. No one else. No matter what the explanation happens to be, in the end. Is that what you want me to say?

His eyes are shining.

Yeah, he says. I guess that’s it.

Then the answer is yes. See? I don’t even have to think about it. If you hadn’t introduced yourself I would never have known. Isn’t that enough? You could have gone on living your life.
You
chose.

I did. I put my faith in you.

And so what do
I
have to do, then, to demonstrate that I was worth it?

When I know for sure, he says, I’ll tell you.

—

We drive for ten more minutes in silence, and turn off the interstate onto Route 193, the suburban strip outside the old city, passing three intersections, each interchangeable with the last: Wendy’s, Best Buy, Starbucks, Walmart, Target, HomeGoods, Bed Bath & Beyond. Since moving to Baltimore I haven’t once needed to go to a mall, or any store larger than a supermarket, though in Cambridge, with a household of three, we were forever searching out some bargain outside the city on a gray February Sunday, placating Meimei with food-court egg rolls and new DVDs. In a little more than a year I’ve forgotten how to drive these four-lane roads, with cars stacked up in the dedicated turn lanes, the traffic signals signaling seven different movements at once. It’s as disorienting as a pinball machine. I used to be the expert, the director, the choreographer of our American existence. And now, it seems to me, having stopped growing—shrinking, in fact, as I get older—I need nothing from this America. No economy-sized pallets of paper towels. No
Little Mermaid
bathing suits. I have failed to burgeon.

I look over at Martin, the very essence of calm behind the wheel, eyes on every mirror, checking his watch. Which of us is the visitor, I
want to know, which of us has given up his claim? Instead, I clear my throat and ask: how long are you going to be?

Are you on a schedule? I thought you had all afternoon.

Just for my information.

Maybe an hour and a half. These legislative lunches never run too long.

And what is it you’re legislating?

Import-export stuff. Tax exemptions. Inspection issues at the port. I come down here every six months. All part of the job.

We’ll have to talk more about that.
The job.
I still don’t really grasp it.

Is it relevant? I mean, for this? For the story?

Maybe indirectly.

I’m an open book, he says. For you. For now. Ask away.