Your Face in Mine (12 page)

During my dissertation-writing years, in my late twenties, I traveled so often between Beijing and Taipei and Tokyo and Cambridge that I coined my own term for jet lag:
the gray hour
. Three in the afternoon, the day after you’ve arrived, when the last of the morning’s adrenaline has leached away, and, in the middle of teaching a class, driving on the highway, picking up a child from daycare, the daylight turns into a gluey fog, your eyes loosen in their sockets, and your stomach begins to burn its leftover acids: because it’s three in the morning, of course, according to your circadian clock. Your fuels are spent; your body hardens into clay.

I park on Duke of Gloucester Street, just south of the statehouse, planning to walk downhill to the harbor market for lunch, but when I get out of the car I feel that same unmistakable lurching sensation, my clothes chafing, my shoulders about to give way, as if I’ve carried two bags of bowling balls up a long flight of stairs. The gray hour. I associate it with a satchel full of unread journals and the taste of the cheap jasmine tea I carried with me everywhere in a jar. On the next block there is a sign for a bookstore-café, the Wickett Arms, with hand-chiseled letters on what appears to be a blackened shield. I cross through the front space, an ordinary-looking room, and enter the café through
an open grate in the rear. It’s a brick vault, a former prison, with chains dangling from the walls between the fair-trade posters and framed burlap sacks from Costa Rica and Ethiopia. From the teenage girl at the counter I order a double red-eye—having never been able to stand the syrupy texture of straight espresso—and wait for it in front of the pastry case, not trusting myself to sit down and get back up again. Then, waiting for it to cool, still wary of a comfortable chair, I wander back through the shelves, looking for the African American section, and take down a copy of
The Souls of Black Folk
.

I read Du Bois in high school, in AP American history, and then later on in a class at Amherst called “The Concept of an American Minority.” I’m remembering, now, something very particular: his description of his newborn son, who lived only a few days.

How beautiful he was, with his olive-tinted flesh and dark gold ringlets, his eyes of mingled blue and brown, his perfect little limbs, and the soft voluptuous roll which the blood of Africa had molded into his features! I held him in my arms, after we had sped far away to our Southern home—held him, and glanced at the hot red soil of Georgia and the breathless city of a hundred hills, and felt a vague unrest. Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?

No more evil omens, no more vague unrest.

The body you want, not the body you have.

I could write a brochure.

Fuck, I think. I
am
writing his brochure.

On the same note, who would I want to be? How far does it extend? Could I be, for example, Takeshi Kitano? I’ve always loved Takeshi Kitano. Something about the weariness in his eyes, and his utterly still face. Or, simply, better looking. Given the chance, I might choose to be handsomer. Better bone structure. A slightly larger penis. From what
point do I begin to empathize with Martin? Or does this stretch and distort the very idea of empathy, the powers of the imagination? I have no idea what it would be like to want to be a woman. In my life I’ve known two transsexuals: Donald Hathaway, who was two years below me at Amherst, and who became Dani my senior year, and Trish Holland, at WBUR, who called herself a boydyke, wore three-piece suits, and resembled a thinner Leonardo DiCaprio with dark hair. In neither case did I ever feel I had to
understand
them. There is a point where analogies end. Acceptance has to precede analogy. Acceptance is not equivalence.

Acceptance is not enough.

I sip the coffee, now in its proper state, just short of scalding, and with a rush of tingling energy, take out my pen and notebook—a reporter’s notebook, which I bought weeks ago and haven’t used at all, except to note the dates and lengths of our interviews—and write out a line from the
Tao Te Ching
:

Know the white,

Stay with the black,