Your Face in Mine (3 page)

—No, no, I said, I’m from there. No need to explain.

•   •   •

T
wo days after the funeral, Wendy’s father called me from Wudeng, using the new cell phone she’d bought for him online a few weeks before. There was no way for them to come; they’d held their own funeral and put up tablets in the family tomb, with a local Taoist priest officiating. Afterward, he said, someone had asked him if it was appropriate to enter Meimei’s name in the family record, given that her father was a
laowai
, that she wasn’t fully Chinese. I would have hit him, he said, only your mother-in-law stopped me. I told him, you will not slander the name of my only grandchild.

I held the line for a full minute, listening to him gasping for breath on the other end.

You should come back to Wudeng, he said; you should teach here again. There are always jobs, you know. You could translate. There’s the new Honda factory over in Xiling, I’m sure they could use you for something. Native English speakers are worth more than gold now, he said, repeating a constant cliché in the news. Live with us, in your old apartment.

And how could I come back to Wudeng without Wendy? I asked him. How would it look?

You’re still our family, he said. You’re all the family we have now. American, Chinese, I don’t care anymore. I used to hate you for taking Wendy away. Now none of that matters. You still have a duty to us. Not money. I don’t care about money. We
need
someone.

I can’t, I said. I can’t.

Not now. Maybe sometime, he said. The offer is open. You understand? As long as we’re alive, the offer is open.

Mort Kepler is already sitting in my office when I arrive, fifteen minutes early. He’s given up raking the sand in my miniature Zen garden, and now sits back, one hiking boot propped on the radiator, flipping through the latest issue of
Station Manager
with the tiny bamboo rake still held delicately between two chubby fingers like a cigarette. Sorry, he says, thumping his foot back on the floor. I had the insomnia again last night. Winona kicked me out of bed at five-thirty, and Starbucks wasn’t open. So I came to work. Isn’t that sad?

Something I can do for you?

Oh, he says, I want to talk about a twenty percent raise and two more PAs for
Baltimore Voices
. That okay with you? Just kidding. Don’t look so serious, I’m breaking your balls again. But we should talk about how we’re going to present this to the board.

The most regrettable thing about Mort Kepler is that he’s a legend mostly—but not entirely—in his own mind. He spent the late Sixties and much of the Seventies as a
Sun
reporter covering civil rights and the peace movement, and published a collection of pieces,
Notes from the American Front
, that created a bit of a stir in 1981. Later, in the Eighties, he moved to the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation in South Dakota and taught high school English, took up an affair with a seventeen-year-old,
Winona, and somehow arranged for her to land a full scholarship at Goucher College, landing them back in Baltimore before the scandal broke. Not long after that he began his career as a public radio host, first on a small Delaware station and now here, where he’s become a local institution, on a very small scale. His lunchtime call-in show takes all comers—the Nation of Islam, Pentecostal Israelophiles, 9/11 Truthers, lesbian separatists, Christian vegans. Last year the station spent nearly $10,000 on FCC fines, all of them for
Baltimore Voices
; our PAs can’t always tell who might begin screaming obscenities the moment they go on the air.
Never mind, Mort told me, in my first meeting with him, it’s all part of the struggle, the never-ending struggle.

I was born in 1974, on the day Nixon left office. He tells this to visitors, sometimes, with a bark of bright anger and amusement. Kids, he says, the world is overrun with kids. We might as well just pack it in.

Mort, I say, I’m sorry, I’m a little foggy this morning. Present
what
to the board?

You didn’t get my email last night? Shit! He smacks his forehead theatrically. I’ll bet I sent it to the wrong address. I got a bad habit of forgetting the last dot, you know, dot E-D-U? He rummages in his bag and produces a rumpled document, four or five pages, single-spaced. The Outreach Committee’s new plan, he says. There are some brilliant ideas in there. We want to start a whole new revamped internship program. That actually brings some interns in the
door
this time.

Good, I say, so I’ll look at this, and can we meet tomorrow? Same time? Bright and early?

Okay. Tomorrow’s okay. But the only problem is, the board meeting’s Thursday. That doesn’t give us much time to prepare.

Right, I say, but I have to
read
this, Mort, and make sure I can sign off on it, and then Barbara has to look at the numbers and put them in the budget proposal—

You sure? I mean, we’re talking three cents on the overall dollar. The PD’s approval has always been pretty pro forma.

Well, I say, look, Mort, I just got here. And if I start doing things pro forma without looking at them first, nobody’s going to be very happy.

You mean the board won’t be.

Well, them. Them and others.

Sometimes in the middle of conversations like this I have a sense of my body tilting upward, till it’s parallel with the ground, and I’m looking down at my own office, like a dream swimmer. I hear a certain throbbing in my eardrums, and I see the serious look on the face of the person across from me—because when people come into my office they’re always serious, always wanting something, and yet having to pretend that it’s for the good of the station, the public interest, the city, the earth. The cringing, the apologies, the hand wringing, all for a few hundred dollars to attend a conference at a community college in Atlanta! And then I want to burst out laughing. I want to pop open a mini-fridge and hand out cans of Coors Light. We’re choking on our own piety in this business, and yet here I am, parish priest of this tiny church of public radio, waving my hands and dispensing indulgences.

Kelly, Mort says, is it all right if I cut the bullshit for a moment?

Please.

I just want to give you a little feedback on how things are going. Now that it’s been a month. I—we—look, we’re concerned about the level of inclusivity. We feel, some people feel, that you’re not taking the committee structure seriously.

Would you like me to respond honestly? I ask. He nods. Mort, I say, I don’t. I can’t. And then I do something I’ve promised myself not to do, in fact to avoid at any cost: I open my top drawer, the locked drawer, and take out a green folder, an as-now-empty folder with the words
Station Audit
in the little plastic window.

Last month we received our disaffiliation papers from NPR. As of December first, they’re cutting us off. Chronic nonpayment or late payment of annual fees. Decline in listenership across the brackets. Weakness in local programming. That’s what they said. It’s all itemized. We’re
going to have an all-staff meeting next week and I’ll give the full presentation.

He’s been following me, squinting, mouthing the words.

I knew it, he says. You’re one of those fucking turnaround artists. You’re Neutron Jack. Look, am I fired? Just tell me now.

Of course you’re not fired. You’re promoted.

To what?

Director of outreach.

No more committees?
None
of them?

Network policy is that we have to have a standard governance structure.

Do you have any idea what you’re doing? he says. You’re
from
here, right? Didn’t you ever listen to BCC at all, as a
person
?

I listened to my own music. I was just a kid. Never turned on the radio.

Yeah, he says, addressing the ceiling, that’s just like them. Bring in a PD who’s never turned on the radio.

He looks at me with pure, piggish hatred, and I have the words right on my tongue, prepared, a whole speech:
Make me the scapegoat, make me the bad guy. Shoot the messenger. Just do the right thing and decide to keep your station, all right?
I’ve been practicing in the shower, behind the wheel, for weeks, ever since I received my copy of the report. No station should be allowed to die, not even the little ones, the redundant ones, with two hours of bluegrass during the afternoon rush before the news comes on. It’s a community station; it’s the principle of the thing; it’s a public resource, never mind if point-five percent of the public is ever listening. It’s salvageable. There are good people here. I look through my partition window at Barbara, her silver hair wound up in a long nested braid: a maniacally effective accountant, a chain smoker, a lover of Mel Tormé and Bobby Darin. I look back at Mort, and the words turn to sawdust in my mouth.

We’ll talk more later, I say. Take a deep breath.

What, he says, turning around in the doorway, so that Barbara and half the office can hear, is BCC too big to fail?

—

The Baltimore I know runs on a north-south axis along three parallel streets, Charles, Calvert, and St. Paul. Beginning at the city line, the anonymous ranch-house suburbs of Towson give way to the ring of neighborhoods where I lived out my adolescence: Mount Washington, Roland Park, Homeland. There is the bizarre Art Deco cathedral of Mary Our Queen and the Masons’ Boumi Temple and the enormous empty St. Mary’s Seminary, and then farther down the anonymous, faceless stone and brick mansions of Guilford, then the Johns Hopkins main campus, cut off from the streets by a forested median on St. Paul Street and the lacrosse stadium on University Parkway. Until this point the city is really not a city so much as an agglomeration of villages, leafy, prosperous-seeming, and carefully composed. At 33rd Street, which leads east only a few blocks to Memorial Stadium, Baltimore proper begins, first as a long corridor of row houses broken by large avenues, then the canyon formed by Interstate 83 as it cuts southeast just below Penn Station; below that, Mount Royal, clustered around the Washington memorial obelisk, and finally the gleaming steel-and-glass bank buildings just before the Inner Harbor and its shopping arcades and Camden Yards, the new baseball stadium, which to me still looks like an architect’s drawing or a hologram.

I moved here when I was twelve and left for college at eighteen, and when college was over there was China, and Wendy, and then graduate school, and Meimei, and WBUR, and in the space of fifteen years I came back only five or six times, each time only when I couldn’t possibly avoid it. I did everything I could not to come home for longer than a week; and then finally—just before I married Wendy—my parents retired and moved to New Paltz, and I thought, briefly, that I would never have to see the city again.

Not because I hated Baltimore, not at all, but because, as one of my friends put it, it was a place to be
from
, not a place to belong
to
. When I arrived at Amherst I realized within five minutes that it was pointless to try to explain to a girl from Rye, New Hampshire, what it meant to go to an illegal warehouse show on North Avenue, or why it mattered that my sweater came from Don’s Discount in Fell’s Point, or why I had a collection of Polish saint cards taped to my wall, since I wasn’t even Catholic. I felt, for the first time, provincial. Everyone had a hometown, a story, a past, and it could matter if you wanted it to—if, for example, you lived at 88th and Park Avenue, and your father was the director of the Guggenheim—or not, and I chose, as nearly all of us chose, not. I wanted to be denatured, detached, to luxuriate in my cocoon and emerge an utterly different butterfly. Everyone I knew from home had done the same. To be fair, we weren’t exactly locals, to begin with: mostly our parents were academics, teachers, lawyers, scientists, who’d made a life here more or less arbitrarily; whose concerns were global, and who viewed Baltimore and its problems with generic concern, not civic pride. When I saw my friends at Thanksgivings and Christmases it was as if years, not months, had passed, and we stayed mostly in one another’s houses, as if the city might not want to take us back.

By then I’d lost touch with Martin completely. I last saw him, I’m remembering now, on February 12, 1993, the day of Alan’s funeral, and that was the first time in months—the band had broken up, and he had all but disappeared, barely even coming to school. I assumed that his life had gone on, as all of our lives did; I assumed he’d disappeared into this new and large and atomized world. It never occurred to me that he might have stayed in Baltimore.

—

I met somebody, I tell Wendy, in the car, on Charles Street, coasting through one green light after another. An old friend.

How old?

High school. He’s changed, though. I wouldn’t have recognized him.

That always happens.

No, I’m about to say, you don’t understand, but I stop myself.

Anyway, what was he like back in the old days?

That’s the problem. I don’t really remember.

What do you mean, you don’t
remember
?

I mean he wasn’t that memorable, honestly. I mean, individually. We were in a band together, we played music together. And we hung out. But everyone hung out.

Hung out,
she says. I’ve always hated that expression. It reminds me of laundry.

It’s a bad habit, probably, talking to your dead wife, but I do it without thinking, as unconsciously as talking to myself. And perhaps it really is just talking to myself. The Wendy of my imagination is more voluble than the real Wendy ever was, more inclined to keep the conversation going. But she
is
still there. It sounds absurd, but there is another voice, another presence; it answers me, I don’t tell it what to say. You could call it my unconscious, but if that’s the case, my unconscious is much more capacious than I ever thought it could be. And it speaks better Chinese.

It couldn’t possibly have been the way I remember, I’ve been telling myself. Martin couldn’t really have had surgery. Changed his hair, put on makeup, had his skin dyed, maybe. It ends there. The rest was an illusion, drag, a fetishistic thing, maybe. Online I searched for
racial reassignment
and found articles on passing, on Michael Jackson, on Jewish nose jobs, on eyelid surgery in Korea—more or less what one would expect. It doesn’t exist. It isn’t something people do. There would be an outcry; there would be public discussion. Like cloning, like stem cell research: the technology couldn’t just develop out of nowhere. You can’t develop a new category of human beings without anyone noticing. Martin, I want to say, is a little unhinged, maybe. Mildly delusional. Or living in some alternate universe, aesthetically, intellectually. It’s a great
question mark, and that’s why I’m going downtown, now, to have lunch with a question mark. This is the story I tell myself.

Tell me about him, Wendy says. Just open your mouth and talk. Maybe that’ll help.

He was just this guy I knew. He was tall, rail-thin, absurdly thin, super-pale, not a great complexion. Always wore T-shirts that hung off his frame awkwardly, and he walked with a bit of a stoop. I remember that. Baggy black jeans, Doc Martens, a bicycle-chain bracelet on his right wrist. We always complained that it hit the bass strings when he played, but he said he liked the effect, it was, like,
industrial
. You don’t know what that means, do you? You don’t know what any of this means.

Don’t worry about me. Just talk.

We were called L’Arc-en-Ciel. The French word for rainbow. Didn’t I ever tell you this before? It sounded kind of badass if you didn’t know what it meant, at least that was the theory. We never recorded anything—anything that made it to vinyl or a CD, anyway. And then a Japanese band came along and stole the name. So there’s no trace of us anymore. It was Alan’s thing, really, mostly his idea, and he wrote the songs, which were sort of like Jesus Lizard crossed with Devo. Lots of big thumping guitars and high, piercing keyboards. When we played people stood fifteen or twenty feet back and frequently covered their ears, which we took as a compliment. Martin auditioned with “Blitzkrieg Bop,” then a Primus song, and then something by Steely Dan, to show he could really play. He was good. You know how hard it is to find a good bass player? It was me on the drums, Martin on bass, Alan on guitars and keyboards and vocals and everything else.
His
band, though it wasn’t as if anyone played any solos. We thought nothing was worse than the Grateful Dead—the endless noodling, the blissed-out girls spinning in circles. Alan said, we want to sound like a heart attack. We want to sound like a 3-D nightmare.