Your Face in Mine (4 page)

Okay. Okay. Enough about the band.

What else? I ask. What else can I say? He went to my high school—Willow, the Willow School, a private,
progressive
school, whatever that meant, it was just as much of an anorexia factory as the rest of them—in name only. Never had much of a presence there. No clubs. No plays. Didn’t even really hang out with us in school much. Frankly, I don’t even know if he graduated, either.
Martin Lipkin
—who were his parents? Where was he from?
Blank, blank, blank.

A single memory: we dropped him off one night, after a late show, at a row house somewhere off Guilford, a neighborhood I’d never been to before. No one I knew lived that far south; and as I remember it, not just the one house but the whole block was dark, not a lit window anywhere. This your place? Alan asked. Yeah, Martin said, home sweet home, and we waited—polite, well-brought-up children that we were—till he’d used his key and disappeared inside.

How is it, I ask Wendy, that we can spend so much time with people, and know nothing about them? I mean, we were a serious band, for a high school band. We practiced twice a week, Fridays and Sundays. We played shows in Annapolis and D.C. and Harrisburg. It ought to be criminal, how casual we are with our friends, at that age.

You were young. You weren’t thinking for the long term. You don’t think, when you’re a teenager, that anyone ever goes away, do you? Every friend is a friend for life.

I roll to a stop at the corner of St. Paul and Cathedral, and look over at my reflection in a storefront window: an ordinary face, I guess you could say, relatively dark-featured, with a close-trimmed beard and thick eyebrows, the gift of my Portuguese great-grandparents. An unremarkable, unhandsome, inoffensive face. A white face. I should add that now. It would never have made the list before. There are so many parts of myself that I can change, that I have changed, but who spends much time assessing the givens? An unremarkable face of a man alone in his unremarkable car, who, if one observed closely, could be seen
talking to himself out loud—not to a speakerphone, not to a Bluetooth headset, to the air.

I shouldn’t have come, I say to Wendy. I should never have moved back here. It was a terrible mistake.

Did you have another choice?

I should have been driving.

Silence. I could snap my fingers and hear it echo: my mind, for a moment, a deserted room.

Aegeos, the restaurant Martin suggested, is in the prime spot—first floor, water side, nearest the Aquarium—in the Harborplace shopping complex where Phelps Seafood used to be. In truth, I haven’t been to Harborplace in so many years that I hardly remember what goes where. Locals, by and large, avoid it. Fundamentally it’s just a mall with expensive, inconvenient parking, unless you’re downtown for some better reason, like jury duty. But of course that’s not the reason: to go there is to be reminded, if you’re at least as old as I am, that at one time the city’s very existence seemed to depend on two long glass-and-brown-brick sheds filled with potted ferns, neon handwriting, and shiny baubles from The Limited, La Sweaterie, and The Nature Company. This was before crack, before AIDS, before the final Beth Steel shutdown, three recessions ago—as if Baltimore has ever come out of recession in my lifetime—and yet year after year the tourists spill across its tiled plazas in waves, buying
Don’t Bother Me, I’m Crabby
aprons and twelve-dollar salads, blueberry-flavored popcorn and ships in bottles, and their money, as far as I can tell, gets flushed into the oily water of the harbor, or rather onto the balance sheets of multinationals, leaving not a trace. Of course, now the Inner Harbor has metastasized: where there were once grain piers and hulking warehouses, from Fort McHenry to
Canton, you find gleaming condo high-rises, marinas, and office towers. But Harborplace itself hasn’t changed; in fact, it’s become a little tired, almost seedy. Half the interior shop spaces are walled off with paperboard murals:
New Shops & Entertainment Coming Soon!
To walk in here, I’m thinking, is to look at the future in a developer’s mind, circa 1978, and to watch the police cars circle the perimeter along Light and Eager Streets, in case Baltimore itself spills in.

Martin is sitting at a window table already—this is the kind of day I’m having—with a salmon-colored legal pad in front of him, looking out over the harbor, which today has a kind of low-wattage electric sheen, and talking into his BlackBerry as I sit down. Tell him that’s clever, he’s saying, and turns to me and mouths
sorry
—it’s clever as a negotiating tactic, but we don’t do things that way. You’re talking about a currency that lost thirty-five percent of its—yeah. Right. Sheila has the routing number. You don’t even have to call HSBC. Just take care of it and email me the confirmation. Got it. Okay. Later. You’re not late, he says to me, I’m early. And I apologize. I should have waited at the bar. It’s an unfair advantage, sitting down first.

Advantage for what?

He opens his arms wide, so that I can see, at either end of the wingspan of his taupe suit, an immaculate French cuff with an onyx period for a cuff link. You’re right, he says. You’re absolutely right. I just, you know, I think like a businessman. Instinctively. Like you think like a reporter.

I’m not a reporter.

For good?

Never was. There’s no money in it.

He snorts and rubs the corner of his eye with his pinkie, as if bothered by a contact lens or a sudden itch. You work in the nonprofit realm, he says. There’s no money in any of it, is there? Wouldn’t you like to jump ship to corporate, ultimately?

Corporate radio? I thought it was all run by computers now.

What about, say, MSNBC?

Why is it, I always want to ask, that strangers assume I’m just waiting for my chance to move to the big time, that promised media-land of fame, wall-to-wall exposure, the news zippers, the endless symphony of dings, bleeps, swooshes, texts, pings, updates, alerts? No one wants a job to keep anymore: I get that. We’re all free agents. But do I, in particular, look like I want to be on that treadmill, do I have that look of perpetual dissatisfaction, the hungry one, the up-and-comer? No. It’s become a default, I suppose, an assumption, the question that always has to follow
what do you do?

No, I say, look, I mean, public radio is different. It’s a mission. It’s about what you want out of your life, I guess you could say. Nobody does it for the money. Really it’s a kind of self-flattery, when you get right down to it. But whatever—I fell into it because I need a steady job. It beats pumping gas.

Or working for Fox News.

Right, I say, with a weak laugh. As if that were an option.

It occurs to me that this would be the place where I could clarify what it means to be on the programming side, the administrative side, of radio. But, on the other hand, I’m just enough of an operator not to. It’s an old habit, this self-promotion that dares not speak its name. That’s how you get into Amherst with an A average.

So what, you just wanted a promotion? That’s what this is about, moving back to Baltimore, taking this job?

His BlackBerry buzzes, conveniently, and he checks the screen before shutting it off. I find myself staring, for no good reason, at his ears: perfectly ordinary, like all ears, fascinatingly shell-shaped, overly detailed, a kind of virtuosic molding of cartilage with no obvious rationale. Why do we have earlobes, for example? To be tugged, tickled, pierced? I remember nothing about Martin’s ears other than they seemed a little too large for his head, and that he was always tucking his chin-length bangs behind them, especially on the right side. These are the same ears, presumably, only the color has changed.

He’s done it; it’s real. Here, in the soft mood lighting of an expensive restaurant, and the high, flat light of the sky over the water, in public, framed by two potted olive trees and a trellis of fake grapes, he is inarguable; there are no cracks, no fissures; he is unquestionably a black man. All at once I feel an intense, pressurized pain in my sinuses, my forehead, eye sockets, across the bridge of my nose: as if my own face has become inflatable and is about to lift off.

You okay? he asks. Hey. Kelly. Look at me. You need a Tylenol or something?

No. I’m all right. Already the pain is receding; I wet my napkin, rub it across my forehead, and it’s gone, just as fast as it came.

Thought you were having a panic attack there or something. He laughs, a deep, reverberating belly laugh. Heck, I
knew
you NPR people don’t like to talk money, but this is something else.

No, I say, really, it’s not about money at all, Martin. I came here because I needed to start over. So to speak. I needed something; this was what came up. I was grieving. That’s how it is. Sometimes you have to make quick decisions.

Was it a mistake, coming back to the old town? Too many memories, something like that?

I don’t remember nearly as much as I ought to.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

I feel bad that we never kept up, I say, trying to sound as loose, as conversational, as possible. It wasn’t right, to end things the way we did.

When was that?

When was that?
After Alan died, of course. After the funeral. What was that sushi place called, in Towson, the place we ate afterward?

He laughs, weakly, as if I’ve said something mildly funny, and then stretches out his chin and rotates his head ninety degrees in each direction, a calisthenic stretch, only his eyes are open, peering, checking out the room.

I’m sorry.

Don’t be sorry, he says. It’s not your problem, is it? Why shouldn’t you want to catch up?
But listen, here’s the thing: if you were me, who would you trust with this kind of information, with this particular secret? It’s not like I got one of those scanners and stole someone’s Social Security number off a phone call. The way real people do, the standard way. It’s not
criminal
. Lord, if it were that easy. Listen, Robin’s a good woman. You’ll meet her. But she’s got a family to protect now. She wouldn’t believe it if I told her today. She’d think I’d gone schizophrenic.

You have kids?

Adopted. Twins. Sherry and Tamika. They’ll be eight in December. What’s wrong? You look skeptical.

I mean, because, biologically—

I’m officially infertile. Unofficially, vasectomized. Those genes are staying put. But look, what I want to talk about right now is
you
.

What about me?

Well, why do you want to get into this mess? Why not just be a good public-radio guy, station director, whatever it is? If it’s not the money, then what?

You haven’t even told me what you want me to do.

It’s right in front of us staring us in the face, so to speak, right?
My
story. I need someone to tell it. To spring it on the world, the way it needs to be done.

What you need is a publicist.

Yeah, maybe, he says. Somewhere along the line. But first I need to have the whole thing worked out. I need a
narrative
. Not just for myself, you see. There are other people involved. Expose one part of the story and you expose it all.

You mean the surgery. The doctors, the hospital, the research—

Of course. And of course you must be curious. But honestly, it’s nothing that surprising. Mostly it’s been done before. Collagen, rhinoplasty, eyelid changes, voice box alterations. A lot of nipping and tucking. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to make a difference.

And the skin?

Drugs, he says. Dr. Silpa, my doctor, he’s got it all figured out. He did decades of research on this stuff. Synthetic melanin. Tailored precisely to the shade you want. It’s all proprietary; the patents are in. But look, that’s not what I’m talking about; that’s just
research
. The technical stuff you can write up in a few pages. What I’m talking about is the story, the emotional logic of the whole thing. That’s the crux of the matter. Why me? Why was I the pioneer? In a hundred years this’ll be as common as a nose job. But there always has to be a first one. Your job is to prove that I’m not out of my
mind
.
Ever heard of Christine Jorgensen?

No.

I’m not surprised. But ask your grandparents—anyone who was around in the Fifties—and they’ll know that name. Dimly. Jorgensen was the first person to have a sex change and write a book about it.
A Personal Autobiography.
I got a copy from eBay; it’s in my office. I’ll show it to you sometime. She was a huge celebrity. When she came back from Denmark—that’s where the surgery was—there were crowds at the airport. This was 1952. The tabloids were all over it. She appeared on talk shows. Sid Caesar made jokes about her. She made it a possibility; fifty years later, it’s just ordinary business. So I’m the Christine Jorgensen of the twenty-first century. That’s the business model. Only now, of course, we have to be global: everywhere at once. Americans are stuck on the idea of race, no question.
Here
we’re going to be facing some serious hysteria. At first. But the thing is, there are a hundred other ways to play this in a hundred other places.

Do you have someplace in particular in mind?

He waves a finger at me.

Not till you sign on, he says. Then you get the whole picture.

Sign on to do what? Produce a documentary? Write a book?

All of it. The whole package. I leave the specifics up to you. What I say is, if someone’s good at telling a story, the format doesn’t really matter. You work in radio, fine. Start with a tape recorder. That’s good.
People don’t notice so much. I mean,
eventually
I want to wind up on Diane Sawyer. But look, baby steps. You start by doing research. Two months of research, give or take. Here and in Bangkok. You’ll be compensated all along the way.
Then
we make a decision about how we’re going to blow this thing.

Bangkok, too?

Of course. That’s where it all happened! My womb. My chrysalis.

I have to think this through, I say. I mean, I’m
interested
.
Who wouldn’t be? And I’m your friend. I’m still your friend, right?

You wouldn’t be here otherwise, he says.

I mean,
I
wouldn’t hire me, necessarily. For this kind of thing. I’m not one of those people with a huge Rolodex.

Come on. You’re being modest.

I’d say I know people who know people. At the
Times
.
The Atlantic. Slate. Politico.
HarperCollins. Simon and Schuster. Are there any sure things in this world? No. Could I make it happen? I guess so.

That’s all I need. But my point is, it’s
you
. The security has to be absolute. I like to keep things intimate. You’re just in the right spot. Couldn’t have come along at a better time. I
know
you. Always did. You were always the solid one.

And I have a stake in this story, too.

Yeah, you do. Maybe more than you realize.

He stares at me, and I have the sense—it’s something around the eyes, the way the lids pull back—that’s he about to indicate something, to make a sign, but he doesn’t. Not in any way I can read. What falls into that hole, that chasm, between us? What other than Alan? So that’s what it is. And I almost want to blurt out, apropos of nearly nothing,
I’m broken, too.
I’d like to have those balls. But this is me we’re talking about, and this is the age of irony, of never making a statement you can’t serve up with a sardonic twist. Well, I say, we came from more or less the same place, right? So why you and not me? I mean, not
me
specifically. All of us.

All white people.

Yeah. I mean, out of all the white people on the planet, why would you be the one to go first, to figure this out? That’s kind of interesting, wouldn’t you say?

Kind of interesting.
This is the story of the fucking century.

Our salads arrive, enormous piles of cucumber, tomatoes, olives, dolmas, artichokes, feta, and he gazes at me silently for a moment, until the waitress pulls away.

The future is the future, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I look like? And the future is for those who get there first. I’m asking you to think, you know, entrepreneurially. I know that doesn’t come natural if you’re out of the private sector. But maybe this is your time, Kelly. This could be your moment. God doesn’t close a door without opening a window.

You go to church?

Druid Hill Park A.M.E., he says. What, you thought I was going to stay Jewish? Become one of the Black Hebrews, the thirteenth tribe? Come on, he says. Look at me, Kelly. I’m
black
. If you want to be along for this ride, you have to make your peace with it. Black and never going back. Listen to me, I sound like some kind of crazy missionary.