Ben Greenman - What He's Poised to Do - Stories

You set your mouth in a straight line and sat down on the steps. “Rennie,” you said. “I won’t have you mocking Africa. It’s where we all come from. The Harlem that you see around you wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t been loaded into boats against our will. You’re a light-skinned man, but you can’t pass for white, so don’t go thinking you can turn an eye on the place you came from.” It was the first time I noticed that you got more beautiful when you got mad.

“Actually,” I said, “I know for a fact that my ancestor wanted to come. He tied himself up and hopped into the boat. He got a little sick of baobab stew and thought he might prefer some soul music and American movies.”

I thought you’d scoff at me, or at best laugh the way girls always laughed, their eyes bright but their body leaning back. Instead, you leaned forward so I could better see the twinkle in your eyes “Not funny,” you said. “That’s a historical tragedy and you’re getting A-list material from it. If you call that A-list. Please don’t make these jokes around me anymore.”

I put a hangdog expression on, though my heart was leaping. “I’ll make a note of that,” I said, “and put it in my purse.”

Here I was sure you’d finally lean back, but you jumped off the steps and threw your arms around my neck. “You heard me,” you said. “No more jokes.” Then you kissed me on the side of the face, but it was like you were kissing my lips. A girl went by behind you on roller skates. A leaf fell off a tree. There were so many other details that I’ll never recover, little things I wish I could have noticed. Instead, I was in the grasp of something broader, thicker, and darker. So were you: that is a joke but it is after the fact.

That took us back more than twelve days. Sorry. You try keeping your mind from the memory of our first kiss. Let me reset the time machine. Twelve days ago, on Saturday, we were having coffee and toast in my apartment, where you had been living since late spring. “Like a real couple,” I said. This was my move: to state the thing that truly amazed me, with a bend in my tone to make it seem like I was taking it all in stride. In my mind, I called it the Twistback. I was reading the newspaper; you were looking out the window. That’s how breakfasts went. I always brought a book or a paper. You liked to start the day making sense of the world with your eyes. Between us, we had it all covered. Near the bottom of the front page, there was an article about Malawi, newly independent from Britain. “Isn’t that strange?” I said. “That a country can be newborn after it’s been around a while?”

You tracked a bird across the window, left to right, before you answered. “It didn’t used to be called Malawi,” you said. “What was it again? Hyasaland? Something like that?”

“Nyasaland,” I said. “If it was high-ass-a-land, they would have elected you president.” I paused. “On account of the ass you have on you,” I said.

You ignored me, which was a form of accepting the compliment. “I’m all for independence,” you said. “The only problem is that sometimes when these states go that way, they end up like children who need a parent, and the parent is some dictator-for-life who never treats the people like they’re people.” You crunched your toast between your teeth.

“How a twenty-four-year-old black girl who’s never been out of New York City knows so much about the world never ceases to amaze me,” I said. Again, the Twistback.

“Well, I always paid attention to where I came from,” you said. “While you were busy studying the human comedy, I was trying to figure out human drama.”

“You’re the sad mask; I’m the happy mask,” I said. “Takes both of us to put on a play.”

“I don’t have time to put on a play,” you said. You were studying to be a lawyer, and the fact that you seemed unencumbered in the morning was only the shadow of the way you were at night: walled in by textbooks and mimeographed papers, ballpoint pen in your mouth, glasses pushed high on your head. Many times I’d go to bed by myself, and you’d show up hours later, slipping silently between the sheets. I wasn’t asleep, but I didn’t let on, and you didn’t go to sleep either, but rather stayed up repeating names to yourself: names of cases, names of judges, names of laws. That exercise filled your mind with answers, but overnight the answers turned into more questions, which you liked to ask me in the morning. That morning the questions were about belief, or at least they started that way. You asked me if I could believe that there was a time in our country’s history when there were no penalties for obstructing minority access to a polling place.

“Black people can vote?” I said. “Heavens to Betsy. No one told me.”

“I just get tired of this sometimes,” you said.

I felt a chill race down my spine. “This?” I said, waving my arm around the kitchen like a TV pitchman. “But it has everything.”

“Not this,” you said. “This, America, now. We’re all working to make it better, except for the ones who are working to make it worse. But it all goes so slow.” You looked out the window for the bird, another form of progress. You crunched your toast again. “Have you ever thought of visiting Africa?” you said.

“Why?” I said. “I like wearing pants. That way, I can take them off when I want to get with you.”

“Be straight for a minute,” you said. “It’s where you came from, the place that created both your problems and your promise. Aren’t you curious? You really should go.”

“You go.”

“I’m broke as a joke.”

“I have money, but do you really want me to crack open my Diamond Ring Fund?”

Usually this got you to stop: it was marriage talk, which sent you off into a speech about how you didn’t believe in marriage, that it was only a ceremony to verify a love that, if truly felt, didn’t need a ceremony for verification, that you were wary of entering an arrangement that made you formally dependent upon another human being, let alone an abstract idea that shared more with slavery than with salvation. This was the only time you seemed as though you were joking, and it was when you were at your most serious. You had been doing it as long as I had known you; Larry used to say you were a secular preacher with the whole world as your congregation. “I’m just saying that even a pea-brained rising radio star might want to reconnect with his own identity now and again.”

“Not guilty as charged,” I said. It’s true that I worked at a radio station, that I played a little music, made a few jokes on the air, pocketed a bit of dough. It advanced my reputation to some small degree, or, I like to say, at least cemented my reputation as a man who can only be advanced by small degrees. But I was secretly proud of what I did. I leavened moments in people’s days that were otherwise leaden. I offered a balm for the spirit. I encouraged people toward the divine without resorting to anything godly. “But if I see a pea-brain, I’ll let him know,” I said. I got up to put my plate in the sink, and I took yours, too, and you said, “Thank you,” and whatever little bit of tension was rising in the room dissipated. We went to the couch and listened to records and you let me kiss your neck a little bit. “I’m just saying,” I said, “I’m happy here in America. I know there are problems. There’s always going to be problems. I know we were kept down, and we’re rising up too slowly. But I also know other things. Do you hear what we’re hearing? Is there another place you can listen to Marvin Gaye and then the Beatles and then Chuck Berry and then Mary Wells and feel like you really know what they all mean? I love being here in this place and I love being here in this place with you.”