Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

Grief makes you temporarily invisible: a fugitive in your own place, in your own time. That’s not news. What frightened me, when I gained just enough traction to begin to think about it, was that I didn’t mind so much. In fact, it seemed like a confirmation of who I already was. Snuggled inside my nearly middle-aged soul, wombed inside my happy fatherhood, was a creature who would use the excuse of mourning just to buy time, until no one expected me to heal or move on . I thought, for a while, that I would make an excellent crank: bushy-bearded, in a torn T-shirt, getting by on disability or food stamps, walled into my apartment with books and manuscripts. I could teach myself Sanskrit and Tibetan and ancient Greek. I could rot on a bench in Harvard Square, part of a venerable tradition, mumbling fragments of Aristophanes.

Finally, obviously, I realized I had to leave. Cambridge was unbearable; my house was unbearable; and my job, which I had loved, the office of program development and planning, had turned into a pale tunnel of drawn faces and outreaching hands. I had become a kind of obelisk of grief, a freak of disaster, and for young women, especially — women I cared about, and mean no disrespect toward — there was something almost pornographic about the way they looked at me, something almost exuberant about all that horror and pity.

The recruiter — no more than a voice to me, Lois, a woman speaking from Boulder, who did this for a living, matching NPR and PRI stations and staff — said to me, this is a bit of an unusual one. It’s a fixer-upper. In fact, it’s in real trouble. WBCC, in Baltimore, have you heard of it? Probably not. It’s second-tier, community radio, independent license, free-form music during the day — kind of a turkey, if you ask me. They’ve got big money problems. But look, they need a PM now , and they’ll take you for sure, experience or no. Have you been? Baltimore’s a nice town. Super-cheap. Lots of character. Forty-five minutes from D.C.—

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

• • •

Two 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.