Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

I know it’s silly. I know it’s a cliché. But I’m not afraid. I’m not deceived. No one would tell this story for me. Listen: when I was in Burlington, this was in the spring of 1998, April, May, I was there for a month, and it seemed like every house I went to, every car I hitched a ride in, this song was on the stereo. Okay. Big whoop. Crunchy granola folks like Bob Marley. But everywhere, and the same song. That bass line was in the air; it carried me. Days and nights blurred together. I was carrying around fifteen thousand dollars in a little Mountain Gear backpack. Bricks of dirty twenties. Seymour had made up with his girlfriend, bought a new house with her, and he kept saying, look, let me show you what it’s like here, you’ll never want to be anyplace else.

It was pretty great. No matter how high you are in Vermont, and I was high, you feel as if you’re just getting healthier every day by breathing the air. It’s like air conditioning for the soul. Anywhere you walk in Burlington you can see these amazing mountains, Mount Mansfield, the Green Mountains, and then there’s the lake right at the edge of the city, and everything just feels washed clean and new. I suppose it reminded me a little of what Big Love was like, back in the day. Wouldn’t want to live in Vermont, god knows, but it’s about the best place in the world to recharge. And Seymour had this amazing house, a modern place, all wood on the outside, huge windows, beautiful trees all around, cedars and hemlocks, with a sauna and a hot tub on the back patio. His girlfriend — I think her name was Amy — was this incredibly beautiful half-Japanese, half-Mexican girl, still in college, who was some kind of professional vegetarian chef and also a harpist. She would make us these incredible meals, huge salads, fresh soups, sushi, cold noodles, homemade tofu, and then go off into her studio over the garage and play the harp all day. It was the first time I’d ever really tasted food in my life. Seymour took me downtown and bought me all new clothes — lots of linens, and a couple of really beautiful suits, from this tailor he knew, a Czech refugee named Jaroslav.

You know what I’m trying to show you? he said. It’s very simple. You want to know how I hide my money? I don’t. Nobody bothers rich people in this world. Yes, there’s some basic mechanics involved. You’ve got to get that dirty cash into bank accounts. I mean you. Starting now. We’ve got to work on that. But the most important thing is, you’ve got to live like you’ve got nothing to hide. No fear. And for god’s sake, live like a grown-up. Don’t know what couches to buy? Get a decorator. Better yet, marry a decorator. Don’t know what suit to wear to a summer wedding? Go into Bloomingdale’s and ask. You’ll put it together soon enough. That’s your work from now on. Worried about getting a life? Forget that. Get a lifestyle.

I was listening, but at the same time I wasn’t really listening. You could say I was storing it up for later. His life wasn’t my life. I was still an egg. Still cracking. The chrysalis. It was all coming together, but I couldn’t see what it was. I was just walking around with a gigantic rock in my gut. Seymour knew it, too, and he kept saying it was a matter of changing the formula. He had a whole room full of bud, in glass jars, all labeled, sources and dates — his apothecary — and his philosophy was that there was a blend for every psychic condition. That was what he was working on: weed psychiatry. First he had me on “Questioning,” then “Anxiety Detox,” then “Clarification.” I smoked it, I used his atomizer, ate it in brownies, ate it ground up and sprinkled on rice; I got high in the sauna, in the hot tub, in the woods, sitting in his massage chair — I was his guinea pig, in other words, and it wasn’t working. What happened instead, not surprisingly, is I started to forget things. Whole conversations, whole days. Names of people I hadn’t thought about in months. I thought I had early-onset Alzheimer’s or something. And then I came to my senses and I knew I had to leave.

In the end it was very simple: I packed up and took a taxi in the middle of the morning, when everyone was asleep. That was the last I ever saw of Seymour. I went and knocked on this girl’s door. Carolina. We’d met at a party; she’d made it clear that she’d give me the time of day whenever I asked for it.

Come in, she said, I was just about to do some peyote. Want to come?

Three days later I woke up in a field, soaking wet. It was just before dawn. Half in, half out of my sleeping bag, my hands spread out on the grass, drenched in dew, smelling of clover. My backpack was gone. My money was gone. I knew that immediately. Seymour was gone. And this is what it was: we know where we’re going, we know where we’re from. We live in Babylon, we’re going to our fatherland.

I picked up my arms, I swear to god, I looked at my hands, in the dawn light, you know, the blue light turning to daylight, and I saw myself getting darker, saw my skin turning brown, all but the palms of the hands, and I knew, I knew, swear to fucking god, that I was emerging, all wet, as what I was always meant to be. I had no fear. I stood up and started walking. I went back to Baltimore; I got my savings out from all the places I’d stored it, the rafters, the basement, safe-deposit boxes, dummy accounts. I did what Seymour told me to do. Found the right lawyer. Put on a golf shirt and flew down to the Caymans with a big fat cashier’s check. And then when I got back to Baltimore I opened the Yellow Pages, and looked up plastic surgery.

Six weeks ago, when we met the first time, when I handed her the tacky laser-printed business card I’d just made— Kelly Thorndike, Freelance Journalist —Robin made a quick notation on her phone and said, I get an interview, too, right? Want to set one up? My schedule’s pretty full.

Mine’s not, I said. Send me a time.

Done, she said, and the next day her assistant emailed me a date at the beginning of May. Lunch 12:45-1:50. I wrote it down on a Post-it and stuck it on the window next to my desk, and nearly every day for weeks I wanted to call her and suggest another time, tell her I’m traveling, that my deadline was moved up — to find a polite and neutral way to cancel. I am not a practiced liar. I am not an actor. With Martin there as my alibi the whole enterprise makes sense; without him Robin and I will just be two people, two adults, out for lunch, in the ordinary everyday world. Two adults with some business to discuss, some matter at hand, but not without a mild frisson of companionable attraction, a little lighthearted flirtation. Nothing is more terrifying for a conspirator, I’m realizing, than the temptation to relax.

Let me put it another way.

Part of getting past the first stages of grieving, my therapist told me, is learning to surprise yourself again. In a traumatic event, your senses shut down. Taste, smell, temperature — you forget to wear a hat when it’s five below. Bite into a piece of sushi and it’s like eating a sponge. Then, gradually, it all comes back, but it’s different. There’s a reset button. Like pregnancy. Or chemotherapy. Ever seen someone whose hair has all grown back a different color?

I’ve never in my life been attracted to a black woman. Not at all. Not ever. You could call it simple socialization: that in those defining years, thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, the bodies I saw, the faces I saw, were white girls, skinny white girls, by any historical standard — the standard being somewhere between Molly Ringwald and Kate Moss. Girls whose breasts disappeared in the palm of your hand, whose hips, whose asses, described a gentle curve, a suggestion of something, you could say, more than the thing itself.