Jess Row - Your Face in Mine

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.

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.