New People Page 4

  The place carries mostly white rock but she finds a small section labeled R&B and Rap. It includes the music she listened to in high school. Kool and the Gang. Doug E. Fresh. LL Cool J. Her heart beats faster at the sight of Whitney Houston’s first album—there she is, teen beauty queen with her hair slicked back, in a bathing suit, her lips shimmering. She stares at Whitney Houston for a long time. It seems to her she has always only ever wanted to look like Whitney Houston. She already owns this album, Whitney. She owns all of Whitney’s albums. They are in a box somewhere.

  She keeps flipping through the records until she comes upon an album by Stacy Lattisaw—With You. The singer looks about twelve on the cover, kind of dumpy and pale, not even close to Whitney Houston, but Maria remembers liking the song “Love on a Two-Way Street.” She buys it and leaves the shop with her purchase and walks around the neighborhood hoping to bump into the poet. She walks for an hour and buys a hot dog. She sits on a bench in Washington Square Park taking bites of the hot dog and watching a group of homeless men.

  One of the homeless men is leaning over, sifting through a backpack, searching for something. Another homeless man, smirking, tiptoes up behind him and kicks him as hard as he can right in the ass. The man flies forward and lands on his face. The one who kicked him begins to laugh, slapping his thigh, striding around, pointing and jeering. The one who fell gets up and begins to stomp and cry and rage like an angry child. The other keeps laughing, wiping joyous tears off his face, rocking back and forth holding his middle. The one who got kicked begins to chase him, shaking his fist, shouting violent obscenities. Maria chews her hot dog and watches. She hates the man who kicked the other one and hopes he gets hit by a car, but he only runs out of the park and disappears into the city. The other one stands at the gate staring out for a while but then just sits down on a bench and puts his face in his hands. She can’t tell if he’s crying or laughing. She cannot tell if they are friends or enemies. If it was a prank or an assault.

  The worst prank she ever pulled was in college. Claudette was still her best friend, and it was their senior year. They liked to talk in British accents to each other. Claudette, so she hears, is living in England now, Brixton, maybe speaking like that full-time. At the time Maria had recently taken up with Khalil after he’d dumped his white girlfriend. Maria liked to joke that she was his transitional object. He was morphing into a race man before her very eyes. He had begun selling X T-shirts out of his dorm room. He’d become a columnist for the newspaper, their token black voice—though, as Claudette pointed out, he’d only known he was black for about ten minutes.

  That week he’d published a column about embracing his black identity. He wrote that he’d grown up in a liberal, humanist, multiracial family, oblivious to his own blackness. He wrote that this kind of color-blind humanism had not prepared him adequately for the racism of the world. That he’d been robbed of his identity as a black man. He’d sold his birthright for that famed mess of pottage. Now, he wrote, he was claiming it. He was taking a long, probably permanent, break from whiteness. He didn’t want to be a token, the some-of-my-best-friends-are-black kid, the cool black guy at the frat party. He said it had become exhausting, soul-wearying. He was no longer at war within his own beige body.

  His column read like a manifesto, a stern rejection of all things muddy and mulatto.

  He published it on a Thursday.

  Saturday night, still high on born-again negritude, he went out to an Alpha Phi Alpha party with a group of friends. Maria stayed back at Ujamaa with Claudette. They smoked some reefer.

  The joke was Claudette’s idea. She said, Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s make Khalil feel even blacker. Let’s make him feel like the blackest man in the world.

  Maria dialed his number and when his answering machine beeped she said in her best impression of a white boy: I read your fucking column, Khalil. Screw you, man. I’m sick of your bullshit. Me and the brothers, we’re coming for you. We’re gonna string you up by a dreadlock, man, and light you on fire.

  She hung up, laughing. Claudette was rolling around in hysterics, marijuana-laced tears streaming down her face.

  Their high wore off. Claudette grew sullen, quiet, seated on the bed, her now dull eyes fixed on a spot on the rug. Maria sat on the floor, cross-legged, eating a whole family-sized bag of Cheetos by herself. She felt sick. Claudette looked at her and told her to wash her face. Maria went to the mirror and saw that it too was covered in orange dust. Claudette said she was going home to sleep it off. They said goodnight.

  Maria waited up for Khalil. She fell asleep at some point and woke up in the middle of the night. Khalil wasn’t beside her the way he usually was. It was three in the morning. She went to check for him in his room on the second floor.

  Halfway down the hall, she heard her own voice booming out of his open door. It was the message she’d left for him earlier, to amuse Claudette. She slowed her pace as she listened to her impression of a white man: We’re gonna string you up by a fucking dreadlock, man, and light you on fire. Nigger boy.

  Had she really said nigger boy? She didn’t remember saying that, but she’d been stoned out of her mind. Chuckling a little, she started toward his room, but stopped at the edge of the door. Inside sat the entire leadership of the Black Student Union: the president, the treasurer, and six other members. It was three in the morning and they were all crowded into Khalil’s single, huddled around his answering machine in solemn silence, listening to her message.

  Oh fuck, Maria whispered. She looked down the hallway and was about to take off when Khalil spotted her.

  Hi, babe, he said.

  He rose and made his way through the crowd of bodies toward her, a strange expression on his face—half smile, half grimace. Did he hate her? Did they all despise her now? Would they take away her black card?

  Khalil hugged her long and hard.

  Hey, Maria, a girl seated on the bed said. What’s up, girl. I guess you haven’t heard about what happened. It’s bad.

  A boy beside her elaborated. Khalil got a message. Have you heard it?

  Maria swallowed, shook her head, and stepped inside the room.

  We think it was Sigma Nu, somebody said.

  A girl named Cheryl, the president of the BSU, shook her head. The fucked-up thing is it was probably somebody who you sit next to in class every day. I mean, that’s the part I cannot get around. This is our community too, guys. This is where we have to live.

  Khalil looked at Maria. We’re preparing a statement for the newspaper. You can help us out.

  She sat down beside Cheryl. Okay, sure. I can help.

  Later, after they’d finished preparing the statement for the student newspaper—after they’d finished speaking to the police—after they’d somehow gotten a direct line to the university president’s home—after they woke the university president from his sleep and told him about the incident and after they played the recording of the voice message into his receiver at top volume—after they asked him, point-blank, if he was going to respond swiftly and decisively, or if he was going to go back to sleep in his bed of white privilege—after the president assured them that no, he was not going back to sleep, he was never going back to sleep, he was pulling on his pants right now—after the president assured them he was not part of the problem, he was on the right side of history, and that as soon as they let him off the phone, he was going to call his staff for an emergency meeting and get to the bottom of this nightmare—after the members of the BSU had trudged back to their own dormitory beds—after the sun had risen over the campus—Maria lay beside Khalil in his bed and let him make slow, solemn, revolutionary love to her.

  As they lay side by side in postcoital stillness, she stared at Khalil’s face. His jokey features held more gravitas somehow. There was a somber down-pull to his lips. He seemed to have turned, overnight, from boy to man.

  He sat up besi
de her and scooted across the bed to the answering machine. He pressed play. Maria lay in a fetal position on the bed listening to her own deepened voice bellowing hatred and sick racial violence into the recently sexed air of the dorm room. She could just make out Claudette’s high-pitched laughter in the background.

  Earlier, a guy named Ralph, the treasurer of the BSU, had called attention to that background laughter.

  Ralph said it sounded just like the laughter of a white boy named Billy from his early-morning statistics class.

  When the message ended, Khalil turned to look at her. He wore an unfamiliar smile. Maria Janie Pierce, he said. Maria Janie Pierce.

  He reached out, pulled her up and toward him, and stared into her eyes.

  He knows, Maria thought. He’s going to say he knows.

  But instead he said: I want to marry you someday. I want to marry you and live with you in Brooklyn. I want us to have a tribe of children and a brownstone and a big hairy dog named Thurgood. He laughed, then continued. I want to give you a big life. I want us to be that couple. I want us to have it all, even that mess of pottage.

  Maria felt uneasy. She swallowed. Asked him, What exactly is a mess of pottage?

  He touched her cheek. Hey, I’m being serious. You don’t have to fight this life. You don’t have to fight being happy. Don’t you want a big life?

  Of course, she said. Of course.

  They embraced.

  In a small voice she told him that she loved him, and that yes, she wanted all of that too—that big life he’d described, the tribe of children, the brownstone in Brooklyn, the giant dog named Thurgood. She said she would learn how to make a mess of pottage—she would learn how to knit, even purl, whatever that was. Why not? She squeezed him tight, her eyes fixed on the now silent but winking answering machine in the corner.

  Nobody ever caught the perpetrator. Billy from Introduction to Statistical Methods was a suspect but Billy had an alibi. Nobody could prove it was Sigma Nu either, though a cloud of suspicion hung over the house and they ended up hosting a social awareness day for the entire campus, complete with ethnic food kiosks and Kuumba dancers, in an attempt to clear their name.

  The incident, as it were, launched a wave of protests that rippled through the campus, protests against institutional racism and the unbearable whiteness of being. The BSU began selling T-shirts and buttons on the plaza, including one that said, Reparations—NOW! Khalil designed and sold some of the T-shirts. The first ones he made were black and said in red Garamond across the middle: The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Audre Lorde. That design didn’t sell as well as his second batch, which were cardinal red and said in black Garamond across the middle: And still I rise. Maya Angelou. Those were a hot seller, along with the buttons the BSU sold to white students wanting to show their support, the ones that said, in large letters, Recovering Racist.

  The pinnacle of the year: Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow Coalition visited the campus and stood on a podium and told the students in a voice that sounded weirdly to Maria like Foghorn Leghorn that they were an inspiration to the nation. Keep hope alive! Jackson referred to Khalil in his speech only obliquely—“the young brother who was the target of this vicious attack”—but everyone in the audience knew who Jesse was talking about and people craned their heads to look at him, their eyes flashing with excitement. Khalil was famous. He got the fist bump wherever he went. Perfect strangers told him to “stay black, stay strong.”

  Maria had never seen the immersion phase of racial identity formation overtake a person more swiftly or more extremely than it did Khalil. The irony was that Maria got black points for her association with him. Nobody remembered that he’d played Hacky Sack or that he had been planning to live in the Enchanted Broccoli Forest, the hippie cooperative dormitory on the edge of campus. Nobody remembered that it was Maria who’d airlifted him out of there on a reconnaissance mission. Oh well. It didn’t matter. Maria felt lucky she’d gotten away with the incident unscathed.

  The only casualty was her friendship with Claudette. Over the days following the incident, Claudette stopped returning Maria’s calls. When a week later she spotted Claudette at a booth at the Coffee House, seated with the LGBT crowd, Claudette only gave her a wan wave and slid down low in her seat, covered her face with a menu.

  At first Maria thought Claudette was just waiting for the drama to simmer down—the way bank robbers in the movies temporarily split up after the heist, then meet up in the Bahamas later, when the coast is clear. But soon it became clear that she was distancing herself permanently from Maria. She waved when they passed each other on campus but kept moving. She always found an excuse not to stop and talk. She was late for her Harlem Renaissance seminar. She was rushing to an event in the LGBT Center. She was meeting friends—these loathsome new nameless friends!—in the city for a rave. She acquired as well—overnight it seemed—a homely girlfriend, someone Maria had never before seen in her life, a dishwater blonde whom Claudette kept propped on her bike’s handlebars as though to shield herself from view.

  The winter sunlight over Washington Square Park has a silver tinge. There is a Christmas garland, gold and garish, strung up along the streetlights and she thinks it looks so ugly without snow. She thinks she hears somebody whispering her name, but when she whips her head around there is nobody. She rises and begins to walk east. Before she knows it, she is there, on the street where he lives, at the address she has memorized.

  She gazes up at the windows of the building but doesn’t know which belongs to him. She has no plans, no plot really to get inside, but as she’s standing there, a man comes out of the building and dashes past her, leaving Maria just enough time to grab the door before it closes. It feels inevitable. She steps inside the foyer and stares at the list of names and buzzers beside an intercom. She finds his last name beside 310. Just for kicks, really, she reaches out and presses the buzzer beside it. 309. Koehner in 309. She is startled when, a moment later, the door to the interior of the building clicks, the lock releasing. She pushes it open and steps inside.

  She doesn’t feel like herself. It’s an expression, she knows, something people say. I don’t feel like myself today. They are usually referring to illness. But there is an “I” who still exists when they say it. They don’t feel like themselves. She doesn’t feel like herself, doesn’t even feel there is an “I” to not feel like. She imagines the one who she thought was herself has long since made it up to the carrel in the university library where she is sitting poring over notes on Jonestown. She thinks that she has split off from this girl and is not her anymore, but that the other girl still exists. She doesn’t know when it happened.

  She climbs the stairs, carrying the Stacy Lattisaw album in the bag at her side. Halfway up, she hears footsteps, somebody jogging down the stairwell in her direction. She stops, waits to come face to face with the poet. He will see her and know she has come here looking for him. But the man who comes around the bend is not the poet. He is an aging white-bearded hippie. He smiles.

  ’Scuse me, darlin’, he says, and moves around her, past her, continues on his way, whistling.

  She is both relieved and disappointed. She keeps climbing.

  She hesitates on the third-floor landing. She has not made a plan. She has not come with a purpose. She had only hoped to bump into him at the record shop. But now she is here, inside his building. She understands she has crossed a line somewhere. And she understands too that it’s not too late to turn around, to leave the building, walk to the subway, go up to the university, the library carrel she has been given, and sit reading about Jonestown as planned.

  But she doesn’t stop. She keeps moving toward apartment 310. The hall feels long, warped, oddly lit. She passes other doors, hears the muted sounds of the lives within. Someone plays the same five notes—the beginning to a song—over and over again on a guitar. Somebody else shrieks with laug
hter. A television is on, the sound of talk-show applause. A baby is crying. A small dog is yapping, furious.

  She is almost to the end of the hall when a door beside her swings open. It is the door to apartment 309—the buzzer she pressed to get inside. A woman sticks her head out. A baby cries within. The woman has a phone in one hand, pressed to her ear. Her eyes are red and puffy as if she’s been crying.

  Thank fucking God, she says into the phone, Consuela just showed up.

  Maria glances over her shoulder for Consuela. There is nobody there. The poet’s door is two feet away from her. He is maybe two feet away.

  The woman puts her hand over the phone and whispers to Maria, You got all my messages. Sorry to mess up your plans, but this really is an emergency. She pauses, eyes Maria up and down. You changed your hair, she says, frowning a little. It looks nice. Changes your whole face.

  She disappears inside the apartment. Maria pauses before following her down a narrow hallway.

  Oh, right, the woman is hissing into the phone. I forgot. You’re such a mensch. You’re such a goddamn good guy. Family man of the year. But I just can’t do this anymore. You can’t have us both. I’m not that stupid, Meryl. I mean women my generation, we got a raw deal. A raw fucking deal. You’re a rotten lot—a bunch of macho pussies.

  The woman claws at one side of her face, pulls the skin down so she looks like she’s melting. She is so consumed by her passion that she seems unaware of Maria standing there, unaware of her baby crying in the other room.