The last of her kind, p.12
The Last of Her Kind, page 12
Q: Should Cleo have been told?
She would have wanted to know, I think.
I was her friend. Was it right that I should be told about those letters but not she?
She was three years older than I, she was from Philadelphia, she had her B.A., and after two years at Visage she would go to journalism school. “It’s either that or law school,” she said. At Visage, mulling over her choice, she worked for the fiction and poetry editor. After she left, she kept her connection with the magazine, doing occasional book or theater reviews. She became the author of a book herself, about the figure of the empathetic black in white society, which brought her some attention. Then she wrote a play, which brought her much more attention. She wrote more plays and made a name for herself. She married early and had a child. She divorced and raised the child herself. She wrote a book about that. She got cancer and wrote a book about surviving.
“We thought Cleo’s six-inch-deep Afro overwhelmed her finefeatured face.” So they mowed that thing down closer to her scalp. It was Kenneth, the king of coiffeurs, who said it was a mistake for a woman to keep changing her hair, because for every woman there were only one or two styles that suited her face. This was something sophisticated women (Jacqueline Onassis, Princess Grace) have always understood, Kenneth said. But such good sense was now being lost. Tell it to Cleo. Back in school again, she grew her hair and straightened it and held it in place with barrettes as she’d done as a girl. Next came cornrows, then dreadlocks. And in the way that a few faces look good in almost any hat, all these styles suited Cleo. Even when chemotherapy left her with no hair at all, the effect, we agreed, was a striking, extraterrestrial beauty. So much so that for a while, as the hair grew back, she kept shaving it off.
The last time we met, after many years, her hair was a skullcap, a thin pelt, a white rind. She saw how my eye went right to it and, patting it with one hand, said, mock-mournfully, “Like frost.”
Meanwhile, something momentous had happened to Ann. She had fallen in love. She wept when she told me about it, and I felt the old envy, for though I was involved with my neighbor upstairs, I was in love with no one.
Ann wept at my table, having eaten almost nothing of the lasagna and salad I had made her. I was learning to cook. My neighbor, the one with whom I was involved, was a steadfast test subject because, as he put it, even when the meal was a disaster there was always dessert, meaning sex. (Indeed, it all began because I was dying to try Visage’s Candlelight Dinner for Two.)
Ann had stayed in New York after leaving school, moving into the same communal apartment where Sasha lived. She was working in a store called The People’s Books. She never went home to Connecticut and hardly saw her parents anymore. She had her job and her causes, and now she had this man with whom she said she was in love. She blew her nose in her napkin and told me about him, a schoolteacher from Harlem she had met on a subway platform. (She had been sitting slumped on a bench, catching her breath, having just been mugged, when he stopped to ask what was wrong.) “He also writes poetry.” She had been thrilled to learn he had once belonged to SNCC and to the Communist Party and had sown his share of radical wild oats. “But he’s not a revolutionary—not anymore,” Ann said tenderly. “Just a quiet guy who loves kids.” During his revolutionary phase it would have been unthinkable for him to date a white girl. “He said if I knew some of the things he’d said and written about white people, especially about rich white people, I would never want to be with him.” But of course she did know, she made it her business to know precisely such things, and she did want to be with him.
Once again, a life change had demanded a rechristening. He’d been Kwame Kwesi since 1966 but was now thinking of going back to his birth name. His mother would have been pleased, but not Ann. She would rather be with a Kwame Kwesi than with an Alfred Winston Blood. I said I liked the lordly sound of Alfred Blood, but she objected passionately. “Tell me the truth. When you hear that name, do you see a black man?”
He was not young, he was about to turn thirty, and he wanted to settle down. He had warned Ann not to get involved with him unless she was serious. He wanted children. Was she ready for that? I could not imagine her fooling herself into believing that she was. She had just turned twenty. Yet already they had taken the first step. They were looking for an apartment to move into together, and they would soon find one, above the Barnard campus, on Tiemann Place. He didn’t like the living arrangement Ann had now one bit. The squalor. The musical beds. He didn’t like her roommates. At his most radical, he had hated young white radicals most. Coming into the ghetto: we’re gonna show you what to do. Till Stokely Carmichael, a.k.a. Kwame Ture, told them to keep out. He didn’t like The People’s Books, the manager in his Jewish Afro giving him the raised fist every time Kwame walked in. Just because he didn’t hate white people anymore didn’t mean he had to like them. And what about Ann’s activism, her own revolutionary goals? “He wants me to say goodbye to all that.”
No wonder she was crying. She must have been so confused.
Nothing was easy. The Draytons did not yet know about the relationship, but the Bloods did. Kwame, who had lived on his own since he was eighteen, had had some kind of dispute with his current landlord and had moved in temporarily with his parents. About Ann, the first thing his mother said was, “Now, why would you want to go and bring so much trouble into your life?” His two sisters, both older and married, said, “No black woman good enough?” “She’s not even pretty, she’s just white!” At least some of his other relations and friends had also expressed, to varying degrees, disapproval or doubts. On the streets of Harlem, strangers made their feelings known: “Hey, nigger, what you doin’ with that pink bitch?” Only his father remained detached. Moses Blood had worked as a chauffeur, had been in a crack-up, and now spent all his time in a wheelchair and all his resources fighting pain.
I was a little hurt that I had not already met Kwame. That subway encounter had happened months ago. It was a sign of how much had changed, and how rapidly, since Ann and I had left school, though I did not like to admit this. I did not like to admit that it now seemed to be mostly up to me to keep in touch, that it was usually I who called, I who suggested we get together, or that when we did get together we seemed to have less and less to say to each other and Ann’s mind often seemed to be somewhere else. The truth—and I shrank from it—was that I was afraid of losing Ann’s friendship, because for me that would have entailed another, deeper loss. What to call it? Some important failure. I would remember—piercingly—those early days when I would hide out from Ann, putting off till late returning to our room, not wanting merely to avoid her but to snub, to reject, to hurt her. And how she would have done anything in the world not to hurt me. But now she was no longer careful about my feelings. For example, the dinner I had made for her and which she hardly touched—she said nothing about it, not even a polite word. As if it weren’t a lot of work, lasagna. As if she were not my guest.
Upstairs, my neighbor—my lover—had just come home and put on some music (he was a drummer in a band). I had thought about introducing him to Ann, but it would never happen. Another sign: none of my new friends had met her.
Of course, I could not leave Visage out of account. As always, Ann was open in her contempt. I had entered the enemy territory of her parents (“Sophie reads all those magazines”), and the longer I stayed there, the less respect she would have for me. She was affectionate at times—indeed, much of the time. But she was also impatient and irritable, which bothered me in a way I would not have imagined. I saw that—much as I wished it were otherwise—her opinion of me would always matter. I did not yet know that, contrary to youth’s sense of itself as tolerant, freethinking, and egalitarian, it is more often stubbornly critical and judgmental, priggish and snobbish. I would find these faults much later (glaring) in my son and daughter and their friends. But at that age myself, I did not see how we truly were, nor did I put together that these faults were often worst in those with the strongest political opinions.
The more critical Ann was, the more vulnerable I became. It was like having layers of skin peeled away. That I had disappointed her, that I did not meet her standards, that I had ceased to be of serious or special interest to her—all this was as painful as it was undeniable. It weighed on my mind and on my spirit, but there was no one with whom I would have talked about it. The only person I had ever been able to talk with about something so painful, so close to my heart, was—Ann.
I began to count the number of times she used the word superficial in response to something I’d said. “That is so superficial, George.” George. (“I’m sorry. ‘Georgette’ makes me think of some kind of frilly petticoat.” Never mind that it was my real name.)
On my new work clothes: “I think it’s awful that they make you dress like that.”
Probably I should have resisted telling her to be sure to check out the January issue of Visage. But I was too excited to keep it to myself. I told everyone. Whether or not she saw it, I don’t know; she never mentioned it. It is possible she forgot about it completely. It would have been easy for something so superficial to slip her mind. (Those tempted to ascribe Ann’s behavior to simple envy did not know Ann.) But I never forgave her. How could something be superficial if it was important to me?
Still. When we hugged goodbye that night, I did not want to let her go. I was confused, too. I was always confused about Ann.
“So when do I get to meet this guy?”
“Next time,” Ann promised. But she did not say when that would be.
I had just started washing the dishes when my neighbor came down and rang the bell. He must have noticed Ann leaving. He was holding a small jar of dark honey. He was a good drummer, and good at one other thing, too. “Dessert?”
By the time I met Kwame, he and Ann had moved into their apartment on Tiemann Place. Ann invited me to come to dinner after work. But first I stopped at my apartment to change (I would rather Ann not see me in my work clothes anymore) and to pick up a bottle of wine I had bought the day before. Also, because Ann had admired my avocado plant, I had decided to give it to her as a housewarming gift. I would miss it—it was the first plant I had ever tried to grow, and it was thriving—but I figured I could grow another one. (As it turned out, though I tried again, twice, mysteriously both seedlings failed.)
On the short subway ride to 125th Street, the heavy terra-cotta pot bruising my thighs, the leaves nearly smothering me, I thought about how nervous I was. What if Kwame and I didn’t like each other? I wondered what Ann had told him about me, what sort of person he’d be expecting. I thought about all the things Ann knew about me, all the intimate things I had told her since we’d met. She knew everything, really—and did that mean that Kwame, a total stranger to me, now knew all these things, too? (I have never been completely pleased or at ease when someone to whom I am introduced says, “I’ve heard so much about you.”) Or had I come to mean so much less to Ann that she’d hardly spoken about me to her boyfriend at all, merely summing me up in a word or two, and one of those words superficial? And, as I was walking from the subway station to Tiemann Place: Had she told him what had happened to me just a stone’s throw away, in the park?
It was Kwame who opened the door and took the plant from my arms.
“Oh, wow—sweetheart, come look at this.” Sweetheart! How strange to hear anyone call her that. It made them both seem old. He was a small man, not much taller than Ann or I, and very lean. He had high cheekbones, and sideburns that covered much of his jaw, and he was wearing an African cloth cap. He was more pleasant-looking than good-looking, I decided, though he did have perfect teeth and almond-shaped blue eyes. Ann came running out of the kitchen. She clapped her hands when she saw the plant, and my heart swelled with pride. After some discussion about where to put it (the living room, which had the best light), I gave them the wine. It turned out that Kwame didn’t drink wine, or any alcohol, but he opened the bottle and poured two glasses. Ann took hers and returned to the kitchen, where she was making a tuna curry with rice. She wasn’t much of a cook and didn’t pretend to be. She was following a recipe on the tuna can label. “This should take about twenty minutes,” she said.
Meanwhile, Kwame showed me around. The apartment was freshly painted, uniformly white, and underfurnished—they had not lived there long—with the improvised look of grad-student rooms: the bed a mattress on the floor, the coffee table an old trunk with a batik cloth over it, bookshelves made of pine boards and cinder blocks. And yet it had the feel of a real home, I thought. In the bedroom, I was startled by a poster that was actually a blown-up black-and-white photograph of Ann and Kwame standing hand in hand and facing the camera—stark naked, like John and Yoko. “A friend of mine took that,” Kwame said. Then, teasingly, “Why are you blushing?”
“It’s the wine,” I said, taking a peek into the spare room, which was furnished with only a small desk and a metal folding chair. There was a typewriter on the desk, and in the typewriter a partly typed page.
This could be my room: I could not prevent the absurd thought from forming. Have I said that I was terribly lonely? I had never lived by myself before. A room of one’s own was splendid, of course, but a home all one’s own was a prison sentence.
In fact, the wine was helping me relax. Back in the living room, I sat down with a feeling of relief. I was comfortable, Kwame was comfortable, Ann was happy with my gift. I had no reason to be nervous, no reason to fear the evening would not go well. The living room was warm and fragrant both with the curry and with pipe tobacco. Kwame did not drink, but he smoked everything—pipe, cigarettes, cigars. Right now he was rolling a joint. Ann poked her head out from the kitchen. “Put on some music, hon.” Hon! How strange to hear her call someone that. Kwame turned the stereo on without changing the record that was already on the turntable. I recognized with a pang Ann’s old Billie Holiday album. “God Bless the Child.” I knew every scratch.
“I was sorry to hear about your sister.” So this he had been told. “Any news?” I was surprised—not because Ann had told him or because he’d brought it up, but because, in fact, there was news. I had received a postcard. Not that the postcard was signed. It said only, in the puffy script of the kind used by comic-book artists, “Guess Who?” Big fat question mark. The card had been mailed from Ann Arbor, Michigan (where I knew not a soul), but showed a picture of the Statue of Liberty. Little joke. Once again I could not be sure it was Solange, but I couldn’t think who else it could be. She had been missing for almost two years now. All that time I had believed she might be dead. Now I believed she was not only alive but, if not ready to go home (in fact, I was sure she would not go home), willing to be found. I believed also that she had figured out that, though still a minor, she could reappear at this point and nothing bad was going to happen to her.
“The Statue of Liberty?” Kwame said. “What do you suppose she’s trying to tell you? That she passed through New York? That she’s got to be free?” He was speaking in the strangled voice of the pot smoker trying not to exhale, at the same time offering the lit joint to me. I shook my head. Recently I had started to feel paranoid when I smoked pot. The only time I got stoned now was when I was with my drummer, who was one of those men who, though reckless, fickle, irresponsible, dissolute, and too hard-living to be in physical shape, somehow had the ability to make a woman feel safe. After a few tokes Kwame carefully extinguished the joint and laid it aside. “Ann’s not big on reefer, either,” he said thoughtfully. What made me thoughtful was this: there was not the slightest sign that Kwame was high. I doubted whether that half a joint had affected him as much as half a glass of wine was affecting me. I guessed that he was one of those people who smoked every day without ever getting wrecked, like those other people who would not have let a day pass without downing a six-pack or a couple of cocktails but somehow remained quite sober.
I said I didn’t know if Solange was trying to send any message at all. “She probably just happened to have that card and decided to use it. But I think maybe at some point she was here in New York. Just a feeling.”
Kwame was shaking his head. “I don’t understand. If she’s okay, why doesn’t she come straight out and let you know? Why play guessing games? Why would anyone want to hurt their family so bad, going off and disappearing like that? I don’t know that I could forgive my own sister if one of them did a thing like that.” He was, indirectly, asking a question, but I ignored it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about Solange. I wasn’t sure I could be truthful. I knew I didn’t want to hear any stranger judge her, though.
He said, “Kids today.” (Talk about sounding old!) “A lot of times, adolescence is already too late. You want to make a difference, you got to reach them earlier. Much earlier.” This, presumably, was why he taught sixth grade.
Dinner was ready. There was no dining table. I mean, there was a table just outside the kitchen, but it was hidden under piles of books and papers. We ate sitting around the batik-covered trunk. I had forgotten: trust Ann, with no experience, to make a great meal out of some canned tuna and rice. But mine was not the important judgment. Though she did not seem at all put out, I was indignant when Kwame refused to compliment her. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We’ll make a good cook out of you yet.” What was that supposed to mean? He knew how to cook? So why hadn’t he made dinner? If there was something I wasn’t going to like about him, it was this. He was patronizing. It might have had something to do with his spending most of his time around children. And I didn’t know if he talked down to everyone the way he talked down to Ann and me, but I noticed also that when he himself was not speaking, his attention often strayed. He did not listen. Of course, most men I have known have been like this.
