Lost and Wanted(14)
“I’m so sorry.”
“That’s the thing. I’m not. I’m sorry for Terrence because he’d like two or three. I love her to death, but I don’t want another. Even if I weren’t sick.”
It sometimes seemed that every parent I knew had at least two, if not three, and I’d read the term “singleton” in the parenting books with distaste. The idea that Charlie didn’t want another, in spite of the fact that she was married, was reassuring.
“What I want is to run my own show.”
“What would it be about?”
“Black physicists on the Manhattan Project.”
“Where on earth did you get that idea?”
Charlie smiled. “Yeah, I know. I’m going to try to get you a consulting gig if it happens.”
“I could use a consulting gig.”
“Careful what you wish for, though. Because this industry is so much more fucked-up than you can imagine.”
“I’ve heard it’s a boys’ club.”
“There’s that, of course,” Charlie said. “But casting directors are usually women—white women. When I first got out here—back when I was still trying to act—people told me to go for everything. But if it doesn’t say black, that’s not what they’re looking for. They’ll be like, ‘Oh, it’s not an ethnic role. And I’m like ‘ethnic’? And then you go to a call for black actresses, and there are three times as many people there, because there are one-thousandth the number of parts, and they’ll be like, ‘Can you do it more sassy?’ Which means that they want you to, you know, roll your neck and snap your fingers.”
“Is it better now that you’re writing?”
“Not really. I was in a meeting with this guy at Sony the other day, he’s a really big deal. And not uneducated—he went to Stanford, I think. And he says this one character—Tyrone, naturally—is more ghetto and he wants me to write that.”
“And I say, I can do some research, and I make a joke about how I watched The Wire.”
“And he totally doesn’t get it—he’s like, ‘No, no, not like The Wire.’ Because this isn’t for cable and he wants people to be able to understand—‘without turning on the fucking subtitles. Write from your own experience.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh okay, yeah—my experience. Got it.’ But that’s what you have to say if you want to work.”
“Jesus, Charlie.”
“The mean streets of Brookline,” Charlie said. “But enough. Now tell me about you.”
9.
I went home that weekend with my baby, happy to have seen Charlie with her family, hopeful that our friendship was entering a new stage. I did a little research online, and learned that lupus affects men less often than women, and white women less often than black women, who inexplicably tend to contract it earlier, with greater risk of life-threatening complications. It’s a disease that can lie dormant for decades before suddenly flaring, that is sometimes ignored or misdiagnosed, but that produces persistent, excruciating pain in the people it attacks most severely.
I had those facts, but on another level, I didn’t understand. Charlie had complained about everything in college: the rooms we were assigned; the boys we dated; the deadlines we were expected to meet. She complained about authority figures, the university in general, and especially about her parents. I assumed that if her illness were really life-threatening, she wouldn’t hesitate to complain about that, too. The very obvious explanation—that the things Charlie had always made a fuss about were not her real grievances, that those were the ones she’d always kept quiet—didn’t occur to me. That was the kind of observation about people that came easily to Charlie, and that I often failed to make in my own life, especially after I stopped sharing it with her.
As our children grew up, Charlie and I fell more and more out of touch. The less I communicated with her, the more I looked at Facebook, and eventually at Instagram. Charlie posted photos and videos frequently, mostly of her daughter. There was Simmi onstage in a white ballet outfit; Simmi playing the guitar; Simmi doing a cartwheel on an actual balance beam. She was (as everyone had predicted she’d be) an extraordinarily pretty child, and she appeared to excel at anything performative. When I allowed myself the consolation that Charlie and Terrence pushed their daughter too hard, I would be confronted by a picture of Simmi on a boogie board in Malibu, Simmi eating an ice pop by the pool.
Just before he turned four, Jack had a series of health problems. First his adenoids were swollen and needed to be taken out, a minor procedure complicated by a bleeding disorder he’d inherited from my father. A few months later he had an episode of croup, something I thought he’d outgrown in infancy. The third time we went to the ER in the middle of the night, Jack was admitted for three days, and diagnosed with asthma. The attending pulmonologist gave me a nebulizer, vials of albuterol, and prescriptions for two different steroids, assuring me that at least ten percent of American children now suffered from asthma and that the rates were higher in other parts of the world.
Did these statistics comfort anyone? In the hospital, Jack and I read books, did puzzles, and were visited by Child Life volunteers who brought craft projects—plant a cactus in a clay pot, decorate a mug for Valentine’s Day—or, once, escorted us to a playroom for a magic show by a clown named Looney Lenny. In the playroom were bald children undergoing chemo, children with cystic fibrosis, a boy who couldn’t speak or focus his eyes, ten years old, in a wheelchair and a diaper. (There but for the grace of God, my maternal grandmother would always say.) Because of his comparative health, Jack was Lenny’s assistant, turning a scarf into a flower, and discovering a plastic dinosaur behind Lenny’s ear.