Luster(19)
* * *
In the lobby, there is a Diversity Giveaway. I go up to the table and scan the books, and there are a few new ones: a slave narrative about a mixed-race house girl fighting for a piece of her father’s estate; a slave narrative about a runaway’s friendship with the white schoolteacher who selflessly teaches her how to read; a slave narrative about a tragic mulatto who raises the dead with her magic chitlin pies; a domestic drama about a black maid who, like Schr?dinger’s cat, is both alive and dead, an unseen, nurturing presence who exists only within the bounds of her employer’s four walls; an “urban” romance where everybody dies by gang violence; and a book about a Cantonese restaurant, which may or may not have been written by a white woman from Utah, whose descriptions of her characters rely primarily on rice-based foods. I take the book by the white woman and head outside, where Aria is leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette. She casts a bored glance in my direction, reaches into her bag and pulls out another cigarette. I take it, accept her light.
“They’re giving me your job,” she says, smoke streaming from her nose.
“I know,” I say, even though it is only now that I look at her soft, dark profile and feel that I have been swapped out for a prettier, more docile model.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she says, and around her eyes is the residue of old mascara, which against her usual prim white cardigan is more disturbing to me than the homeless man who is urinating next to us. “You think I’m a coon.”
“I don’t think that.” Of course I do think that, but now that she’s said it out loud and I see the look on her face, I feel bad.
“We could’ve been friends. I really needed a friend here,” she says, turning to toss the cigarette. I can see the clips mounting her synthetic yaki ponytail. Though I have in the past taken such poor care of my hair I’ve had to shave my head to preempt inevitable baldness, I want to take her face into my hands and point her in the direction of a good wig store. I would prefer to be upset with her, but my hand is bleeding profusely, and this is precisely her charm, the reason the professional whites talk openly to her about their fiscal conservatism—her lovely brown doll face, her full mouth and kind, carefully empty eyes.
I don’t know if there is any good way to admit my own desire without seeming deranged, because this hypothetical in which we were friends was never purely hypothetical to me. The blossoming and immediate kibosh of our friendship had in fact taken me months of half-written emails to get over. Because it is impossible to see another black woman on her way up, impossible to see that meticulous, polyglottal origami and not, as a black woman yourself, fall a little bit in love. But we had nothing at all in common.
“Please. I was a liability to you,” I say, holding the smoke in the back of my throat.
“Well. Yes.” She lights another cigarette, smiles. “But not like you think.”
“You’re going to tell me again what I think?”
“You think because you slack and express no impulse control that you’re like, black power. Sticking it to the white man or whatever. But you’re just exactly what they expect. Like, I understand wanting to resist their demands. But they can be mediocre. We can’t.”
“Mediocre?”
“I can’t be associated with it. Like, there is actually a brief window where they don’t know to what extent you’re black, and you have to get in there. You have to get in the room. And if I have to, I will shuck and jive until the room I’m in is at the top.”
* * *
It is only once I am underground that the arteries in my hand truly begin to weep. It is one of those early August days where the oxygen in the air is uncoupled, dense with Drakkar Noir, old pollen, and reheated Spam. It is one of those days where the M is full of Italian tourists energized from a full day at Banana Republic, and three stops in, my sweat is their sweat, the pores on Federico’s neck emptying into my mouth. There is blood everywhere, and I can at least count on my city not to notice, though a baby by the door is pointing at me, so I turn away and try to look involved with my phone. Then, in the brief window of service between Manhattan and Brooklyn, Eric sends me a photo of a friar fleeing a baboon. He writes, at this archival conference in toronto and saw this illuminated text. pages are swollen, binding is beyond reinforcement. this thing is nearing the end of its life. you can practically smell the rot.
* * *
Having already been in the process of filing him away, burying him with the other men who evaporate after pulverizing my cervix, I am relieved, and yes, I am ashamed. I want to say that I am not that kind of girl. Portable, contorting herself over an inaccessible, possibly disinterested man, but what if I am? There are worse things—factory farming and Christian rock and the three-dimensional animation of Mr. Clean. Because maybe I don’t want to be cool. Maybe I want to be all-purpose. Maybe I can’t pretend to be aloof to men who are aloof to me. So I text him two hundred words’ worth of things I know about baboons and I play Rebecca’s voicemail again with this exchange still fresh.
* * *
When I arrive home I can’t extend my fingers, and the floor moves when I open the door. By that I mean we have roaches and they scatter as I search for some peroxide and gauze. But of course we don’t have these things. We don’t even have a smoke detector. For instance, we have a big general pill bottle where we keep some old ibuprofen, Xanax, and Alka-Seltzer, we have some coconut oil we use for bacon and our hair, and for cutlery, three butter knives, one of which keeps showing up in the shower. Neither I nor my roommate is very prepared, which is why we get along and then have huge fights in the case of there being an actual emergency, usually re: the mice.