Our Country Friends(77)
“Was I wrong?”
“Well.”
“Then you racialized it first.”
“Okay, fine. Where should this kiss take place? Right here in front of everyone?” Both of them now realized that after Dee’s recent public contretemps she might be recognized by some of the tent-restaurant’s patrons, all of whom were heavy social media users, even Kent and Lorimer, the five-year-old twins. Dee did not want to lose any more of her privacy, even though publicly kissing an Asian man, as he had correctly limned her thoughts, could only help her at this point. (A famous neo-Nazi television personality was now dating a Black man, not that Dee would compare herself to her.) “Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.
The propriety of Ed’s cotton shirt and the way he helped her up from her wooden bench meant they couldn’t just rush to her car and drive at double the speed limit to the Big Island or Writer’s Cottage. (Which would be better for a first tussle?) Instead, they had to do something date-like around town before giving in to their animal best. They walked over to the town’s main street, which sloped from a considerable height toward a promenade overlooking the river. Perhaps there they would find a suitable space for their first unhurried kiss.
The town was full of distressed art galleries and outrageously priced antiques shops. All the goods now had signs against racism next to their price tags. Toward the river, a housing project sheltered many of the town’s nonwhite citizens, and a small Bangladeshi community had set up residences and shops nearby. The easy pace reminded Ed of a recent visit to Trinidad, and indeed a storefront was cheerfully hawking island food to the locals. He made all of these observations to Dee at a rapid clip, and as she compared the Actor’s blathering with his, she found them similar in some ways, but Ed’s crooning was less intense, less self-conscious, the warble of an observer, not a participant. Again, she found it matched her own new outlook, a traveler just passing through a series of delightful hellscapes on the way to oblivion, and the way he sweated in his overdone formal shirt lent him all the personality she could handle in a man.
As they walked through the white section of town, Dee caught a few stares from passersby, as she was clearly recognized for her recent misadventures. There was more surprise than disgust, the well-tuned minds quickly doing their social calculations: Why, yes, Senderovsky’s “Dacha of His Own” was only fifteen miles due south, so why shouldn’t she be here? And who was this new gent? Was he infamous, too?
In the Black and Bangladeshi sections, the stares faded away; she was not a seasonal celebrity here, merely a tourist. Upon crossing the street separating the races, Dee and Ed joined hands, as if making a very lame statement of their own. He was still talking about the Caribbean—about Cuba, evidently (frequent mentions of Raúl and Fidel and “state-run shops”)—and the talk was as ambient as a sound machine or an air conditioner as they both floated in a haze of grapefruited mezcal and the excitement of two hands constantly squeezing out signals that ran counterpoint to whatever he was saying. Who cares about the gayish nights he spent along the malecón? the squeezes said. Who cares about this whale town as one of the finest examples of nineteenth-century vernacular American architecture? This is all just class-based courtship. What we really are, maybe, is in love.
A green Parade Hill looked over the promontory at the wide expanse of the river, here forked over a large but uninhabited island, concealing the town on the other side (the ragtag namesake of a city of antiquity). Clouds hid then revealed biblical sunbursts and everything around them—the cute children talking in adult language and tossing back their braids, a distant Victorian lighthouse in the middle of the river recalling another empire lost, a crowd of Bangladeshis barbecuing goat by the train tracks against a backdrop of purple mountains fading blue, gray, gone—everything was lit up in professional cinematic ocher that meant they had the license, indeed the duty, to kiss each other. They did so quickly, then slowly, as if each had run a long exhausting high-altitude race and now had to breathe life back into the other. Their eyes were closed and she tried to think of nothing but him and he tried to think only of her, they tried to banish the why of what they were doing and concentrate only on the how, and for the most part they were successful, moaning kindly in appreciation of what the other had to offer, fingers caressing the undersides of each other’s ears, his thick mane, her sweaty tendrils clinging to her neck, while the impudent little kids on the bench next to them kept making fun of their ardor, boys daring the girls to “mess” with them, too.
“What were you like at my age?” Dee asked when their tongues had decided to take a short break. This brought to Ed’s mind their significant age difference. He worried that when he would speak of the past, he would sound and look old, as all ancient storytelling men did.
“It’s funny that we’re sitting by a river,” he said, “because when I was exactly your age, I was still living in Italy and that was the year I had published that bilingual magazine, Rivers/Fiumi.”
“The one about all the great rivers of the world.”
He sighed. “Well, the idea was that we explored the complexities of societies by interrogating the rivers running through them. Maybe back then we didn’t use the term ‘interrogate.’?”
As a child he had lived in fear of being scolded and maybe he feared it still. For thirty-one-year-old Ed, nothing had been worse than being told he was wrong. That’s what Fiumi had taught him, how hurtful it was to try something and still remain inconsequential. But as he told his story to Dee, he managed to see just how funny all of it was. How steeped the world was in artistic failure, even as the artists (and sometimes the society around them) failed to recognize that failure as such. Gradually he began to do what Senderovsky always did when he spun a tale—he began to make fun of all the principals, chiefly himself. As soon as one acquired a liberal education, huge parts of life became an elaborate joke. Maybe that’s what you paid for when your parents’ check cleared with the bursar—the rights to the joke.