Real Life(25)

“I hate you, Wallace. And do you know why? Do you know why I hate you? Because you walk around like you’re so important because you spend all of your time working. You dump all of your precious little time into this lab, and into these dumb little experiments that don’t matter, and you have the nerve to say to me, Some of us work. Imagine, you, saying that to me. Of all people. You aren’t Katie. You’re certainly not Brigit. And yet you think you have a right to lecture me.”

Wallace can smell his own blood. He touches the end of his nose to see if there is blood there, but no, he isn’t bleeding. There is just the metallic sheen of blood coating everything. Its heat. Its bitterness. He can taste it too.

“Oh, no one could lecture you.”

Dana sits up straight. The laughter is gone, though the room rings with its ghost.

“You know what I think, Wallace? I think you’re a misogynist.”

The word flicks by him, a shooting dart of silver. There’s a momentary grit of bitter regret at the back of his throat.

“I am not a misogynist.”

“You don’t get to define what misogyny is to a woman, asshole. You don’t get to.”

“Okay,” he says.

“So, if I say you’re a misogynist, then you’re a misogynist.”

Wallace turns from her. There is no arguing. This is why he keeps to himself. This is why he speaks to no one and does nothing.

“Fucking gay guys always think that they’ve got the corner on oppression.”

“I don’t think that at all.”

“And you think that you get to walk around because you’re gay and black and act like you can do no wrong.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You think you’re fucking queen of the world,” she says, slapping her palm on the bench, which makes Wallace jump.

“Dana.”

“I’m fed up with your shit. I’m fed up with you always talking down to me and treating me like I’m beneath you. I’m tired of it.”

“No one did that to you, Dana. No one has done anything to you except try to help you, but you won’t be helped because you have to prove yourself.”

“I have to prove myself because you and men like you are always counting me out. Well, fuck it, women are the new niggers, the new faggots.”

A sour, wet taste spackles the roof of Wallace’s mouth. The world is momentarily illuminated by something coarse and bright. He blinks. He grips the back of his chair to keep himself still, steady, even. He thinks of Brigit, her warmth, her kind voice.

Dana pants like a winded, wounded animal. She has worked herself up into a froth, into a violent anger. She is making fists over and over, her small hands turning to hard white knots. It isn’t sympathy he feels. They are beyond that now. But it is the first part of sympathy: recognition. White foam sticks to the corners of her mouth. Her eyes flash and narrow. He recognizes himself in the futile, thrashing heat of her rage. The unfair thing, he thinks, is that she is afforded this moment to vent herself. She will be fine. She will be all right. She is gifted, and he is merely Wallace.

None of this is fair. None of this is good, he knows. But he also knows that the point is not fairness. The point is not to be treated fairly or well. The point is to get your work done. The point is results. He could say something to her, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter because no one is going to do his work for him. No one is going to say, Well, Wallace, it’s okay if you don’t have your part of the data. You were being treated poorly. And there is the other thing—the shadow pain, he calls it, because he cannot say its real name. Because to say its real name would be to cause trouble, to make waves. To draw attention to it, as though it weren’t in everything already. He tried once, with Simone, to talk about the way Katie talks to him as though he is inept. He said to Simone, She doesn’t talk that way to anyone else. She doesn’t treat them like this. And Simone said, Wallace. Don’t be dramatic. It isn’t racism. You just need to catch up. Work harder.

The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.

Wallace does not talk about it anymore. He learned his lesson in third year, when, after he had passed his preliminary exams, Simone pulled him into her office to debrief. She sat behind her desk with her legs crossed, a beautiful winter day lying white and smooth behind her, all the way to the lake, that blue-white churn and the trees like delicate woodwork in a diorama. He felt good about himself. He felt, for the first time since coming to grad school, like he was finally doing what she always urged him to do—catching up—and he imagined that he saw pride in her eyes. He was excited. He was ready to begin in earnest—to really begin. And she asked, How do you think that went? And he said, Oh, well, I thought it was okay. And she shook her head grimly. She said, You know, Wallace, that was . . . frankly, I was embarrassed for you. Had that been another student, it might have gone differently. You might not have passed. But we talked a long time about what was feasible for you, what was reasonable for your abilities, and we decided we’d pass you, but we are going to watch you, Wallace. No more of this. You need to get better. She spoke as though she were bestowing blessings. Bestowing beneficence. Bestowing irrefutable grace. She spoke as though she were saving him. What could he say? What could he do?