The Office of Historical Corrections(46)
“It’s not the government, it’s me,” I said. “And it’s not the truth in some abstract ideological sense. It’s the actual historical record. I was a professor for three years. I loved teaching, but all my resources went into bringing information to the exact people who would have gotten it somehow anyway. Now I can be anywhere.”
“But so can anybody,” he said. “What happens when you leave and the office is full of people with a different agenda?”
“I guess I don’t leave,” I said. “Isn’t that the point of being a career civil servant? Administrations come and go and there you are, doing the work. Did you change how you did your job when your newspaper got sold?”
“You strike me as the leaving type,” he said, avoiding the question. We both laughed and treated it as though he had paid me a compliment, though later it would occur to me there was no reason it should have been. Things started quickly between us but then didn’t seem to know where to go. We were busy; I had recently declared myself to be beyond giddy girlish feelings and their accompanying heartbreak; he’d broken an engagement a month before he met me, though I gathered some months later that while the wedding was off by then, the fiancée hadn’t yet entirely disappeared from his life. I didn’t pry—there was no arrangement we’d made, and if there had been, the way things were headed I would have held on to it quietly, certain already that someday I’d need forgiveness, or something to hold against him.
* * *
—
Tonight I had intended a mood for Daniel’s birthday: candles, the cake, a change of clothes, my good lipstick. But when Daniel arrived I was thoroughly unmade, the candles unlit, and the cake still in its box. I had shed my pants and bra, but was still wearing a work blouse over yoga pants, sitting on the living room floor with the contents of the clarification file spread in front of me.
“I got you a cake,” I called when he walked in. “It’s on the table.”
“Fancy cake,” he said, a moment later. I looked up and found him staring into the cake box.
“I was working Capitol Hill today. I had to go to a gentrification bakery.”
“Is there any other kind anymore? I was just talking to a cat who grew up there yesterday. Working on a long piece about what happened to the property people lost to back taxes. Did you at least get to yell at any tourists?”
“Not even one.”
“All I wanted for my birthday was a video of you just once cursing out a white person who should know better.” He sat beside me and gestured at the papers. “So what did you get me? A scavenger hunt?”
I leaned into him. He had stopped at home, I noted, had changed out of his work-routine suit and into a dress shirt, smelled like good cologne—woodsy and bright—and coconut oil. I kissed him. He began to sort through the contents of the file, and I decided it would be both rude and futile to demand privacy. I gave him the basics and let him look through the records with me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t make fancier plans,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to a guy who tried to buy property in the thirties and may or may not have died for it. See? You can hate my job all you want, but we’re both trying to solve the mystery of why this country doesn’t let Black people keep anything.”
“Boo-Boo the fool could solve that mystery. The real question is how we get it back.”
“Black love is Black wealth.”
“Isn’t that poem about being broke?”
“Look, I got you a gentrified cake, a pile of evidence about how much our country hates us, and a Nikki Giovanni metaphor about dealing with it. Happy Birthday. Make it count, because I have to leave town soon to deal with all this—it’s a clarification on one of Genevieve’s corrections.”
“Why don’t they just let Genevieve be? It’s bad enough they drove her out. Now they can’t stop undoing everything she did while she was there?”
“It’s not like that. This might be an actual mistake. I have to go to Wisconsin and find out whether or not this man was actually murdered.”
“Wisconsin.”
“You know that’s not it.”
“Do I?”
“This is a work thing—I have to make a correction. It might even be a relatively happy one, but I have to do it gently enough that we don’t have to go on another apology tour or duel the goddamn Free Americans in the press.”
“So you’re letting them use you now so you don’t have to let them use you later.”
“Them who?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t have anything to prove,” I said. “If there’s someplace else you’d rather be on your birthday, I’m not keeping you here.”
“I guess you’re not,” Daniel said, getting up. “But, for the record, this was where I wanted to be.”
I refused to meet his eyes. I stared at the floor and waited for the door to slam and then got up and ate two slices of Daniel’s birthday cake for dinner. The buttercream was exquisite but the cake itself was dry and crumbly. I overthought the metaphor. I had made the wrong choice, clearly, but had I made it in trying at all or in not trying hard enough? The night had probably been salvageable when I let him leave. Things were always salvageable between us, and knowing that felt like both a relief and an obligation. I wanted to be able to go out into the world with him and protect him from anything that might harm him, and I knew that I could not; I wanted to leave for Wisconsin with the freedom to be disappointing and I knew that I could.