Starting Out in the Evening Read online

  William walked the walk, and William wore the uniform. With his huge baggy sweatshirt and his huge baggy jeans, he looked as if he was in training to become a dirigible.

  “How’s your mother?” Casey said.

  William looked at his father as if this were a stupid question. “She’s the picture of health,” he said.

  “Mason?”

  William smiled—slightly. His smile was like a shrug. “He’s Mason.”

  “Are you hungry?” Casey said.

  “I could eat.” This was how it was going to be. Nothing had changed. William never told you anything about anything. He provided information on a strict need-to-know basis, and as far as he was concerned, nobody needed to know.

  When they got home Casey ordered some food from a Chinese restaurant and William started putting his things away. He hauled his bags to the living-room closet, half of which was always reserved for him, and began to hang up his stuff. He was only staying here for a couple of days, but he’d brought a lot of clothes for his trip. He was visiting colleges across the East Coast.

  Evidently he knew enough not to wear the uniform on his interviews: he was hanging up button-down shirts and nice wool trousers.

  As William took things out of his bag, Casey noticed that he’d brought a bow tie.

  “Is that to make you look like Louis Farrakhan,” Casey said, “or to make you look like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.?”

  Stupid attempt at a joke, Casey thought. He’s probably never heard of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Don’t make jokes that require research.

  “You really sold me a woof ticket,” William said. Casey didn’t know what this meant, and that was the point: his son was showing him that he too could command an incomprehensible dialect, if that was Casey’s game.

  William was the most guarded person Casey knew. Sometimes Casey wanted to tackle him and not let him up until he had uttered one true thought. You never knew what he was thinking. Never. He was no longer the boy who used to wake you up in the morning to tell you what he had dreamed.

  Maybe there was nothing to be done but wait out his adolescence, and hope that at the end of it all he might be a person who would want to talk to you.

  Yvonne had assured Casey that he acted the same way with her. She said it didn’t bother her. “He’s a good kid. He does his homework, or some of his homework. He has friends. He has a girlfriend. What else do you want?”

  “Would you like something to drink?” Casey said. “Juice, water, milk, soda?”

  “Fruit juice is for faggots,” William said. “Milk is for kitty cats. Water—fish fuck in it.”

  “You’d like some soda, I take it?”

  “I could have a sip. As long as it’s not diet soda, which is . . .” Apparently he couldn’t think of who diet soda was for.

  When he came back from the refrigerator, Casey noticed something new.

  “What’s that thing on your ear?” he said.

  William fingered it self-consciously and, for the first time this evening, he smiled a genuine smile. A half-guilty smile.

  “It’s called an earring,” he said.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Does it have to have a meaning? It’s beyond meaning. It is what it is.”

  Casey understood the sentiment. An earring on a guy no longer meant what it meant fifteen years ago. Barry Bonds wore an earring. Springsteen wore earrings. Half the guys in Casey’s classes wore earrings these days. But still, it gave him the creeps to see one on his son.

  Nose rings on young women, earrings on guys, let alone nipple and navel rings: he was baffled by contemporary tastes in self-mutilation. But every generation makes itself ridiculous in its own way. When he himself was in high school he had a mile-wide Afro, so big he couldn’t wear a hat.

  But he still didn’t like to see an earring on his son’s ear.

  “Are you making a statement?”

  William seemed amused. “What kind of statement would that be?”

  “I don’t know. An earring and a bow tie. Are you tweaking the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie?”

  “You tell me. You know more about the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie than I do.”

  Forget the earring. After all, they’d been here already. They’d already had a few dead-end discussions about the way William dressed. A few years ago William had shown up wearing an X cap, and Casey had subjected him to a lecture about Malcolm X.

  Whom he had never been impressed by. The early nonsense about Yacub, the mad scientist who’d caused the world’s problems by inventing whites in the first place; the tardy revelation that hey, white folks are people too—politically and intellectually, he had always considered Malcolm a lightweight.

  In black intellectual life there were certain people, scattered all across the ideological spectrum, who, when the name of Malcolm X came up, exchanged ironic points of light. Stanley Crouch, Jerry Watts, Julius Lester, Adolph Reed-Casey admired the courage of these people, all of whom had written witheringly about the sanctification of Malcolm, no two of whom, probably, agreed with each other about anything else.

  So when William showed up wearing an X hat, Casey delivered a long lecture in which he had dealt not only with Malcolm’s career but with the simplicities of Afrocentrism, arguing that Afrocentric ideas were both historically and theoretically naive, and that rather than searching for some authentic black identity in our African roots, African Americans should recognize that we have created our culture here, and that the authentic black cultural identity is a diaspora identity. Casey had spoken about this at great length, trying to render these complicated ideas in accessible language. This was when he felt most alive: trying to explain a difficult idea to a young person. He often felt alive like this with his students, but very rarely with his son.

  After he finished his little lecture, he asked William what he thought. It turned out that William had a much more practical view of the Afrocentrism question. “I’ve heard a lot of stuff about how Africans, you know, invented math. But I don’t really care who invented math. It’s boring to me no matter who invented it.”

  More than once, Casey had vowed to stop delivering political-intellectual lectures to his son. But it was a hard habit to break. He worried about his son’s political education. And providing a political education was what parents did for children, wasn’t it? It was what his parents had done for him.

  Casey was the product of one of the classical mixed marriages of the old left: a black labor lawyer for a father, a Jewish social worker for a mother. Casey’s grandfather had been the patriarch of Philadelphia’s oldest, most respectable Negro law firm; Henry, Casey’s father, became a lawyer too, but, radicalized as a young man during the 1930s, he specialized in labor law and eventually joined a small left-wing group (“the Johnson-Forest tendency”), where he met Ruth, Casey’s mother.

  Simply by virtue of loving them he’d been delivered from the simplicities of ethnocentric thinking. His parents were true-blue internationalists: they’d really believed in the brotherhood of man, and he’d inherited that belief. The family heroes were Paul Robeson and Rosa Luxemburg and Eugene V. Debs, and those still seemed like pretty good heroes to him.

  Growing up as he had—the child of a mixed marriage, the child of socialists—had left him with a lifelong feeling of alienation, of being an outsider even among his fellow outsiders. Near the turn of the century, W.E.B. Du Bois had written of the “double consciousness,” the sense of “twoness,” imposed on those who were black and American. For Casey, fiveness or sixness was more like it. Twoness would have been a relief.

  William planted himself on the couch, picked up the remote control, and started clicking aimlessly among the seventy-six stations on cable.

  “Your mother tells me you have a girlfriend.” William’s girlfriend, according to Yvonne, was his true soul mate: intelligent, watchful, and as silent as a thief. Yvonne had reported that once, thinking William was out, she’d opened the door to his room to bo
rrow his boombox and found the two of them sitting on the floor a few feet away from each other, not talking. “They were sitting side by side like a couple of cats,” Yvonne said. “I think they spent the whole evening like that.”

  “Diane,” William said. “She may be referring to Diane.”

  “Is she nice?”

  “Nice,” said William. “Nice.” He pronounced the word experimentally. “I’ve read that word in books, but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it used in conversation.”

  “Would you shut up and answer me? Is she a nice girl?”

  “She’s angel food cake,” William said. “She’s the life of the party.”

  “Well I just hope you keep your party hat on.” This was an attempt at a streetwise reminder to wear condoms.

  “The tragic rise of out-of-wedlock births,” William said. “I saw something about that on Oprah.” He leaned back on the couch, large, smug as an owl. He was fifteen years old, and there was no way you could touch him.

  Children must avenge themselves upon their parents. Yvonne was a fiery achiever—a woman who wanted to make it in the world. Casey was an intellectual who, despite the political befuddlements of recent years, still wanted to make the world over. William’s revenge was to be neither a joiner nor a reformer. He looked upon all enthusiasms with scorn.

  But he’s only a boy, Casey reminded himself. Every teenage boy looks upon all enthusiasms with scorn.

  He remembered the gullible boy William used to be, the boy who was always stunned by his good fortune. On Christmas morning of William’s sixth year—Yvonne and Casey’s last year together—after tearing the wrapping off his presents—his swords and his football helmet and his baseball bat and his baseball books and his dinosaur books and his Batman costume and his team of little robots—William had opened his mouth in comic-book astonishment and cried out, “Santa Claus not only brought me what I asked for, he brought me extras!” Casey and Yvonne were in the bitterest days of their battling, but they were trying hard to keep it all offstage, trying to shield him. When William said that, Casey had thought, Christ, it’s so easy to be good to someone. As he sat there that morning, already sloshed on eggnog, William’s remark inspired in him a half-baked philosophy of life. Despite Marx and despite Freud, each of whom, in his own way, had devoted his career to refuting this proposition, people do know what they want in life. And the trick to making anyone happy, and making yourself happy in the bargain, is to bring them not only what they ask for, but to bring them extras.

  Well, that was a long time ago. Casey didn’t know how to be good to him anymore—because it isn’t always so easy to bring extras to your loved ones. To bring someone more than what he asks for, he has to ask for something in the first place. And that was something William wouldn’t do.

  37

  The Eiffel Tower has the distinction of being the world’s tallest cliché. During Schiller and Stella’s first year in Paris, they felt smug about the fact that they never visited the thing. They were too sophisticated to stand in a crowd of tourists, gawking slackjawed at that graceless immensity.

  But even if you don’t visit it, you can’t avoid it either. Walking in a distant, unfamiliar neighborhood, hemmed in by little buildings, feeling lost, you would turn a corner and see the tower in the distance. No matter where you were, it was always nearby.

  Coming to know it was like coming to know a person: someone who strikes you as vulgar at first, but who, little by little, day by day, begins to reveal unexpected qualities of subtlety, steadiness, tact.

  Finally, taking a long walk one day from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe, they decided to extend the tour by walking to the Eiffel Tower.

  Standing close to it for the first time, they were surprised by its magnificence. It was a different creature from the thing you see at a distance: it was impossibly graceful, with all its heaviness flung up into the air so that it seemed to defy gravity.

  At dinner that evening, Stella remarked that it was already hard to remember what it looked like from up close: all the trite representations that she’d seen over the years—the photos and the postcards, the bookends and the paperweights—had crept back into her mind, covering up the memory of the tower as it actually was. “We’ll have to go back,” she said. “So we can remind ourselves of what it really looks like.”

  “Of course we’ll go back.”

  “I want to make a date. I want to meet you there on this date—forty years from today. I want to meet here again near the end of our lives and hold your hand.”

  “The men in my family don’t generally make it to seventy.”

  “This will be an incentive. And if you’re dead I’ll come here anyway, and I’ll expect your ghost to visit me. And I want you to do the same. If I’m a ghost I’ll do my best to get here.”

  He liked the idea of meeting her here in forty years. He liked the idea that they would come together to review their lives and reaffirm their choices—their choice of vocation, and their choice of each other.

  He believed that their choice of each other was permanent. He was sure that they would wake up in the same bed that morning and walk to the tower together.

  On the morning of their appointment, Schiller woke alone, with a howling backache from the too-soft mattress of his hotel room. He dressed slowly and went out into the bright cool day.

  He took the Métro to the Champ de Mars, walked up the long row of stone steps, and emerged on the large bright plaza, with the tower in the middle distance to the west.

  The tower was resplendent in the clear day. He sat on a low stone wall a few feet from a group of German tourists who were taking pictures of one another and clowning for the camera.

  He sat there, an old man in a breeze, in the quiet of the spring afternoon.

  Nothing is foreordained. If a few things had gone differently, Stella would still be alive.

  It was astonishing that she couldn’t join him here.

  When most of the people you’ve loved are gone, you begin to let go.

  Once, when he was five years old, he asked his mother why people have to die. She told him that when people get old they get tired, and they want to die, because it’s like going to sleep. When she said this he was sure she was lying: she was just trying to make him think that things always worked out for the best.

  But now, sixty-six years later, he felt that there was a kind of truth in what she had said. With the death of so many of the people he loved, the world had become a strange place, and leaving it would mean less than he had ever thought it could.

  It was a cool blue breezy day; thick clouds were hurrying along low in the sky. For forty years, he had wondered what the weather would be like on this day. He’d hoped it would be a nice day, so that he and Stella—as he’d pictured it during the first fifteen years of his anticipation—would be able to sit outside. He had worried that the day, when it finally came, might be marred by rain or by a freak April snowstorm. But it was pleasant and cool.

  He sat huddled up in his raincoat; the few hairs he had were stirring in the breeze.

  Of course he had considered not coming. The money he’d spent on this trip—more than a thousand dollars, what with the airfare and the hotel and the meals—could have been spent in much more intelligent ways. He could have just given it to Ariel, and he probably should have.

  But he had to come. He had to come, to keep faith with the young woman and the young man who had made the appointment.

  He didn’t look like a romantic figure, this tall fat man in his battered raincoat. If you had seen him there, you would have thought he was sitting on the little wall only because he was out of breath. You wouldn’t have thought him a romantic hero, and Schiller certainly wasn’t thinking of himself that way. But perhaps that is what he was. As mild a man as he seemed, he had lived steadily in the service of his passion; and if he had come to honor an impossible appointment, then it was only another gesture in keeping with this way of life, this need to live out his pa
ssions, even if they were futile passions, to the end.

  He could still remember what it was like to walk these streets with her when it seemed as if the possibilities of life were endless. It was a time when, out of necessity, they kept everything simple—they had few possessions; there was nothing in their lives but love and work. But they had everything they wanted.

  They had two years of it. Sometimes they talked about living there permanently; but when Stella became pregnant within a month of finishing her dissertation, she took it as a signal that they should go home.

  He resisted for a while; he thought they could make a life in Paris. But he knew his position was doomed. He could never hold his own in arguments with Stella: she had spent the better part of her adult life immersed in the Western philosophical tradition, and whenever he tried to engage her in debate she made short work of him. They got ready to go home.

  On the eve of their departure, she was seized with worry that they’d made the wrong choice. She suggested that they cancel their flight and stay on for a few more months. He didn’t take her seriously—they’d paid for the tickets and it was too late to get a refund—and they left Paris the next day as planned.

  Forty years later, he still wondered whether everything might have turned out differently if he had listened to her that night.

  He had thought about this for years. If they’d stayed here only six months longer, only six weeks longer, everything that followed would have been subtly changed, and she might be alive today.

  But now he realized that it didn’t really matter. She was gone, and he would follow soon enough, and it would be as if neither of them had ever been.

  Sitting on the little stone wall, he waited for her ghost to come, but it didn’t. He couldn’t feel her presence at all.

  He had thought about this odd appointment so many times over the years that in a part of his mind, the part that doesn’t believe in the laws of nature or in any laws at all, he had come to believe that perhaps her ghost would somehow show him a sign. In the irrational part of his mind there had survived the hope that she would find a way to show him that some slip of a glimmer of a trace of a hint of her still survived.