3. Also, the hottest.
And so he had hunted in antique stores and used-jewelry shops until he had found an engraved silver band. He thought it was elegant and hoped that she would, too. What her politics were about silver, he hadn’t a clue. He waited for a week to pass after the 9/11 anniversary. It felt wrong to be happy on that day, as if he were out of step with the mourning that engulfed the whole country. After a year, the trauma was still present—he still looked up nervously at the sky if a plane was flying at a low altitude—but the fact was, he was happy. He had been a happy fool from that first day with Carine, even though her political views and her outspokenness drove him crazy. At the beginning of their relationship, he was constantly trying to shush her in restaurants, on the street, where her loudly stated opinions were often met with hostile stares, even in progressive Cambridge. He often found himself looking around the room, smiling an appeasing smile, his skin tingling, his antennae up, prepared to get into a fight if need be to defend his opinionated girlfriend, but hoping to convey by his posture and body language his indulgent humoring of her, and that he was asking those around them for the same indulgence.
Until the day at the restaurant when she had fixed him a hard stare and said, “Whattsa matter, boy? I thought your name was Anton. Not Tom.”
He had flushed, pushed away his half-drunk Coke, gotten up wordlessly from the table, thrown down a twenty-dollar bill, picked up his jacket, and left. All the way home, his eyes stinging with tears, he had called her names. Bloody bitch. Bloody crazy bitch. Who the hell does she think she is?
It had been a short-lived quarrel. She had knocked on his door two hours later, and when he opened the door, her eyes were red and her face small and pinched. She had apologized and he had accepted. But the impact of her words lingered like the reverberation of a bell. The next semester, he signed up for a literature class with Skip Gates and heard the term “the white gaze” for the first time. He had spent his boyhood and teenage years, he realized, mindful of that white gaze. What would it feel like, he wondered, to be free and direct the way Carine was? To not have to conduct yourself in a certain way at all times? To not have to constantly smile to prove that you were unthreatening, to continually demonstrate that you were intelligent, articulate, and not an affirmative action charity case? Carine seemed to have no such hang-ups. She often wore her hair in dreadlocks and had an eclectic wardrobe, so she could go from African queen to college student in no time at all. She laughed uproariously when something was funny and did not when someone made a sexist or homophobic joke. No, nobody would ever accuse Carine of being a Tom.
He began to grow out his hair. It wasn’t an Afro, exactly, but it was longer than the close-cropped cut that he had worn ever since he had moved in with the Colemans. Carine went home to Georgia for a few days and returned with three collarless cotton shirts, all brightly colored, that her father had purchased in Kenya. Anton had balked at first—“I’m a T-shirt-and-jeans kinda guy,” he’d protested—but now they were his favorite shirts. With his longer hair and new wardrobe, the transformation was startling. Just last week at a coffee shop in Watertown, the waitress had asked him, “Where are you from?” When he smiled and said, “America,” she’d said, “Oh,” and hurried away.
He was wearing his blue Kenyan shirt as he rushed to meet Carine on Friday. She was waiting for him outside the Au Bon Pain at the Square, as planned. It was an overcast day, and she wore an oversize army jacket over her black T-shirt and jeans. He fingered the ring in his pants pocket as he approached her. She hadn’t spotted him yet, and he relished the few seconds of observing her. Even in repose, Carine’s face was alert, and he felt giddy with pleasure at the sight of her. He had dated some in high school and during his first year at Harvard, sweet white girls from good families, but he had not been madly in love with any of them. He had been enchanted by them, had liked them well enough, but the partings had always been friendly and bloodless. What he felt with Carine wasn’t so much love as a homecoming, and he honestly didn’t think it was racial—though she was the first black girl he had ever dated—so much as chemical, protons and electrons coming together. I guess that’s why they call it chemistry, he thought, but now she had spotted him, and he took the last few steps toward her and kissed her briefly on the lips.
“Your nose is cold,” he said, touching it with his finger.
“Yeah. And whose damn idea was it to meet here on this bleak day?”
“Actually, it was yours.”
“Oh. Well. In which case, what a great idea.”
They smiled at each other. “Where do you want to go to dinner?” he said. He had a vague idea that he would give her the ring at the restaurant without making too big a deal about it. He had the feeling Carine wasn’t the kind of girl who’d want a proposal on bended knee.
She scrunched up her nose. “You know what, baby? Do you mind if we just go back to your place and make some pasta or something? I feel like maybe I’m coming down with a cold.”
“Oh, no.” He nodded. “Pasta sounds perfect. You ready to go?”
He put his arm around her to protect her from the wind. She leaned in to him as they walked down Mass. Avenue toward his apartment. He took in the big gray clouds, the vivid green of the trees, and felt a trickle of happiness, pure and thick as honey, in his chest. This was the world, he thought, and he had a place in it. With this mad, crazy, impetuous woman by his side, he felt mighty, powerful, clear about his future. He realized now that he had never felt young until he met Carine. But he felt it now, and as they walked, he saw their future roll out before them like a plush red carpet.