“I can’t decide if you’re the blackest white man I’ve ever met or the whitest black man.”
He sucked in his breath, the words crashing into him. He felt as if she had unmasked him, laid bare the central conundrum of his life. For the rest of his life, her words would haunt him. He knew this with an immediate and fierce surety.
She watched his face for a full moment and then moved away, as if putting her sword back in its sheath. “Bye, Anton,” she said over her shoulder, and then ran up the four steps that led to her apartment.
He stood still, his chest heaving, as he stared at the closed door. He fought the urge to beat on that door with his fists, demand that she take back those malicious words. But after a few moments, his shoulders sagged and he made his way home, carrying an exquisite riddle that he would spend a lifetime trying to solve.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Anton stayed away from Carine for the rest of Thanksgiving break. On Monday night he returned to his apartment after a long day of classes to find a note of apology slipped under his door. He went to bed with a heavy heart that night, but the next morning, he called her while walking to school. When they finally got together for a quick lunch on Wednesday, it was as if they’d arrived at an unspoken agreement not to discuss the disastrous holiday. The same code governed his conversations with his parents, although during his first phone call to Pappy, the old man, true to form, boomed, “So how is that Trotskyite friend of yours?”
“She’s fine, Pappy.” He laughed. “She’s not a Trotskyite.”
“Could’ve fooled me.” Pappy sighed. “Ah, the passion of youth. She’ll settle down.”
Anton wasn’t so sure. The engagement ring rested at the bottom of his sock drawer. It seemed preposterous now, proposing marriage to Carine, when he was torn with so many doubts. Her passion, her indignation, which once seemed admirable to him, exotic, even, now felt tiresome. Sometimes he couldn’t tell if she was self-righteous or mentally unstable. It would help if he could meet her parents, see her in the context of her family, but Carine seemed in no hurry for him to visit them. Besides, the thing she’d said to him on Thanksgiving night, the conundrum that she’d laid at his feet, continued to haunt him. Was it accurate, what she had said? Or did she just have an awful knack for getting under his skin?
A few weeks later, they were celebrating the end of classes at India Palace when Carine casually referred to a high school friend as an Oreo.
“Oreo? Wow, that’s pretty racist,” Anton said.
“How so? It’s not a description of skin color, per se. It’s describing an attitude—a brother who thinks he’s white.”
The flat casualness of her tone irked him, took him back to the night of her exquisite insult. “Do you know how often you do this, Carine, pigeonhole people? You do it all the time. Maybe there are some of us who are, like, you know, not obsessed with skin color. The world has changed, Carrie. It’s not the sixties anymore. We are now in a post-racial age where we must—”
“Post-racial? I can’t believe it. Did you really say that?” Carine’s face battled multiple emotions—incredulity, disbelief, and vexation—until it settled upon murder. She shook her head. “Honestly, sometimes I don’t even know how we got together, Anton. Do you ever hear yourself?”
“Do you?” he began, but she cut him off. “When you look in the mirror, Anton, what do you see?”
“I see myself. Just that. A guy who has his feet in two worlds. Who wants to act as a bridge between those two worlds.”
She laughed humorlessly. “I’ll tell you what. Just go with me to Georgia one time. Leave behind your Harvard sweatshirt and your checkbook and the fact that your daddy is governor. And what you will see on the faces of the white men on the streets of Augusta will tell you who you really are.”
He rubbed his forehead in agitation. “Jesus Christ. It’s like you’re stuck in some time warp. Shit. My best friend is white. I don’t think Bradley even notices my skin color when he sees me.”
“You know why? Because you’re so damn colorless, you’re a ghost. Invisible. And if that’s how you choose to go through this life, you shithead, go right ahead. You go right ahead with your post-racial this and your Kumbaya that. I’ll just call it what it is—an identity crisis.”
He gripped his hand around his water glass to keep it from curling into a fist. So much for a pleasant celebratory meal. He had a sudden flash that it would always be like this with Carine—that she would challenge him, nudge him, provoke him. He saw a long string of tempestuous family gatherings, and suddenly, he wanted no part of it. His love for his parents was always reinforced by his gratitude—they had been a rich, successful couple, they could’ve adopted any kid, but they’d chosen to rescue him. He would not destroy his relationship with his family because of this headstrong, impetuous black girl who constantly seemed to want to battle the world. And him.
“Well? Black cat got your tongue?”
He laughed helplessly. “You see? You’re incorrigible. Even your idioms are racialized.”
“I didn’t start it, baby. It started about three hundred years before I was born.”
He shook his head in frustration. “You know, I’ve had a tough semester. I just finished my last exam, and we’re supposed to be celebrating. Is it too much to ask that we have a nice, quiet meal?”
Carine put her hand on his thigh. “Is that what you want, baby?” she purred. “A nice, soft, pliant girlfriend?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, bemused. “But hell, it’d be nice to find out what one looks like.”
Her eyes flashed, but she kept up her new persona. “I see.” She batted her eyes at him so coquettishly that he giggled. But then her hand moved higher up his thigh and he stopped giggling.
As if to teach him a lesson, she took him to her apartment after dinner and fucked his brains out. When they were done and his eyes were still misty, she leaned over his chest and whispered, “I hope you enjoyed your sweet Valley girl fuck.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE