She didn’t say another word, but it was obvious that she didn’t get it. He told himself it was okay, he didn’t mind. But he did. Something pure and real had happened to him when he’d read Walden at sixteen. He remembered it well, that selfish moment of self-discovery, of finding something that belonged only to him. Up to that point, everything in his life had been borrowed. His bedroom was borrowed from a dead boy, as were his parents. His best friend was inherited, seeing as how Brad’s dad and his dad were also the best of friends. The clothes on his back, the shoes on his feet, had been given to him. Whatever he was, whatever voice he might have developed, whatever pitch he may have learned to sing in, had been lost, muted, stolen from him. In broad daylight, in the middle of the day, he had been pulled out of his home, out of his old life, and transplanted into a new one. Without even knowing it, he constantly battled a film of inauthenticity that clung to him. Black boy in a white school. Black boy with light skin and golden eyes who looked vaguely foreign, exiled among people who liked the way he looked. Black boy who dressed so preppy that the occasional black person he encountered in his rich neighborhood—maid, janitor, gardener—looked at him with puzzled eyes, trying to solve the riddle of him. No, nothing in Anton’s life had belonged to him until he got his own copy of Walden. And then it seemed to him that the book had given him a new lineage, a saintly, courageous, self-reliant man who needed only himself and nature for company and validation. A man who occupied his own skin comfortably and thoroughly, a man who never had to ask himself the deadly, unknowable question, “Who am I?”
It was private, this obsession with Thoreau, so private that he had never shared it with Carine or anyone other than his dad. So why should he mind if she didn’t realize that he had given her a gift, his very soul, when he’d invited her along? Why should he mind her chatter, on the way back to Cambridge, about how Thoreau had influenced Gandhi in India and King right here at home—inane facts that every schoolboy knew, but ones that she was reading from some pamphlet that she’d picked up in downtown Concord?
They had eaten hamburgers in the car on the way home but decided to get a cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts after returning to Cambridge. He placed her cup of latte before her, and she took a few sips before saying, “This was a wonderful day. Thank you.”
Her words moved him, precisely because they were unexpected. In that moment he felt closer to her than he had in several months. He looked at her with the gratitude that the giver feels when his gift has been appreciated. “Really? You had a good time?”
She looked puzzled. “Of course. It just feels so good to get out of town once in a while. I’m so sick of being in Cambridge all the time.” She smiled. “And it was wonderful spending time with you.”
He smiled back, but his heart sank. This is what the day had been to her—an excursion. They could’ve gone to the Boston Aquarium, for all the difference it made. To her, the trip had been a picnic, not a pilgrimage.
He had felt many emotions around Carine—anger, frustration, ecstasy, contentment—but he’d never been lonely before. He felt lonely now because he’d offered her the truest, purest part of himself, and she had not known it.
He was arguing with himself about the unfairness of his thinking when she said, “Guess how much time Thoreau spent in prison for his civil disobedience?”
He shrugged irritably. “I don’t know. A couple of weeks?”
She looked at him, a glint in her eyes. “A night. A single night.”
“Okay.”
“Guess how much time King spent in prison for his civil disobedience.”
Too late, he saw the trap. When he spoke, his voice was cold. “I don’t know. And I don’t really care.”
“Eight days in Birmingham jail, alone. And many, many more times before and after.”
“So what’s your point, Carine?”
She shrugged. “Nothing. Just that he’s part of a trend, right? In a country where one third of black men are serving time, why would King have been different?”
“I thought we were talking about Thoreau.”
She rested her arms on the table and leaned in. “Thoreau’s theory, baby. Martin is practice.”
“I see.” And he did, saw it clearly, saw before him endless years of argument and miscommunication. He felt a sudden sense of liberation, as if the last thread binding her to him had snapped.
“That’s all you got to say? ‘I see’?”
He drained the last of his coffee and pulled himself up to his full height. “Yes,” he said. “That’s all.” He faked a yawn. “You ready to go? I have a long day tomorrow.”
Neither of them said much as he walked her home to her apartment. Anton felt enveloped in a cold white silence. But inside that silence, impenetrable by Carine’s voice or the sound of car horns or the desultory laughter of passersby, his thoughts were as sharp and lethal as ice. He glanced down at her as they walked and, for the first time, didn’t find her beautiful. The beauty that had dazzled and blinded him fell away, as if he had drunk a potion in a fairy tale, and he found himself walking beside an ordinary black girl, one who hid her insecurities behind a facade of bravado and radicalism. Her radicalism is phony, he thought, because it keeps her from seeing the world, blinds her to its mysteries and charms. Even her intellectualism is suspect because it’s not open-minded and skeptical and probing but, rather, circular, chasing its own tail. To chastise Thoreau for having spent only a single night in jail was to miss the forest for the trees.
“You coming in?” she asked when they reached the front door.
He hesitated. Would it be easier to say what he had to say in her living room? But then he felt her gaze on him and saw the uncertainty in her eyes and he knew that Carine suspected something. Brad’s words came back to him, except now they didn’t sound like something inside a Chinese fortune cookie. Now they sounded like the wisdom of the ages. When it’s time, you’ll know.
“Carine,” he said, and the word must’ve carried more than he realized—a sweet regret, an embarrassed gentleness—because already her eyes were filling up with tears and she was beginning to turn away. Still, he forced himself to go on. “I’m sorry. This isn’t working for me.”
“I know.” She brushed away her tears with such force that he wanted to take her hand in his to make her stop.
The wind swiveled the dead leaves at their feet, and he shivered a bit against the chill of the night, against the deadly cold entering his body. It would be hard to give up this impetuous, lost, blundering girl with her loud mouth and her lofty opinions and her bruised heart. At that moment, he loved her more than he ever had.
But then he thought back to Walden Pond and the solitude that he’d felt the first time he’d been there on his own. When it’s time, you’ll know. He knew. Now was the time, two months before graduation, now, before they made decisions driven by sentimentality or inertia that would tie their futures together, now, before they wasted the next decade of their lives trying to mix oil with water.
Carine looked up at him and he closed his eyes, bracing himself for a verbal assault of recriminations and insults. So he was startled to feel her fingers brushing his right cheek. “Bye, Anton,” he heard her murmur. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
He kept his eyes closed. The world looked safer that way, in the dark. When he finally opened them, the front door had shut and she was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Anton returned home the day after graduation, away from the possibility of running into Carine or any of her friends. He knew he would be back in the fall to attend Harvard Law School, but she would be gone by then, back to Georgia, and he wouldn’t have to tense each time he entered the Coop or the Harvard Book Store or any of their other haunts.