Something was creeping in his room. He could hear its tiniest motions, inching closer and closer to the twin bed that he slept on. The thing didn't seem to be trying to be inconspicuous about the noise it made, as though its movements would not possibly be heard over the din of the fan that the young man always kept on while he slept.
The thing's breath was close and rank; the smell of garlic and cigar smoke. The young man made to scream just as it's warm clammy hands wrapped around his throat. Its pale blue eyes stared into his almost affectionately and pulled him down, down, down.
Ty sat up in bed. He felt more exhausted in waking then he had in going to sleep, but he knew he would not be able to rest anymore. Yawning, he reached for the phone.
"Lana, you up?" He asked, cradling the receiver between his neck and his head.
"Ty?" She inquired in a groggy voice, “Are you OK? What time is it?"
Ty bulldozed on, ignoring her questions.
"Listen...you wanna meet up for brunch? Today? This afternoon?"
His voice cracked awkwardly, and his hand shook over the pot of coffee he began to brew. He closed his eyes as Lana took a deep breath that seemed to last an hour.
“Alright Ty," she said at last.
"1pm. Beekon's on 95th," he blurted out, and quickly hung up the phone before he lost his nerve.
The coffee was inky, just the way he liked it and he took a long drink, directly from the pot. The caffeine had an immediate effect on him and for a moment, he felt better than he had in a long time.
He looked over at his roommate's room and enviously noted that there was no motion in there. Mark was probably fast asleep, the fat chick from the bar at his side.
Ty wasn't a misogynist; "fat chick from the bar" was just what Mark called her. Ty marveled that the girl did not to mind being called this, and even seemed to swell with pride when he said it. But that was how Mark was. Charming and Irreverent.
Ty snapped on the news. At 6:30am, the typical gloom and doom stories of television journalism seemed stale, as though, on this Sunday morning, not enough evil had yet happened in the world to make headlines.
Ty's anxiety began to well up again, and he took another swig of the coffee.
What was it that Mark had said to him? Ah. That he was so caught up in black victimhood that he could not see when he was the one doling out the pain. That on some level, deep down, black people actually relished being treated badly because they had so adopted the role of the oppressed. They were masochistic, Mark said, for they purposely sought situations in which they felt abused as a consequence of their skin color. And now this intentional self-sabotage was at work in Ty's strange aloofness in regard to Lana's obvious advances. At the bar, Mark had smugly chugged his whiskey and issued his final prognosis:
"You're a nigger and she's a WASP, and you've decided that its 1920 or some shit and that it won't work. So, just to make things impossible for yourself, you've cut her off and denied yourself a perfectly fuckable situation. Brilliant dude, brilliant."
“Fat chick from the bar" had just looked down at her margarita, while Ty had, not for the first time, called his friend a racist. She was always embarrassed when the roommates argued, and the liberal in her cringed, not at the "n" word, but at the "r," word "racist."
In their first semester in law school, Lana, Ty, and Mark, along with two others, had formed a study group in order to conquer the famous Larry Stephen's section of property law. Now, in their second year, the group continued to work together, and it’s members were regarded as the best and brightest of the class.
Lana and Ty had, from the start, had chemistry. They were both from the Midwest, he from Cleveland, she from Dearborn, and they bonded over the fact that they both said "pop" while their study mates said “soda". They both shared a passion for jazz, and discovered that each had seen Bradford Marsalis perform several times. They each enjoyed cheap beer, and were alcoholic lightweights who believed their tolerance to be greater than it actually was.
But she was blond, and that weighed on Ty.
He rebuffed her efforts to go to the Blue Note Jazz Club, always gentle but firm. He always brought along Mark or others of their study group when she asked him to dinner. And in the summer between 1L and 2L, when they were left alone at a bar by several of their law school friends bent on making what they felt was inevitable happen, Ty had gotten up to go the restroom, and left the restaurant altogether. Later, when he began to feel bad at having left the bill on Lana, he justified his actions by saying that her summer associate position at Ernst and Young yielded her more than enough to pay for it.
Since that incident, Ty had not seen Lana. He had been busy at his own summer associate position (at a boutique firm in midtown) and then had briefly gone home to Cleveland before school started up again. On his arrival back in New York City, he had largely kept to himself, as he still had days to kill before classes. It was quite by accident, on the Saturday before the first day, that he literally ran into her while racing for a 1 train at Penn station.
"Hey," she had said with a radiant smile.
"Hey," he had replied, at once excited and anxious in seeing her. "I gotta go catch the -"
"Of course you do," she said cutting him off and rolling her eyes. She laughed out loud at his awkward expression, and in a moment, disappeared into the crowd.
Ty blinked and took another swig of the coffee. Maybe Mark was right; it was he handing out the pain. But something about this girl scared him. Looking at her made his legs turn to jello, and his heart flutter onto nausea. Her petite stature, and delicate features, and her whiteness, oh her overwhelming whiteness.
Six beers deep, Ty had tried to explain to Mark that people would stare. They'd bless their daring or curse their intermingling. No one would ever just let them "be" and from the outset, their relationship would be damned. This was common sense. Mark had just chuckled.
Ty took a long sip of coffee. He wasn't sure what had possessed him to ask her to brunch. He knew it was folly, but the heart knows no reason. He was in love and he hoped, against the odds, that that would be enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment