Open Thread: For All the Zipped-Up Negroes
This is for the Zipped-Up Negroes, the upwardly mobile American and Non-American Blacks who don’t talk about Life Experiences That Have to Do Exclusively with Being Black. Because they want to keep everyone comfortable. Tell your story here. Unzip yourself. This is a safe space.
CHAPTER 34
Her blog brought Blaine back into her life. At the Blogging While Brown convention in Washington, D.C., during the meet-and-greet on the first day, the hotel foyer crowded with people saying hello to others in nervously overbright voices, she had been talking to a makeup blogger, a thin Mexican-American woman wearing neon eyeshadow, when she looked up and felt herself still and quake, because standing a few delicate feet from her, in a small circle of people, was Blaine. He was unchanged, except for the black-framed eyeglasses. Just as she remembered him on the train: tall and easy-limbed. The makeup blogger was talking about beauty companies always sending free stuff to Bellachicana, and the ethics of it, and Ifemelu was nodding, but was truly alert only to the presence of Blaine, and to him easing himself away from his circle, and moving towards her.
“Hi!” he said, peering at her name tag. “So you’re the Non-American Black? I love your blog.”
“Thank you,” she said. He didn’t remember her. But why should he? It had been so long since the meeting on the train, and neither of them knew then what the word “blog” meant. It would amuse him to know how much she had idealized him, how he had become a person made not of flesh but of little crystals of perfection, the American man she would never have. He turned to say hello to the makeup blogger and she saw, from his name tag, that he wrote a blog about the “intersection of academia and popular culture.”
He turned back to her. “So are your mall visits in Connecticut still going okay? Because I still grow my own cotton.”
For a moment, her breath stalled, and then she laughed, a dizzying, exhilarating laugh, because her life had become a charmed film in which people found each other again. “You remember!”
“I’ve been watching you from the other end of the room. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you.”
“Oh my God, what has it been, like ten years?”
“About that. Eight?”
“You never called me back,” she said.
“I was in a relationship. It was troubled even then, but it lasted much longer than it should have.” He paused, with an expression that she would come to know well, a virtuous narrowing of his eyes that announced the high-mindedness of their owner.
E-mails and phone calls between Baltimore and New Haven followed, playful comments posted on each other’s blogs, heavy flirting during late-night calls, until the day in winter when he came to her door, his hands sunk into the pockets of his tin-colored peacoat and his collar sprinkled with snow like magic dust. She was cooking coconut rice, her apartment thick with spices, a bottle of cheap merlot on her counter, and Nina Simone playing loudly on her CD. The song “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” guided them, only minutes after he arrived, across the bridge from flirting friends to lovers on her bed. Afterwards, he propped himself up on his elbow to watch her. There was something fluid, almost epicene, about his lean body, and it made her remember that he had told her he did yoga. Perhaps he could stand on his head, twist himself into unlikely permutations. When she mixed the rice, now cold, in the coconut sauce, she told him that cooking bored her, and that she had bought all these spices only the day before, and had cooked because he was visiting. She had imagined them both with ginger on their lips, yellow curry licked off her body, bay leaves crushed beneath them, but instead they had been so responsible, kissing in the living room and then her leading him to her bedroom.
“We should have done things more improbably,” she said.
He laughed. “I like cooking, so there will be many opportunities for the improbable.” But she knew that he was not the sort of person to do things improbably. Not with his slipping on of the condom with such slow and clinical concentration. Later, when she came to know of the letters he wrote to Congress about Darfur, the teenagers he tutored at the high school on Dixwell, the shelter he volunteered at, she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine but had, instead, a firm reed of goodness.
IT WAS AS IF because of their train meeting years ago, they could bypass several steps, ignore several unknowns, and slide into an immediate intimacy. After his first visit, she went back to New Haven with him. There were weeks that winter, cold and sunny weeks, when New Haven seemed lit from within, frosted snow clinging on shrubs, a festive quality to a world that seemed inhabited fully only by her and Blaine. They would walk to the falafel place on Howe Street for hummus, and sit in a dark corner talking for hours, and finally emerge, tongues smarting with garlic. Or she would meet him at the library after his class, where they sat in the café, drinking chocolate that was too rich, eating croissants that were too grainily whole wheat, his clutch of books on the table. He cooked organic vegetables and grains whose names she could not pronounce—bulgur, quinoa—and he swiftly cleaned up as he cooked, a splatter of tomato sauce wiped up as soon as it appeared, a spill of water immediately dabbed at. He frightened her, telling her about the chemicals that were sprayed on crops, the chemicals fed to chickens to make them grow quickly, and the chemicals used to give fruits perfect skin. Why did she think people were dying of cancer? And so before she ate an apple, she scrubbed it at the sink, even though Blaine only bought organic fruit. He told her which grains had protein, which vegetables had carotene, which fruits were too sugary. He knew about everything; she was intimidated by this and proud of this and slightly repelled by this. Little domesticities with him, in his apartment on the twentieth floor of a high-rise near the campus, became gravid with meaning—the way he watched her moisturize with cocoa butter after an evening shower, the whooshing sound his dishwasher made when it started—and she imagined a crib in the bedroom, a baby inside it, and Blaine carefully blending organic fruits for the baby. He would be a perfect father, this man of careful disciplines.
“I can’t eat tempeh, I don’t understand how you like it,” she told him.
“I don’t like it.”
“Then why eat it?”
“It’s good for me.”
He ran every morning and flossed every night. It seemed so American to her, flossing, that mechanical sliding of a string between teeth, inelegant and functional. “You should floss every day,” Blaine told her. And she began to floss, as she began to do other things that he did—going to the gym, eating more protein than carbohydrates—and she did them with a kind of grateful contentment, because they improved her. He was like a salutary tonic; with him, she could only inhabit a higher level of goodness.
HIS BEST FRIEND, Araminta, came up to visit him, and hugged Ifemelu warmly, as though they had met previously. “Blaine hasn’t really dated since he broke up with Paula. And now, he’s with a sister, and a chocolate sister at that. We’re making progress!” Araminta said.
“Mint, stop it,” Blaine said, but he was smiling. That his best friend was a woman, an architect with a long straight weave who wore high heels and tight jeans and colored contact lenses, said something about Blaine that Ifemelu liked.
“Blaine and I grew up together. In high school, we were the only black kids in our class. All our friends wanted us to date, you know how they think the two black kids just have to be together, but he so wasn’t my type,” Araminta said.
“You wish,” Blaine said.
“Ifemelu, can I just say how happy I am that you’re not an academic? Have you heard his friends talk? Nothing is just what it is. Everything has to mean something else. It’s ridiculous. The other day Marcia was talking about how black women are fat because their bodies are sites of anti-slavery resistance. Yes, that’s true, if burgers and sodas are anti-slavery resistance.”
“Anybody can see through that whole anti-intellectual pose thing, Miss Drinks at Harvard Club,” Blaine said.
“Come on. A good education isn’t the same thing as making the whole damn world something to be explained! Even Shan makes fun of you guys. She does a great imitation of you and Grace: canon formation and topography of the spatial and historical consciousness.” Araminta turned to Ifemelu. “You haven’t met his sister Shan?”
“No.”
Later, when Blaine was in the bedroom, Araminta said, “Shan’s an interesting character. Don’t take her too seriously when you meet her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s great, she’s very seductive, but if you think she slights you or anything like that, it’s not you, it’s just the way she is.” And then she said, in a lower voice, “Blaine’s a really good guy, a really good guy.”
“I know.” Ifemelu sensed, in Araminta’s words, something that was either a warning or a plea.
Blaine asked her to move in after a month, but it took a year before she did, even though by then she was spending most of her time in New Haven, and had a Yale gym pass as a professor’s partner, and wrote her blogs from his apartment, at a desk he had placed for her near the bedroom window. At first, thrilled by his interest, graced by his intelligence, she let him read her blog posts before she put them up. She did not ask for his edits, but slowly she began to make changes, to add and remove, because of what he said. Then she began to resent it. Her posts sounded too academic, too much like him. She had written a post about inner cities—“Why Are the Dankest, Drabbest Parts of American Cities Full of American Blacks?”—and he told her to include details about government policy and redistricting. She did, but after rereading it, she took down the post.