Lydia always hated Marcus’s house, but he had tried to keep it clean for her between the time of their first post-lecture coffee conversation and the Montreal trip. They usually went to her place—a two-bedroom on the upper floor of an old Victorian converted into a condo. There were some rare times, however, when she would come by and stay over. As their relationship deepened and stabilized in those formative weeks, she eventually commandeered a drawer and brought a few toiletries. He, in turn, stocked the fridge with the best he could buy, which was not much. Under these conditions she periodically stayed at his house. After Jeffrey, though, this stopped.
When they returned from Canada she pulled away from him. There were no more visits and he let the house go. They would see each other on campus and talk, but the connection—the sense of a love developing—was gone. She didn’t end it yet, not explicitly. He tried to reel her back.
“Let me take care of you,” he once said.
This is when she explained what his house “signified” to her. They were at her office. It was after hours. The janitor was buffing the floor with a giant metal polisher while listening to his iPod. The building was desolate.
Hers was a small office in a modern building. It had one large window that partly faced a green courtyard, but it was obstructed by another part of the same building. She there—the teacher—waiting for him to say something. He stood behind the chair reserved for the student. He wouldn’t sit. Wouldn’t play the student. He was her lover. He was here for an appeal, not a lecture or a grade. There were black-and-white photos on the wall of African American faces. He could recognize only a few: W.E.B. Du Bois. James Baldwin. Maya Angelou. Richard Wright. A black woman astronaut with a sweet face he should probably have recognized but didn’t. A dozen more portraits or busts in small frames collected from yard sales and antiquing trips. He wanted to ask them: “What do I say?”
He didn’t come for a lecture, but that is what she delivered. And not one that was heartfelt; not one that cried out from the vastness of her heart about loss and grief and anger. Lydia, instead, doubled down on academic and Latinate words of the intellect that seemed, to Marcus, inadequate and confining. The fancier her vocabulary, the more infuriated he became.
“What, Lydia?” he said after she started to explain calmly why, no, she did not want to visit him anymore. “What exactly does my apartment ‘signify’ to you?”
“Someone who couldn’t even keep what he was born with,” she answered.
“Which is what? We’re not rich. We aren’t powerful. My dad works on a farm. My sister is a cop. It was a little Norwegian farm that—”
“Your skin, Marcus! Your skin,” she said finally.
Was this a truth revealing itself, or was it simply the most offensive thing she could think of in that exact moment because she was so hurt and there was no one closer at whom she could lash out? Are we most truthful during our anger or just the most creative in finding ways to hurt people?
“Your skin is a shield,” she said. “My skin is a target. That’s it. That’s where the shovel hits the stone, don’t you understand? It isn’t some abstract discussion about inequality or indignity or history, Marcus. It’s about being born into danger. It is dangerous to be black. To be called black. To be labeled black. To be singled out, specified, categorized, compartmentalized, and ultimately treated and shelved as black. Jeffrey was born with a bull’s-eye for a face. And eventually someone shot at it. The end.”
“I’m not a symbol, Lydia. I’m a person.”
“You’re both.”
“I love you.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said aloud but clearly to herself.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No,” she said, immobile behind her desk.
Marcus was flailing for direction. Should he have been apologetic? For what? The past, the present, or the future? He was angry and defenseless and he felt wronged. Unable to think of how to defend himself, he chose to attack. This was the day of her death. These were the precipitating events. This is what he needs to relive and replay to settle on an understanding of this moment that will satisfy him while he sits by a pond in a forest in the soil of an America that will become his grave.
“You’re blaming me for this?” he asked. “For Jeffrey? For . . . my God . . . America?”
“No,” she’d said. “You’re just some foreigner. I absolve you, Marcus. But I look at you and I think about it. I look at you and it reminds me. I look at you and I . . . Your skin, your hair, your penis. I don’t want it near me anymore.”
“I didn’t do this,” he yelled at her in his defense. “I don’t want to let what’s most random about us matter most. It’s all so . . .”—he looked at her, he looked at the faces of the chorus on the wall, and through it all still said—“arbitrary!”
“It might be completely arbitrary that my skin tone makes my life dangerous and not yours, Marcus. But once it’s true, it stops being arbitrary. It becomes very consequential.”
And then, pathetically, he appealed the decision with the nothing that remained. Not as lover, not as an adult, not as a man. But as a child overwhelmed by impending loss and the final recognition that he was letting it all happen again; that words were failing him again. That if only he’d spoken his
