What Happened
Lydia arrived, unexpected, at his front door. She had not been there since before their trip to Montreal. They had not slept together since then. They had barely spoken since she explained how she felt after hours at her office on campus. And yet, there she was. Her face was stone.
He invited her in. She stood in the living room looking at the abject decay of Marcus and his home in the intervening two months. It was disgusting in there.
The grand jury had not found grounds for concern about Roy Carman’s actions. There was not enough reasonable doubt, they had decided, to advance the matter to trial, let alone convict him. He had done nothing wrong, they said, and there was nothing else to discuss. Sad, so sad, that the boy was dead. But the specific details of the actual case were all they had been instructed to consider by the judge, and the facts were all there, and the law was the law. He was indeed tall for a child. And that cap gun looked real. And those white children looked scared of him. And blacks commit more crimes around here. What else would a reasonable police officer have done? As a point of fact, Roy Carman had acted very bravely facing down an armed thug like that.
The city apologized to Roy for the hardship that the grand jury process had inflicted on him and his family, and after concluding their affairs, the city sent Lydia’s sister Karen a bill for $420 for the ambulance ride that took their dead child to the hospital.
Marcus did not see Lydia often after Jeffrey was shot, but he did see her. A café off-campus. The stone edge of a fountain with a sandwich from Subway. They mostly sat together. She didn’t have the strength to grieve and break up with him simultaneously. It was easier for her to accept his presence. This was before the grand jury.
That woman—that Lydia Jones who had lost a nephew—was a person bereft by the loss of love and the universe that constituted a person she knew. But after the grand jury: that was something else. That was a woman who wasn’t struck only by an emotion but by an understanding. What had once been theory, had been words, had been conclusions, was now Truth. She had encountered the edge of what her life could be in a way that she had never actually experienced before.
Lydia Jones had been smart and she’d studied hard, and earned her degrees and finally published enough—been lucky enough, focused enough—to have landed a solid academic position in a time, and in a subject area, where competition was fierce. She had studied race, she had experienced race, she had taught race. But until that moment she had not been entirely consumed and nullified by it.
She came to Marcus’s house—by then a dump—to collect her few items and create, for herself, a proof of finality. She stuffed them into a brightly colored duffle bag, forcing the items into the bottom as if she were a piston. T-shirts, nightgowns, three dresses, undergarments, and a pair of jeans. Two pairs of shoes. She entered the bathroom. Marcus heard the sounds of perfume jars and beauty implements being tossed in with them.
It was a beautiful day for leaving his house behind. The sunlight glinted off the windows of the passing cars from the off-ramp, and each time it did the bedroom burst into Technicolor. The palette of the bedspread—green and yellow and red, colors he’d been attracted to in the shop and later forgot existed in the oppressive dark of the house—roared into view with each passing car.
The staccato strobes from the bus windows were blinding. In the light, Lydia appeared and disappeared—there and gone. There and gone. There and gone.
Marcus told Irv and Sigrid about their discussion while she packed. What he said at the top of the stairs. How he became aware of the color of himself—not what he looked like, but what it meant to be “white” in relation to her “black.” How there, then, his whiteness drowned out his unique and personal voice and in being so negated, he finally had some basis for imagining what Lydia must have been feeling every day. What she must have been feeling then. Negated, not by a person she loved, but by her entire country. And with that new knowledge, that new insight, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
When she was finished packing, Lydia swung the duffle bag over her shoulder with the grace of a dancer and descended the staircase to make for the world outside.
Marcus watched from the top of the stairs.
He could have shouted something, but his Lutheranism ran too deep. His edges had been filed off and the stumps worn down by a culture that didn’t know how to sin and then repent and so suppressed everything and hoped that God wouldn’t notice.
The screen door slapped the doorframe.
Whap.
And he was alone.
Out the door, down the street, Lydia humped her duffle bag like a soldier who was pissed to learn what the war had really been about.
Marcus stood outside
