TheTV above the bar is tuned to a Saturday afternoon football game being played in Florida.The male cheerleaders are tossing the women high into the dark-blue air.The bartender is a man in his sixties, tall and stately, with delicate broken veins in his hollow cheeks and thick author-itative eyebrows.He looks like a New England Protestant patriarch, he should be a county judge, and Kate wonders what wrong turns have brought him to this place, standing behind a noisy bar wearing a red cut-away jacket and a black bow tie.
“I’d like a largeTanqueray martini, no olives, no ice, very dry, and a Heineken,”Kate says.
The bartender narrows his vaporous blue eyes, while his trembling hands, dappled like the hide ofa fawn, worry the silver tops ofthe mix-ers slotted into the inside ofthe bar.“I’m going to have to see some sort ofID,”he says pleasantly.
“Are you serious?”
“A driver’s license, preferably.”
“You’re making my day.”She waits, but the bartender doesn’t move.
“What’s the drinking age in Massachusetts?”she asks.“Forty?”
When Kate gets back to the table, she finds Daniel has struck up a conversation with a couple at an adjoining table.The man, who appears to be about fifty, wears a heavy blue fisherman’s sweater;his short hair is the color ofpewter, and his skin is richly, intensely black.The woman with him, who, as Kate approaches, has reared her head to let out peals ofshrill laughter, is young and white.She wears a short, spangled skirt that Kate thinks would be risky even for a woman with long, slim legs.
Kate simply cannot help thinking this, that the black man might very well be blinded by the woman’s whiteness as well as her youth, and has not yet noticed her stockiness.
“Kate!”Daniel says, with an odd excess ofenthusiasm, the way men do when they’ve been caught at something and are trying to pretend everything is just great.
Kate sits and Daniel makes the introductions.The man’s name is Erick Ayinde;his accent is a mixture ofBritish and something else far more ex-otic, which Kate guesses isAfrican.The woman’s name is Christine Kirk; she speaks softly, carefully, as ifin vigilance against her real voice.
“Erick’s a private detective,”Daniel announces.
”Really,”says Kate.“Imagine.”
“Daniel tells us you’re a writer,”Erick says.
”I wish I had more time to read,”Christine says.“I love books.Do you think you might have written something I’ve read?”
“I’m not sure,”Kate says.“Tell me what you’ve read.”
Daniel has heard this reply before and knows he must laugh to cover the aggression ofit.
“And what about you, Christine?”Kate says.She takes a long drink ofher martini.Too muchvermouth, it tastes slimy.“Are you a detec-tive, too?”
“Yes, I am, an investigator,”Christine says, with a small, satisfied smile.She knows she has been underestimated.“Erick and I were in busi-ness together, but it got
“What kind ofdetective work do you mostly do?”Kate asks.
“Matrimonial?”
“Not so much ofthat,”Christine says.
”Mostly business and industrial,”Erick says.
”And missing persons,”says Christine.“Which I prefer.”
“Do you mind ifI ask you something a little on the personal side,”
Daniel suddenly says.
“The personal side is our bread and butter,”Erick says, smiling.He tilts back in his chair, drapes his arm around Christine.
“I take it you two are married?”
“Correct,”says Erick.
”Do you get a lot ofhassle, being an interracial couple?”
Kate cannot believe he has asked this question.It is not so much its considerable impertinence, but that it reveals what is really on Daniel’s mind.
“Do you want to handle this?”Erick says to Christine.
”No, it’s okay.You go ahead.”
“Well, first ofall, thank you for your question.Actually, Chrissy and I wonder why more people don’t ask us about this.Even our friends fail to ask us what it feels like to be going through this experience.”
Here, Christine interrupts.“Short answer? It’s extremely trying.
We’re always being looked at.”
“Or pointedly ignored,”adds Erick.“We live in Beacon Hill, in an upscale neighborhood.So, in a way, we’re sheltered from some ofthe more virulent forms ofracism.We live in a cocoon.Where we shop, where we eat, it’s not a problem.”
“I see things Erick doesn’t,”Christine says.“I see it in their eyes.”
“I can live with what’s in their eyes,”says Erick.
“But how does it affect your relationship?”Daniel asks.He has always had this earnest wide-eyed aspect to his personality, but it has never seemed so infantile and jejune to Kate before.She feels like dragging him from the bar by his hair.“It seems to me that it would either tear you apart or cement you together.”
“Oh, we circle the wagons, ifthat’s what you mean,”says Erick.“No question but that sharing the antipathy ofsmall-minded people bonds us.
But that’s not our marriage’s source ofstrength.”
“Then what is?”asks Daniel.
His behavior reminds Kate ofsomething her English publisher once said aboutAmericans, how they can say more to a stranger on an airplane than an Englishman generally says to his closest friend.
“Well, what binds us is what people said would drive us apart—our differences,”Erick says.“The terrible trap married people fall into is be-lieving that their spouse is actually a version ofthemselves, and that they will act as they act, want what they want, believe what they believe.
When the spouse fails to do this, when, let’s say for argument’s sake, the husband acts in some contrary way, the wife cannot help herselffrom be-lieving he is doing so just to annoy her, or out ofdisrespect, whereas he may very well be acting in accordance with how he was raised, his own particular psychological dynamic, but she can’t see this clearly because she feels that fundamentally they are the same, two sides ofthe same coin, as much brother and sister as husband and wife.”
Kate looks in wonder at Daniel, who is rapt, as ifthis blowhard were some sort offucking oracle.She casts wildly about in her mind, trying to come up with a gesture or phrase that could instantly extricate them, move them on to dinner or, better yet, back up to their room, their dear, old, immemorial room, where, Kate thinks, they can screw their way back into each other’s good graces.
“But with Chrissy and me,”Erick continues,“our differences are obvious and undeniable.I was born in Nairobi, educated inWales and Mon-treal, and then PaloAlto, and she comes fromWorcester, Massachusetts, her father was a policeman;and we bear this in mind, all ofit, the whole curious burden ofhistory.Our life together is a constant struggle to un-derstand.We have no assumptions, and few expectations.It’s a journey, do you see?”
“I do,”says Daniel.“I see what you mean.”
“How’d you two happen to meet?”Kate asks.“I’m curious.”
“Erick was one ofmy professors at Boston College,”Christine says.
“‘Controversies inTwentieth-Century Criminology.’”
Kate smiles.“Really,”she says,“I thought universities sort offrowned on things like that.”
“Kate!”Daniel says, admonishing her, but in a somehow teasing way, as ifshe were merely being irascible and eccentric.
IfErick and Christine feel insulted by Kate’s remark, they nevertheless remain serene.“How about you?”Erick asks.“How did you two hap-pen to meet?”
