Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

melancholy from my days, that perhaps I had actually found my bar. It was agreeable to belong somewhere, to a region, to a family, to a man.

I said as much to a new acquaintance at a party, a tall skeptical-looking surgeon who had the nondescript features of the Torino upper classes, prematurely wrinkled from a lifetime of winters spent skiing in the Alpine snowfields. He laughed when I told him about the bar. “I’m sorry to disillusion you,” he said. “But that is a rather naughty little place. It’s notorious for being the starting point for Belle du Jour adventures. A lot of those bored wives are waiting for telephone calls about personal ads, or to meet strange men as previously arranged. People say that some of them get paid for it.”

He laughed again as he saw my expression. “Strange, I didn’t think you were a prude.”

I wasn’t shocked at the goings-on in the Bar del Buon Caffe, but rather at the stupid ease of my own self-deception. I should have realized, I told myself, that no matter how solidly planted one feels, the daylight hours are always times of random searches, of changing shapes in the traffic and in the fog along the street. It occurred to me then that for the rest of my life the delinquents, in one form or another, would be peering over my shoulder. I ended up deriving a curious comfort from the idea. It was a thought that went well with the taste of strong coffee and milk.

The Pulpit

Once upon a time, O Best Beloved, some years before your quick feet and lucent curls were seen upon the earth, your father was a student courting me. Through a long Boston winter he escorted me, in the time-honored mode of the university suitor, to the symphony, to small, dank ethnic restaurants, to ocher-colored foreign films at the Brattle, and on glacial strolls beneath the elms of Harvard Yard. And I have to confess that on many of these occasions I behaved in a capricious and bad-mannered fashion, yawning openly and pleading exhaustion at 10:00 P.M. My private name for him was the White Boy, though he was certainly not the only white boy in my life, confined as I had always been by the aspirations of a middle-class black family to the narrow channels of East Coast private education. But there was something about him that seemed whiter than the others: white in the sense of inexperience and blandness, a sort of hapless innocence that to a romantic girl of any color seems worse than all the seven deadly sins. This irritating naïveté was joined to another quality that I couldn’t define, but that seemed equally intolerable, and all in all I had decided to be busy for his future invitations. I’d just come to this decision when I found myself drinking Guinness with him—for the last time, I vowed—in one of those historic college bars where every wooden booth is a palimpsest of carved letters recording extinct love affairs and dead politicians, and whose cracked leatherette cushions bear the buttock prints of jocks long gone to seed. And, as if my soon-to-be-rejected companion had read my thoughts, he looked at me with a pair of ingenuous blue eyes that were part of the problem and began to tell a story.

He described a summer seven years earlier, in the late nineteen sixties, when he was working for a civil rights group in western Alabama. The place, which I’ll call Tenlow County, was a vast chunk of cotton country adrift in rusticity. So much so that the seismic upheaval in Southern life that had begun in the same state almost a decade and a half before with an intrepid laundress on a Montgomery bus had scarcely rippled the old feudal reign of injustice over local plantations and towns. Things were about to change, however. In Tenlow County that summer an election was approaching that promised to be one of the great theaters of confrontation of that peculiarly confrontational year, when all of America was as candidly divided—between old and young, long hair and short, stoned and straight, hawk and dove—as the squares on a chessboard. The facts were simple: several thousand black men and women, most of them sharecroppers, were for the first time in their lives intending to vote. And a smaller group of whites, the people who ran things in the county, didn’t want that to happen. A constellation of civil rights organizations had moved onto the scene, and young volunteers had come from all over the United States to help with the voter registration drive. Your father—whom from now on I’ll call Y.F.—and his best friend McGinty drove two thousand miles from their town in Southern California. They were both seventeen.

Now at first, as I sat in the bar watching the foam evaporate on my Guinness and trying to shut my ears to the yammering of some Winthrop House oarsmen in the next booth, I felt annoyed by this story. How unsubtle, I thought, to try to seduce a black girl with tales of your youthful prowess in the civil rights movement. I myself, with a battling Baptist minister for a father, and siblings who always seemed to be integrating some school or other, had been weaned on civil rights legends. So I wasn’t the slightest bit charmed, and was tempted to invent a morning conference with my adviser that would allow me to end the evening even earlier than usual. But for some reason I kept listening.

What intrigued me at first, I think, was just how ordinary a story it seemed. Ordinary like a fable or a page from a reading primer, something I seemed to have heard many times before. And how the voice in which he told it, with its flat California vowels and suburban syntax, suited the words as an instrument suits a particular melody. It began in fact as a fabulously commonplace story