230: Black & White
"I look like a goddamn monkey in this."
"You look fine. And please-- please-- watch what you say tonight."
"Ah yes. No Freudian slips about how nice it is to meet you, Mr. Hayden, and did you know your son likes to take it up the ass, sir?"
In the mirror behind me, Marshall visibly winced. "Yes. That's the sort of thing I'm asking you not to say. "
"Come on, it might give him a fatal heart attack. Then you inherit! Very convenient."
"Paul..."
I rolled my eyes at my reflection. "Yes, Marshall, I get it. You're the good straight son, I am your respectable and equally straight friend and classmate. I am polite and civil and well-bred, and use the salad fork for the salad and the dinner fork for the dinner, and I avoid prefacing anything I say with the qualifier of having first heard it from a hooker."
Marshall smiled and slid the bowtie around my neck. "Thank you. ...do you know which is the salad fork and--"
"Oh, shut the fuck up. I went to a fucking private boys' school, Marshall. I know which fork to use."
"Okay, okay." He paused and glanced up at me, fingers momentarily stilling on the tie. "You went to a private school? You never told me that." He tied quick loops with the black fabric while I continued to give my tuxedo-clad reflection critical glances. "Why'd you never mention it?"
I frowned at the glass and raised a hand to loosen the tie; it felt too tight. "Because it doesn't matter? "
"Leave it alone, it's supposed to be snug. And of course it does."
"Because it shouldn't matter, then."
Marshall gave me a long look in the mirror, then shrugged. "It will to my father," he said, and reached for a carnation. The flower was pale against his fingers, a moment of striking contrast. He slid it into my buttonhole, then gave me a final once-over.
"You look fine," he repeated, this time with a grin. "You ought to wear more suits."
"Yeah, I'll get right on that. When I win the fucking lottery. Let's get downstairs? Unless you want daddy dearest to start wondering what's taking us so long."
***
I'd met Marshall at Columbia, second year. Unlike CUNY, Columbia's law school had plenty of rich kids in attendance (a J.D. is a decent degree to take home to Daddy Rockefeller; a B.S. in criminal science is less so, I presume), of which Marshall was one. However, he had a skin disease preventing him from hanging out with the rest of the polo-and-rowing-teams crowd: an inherited disorder of niggeritis. Or so I liked to joke.
He tried, in the beginning-- Daddy certainly would have wanted him to be in with that crowd-- but in addition to being black, Marshall had the damning strikes of a) having half a brain as opposed to none, and b) being a shitty polo player.
(And queer, but that fact, at least, was safely closeted.)
So he ended up with a few others who lurked around the edges of idyllic campus life, who pulled better-than-average grades and who were, for some reason or another, unpalatable to any other group. Kaede, myself, Tommy Ball, a few others. Some I considered friends and some not. People to party with, at any rate. In Marshall's case, someone to sleep with.
Someone to... someone to stay up until five a.m. arguing with. Explore the lost little back-street bars with. Debate case precedents with, that's fun. Fence with, since he got me into it (rich kid sport...). Someone to curl up in bed with, when it's raining like hell outside.
Not a hell of a lot to ask, really. So. Marshall and me, me and Marshall, what-the-hell-ever; Marshall and me for, I don't know, the last half of our second year? Several months, anyway.
And then the sonofabitch had to ask me to come for a weekend at his family's place in the goddamned Hamptons.
***
Daddy Hayden was tall, greying at the temples, immaculate in his own snazzy tux. I behaved myself perfectly through the introductions (Marshall sighed not-quite-imperceptibly in relief) to him, to Mrs. Hayden, to Marshall's older brother, and to numerous other people whose names I no longer remember.
I was polite, but Jesus. You could damn well smell the money in the air, choke on it if you weren't careful, and regardless of what Marshall said about how I looked in the tuxedo (after all, he was biased), I could sure as hell feel myself suffocating. Felt like fucking Adams, squared.
Not that I let this show. I behaved. I can do 'witty' and 'sociable' if given a reason, and Marshall had asked for it, so. So I played along, sipped champagne, smiling the smile of an insider at talk of summering at Martha's Vineyard and sailing in Kennebunkport.
A card table in the library stands ready/To receive the puzzle which keeps never coming.. .. (The opening from James Merrill's "Lost in Translation," published in Divine Comedies, which copy was on loan to me from Marshall. He being the one with the abiding interest in poetry, not me.)
All of the multiple courses of the dinner went off with no catastrophes, no slips of my tongue against anything but the salad fork. I was busy watching: watching the other dinner guests (all white); and watching Marshall.
Downright fascinating, the alchemy effected by his suit: an arcane transfiguration by which the Marshall I knew was magically whisked away, and some other Marshall showed up who looked like him but sure as hell didn't sound like him.
New Marshall shared the table's prevailing political views; New Marshall demurred and deferred to his brother or father whenever possible. New Marshall expressed his admiration for a movie we'd gone to together and walked out of. New Marshall agreed with the Supreme Court's decision on Bakke. New Marshall disapproved of Jimmy Carter. New Marshall approved, a lot, of the young woman seated across from him.
At some point after dinner I took a glass of whiskey and myself off to the outside, to the verandah of the grand old Hamptons house. This was-- June? yes, June-- and despite the hour there was still light in the sky. I made a circuit of the house, once-- Sour windfalls of the orchard back of us-- and settled myself on a deck chair. Listened to the rolling surf, the muted sounds of music and conversation from inside.
A window on one side of me gave me back my reflection. Gave me back somebody anyway. Somebody whose hair was cut to a respectable length, somebody dressed in borrowed formalwear, white carnation on a black lapel, black band around a white throat.
Marshall found me out there, when he came looking with cigars and shot glasses in hand for us both. We smoked his father's cigars and drank his father's brandy in silence for a bit, watching the light fading.
"You've been holding out on me. Angela should get you in her next play, you're a fucking natural," I said after exhaling a line of smoke at the Atlantic. Marshall shot me a glance, come again, and I grinned. "Your thespian abilites, Marshall. Quite impressive. I especially liked how you kept reminding yourself to shoot occasional glances at her cleavage."
"Oh. That." He laughed a bit and looked back to the water. "Yeah. Her father's a good friend of mine."
"Mmmm." I raised a hand to undo the damn bowtie. I probably should have left the conversation there, let us laugh the whole farce of an evening off, but, hell.... "They won't let you marry her, you know."
Marshall's gaze flickered back to me, but he hadn't registered the edge, so he just grinned, white teeth in a face too dark for this place. "Fine. I think you'd be higher on my list than her anyway."
Asshole. Idiot. Both. I didn't smile. "They won't let you do that, either."
I caught the fade of his smile from the corner of my eye, but I was more interested in the petrels wheeling above the darkening water. The cigars' rich scent mingled with that of the ocean.
"I know that," he said quietly.
Brandy burned going down. Useful against the breeze coming off the water now. I'd only been here five hours and already I was exhausted of it, dead fucking sick of it, ready to go back to New York. I slid the bowtie the rest of the way off, wadded it up one-handed.
"I think I'm done for the evening. Make my excuses to the patriarch, will you? Something about how the caviar or the superiority disagreed with me, we're not sure which, but I'll be up bright and early in the morning to attend the regatta or wine-tasting or horse-racing or what have you with you all."
I finished the glass off and set it down on the railing, turned to go. And that could have, might have, been that, except the dumb fuck put a hand on my arm as I passed him, said: "Paul--"
"What?" Someone with a brain would have picked up on the warning in how quietly I said it. But, as mentioned, Marshall had half a brain.
"Paul-- it doesn't really bother you that I'm flirting with her, right? I mean, you do know it's just for show? For my father?"
Oh, Jesus, if you grabbed a fuckin' porcupine you'd still miss the point, wouldn't you, Marshall? "Yes, Marshall, I know that. Thank you for clarifying. Out of curiosity, is there any of tonight that's not for show?"
"What?"
"Fuck's sake. You, tonight, in there. Playing at being straight is one thing, goddamn half the fags in the country do that if not more; we call it a closet. But hell, the last time I saw anybody so thoroughly try to reinvent their entire selves it was in the context of fucking method acting. Jesus, Marsh. You do know, yes, that no matter how you dress or what you say or whose ass you kiss-- and this goes for your father as well, and for your mother and brother and Jesus does it ever go for you-- you do know you're never going to be white, right? That those fucking assholes in there with their country club memberships and their sailboats will always think of you with, yes, a certain fondness, a certain affection-- roughly the same sort given to their favored hunting dogs?"
I swung up into a stilted falsetto. "Oh yes. The Haydens. Good people. Our sort of people. So respectable. Not like the blacks you see most places." Back down into my normal range. "What a fanfuckingtastic future awaits you, Marshall. Start mixing the whitewash now; God knows you're going to need enough of it. Seeing how you're trying to paint over your skin and your flaming rainbows."
When Marshall got mad, he would shake, little fine tremors of his balled fists and jaw. He was doing so now, staring at me with his head lowered, like a bull. I watched his hand moving on the railing, silently urging him to do it, take the swing, come on you fucker, hit me if you want to.
Tell me how you really feel.
He didn't. He swallowed it back up, bit out shortly, to my disappointment, "I think you're drunk, Paul."
"Entirely fucking possible. And? Doesn't make anything I'm saying less true. Indulge my curiosity a bit more: did you know your dad offered me a job? You were busy flirting, so it's possible you missed it. But you were right about him liking the private school thing. He said that he'd be happy to give a bright young man like myself a place with the company upon graduation, especially a friend of Marshall's. Because 'Marshall will need good people working for him, eventually.'
"Was that the big plan with the invitation, Marshall? Get me a job offer? Good way to keep me around without arousing suspicions, after all. So you can marry whoever it is Daddy picks out, and conveniently fuck an employee on the side?"
Oh, he was vibrating now. Come on, take the fucking swing. "If you honestly think I'd do that to anyone working for me-- let alone you--"
"Well, why not? Pretty common for Massa, back in the day, and we've established you are trying to pass, just without the makeup."
That got me a reaction, though still not the punch I was hoping for. He slammed the railing with his hand and said, "Apologize. Apologize for that."
"Why? Are you really offended, Marshall? I mean, let's be frank here: how does the history of your enslaved race directly affect you? Not your granddaddy, not even your daddy who has, I am sure, a heartwarming tale of rags-to-riches by dint of his own hard work and ingenuity-- but you, Marsh. You who were chauffered from your home on the Upper East Side to your private school, you who summered here, you who always had the benefit of the best honorary whiteness daddy's money could buy. You, who have the luxury of being able to agree with those assholes in there that the admissions process should be colorblind, because you've always been in the top tier anyway, and fuck knows daddy would have hired you tutors if you'd ever fallen even one letter grade behind.
"So tell me, Marshall, how is it about you if I say 'nigger' or 'massa'? If we were in Harlem, I'd have been knifed ten seconds after that came out of my mouth and I'd have likely deserved it, for stupidity if nothing else, but we're not in fucking Harlem, we're in the goddamn playground of the rich and entitled and you're outraged at me not because what I said really cuts but because you feel you should be."
Rough silence; the roar of the surf. Marshall got himself under control and ground out, "You have no idea what my life's been like. No damn idea."
I conceded the point with a wave of my hand, trailing smoke. "Which is about as much idea as you have of what the average schmuck-of-color deals with in this country. Chrissake, if you can't accept you're one entitled-as-hell-Oreo, then maybe I ought to introduce you to some of those Harlem gents I know. Shit, if Mamajohn was still alive, she could do a fine job educating you," I muttered around my cigar.
Marshall's face was somewhere on the far side of anger, seguing into incredulity now. "You're telling me how to be black."
"Well, Jesus, somebody ought to do it. Since Daddy's passed on doing--"
"Stop talking. About. My father."
I took a breath, a drag, another breath. Dark out now, dark over the water, except where the twinkling lights of the beachfront houses reflected. Party still going inside, in its genteel fashion. I wanted out of the fucking tux, and the hell out of the Hamptons.
Marshall was still staring at me, jaw working, fists clenched at his sides-- then he stopped, laughed a short hard laugh. "God. This isn't about race at all, is it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"This. You. You being this much of a dickhead. This has nothing to do with me being black, and everything to do with me being in the closet and refusing to admit we're together. That just pisses you off, doesn't it, Paul? This is about that. "
"You moron, Marshall," I exhaled with my cigar's smoke. "You fucking moron. This is about honesty.
"Black or white or fucking zebra stripes. Gay or straight. I don't care, Marshall, but what I do care about is that you don't have the balls for, apparently, any of those options. And, you know, that's your goddamn issue to work through, but what gets me in my asshole is that you dragged me into it. That I'm here playing straight man and suck-up, putting on someone I'm sure as hell not for you.
"Fuck's fucking sake, Marshall, I don't do that for the sake of my best interests, so you explain to me why I should for yours."
He was no longer trembling with anger. He was just very still, very still. Flatly he said, "You knew my situation. If you weren't willing to go along with it, then why did you even come? "
"Hell if I know." I jammed the cigar's stub out on the railing with a certain amount of violence. "Because you asked, and because I'm a fucktard, I guess. Christ, I don't know, maybe I thought you intended to introduce me to dad as the real thing and so kill the bluebirds of coming-out and meet-the-parents with the same Paul-shaped stone."
Marshall made a wordless noise of pure frustration and rubbed at his face with his hands. "Goddamit, Paul. It's-- it is not that simple, okay? It would... Jesus, it would break my mother's heart for one thing, and my dad... he does have the rags-to-riches story, alright? He did haul himself up from nothing, and everything I have, all those advantages you listed, he worked himself to the bone for. Getting us here. Getting us white, if you insist. And you want me to just throw all that back in his face, take the good reputation he spent forty years building and ruin it for your sake?"
Your sake, you shithead, I would have said, but he wasn't done. "Damn it, Paul. Sometimes you have to compromise. Sometimes you have to wait for things."
"Wisdom from Dad regarding Dr. Martin Luther King's prison letter, I'm guessing?"
He hit me then.
It was somewhat less satisfying than I'd hoped for.
I left the next day, while everyone else was at the regatta. Pled a family emergency back in the city to Mr. Hayden, senior. He let me go with a smile and a handshake and a you keep my offer in mind, son. Yes, sir.
But that night I took off the borrowed suit, skimmed out of the alienness of a nice set of clothes, picked them up and hung them carefully despite a strong desire to leave them rumpled on the floor. Not me, not then.
I lay on my back in the huge bed of the guest room, window open to the sound of the sea, holding a steak to my face with one hand and the bowtie with the other. Wrapped it around and around my fingers, listening to the silence from the other side of the wall, listening to the ocean, listening to nothing at all. Reciting Merrill to myself to fill the void.
...All too soon the swift
Dismantling. Lifted by two corners,
The puzzle hung together-and did not...
Nothing in this world is black and white. Nothing at all. It's one of my major problems with the world.
Try to change that, and you just end up with black and blue.
fandom: boondock saints
muse: paul smecker
word count: 3150
"You look fine. And please-- please-- watch what you say tonight."
"Ah yes. No Freudian slips about how nice it is to meet you, Mr. Hayden, and did you know your son likes to take it up the ass, sir?"
In the mirror behind me, Marshall visibly winced. "Yes. That's the sort of thing I'm asking you not to say. "
"Come on, it might give him a fatal heart attack. Then you inherit! Very convenient."
"Paul..."
I rolled my eyes at my reflection. "Yes, Marshall, I get it. You're the good straight son, I am your respectable and equally straight friend and classmate. I am polite and civil and well-bred, and use the salad fork for the salad and the dinner fork for the dinner, and I avoid prefacing anything I say with the qualifier of having first heard it from a hooker."
Marshall smiled and slid the bowtie around my neck. "Thank you. ...do you know which is the salad fork and--"
"Oh, shut the fuck up. I went to a fucking private boys' school, Marshall. I know which fork to use."
"Okay, okay." He paused and glanced up at me, fingers momentarily stilling on the tie. "You went to a private school? You never told me that." He tied quick loops with the black fabric while I continued to give my tuxedo-clad reflection critical glances. "Why'd you never mention it?"
I frowned at the glass and raised a hand to loosen the tie; it felt too tight. "Because it doesn't matter? "
"Leave it alone, it's supposed to be snug. And of course it does."
"Because it shouldn't matter, then."
Marshall gave me a long look in the mirror, then shrugged. "It will to my father," he said, and reached for a carnation. The flower was pale against his fingers, a moment of striking contrast. He slid it into my buttonhole, then gave me a final once-over.
"You look fine," he repeated, this time with a grin. "You ought to wear more suits."
"Yeah, I'll get right on that. When I win the fucking lottery. Let's get downstairs? Unless you want daddy dearest to start wondering what's taking us so long."
***
I'd met Marshall at Columbia, second year. Unlike CUNY, Columbia's law school had plenty of rich kids in attendance (a J.D. is a decent degree to take home to Daddy Rockefeller; a B.S. in criminal science is less so, I presume), of which Marshall was one. However, he had a skin disease preventing him from hanging out with the rest of the polo-and-rowing-teams crowd: an inherited disorder of niggeritis. Or so I liked to joke.
He tried, in the beginning-- Daddy certainly would have wanted him to be in with that crowd-- but in addition to being black, Marshall had the damning strikes of a) having half a brain as opposed to none, and b) being a shitty polo player.
(And queer, but that fact, at least, was safely closeted.)
So he ended up with a few others who lurked around the edges of idyllic campus life, who pulled better-than-average grades and who were, for some reason or another, unpalatable to any other group. Kaede, myself, Tommy Ball, a few others. Some I considered friends and some not. People to party with, at any rate. In Marshall's case, someone to sleep with.
Someone to... someone to stay up until five a.m. arguing with. Explore the lost little back-street bars with. Debate case precedents with, that's fun. Fence with, since he got me into it (rich kid sport...). Someone to curl up in bed with, when it's raining like hell outside.
Not a hell of a lot to ask, really. So. Marshall and me, me and Marshall, what-the-hell-ever; Marshall and me for, I don't know, the last half of our second year? Several months, anyway.
And then the sonofabitch had to ask me to come for a weekend at his family's place in the goddamned Hamptons.
***
Daddy Hayden was tall, greying at the temples, immaculate in his own snazzy tux. I behaved myself perfectly through the introductions (Marshall sighed not-quite-imperceptibly in relief) to him, to Mrs. Hayden, to Marshall's older brother, and to numerous other people whose names I no longer remember.
I was polite, but Jesus. You could damn well smell the money in the air, choke on it if you weren't careful, and regardless of what Marshall said about how I looked in the tuxedo (after all, he was biased), I could sure as hell feel myself suffocating. Felt like fucking Adams, squared.
Not that I let this show. I behaved. I can do 'witty' and 'sociable' if given a reason, and Marshall had asked for it, so. So I played along, sipped champagne, smiling the smile of an insider at talk of summering at Martha's Vineyard and sailing in Kennebunkport.
A card table in the library stands ready/To receive the puzzle which keeps never coming.. .. (The opening from James Merrill's "Lost in Translation," published in Divine Comedies, which copy was on loan to me from Marshall. He being the one with the abiding interest in poetry, not me.)
All of the multiple courses of the dinner went off with no catastrophes, no slips of my tongue against anything but the salad fork. I was busy watching: watching the other dinner guests (all white); and watching Marshall.
Downright fascinating, the alchemy effected by his suit: an arcane transfiguration by which the Marshall I knew was magically whisked away, and some other Marshall showed up who looked like him but sure as hell didn't sound like him.
New Marshall shared the table's prevailing political views; New Marshall demurred and deferred to his brother or father whenever possible. New Marshall expressed his admiration for a movie we'd gone to together and walked out of. New Marshall agreed with the Supreme Court's decision on Bakke. New Marshall disapproved of Jimmy Carter. New Marshall approved, a lot, of the young woman seated across from him.
At some point after dinner I took a glass of whiskey and myself off to the outside, to the verandah of the grand old Hamptons house. This was-- June? yes, June-- and despite the hour there was still light in the sky. I made a circuit of the house, once-- Sour windfalls of the orchard back of us-- and settled myself on a deck chair. Listened to the rolling surf, the muted sounds of music and conversation from inside.
A window on one side of me gave me back my reflection. Gave me back somebody anyway. Somebody whose hair was cut to a respectable length, somebody dressed in borrowed formalwear, white carnation on a black lapel, black band around a white throat.
Marshall found me out there, when he came looking with cigars and shot glasses in hand for us both. We smoked his father's cigars and drank his father's brandy in silence for a bit, watching the light fading.
"You've been holding out on me. Angela should get you in her next play, you're a fucking natural," I said after exhaling a line of smoke at the Atlantic. Marshall shot me a glance, come again, and I grinned. "Your thespian abilites, Marshall. Quite impressive. I especially liked how you kept reminding yourself to shoot occasional glances at her cleavage."
"Oh. That." He laughed a bit and looked back to the water. "Yeah. Her father's a good friend of mine."
"Mmmm." I raised a hand to undo the damn bowtie. I probably should have left the conversation there, let us laugh the whole farce of an evening off, but, hell.... "They won't let you marry her, you know."
Marshall's gaze flickered back to me, but he hadn't registered the edge, so he just grinned, white teeth in a face too dark for this place. "Fine. I think you'd be higher on my list than her anyway."
Asshole. Idiot. Both. I didn't smile. "They won't let you do that, either."
I caught the fade of his smile from the corner of my eye, but I was more interested in the petrels wheeling above the darkening water. The cigars' rich scent mingled with that of the ocean.
"I know that," he said quietly.
Brandy burned going down. Useful against the breeze coming off the water now. I'd only been here five hours and already I was exhausted of it, dead fucking sick of it, ready to go back to New York. I slid the bowtie the rest of the way off, wadded it up one-handed.
"I think I'm done for the evening. Make my excuses to the patriarch, will you? Something about how the caviar or the superiority disagreed with me, we're not sure which, but I'll be up bright and early in the morning to attend the regatta or wine-tasting or horse-racing or what have you with you all."
I finished the glass off and set it down on the railing, turned to go. And that could have, might have, been that, except the dumb fuck put a hand on my arm as I passed him, said: "Paul--"
"What?" Someone with a brain would have picked up on the warning in how quietly I said it. But, as mentioned, Marshall had half a brain.
"Paul-- it doesn't really bother you that I'm flirting with her, right? I mean, you do know it's just for show? For my father?"
Oh, Jesus, if you grabbed a fuckin' porcupine you'd still miss the point, wouldn't you, Marshall? "Yes, Marshall, I know that. Thank you for clarifying. Out of curiosity, is there any of tonight that's not for show?"
"What?"
"Fuck's sake. You, tonight, in there. Playing at being straight is one thing, goddamn half the fags in the country do that if not more; we call it a closet. But hell, the last time I saw anybody so thoroughly try to reinvent their entire selves it was in the context of fucking method acting. Jesus, Marsh. You do know, yes, that no matter how you dress or what you say or whose ass you kiss-- and this goes for your father as well, and for your mother and brother and Jesus does it ever go for you-- you do know you're never going to be white, right? That those fucking assholes in there with their country club memberships and their sailboats will always think of you with, yes, a certain fondness, a certain affection-- roughly the same sort given to their favored hunting dogs?"
I swung up into a stilted falsetto. "Oh yes. The Haydens. Good people. Our sort of people. So respectable. Not like the blacks you see most places." Back down into my normal range. "What a fanfuckingtastic future awaits you, Marshall. Start mixing the whitewash now; God knows you're going to need enough of it. Seeing how you're trying to paint over your skin and your flaming rainbows."
When Marshall got mad, he would shake, little fine tremors of his balled fists and jaw. He was doing so now, staring at me with his head lowered, like a bull. I watched his hand moving on the railing, silently urging him to do it, take the swing, come on you fucker, hit me if you want to.
Tell me how you really feel.
He didn't. He swallowed it back up, bit out shortly, to my disappointment, "I think you're drunk, Paul."
"Entirely fucking possible. And? Doesn't make anything I'm saying less true. Indulge my curiosity a bit more: did you know your dad offered me a job? You were busy flirting, so it's possible you missed it. But you were right about him liking the private school thing. He said that he'd be happy to give a bright young man like myself a place with the company upon graduation, especially a friend of Marshall's. Because 'Marshall will need good people working for him, eventually.'
"Was that the big plan with the invitation, Marshall? Get me a job offer? Good way to keep me around without arousing suspicions, after all. So you can marry whoever it is Daddy picks out, and conveniently fuck an employee on the side?"
Oh, he was vibrating now. Come on, take the fucking swing. "If you honestly think I'd do that to anyone working for me-- let alone you--"
"Well, why not? Pretty common for Massa, back in the day, and we've established you are trying to pass, just without the makeup."
That got me a reaction, though still not the punch I was hoping for. He slammed the railing with his hand and said, "Apologize. Apologize for that."
"Why? Are you really offended, Marshall? I mean, let's be frank here: how does the history of your enslaved race directly affect you? Not your granddaddy, not even your daddy who has, I am sure, a heartwarming tale of rags-to-riches by dint of his own hard work and ingenuity-- but you, Marsh. You who were chauffered from your home on the Upper East Side to your private school, you who summered here, you who always had the benefit of the best honorary whiteness daddy's money could buy. You, who have the luxury of being able to agree with those assholes in there that the admissions process should be colorblind, because you've always been in the top tier anyway, and fuck knows daddy would have hired you tutors if you'd ever fallen even one letter grade behind.
"So tell me, Marshall, how is it about you if I say 'nigger' or 'massa'? If we were in Harlem, I'd have been knifed ten seconds after that came out of my mouth and I'd have likely deserved it, for stupidity if nothing else, but we're not in fucking Harlem, we're in the goddamn playground of the rich and entitled and you're outraged at me not because what I said really cuts but because you feel you should be."
Rough silence; the roar of the surf. Marshall got himself under control and ground out, "You have no idea what my life's been like. No damn idea."
I conceded the point with a wave of my hand, trailing smoke. "Which is about as much idea as you have of what the average schmuck-of-color deals with in this country. Chrissake, if you can't accept you're one entitled-as-hell-Oreo, then maybe I ought to introduce you to some of those Harlem gents I know. Shit, if Mamajohn was still alive, she could do a fine job educating you," I muttered around my cigar.
Marshall's face was somewhere on the far side of anger, seguing into incredulity now. "You're telling me how to be black."
"Well, Jesus, somebody ought to do it. Since Daddy's passed on doing--"
"Stop talking. About. My father."
I took a breath, a drag, another breath. Dark out now, dark over the water, except where the twinkling lights of the beachfront houses reflected. Party still going inside, in its genteel fashion. I wanted out of the fucking tux, and the hell out of the Hamptons.
Marshall was still staring at me, jaw working, fists clenched at his sides-- then he stopped, laughed a short hard laugh. "God. This isn't about race at all, is it?"
"I'm sorry?"
"This. You. You being this much of a dickhead. This has nothing to do with me being black, and everything to do with me being in the closet and refusing to admit we're together. That just pisses you off, doesn't it, Paul? This is about that. "
"You moron, Marshall," I exhaled with my cigar's smoke. "You fucking moron. This is about honesty.
"Black or white or fucking zebra stripes. Gay or straight. I don't care, Marshall, but what I do care about is that you don't have the balls for, apparently, any of those options. And, you know, that's your goddamn issue to work through, but what gets me in my asshole is that you dragged me into it. That I'm here playing straight man and suck-up, putting on someone I'm sure as hell not for you.
"Fuck's fucking sake, Marshall, I don't do that for the sake of my best interests, so you explain to me why I should for yours."
He was no longer trembling with anger. He was just very still, very still. Flatly he said, "You knew my situation. If you weren't willing to go along with it, then why did you even come? "
"Hell if I know." I jammed the cigar's stub out on the railing with a certain amount of violence. "Because you asked, and because I'm a fucktard, I guess. Christ, I don't know, maybe I thought you intended to introduce me to dad as the real thing and so kill the bluebirds of coming-out and meet-the-parents with the same Paul-shaped stone."
Marshall made a wordless noise of pure frustration and rubbed at his face with his hands. "Goddamit, Paul. It's-- it is not that simple, okay? It would... Jesus, it would break my mother's heart for one thing, and my dad... he does have the rags-to-riches story, alright? He did haul himself up from nothing, and everything I have, all those advantages you listed, he worked himself to the bone for. Getting us here. Getting us white, if you insist. And you want me to just throw all that back in his face, take the good reputation he spent forty years building and ruin it for your sake?"
Your sake, you shithead, I would have said, but he wasn't done. "Damn it, Paul. Sometimes you have to compromise. Sometimes you have to wait for things."
"Wisdom from Dad regarding Dr. Martin Luther King's prison letter, I'm guessing?"
He hit me then.
It was somewhat less satisfying than I'd hoped for.
I left the next day, while everyone else was at the regatta. Pled a family emergency back in the city to Mr. Hayden, senior. He let me go with a smile and a handshake and a you keep my offer in mind, son. Yes, sir.
But that night I took off the borrowed suit, skimmed out of the alienness of a nice set of clothes, picked them up and hung them carefully despite a strong desire to leave them rumpled on the floor. Not me, not then.
I lay on my back in the huge bed of the guest room, window open to the sound of the sea, holding a steak to my face with one hand and the bowtie with the other. Wrapped it around and around my fingers, listening to the silence from the other side of the wall, listening to the ocean, listening to nothing at all. Reciting Merrill to myself to fill the void.
...All too soon the swift
Dismantling. Lifted by two corners,
The puzzle hung together-and did not...
Nothing in this world is black and white. Nothing at all. It's one of my major problems with the world.
Try to change that, and you just end up with black and blue.
fandom: boondock saints
muse: paul smecker
word count: 3150