Rhinehart had been trying to get divorced for years, but his wife had made it her life’s work to deny him. They had been a beautiful, perfectly contrasted ebony-and-ivory couple, she long, languid, pale, he equally long, but a pitch-black African-American, and a hyperactive one at that, a hunter, fisherman, weekend driver of very fast cars, marathon runner, gym rat, tennis player, and, lately, thanks to the rise of Tiger Woods, an obsessive golfer too. From the earliest days of their marriage Solanka had wondered how a man with so much energy would handle a woman with so little. They had married splashily in London—Rhinehart had for most of his war years preferred to base himself outside America—and, in a ceramic-and-mosaic palazzo rented for the occasion from a charity that ran it as a halfway house for the mentally troubled, Malik Solanka had made a best-man’s speech whose tone was spectacularly misjudged—at one point, doing his then-celebrated W. C. Fields impression, he compared the risks of the union to those of “jumping out of an airplane from twenty thousand feet and trying to land on a bale of hay”—but prophetically apt. Like most of their circle, however, he had underestimated Bronislawa Rhinehart in one essential respect: she had the sticking power of a leech.
(At least there were no children, Solanka thought when his, everybody’s, misgivings about the union proved justified. He thought of Asmaan on the telephone. “Where’ve you gone, Daddy, are you here?” He thought of himself long ago. At least Rhinehart didn’t have to deal with that, the slow deep pain of a child.)
Rhinehart had done her wrong, no denying that. His response to marriage had been to begin an affair, and his response to the difficulty of maintaining a clandestine relationship had been to initiate another one, and when both his mistresses insisted that he regularize his life, when they both insisted on occupying pole position on the grid of his personal auto rally, he at once managed to find room for yet another woman in his noisy, overcrowded bed. Minnie Mouth was perhaps not such an inappropriate local icon. After a few years of this, and a move from Holland Park to the West Village, Bronislawa—what was it with all these Poles who kept cropping up in various positions?—moved out of the apartment on Hudson Street and used the courts to force Rhinehart to maintain her in high style in a junior suite at a tony Upper East Side hotel, with major credit card spending power. Instead of divorcing him, she told him sweetly, she intended to make the rest of his life a misery, and bleed him slowly dry. “And don’t run out of money, honey,” she advised. “Because then I’ll have to come after what you really like.”
What Rhinehart really liked was food and drink. He owned a little saltbox cottage in the Springs with, at the back of the garden, a shed that he’d equipped as a wine-storage facility and insured for consider ably more money than the cottage, in which the most valuable object was the six-burner Viking range. Rhinehart these days was a turbocharged gastronome, his freezer full of the carcasses of dead birds awaiting their reduction—their elevation!—to jus. In his refrigerator the delicacies of the earth jostled for space: larks’ tongues, emus’ testicles, dinosaurs’ eggs. Yet when, at his friend’s wedding, Solanka had spoken to Rhinehart’s mother and sister of the exquisite pleasures of dining at Jack’s table, he had bewildered and amazed them both. “Jack, cook? This Jack?” asked his mother, disbelievingly pointing at her son. “Jack I know couldn’t open a can of beans less’n I showed him how to hold the can opener.” “Jack 1 know,” his sister added, “couldn’t boil a pan of water without burnin’ it up.” “Jack I know,” his mother concluded, definitively, “couldn’t find the kitcben without a seein’-eye dog leadin’ the way.”
This same Jack could now hold his own with the great chefs of the world, and Solanka marveled, once again, at the human capacity for automorphosis, the transformation of the self, which Americans claimed as their own special, defining characteristic. It wasn’t. Americans were always labeling things with the America logo: American Dream, American Buffalo, American Graffiti, American Psycho, American Tune. But everyone else had such things too, and in the rest of the world the addition of a nationalist prefix didn’t seem to add much meaning. English Psycho, Indian Graffiti, Australian Buffalo, Egyptian Dream, Chilean Tune. America’s need to make things American, to own them, thought Solanka, was the mark of an odd insecurity. Also, of course, and more prosaically, capitalist.
Bronislawa’s threat to Rhinehart’s booze hoard found its mark. He gave up visiting war zones and began to write, instead, lucrative profiles of the super-powerful, super-famous, and super-rich for their weekly and monthly magazines of choice: chronicling their loves, their deals, their wild children, their personal tragedies, their tell-all maids, their murders, their surgeries, their good works, their evil secrets, their games, their feuds, their sexual practices, their meanness, their generosity, their groomers, their walkers, their cars. Then he gave up writing poetry and turned his hand, instead, to novels set in the same world, the unreal world that ruled the real one. He often compared his subject to that of the Roman Suetonius. “These are the lives of today’s Caesars in their Palaces,” he’d taken to telling Malik Solanka and anyone else who was prepared to listen. “They sleep with their sisters, murder their mothers, make their horses into senators. It’s mayhem in there, in the Palaces. But guess what? If you’re outside, if you’re the mob in the street, if, that is, you’re us, all you see is that the Palaces are the Palaces, all the money and power is in there, an’ when dey snaps dey fingers, boy, de planet it start jumpin’.” (It was Rhinehart’s habit from time to time to slip into an Eddie Murphy-meets-Br er Rabbit manner, for emphasis or fun.) “Now that I’m writing about this billionairess in a coma or those moneyed kids who iced their parents, now that I’m on this diamond beat, I’m seeing more of the truth of things than I did in fucking Desert Storm or some Sniper’s Alley doorway in Sarajevo, and believe me it’s just as easy, easier even, to step on a fucking land mine and get yourself blown to bits.”
These days, whenever Professor Solanka heard his friend deliver a version of this not infrequent speech, he detected a strengthening note of insincerity. Jack had gone to war—as a noted young radical journalist of color with a distinguished record of investigating American racism and a consequent string of powerful enemies—nursing many of the same fears expressed a generation earlier by the young Cassius Clay: most afraid, that is, of the bullet in the back, of death by what was not then known as “friendly fire.” In the years that followed, however, Jack witnessed, over and over again, the tragic gift of his species for ignoring the notion of ethnic solidarity: the brutalities of blacks against blacks, Arabs against Arabs, Serbs against Bosnians and Croats. ExYugo, Iran-Iraq, Rwanda, Eritrea, Afghanistan. The exterminations in Timor, the communal massacres in Meerut and Assam, the endless color-blind cataclysm of the earth. Somewhere in those years he became capable of close friendships with his white colleagues from the U.S.A. His label changed. He stopped hyphenating himself and became, simply, an American.
Solanka, who was sensitive to the undertones of such rebrandings, understood that for Jack there was much disappointment involved in this transformation, even much anger directed at what white racists would eagerly have called “his own kind,” and that such anger turns all too easily against the angry party. Jack stayed away from America, married a white woman, and moved in bien peasant circles in which race was “not an issue”: that is, almost everyone was white. Back in New York, separated from Bronislawa, he continued to date what he called “the daughters of Paleface.” The joke couldn’t hide the truth. These days Jack was more or less the only black man Jack knew, and Solanka was probably the only brown one. Rhinehart had crossed a line.