Nevins nodded slowly, without taking his chin off his folded hands.
“Was this before she was Bass Maitland’s main squeeze?” I said.
“While,” Nevins said.
“Ah,” I said. “And you are too gentlemanly to kiss and tell.”
“That relationship is important to her. I don’t want to destroy it.”
“You’re getting lynched here,” I said, “and won’t say anything in your own defense because it would be dishonorable.”
Nevins shrugged.
“Honor requires difficulty,” Nevins said.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Your old man isn’t the only one for whom machismo is the essence of existence.”
Nevins widened his eyes at me as he sat there, and cocked his head slightly without lifting it.
“You think I’m motivated by considerations of machismo?”
“I hope so,” I said. “I hope you’re not crazy.”
An old fat black woman in white sneakers shuffled to our table, cleared the table debris, including the coffee cups we hadn’t finished, into the cart she was pushing, and shuffled on. Neither of us said anything. I wasn’t even sure she had seen us.
“Have you had other girlfriends,” I said. I wasn’t even investigating anymore. I was simply interested.
“Yes, and I’ve been reticent about them because they have been white.”
“Un huh.”
“And… I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a priggish jerk.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re a professor.”
He smiled sort of automatically.
“Well, I am badly overeducated. I can only relate well to women who are also badly overeducated.”
“And most of those women are white.”
“Yes.”
We were quiet while the old fat black woman came back and wiped off our table with a damp cloth and moved on.
“I’d have thought interracial dating would not have caused problems in your circles.”
“I don’t know if it would have. I wasn’t brought up to believe that it wouldn’t. My mother was very careful about staying on our side of the line. I find it difficult to overcome my upbringing.”
“I’ve heard that could be hard,” I said. “So you kept your dating a private matter.”
“Yes.”
“And because you were single and forty it was assumed you were gay?”
“Single, forty, educated, bookish, unathletic – do you know I’ve never played a basketball game in my life?”
“A clear betrayal of your heritage,” I said.
“You know, the funny thing, I have no interest in sex with other men, but I am, in many ways, more at home in the gay community than the straight. I found the gay world readily accepting of a black man and a white woman. No one expected me to be Michael Jordan.”
“No one expects anyone to be Michael Jordan,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do. You have a large number of gay friends?”
“Yes. I’m more comfortable in the gay world than I am in the black world.”
I wasn’t sure that worlds divided themselves so neatly as Robinson suggested, but that wasn’t my issue. I nodded encouragingly.
“America expects black men to be macho,” he said.
Again, I wasn’t sure either of us was in a position to know what America expected, and, again, it wasn’t my issue. So I nodded some more.
“Of course,” and he smiled suddenly, “I am also relighting the family fight, you know, the refined mother and the father who trained fighters?”
That sounded a little closer to it and I liked him better for knowing it.
“Yes,” I said. “Being a straight man in a gay circumstance would be a nice way to do that, wouldn’t it.”
His eyes widened and he looked at me.
“Well,” he said, “you’re not…” He made a little oh-I-don’t-know hand wave.
I finished it for him.
“… as stupid as I look,” I said. “In fact I am. But I have a smart girlfriend.”
“I’m impressed,” Robinson said.
I went for the complete show-off.
“For a black man,” I said, “dating white women might be another way of dramatizing his ambivalence.”
“Your girlfriend must have had some therapy,” Robinson said.
“She’s a shrink,” I said.
“Oh,” Robinson said, “well, that’s not fair.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I don’t like to ask this, but may I speak to your current girlfriend?”
“Yes. Her name is Pamela Franklin. I’ll give you her address.”
He took a ballpoint pen and a small notebook from his inside pocket and wrote for a moment and tore the page out and handed it to me.
“Thank you. Do you know Amir Abdullah?”
“Yes.”
“Comment?”
“Amir is a fraud. He’s an intellectually dishonest, manipulative, exploitive charlatan.”
“Know anything bad about him?” I said.
Robinson started to protest, caught himself, looked at me a moment, and smiled without much humor.
“You’re joking.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t so much,” he said.
“Almost certainly,” I said. “Tell me more about Amir?”
“He has created himself in the image of a black revolutionary, without any vestige of a philosophical ground. I am not by nature a revolutionary or an activist, but I can respect people who genuinely are. Amir is not. He is a contrivance. He gets what he wants by accusing anyone who opposes him of being a racist or a homophobe.”
“Or a Tom,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Are you and he politically opposed?”
“I am not political,” Robinson said. “But I disagree with almost anything Amir espouses.”
“Have you been critical of him?”
“Yes.”
“Would your denial of tenure benefit him?”
Robinson looked thoughtfully at the old fat black woman shuffling among the now nearly empty tables.
“Someone once remarked,” he said, “I don’t recall who, that the reason academic conflicts are so vicious is that the stakes are so small. There is no genuine benefit to Amir if I am denied • tenure. But it would please him.”
“And it would reduce by one the number of people who could confront him without the risk of being called a racist.”
“Given the number of black faculty members, that would be a significant reduction,” Robinson said.
“How about Lillian?”
“What about her?”
“She and Amir are the two members of the tenure committee who told the cops they had direct knowledge of your relationship with Prentice Lamont.”
“Lillian?”
I nodded.
“I haven’t done anything to Lillian.”
“And since we agree that the allegation is untrue, why would she make it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I could hypothesize.”
“Do,” I said.
Robinson took in a long breath and let it out slowly. “Most straight black men know someone like Lillian,” he said. “She has very little connection to what people outside of English departments sometimes refer to as the real world. She doesn’t do things because they would be fun, or they would be profitable, or they would be wise. She does things because they conform to some inner ideal she has structured out of her reading.”
“I’ve met Lillian,” I said.
“Okay,” Robinson said, and smiled, “a pop quiz: why would you guess she is in this long-term relationship with Bass Maitland?”
“Because he reminds her of Lionel Trilling,” I said.
“Or Walter Pater,” Robinson said. “You’ve got the idea. Now, for extra credit, why was she sleeping with me?”
“White woman’s burden,” I said.
“Yes.” Robinson’s face was suddenly animated. “And why did she stop?”
“You weren’t black enough.”
“Wow,” Robinson said. “You’re good.”
“I’ve met several Lillians,” I said. “If she transferred her passions to Amir she could be supporting the aspirations of her black brothers and sisters and still stay faithful to Bass.”