“Do you mean to say that racism doesn’t exist?” she exclaimed.
His eyes gleaming, a stray lock of hair across his forehead, Stephen was in his element.
“That’s not what I mean. Because American society is segregated, still today, even in New York, whatever they like to say, most whites, without being racist, feel a deep malaise in the company of a black person, and are extremely uncomfortable in their presence. The black has to be reassuring…”
The outcry turned into a racket. Everyone protested at the same time.
“Reassuring!” Amy shouted. “You’re asking the victims to reassure the perpetrators!”
“Reassuring! What are they afraid of?” Caleb asked.
“You have just given the exact definition of racism!” screamed Aaron. “For the white man, the black is not a human being like himself.”
Rosélie had been hearing this from Stephen for years. Every time she complained about his colleagues, the waiters in a restaurant, or the local shopkeepers, he made an excuse for their behavior and put the blame on her. She intimidated them by her aloofness, she disconcerted them by her silences. She didn’t laugh at their jokes.
“Smile!” he begged her. “You are so lovely when you smile. They’ll be so charmed they’ll be eating out of your hand.”
How can you smile at someone who doesn’t see you? Invisible woman.
The discussion was interrupted for lunch to sample the pièce de résistance, the goulash. It smoldered again over Mocha Java coffee, then flared up with the liqueurs, a Poire Williams and a Courvoisier cognac Aaron had brought back from Paris. For although France was a haven for anti-Semites, it still remained a paradise for fine eating. It finally went out when the visitors got back in their cars and left for New York. The next morning, lying beside her on the beach, Amy let slip her first criticism of Stephen, a prelude to many others.
“I don’t know how you can put up with such an insensitive man!”
Stephen, insensitive? Provocative, yes. He loved being politically incorrect.
During that particular vacation Rosélie did an oil painting, six feet by nine, that she called quite simply The Sea at Montauk. It was an infinite variety of grays. Caleb and Amy fell in love with it and bought it from her for several hundred dollars.
The reader who merely recites from a geography manual that New York is divided into five boroughs hasn’t a clue that Brooklyn, in fact, is another country, a continent in miniature. You reach it across a bridge, a lasso thrown from the high towers of finance, making a perfect arc over the barges on the river, finally anchoring onto the pillars of a freeway. The nature lover can lose himself in its miles of parks; the art lover can visit its museums. The visitor who is tired of eating beef, cheese, and other burgers, the unsavory culinary inventions of Caucasians without a palate, can burn his tongue in the cheap Jamaican eating houses and exchange his pints of insipid beer for a Bacardi or, even better, a five-star Barbancourt rum. You will find Latino-Americans, Caribbean-Americans, Korean-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans. Few Americans without a hyphen. It is the realm of the Haitians and the Hassidic Jews.
The Cohens lived in Crown Heights in an old twelve-room house, surrounded by a garden, a genuine park of rare trees, inherited from Caleb’s father, a wealthy trader gone home to confront the suicide attacks in Israel. The relaxed atmosphere of the neighborhood, where in the summer Amy would jog without a bra in a tiny pair of shorts and the children would play unsupervised in the garden and Caleb would walk back from the hospital at any hour of the night, had been dearly won. A few years earlier it had been the scene of some of the worst racial rioting. As a result, New York, even the entire country, had been almost swallowed up in an apocalypse of hatred. Then they had buried the dead. Wept. The purification of mourning had restored peace. Back to being themselves, everyone tried to live in harmony with their black, Jewish, or Asian neighbors.
Twice a week, Rosélie took the subway to Brooklyn.
It’s a well-known fact that the New York subway is unlike any other. It’s an Ali Baba’s treasure trove of violence and stench. Those whose heart is hanging on by a thread should be warned not to venture down there! Nutcases shove unsuspecting passengers under trains entering the station in a rattle of iron loud enough to deafen the deaf. Weirdos playing with knives can slash your face. Bums, junkies, and perverts have set up home there. Some of them beg in a tone of voice once used by criminals when they demanded your money or your life. Others exhibit sores and other disabilities to turn your stomach. Yet others shout the end of America is nigh, collapsing under the weight of its mortal sins. The reason why Rosélie braved so many dangers was that Amy’s company brought her infinite happiness. In her presence she rediscovered the forgotten sensation of being a person, a human being, unique, remarkable, perhaps created in God’s image. She was no longer an invisible woman. Amy showed interest in her, in her painting, her hopes, and her failings. When they were running together in the park, Rosélie revealed her wounds: those that endure forever, those that fester, and those that never heal. Amy, who had just admitted her incontinent and bedridden mother to a home for the elderly and hadn’t the courage to visit her, could understand Rosélie, since she was living the torment she herself had once lived.
“We haven’t abandoned them,” Amy asserted. “It’s because we love them too much to watch them deteriorate. I envy Caleb. He lost his mother when he was five. He hardly remembers her and has built a myth around her. Young, beautiful, and eternal. As for your father, fathers are made to be admired and respected. Yours made a bad job of it. It’s his fault if you felt nothing for him.”
Amy and Caleb’s house, with its ornate rooms, its heavy, old-fashioned furniture, and portraits of aunts and uncles, was a bit like the house she had grown up in. It was also like La América, minus the presence of Ariel.
Sometimes, Ariel, your absence is killing me.
For Amy and Caleb lived amid a constant stream of friends of every origin and every color who worshiped every type of god and expressed themselves in every type of foreign idiom. Among this crowd who turned up unexpectedly and sampled the goulash of an evening, once the children were asleep, Andy and Alice were the only ones who terrified Rosélie. Andy and Alice were a couple of African-Americans: Andy, obstetrician in the same hospital as Caleb, and Alice, a law professor at a prestigious white university.
Come now, the term Black American went out years ago. So did Afro-American. As for the word “Negro,” it is no longer pronounced. The Negro doesn’t exist.
The looks Andy and Alice cast at Rosélie thrust her back into insignificance. Oh, she was a painter, was she? With very little talent, judging by the picture The Sea at Montauk that Amy and Caleb, out of pure paternalism, had hung in the middle of their living room.
A child could do as well.
Or me.
They then insisted on calling her Rosalind, so different from Rosélie, and never apologized.
Stephen would faithfully go and fetch Rosélie of an evening for he didn’t like her taking the subway after eight at night. He was far from sharing her infatuation for the Cohens. Even though there had been no further quarrel of epic proportions with any member of the family, his presence always caused a certain embarrassment. In his opinion, Amy and Caleb belonged to that most dangerous of species, the right-thinkers. Their conversation resembled a digest of the newspapers they devoured, like priests consumed by their breviaries. They never had a personal opinion on art or literature. They expressed admiration for the plays, films, musical comedies, and art exhibitions they were supposed to admire. In politics, they were so careful not to hurt anyone, they agreed with all sides.