Tate looked through his window at Cardoza High on the right. Denice would be entering it next fall. More money was available to D.C. schools than to practically any school district in the country. Despite this, Tate knew of no public school system in worse shape. Leaking roofs, broken windows, lack of running water and working toilets in bathrooms, a severe shortage of supplies, in many cases no supplies. Tate knew that most of the money had gone to midlevel administrators. And Tate had read in the Post how the mayor had awarded many of the major school contracts to minority firms, how those firms had driven up the cost of supplies, materials, and repairs to outrageous levels. Since the well was only so deep, the artificially high cost meant less of everything for the children. Tate was all for brothers giving brothers preferential treatment in business — hell, it worked for the Koreans and Greeks and Italians who had come before them. But the mayor’s administration had made a handful of black men wealthy while tens of thousands of black children went without across the city. Tate couldn’t abide by that. He loved D.C. But he’d be damned if he’d see his little girl have to put up with that kind of day-to-day substandard bullshit much longer. He’d leave the city if he had to, even if it was the last thing he ever wanted to do.
“Daddy?”
“What, baby?”
“I was gonna go over to Ashley’s tonight, watch some video.”
“Ashley’s momma gonna be there?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
It ain’t exactly a lie, thought Denice. Ashley’s mom is gonna be there, but me and Ash are not. Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers are playing at the Masonic Temple tonight. We’re gonna be there. And it is gonna be the bomb.
“All right, honeygirl,” said Tate. “You can go if you’d like.”
Donna Morgan looked across at Dimitri Karras. Karras wore his cat eye — lens Vuarnets, his gray hair moussed and spiked. He sat low in the driver’s seat of the 325, his right hand working the stick.
Karras in a Beamer. Spiked hair and Vuarnets. If the yuppies had a coat of arms, it would be those sunglasses, that haircut, this car. She wasn’t surprised that Karras had adopted the uniform. Karras had always worn masks.
She had met him at College Park, when she was a student and he taught American lit. That was the seventies, when he still wore the Shaggy Professor mask — longish hair, droopy Wyatt Earp mustache, corduroy sport jacket over Hawaiian shirt and jeans. Clydes on his feet. He had that casual thing down cold with his students — I’m older than you but, hey, I’m one of you — and also a rep with the girls. Men who were sexually aggressive didn’t scare Donna. They never had. And besides, Karras was cute. The first day of class, when his eyes flashed on hers from the front to the back of the room, she knew he was going to be inside her. It was just a question of when.
Karras wasn’t much of a teacher. He claimed to love books, but seemed wary of overanalyzing them. The syllabus required that the students read six assigned novels over the course of the semester and show up for class twice a week. There would be a final because there had to be a final, but Karras assured them it would be lightly weighted against their overall participation in the weekly discussion, which tended to concern the book at hand only marginally. To no one’s surprise — he always looked a little stoned — Karras admitted his love of marijuana one day to everyone in the room. At undergrad Maryland U, this was akin to pulling one’s finger out of the dike. After his confession, a majority of his students began to meet out on the mall, where kids played Frisbee and caught sun and walked bandanna-clad dogs, and get smoked up together before his class. The discussions thereafter were sometimes heated, momentarily interesting, frequently incoherent, and instantly forgotten. At the time, the word on campus was that Dimitri Karras’s class was “really deep.”
Donna Morgan nailed Karras behind his desk after class one afternoon about three weeks into the semester. There was little verbal foreplay before she brazenly cupped a handful of his jeans. She straddled him on his chair and gave him the goods, really pushed it out. He had this smile on his face, this I-Don’t-Give-a-Fuck-About-Nothin’ smile, that should have hipped her to his character. He never even said, “Maybe we shouldn’t,” or even the more cowardly “Do you think we should?” There was no ethical question raised because neither of them thought to bring it up. Teaching was just something Karras was doing on the way to something else, and Donna attended classes with naked disinterest and a blind eye to the future. Indeed, Karras ankled his position at the end of the semester. Donna dropped out of school at the same time and never returned.
They had stayed boyfriend and girlfriend for a few months into the new year. He began to move dope in quantity, and she took a salesclerk job out at the Hecht’s in Wheaton Plaza. They broke up, for reasons Donna could not now remember, sometime in the spring. Donna heard later from a friend that Dimitri had gotten into some unspecified bad shit in the summer of ’76, and that he had given up wholesale for retail — records, that is.
Over the next ten years, she ran into him maybe twice. Once down on 19th Street in 1980, when they were both standing in line to see Raging Bull at the Dupont. On that night, Dimitri wore a new mask: an Elvis Costello pompadour and a deep-weave overcoat with heavily oilskin shoes, straight off the cover of Get Happy, his retro Teddy Boy look. She saw him a couple of years later at the Wax Museum, Graham Parker’s Real Macaw tour. Karras wore a black sport jacket, pointed Italian shoes, and a skinny black tie, like the Special Beat Service boys coming off the plane. Karras had begun to go gray.
On those occasions when cocaine brought them back together, she called him Mr. Karras. It was an unsubtle jab at their age difference, but also a reminder of their teacher/student history. Karras didn’t seem to get it. If he did, he didn’t care.
Mask or no, Donna had to admit that Dimitri Karras looked good behind the wheel of his BMW. Rumpled, waved out, or yuppified, the man always had style.
“Nice car,” said Donna.
“You think?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I didn’t want to be one of them. But I saw this on the lot and fell in love. The navy over burgundy combo, it’s bad, isn’t it?”
Donna ran her hand over the leather seat. “It’s really nice.”
“I been workin’ hard these last few years. I had the money. No kids to support, nothin’ like that, so...”
“You don’t have to apologize. Everybody’s making money these days. You gotta spend it on something, right?” Donna looked out the window. They were coming into Georgetown via M. “Where we going?”
“I’ve got to stop by the store, check in.”
Marcus had told him to go home. But Karras would call Marcus from the Georgetown store, score a few points, let him know he was still on the case.
Karras said, “Where were you and Eddie off to tonight?”
“Echo and the Bunnymen at Lisner. I left the tickets in his visor.”
“Funny, him taking off like that.”
“I know. I wonder why he booked.”
Karras looked over at Donna in her seat, the cut of her black-stockinged thigh. Karras hadn’t mentioned his conversation with Marcus to Donna. He was glad Eddie Golden had taken off. He didn’t care about Eddie heisting a pillowcase out of some drug car. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want Donna to know, not tonight. He wanted Donna alone.