Chapter 2 #10
Although JB hadn’t been around to overhear that night’s exchange with the taxicab driver, Malcolm’s guilt and self-hatred over it moved race to the top of tonight’s list. Race had always been a challenge for Malcolm, but their sophomore year, he had hit upon what he considered a brilliant cop-out: he wasn’t black; he was post-black.
(Postmodernism had entered Malcolm’s frame of consciousness much later than everyone else’s, as he tried to avoid taking literature classes in a sort of passive rebellion against his mother.) Unfortunately, no one was convinced by this explanation, least of all JB, whom Malcolm had begun to think of as not so much black but pre -black, as if blackness, like nirvana, was an idealized state that he was constantly striving to erupt into.
And anyway, JB had found yet another way to trump Malcolm, for just as Malcolm was discovering postmodern identity, JB was discovering performance art (the class he was in, Identity as Art: Performative Transformations and the Contemporary Body, was favored by a certain kind of mustachioed lesbian who terrified Malcolm but for some reason flocked to JB).
So moved was he by the work of Lee Lozano that for his midterm project, he decided to perform an homage to her entitled Decide to Boycott White People (After Lee Lozano) , in which he stopped talking to all white people.
He semi-apologetically, but mostly proudly, explained his plan to them one Saturday—as of midnight that night, he would stop talking to Willem altogether, and would reduce his conversational output with Malcolm by a half.
Because Jude’s race was undetermined, he would continue speaking to him, but would only do so in riddles or Zen koans, in recognition of the unknowability of his ethnic origins.
Malcolm could see by the look that Jude and Willem exchanged with each other, brief and unsmiling though, he observed irritatedly, full of meaning (he always suspected the two of them of conducting an extracurricular friendship from which he was excluded), that they were amused by this and were prepared to humor JB.
For his part, he supposed he should be grateful for what might amount to a period of respite from JB, but he wasn’t grateful and he wasn’t amused: he was annoyed, both by JB’s easy playfulness with race and by his using this stupid, gimmicky project (for which he would probably get an A) to make a commentary on Malcolm’s identity, which was really none of JB’s business.
Living with JB under the terms of his project (and really, when were they not negotiating their lives around JB’s whims and whimsies?) was actually very much like living with JB under normal circumstances.
Minimizing his conversations with Malcolm did not reduce the number of times JB asked Malcolm if he could pick up something for him at the store, or refill his laundry card since Malcolm was going anyway, or if he could borrow Malcolm’s copy of Don Quixote for Spanish class because he’d left his in the basement men’s room in the library.
His not speaking to Willem didn’t also mean that there wasn’t plenty of nonverbal communication, including lots of texts and notes that he’d scribble down (“Scrning of Godfather at Rex’s—coming?
”) and hand him, which Malcolm was positive was not what Lozano had intended.
And his poor-man’s Ionesconian exchanges with Jude suddenly dissolved when he needed Jude to do his calculus homework, at which point Ionesco abruptly transformed into Mussolini, especially after Ionesco realized that there was a whole other problem set he hadn’t even begun because he had been busy in the men’s room in the library, and class began in forty-three minutes (“But that’s enough time for you, right, Judy? ”).
Naturally, JB being JB and their peers easy prey for anything that was glib and glittery, JB’s little experiment was written up in the school paper, and then in a new black literary magazine, There Is Contrition , and became, for a short tedious period, the talk of the campus.
The attention had revived JB’s already flagging enthusiasm for the project—he was only eight days into it, and Malcolm could see him at times almost wanting to explode into talk with Willem—and he was able to last another two days before grandly concluding the experiment a success and announcing that his point had been made.
“What point?” Malcolm had asked. “That you can be as annoying to white people without talking to them as when you are talking to them?”
“Oh, fuck you, Mal,” said JB, but lazily, too triumphant to even engage with him.
“You wouldn’t understand.” And then he headed off to see his boyfriend, a white guy with a face like a praying mantis’s who was always regarding JB with a fervent and worshipful expression that made Malcolm feel slightly sick.
At the time, Malcolm had been convinced that this racial discomfort he felt was a temporary thing, a purely contextual sensation that was awakened in everyone in college but then evaporated the further from it you moved.
He had never felt any particular agita about or pride in being black, except in the most remote ways: he knew he was supposed to have certain feelings about certain things in life (taxicab drivers, for one), but somehow that knowledge was only theoretical, not anything he had experienced himself.
And yet blackness was an essential part of his family’s narrative, which had been told and retold until it was worn to a shine: how his father had been the third black managing director at his investment firm, the third black trustee at the very white boys’ preparatory school that Malcolm had attended, the second black CFO of a major commercial bank.
(Malcolm’s father had been born too late to be the first black anything, but in the corridor in which he moved—south of Ninety-sixth Street and north of Fifty-seventh; east of Fifth and west of Lexington—he was still as rare as the red-tailed hawk that sometimes nested in the crenellations of one of the buildings opposite theirs on Park Avenue.) Growing up, the fact of his father’s blackness (and, he supposed, his own), had been trumped by other, more significant matters, factors that counted for more in their slice of New York City than his father’s race: his wife’s prominence in the Manhattan literary scene, for example, and, most important, his wealth.
The New York that Malcolm and his family occupied was one divided not along racial lines but rather tax brackets, and Malcolm had grown up insulated from everything that money could protect him from, including bigotry itself—or so it in retrospect seemed.
In fact, it wasn’t until college that he was made to truly confront the different ways in which blackness had been experienced by other people, and, perhaps more stunningly, how apart his family’s money had set him from the rest of the country (although this assumed you could consider his classmates representative of the rest of the country, which you of course couldn’t).
Even today, almost a decade after meeting him, he still had trouble comprehending the sort of poverty that Jude had been raised in—his disbelief when he finally realized that the backpack Jude had arrived to college with had contained, literally, everything on earth in his possession had been so intense that it had been almost physical, so profound that he had mentioned it to his father, and he was not in the habit of revealing to his father evidence of his na?veté, for fear of provoking a lecture about his na?veté.
But even his father, who had grown up poor in Queens—albeit with two working parents and a new set of clothes every year—had been shocked, Malcolm sensed, although he had endeavored to conceal it by sharing a story of his own childhood deprivation (something about a Christmas tree that had to be bought the day after Christmas), as if lack of privilege were a competition that he was still determined to win, even in the face of another’s clear and inarguable triumph.
However, race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic, as if clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its potent apotheosis in college applications.
At his age, the only truly important aspects of one’s identity were sexual prowess; professional accomplishments; and money.
And in all three of these aspects, Malcolm was also failing.
Money he set aside. He would someday inherit a huge amount.
He didn’t know how huge, and he had never felt the need to ask, and no one had ever felt the need to tell him, which is how he knew it was huge indeed.
Not Ezra huge, of course, but—well, maybe it was Ezra huge.
Malcolm’s parents lived much more modestly than they might, thanks to his mother’s aversions to garish displays of wealth, so he never knew if they lived between Lexington and Park because they couldn’t afford to live between Madison and Fifth, or whether they lived between Lexington and Park because his mother would find it too ostentatious to live between Madison and Fifth.
He would like to make his own money, he would.
But he wasn’t one of those rich kids who tortured himself about it.
He would try to earn his way, but it wasn’t wholly up to him.