Equal Opportunity Employer
"You really imagine you're the first man who implied that if I go to bed with him, I'll have the job, don't you? You really believe this is the land of the free and the home of the brave, too; don't you, Mr. Big Boss?"
He seemed to think he could kill two birds with one stone. I remembered my motto: "Trust no one; least of all yourself." I'd been made the fool often enough. Painful lessons create cynics, so I lost my cool and completely blew the entire interview by refusing to accommodate what I was sure was his shallow lust for an exotic thrill. I stopped caring if I alienated him. I wasn't going to stoop to conquer this time, not again. I'd been burned too often by false flatterers.
"You think my having black skin and being a woman with a pretty face and good figure makes me dumb, don't you?" You think I don't know what goes on in the white corporate world of C.E.O.? Well, no one's going to get away with trying to sweet talk this woman--before I even have my nigger toe in the door! Thanks for the invitation but no thanks!" If you like my legs so much, how about letting me put them over the threshold of a corner office Monday morning, Honey Man, with a fat salary in my pocket, too, before you start telling me how you like my dress and can we go to dinner! What has that got to do with my degrees, my experience, my resume?" I stood to leave.
The sleek executive suddenly resumed his cool demeanor. He hardly batted an eyelash when I lost my rational tone and dropped my proper English cadence to let it all hang out. "I can report you for a class action suit." I decided to jab it to him. "Are you still feeling sexy? Do you still want me to go to dinner?"
"Who'd believe you? Don't get all upset. It's not worth all the fuss and trouble." He answered very calmly. Or was he actually just exhausted--as he later told me.
"Please don't get all upset. Women have a hard time proving these things and it's not worth all the fuss and bother in this case, at any rate."
"I became furious at his calm. "The fact is, I'm the best person for this job in this city, and you need your token Black and token woman. One stone; two birds! You're the one who blew this interview, as far as I'm concerned it's you who wasted both our times." I started for the door. I felt tears welling and I'd be damned before I'd give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry. I'd been building up to the interview all weeks--nervous as a cat about it. "You just lost your chance to satisfy the Feds. with one bird!" I turned to give him one more distainful look.
"I'm very sorry if I offended you Ms. Angelvani. You're an attractive woman, it's true, and that would be an asset in this position. You are beautifully dressed and I simply meant to comment on how important that is for this sort of Public Relations position. What's so terrible about asking you to dinner to continue the interview? I'm starving, and exhausted. You've made it through all the bureaucracy and up to this third interviewt. Why get all hot and bothered over nothing. I certainly didn't mean to...."
I wanted to make him squirm a little, the way I had all week. "You're the one who's getting all hot and bothered; aren't you?" I smirked.
"Look, just because I gave you a compliment, said that you're an attractive woman, doesn't imply anything. You are an attractive woman and we need an attractive woman in this job--for obvious P.R. reasons. That's all...."
I didn't care to let him finish his sentence. I knew it was over. "Oh can a Black woman do any good for the P.R. of this corporation? And what does our having dinner together have to do with anything? You think that just because I need a job I'll accept your insinuations...?"
He laughed, now, but helplessly. "You are a volatile woman. Calm down Ms. Angelvani! You really shouldn't go off feeling offended this way. It does neither of us any good, and I truly meant nothing but dinner and talk. I'm starving and it's been a long day." He went to the closet and took his coat. At least let me escort you to the elevators. My secretary's probably gone already.
"And you're a married man, too, according to my research." I softened just a little, because he was so disarming. I wondered if I'd been wrong.
"The fact is my wife and I are legally separated for over a year now. I just got the final word from her lawyer this afternoon that she wants to go ahead with the divorce. That's why I'm exhausted and off my guard. Her father is one of our chief shareholders, too. It's a strain all the way around. I've been eating dinner alone, late, every night for months. I simply thought it would be pleasant to continue our interview over dinner at the comfortable restaurant across the stree where I always dine--so I could get a cup of coffee. Frankly, I'd more or less decided to hire you already, but I have two more girls coming in for interviews in the morning and it's too late to break the appointments. I have to be fair and see them, but..."
"Girls!?" I smirked disapprovingly. "You make it sound like your auditioning a chorus line--or for a brothel maybe! Girls, indeed!"
Excuse me. You're right. I mean women. My slip. My daughter's in college and always correcting me on that one! My apologies. Again, no offense intended. Just a foolish expression. Maybe, I'm just feeling old enough to be your father. It has been a long day. I was impressed with your resume and the way you handled the interview, up until now, that is, but maybe it's my fault. Maybe I did sound insinuating. Your recommendations, your experience are excellent. It's a shame; this misunderstanding. We are really an equal opportunity employer. At least, we try to be.
"It wasn't the dinner invitation, so much as the tone of your compliments. I was sure there was an implicaton from your tone." I began to doubt my conclusion a little. Maybe I had been too hasty. "I'm usually right about these things. I don't know...." Maybe I've been nervous and overwrought about this interview. I didn't sleep much last night; it's true." Now I really did feel like crying. Maybe I'd blown it for no reason.
"My God. Did I imply....? Well, I didn't mean to, or maybe subconsciously I did and it revealed itself. It's been a hard day and a long lonely year, and I feel like a complete ass.... I, well, I.... I'm sorry. I....didn't know I'd implied anything. I don't think I meant to, but.... Well, you are attractive and you were, well, so sympatica.... Maybe I got carried away without knowing it.... What shall I say....I....?
He was attractive, tall, greying, distinguished, polite. I'd been tempted to accept his invitation right off. I was lonely, too, and I hadn't had a decent dinner out in weeks. I'd been job hunting like an obessessive maniac. Working at it every minute, every day. Employment agencies, telephone calls, head hunters, newsletters in the industy, research in the library, but this was the job I'd always wanted and I was worked up about it. I'd had such high hopes. I'd spent a days researching the company and its executives and preparing for the interview with him. I knew all his bio. specs. Maybe, I was overwrought and over reacting to nothing. I decided that as long as he wasn't pawing me, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt. Even if it didn't work out, I'd at least have a good dinner for my trouble. I was fairly broke and hadn't eaten right all day. "Okay. My apologies if I misunderstood." I laughed to cover any tears that were welling. "Maybe I'm the one who feels like an ass..." I tried to laugh again.
"Let's just forget it. Even the best of us can make mistakes and misread things, or use the wrong tone. Dinner and some talk? About the position that is."
"Okay. I softened my tone. "I'm starving too, to be very frank."
He became enthusiastic again. "Great. That's better. It's a treacherous world, out there; it's true." He opened the door for me, and stood aside so I could exit clearly.
"It sure is." I answered flatly.
I sipped that one wine spritzer very slowly. I wasn't going to let myself get tipsy handling him. But he really did order coffee and nothing to drink. We started talking like ordinary people. "My Black grandmother was Puerto Rican on one side and my father was Southern Italian. You're looking at four minorities rolled into one package." I laughed.
He laughed to please me. "A very nice package at that."
"You think so, do you? Well, I'm what the world could be it if got its act together!" I laughed again and he laughed again to please me.
He convinced me to trust him, and, yes, I fell in love with him. Not right away, but a year later, after I'd been on the job for awhile. It wasn't just the romantic atmosphere of the restaurants we ate in, or his good looks, or position. I knew he really wanted me--not just a fling. You don't make love the way he did--eventually--on just a lark. His wife had been uptight and frigid and he'd been loyal to her for too long.
When we finally made love, after months of courtship, and conversation, it was like the sea rolling into a desert and washing shells of soft living inner bodies to shore, polishing their worn crusts in the sun. We felt like balmy night breezes after a sweltering loneliness of repressed heat. We were the Sunday sermon that makes trees grow greener and bees give honey. I felt healed in his hands as if he were molding me of clay. I made his pale face shine with sunny color. He called me his night orchid--blooming in the shade of his soul. I made him feel desire and passion like he'd never felt before. He was thirst and I was water--how can I say how wonderful it was without sounding purple! Who knows why. We made jokes about the exotic other, about making it with the enemy for a thrill. We'd both had plenty of history courses in the real world. We didn't kid ourselves. We knew all the psychological sociology of our situation. We were big city slickers with higher degrees. We knew what we were doing. We laughed about it all the time--and took it dead seriously, too.
But, his wife decided she wanted to keep him and her father owned a big piece of the company. That's right. You almost got it! But I didn't get fired. I just got transferred far away--to Atlanta--naturally. At my request.
People tell me I've got a bitter sense of humor and I do. Even my smile twists around a little before it shines out, now. It can't come out straight anymore. It curves around a knife that's lodged in my brain from a place that bleeds with red and blue light--slowly. It will bleed slowly until it kills me, or I die. But we all have to die some day anyway. I know he's got that same wound in his skull--left over from our passion-- which will never come quite like that again--like a teenage love, unrequited in its requitedness--forever. Would I have gotten the job if I didn't have dinner with him? Would he have asked me to if I were white or ugly? Will I ever know the answer to those questions for sure? Did our colors have to do with our excitement?
I make an excellent salary for a woman, and especially for a Black woman, as a C.E.O. in Atlanta. I did get promoted--a good excuse for asking to be transferred. When I drive through the South, I pass through the poor Black shanty towns like the one where I grew up--Spanish moss hanging over the mud at the edge of every city or town--the shoeless children with no fathers. The old grandmothers rocking on the porches in squeaky old chairs, houses with no window glass, ragged curtains and shades flapping in the hot breeze. A rage bleeds in my brain from the knife lodged there, and I don't have much faith that anything but a hell reaching at heaven will ever exist here on this earth. Because I know not only the brutal, genocidal history of slavery, but the story of the bomb and Hiroshima, too. And, the Rape of Nanking, the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, the Philippines, El Salvador, the massacre of indigenoous people everywhere, the rage of guns from South Africa to Nicaragua, Afghanistan to Angola, Yugoslavia to Los Angeles, the Hitlers and Stalins and President with their Gulf war massacres. History's my hobby. I read in the evenings, alone. I keep trying to figure out the Guernicas and the ovens carefully engineered for burning human flesh, even making lampshades, as if light can shine through murdered skin. Like the song says, Fire's what I knew with him. I have a bitter sense of humor. But people have to laugh.
I live alone and I don't love any man too much. I think about him sometimes, of course, as you'd expect--at night when I'm alone and not reading history books. He thinks about me, too, when he's alone at night. We know those moments--both of us, and we know that heaven can happen for a tiny moment here on earth--even if we're mostly living in hell.
Sure, he was blue-eyed and yes, it was interesting to love someone so very different. He said, so, too, and yes, I let him go as cliched as it sounds, because of the children--the daughters he loves. That's why he went, too, but also, because my mother and brother wouldn't have understood love with the enemy anymore than his snobbish old father with his weak heart would have. So, when I smile, it curves around a lot of history before it shines out. And always in the middle of his brain, in the middle of mine, when the night is dark and the damp orchids are sighing in caves of sleep, the wounds in our brains bleed purple and red, the same colors as our thoughts--as everybody's.
No, he really wasn't just a creep out for a cheap thrill. He is as lonely as I am and was. He's strong and decent in character. And no, he laid all of his cards out and left it up to me. Like a real gentleman should. It wasn't just a moment of weakness, and neither was he for me, because I'd been up and down and around the mountain already. We might have stayed together until we died--if it weren't for the rest of you--but the hassles would have been something--and there were the children and my mother and brother, and his father, with the weak heart getting older.
The money I send home is putting my brother through his PhD. in molecular biology--guess where--? At, Harvard! He's going to make a little scientific history--on sickle cell anemia. He's on the verge of discovering some very esoteric thing about reality. And my mother's living real good on what I send her. I get a great salary and I work damn hard for it, too. The company gave me a medal and a big bonus at Christmas. I'm their equal opportunity asset, too! Nobody messes with me.
Him? He's still got his great executive position and his father-in-law and father are happy as a lark with his wonderful granddaughters, doing so well--though his father's old heart's getting feebler every minute. The kids are in high school now. He writes me whenever he's depressed, and I answer if I'm up to it. Sometimes we even phone--but only in very depressed moments. "I can't stand it he says. Please, reconsider?" We joke about running away to a desert island. But, we're too civilized to do it. His wife's in mid life crisis--naturally--and he's encouraging her to start a new career. To get out of the house. He's decent. So am I. What else can anyone expect of us. Tristan and Isolde? Romeo and Juliet? Othello and Desdemona? People have to live and love's not always enough. Sometimes it's got nothing to do with it--as that great American philosopher, Tina Turner, says.
Anyway, contrast creates perception, like they say. You can only see light, if you know dark, and you can only feel pain if you've known joy. He and I; we understand all that and it was my decision, finally. My brother's PhD. at Harvard rests on a long slow struggle and I wasn't going to throw away that little bit of real history in the fire of love. That old Pandora must have been a woman like me! Ha! Because she held unto hope closing that lid just in time after she'd opened too widely her thighs. "Trust no one; not even yourself, " is still my motto, because the joker is wild and wounds us with our folly.
And like Dr. Du Bois said in 1903, "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."
* * *
ASKING THE RHETORICAL QUESTION: "IS ECSTASY COMFORTABLE?"
Now, there was one pair of lovers who had just met and were melting in the throes of the first deep blushes of romance and marriage. The world was an exciting place and all things in it new and unfamiliar, including the lovers' bodies to each other's. They worked themselves to such high pitches of ecstasy trying to achieve ecstasy that ecstasy became no less then excruciating. They loved, gazed, smiling, into each others eyes, brimming with sparkles, watery with heat, frothing with pleasure, and waited for the day when their love would stop consuming them, setting them afire, burning them to happy cinders. They labored for the day when their bodies would know each other's so well that their ecstasy would no longer be excruciating, but comfortable.
Now, there was another pair of lovers who had known each other for years. They were cooling in the last throes of romance. The world was a complacent place, and all things in it old and familiar, including the lovers' bodies to each other's. They no longer worked themselves to high pitches of ecstasy trying to achieve ecstasy. They were satisfied easily with the old married taste of each other's pleasure which became daily less pleasurable as it became sure of its own being. They loved, gazed understandingly into each others' eyes, glowing with embers of a fire nearly done, glowing with the last vestiges of happy cinders, and waited for the day when they would part from each other and remember their ecstasy so well as to relive it with renewed excruciation.
THE POOR SUCKER AND THE BAT OUT OF HELL
Luncatics, lover and poets
are of imagination all compact....
[William Shakespeare]
When we are adolescents, I now understand, the body turns anxiously to the flesh--rushing and rolling sprays of wind. Hopes ooze between our damp fingers, concoct heat, search for the zone and come anxiously together with the breath sweetly askew. My boyhood friend, Antonio, spent a good deal of his adolescence literally trying to suck himself off. When I look at the cat chewing his tail, I think of Antonio.
"Three little words: I love you!" I'd sing a popular love song, changing the lyrics to tease Antonio. "Three little words. Go suck yourself!"
"Yourself is not a little word, Jerk-off!" Antonio would snarl back indignantly. Antonio confided to me how he'd tried unsuccessfully to twist himself into a pretzel the way a Yogi might. He was never quite able to reach his goal with his lips as he told it, but he tried many times, bending and working to get his body round and around. He read reams of Yogic philosophies. One day, he even showed up in school holding his head to one side with a very stiff neck.
Pretty Boy, the class Romeo, was different. He could get all the girls giggling like a pack of hens, pecking around him, teasing him as he teased them, but Antonio was shy with girls.
"That jerk-off beats his meat every night, I betcha!" Antonio complained of Pretty Boy. Antonio was very good looking and built like a weight lifter. Many girls did their best to loosen him up, but nothing worked. Whenever the girls tried to talk with Antonio, he'd run and hide his head in some wild, romantic love poetry.
It was during the time of the notorious Bruno Richard Hauptmann trial. Hauptmann was accused of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, and he was about to be fried for it. The kids in our class at Stuyvesant High pinned a sign on Antonio's back, because he babbled so much. "Hauptmann is innocent; Antonio is the Lindbergh Baby," it said. Antonio got angry and went home from school in the middle of the day and probably tried to suck himself off.
One summer, Antonio got to know Tennessee Williams for real--at Lake George where his parents used to rent a cabin. Antonio kept asking me to come for a visit at the lake, but I'd met Tennessee Williams at a bar in The Village and decided I wasn't interested. One week Antonio finally convinced me to come for a visit to Lake George. He said Tennessee wouldn't be there because it was his parents week to have the cabin. So, finally, I consented to go with Antonio to the lake. He was so anxious all the time that I felt sorry for him--and, actually, he was very bright and an interesting babbler. We got to the cabin under the trees in a pine grove by the lake and the door was bolted locked. Antonio tried to unlock it with his key, but couldn't. We were supposed to go fishing, swimming, boating, and hunting in the woods for snakes and bugs--all that stuff I loved to do--but Antonio pounded and banged on the door and refused to give up. Antonio's German shepherd, which was always at his side, started barking it's toothy head off.
Suddenly, the door swung open and Tennessee Williams walked out with about five other guys--each more queer than the others as far as I was concerned. Tennessee apologized for over-staying his time share of the rental. He was soft spoken and gentlemanly. Antonio never seemed to know if someone was making a pass at him or not--woman or man. Most would have realized that Tennessee was gay, but not Antonio. As soon as Tennessee walked off under the trees with his friends in tow, I turned to Antonio. "See, I told you so!" I iterated the words with the usual obnoxious satisfaction such a statement brings its soothsayer. Antonio had insisted that Tennessee was straight as an arrow, probably because he was too busy rolling up into a pretzel to notice anyone else for real.
But, Antonio knew everyone in The Village--even more than I did--because he would wander the Lower Westside at night, his dog always at his side for protection. He was so close to that dog and always claiming he wanted to be with girls--but always walking that damn dog around The Village at night and sleeping with it--hugging it in bed. We used to tease him that he was making it with the dog, and he'd get furious. Antonio was from a well-to-do family and he could always be counted on to buy somebody drinks or dinner or put them up for the night in his parents big penthouse. Also, he had these eyes, big and wide, that invited everyone to fill them with their ideas and dreams. Big eyes just sat in his head asking question of everything he saw and everyone he met. Those staring innocent eyes never seemed to comprehend anything, but Antonio babbled on philosophically about everything--because he'd met and listened to every kind of artist that ever came to New York City to stalk the streets of Greenwich Village at night. He'd heard everyone of them expound their theories and philosophies, and he was very articulate at spewing them forth--mixing them up and regurgitating them with great charm--like baby babble and pablum--all at once.
I think what fascinated me about Antonio was his utter innocence. It seemed that no realization would ever penetrate his mind or psyche with stark reality. He was all dreams, ideas, hopes, imaginings. He'd rather practice his peculiar brand of Yoga than face the real live viscera of a woman. I couldn't help him understand that getting into a woman was the best thing of all. I always considered masturbation or anything like it perverted, at best, beneath my dignity. I was extremely intimate with my cute cousin who happened to live with us. In the laundry room, in the pantry, in the closets of our house in Washington Square--whenever her father, my uncle, wasn't around. She was young and utterly nubile and crazy about me. I could bring her to ecstacy in an instant it seemed--just from kissing her breasts or putting my fingers in her juicy place. She was like the apples and grapes of Eden to me--all women and Eve rolled into one package of absolute pleasure. I was thinking almost constantly of sex in those days--but Antonio--though he was a hot blooded, Hungarian-Italian with a brain as sharp as the best of them--remained hopelessly innocent when it came to real meat and potatoes. I avoided Antonio when he talked about his pretzel antics and nirvana--but somehow he depended on me to keep him in touch with reality. He knew somehow that I was seeing the world as more real, even if he couldn't.
The autumn of our eighteenth year, Antonio experienced a horrible tragedy. He was closer to his mother than anyone in his family. She was a beautiful and youthful woman of forty, gorgeous as Sophia Loren and she looked more like twenty-five, and oh, did she love Antonio--her favorite son. He was everything to her. One reason I used to like to visit Antonio was that she would serve us dinner--dressed in a pink silk negligee that Antonio's father, Paolo Manarone had brought her from one of his trips to Paris. He was an international businessman who owned a string of hotels to which he was always traveling with his two older sons--leaving Antonio and his mother alone at home. His older brothers were tough hard guys--completely the opposite of Antonio who was his mother's baby. Where Antonio's father was always complimenting Antono's older brothers Carlo and Tomaso for being wonderful men, Antonio's mother, Luciana was always having to defend Antonio from his macho father's sarcasm. His father just had no sympathy at all with Antonio's desire to write poetry and plays. He thought Antonio was a sissy.
I remember Antonio's mother had gorgeous breasts, and she would wear that pink silk negligee almost falling open all the time. I loved to get a gander at her cleavage as she bent over the table serving us a delicious dish of antipasto or pasta with basil sauce or some fabulous fetuccini Alfredo or lasagna or something. Wow, was she a hot cook!
Well, one afternoon, Antonio's mother died suddenly just after a hysterectomy--a stroke after surgery. That evening, he begged me to spend the night at his place--with his father and brothers. He said he felt like he was about to flip out completely and needed someone besides them around. He begged me to come and spend the night on the couch in his Penthouse on the Lower Eastside where his father and brothers were grieving.
"I can't believe she's dead! They said she got an embolism. What's an embolism? I expect her to be there at home." He'd told me he felt like the ground was disappearing from under his feet and he would fly off the end of the world. I really wanted to go home to my own house, my room and my cousin who lived with us--but I felt sorry for him. His eyes seemed more questioning than ever--and I had no answers to offer and no comforts from any gods.
That night, as I lay on the couch in that big drafty penthouse on the Lower Eastside with the windows open and the white curtains blowing in the moonlight, I heard a huge scream come from Antonio's room and it took a moment to recognize his voice.
"There's a bat in here flying around. Help me!" He screamed. I ran into his room and sure enough, there it was. A bat was flying all around Antonio's bedroom, trying to find its way out of the window, but the curtains kept blowing in its way. Finally, Antonio and I grabbed a bedsheet! His eyes were bigger than ever--bigger it seemed than the moon, full and shining in at us. We threw a sheet over that damn bat and Antonio was holding it down like it was a raging bull or something--bending over it in his nakedness. He'd been startled out of bed by the bat's wings flapping in the windy room. You could see he was crying over his mother and feeling like he was going to flip out.
There I was helping him catch that bat under that sheet and there he was screaming and his big pet dog, the German shepherd, the one we used to tease him that he was making it with instead of girls--that dog came running into Antonio's room and slipped and the dog's nose went right up Antonio's ass as he was bending there holding down that bat out of hell under that sheet. Antonio fell over and the bat flew free and Antonio just screamed and kept on screaming and wouldn't stop screaming. Finally, the bat flew out the window and Antonio tried to follow it. I held him back. His brothers came running in and had to hold him down from flying out the window after that bat. His father finally had to call Bellevue, because his brothers had to tie him down to keep him from killing them. We had to wait for the men in the white coats to come while Antonio snarled and wept. Finally, they took Antonio away to Bellevue. I never saw him really right again. He spent the rest of his life half in and half out of asylums, wandering around The Village with his dog, or sleeping in Wilhelm Reich orgone boxes. One day I heard Antonio had flown out of the window, claiming he was a bat going to meet his mother in heaven or hell, calling her name as he flew down twenty stories crying to the moon. And I don't think he ever really got to suck himself or anybody else off--man or woman.
Years later, I understood that death in its brutal cruelty, coming and coming, shouldn't be a fear, but a final orgasm--the end of a curving line beginning forever in a circle. I wrote a mantra for Antonio--inspired by Allen Ginsberg who we used to hear reading in coffeehouses around The Village when we were young. I recite my Kaddish for Antonio, remembering our days of adolescence: Touch the palms of your hands to a warm body. There's a tinglig of sympathy in the hand spread firm on the naked flesh erect with the joy of the nipples. There is a tingling of sympathy in the tongue pressed in the ears and mouth, hollow with loneliness. There is a magnanimity in the legs spread and the arms opened. There is a tingling empathy in the body held by the body held and pressed, holy holy holy. Rama, rama, rama. Our mouths are holy, our licking and sucking and feeling and kissing and loving and touching are holy, holy, holy. Rama, rama, rama.
