The Fugitivities Page 8

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  Freeze-frame. That was the effect if he had to describe it, Jonah said. He was aware that the lights had come on, the cinephiles dispersed, the theater returned to entombed silence. But as he placed the film reels carefully back in their cases, he could feel the lingering presence of Phineas, his troubling voice and troubled genius shifting him off foundations he hadn’t even known were there, something newly moving, like a pendulum at the instant when it has finally passed the point of its maximum amplitude. He hastily jotted down his hours and slipped out.

  On the rue Christine, the air felt clean and cool. It was late in the afternoon and people strolled languidly, pausing to consider café terraces and their perennial cast of dilettanti. Sounds and images from the film trickled in his mind and mingled with anxieties that had followed him since his graduation. Folks had warned him that, after college, if he wasn’t careful, he could be led into a dead-end job, that if he didn’t keep his eye on the ball, he could be knocked off the course of professional and personal advancement and fall behind his peers, that it was too easy to lose all the hard-fought gains that a college education had provided, particularly (although he felt it didn’t need to be repeated as endlessly as it was) for a young man like himself. One had to advance decisively.

  This attitude (firmly adopted by his kinfolk) held a very dim view of the kind of reasoning that would consider an internship as a projectionist’s assistant in a Parisian art-house movie theater an acceptable postgraduate term of employment. The suspicion was, depending on who he asked, that Jonah was either spoiled or a damn fool, or both. He didn’t have a good counterargument. It was easier to view life than to experience it. At work, he sat in the dark, watching; at home, he flipped open his laptop and watched his friends’ life-pages proliferating, streaming at an ever-increasing frame rate.

  His own life, up to that point, had been, by most counts, “interesting,” special, even singular—though to him it seemed primarily a matter of cushioned apartness. Boyhood brought to his mind mostly an impression of innocence suspended in a kind of fin de siècle phoniness, an unlikely life of privilege. The details he retained most vividly were sheltered and oddly abstract. The tinkle of pickup sticks; the loving rotundity of LeVar Burton’s voice; clots of Nestlé powdered cocoa and the vibrant packaging of multipack breakfast cereal. At the time, it had seemed to him like an ideal upbringing. It could have occurred just as easily in one of those rare and famous wealthy black American enclaves that his father liked to crack awkward jokes about. But a black American in Europe? That was a weirder story, not without precedent, but not entirely relatable either. It was his father, Jonah said, who was the architect of this strange situation, who provided the illusion and snatched it away. “Remember this, boy,” he’d say if Jonah upset him. “You’re living a life other kids just like you don’t have. You have no idea how good you have it, you never will.”

  Confronting one’s history was important. His father talked a great deal about history and power. The limitations placed on men by its cruelty; the force of hatred in the world, which was oppressive and could strike anywhere at any time, which he should be prepared to face down as a special condition because it would inevitably target him. This was the most terrible vision. That history would come looking with special prejudice for him. Sooner or later he would confront a penalty, and it would be his responsibility to prove that he was not going to allow that penalty, however unjustly imposed, to hold him back. That he would use the extraordinary good fortune of his upbringing to make something great of himself and serve others, in spite of the inevitable swerve of history that would come looking for him and all who were darker than him, with intentions that were not to be trusted but nonetheless grimly confronted, surmounted with grace, without complaining, without under any circumstances allowing them to see the hurt.

  Often, history was taught through the television, which brought its lessons—sometimes, and sometimes not, involving darker people—into the living room. But in his father’s explanations, they all were versions of the same thing: the great contest between the forces that tried to pit man against man through hate, and the forces of quiet dignity that tried to resist this, but often failed and often paid a terrible price. The more terrible price was paid by women, who generally bore the scars of this great cosmic conflict twice over, and who were the ones left to tend to the wounds caused by male chaos, to weep at funerals, to care for and raise neglected children, to survive and patch together the human family while making a life for themselves as best they could.

  On such occasions, his father adopted a tone of ancestral teaching, as if (despite his rather limited schooling) his paternal mission consisted of imparting the ways of the world from the standpoint of successes and failures not only his own but of mankind generally. His voice, always grave at the outset, could shift, depending on his humor, revealing unsettled edges like a graveled road. He was fond of marking dramatic pauses with a flick at the base of one of his blue packets adorned with an Asterix helmet. The little kick liberated a cigarette, whose consumption was momentarily deferred until oratorical triumph dictated it should be plucked and ignited to his satisfaction.

  Through the gauzy spread of tobacco fumes, the Japanese television set transmitted the revolution in newscasting, a never-ending global drama beamed directly into the living room. Riots, earthquakes, rafts of the dispossessed, Ethiopian famine, the space shuttle, Nelson Mandela, Morgan Freeman, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston. He remembered his father explaining the Berlin Wall coming down, the throng of fists and scarves and gloves parading, a chorus rising and roaring to garbled cheers and astonished weeping, a white man with a sledgehammer whacking away as slabs of gray matter yawned open. “You see, son,” his father said, “this is what freedom means. Taking it into your own hands, making the arc of history bend to your will. Hell, that’s what all great men want, and it’s what all great artists do—if—if they have the opportunity and the God-given ability to meet the challenge that’s in their path.”

  Jonah’s father believed strongly in the greatness of art. He also believed, and for a time had convinced enough other people with the right connections, that he was an artist. He had come to this realization while studying for a degree in business communications. If he had learned one thing from those classes, it was the importance of seizing on opportunistic timing in a volatile market. He was well aware that, to some extent, he had taken advantage of a moment, after the assassinations of the sixties, when white liberals felt guilty about race relations and wanted to be seen endorsing, supporting, and promoting radical black art. This awareness didn’t imply pure cynicism on his part. Especially in the early days, he had brought genuine anger and frustration to his work, and its expressionist élan reflected something bold and unnerving that caught the eyes of gallerists and the art press alike. He nurtured an Afrocentric brand and ran with the dashiki crowd, admired Ron Karenga, flirted with Islam, even seriously considered converting, but couldn’t bring himself to give up swine. He also came to doubt (or confront) the reach of his abilities, seeing them for what they were, talents not gifts, unusual but not immeasurable, not genius beyond compare.

  He liked to tell the story of an important showing of his work at a reputable gallery in Paris in 1977. He was particularly proud of a mixed-media portrait, a mural of sorts, that he called Homage to Barbara Jordan, which depicted the congresswoman as a towering figure of justice in the act of indicting Nixon, who appeared as a grotesque, pale gnome in the corner, part of his face spray-painted over with graffiti. The crowd at the opening gave it rapturous attention and adulation, and he basked in this glow, right up to the moment when he noticed, or came to the end of a long failure to notice, that he was the only black person in the entire room. “If you ever find yourself doing something and you’re the only one there—you better check yourself,” he would warn Jonah in his sternest voice.

  His father was, according to himself, black i
n the right place at the right time. But it still felt wrong, like a bad joke. Like he was getting the pretend version of what he had grasped at all his life. Yes, he had faked it when he had to, in order to rise; but now that he really wanted it, or rather wanted to be real in it, every vernissage he showed up to was full of the wrong people, even though they were the same people from the years before, the ones who were always thrilled to see him, wanted him to drink at their tables, pose for pictures with them, and never gave a damn about a thing he had made.

  It could have led to despair, and for a brief and turbulent time, it seemed it would. But his father was able to convert these frustrations into a desire to get over, to get the most, and his social connections blossomed accordingly. He was even more successful once he made it obvious and plain to them that he was scheming, that he was a needy and somewhat fraudulent hustler taking advantage of their thirst for his “urban” sensibility. It only made him more glamorous, more real, and a stream of increasingly prestigious “minority” and “diversity” fellowships, residencies, and keys to chateaus were never more than a phone call away. His plot against the white art world quickly turned into something of a perpetual-motion machine, as he dragged his family with him from position to position, always in search of a place where he could maximize his quality of life at minimum cost. The family bounced around overseas from one art-world metropolis to the next: London, Berlin, Paris.

  Berlin Jonah remembered as gray blocks, gray skies, and snow. Deep drifts under the linden trees on Hölderlinstraße. And the beautiful girl, very blonde and porcelain, whom he met sledding somewhere in a forest clearing, her image set to rest at the very back of the mind like a snow globe waiting to be shaken. If he closed his eyes, he could remember the sound of her name, but not the name itself. He might not have remembered her at all if she had not formed an early taste of some unspeakable gulf between desire and detachment, something bitter, a cool remoteness that frightened him. Those were strange days, when the TV spoke in a foreign tongue and rosy-cheeked boys like cutouts from Kinder chocolate commercials stopped cheerfully to interrogate him, touching his hair, laughing. The girl and her sky-colored eyes had questioned him too, that day in the woods, not with any overt hostility, but with distance, as if he had appeared like a comet, a sight from another world.

  When his father announced that they were moving to Paris, the change meant nothing more to him than another, hopefully more temperate city. On the overnight train he dreamt that the girl was hidden in his father’s suitcase. He joined her there, and, in the darkness of the sealed luggage, she played with his hair. He told her to stop and slapped her. The trunk flew open, and she fled, vanishing into the silence and whiteness of German forests. He woke near dawn. Their carriage was flooded blue. The train clacked and screeched, gently rocking across the exchanges of a rail yard. Outside, the little balconies and the slate rooftops of Paris faced the pale sunlight.

  They moved into an apartment on rue de Tocqueville, an unglamorous part of Paris near the rail yards, Jonah said, where switching tracks formed long radial chasms bisecting the Périphérique before sweeping out into the dreary suburbs to the north. The neighborhood shared the name of the little Square des Batignolles that stood beside the Pont-Cardinet station. If the weather was good, Jonah spent long afternoons in the park, where time was marked by the rumbling of the trains and the clean, cracking report of Pétanque players punctuating the gravel lots. A carousel turned, radiating a ragtime or an old song by Barbara, a sad woman who looked like a bird and sang like one too. Sometimes the race-car man had a set of wooden-pedaled soapboxes. If he was there, for five francs you could hurtle along into a halo of glory like Ayrton Senna, racing the commuter lines out of Saint-Lazare. That childhood experience of Paris, Jonah said, was impossible to evoke clearly. It had a shimmering, confectionary weightlessness; and yet it was also dense, a plenitude accumulated imperceptibly, like the leafy dust sagging in the green awning of the crêpe stand.

  On the evening of the Phineas Newborn screening, he had come across an accident as it was unfolding on the boulevard Saint-Germain. A woman on a scooter had been struck by a small delivery van that had pulled out hurriedly into her lane. The woman was on her back in the street, and a small crowd had gathered around her. Passersby stopped, dumbstruck, some putting their hands to their mouths, others looking around anxiously or reaching for their phones. The woman was wearing a navy-blue business jacket, and Jonah could see her dark hair coming out of her helmet, which rested motionless on the pavement. It was impossible to tell if she was conscious. A wail came pulsing up the boulevard. Police arrived and began diverting traffic. With the traffic stilled, the plane trees appeared even more majestic, their crowns basking in the evening light. As the ambulance neared, some bystanders began to move again, but others just arriving now stopped, transfixed. The paramedics crouched over the woman’s body. There was a shout, and a man in a light-blue shirt, holding a phone to his ear, ran up the sidewalk. He was sweating heavily, and everyone understood. He knelt over her, talking into the helmet and turning periodically to consult with the medics. And then Jonah could see a small heaving in the woman’s chest. The man held her wrist. The medics brought out an orange canoe with straps and a pillow. The driver of the van hid his eyes with his hand.

  Jonah waited a bit longer. Then, feeling vaguely irritated with himself, he turned and left the scene hurriedly. It was overwhelming, the touch of human stuff, the queer vastness of it colliding all around. Everyone knew all of it could, in the space of one head-on smash, come to a full stop. That there was a day, a definite one somewhere still in the future, full of the same buzz and pullulation of other people living and going on, when it would be someone else in some version of that crowd looking on at him, lying there, watching him exit the play with no more difficulty than the energy it took him to turn and walk away.

  The accident had caused him to backtrack, reversing course along the opposite side of the boulevard as the summer evening deepened. At the Odéon intersection, looking more miserable than ever, Danton thrust his arm out over the loiterers assembled at the base of his socle. Jonah turned off the boulevard into the medieval passageways running down to the Seine. He passed art galleries with garish and austere baubles. Tourists fumbled with their digital cameras. At the angle of the rue Jacob, he thought he heard a piano playing. But it was only a waiter storing his silverware. He pressed on into the quiet streets. On the rue Bonaparte he passed the cobbled courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts and its Greek statues, and then the Tunisian greengrocer where he sometimes bought clementines in the winter. He kept thinking of Phineas. That image of Phineas Newborn at his piano, staring down at his own hands.

  He arrived at the crossroads near the statue of Condorcet. To his right, the Pont des Arts stretched across the Seine to the Louvre. The bridge was peppered with young professionals and students. They lounged against the railings or formed circles around cheap bottles of wine and beer, laughing and rolling cigarettes. Dealers roamed their periphery looking for sales. Street vendors with key chains, plastic gadgets, and bottled water, buttonholed tourists trying to pose for each other with a romantic view. A column of jolly Americans dressed in khakis and polo shirts rolled by on Segways, traversing the scene like a vaguely alien but benign patrol force.

  Paris at the dawn of the new millennium. The softness of its way of life, its affordance and assumption of the artful enveloped them all like a delicate and indefinitely antiquated movie set. It was, Jonah said, almost sickeningly beautiful. He stood in it as one who had neither a place nor no place in it. He hadn’t done nothing to nobody. But really, he had done nothing, could do nothing, other than grow more like the city around him. Become a waxy walker in the museum of nostalgia, a curious prop, seemingly borrowed from another set for the tourists to ponder with disinterested bewilderment.

  What was he doing? Elsewhere life was happening, moving in some fateful direction. It might ultimately be catas
trophic, but it was moving all the same. The decisive meanings would be discovered and won or lost there. His college friends, armed with their degrees, were moving to Brooklyn or out to Silicon Valley, where the future was being encoded as a set of calculably diffusive effects presided over by a sempiternal abstraction devoted to watching, recording, and taking a cut. He knew he wanted no part of that. But what alternative vision did he have? These thoughts obsessed him as he walked back across the city to the rue de Tocqueville.

  His bedroom was full of movie posters, most of them rolled up in tubes in a corner leaning against his desk. He got them for free on the job and had more than he knew what to do with. He had seen so many films, too many. Art films from small European countries that were younger than he was; obscure westerns that only the elderly came to watch, and usually dozed off to. Even the glorious Isabelle Adjani who stormed across the screen in her avenging genii, her Emily Brontë, her Adèle Hugo, her Camille Claudel; even Adjani’s achingly romantic poses looked somehow hollow to him now. He was tired of watching. What was he really looking for? What did the watching conceal? He loved the movie theater; he loved working in the booth, feeding the reels and watching the platters turn. But how long would any of it last? What did it have to do with him? It came back to the same thing. The movies were his way of hiding. And he knew it. He just hadn’t had the courage to admit it. Somehow Phineas had said it for him. Reached something vulnerable, something that was broken but not forgotten in the life that held the music forth like an instrument that played his unknown past and spoke of unknowable futures.