The Uttermost Parts of the Earth Read online

  “I don’t think of you as black, Kwame. May I call you Kwame? I think of you—”

  “Please don’t.” He agreed to meet at her place for drinks.

  When he turned up, she served champagne. Her father, she said, had sent her a magnum to celebrate her finishing her exams. To the surprise of neither, they snacked on hors d’oeuvres and went to bed. Her lovemaking pleased him. Livie knew how to kiss. Her foreplay was inventive, passionate. She moaned at climax and held the skin of his back as if she would rip it from his bones.

  Then as moonlight splashed in from the window, they lay side by side and got acquainted. Livie said for now she wanted to get as far away as possible from school. Kwame was to take no offense, but she might never read another book. “How long are you going to be in Africa?” she asked. When Kwame explained that he would be away two years, she rose to an elbow and said, “You can’t!”

  He felt like a fake, he told her, teaching African literature when he hardly knew the continent. He had spent two weeks each in Nigeria and Senegal, three days in Ghana; that was all. His department chair had agreed that by living in Africa he would more effectively teach African literature. She had okayed a leave of absence. Now he’d be living in Africa. That excited him.

  “Why?” Livie asked.

  “Why not?” He pulled the sheet off him. “When you look at that, what do you see?”

  “Something splendid.” She slapped his chest.

  “See something African. Going back generations.”

  “I’m content to see something splendid.”

  Livie rose from the bed. Kwame watched her walk through a slice of moonlight and return from the living room with the magnum of champagne. They drank from it and again made love. And talked once more. He explained to her that he had grown up, the son of proud parents, in western Massachusetts, in Amherst, the country’s premier college town. In the midsixties his parents had gone to Africa, to Ghana, at the high-water mark of John Kennedy’s “rising tide of expectations.” They returned with the name Kwame. When he was born, they gave it to him. Yet somehow he always felt compromised, always an outsider, neither African, nor American.

  From his youngest years, Kwame told the darkness and the girl whose hand lay on his chest, his mother had drilled into him that his people had never worked in the hot sun of the South. His people had been Northerners, freemen well before the Emancipation Proclamation; they had worked on the underground railway. He said, “My mother never stops reminding me that ‘our people’—it’s always ‘our people’—worked with their minds, not their bodies. We were never plantation slaves. Never minstrel show performers or field hands, musicians, or athletes. We used our heads.” Livie moved against him. She put her hand to his cheek and kissed him. “I sometimes want to say, ‘Mother, why must we always be different? I don’t want to be a black aristocrat.’”

  “But you are one!” Livie exclaimed. She began to caress his body.

  He left before dawn while she slept. He never expected to see her again.

  Six weeks after he arrived in Cape Town, Livie appeared in the USIS library. “I told you I intended to get as far away as I could from school,” she told him. She needed a place to stay for a week. He had already begun dating African women, but he agreed to let her camp in his apartment. In the context of South Africa, it was edgy and cool for a black man to be living with a white woman. She was with him for the rest of his tour.

  KWAME SPENT a week in New York with Livie and the Carlyles. At the end of that week he felt all ajangle. For seven days he had been force-fed art. He was surfeited with culture. Overstimulation exhausted him. Images saturated him. Theatre, concerts, and gallery openings, films (they were never called “movies”) and dance recitals: these had been stuffed down his gullet. Now a physical malaise afflicted him. Seeking refuge in television (was not banality an antidote for high culture?) he found it to be a neighborhood of brothels. Each network seemed a whorehouse. Both America’s TV and its high culture made Kwame yearn for the deprivations of Africa.

  Kwame became convinced that the work of art that Amanda most vigorously advocated was Amanda herself. He saw her as a piece of sculpture: nose job and face lift by Myron Saperstein, MD, plastic surgeon; breasts by Dow Chemical; waist and hips by liposuction and Jazzercise, thighs and ass by StairMaster; hair styling by Monsieur Pierre; hair color by Clairol; makeup design by a consultant called Ariel; perfume by Lanvin; clothes by Doris Klotz, a seamstress with “fantastic talent” for copying Paris fashions.

  Amanda also sculpted her opinions. She assiduously scanned the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the New York Review of Books. A sense carefully honed at cocktail parties told her when to agree with cultural pooh-bahs and when to scorn their insights.

  By contrast, Livie’s mother, Consuelo, had become a therapist. She did not need the money, but wanted to help people less fortunate than herself. She was certain that she herself had not been abused as a child; neither probably had Livie. But she discovered that most of her patients had been. Kwame never felt comfortable with Consuelo. She seemed always to inspect him as if he were a specimen. When she asked about his background and childhood, he concocted excuses to flee.

  Consuelo lived with Marcus, a computer genius and selfconfessed, time-obsessed chrono-maniac. Unfortunately Marcus suffered from stress. He lived so much in his head that some of his motor skills had atrophied. He sometimes fell off curbs or stumbled on uneven paving. He had taken to wearing a safety helmet and even kneepads when he went for a walk. Having recently fallen in the shower, he was now wearing a helmet while bathing.

  Livie had a sense of humor about the two couples; she was going to study law in Boston partly to keep her distance from them. Even so, Kwame wondered if she would turn out to be like them. She accepted the premises of the two couples’ lives with such little question—and by now took Kwame so for granted—that she did not sense him watching them. And watching her. And feeling out of place. Even so, he told himself, “Suck it up! You’ve got a good thing going here.”

  AFTER A week in Manhattan, they escaped the city and the exertions of “keeping up.” Kwame and Livie went with Jack and Amanda to spend a country weekend in Darien where the Carlyles owned a home.

  Late Sunday evening when the women craved delicacies, Kwame was sent in Jack’s BMW to fetch sherbet from a market. He drove slowly through the quiet, unpeopled streets, dark under heavily leafed trees, and noticed a police car pass. He glanced in the rearview mirror. The car made an abrupt U-turn. It advanced on him. It flashed its lights and pulled him over. Kwame felt a hollowness in the bottom of his stomach. As the officer sauntered toward him, he knew an apprehension deeper than anything he had ever felt in South Africa. So deep it made him feel dizzy. He tried to calm himself. Hey, he told himself, you’re in Connecticut. Even so, he knew that he must be careful.

  “Good evening, officer,” he said when the cop arrived at his window. The man inspected him with suspicion. He brought a flashlight from behind his back; for an uncertain moment Kwame thought it might be a club. The cop directed its beam onto Kwame’s face. He flashed it throughout the interior of the car and brought it to rest, almost touching Kwame’s nose.

  The cop asked quietly, “What’re you doing in Darien?”

  Kwame explained that he was an American diplomat, presently on home leave; he was visiting friends. He mentioned Jack Carlyle by name and noted the street where he lived.

  The cop inquired, “This your car?”

  The car belonged to Jack Carlyle, Kwame explained. He was on his way to get ice cream.

  “Get out,” the cop said. “Stand behind the car, hands on the roof, feet spread.”

  A flush of fury swept over Kwame, but he obeyed. He was wearing a tee shirt, jeans, and sandals and the officer patted him down, the truncheon swinging off his hip. He slid his hands down each of Kwame’s legs and checked his crotch. A car approached, slowed. Kwame turned his back against the headlights, feeling the car’s occupants watch
ing him. Humiliation and anger raged in his blood. But he must be cautious. He stood in silence, feeling outrage, but even more deeply feeling fear. The hollowness in his stomach expanded. Kwame was afraid it might swallow him. The car passed and moved on. Kwame knew that he must maintain his self-possession. “Careful, careful,” pounded his pulse. “Always be respectful, play the inoffensive black boy.” He must give the officer no reason to employ the truncheon, to hit him where the bruises would not show.

  “Driver’s license,” the cop now said. Kwame surrendered the license. The cop examined it. He instructed Kwame to drive to the local station house, following him through the silent streets that now seemed full of menace. The officer called Jack Carlyle from the station house, employing his own carefulness, using an inoffensive white boy tone of voice. It turned out that Kwame was indeed Jack’s friend; his use of the BMW was authorized. When the officer put down the phone, he told Kwame that he was free to go. “My apologies for any inconvenience, Mr. Johnson,” he said. He spoke Kwame’s name for the first time. The men looked at one another. The cop added, “But none for pulling you over. The people of this community want a certain kind of protection and that’s the kind I give ’em.”

  “Thank you, officer,” Kwame said. “Have a good evening.”

  Outside the night did not seem quiet and gentle, but raging and shredded. Kwame wanted to shout profanities. Instead he went to the market, looking no one in the eye. He got the sherbet and drove around. He tried to unwind, but could not shake the fear that yet again some cop would pull him over. When he returned to the house, Amanda had gone to bed. Jack apologized for the incident. “These things happen,” he observed. “Roll with the punch.” He said good night and went to bed.

  “What the fuck’s he mean?” Kwame demanded. “Roll with the punch.”

  Livie made a face. “Hey, baaad dude!” she teased. “You got danger written all over you.” She sashayed around the living room, twitching her behind. Kwame made himself smile at her antics.

  Livie tossed off her clothes, one item at a time, leading him to their room. When she had shucked off her panties, but not yet her tee shirt, he slammed her against the wall, intending to take her from behind, to release his fury on her. “Ooooh, such a baaad dude!” Livie teased, shaking her hips. But he felt no desire and walked away.

  She turned toward him, pulled the tee shirt below her hips and said, “Everybody has to roll with things, Kwame.”

  “Do they?” he asked. “What’s Jack Carlyle roll with?”

  “You think everything’s perfect for him?”

  “He has to roll with the fact that a nigger’s fucking his daughter. And in his own house. Right?”

  “Racist fuckhead. He doesn’t care that you’re black.”

  “But what?”

  Livie went to where she’d dropped her shorts, turned her back, and put them on.

  “But what?” Kwame demanded a second time.

  “He thinks I ought to marry you. Or move on.”

  “Oh, great!” Kwame said. Livie took refuge in the bathroom and shut the door.

  Later when they were in bed together, Kwame could not perform. He wondered: What’s happening here? This doesn’t happen to black guys.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Livie reassured him. “Forget it. It’s not important.”

  Kwame said nothing. Livie patted his groin. He pulled her hand away, his humiliation deepening. His cock lay shriveled and as inoffensive as a worm.

  By morning Kwame’s humiliation had abated. The anger was gone, his virility restored. Over breakfast he asked her, “You coming with me to Massachusetts?”

  “They don’t want to meet me yet,” she said. “Wait till they’ve had a good visit with you. We can arrange it over the phone.”

  And so it was left that Livie would meet his parents some other time.

  ON THE drive from Darien to Amherst Kwame was alone for the first time in days. When he arrived and embraced his parents, Bob and Shirley Johnson watched him keenly. They could sense decisions being made even before he himself was aware of it. But he was aware of it now. At their first dinner together he announced, “I’m going back to Africa.”

  “Why?” his mother asked, exasperation in her voice. “Your future isn’t there. And don’t think you’ll find some mystical connection with the people.”

  “That’s what we thought when we went to Ghana,” said his father.

  “But there is no mystical connection,” his mother declared. “Our forefathers may have been Africans, but we’re Americans.”

  “Are you testing yourself?” his father asked.

  “God, no!” Kwame assured him. “I’ve taken so many tests I don’t ever want another one.” He added, “I do teach African literature.”

  “You don’t teach it there, son,” his father said.

  “Don’t go there,” his mother said. “It’s the uttermost parts of the earth.”

  “Oh, c’mon,” Kwame replied. “There aren’t any ‘uttermost parts’ anymore. If you wanted, you could hop a plane and visit me.”

  His parents looked at one another, upset. As people of the mind, they preferred to boast that their son taught literature at Boston University than to say that he was an American diplomat living in an African country no one had ever heard of. “Is Olivia going with you?” his mother asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said once she was going to law school,” his mother remarked. Kwame nodded. “Is it serious with her?” she asked. “Do you love her?”

  “Don’t question the boy,” his father said.

  “I wouldn’t if we saw him oftener.” His mother scrutinized him. “Are you going to marry this girl? Or are you going to Africa to get away from her?”

  Kwame said nothing.

  His mother asked, “Do little bells go off when—”

  “When we fuck?” Kwame laughed. His mother raised her hands to her ears.

  “Don’t talk that way in front of your mother,” his father admonished, although he, too, was laughing.

  “Bells sound then,” Kwame told his mother, “only if the phone is ringing.”

  “Are we going to meet her?” his mother asked.

  “Will you stop this!” his father demanded.

  WHILE LIVIE thought he was with his parents in Amherst, Kwame drove to Brookline to visit his professor colleagues. To the chair of his department he broached the idea of extending his leave of absence for another two years. “If you want to teach here,” she told him, “you can’t keep putting it off. But okay. This is your last extension.”

  He flew to Washington—Livie still thought he was in Amherst—and told the USIS personnel officer in charge of Africa that he had decided not to resign; he’d like another assignment. “Someone who wants to serve in Africa!” she whooped exultantly. “Watch out! I may kiss you.” The officer typed commands into her computer. The manning chart for the entire continent came up on her screen. She scrolled through it, Kwame looking over her shoulder. “The Number Two Cultural Officer slot is open in Kinshasa,” she told him.

  “Is it dangerous in Kinshasa?”

  “Of course, it’s dangerous. It’s Zaire. The old Congo.” She grinned. “I’m kidding. It’s safe in Kin. There’s a 25 percent hardship duty differential. And not much hardship. You could come out of there rich.” She gave Kwame an impish look. “We need someone out there in less than three weeks,” the officer said. “So if you want the slot, let me know. I’ve gotta fill it.” They shook hands. As Kwame opened the door, she called, “Zaire’s a good name on your personnel record. Or a résumé. It’s not Malawi or Burkina Faso. People have heard of it.”

  “That hard to fill, is it?”

  After the interview Kwame strolled through downtown Washington, wondering how Livie would react. Would she come with him? Did he want her to? Homeless people seemed stationed on every corner, their hands out, crudely lettered cardboard signs at their feet. Most were black. They would see Kwame approaching, look at h
im with special pleading and murmur, “Hey, Bro—” Then, taking a closer look, they would stop, realizing that he was not one of them, not a brother. It unnerved Kwame that fellow blacks sensed that they need not appeal to him.

  HE AND Livie spent two weeks together at a rented cottage on the north shore of Cape Cod. At the end of the first week Kwame broke the news that he had signed on for another tour in Africa. Within ten days he would be in Zaire. He did not ask her to accompany him and she did not offer to go. She did keep asking, “Why do you insist on this?” He would shrug. “Don’t keep shrugging,” she would say. “You’re a person of the mind, remember? Why do you have to do this?”

  He would say, “There’s something I have to connect with in Africa.”

  “That is such bullshit!” she would cry. “What about us?” Then she’d say, “Fuck it! I swore I’d never say that to a man.”

  On the second evening before he left they lay holding one another under a blanket, lying on a dune that sloped down to the water. A scattering of stars shone brilliantly above them. “The stars must be fantastic in Zaire,” Livie said. “Less pollution—at least out in the boonies. Less ambient light. Shall I come watch the stars with you out in the middle of nowhere?”

  After a moment she turned toward him. “We’ve been together all this time, Kwam. And yet—” She shrugged. “You’re going back to Africa to break this off, aren’t you?”

  “No. There’s something out there—”

  “Like hell.” Then for a long time she said nothing. Finally she asked, “Do you love me?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Have you thought about marriage?”

  He shrugged.

  “Fuckhead!” Neither spoke. “I hate it that you always make me bring this up,” she said. “Have you thought about us getting married?”

  “Yes. I’d like that.” The words found their own way out of his mouth. He realized that once he left her, he would probably never see her again. Suddenly he did not want that to happen. Them married: he would like that. “But not if we eventually get divorced.”