Terroir Page 6

  On one side of our row house was a burnt-out shell and, on the other, a house inhabited by a woman in her early forties, her toddler granddaughter, and sometimes her son. She seemed to be unemployed. When I came home, she was usually on the front porch with her granddaughter.

  “Nice day,” she’d say to me. Or, “Spring’s on the way.”

  “Looking forward to it,” I replied, slipping my key through the industrial-grade steel bars that protected the front door. Then, just as I thought I was home free, she would mutter, “white bitch.” Getting past her without the invective was like having a winning lottery ticket. I used to tell this story to show how resilient I was. I am telling it now as an example of white fragility—a white person’s inability to deal with racial confrontation, no matter how mild.

  Our neighbor’s fights with her son busted out the upper-floor windows and filled her backyard with shattered glass. The windows were replaced with plastic sheeting and duct tape. Sometimes we heard the child screaming and wondered if we should call social services. We didn’t. When I called our neighbor’s grandchild “illegitimate,” Tyrone asked, “What difference does it make?” I pondered. None? Internalized prejudice is like shit on city streets, except that when you step in prejudice, cleaning it off teaches you something. I didn’t realize then that my white privilege trumped every other thing about me. I could walk into Garfinckel’s and not be followed by a salesperson. I could drive Tyrone’s yellow Pontiac Firebird and not be stopped by the police. We didn’t discuss the power inequities in the city and everywhere else, and that created distance between us, but we were both used to being cushioned by silence.

  Ludus and Storge

  Restaurant work gave me something in common with Tyrone. Because most good restaurants and hotels employed only male servers, I felt lucky to be hired as the only female server at 209½ Pennsylvania Avenue, a restaurant on Capitol Hill, in the last August of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Our uniforms made us look like a Hyannis Port wedding party: bibbed tuxedo shirts and bow ties. A size-fourteen-neck shirt drooped at my shoulders, and since the gray morning-stripe men’s pants were impossible to fit to my hips, I wore a black skirt. The uniforms were one of many things at 209½ that implied a Town and Country magazine world. A drink—blonde Lillet, white wine, an orange twist, and fresh mint—was named after Marjorie Merriweather Post’s estate in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago.

  Glossy-haired and manicured Jason, the owner’s son, was two years older than I. Jason adapted ideas from Gourmet magazine to a prix-fixe menu with four choices for each course. In the summer there was cold lobster salad (five dollars extra); in the spring, soft-shell crabs, looking like large insects, pan-fried.

  I started working lunches with Jim, in his early thirties, dark-haired, mustached, and slim. He was the only man at the restaurant in a committed relationship. He had a deep laugh, ears that stood out slightly from his head, and a weak arm from childhood polio. He, too, lived on Capitol Hill, four blocks from the restaurant instead of thirteen. “Dahling,” he said, in a mix of Mississippi and Greta Garbo, “Now that you’re with us, let’s call ourselves waitrons.” One night he gave me a ride home. “Toto,” he quipped, as we passed the burnt-out buildings and empty lots, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  I could balance two plates on my arm without having my fingers touch the rims. But I’d never worked in such a small room. On a glass-shelved étagère, brushed stainless-steel pots held coffee and hot water. Lower shelves contained stacked silverware, cups and saucers, and mauve cotton napkins. On a cake stand on the bar, opposite the painted wooden Indonesian Garuda and next to a huge vase of flowers, was our version of Maida Heatter’s sour cream chocolate cake. Everything else we carried in from the tiny kitchen.

  The eggplant-colored ceiling made the tall, narrow space seem more intimate. The restaurant used to be a dive-y luncheonette, and when paint chipped from the mauve wall, a dingy yellow layer was revealed. The dank cellar (with, of course, rats) housed refrigerators, freezers, shelves of goods, and a desk. This area could be reached only through two trapdoors: one outside on the sidewalk, and one in the kitchen.

  Jason’s mother, who bankrolled the restaurant, chose the smart décor. “I’m Rochelle Rose,” she’d say at the door on Saturday nights, waving a diamond-encrusted hand. “Welcome to 209½.” If customers dallied after paying, she stood next to their tables until they got the hint. She wore sheer silks and satins in copper and green, heavy jewelry, and delicate shoes. Throughout the evening, she nursed a single-malt scotch on the rocks. Her voice, like her son’s, hissed—but in a lower key: she smoked Dunhills. Every other night servers took turns hosting, which reduced our pay, so we were grateful when Mrs. Rose was there, even as we made fun of her hair color—the orange-pink of krill-fed salmon.

  Because we started work at 4:30 in the afternoon and were not fed, I was starving by 7:30. Other waitrons ate off customers’ plates in the tiny triangular dishwashing room. During my first shifts, I thought: disgusting. But one night I cleared a plate from a clean-looking woman who had not touched her two fried zucchini pancakes. Standing in the dish room with her plate, I lifted one pancake and took a bite. Delicious, a latke with the added flavors of zucchini and Parmesan cheese, and just the right degree of greasy. I ate the whole thing, then I ate the other pancake too, standing near the warm mist of the spray arm held by the dishwasher, a young man from Ecuador whom the guys dubbed “the missing link” because of his low forehead and continuous eyebrow. I knew this slur was wrong, but I didn’t ask them to stop. I was part of the team.

  Soon I no longer cared whose plate I was eating from. I also didn’t register to vote and didn’t declare my tips. It did not occur to me to care whether Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan won because, even though I was living in the nation’s capital and waiting on members of Congress, I was disconnected from politics. Before the election, a Republican waiter, biding his time until he started a job as a lawyer, asked me, “Who will you vote for?” When I said “no one,” he replied, “Good. We need a few more like you.” He voted by absentee ballot in Oklahoma, where his vote counted. I felt negligent, but not enough to do anything. I didn’t know what was at stake. I’d returned from Europe assuming the laundry detergent ERA was named after the Equal Rights Amendment, my feminism a consistent—albeit simple—platform. I didn’t realize that I needed to act to truly be a citizen.

  When Reagan won, our primary customers—lobbyists—became more brazen: “Let’s have the Dom Perignon; it’s on the taxpayers.” The fur coats in our closet multiplied.

  I learned the difference between mink and sable, the latter many times more expensive because it is rare, lightweight, and silky, once hunted almost to extinction. Its name in Croatian is kuna, also the word for their currency. A tipsy guest took someone else’s sable coat from the closet, and half an hour later the owner of the ten-thousand-dollar coat gasped upon finding only an ordinary brown mink. I worried that it was my fault, but the next day, the now-sober woman returned the sable.

  I should have been worrying about other things: days after Reagan was elected, a gunman emptied forty rounds from an Uzi, killing two men and wounding many others in gay bars in Greenwich Village. In New York’s gay newspaper, a college friend wrote, “For all of us worried that the conservative backlash in this country would bring about terrible unnamed things, the future is now.” That backlash would include a 60 percent cut in federal aid to local governments. Deregulated banks. EPA and Energy Department budget cuts. Flourishing racial discrimination and real estate speculation. Slashed funding for public-service jobs and public transit. Mentally ill people turned out on the streets. I should have had a sense of dread. I should have voted.

  Almost everyone who worked at 209½ had a college degree; many had graduate degrees. Holding up a New York Times one Saturday, a bartender with a political science degree from the University of Chicago compared it to the Washington Post. “The Post isn’t confident enough for a front-page human-interest sto
ry from Indonesia,” he said. “DC’s provincial,” he continued. DC was heading for sophistication, however, with the help of its gay men. A florist named Kenneth Love hosted at 209½ now and then. He was as dark-skinned as Tyrone, although not as good-looking. He wore a pair of loafers so beautiful I asked him to take one off so I could look at it more closely. “Belgian Shoes,” he said, “handmade.”

  “Would you like a glass of my Veuve Clicquot?” he asked. Clearly, he wasn’t hosting for the $3.10 an hour. Why then? To be elegant in the public eye, or to attract clients who could appreciate his taste? He scorned bouquets with tight buds and baby’s breath. I later found out that he grew up working-class in Anacostia, by then an entirely black quadrant of DC isolated by Route 295 and the river. Kenneth didn’t inherit taste. He worked hard at raising himself up, schmoozing with white society. His hunger for acquiring and enjoying fine things was as palpable as the lustrous leather of his shoes.

  My friend Russell was the son of an ambassador to two African countries. The only African American student in my MA cohort, Russell was tall and slim with skin the color of light caramel. He had striking eyes, beautiful and large, a high forehead, and a receding hairline. His parents lived in a gracious home off DC’s Sixteenth Street, and Russell had attended a Swiss boarding school and Hampshire College. In DC, his job was screening documentaries for PBS. Russell corrected Tyrone’s French and questioned his cooking techniques, and behind his back, Tyrone made fun of Russell’s nasal voice and his hand flourishes. For my birthday, Russell gave me a small, rolled-steel pâté de foie gras mold, something that I have only ever used for cake. In the early 1980s, to be black and gay was like that graphic depicting either two profiles or a vase. People see one or the other. This is different from seeing a black man and assuming him to be a criminal. While jogging in Chicago, writer Brent Staples whistled opera so women wouldn’t be afraid of him. Tyrone wore plain cotton shirts and no jewelry, and he refused to serve watermelon or to fry chicken. How many black men in DC would have recognized a pâté de foie gras mold? I knew three of them.

  The restaurant was the inverse of the larger culture: gay waiters and cooks had an automatic pass, while straight men had to prove they weren’t homophobic to get hired. Our straight bartender was an actor, comfortable around gay men. The workspace was what theorist Michel Foucault calls a heterotopia—a compensatory place of otherness, valuable for its affirmation of difference and a way to escape repression. We developed a camaraderie with deep roots. With a beer glass as a microphone, the bartender narrated in Marlin Perkins’s whisper as the waitrons mimed Wild Kingdom animals. Maybe our fun—often at the expense of customers, Jason and his mother, or ourselves—was protection. The ancient Greeks feared laughter; Plato worried it might undermine society. Perhaps our bonding mirth undermined the existing social structure, one that in 1980 still forced queer folk to be closeted to one degree or another. A structure also built on racism, sexism, and classism, but most of us didn’t know how to challenge the system through the law. We had no public, active voice.

  To fit in at 209½, I pretended to know more than I did. I didn’t mention the fact that the hotel where I worked in Switzerland used canned fruit cocktail for the pork Hong Kong or that I’d never eaten sweetbreads. My knowledge of wine was limited to reading wine-writer Hugh Johnson’s books, but I was sucking up information the way beurre blanc absorbs butter. I tasted the only bread pudding I’ve ever liked: brioche in an orange-vanilla-flavored custard, rich with egg yolks.

  Steven, the only Cordon Bleu–trained chef at the restaurant, made the pudding. “My mother supports an entire African village,” he told me. “But she hasn’t talked to me, much less given me a cent, since I told her I was gay.” It’s no wonder that gay folk refer to one another as “family.” Most of the gay employees at the restaurant were closeted or estranged from their parents. Given her closeness with Jason, this cast Mrs. Rose in a warm light.

  My European background had impressed Jason despite his misogyny. If he had been more mature, I might have sympathized with him for being Jewish in a city where anti-Semitism was as rampant as racism. Although real estate developer Morris Cafritz owned a good portion of the city, his wife, Gwen, renowned for her parties and her art philanthropy, wanted everyone to know she wasn’t Jewish. She insisted on being buried in a Presbyterian cemetery rather than in the Cafritz plot in Washington’s Hebrew Cemetery. I was only tangentially aware of the interwoven lace of prejudice in DC. Sometimes I’d find a thread loose in my hands, but I couldn’t see the pattern.

  The waitrons could be as polished as gemstones or as prickly as pickle forks. They taught me to yank open the kitchen door and yell, “HDA” (hairdo alert), so that the cooks could look out the small window or, in exceptional cases, take a bathroom break to stare at a man with a bad toupee or a woman who misspent a fortune on her platinum helmet. They called the round doorstop a “Betty Ford” in honor of her mastectomy. At 209½ I learned that politeness is not kindness and that wit is not cruelty. If you’ve been excluded from mainstream rights, you critique the mainstream whatever way you can, especially if you are in good company. The cattiness of gay culture grows from outsider knowledge that eventually makes its way inside, absorbed slowly through both collective and individual permeable skins. Verbal performance is capital in a world where masculinity is defined by physical prowess or by income.

  In college, my friend Cathy theorized that we loved gay men because they wouldn’t have sex with us. They weren’t interested in our bodies. “Fag hag” emphasizes the undesired heterosexual woman and the homosexual man, making sex the center. But what if something else were the center? What if attractions and bodies were not categorized crisply? Maybe in another shift of power, the ability to critique the inside while being on the outside was part of our bond.

  The first week of freshman year at the University of Virginia, a fraternity invited women in my dorm to a party. I was relegated to the back of the pickup truck they used to transport us. In the grand antebellum mansion where the party was held, with its wood paneling and scuffed floors, we were offered Kool-Aid laced with grain alcohol and stood awkwardly waiting for boys to talk to us. I’d rather be doing homework, I thought, and walked back to the dorm. Later that year, through the art, theater, and architecture departments, I discovered a queer subculture, mostly men and a few women. Their parties revealed a kaleidoscope of desires and fulfillment. I retrieved my coat out from under two men coupled on a bed. The sight of a woman, pressing one hand on a doorframe and the other on another woman’s back, drawing her in as they kissed, burned into my memory like a brand.

  At 209½ I allowed my subconscious desires to percolate to consciousness, in part by talking about them. I only had sex with Tyrone, but I wanted to have sex with a significant portion of the population—male, female, gay, straight. I was pansexual in desire, if not practice. Under the wet sand of my good-girl persona, yearnings were buried like mollusks, leaving small air holes in the surface, evidence of life.

  Don, a tall blond boy from Ohio, lied about having restaurant experience, but Jim and I liked him so much we covered for him. He was jaw-dropping handsome, like a William Hurt with curly hair, but he didn’t act as if he knew it. There was something fragile about Don. He gave money to the homeless woman, dubbed Miss Mary, who pushed her shopping cart along Pennsylvania Avenue. His father was an alcoholic who couldn’t read or write and who wouldn’t believe that his son was gay. Don acquired a dildo collection from a job in a sex shop back home, and on his drive to DC he threw them out the window, one by one, planting phallic trees along the highway to mark his journey into a new life.

  Don was a connoisseur of bodies: “He’s a swimmer,” he’d say. “See that layer of fat over the muscle?” Or, “A soccer player, look at those quads.” Don also had business acumen, a combination of sniffing out opportunity and tolerating risk. On weekend mornings, he sold Rosewood pottery and other antiques he brought back from Ohio at DC’s open-air markets. Lat
er he would have a restaurant of his own as well as a flower shop and a jewelry studio featuring chain-mail jock straps and colored titanium pins in geometric shapes. He made my wedding ring, a rose gold twist.

  From Don I learned details of gay men’s sex: bathhouses, orgies (in- and out-of-doors), glory holes, and “the beach,” a grassy part of Rock Creek Park near P Street. He didn’t make me feel prurient for asking. My friends were like French libertines: consensual anything is okay. It would be another two years before the HIV virus was identified and in the news, and fifteen years before the first protease-inhibitor drugs were developed. In 1980, no one I knew was aware of this new virus and the horror it would bring.

  One Saturday afternoon before Halloween, I walked into the restaurant, opened the kitchen door, and found Danny, the cold station cook, peeling cucumbers while dressed in a nun’s habit. Fresh vegetal mist filled the air. Petite, fair, and delicate in his wire-rimmed glasses, Danny was a founder of the DC chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. On his way to work, he said, he passed two women who did a double-take on seeing him. “Real nuns,” he surmised, because often the only evidence that one is a nun—not just a dowdy academic—is a gold cross around the neck.

  “Wow,” I said. “You make a great nun.” Danny’s habit featured a wimple, a headpiece that focused attention to his heart-shaped face, and floor-length black robes with a woolen belt and turned-back sleeves. He wore rubber-soled oxfords, plus the gold cross. Were it not for the overkill, he could pass. “How about a prayer?” I asked.

  Danny put down the cucumber and the vegetable peeler, folded his plastic-gloved hands together, and bowed his head. “Heavenly Father, cease not to watch over us when we have attained ecstasy in the arms of a hunky guy. Be a protector of our expenses as we dress ourselves in your honor. Supply what may be wanting to us through shortsightedness or sinful neglect. Make our scallops tender, our chocolate cake light. Guide our waitrons”—he looked up for a second toward me—“that they may become like Jesus, that they may persevere. Amen.”