Terroir Page 7

  “Amen,” I said, giggling.

  Tad, a manager with a temper like a gas flame, was also laughing. “Danny boy, you don’t know how lucky you are to buy off the rack. My feet”—he paused to stick one out from under his white apron—“are size eleven. Cost a fortune.”

  Danny smiled coquettishly and picked up the naked cucumber. He waved it at Tad like a magic wand, almost touching him on the shoulder. “Bless you, my child.”

  The same age as Jason, Tad couldn’t be more different as a manager. There was no pretense about him, no defense, and that made him sexy. Without malice, he looked you in the eye and told you to iron your shirt. With warmth, he complimented your hair. His crush on our straight bartender translated into kindness.

  In college, I’d learned that queer parties might involve drag, or at least dressing up. On sale, I bought a pair of gloriously impractical beige Italian pigskin boots and wore them as often as possible. In warm weather, I wore the woven plaid ruffled dress I bought in Spain—the one I wore with white leather espadrilles whose ties wrapped around my calves to my foreign service interview two years before. There, three navy-blue suit-clad interviewers asked me, “What’s the biggest problem in the United States today?”

  “Capitalism,” I answered. My knowledge of politics was rudimentary: capitalism and communism are bad, European socialism is good. Despite my fabulous espadrilles, I couldn’t articulate the subtleties that might have gotten me the job.

  If I hadn’t been such a fool, I could have been one of the regular State Department guests dining at 209½. Or I might have been stamping visas in Mongolia. But then I wouldn’t have met Tyrone at the Hilton or stood with two funny men discussing women’s shoes. Amor fati, says the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Love your fate. Everything in your life is necessary to whom you become, so don’t regret your past. I bought a simple, two-piece black dress for when I hosted, which would have been perfect for that State Department interview. I didn’t then know the phrase “we’re all in drag,” or that throughout history, women dressed like men to gain access—to work on sailing ships, cross the prairie safely, or, like transgender musician Billy Tipton, marry other women. Joan of Arc was tried for transvestism, not heresy. Women more frequently dress like men while men rarely dress like women: Why give up the power of being male? When men do cross-dress, their rejection of male power begs us to read their choices like a poem, closely, looking for lapses in verisimilitude. I learned that even small choices can be acts of will and that bodies can speak more powerfully than words.

  At one party our straight bartender wore a flesh-colored body suit to become a naked Mrs. Rose, complete with orange-colored wig and girl patch, and gold wine-foil-wrapped fingers. “Welcome to my apartment,” he said at the door. His drag was parody; no one would see him as anything other than male. But when you’re not sure whether someone is male or female, you might feel threatened because you sense that you’re supposed to know. A few people—often rich and elite like Anne Lister but also poor like Sylvia Rivera or middle class like Quentin Crisp—have always defied the conventions of gender, although they paid a price. In a photo from that party, Tyrone (an Arab, in a sheet with a headband) and I (a lion, wearing a yellow cotton head I sewed from a kit) look tame compared to a Carmen Miranda behind us in her fishnets and patent-leather stilettos.

  The actor Carol Lawrence sashayed into the restaurant wearing high heels and a sparkly royal blue suit. She was extremely friendly, which translated into a kind of noblesse oblige. Celebrities raised the temperature in our little culture. We waited on Ted Kennedy (four-martini lunches), Lady Bird Johnson (and her secret service men), Tom Brokaw, George Will, Françoise Gilot and Jonas Salk, Maya Lin (who at nineteen squeezed lemon into the coffee cream to curdle it), Diana Nyad (who brought her own Tupperware containers for leftovers), and Peter, Paul, and Mary. I recognized Anthony Hecht, poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. He dined with his much younger second wife, Helen, and their five-year-old son, so precocious he ordered his filet mignon saignant. Helen’s cookbooks had a badly composed author snapshot taken by her husband, one that did not do her justice. By contrast, Anthony’s own author photo was a side shot of him in French cuffs with gold links, gazing into the distance as if from Mount Parnassus. My feminist hackles rose up. Nobody noticed.

  Waiting tables is the art of knowing how to approach a couple who is bickering, a family for whom the food is merely an excuse for a get-together, or a lobbyist who, after receiving the whole artichoke he ordered, indignantly called me back. He pointed to the mess of chewed leaves on his plate, “This artichoke is tough.” I could instruct him (in front of his client) how to eat an artichoke, or I could accept the blame. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Let me bring you the fettuccine.”

  We were quick, picking up verbal and nonverbal cues from one another and from guests. Who needs another drink, now? We were more patient with our guests’ moods and idiosyncrasies than we would be with those of anyone else. We loved our customers simply for being human, and we tried to make them love being in our hands (agape with a dash of eros). To do that, we loved one another along with all our snobberies and cutting insights. “Gaydar” exists in part because queer folk pay attention to detail, to the way people conform—or not—to stereotypes, for their own safety in seeking mates. We gossiped like nobody’s business. We confirmed suspicions about a White House correspondent’s bulimia by following her into the bathroom with its two unisex stalls. Thereafter, when her name was on the reservation list, we signaled by opening our mouths and pointing a finger down our throats.

  On Sunday afternoons, when the restaurant was closed for lunch, we played volleyball on the National Mall courts. “Bring your balls,” said Jim to the other waitrons and the kitchen staff. We played for fun, and no one cared if I couldn’t spike. Tyrone played, too. If his Jamaican background disposed him toward homophobia, getting to know so many gay men changed that. As for me, even though I already spent so many hours a week with my coworkers, I loved being on their team.

  Except perhaps during Princess Di’s wedding, when Jason used the occasion to anglicize the menu with clotted cream and potted shrimp, and someone brought in a TV and the guys stood around it that Saturday afternoon.

  “That dress has ten thousand pearls.”

  “She took a risk with those bangs.”

  “My God, look at the carriage.”

  “Who cares?” I said, setting tables, deliberately uninterested. “She’s not very bright. Really, a kindergarten teacher?”

  “Oh, honey,” said Jim. “She has to be a virgin. A doctor certified her.”

  I rolled my eyes, but the men were glued to the screen. Maybe they yearned to be virgin princesses. My grumpiness and snobbery might have had something to do with how pretty she was, or with the general notion of monarchy. At least movie stars’ fortunes are based on their work. Virginity is a state of inaction, of withholding. Why should it be praised? Could any of us then imagine that the royal marriage would end in divorce, that Charles was already long in love with another woman? Camilla was kept from the press or remained a secret no journalist dared to broach, although Charles gave himself away when asked if he was marrying for love. On the eve of his wedding, he answered, “Whatever love means.” In a letter written five years after the royal wedding, he asked, “How could I have got it all so wrong?”

  Tyrone made me aware that during this wedding hoopla, Caribbean immigrants were rioting: Bristol, West Yorkshire, and Brixton. Deaths were rare in the UK because neither rioters nor police carried guns, yet inequities in housing and employment were as obvious as billy clubs, and they inflicted much longer-lasting damage. Who could take in the figure of twenty million pounds of taxpayers’ money spent on security for the wedding and not consider what else that money might do?

  Philia

  One spring Saturday, Tyrone and I planned a dinner party. We’d previously moved the autumn-gold refrigerator from our galley kitchen into the large dining room,
so that Tyrone could install a clever flip-down work shelf along the kitchen wall. When, at the end of our lease, the landlady told us she wanted the house arranged as it had been, we removed the shelf and replaced the refrigerator. Happily, it covered the spot where we accidentally melted the vinyl flooring with a bag of warm fireplace ashes. It seemed like a gift not to expose our mistake, not to be required to pay for a new floor. The two years Tyrone and I lived in that house were a honeymoon, on our own island. When I fretted over splitting a bill, he shook his head, saying, “Money is not worth worrying about, woman. I’ll pay it.” When I complained about cleaning, he said, “All you have to do is ask.” It was not the same as reading my mind, but I asked, and I received.

  At the riverside docks, Tyrone bought a striped bass (which locals call rockfish) caught that morning. He cut potatoes into perfect ovals to be twice cooked, and I zested lemon rind for the mousse. The citrus scent surrounded us like a halo. Maybe my parents would come around, maybe Tyrone and I could live without barred windows, maybe I would find work teaching. One day that winter when I was running for the bus, something in my back snapped. “Surgery,” the orthopedist said. I protested, then he shrugged: “Bed rest.” I didn’t yet know about Pilates or Feldenkrais, but I did figure out that my lack of upper-body strength along with the bad ergonomics of leaning over people to pour coffee from a fifteen-pound pot had caused the injury. I created work-arounds, like walking empty cups to the full coffee pot or asking the guys to pour coffee, but the job was no longer fun. Perhaps I’d also learned what I needed from working at 209½.

  The 209½ lemon mousse recipe used uncooked eggs. This was a decade before the first large salmonella outbreak. It was also a decade before Kenneth Love, once an elegant host at 209½, then a florist to DC’s elite society, was murdered by a white, nineteen-year-old hustler who stole his gold watches and escaped in his vintage Daimler. Love’s death exposed a trail of bounced checks and defaulted loans. Also in that coming decade, Jason’s restaurant empire (209½ was the second of many) collapsed. 209½ is now a Korean fast food joint and Jason a real estate agent.

  Within the next ten years, AIDS took the lives of five of my friends, four from the restaurant. Jim’s bout with polio as a child had weakened his immune system and sped his death, but what of the others? Tall, handsome Don was the first to die, in November 1990, in a Johns Hopkins hospital room heavily marked with red biohazard warnings. I brought him my hardcover copy of A Boy’s Own Story. I was afraid to hug him. As if chiding a student who hasn’t done the homework, his doctor said, “Other patients have fought harder to stay alive.” Baptist churches posted marquees: AIDS = GOD’S CURSE ON A HOMOSEXUAL LIFE. Hemophiliac Ryan White, diagnosed with AIDS at age thirteen after a blood transfusion, was expelled from school and then allowed to return after national media covered his story. I lost touch with 209½ cohorts Tad and Danny, heard of their deaths secondhand, and felt pangs of guilt.

  In his poem “For the AIDS Dead,” Frank Bidart writes, “Without / justice or logic / without sense, you survived. They didn’t. / Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.” My friends spent down their savings to be eligible for Medicaid or racked up their charge cards because death erases debts. Their bodies wasted away, an emaciation I had previously seen only in photos.

  But that spring night in 1982, eight of us enjoyed rockfish and lemon mousse, sitting on red metal folding chairs around a table created by placing a door on sawhorses. At Garfinckel’s, a department store that discriminated against black people (something I intuited and didn’t think to do anything about), I bought a tablecloth to cover the door in the splendor of Portuguese damask. I paid for this with my first credit card. Tracing the raised black numbers and the letters of my name on my Amex card, I felt as adult as the people I waited on. I remained a prudent spender, and in two years I saved ten thousand dollars. As with the money I earned in Switzerland, my savings seemed like a passport, although to what, I didn’t know.

  At our damask-covered table were two other women: Tyrone’s cousin, a dentist in DC, and a friend of mine from Hopkins who was attending Georgetown law school. Mentored by writer Edmund White in hopes of becoming the next Amy Tan, she was instead pressured by her family to go back to Hawaii and work in real estate. With our other guests, Russell, Don, Jim, and his partner, we could have been a poster for diversity, but people weren’t yet advertising what was later called “inclusion.” Jim brought Rubrum lilies arranged in a vase—Stargazers—dramatically spotted hot pink-and-white flowers with an intoxicating sweetness. He thoughtfully snipped the red stamens so that pollen wouldn’t stain our clothes and linens or poison our cat.

  Of Tyrone’s roasted rockfish stuffed with crabmeat, Don said, “This is the best fish I’ve ever eaten.” It was fresh and flaky, served alongside the crisp potatoes. Because the fish and crab were both still so plentiful in eastern waters, we took them for granted. We drank a lot of white wine and lifted our glasses to make toast after toast. To friendship. To food. To family, however that is formed. To whirled peas! Champagne to our real friends and real pain to our sham friends! We savored the creamy lemon mousse.

  Toward the end of the evening, a mouse ran around the perimeter of the dining room, and Russell and I screamed. We remained in that dining room on hard metal chairs because the living room was too small for us, we who made our city larger by living and working in it, by the weight of our bodies and the sound of our voices. And if on this night our past selves floated away like steam from a soup pot, our futures were as impenetrable as the metal bars we never removed.

  Town of the Big House

  BECAUSE I THOUGHT BALTIMORE WAS UNDERGOING A renaissance, I convinced Tyrone to move there from DC. “Baltimore’s more real,” I said, “and we can afford to buy a house and renovate it.” He was eager for a change and happy to please. The neighborhood where we bought our first house had two secondhand bookstores, a coffee shop, a free medical clinic, a feminist bookstore, antique stores, a hardware store (the kind where you can walk in with an odd screw and the clerk will find its mate), the food co-op Sam’s Belly, the Butter Crisp bakery, a post office, and an A&P. Three blocks west was the Johns Hopkins campus with its library and swimming pool. When the cat was sick, I put him in his carrier and walked to the vet. Still, the day we moved into that nine-hundred-square-foot house, Tyrone and I were assembling a desk upstairs when someone entered through the unlocked glass-paned front door and stole our wallets from the dining room table.

  The name Baltimore comes from the Irish, Baile na Tighe Mor, “town of the big house.” Founded in 1729, the city was named after the second Baron Baltimore, Lord Calvert, who held the charter for the Maryland colony. Like a watery hand with hundreds of fingers, the Chesapeake Bay reaches into fertile coastal plain with tall prairie grass as well as forest, once full of elk, bison, wolves, and cougars. Native people were pushed west. African slaves labored for the first Calverts, so from the beginning slaves and colonists were mixed in the complex ways that mark American slavery. Black people could not get married; their families were destroyed. “No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery,” wrote Harriet Jacobs, once enslaved and later author of a narrative of her years hiding from her master. Although hundreds of slave narratives such as Jacobs’s were published in the nineteenth century, as an undergraduate and in an MA program, I didn’t read any, because African American scholars or writers weren’t hired at the universities I attended, and white professors were mostly not interested.

  On my own I read the British Virago imprint: novels by eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century white women that had been popular when published but later were largely forgotten. In my book club, we read “classics” like Crime and Punishment. I didn’t wonder why neighborhoods east and west of downtown contained decrepit public housing or burnt-out row houses, a legacy, I learned later, of redlining, the fact that black people couldn’t buy houses or get mortgages or, when they did man
age to do so, only at prohibitive interest rates. I didn’t ask why “the highway to nowhere” cut through west Baltimore only to dead-end in a parking lot, and I didn’t consider the communities it had displaced. Our own neighborhood was anchored to the north by grand houses built around the green-space vision of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Like DC, Baltimore was predominantly African American, yet few neighborhoods were integrated. Due to a historical lack of equity in urban development and housing and the absence of black middle and upper classes (unlike in DC), black household wealth in Baltimore was only 5 percent that of white households.

  Tyrone’s heritage included a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Scottish master’s rape of his African slave. There might also have been a coupling between a Spanish colonist and a Taino or Arawak woman. Caribbean-British Tyrone didn’t fully experience the peculiar US legacy of inequality, although of course he experienced a UK version, as well as racism and classism around the world, during his travels. In his early twenties, he discovered a socialist bookstore in Glasgow, Scotland, where his ship was docked. He came back to the ship armed with the writings of Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, and Marx and Engels, and after the following voyage, he was not the same person. Awakened to injustice in the world and the idea that it can be ameliorated, he could not forget a dead baby whose skin was coated with feces in a Bombay gutter. He carried that image as he did his chef’s knives. When we moved to Baltimore, I had no such image, but I sensed that I needed to learn more. This hunger drove me to earn a PhD in English, a process that instilled in me the notion that the right language could unlock every bright door.