Your Face in Mine: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jess Row is a graduate of Yale University, and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. He is the author of the story collections The Train to Lo Wu, which was shortlisted for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize, and Nobody Ever Gets Lost. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Tin House, Boston Review, Granta, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. His stories have been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O.Henry Award. In 2007 he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. Row is an associate professor of English and Buddhist chaplain at The College of New Jersey, and lives in New York with his wife and two children.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2014 by Jess Row

1.

It doesn’t seem possible, even now, that it could begin the way it begins, in the blank light of a Sunday afternoon in February, crossing the park- ing lot at the Mondawmin Mall on the way to Lee’s Asian Grocery, my jacket in my hand, because it’s warm, the sudden, bleary, half-withheld breath of spring one gets in late winter in Baltimore, and a black man comes from the opposite direction, alone, my age or younger, still bun- dled in a black lambswool coat with the hood up, and as he draws nearer I feel an unmistakable shock of recognition. Even with the hood, that elected shade, that halo of shadow. I don’t know whether to call it a certain place above the bridge of the nose and between the eyes, or per- haps something about the shape of the nose itself, or the way he carries it. Or the exact way his lips meet. Or the mild inquisitive look in his eyes that changes as I come closer to something unreadable, something close to surprise. I am looking into the face of a black man, and I’ll be utterly honest, unsurprisingly honest: I don’t know so many black men well enough that I would feel such a strong pull, such a decisive cer- tainty. I know this guy, I’m thinking, yet I’m sure I’ve never seen this face before. Who goes around looking for ghost eyes, for pleading looks of remembrance, in the faces of strangers? Not me. He’s coming closer, and I’m running through all my past at a furious clip, riff ling frantically the index cards of my memory for a forgotten slight, a stray remark, a door slammed in a black man’s face, a braying car horn behind me on 83 South. He has his eyes trained on me with a faint smile, a smile that dips at the left corner, and says,

Kelly. I’ll bet you’re wondering why I know your name. I’m sorry, I say. Do I know you?

Kelly, he says, pursing his lips, it’s Martin.

We’re alone, in a field of cracked asphalt, dotted here and there with sprays of tenacious weeds, a mostly abandoned shopping plaza missing its anchor tenant. I would never have come here but for Lee’s being the closest Chinese grocery to my apartment, an emergency stop for days when I unexpectedly run out of tree-ear fungus or Shaoxing wine or shallots or tapioca starch. Yes, we’re in Baltimore; yes, I once lived here, grew up here; but because Baltimore is not just one feeble city but many, and Mondawmin is, to be as honest as I have to be, on the black side of town, in the course of my predictable life, I might as well be on the surface of the moon. As a child I imagined there were hidden places— the tangle of bushes dividing the north and south lanes of the freeway, the fenced-in, overgrown side yard on the far side of our elderly neigh- bor’s house—that held gaps, portholes, in the fabric of the world, and if I crawled into one of them I would become one of the disappeared chil- dren whose faces appeared on circulars and milk cartons and Girl Scout cookie boxes, whose cold bodies were orbiting earth as we spoke, and every so often bumped into the Space Shuttle and slid off, unbeknownst to the astronauts inside. How was I supposed to know that I would only have to cross town to find my own gap, my own way into the beyond?

I cross my arms protectively in front of my chest, and say, I know you are.

You do?

Martin, I say, I need an explanation.

2.

We cross the parking lot together, Martin, the black man who used to be Martin, ducked slightly behind my right shoulder, f lickering in and out of my peripheral vision. Somehow I’m still possessed of enough of my faculties to remember to grab a shopping cart. The sliding door creaks on an unoiled runner, and we breathe in the comforting sting of Asian markets everywhere—dried scallops and mushrooms, wilting choi sum, f ish guts in a bucket behind the seafood counter. Mr. Lee looks up at me over yesterday’s Apple Daily—when did they start get- ting the Hong Kong papers?—and says, you’re too late, the cha siu bao are all sold out.

It’s okay, I say. I need to lose weight anyway.

Yeah, says his daughter, stacking napa cabbages on newspaper in a shopping cart. You’re too fat.

Lee gives her a dour Confucian look. Little number three, he says, that’s enough out of you. And then, turning to me: is the black man with you? He doesn’t speak Chinese, too, does he?

Martin has halted by the soy milk case, reading the labels intently. Yes, I say. Yes, he’s with me. And no, he doesn’t.

Tell him we don’t have candy bars or potato chips. They always ask. I give him a noncommittal nod.

My wife was Chinese, I say to Martin, making my way down aisle one, filling the cart with black tree fungus and Sichuan chilies and dried beans and tofu skin. I lived there for three years before I got my Ph.D. She taught me how to cook. My voice sounds bland, conversa- tional, informational: I’ve been stunned, that’s the only way to explain it, stunned back into a certain strained normality. He follows every- thing I’m saying with lidded eyes and pursed lips, nodding to himself, as if it’s exactly what I would have done, in his mind, as if he could have projected it all, with slight variations.

Hold on. Your wife was? You’re not together?

No, I say, no, she died. She and my daughter died. In a car accident. How long?

I look at my watch.

A year, I say, six months, three weeks, and two days.

Mr. Lee, who has never before seen me speaking English, is pre- tending not to watch us, stealing interested glances over a full-page pic- ture of Maggie Cheung.

I was in Shanghai and Hangzhou once, Martin says. Only brief ly, on business. Loved it. Loved the energy. Wish I could have stayed longer.

He reaches up and pulls the hood away from his forehead. His hair, a black man’s hair, of course, razored close to the scalp, with neat lines at the temples and the nape of the neck. The look of a man who’s close friends with his barber. I can’t help thinking of my own scraggling beard, and the last time I tried to crop it into a new shape, how it looked, as Meimei used to put it, half goat-eaten. Fullness of time, I can’t help thinking. The phrase just won’t leave my mind. Fullness of time.

You know, he says. You’re a brave man, Kelly. I think I’d have run away screaming. His voice is different. It is, thoroughly, unmistakably, a black man’s voice, declarative, deep, warm, with a faint twang in the nasal consonants. It’s just a couple of operations, he says. And some skin treatments. In the right hands, no big thing at all. That is to say, it won’t be. When it becomes more common.

Does it, does it—I’m f lailing here—does it have a name? What you’ve done?

If it had a name, he says, what would that change, exactly? Would it be more acceptable to you? Would it be a thing people do? Would it have a category unto itself ?

He laughs.

I’m just playing with you, he says. You should see the look on your face. Kelly, of course it has a name. What do you think it would be called? Racial reassignment.

We’ve stopped at the end of the dried goods aisle, the aisle of staples, and I’m teetering on the edge of the snacks aisle: lychee gummies, shrimp chips, dried squid, mango slices in foil, and three or four rows of Pocky, that bizarre Japanese name for pretzel sticks dipped in coat- ings of one or another artificially f lavored candy. Pocky comes in cigarette-sized packs with flip-top...