Eye to Eye Read online

  “When did you get so strong and reasonable all of a sudden?”

  “Since you and Earl are the only couple in both recent and distant history that are making a shred of sense. My head will explode if you guys start any nonsense. So cut it out.”

  “All right,” I promise. “I’ll cut it out.” And I try. I really try.

  Bita’s a hard-ass. When she decides to do something, you can’t talk her out of it, no way, no how. And I can tell she’s had enough of Mr. Charlie. She’s not a blabber, though. She thinks a thing through before she says anything about it, but by then, she’s already made up her mind. I bet she’s thinking of divorce, she’s thinking of half, as spouses get here in California. She snapped when Charlie didn’t even bother coming home a few nights ago, thinks that’s just being too careless with her feelings and she’s right. About a lot. It’d be time to go, if I were her. But I haven’t told Bita any of that, not until I get her e-mail. It’s a rare quiet day. A Monday. Earl is down at the bar getting ready to open, and I’m at home trying to come up with ways to tutor Ian so that he won’t be bored and difficult. I could tell that he liked that TV assignment and he did crazy-good analysis. It was sloppy and full of grammatical errors, but at the end of the day, I loved that paper. Typos or not, Ian is a kid who’s willing to open his eyes and look at the world. True, I had to pry open those eyes, but his ideas are all his own. I’m still considering having Ian watch more television for analysis, maybe some films, too. I’m not making books play second fiddle, but you have to draw in your student in any way you can. I sit at the kitchen table with our one electronic luxury, my seven-year-old laptop, and read what Bita has written:

  Ron,

  You know what I know about Charlie. I think I’m going to leave.

  I’m thinking, oh no, you don’t leave that house. Somebody else named Charlie Asshole should leave the house. I log off and pick up the phone to call her, but hear a knock on the door. When I open it, Bita is standing there, looking overly cheerful. Weird.

  “What’s this? What are you doing here? I was just going to call you. And don’t say you were in the neighborhood because you are never, ever in this neighborhood.” I grab her hand and pull her into the apartment. She’s been to our place only once before, when it was supposed to look small because of all the boxes and junk piled everywhere while we were moving in. Now, though, it looked…small. Bita lied, though, and said, “Hey! The place looks great!” She sat down at our little wooden kitchen table and tried to look comfortable.

  “Just getting out of the house,” she says, still looking around.

  “Bita,” I say, “for real. What is going on?” It seems like I’m always pulling something out of someone. Ian, Earl, now Bita.

  “I kicked him out,” announces Bita, sounding surprised at herself.

  Yay! “Wow, Bita.” I don’t know what else to say. “Are you okay?”

  “No.” She brushes some stray salt off the table, and then wipes her palms on her skirt. I have to be a better housecleaner.

  “You’ll be okay. You did the only thing you could do.”

  “I don’t want to go back to my house,” she says loudly. She stands up and hugs herself. “It feels very big now…I want to go driving in my car and shopping and laughing and talking shit like normal, so can we please do that?”

  “Of course we can.”

  “And can I please have some water or something? It’s hot as hell.”

  “All right. Take it easy. You going to crack a bottle and hold it up to my neck or something?”

  “I might, if you don’t straighten up.” Bita’s finally grinning at me. In the end, I get her a can of Diet Coke and we hop in her car and drive all the way from Echo Park to Melrose, where Bita buys a ton of overpriced clothes and I buy nothing because (a) I’m broke and (b), even if I weren’t, in spite of the fact that I’ve dropped a pound or two, I’d still be unable to fit into anything Fred Segal would be selling. And I don’t ask about what happened, exactly. I save that for later.

  Once upon a time, Charlie was a prince and a knight in shining armor and all that bullshit. When we were undergrads at UCLA, and Bita first met him, he was all right. Not my type, but still. He was in a fraternity (strike one), the fraternity known for having money, and though Charlie didn’t really come from money, he really, really wanted to be in that fraternity (strike two) and so he rushed it and got in for being an overall good guy. That’s what they used to say about Charlie. As the years passed, though, Charlie became more and more “carried away” with himself, as Earl says. Once—just once—I actually went to one of those fraternity parties because Bita begged and begged, and I overheard one of Charlie’s “brothers” talk about how they’d really like to bang the curry out of Charlie’s “Indian chick.” When I told Charlie about what I’d heard, as I was getting the hell out of there after a night of feeling slimed, Charlie said he was sure it was just some misunderstanding, and kept drinking from his beer (strike three), even though he was already amply hammered. It’s not as if I expected Charlie to conjure the guts to give his buddies an ass whipping and a lecture on feminism and race relations. But damn. If you ain’t part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem, as the militants say.

  In my mind, from then on, Charlie’s shining armor got really, really rusty. But one thing used to be true. He loved Bita, no matter what, and she loved her Charlie—even though in their ten years together there has been a lot of that “I’m sure it was just some misunderstanding” business from Charlie. Totally clueless, he is, about that sort of thing—when he wants to be, anyway.

  I truly believe that Charlie’s determined to make himself as bland and blendable as possible. He’s a much bigger fan of the melting pot, not the salad. Hell, if he could turn back time and show up on Ellis Island, he would have requested that they fuck up his family name. I can see it now: “Look, I’m fresh from Ireland and I don’t want any trouble. Would you please change my name from Flannigan to Jones or something?” And he’s the love of Bita’s life.

  As for Bita’s part in all of this, I’m at a loss. In her case, love wasn’t blind. It was lobotomized. In the years since they’ve been together I’ve seen signs that would have been clear to anyone. I will agree though, that you never know what goes on between two people. As close as I am to Bita, there are things that I will never know about her and Charlie, because it isn’t my business to know. And all these things likely add up to reasons why a smart, beautiful woman like Bita was willing to put up with Charlie’s shenanigans. I should have been a better friend. I should have talked more trash about Charlie, but I thought it best to stay out of it—at the time. After all, Bita didn’t bat an eye when I got off the plane with Earl, who was wearing what he always wears: his tight jeans, his black T-shirt, a gigantic belt buckle and black biker boots. And a hat. He came off the plane at LAX wearing a huge black Stetson.

  What can I say? I was used to all that by then.

  Even Doris, Earl’s biggest fan, was, at first, not into Earl. He looked odd to us. We were bicoastal city chicks who had little experience with dudes who looked and talked like Earl. And I think that’s why Doris and I are close, despite our differences. Talking is the thing. Even if you don’t want to hear it, even if it hurts you, makes you sick to your stomach to hear it, talking is good medicine. Nasty going down, but you feel so much better later. True to form, Doris, later, when I was still running from Earl, kept talking to me, telling me I was a dummy for holding his accent and ZZ-Top beard against him. Bita and I, though: we don’t always talk the way we should. When she met Earl, I knew she liked him, sure, but we never talked about the complications.

  When Bita met Earl, she parked the car (which is a be-yatch at LAX) and met us down at baggage claim, where she gave me a hug, held my face and said that I looked fantastic. When she turned to Earl, he took off his hat and extended his hand. He knew Bita was my only other dear friend in the world besides Doris. He wanted to make a good impression, even though
all he did was be himself. “Hey,” he said, and when Earl says, “hey,” it sounds more like “haaay,” all long and drawn out. “I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Bita,” he said, grinning and killing me, at least, with those dimples. She went to Earl and gave him a big hug, and when she pulled away, he put his hat back on. He blushed and was happy, I could tell, that she was so warm, what Earl would call “down home.” She looked at me and then looked at Earl and said, “I like him.”

  It was only earlier, when I still lived in Indiana and Bita hadn’t met Earl, that she seemed a wee bit dubious, thought I was being like one of those women who traipses off to some island and gets enamored with one of the locals and gets it in her mind to bring him back home with her. After she met him, though, she said it was something about the eyes, the way he really looked at her, the gesture of taking off his hat and calling her Miss Bita, that charmed the hell out of her. And when I worried, at first, about how hard living with Earl in L.A. would be, what the naysayers would say and all that insecure bullshit, she said, “Ron, only a man and woman really knows what goes on between them.”

  “Also, only a man and a man and a woman and a woman knows what goes on between them,” I said, out of habit.

  “Jesus. What grad school has done to you,” Bita admonished. “Have we got everyone down now? All the combinations covered?”

  Very true what Bita said about two people being the only ones who know what the deal is. Now, Doris and Bita think Earl and I are perfect together, but for me, there’s that Lady Macbeth spot I just can’t rub off.

  So the moral of my meandering fairy tale and Shakespearean digression is unclear, even to myself, except that I’m dreading tutoring Ian today. Still, he’s making me feel like a kid in the schoolyard, and like a kid in the schoolyard, I don’t think Ian can grasp the subtleties of the whole goings-on between a man-woman business. He’ll just want to give me shit about Earl. We’ve had a little more than a week off because of his family’s vacation, and the last time I was at the “crib,” as Ian calls it, I was there with Earl just to pick up my car. Even Maricela seemed glad that I was removing my unsightly junk heap from the premises.

  Today, she buzzes me in like always, and I find Ian in the study, farther down the hall from the entertainment room with the gigantic TV. I’ve brought Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which they’re apparently not asking kids to read anymore, and White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty, because I think that it’ll strike some kind of chord with Ian. It’s funny and smart-ass, a book on identity. It’s contemporary, so Ian won’t, I hope, complain about the other two books. When I enter the room, it’s eerie. Ian is sitting at the table with pen and paper, all ready to work. The Bluest Eye is cracked open and laying face down. Ian looks at me with no expression I can read, and so I sit down across from him at the table.

  “Okay, man. What’s up?” I say. I remember his satanical grin when I last saw him, when he met Earl, and I’m waiting for him to fuck with me in some way or another.

  Ian shakes his head and holds him palms up. “Nothing. Nothing’s up.”

  “All right, then. I brought some books that I think you’ll like. There’s one classic, Catcher in the Rye, another Morrison, Jazz, and this guy, Paul Beatty.” I hold up the books as I tell Ian about them, and his eyes linger on White Boy Shuffle. When I put it down, he slides it over so he can take a look at it. Paul Beatty’s black. I see Ian linger over that detail when he spots the author’s photo at the back of the book.

  “We’re reading a lot of books by black people,” Ian says after a moment.

  I’m not sure what Ian means by that comment, so I say nothing and organize the study guide notes I made up for him. We’ll read Catcher in the Rye after Morrison, my little gift to Ian. How can he complain about a kid who leaves school because he thinks it sucks?

  “I mean, like a lot of books,” Ian repeats, and crosses his arms so that his hands are tucked under his armpits. He’s wearing a brown Run-D.M.C. T-shirt. Cool, I have to admit. I wouldn’t mind wearing it myself.

  I stop organizing my notes and place my hands carefully on top of the table. Here we go. “Is this troubling to you in some way, Ian? Do you have something you’d like to say to me?”

  “Maybe,” Ian replies. “But I don’t want to break your achy-breaky heart,” he says, the corner of his lip turned up. He must have spent the whole week thinking of that one, but I play it off.

  “Am I supposed to get what you’re talking about?” I speak slowly, patiently. I don’t have the energy for any showdowns with Ian today.

  “Isn’t that what guys like that listen to? That country crap?”

  He means Earl, I know, but I want him to say everything he means to say. “Guys like what?”

  “That guy the other day. Your boyfriend?” Ian says it like he still can’t quite believe it.

  “Yeah? So? He’s my boyfriend. Your point is?”

  “My point is that you’re all into this black stuff and you’re dating him.”

  “Again, your point is?”

  Ian props his legs up on his chair and rests his head on his knees. “You’re just totally random,” he says and picks at a hole in his expensive jeans. “You sound like my grandmother most of the time, and then every once in a while you’ll get all ghetto on me.”

  I let the whole ghetto thing pass. Everybody is saying that now: ghetto booty, ghetto fabulous, and not just black folks, either. There’s a whole lesson/discussion in that phenomenon, if you ask me. But Bita would just say, What has grad school done to you? Still, I get all teacher on him, not ghetto. “So people are complicated, Ian. There are all different kinds of people, right? Every black person you see hasn’t wandered off the set of some ridiculous video on heavy MTV rotation. I don’t kick it with my bitches and hos. I’m not busting caps in people’s asses. And no, contrary to nearly every black film that comes out these days, I don’t work in a beauty shop or a barbershop. I read books, and I write books, which, I’m sure, you think is a very white thing to do.”

  Ian shrugs.

  “Anything else about me or my life you’d like to critique?”

  Ian shakes his head, but then says, “Is he for real, talking like that? Only dudes on TV talk like that. Dudes on TV who talk like that don’t end up with chicks like you.”

  “And what is a chick like me?”

  “Insane?” Ian quips. “You know what I mean.”

  “Well, anyway, according to your paper, what we see on TV isn’t real, is it? And what about you, Mr. Hip-Hop? Have you ever thought about how absurd someone in the so-called ghetto would think you are, with your four-million-dollar house and NWA on your iPod?” This is getting mean, but Ian started it. That’s what I’ll say when the Bernsteins toss me out on my ass once and for all. Ian started it. I’m so mature.

  “Whatever. Music is universal. It’s for everybody. It’s about how it makes you feel.”

  I put my elbow on the table, and rest my chin on my hand. “But people? It’s not about how people make each other feel?”

  Ian says nothing. He picks up White Boy Shuffle and flips the pages over and over. I have an epiphany that weeks and weeks more of this is just not going to work. Maybe Ian, in all of his sixteen-year-old tenacity and stubbornness can do it, but all of a sudden I’m thirty-one and exhausted. I reach out and take the book from Ian, lay it all out on the line. “Look, Ian. If you’ve seen enough bullshit Hollywood movies, you know that there’s always the movie where the black person comes in and shows all the clueless white folks how to change, how to really see things in their lives, and all of that horseshit. Well, this ain’t that movie. You need to get a good grade in your lit class because your parents want you to, A—and B, you just should. You should pay attention in class, pay attention to literature, because I promise you, it helps you to make sense of the junk we all have to go through before we live our crazy lives and die. So you and I, let’s just stop it. Let’s make it easy on ourselves. You and I both know that
you are smart enough to pass the class in your sleep—if you actually gave a shit.”

  Ian picks at his nails, which are metallic blue today, and then says, “In The Bluest Eye? Morrison was looking at how hard life is, how life grounded those people down, but that there’s, like, I dunno, some hope still. Kind of. Like, you can just get all fucked up and stay that way or climb out of it. And Pecola’s like a, like a…” Ian looked around his huge study. “She’s like a symbol of how the whole black and white thing and being poor messes with people. And that’s how work songs and hip-hop are. Like that.”

  This is why teaching is so damn cool sometimes. The cobwebs get cleared out and wheels get to turning. “What do you mean when you say, ‘Like that’?”

  Ian picks up The Bluest Eye and flips through the pages. “I guess…I guess I mean that without work songs or hip-hop, people would have really fucking freaked out.”

  I want to ask Ian what he means by “freaked out.” I want him to be more specific about “people.” But that would be really, really pushing it. I’ve had my breakthrough moment today, my moment where Annie Sullivan spells out W-A-T-E-R in Helen Keller’s hand and Helen Keller finally gets it. Okay, maybe not that dramatic, but damn near. Pretty damn near.

  “Good, Ian. Those are very cool connections to make. Let’s get started on Salinger.”

  “Fine,” Ian argues. “I’m going to get a Coke. You want one?”

  “Diet, please.”

  Ian heads for the kitchen, but then turns around. “That dude’s bike was cool, by the way. Sa-weet.”

  “Earl. His name is Earl.”

  “Right,” Ian says, rolling his eyes.

  That dude. There’s a voice in my head, but I try to push it out. Hey, Ronnie. When Ian talked about Earl, you were embarrassed, just a little bit, weren’t you? No, I wasn’t. Shut up. Oh yes, you were. But embarrassed for who? Earl or yourself? What? Why would I be embarrassed about myself? Come on, now. I’m talking to you, don’t you hear me talking to you? No, I don’t hear you. Shut up, shut up, shut up!