The Best American Essays 2014 (33 page)

A few weeks pass and your son has not cried again. Decrease but do not suspend the observations. Remain on edge, as there are many kids out there who at any moment could say something potentially harmful with long-term consequences.

This is exactly what happens. And this time the culprit is your older son's little brother. He recently started preschool and has noticed that his skin color more closely resembles the other kids' than his brother's, and that his brother's skin color more closely resembles yours than your wife's, and that your wife's skin color is closer in resemblance to his than to his grandmother's, and that his grandmother's skin color is exactly the same as that of the kids in preschool, except for the brown spots on her hands. He turns to his six-year-old brother and asks, “Why is skin different colors?”

A beat passes before your older son responds, “I don't know.”

Wonder if this is the moment to have your first important discussion with your sons about race. You can do it by revisiting that “stinky” comment, for starters, and then by warning them of other insults they'll likely receive, though be sure to note that insults, relatively speaking, are not much compared to what they'll learn studying a history that is not very funny. Determine that yes, the time for this talk has come, and then watch it evaporate when your sons scream bloody murder as you emerge—perhaps too quickly—from their closet. Fail at your attempts to calm them before your wife hurries into their room and catches the full rush of their bodies. She sits with them on the bed as they wail through tears that you frightened them. Your wife gives you a look that foretells a coming drought of affection, and your boys give you looks that make you seriously wonder if you have the capacity to be a good father. Conclude that you probably do not, but decide to give yourself a fighting chance by ending your subjection to race. Tonight the boys will sleep with their mother, and you will sleep alone in their room, but tomorrow evening, while the boys are in the den playing with their new fire truck, find your wife. She will be sitting at the kitchen table grading papers. Scoop her a dish of mint ice cream. Lower yourself across from her. Stare into her eyes and say this:
You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
She will look confused. Explain.

FROM
The Yale Review

 

O
NCE THE PERSON
introducing me bit his tongue so badly that blood poured over his necktie onto the index card on which he had inscribed my entire life. Another time one of the more combative younger poets introduced a colleague in terms so stark and acidulous the speaker seemed struck dumb: “If I were you,” our host opined, “I'd go do something else, not listen to this genius's gibberish; he screws better than he writes.” One day at the University of Tulsa, my introducer actually read aloud my entire curriculum vitae, taking up some thirty minutes, smitten at the outset by parroty echolalia and devastating nerves. Even as he spoke, on and on, I ran a 2B pencil through paragraphs of comparable length in my speech. Indeed, given time enough, we could have exchanged roles completely; the introduction would have supplanted the speech. I cannot think why someone has not attempted this—suddenly the audience twigs it that the introducer is the real draw after all and the ostensible speaker is a figment, a ghost who will slink away when no one is looking.

Stanley Elkin, never the master of the gentlest turn of phrase, used to proffer an introduction of such glistening eloquence, such magisterial authority, such daunting length that the speaker, humbled, only mumbled, aching to get off and away, not having been warned what he or she would have to follow. In the same neck of the woods, St. Louis, on the campus of Washington University, William H. Gass used to do a similar thing, reading an introduction even more resplendent than anything of Elkin's, achieving something between encyclopedia entry and red-hot book review, leaving you more or less to flounder (or shine) in the afterglow, but with one plus: he left behind him a cloud of menthol and eucalyptus from the big toffee on which he had sucked to clear his tubes. So even as you trotted up into that aroma and began, your sinuses behaved, and you excelled. Or choked by newly descended phlegm, you coughed on your finest phrases.

Gass, that formidable introducer, had (no doubt still has) another trick, however. Having studied temptation, he lays on something you cannot resist, a treat for having sung for your supper—in my case a huge iced chocolate cake, perhaps to keep me from speaking ever again, such was its sleek sweet softness.

You see how, as memory spins and serves things up, the worst evokes the best, calling in from the periphery of aversion the silliest goings-on, I have been introduced, in my time, as a former test pilot, a professional cricketer, and an expert on cheese. I have had the introducer who interrupts you halfway through to pose a question, the introducer who fell off his chair, having been driven to sleep by my speech, and the one who set me up as Paul Weiss. You never know what's coming, what's in the water, whether the reading light will work. Once at Binghamton University, mine host led me up several flights of steep stairs so that I arrived too breathless to speak, not that it mattered anyway; we entered a room wholly in darkness, with nonetheless a murmur of people at the front and who knew how many behind them. The power had failed. So had the mike, the lights. He nonetheless maneuvered me into a chair in what I recalled as a Bob Hoskins motion from
The Cotton Club
(in which movie he is always
positioning
people) and began his introduction without a pause, getting the facts right and even paying tribute in the dark to things I'd written. I was then supposed to get on with my reading: no flashlight, no academic flare. For a few moments I fudged in the dark, heard appreciative glottal sounds, and stopped dead. Then the lights came on in dazzling anticlimax.

I once saw the classical scholar Michael Grant introduce himself in Latin, having waited in vain for his host to show up, and what an urbane, concise job he made of it. Had it been me, I'd have spoken it in Greek—given Grant's linguistic mastery, of course. Carlos Fuentes, handed a minibottle of Tang or some such to slake his thirst, tried it before beginning and treated us all to an agonized rictus of the mouth that merged loathing and disgust with hauteur and warned us not to do anything else vulgar or he would stalk off back to the Mexican embassy. One speaker, who must remain nameless, arrived in a wheelchair and, perhaps made nervous by his introduction, wheeled himself gradually backward as he spoke, destined to cannon against the blackboard as the hour ended. Yet another speaker, introduced in a blaze of NASA light, clawed at her crotch the instant the lights went down for her slide show, and kept doing so whenever darkness descended, fired up by the occasion.

There is something artificial about the speaker confronting an audience, and there is something painful about the speaker, badly introduced, who with an aggrieved twitch wants to correct the introducer instead of giving the announced spiel. Once again, I think, it should be done, just to widen the experience of audiences, to develop their compassion for the focus of solitary palaver. When called upon myself to introduce someone I have not yet offended, I try to subordinate myself to the occasion, with often ghastly results, and that is how you get the various looks that say
This is about me, not you
or
Why do you have to be funny?
Some introducers, not I, like to read aloud something you have written, and that feels like dentistry, with all the stresses in the wrong place, the rhythm bumpy, some words mispronounced, some phrases omitted altogether in what seems a last-minute attempt at censorship. The best introducer I ever had was my French translator, who, having introduced, read a portion of my work in his own exquisite French; I then read the same text in English (this was in Paris) with a feeling of
English sounds so oafish in comparison.

Have your glasses ever fallen off? Have you ever dropped your script? Or brought the wrong one? Or, as I on a couple of occasions have while mine host looked on aghast and unrequited, fallen into one of those dumbstruck spells of critical reverie in which you see a better way of saying what you have put in print? Have you revised, in total silence, on the hoof? Only the other night, under strong lights, with a text enlarged on the Xerox machine and powerful glasses to help, I just could not see what a certain word was and so made various stabs at it; some crystalline fleck in the paper was shining fit to beat the band and the Formica ridge that a bit of black rested on was creating an ambiguity all its own.
Impale
or
impala
? Come on,
you
wrote it, don't you know from memory?

No, I did not. But these hazards are not the introducer's fault, even though they mesmerize the audience with a glimpse of hit or miss. How many felicities owe their charm to a misreading, I wonder.

Who holds the record for the best apparition on the stage, right after the introducer finishes? In my book, Dame Edith Sitwell, who, before launching into
Façade
, tested her loud-hailer or megaphone (like the one the little dog used to listen to on HMV records). Looking like some bleached macaw, bird of semi-demi-paradise, she tooted into the mouthpiece her version of
Testing, testing
, and then let out a screech at the introducer, who had clearly offended in a thousand ways. I thought she was declaring war and was going to rip out his eyes, but she just as suddenly went back to business and made even weirder sounds into the orange cone she held to her mouth. Michael Rennie introducing Gort in
The Day the Earth Stood Still
would have had an easier task than whoever it was launching Dame Edith in front of the peasants of her own Derbyshire, there out of courtesy during a harvest gala.

I am thinking of designing a little card such as hotels often inflict upon you when you leave, asking you to pick certain evaluations. Would you rate your introducer as A., accurate; B., articulate; C., bumptious; D., slanderous; E., certifiable? Something like that. Would you like this person to introduce you again? No, I would like to write my own intro; but the very phrase—
being introduced
—has winning overtones of a foreign body invading the mucous membranes or of spies being parachuted into occupied countries. Amid all this bumbling, fumbling, faking and croaking, preening and posting, there is a heroic art form going to waste. Call it the oral overture, the informative preliminary, or barker's bite, it echoes the boxing announcer's blurry histrionic “Let's get ready to rumble!” and that ancient, little-honored literary form, the prologue, once a vogue, now an epitome of lost things in a revved-up world.

FROM
The New Yorker

 

N
IETZSCHE SAYS SOMEWHERE
that the industrious, virtuous English ruined Sundays. I knew this at the age of twelve—that is, the Sunday part and the ruination part. When I was growing up, Sunday morning was all industry and virtue, a religious bustle: the dejected selection of formal clothes (tie, jacket, gray trousers); a quick pre-ecclesiastical breakfast; lace-up shoes handed to my father, master of the polishing arts (that oily Kiwi cake, glistening in its tin like food). Then the eternal boredom of church, with its ponderously enthusiastic adults. And, after that, Sunday lunch, as regimented as the Hapsburg Sunday lunches of brisket of beef and cherry dumplings that the Trotta family eats week after week in
The Radetzky March.
A joint of beef, or of lamb, or of pork, with gravy, roast potatoes, and a selection of fatally weakened vegetables (softened cauliflower, tattered Brussels sprouts, pale parsnips, all boiled punitively, as if to get the contagion out of them). It was the 1970s, in a small town in the north of England, but it could almost have been the 1870s. The only unusual element in this establishment was that my father cooked lunch. He cooked everything for our family, and always had; my mother was never interested in the kitchen, and gladly conceded that territory.

After lunch, tired and entitled—but sweetly, not triumphantly—my father sat in the sitting room and listened to classical music on the record player. He fell asleep gradually, not really intending to succumb. He wanted to be awake for one of his favorite composers, a narrow but rich cycle of Beethoven (piano sonatas and string quartets), Haydn (string quartets), and Schubert (lieder, especially “Die Winterreise”). These three masters were almost as unvarying as the rotation of Sunday beef, lamb, and pork. My brother and sister and I were all musical children, so we would be appealed to, as we crept toward the door. “Don't go quite yet—you'll miss the next one, ‘Der Lindenbaum,' which Fischer-Dieskau does very well. He has the advantage over Peter Schreier.” My father's musical discussion involved grading performances; though an intelligent auditor, he didn't play a musical instrument. So my memory of those Sunday afternoons is as much a memory of names as of music: “No one has really approached the young Barenboim, in those late sonatas, except Kempff. But of course Kempff is a completely different pianist. Solomon, whom I heard playing the last two sonatas in London, when I was still at school, was tremendously fast and powerful.” Richter, Kempff, Schnabel, Barenboim, Brendel, Ogdon, Pollini, Gilels, Arrau, Michelangeli, Fischer-Dieskau, Schreier, Schwarzkopf, Sutherland, Lott, Vickers, Pears—all the precious names of childhood.

I thought of those Sundays when Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died, some months ago. Some of the obituaries rightly suggested that he became a brand name for a kind of smooth, dependable quality. That is how he functioned in our household (which isn't to deny his beauty as a singer, or the validity of my father's admiration of him). I grew a bit suspicious of that rich emollience of tone, that tempered, bourgeois liquidity. Just as intolerantly, I grew restless with the way my father would look up from his armchair and calmly utter the double-barreled guarantee: “Fischer-Dieskau, of course . . . Marvelous.” The name had the shape and solidity of some dependable manufacturer or department store, a firm that would never go bust. Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Harvey Nichols, Austin Reed, Royal Enfield. My father had great faith in reliable British companies, often against the evidence, it should be said. It was a joke in our family. Once, at dinner, a wall plug and socket exploded, with a mild, odorous flash. Imperturbable, my dad went to the wall and examined the plug, like the scientist he was. “M.K. and Crabtree,” he said, intoning the names of the manufacturers. “Totally dependable.” We all laughed at this stolid evenness of response, while perhaps gratefully aware that this was the kind of man you would want around in an actual crisis. Fischer-Dieskau, like M.K. and Crabtree, was totally dependable, though inconveniently German.