I didn’t get a ticket. I wasn’t on the will-call or overflow list. But after work I’d taken the bus south from downtown and now stood in the lobby being patient but present, projecting as much non-threatening energy as a black man in Trump’s America could.
I’d been in love with some part of her, her brand maybe (but you don’t really fall in love with brands), her persona perhaps since the first encounter in 1997. That thing about her that comes through in printed or projected words was what it was. These did it, her words like this:
But first a description: Clara Bowden was beautiful in all sense except, maybe, by virtue of being black. The classical. Clara Bowden was magnificently tall, black as ebony and crushed sable, with hair braided in a horseshoe that pointed up when she felt lucky, down when she didn’t. At this moment it was up. It is hard to know whether that was significant.
She needed no bra -- she was independent, even of gravity -- she wore a red halter that stopped below her bust, underneath which she wore her belly button (beautifully) and underneath that some very tight yellow jeans. At the end of it all were some strappy heels of light-brown suede, and she came striding down the stairs on them like some kind of vision, or, as it seemed to Archie when he turned to observe her, like a reared-up thoroughbred.
Now as Archie understood it, in movies and the like it is common for someone to be so striking that when they walk down the stairs the crowd goes silent. In life he had never seen this. But happened with Clara Bowden. She walked down the stairs in slow motion, surrounded by after-glow and fuzzy lighting. And not only was she the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, she was also the most comforting woman he had ever met. Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity. She smelled musty, womanly, like a bundle of your favorite clothes. Though she was disorganized physically -- legs and arms speaking a slightly different dialect from her central nervous system -- even her gangly demeanor seemed to Archie exceptionally elegant. She wore her sexuality with an older woman’s ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
“Cheer up, bwoy,” she said in a lilting Caribbean accent that reminded Archie of That Jamaican Cricketer, “it might never happen.”
“I think it already has.”
I have to admit that I wasn’t a completely patient soul. After all, this event was inside a black museum on the South Side of Chicago, almost sacred ground for the community, and I was a member of the co-op bookstore hosting the event not (like most of the crowd) a student or other transient North Side or South Loop type. Too, I’d done events here. Clients had done fundraising for these very walls and collections. But I didn’t flex. I just stood, until the young bearded bookstore employee, probably an English major like myself, signaled me into the overflow seating area with a furtive wave of his hand. In front of a large monitor, plastic folding chairs were rank and file and I got one of the last ones available on the last row. Good enough. Excellent really.
Suddenly three sets of applause row-your-boated around the room, from the actual auditorium on the other side of the lobby, from the monitor at a half-second delay, and from the trained seals like me, seated in the overflow area. We all sat up straighter for our treat flapping our hands like flippers. The same bookstore employee who waved me in is now on stage and introduces a Chinese American professor writer guy who I guess I should know, who introduces Zadie Smith.
She looks like Zadie Smith. She sounds like Zadie Smith. The stage lights are too bright. She squints and she looks a bit laggard. Or properly aloof for a mixed-race Jamaican Brit? In any case she perks up seems to take a simple joyful pleasure in reading words from her new novel Swing Time. She seems so naively happy to be reading her own words that they almost don’t seem like they are really hers. She reads like a novice character actor cast in a sitcom who knows they are approaching the big punch line and they really want to bust up an tell you how funny this all is going to be. You really do get the sense that the words, especially the adjectives and adverbs on the page belong to the narrator, a close friend of Zadie’s, so close she resides inside her head, but not to Zadie herself. I couldn’t help but smile and listen, rubbing the unvarnished yellow, black and red paper jacket of my own copy.
After all the banal questions that the professor guy came up with and those tossed up like dead fish from the audience and as more applause rowed, it seemed to me that everyone clearly thought that they were the only ones clever enough to have read a published review, tweeted by New Yorker or Rolling Stone. Each was the only one to have caught something insightful reveal like a deep sea pearl wrapped in a clever question. Or that they’d found that one weak spot in her persona’s tuna fish side that once poked, would make her she’d crumple from her chair and cringe there on the black deck of the stage like you’d just jabbed a pencil inside an old knife wound and she’d admit that you were right and that her genius and brilliance and clarity and career had all been a fraud and that your question had finally relieved her of the need to keep up these fretfully thin appearances for yet another decade, yet another novel.
As said, in a past part of my career I’d done my share of events, so encounters with celebrities usually haven’t discombobulated me. If the encounter had been part of a job, I could remain cordial and at my distance, focusing on my task list. I’d only really suffered one serious case of L’Esprit de Escalier and that had been with Halle Berry who shares my birthday and Midwest roots. Smug hindsight suggests that had my mind not gone blank as a rock when shaking the newly iced-out hand of the star of Introducing Miss Dorothy Dandridge, I could have saved her from at least one truly unfortunate marriage. If not two.
Probably not.
But I was also an English major in college and I was so because I love books and words, old and new. And even if that was long ago, after everything I still loves words and, this was Zadie Smith, yards away in an auditorium just across the lobby. Row row rowing applause.
This was the Zadie who through a digitus combining of all of it, a writer of stories and her projected self to be seen as a quiet but thoughtfully spoken woman of a certain age, had seemed to conjure into one thing all the objects of my affection and obsession, from Tanya who I’d visited nearly every day after school in the eighth grade to sit with and watch television, her with the big afro, yellow skin, narrow hips and big toothy smile through the four or six or five loves of my college life, to the mother of my children through to my current lover, with even a bit of the comforting yet outward-facing presence of my own mother dashed in.
Surfing my way along the outer wave of people jostling their way from overflow joining the crowd already in the auditorium massing into a bloated line for autographs (this would take hours), I didn’t expect run right into her. Apparently no one had given her directions for what to do after the author chat other than out in the lobby. So here she was, out in the carpeted gangway leading from the auditorium to out in the lobby looking quite lost, but no more anxious looking than someone at friend’s house party who on feeling that first twinge can’t for the moment remember, with all these people around and all the talking, where the god-damned bathroom is. A description: She was beautiful. Burnt yellow skin. Tall and long and fingers for typing. Skinny jeans, but not so tight. Boots at the end. Some kind of sweater and her hair covered in a burgundy wrap -- like she’d borrowed it from Erykah Badu but toned it down and did less accessorizing. She minced back and forth like a pony looking for the open gate.
“Oh hello!” I said, surprised. The ice forming on the Lake Michigan of my mind.
“Hello.” Quite familiarly. “Do you know where I am supposed to go?”
I think over there is what I think I said instead of out for a drink with me, or off to our secret garden of course, as everyone will understand. She had a crooked tooth. For two hours she signed and sincerely chatted up everyone in the line. I was near the end, having run into some old friends who helped the time in the glacial procession pass more pleasantly. When I got up to her again. She was surprisingly still pleasant for all the penning. We chatted about a small school in Iowa where she’d been a speaker and I’d been a young man, both instances separated three decades. She signed for my my daughter, wished her luck on her college search.
