Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (15 page)

That’s what’s tragic. We’re cutting each other down instead of building each other up.”

I wondered how my mother must have felt watching us embrace each other.

I looked up. She was standing in the doorway, her brow knit and her eyes full of sorrow. Later, when I was alone with her, I stared at the People photograph of Mark, at his limbs and eyes and smiling lips.

“I don’t think I’m strong enough to break up with him,” I said.

“Why not?” my mother asked.

“I’m too much in love with him.”

but you can find a support group to help give you strength, can’t you?” she asked.

0Have you ever tried to kill a love you’ve felt for someone?” I asked.

No.”

“It’s hard to force your heart to listen to your head. All I’ll have to do is hear his gentle voice and I’ll melt.”

“If you want to stay with him, go ahead,” she replied. But I’ve learned that staying together with the wrong man is a poor excuse for living.”

The trauma of seeing a divorce unfold before my very eyes was enough to peak my fear of commitment. And the way my parents were pleading with me to slow down, pull back, and rethink my relationship with Mark gave me the feeling I needed some time to reflect and sort out my feelings.

To heighten my dilemma, it seemed that everywhere I looked in Minneapolis I saw a mixed couple. As I dined with my father in a restaurant one night, I could not take my eyes off the beautiful milk chocolate skin of a little girl sitting between her black father and white mother. She smiled with little baby teeth, her black hair hung in tight ringlets, and her charcoal eyes glittered. I missed Mark. I did my best to hold up my end of the conversation, but my deepest thoughts lay elsewhere.

At last I decided to wage an all-out war against my emotions. I swore I would smother my love for Mark before it consumed me entirely, leaving only a trace of my former self. I reasoned that if I could survive on my own for five months, without leaning on anyone for emotional support, then I just might be able to love Mark with no reservations, without the slightest worry about the odds society might stack against us as a mixed couple.

I moved to a dingy railroad apartment in Astoria, Queens, which I shared with an aspiring singer named Tammy and her cat, Reebok.

I gave orders to my friends and brothers not to reveal my new address or phone number to Mark. I tried to convince myself and my relatives that I was fine, but I sorely missed Mark and felt miserable.

Sometimes I asked myself why I was torturing both of us so much by insisting on this separation.

Night after night I had a recurring dream: Mark and I lay side by side on the deck of a boat, floating on a lake. He caressed my cheek; I said I had better go. “When will you return?” he asked. “In five months,” I replied. He tried to prevent me from leaving, but I pulled away and dove into the water, terrified of my feelings for him. As I swam away I felt sorrowful, for I had left a large chunk of myself behind on that boat.

Summer passed and heavy rains ushered in the fall. I received an occasional note from Mark, and wrote him once, when he moved to North Carolina, to tell him I missed him. I knew I was sending him mixed signals, but I could not help letting my true feelings slip out once in a while. In early October Mark surprised me by calling me from North Carolina.

I was at my part-time job doing word processing for a group of consulting scientists.

“I have a surprise for you,” Mark said. “Can you guess what it is?”

“The Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor.”

No, guess again.”

London Bridge is falling down.”

No.”

“You’re moving to France.”

Not in the near future.”

“I give up.”

“I’m going to arrange to have you fly down to North Carolina this weekend. I want you to see my new place.”

I was silent. I did not know how to respond. My heart cried YES!

but my head restrained me.

“Sweets? Are you there?”

“I can’t.”

“How about meeting me in Boston on my birthday?”

“No, it’s the same thing. I don’t want to see you,” I said, but at the same time I wondered, What am I so afraid of? Why am I running?

I heard nothing but silence, then a sort of whimper. Oh, Gail. I love you so deeply. I really do. Do you know that?”

Tears welled in my eyes. I wanted to believe him so much. Part of me wanted to give up and revive our relationship, but something powerful-a fear of disappointing my father, a fear of being part of a mixed couple, a fear of getting married and then divorced-held me back.

Hello, Gail? Are you there, darling?”

“Yes,” I whispered, barely audible.

“Do you know how much I love you? Do you really know?”

I looked up as my boss came in from lunch and walked by my desk. “I really can’t talk right now,” I said.

“Don’t go. You can’t go yet. Please talk to me. How are you doing?

What are you feeling? Don’t you feel anything at all for your little bushman?”

“I’m sorry it had to be you,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just sorry you had to be the man in my life when all this happened to me. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“I’ve felt a lot of pain in my lifetime,” Mark said. “It clarifies things, shows me what is real. And I’ve realized lately how deeply I love you. I left New York to give you space. You know that, don’t you?”

I did not respond.

“But I couldn’t get away from you, even down here. I carry your spirit in my heart.”

“Mark, I have to go,” I said, becoming aware of the office around me.

“Will you come to North Carolina?”

“I don’t know. I’ll write.”

I hung up, flustered and confused. The office manager, Sandy, a very emotional and caring woman who had suffered through eight years as a heroin addict in the 19705, tried to comfort me. When I told her it was Mark, her jaw dropped. She had been my confidante and knew the whole painful story of our tenuous relationship.

“I’m afraid no one will ever love me as much as he does,” I said sadiy.

“Gail! What are you talking about?!” Sandy cried. “Everyone who’s met you has told me what a beautiful, intelligent, delightful person you are. Half the men in this building would jump at the chance to go out with you. But it’s not only your physical attractiveness. It’s what’s inside that’s most important.”

“Thanks,” I said, too miserable to let her kind words fully soak in.

My father called me the following Saturday, told me he was reading iffr Boy, then said he detected a certain sadness in my voice when he mentioned Mark’s name.

Sounds like you’re still grieving, honey,” he said.

It was the first time during the entire separation from Mark that my father showed any compassion for what I was feeling, for the pain I was putting myself through. I could feel a tear roll down my cheek.

“Why don’t you date around?” he asked.

“I don’t want to,” I said, then paused. “Dad, I feel strange talking to you about my relationships.”

“Yes, well, I guess that’s my fault.”

There was a silence.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“No, I don’t think it is,” he said. “I don’t know why I felt so possessive, so…” He stopped talking and I could almost hear the crack of the emotional whip as he flogged himself for having been so overprotective and jealous. When I was a teenager he called me “Babe,” or Hey, Beautiful.” He told me boys just want to get in your pants.”

“In your opinion no one was ever good enough for me, were they?” I asked.

“I don’t know if anyone could have been,” he said, sounding defeated.

I knew I needed to make peace with my father, the first man in my life, in order to have a fulfilling adult relationship with a man. I needed to get rid of any deep-rooted anger I might harbor against him, admire his strengths, and understand and forgive his weaknesses.

In October I began to see Carol Abizaid twice a week, for she was teaching a dance class in Soho I was taking. She could not understand why I was pushing Mark away when she knew how much I still loved him.

Carol was falling in love with a French-speaking black man named Robert, a dancer who had grown up an orphan in West Africa. There was only one problem: Robert had a wife. Carol seemed distracted during dance class, and after we had finished she borrowed a quarter from me and went to make a phone call.

In the locker room I spotted Ellen, Carol’s gorgeous biracial roommate, and asked, What do you think of Carol’s falling in love with a married man? I think she’s setting herself up for a lot of pain.”

“Well, she’s a grown woman,” Ellen said, bending down to strip off her leg warmers. “I guess all we can do is be there for her when she feels down. He tells her certain things, and she believes him, so I guess we have to respect her feelings.”

“She’s really falling seriously in love, isn’t she?”

Fallen-past tense. I haven’t seen her like this since we were at Brown and she fell for Paul. She’s far gone.”

But even the fact that Carol, one of my dearest friends, dated black men and seemed to feel comfortable with that did not make me feel at ease with the prospect of interracial marriage. The stronger my love for Mark grew, the more I feared marriage and commitment. At times I wished I could fall blindly and irrevocably in love with a white man, as if that would solve everything. But in my heart I knew I would never meet another man like Mark in all the billions of this world.

That autumn I spent endless hours in Cafe Dante in Greenwich Village, sipping cappuccino and scribbling feverishly in my journal, trying to compose short story plots, writing notes for a second novel.

The manuscript of my first novel was with Kim Witherspoon, a fellow Brown graduate who had just become a literary agent specializing in young fiction writers. She had submitted my manuscript to six major houses and promoted me over lunch meetings with book editors. It was Kim who told me that Mark was lecturing in Midtown. I had dropped by her office on Broadway to see her.

“You will come to Mark’s speech with us, won’t you?” Kim said, standing up from her desk and pulling on her long black coat. “Marion is waiting downstairs in a cab.”

I felt torn. I yearned to see Mark, yet I was afraid of what it might lead to. My heart, which was constantly at war with my head, finally triumphed and I found myself in a cab between Marion and Kim, bouncing down Park Avenue on our way to the New York Men’s Club.

I spotted Mark, politely nodding to an elderly gentleman, across a crowded room filled with investment bankers in black suits who conversed in low and distinguished voices. His eyes widened in amazement when he saw me. In seconds he was beside me.

“I can’t believe you came,” he whispered. “You look lovely.”

We were called in to dinner and seated around a long U-shaped table. I sat at the farthest end, separated from Mark by the length of the entire room, but even at that distance he looked more handsome and self-assured than I remembered. As he spoke about black life under apartheid, about the imperative need to pressure the Pretoria regime to change, his jaw seemed more square and forceful than ever, his words more eloquent and powerful than I’d ever heard. The bankers dared not set a teacup on a saucer for fear of disturbing the silence of Mark’s dramatic pauses.

“You’d better leave,” my head whispered to me. “This is dangerous.

You still love him too much to be here.”

“What’s wrong with love?” my heart retorted. “Why should I suppress my feelings? What for? To please whom?”

“But he’s black, and you’ll have mulatto babies,” my head replied.

“You’ll be ostracized from society. No one will invite you to their homes. Your mother will say, “I told you so,’ and your father will say he approves in order to keep your aflection, but he’ll privately hate Mark.”

“Do I have to spend my whole life hAD from the man I love?”

0Not your whole life. Just long enough to stop loving hiln.”

“You’re coldhearted.”

“I’m Gail’s mind. You’re her heart.”

FInally I could take it no longer. I was torn in half. The bond between us was so strong that I could feel Mark’s gravitational pull from across the room.

“I have to go,” I whispered to Kim.

“You’re really afraid to be left alone with him, aren’t you?” Kun asked.

I nodded. We left before Mark’s speech was finished and headed down the spiraling marble steps.

“It must be difficult to break up with such an incredible man,” Kim said. “I mean, he’s not just a person, he’s a cause. It must be hard to separate the two. And he’s not just talking about apartheid, he’s talking about being hun.”

I knew immediately from the look in her eyes that Mark’s full impact had hit her. It was the same impact that had first held me, and still held me, in his power. As I was leaving I saw Mark, in a crisp dark suit and tie, quickly descending the stairs after me I frantically tried to push open the door, but it stuck. I saw Mark’s eyes widen, his mouth open. The door burst open and I dashed outside, looked both ways, then ran down Sixty-ninth Street toward Lexington Avenue. I did not feel safe from the whirl of my emotions until the doors of the bus had closed, and even then I could not believe I had left the man I loved standing on those steps, aghast.

The next day Mark called me at work at the scientists’ association and invited me to lunch. I accepted before my head could object, and I took Sandy along as a chaperone. But when Sandy had to leave early to get back to the office, I found myself alone with Mark, walking down Forty-second Street.

“So where do we go from here, Gail?” Mark asked. “What is to become of us?”

We stopped in front of the office building where I worked. My fears took control. I said I had to go, that our relationship would never work.

“Why, Gail? Why don’t you think it can work? Let’s give it another try. I know it will work out. I’ve learned a lot in these past three and a half months.”

Thoughts of my parents and relatives loomed in my mind. My head said, “You have to be strong, Gail. It was a mistake to see him.”

“Is this good-bye then. . forever?” he asked.