Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (16 page)

“Yes, this is good-bye.” I ran inside the building. He followed me.

“Do you want me to forget you?”

“Yes.”

“I can never forget you, Gail.”

“It would never work.”

“Then please, give me one final farewell kiss.”

UThat would only make it harder,” I said. But inside my heart was breaking. I wanted to throw my arms around him, I wanted to take him home with me, I wanted to talk about writing and traveling and make plans to visit him in North Carolina and shout, “To hell with the world! I don’t care what anyone thinks of us! I don’t care that I’m white and he’s black! I have to follow my feelings!”

But I remained stoic, even when I saw tears welling in Mark’s eyes. I turned toward the elevator to hide my own tears from him.

“Let’s try again,” he said.

“No, no, no!” I cried, then rushed past him and into the elevator.

“Good-bye, Gail,” he said softly as the elevator doors slid shut.

Sandy was in the office when I arrived but our boss was not yet back from lunch. I burst into tears and Sandy did her best to comfort me.

She put her arm around me.

“Oh, Gail! I can see why this must be hard for you. He’s the nicest man I’ve ever met.”

My heart was so heavy I could not bear it. I had no desire to go out and battle the New York crowds, no desire to do anything but wrap my arms around Mark. But he was gone, on his way to the airport to head back to North Carolina, probably gone from my life forever. I felt I was to blame. I was too stubborn. I began crying, hysterically. My face was red, my eyes swollen. I hyperventilated from sobbing so hard.

“Oh, kid,” Sandy said. “You got it that bad, don’t you? Can’t you call him? Can’t you reach him somehow?”

I called Ellie Spiegel, the programs director at International House on 122nd and I”iverside. I knew Mark had spent the night at her home across the George Washington Bridge in Leonia. She said she was not sure whether Mark had left yet or not.

When I stepped onto the streets of New York at five o’clock, I said to myself, “I must see him! I’ll go to Leonia. Perhaps he’s still there.” I was irrational with grief as I boarded the A train and headed north through Manhattan. I spent my last dollar on bus fare to cross the bridge.

“I don’t care what anyone says anymore,” I said to myself as tears slid down my cheeks. “My heart has won, and I’m glad. If he has left for North Carolina, then Fate meant for us to be apart. If not, then we belong together.”

Ellie, a gray-haired and pert woman, was on the front porch getting the mail as I came up the tree-lined walk.

“Hello, I’m still looking for Mark,” I called to her.

“Oh, come in, Gail. Let me see if his things are upstairs.”

I stood at the foot of the stairs, almost reeling with suspense.

“Oh, please, dear God,” I whispered. “Let his bags be there. Oh, please!”

“His bags are still there,” Ellie said, coming down the stairs. “I think he’s staying until… oh, dear! What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said, blinking back tears of joy. “It’s just that…

well, it’s kind of personal but I think you should know. Mark and I fell in love while we were at International House. My parents disapproved, at least my father did, and I broke up with Mark in July under all kinds of pressure. It’s so hard to be a mixed couple in this world.”

“Oh, you poor girl,” she said, throwing her arms around me. We stood there hugging for a moment.

Ellie, her husband, Hans, and I were halfway through dinner when the phone finally rang around nine o’clock. Ellie answered it.

“Oh, hello Mark, where are you?” She nodded toward me excitedly and winked. “Yes, I’ll pick you up outside the terminal. You’re just in time for dinner.”

As she ran to get her coat, I said, “Don’t tell him I’m here.”

Ten minutes later Mark walked into the dining room, took one look at me, and broke into a grin. “Oh, Ellie!” he said, “You should have told me!”

“I was under instructions,” she said.

“Oh, what a surprise!” He was beaming and made no attempt to hide his joy.

When he went upstairs to wash up for dinner, I went up after him. We wrapped our arms around each other tightly. Our lips met for the first time in nearly four months.

“Oh, Gail. I love you so much,” he whispered.

“And I love you.”

“I was so miserable. I’ve been wandering around Manhattan in a stupor of depression. But now…” He could do nothing more than smile.

We went downstairs and joined the dinner conversation, while under the table his toes massaged my stocking feet. As soon as we could get away we went for a walk around the neighborhood in our socks, holding hands and discussing the tumultuous four months we had spent apart. The night was warm and tender and compassionate as we whispered back and forth. And I asked myself, Why do you fight your love/or him/ for so long? Accept yourself as you are, Gail.

Accept the/act that you’re in love with a black SouthA’rican.

We spent the weekend in North Carolina, just the two of us, deep in discussion, walking hand in hand through the woods, picnicking by a lake, sharing an umbrella in the pouring rain. The leaves overhead made a canopy of crimson and gold as we ran down a trail through the forest. We talked excitedly about writing a book that would encourage mixed couples to choose love and disregard the world around them. My feelings for him were so real, so genuine. I now saw that all my desperate struggles to break away from him had been artificial, based on a fear of what others would think, say, do.

Back in New York, I was heading up the stairs to the office I shared with Sandy two days a week, when a young executive in a starched white shirt and tie spotted me. Ryan worked in an office one floor below me and had been hinting for months that we date.

“You look unusually happy today,” Ryan said.

“I do?” I laughed.

“Yes! You’re exuberant. You’re radiating light.”

“I am?”

“Well, what happened this weekend?”

I felt like shouting, “I got back together with my boyfriend and we love each other like crazy!” But instead I simply smiled and said, “This is my usual exuberant sell You usually see me on Fridays when I can’t wait to go home.”

“You get like that without drugs?” he asked.

I laughed. It amazed me that drugs had made cocaine addicts like Ryan forget the experience of real joy. The bullding crawled with coke heads, supplied by the elevator operators who would stop the car between floors to make the exchanges. The sound of sniflling filled the bathrooms. I worried that Sandy, who had resisted the temptation of heroin for years and was still taking methadone through a drug rehab program, might be pressured back into snorting or shooting up by the addicts who came to work with bloodshot eyes and chain-saw smiles.

When I entered the office, Sandy was alone with the elevator operator.

I suspected they had just completed an exchange, for they quickly switched their conversation when I entered. I looked to Sandy for an explanation, but she just smiled and asked me if I had found Mark before he left for North Carolina.

“We’re back together again,” I said, unable to contain my joy.

“He must be happier than a pig in shit!” she cried. “And he deserves to be, too!”

My friend Carol, too, was delighted that Mark and I were back together again. She could tell just by looking at me.

“I finally decided that all the external pressures mean nothing compared to what I feel inside,” I whispered to her in the darkness of a movie theater where we were watching a Spike Lee film.

“Yeah! Forget what other people think!”

“And what my parents are going through shouldn’t have to allect my life so much.”

“Hooray! Gail’s being a rebel!” Carol cried, making several heads turn to glare at us in the dark theater.

But my family and many of my friends, who had encouraged my independence, were shocked and then disappointed to learn I had suddenly changed my mind about Mark. They felt I had turned against them, and I knew I had set them up to feel that way. My father called my apartment when I was away, and, learning from my roommate Tammy that I was with Mark in North Carolina, immediately called my mother and brothers to alert them. I dreaded trying to explain to them the painful and joyous twists of emotion that led to my decision, but I knew that for once in my life, I had made a choice, alone, that it was my own, and that it made me happy.

The dreaded call from my father finally came.

“So, you’re back together with Mark again. What does this mean?

Are you going to move to North Carolina?”

“No, not yet. He has his life and I have mine. For now, we’ll visit each other and talk on the phone.”

“Are you still free to date other men?”

“I suppose so, but I don’t feel like it.”

There was a long silence.

“Well, I don’t know what to say,” he said.

“Don’t say anything. I’m not asking for your opinion.”

“Okay.” He paused, then started talking about my mother, casting her in a negative light. I bristled.

“Did you ever love Mom?” I asked.

He reflected for a moment, then said, “We were fond of each other. We were companions.”

“You married her for appearance’ sake, didn’t you? She was good wife material for an aspiring minister. Am I right?”

“Yes,” he said. “We made a good-looking pair. I didn’t realize the importance of love in a relationship.”

“I feel like you expect me to go out and find some socially acceptable mate, even if I don’t love him.”

“No, I don’t. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”

“Mark and I love each other, even though we may get strange looks walking down the street. In society’s eyes, we’re not a perfect match.

But at least I’ve learned to choose love over social acceptabiliry” My father was silent. I knew I had won my case. The struggle to overcome my need to be guided, led, controlled, taught, and protected had been long and difficult, but I finally felt I was out there My mother, after recovering from her surprise at our reunion, accepted my invitation to spend Thanksgiving in North Carolina with Mark and me. She flew down from Minneapolis for a weekend of hiking in the woods, walking beside Oak Hollow Lake, feasting on turkey, and dining at a Moravian Inn at Salem College in WinstonSalem. As the three of us wandered through a High Point furniture store, we passed through a room filled with baby cribs.

“Pay special attention to this room, Sweets,” Mark said.

My mother laughed, finding Mark’s comment charming. I blushed in embarrassment. Having a baby was the furthest thing from my mind. I had no idea that less than three years later we would purchase a crib from the very same store.

“It’s rather crowded in this apartment, isn’t it?” Gail said one morning to Tammy, who immediately flew into a rage.

MARK’S VIEW Gail lived in an all-white neighborhood in Queens, inhabited mostly by Eastern Europeans and Italians accustomed to poking their heads between faded curtains and shouting down to their children playing baseball in the middle of the street. The block was one solid building, divided only by walls and floors into railroad apartments.

Sagging clotheslines crisscrossed the courtyard outside the kitchen window, where her roommate’s cat, Reebok, sat for hours watching birds.

Leaving the subway at the corner of Steinway and Broadway in Astoria, on my way to Gail’s place, I’d walk several blocks past gangs of white youths who glared at me suspiciously. I sensed this was whites-only territory. Occasionally I was followed for a block or so but luckily was never harassed. A few months later, in another section of Queens called Howard Beach, a gang of white teenagers chased a black man onto a highway and to his death.

Gail’s “apartment” was the living room, without privacy. Her roommate, Tammy, passed through it whenever she needed to use the kitchen or bath. Whenever I was there, Tammy and her boyfriend, Billy, tried staying out of our way, but conflicts invariably arose.

“It’s strange that you should say that! You weren’t inconvenienced at all until your black boyfriend came along! Do you know what we have to do to accommodate you two lovebirds? Billy has to go outside to pee and I pee into a trash can. Yet this is my apartment.”

By December Gail and her friend Carol Abizaid were looking for an apartment to share in Brooklyn, a place large enough and private enough to allow visits from Carol’s West African boyfriend, Robert, and me.

They found a sunny, five-room place with hardwood floors and freshly painted white walls on the second floor of a beauty parlor on Flatbush Avenue near Prospect Park. It belonged to a sweet, understanding woman from Trinidad named Cecilia, who’ also owned the beauty parlor. Gail and Carol moved in a few days after New Year’s 1987.

I was glad Gail was now living with a trusted friend. The only inconveniences were the mice denizened behind the refrigerator, the barking and growling of Windy, Carol’s black Labrador, in the middle of the night, the clanking heating pipe by the head of Gail’s bed that awoke us at six on cold mornings, and the constant flow of traffic and screaming sirens on Flatbush Avenue.

It was a predominantly black neighborhood, accented by a handful of white yuppies living in recently renovated brownstones toward the Slope. With such a cultural mix in the neighborhood, we were just another couple each time we walked down Flatbush Avenue to the park on Sunday afternoons.

A third roommate moved in with Gail and Carol. Mandy was black, a dancer, and a native of Brooklyn.

“I’ve never lived with two white girls before,” Mandy told Gail and Carol. “But I guess you two aren’t really all that white, I mean, you both got black boyfriends.”

Her room was separated from Gail’s by nothing but a large piece of plywood that sealed the opening between the two rooms. On some weekends there were six of us, three women and their three black boyfriends. Behind the plywood from Mandy’s room came the thumpthump of rap music and boogie funk.

Down the hall we would hear Carol and Robert arguing. His

English was not half as fluent as his French, so they had difficulty communicating each time a conflict arose. When his anger completely took over, Robert could be heard repeating a belligerent “Fuck you!”