Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (17 page)

But Carol loved him with passionate devotion. He was lightskinned and handsome, was adored by many young women, had a shy and pleasing smile, and had just opened his own business.

Beyond these aspects of his life, Carol knew very little except that he had grown up as an orphan and been abused as a child. He seldom answered questions about his wife, but he hinted to Carol that he would soon leave her.

I found myself contrasting my relationship with Gail with that of Carol and Robert. Carol believed that marrying Robert would put an end to her emotional turmoil and doubts. She would be his wife, not his mistress. She would be able to call him on the phone and not have to hang up if his wife answered. She would see him more than once or twice a week. They would build a life together and become closer each day. She clung to these uncertain hopes and refused to let them die, no matter how many lies Robert told her. Carol’s mother and father urged her to break off the relationship but she angrily refused.

One morning in the kitchen, Carol turned to Gail and said, “Robert and I are getting married today.”

“Really?” Gail said with surprise.

“His divorce was finalized yesterday. We have to marry right away, for his green card.He says we’ll have a public wedding later.”

Carol came home that night alone, carrying a bottle of champagne and calling for a celebration. But the bottle remained unopened and she spent her wedding night watching television alone in her room.

“What was it like?” Gail asked the next day.

“It was sort of anticlimactic. Not that I expected much anyway,” Carol said. She then described the marriage bureau at City Hall, thronging with people, mostly foreigners, waiting to get married. She described how she had felt faint at the weirdness of it all when the preacher read the lines, “Do you, Carol Abizaid, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” And how she had given Robert a “serious” kiss when the City Clerk said, “You may kiss the bride.”

Carol fell silent and stirred soup on the stove.

Getting Married.

“Has anything changed?” Gail asked.

“Nothing’s changed,” she said, staring into the pan, expressionless.

“He still lives with his ex-wife. We’ll see each other once or twice a week. Things won’t change until she goes back to West Africa.”

“When will that be?”

“Soon.” She continued staring vacantly into the pan. “At least, that’s what he told me.”

“Did he give you a ring?”

“No. But I didn’t expect one.”

Gail stared at her for a moment, confused by the strangeness of Carol’s relationship. FInally she said, “Wow, you’re a married woman. You’re a Mrs. Somebody.”

“Shut up! Now don’t you start teasing me!” Carol said, then managed a faint laugh.

The next day Robert’s ex-wife called Carol and thanked her for marrying Robert. “That was a big favor you did,” she said. “We really appreciate iL Now he can get his green card.”

This phone call upset Carol, but Robert explained to her that he had to tell his wife certain white lies to get her to agree to the divorce.

Carol told no one about the marriage, perhaps hoping that someday, when Robert “grows up,” they would live together and plan an actual wedding.

In the meantime, she spent many of her nights alone, waiting for Robert to call and crying herself to sleep when he did not.

Gail and I tried to include Carol in our conversations and invited her to join us for home-cooked dinners of baked chicken, rice pilaf, and special sauces, but the intimacy and contentment between Gail and me seemed only to exacerbate Carol’s misery and loneliness.

She later confessed she was terribly envious of us.

Weekends at my apartment in North Carolina were much more relaxed. We would cuddle under an afghan before the fire, dine by candlelight while discussing Dickens and the French revolution; talk about the importance of keeping a journal, having convictions, and speaking one’s mind; skip rocks across a lake; take floral-scented baths after working out on Nautilus machines; and listen to Paul Simon’s Gracelaad album and to Bob Marley.

We would wander aimlessly through the grocery store, oblivious to the stares, shocked expressions, and raised eyebrows of elderly Southern belIes and disapproving Confederate gents. I rarely called her Gail anymore. To me she was always “Sweets,” a nickname that never failed to draw a smile from her lips.

Neither of us welcomed the arrival of Monday mornings. Mondays meant that one of us would have to go to the airport and return home.

Long-distance relationships are difficult, especially when days of intense closeness are interrupted by weeks of being alone. We were ready to marry, but Gail was not yet ready to leave New York, her friends, and brothers in the city or her job as an editor, and I was afraid she might feel unhappy and isolated if she did so.

One Monday morning in Brooklyn, I canceled my flight back to North Carolina. I postponed it a day, then two more, then a week. I could not tear myself away, especially as it was the week of Gail’s twenty-filth birthday, and she did not want me to leave either.

One February afternoon as Gail and I strolled through Central Park, among joggers, cyclists, and patches of melting snow, we started talking seriously about marriage. She squeezed my hand and said, “Let’s just do it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We’re always talking about getting married. Why don’t we just go ahead and do it?”

“How?”

“Like my grandfather and Grandma Sue did, back in the 1920s when they took the subway from Columbia down to City Hall.

Wouldn’t that be a great way to marry?”

“But that’s how Carol and Robert got married, and they’re miserable.

I’ve hardly seen Robert over at your apartment since the wedding.”

“Their relationship is the problem, not where they married,” she said.

“I’ve always thought of my grandparents’ marriage as being romantic, unconventional. Just think of it: It would be just the two of us. And that’s what it’s all about, after all, isn’t it? It’s a promise between two people, not a social event. I was sitting in my office today, making a list of guests to invite to our adding. Then I stopped and tore it up. I don’t want anyone else to be there, just the two of us.”

I was surprised but pleased by her sudden readiness. After all we had been through, it was hard to believe we had finally reached that level of confidence and trust to decide to make the final commitment, despite the obstacles that still lay ahead.

“Are you sure you want such a quiet wedding?”

“You wouldn’t mind, would you?” she asked.

“No, not really. Since I can’t afford to bring my family to America, and since they probably could not get passports anyway, I guess it wouldn’t matter if we don’t have a big wedding. But what about your family? Won’t they feel left out?”

“We can send them announcements, after the fact.”

“Gail, what’s the real meaning behind this? Are you afraid to tell your family we’re getting married? Do you want a fait accompli so they can’t pressure you into changing your mind?”

My remarks disturbed her. She averted her face, walked a bit faster, and stared across a windswept field toward Central Park South. Then she turned to me and said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m afraid of.

I’ve let my father push me this way and that for too long. I want to go ahead and make a decision alone for once. I love you. And I’m never going to let anyone manipulate my feelings for you any longer.

My father calls once in a while to express his concern’ about me, as if I were throwing away my life by loving you. He’s been sending me books. One of them was Women Who Love Too Much and the other was Women Who Love Men Who Hate Women.”

“Why would he send such books?”

“He read the Boy, probably with a red pen in one hand, searching for your behavioral patterns and trying to psychoanalyze your childhood.

He thinks that anyone raised in such a brutal environment will inevitably become brutal, and that anyone with a father like yours will definitely become a controlling tyranL I didn’t let him finish. I hung up on him and then screamed at the phone, Bastard!”

“But why would he think I hate women? My book flows with praise and admiration for my mother and grandmother. Women have shaped my character and made me grow in ways I never could have. Most important they taught me how to survive the horrors of apartheid with my soul intact. It is their values and example that helped me overcome my anger and hatred.”

“I don’t know. I think he’s just trying whatever he can to make me question my relationship with you.”

“Don’t let it bother you,” I said, drawing her toward me by the hand.

She was trembling. “Let go of your anger. He’ll grow to understand.

He hasn’t even met me yet. And we don’t need to rush into anything. I don’t want you to have to choose between me and your family. I don’t want you to marry me out of fear that someone might convince you to stop loving me.”

“It’s not out of fear,” she said. “I’m sure of my feelings for you. I just want to protect those feelings from the pressures of the outside world. I want it to be just the two of us. At least for a while. You see, everyone in my family seems to know what’s best for me, and I know I feed their malleable image of me with my words, my timid smiles, my hesitations, my silences. I have to be bold in making my own decisions. The future seems so vague and a bit frightening. I’ve been so afraid of making the wrong choice that I’ve made no decisions at all. I want to change that.”

GAIL’S VIEW The subway ground to a screeching halt and the doors jolted open.

We were spewed onto the platform at City Hall in an oozing stream of harried commuters. We ascended the pee-stained, littered steps slowly, clasping each other’s hands with the desperation of children clinging to their mothers’ skirts in a milling crowd of strangers.

City Hall loomed over our heads as we stepped up to the revolving doors, hesitant, peering through the glass. I spotted a sign that read: “Marriage Licenses.”

“To the left, up those stairs,” I said.

Mark’s hand felt warm and moist in mine as we made our way to the second floor and walked down the corridor, our footsteps echoing on the polished linoleum. He was dressed in his best suit and shined brown shoes; I wore slacks and a blazer.

As we waited in line for a marriage license application, I reflected on a phone conversation I had with my grandfather four days earlier.

Eager for the opinion of someone older and wiser, I had called him at his home in New Hampshire. I started by talking to him about my strained relationship with my father. I did not talk about Mark, so my grandfather assumed the major trouble between my father and me was my reaction to the divorce.

“Look, kid,” he said. “He divorced my daughter and I don’t plan to renew my relationship with him. But you’ve got to renew your relationship with him. He’s your father!”

“I don’t know how to go about it,” I said.

“He hasn’t handled his problems very well,” Grampa said, “and he’s dealt with them at the expense of my daughter, and you. I feel resentment, sure. It’s a disappointment, a lifetime shock. The relationship between your mother and father can’t be healed, but your relationship with him can be salvaged. I pray for him every night, not because I’m a great Christian, but because I hope he finds whatever it is he’s looking for.

“I wish your father well,” Grampa continued. “And you should do more than wish him well. Don’t try to correct him. tive your own life.

And in living it, try not to hurt the lives of others. I think your father’s a bastard, but that’s all right. I don’t support his decision, but I won’t limit him one bit. You’ve got a tough road ahead of you, kId.

Internally. We’re talking about feelings, and there’s no microwave for that stuff. It has to develop slowly.”

“It’ll take time.”

“More than time, it will take effort. On your part as well as his.

But c’mon, kid,” he said. “I’ll tell you what marriage is really all about. I thanked God every night I lay in bed next to Sue. And I said, May it always be like this!” Not only when things were good, but every night, even during the bad times. That’s what marriage is all about.”

He paused, and I reflected sadly on the fact that he had lost his wife, Sue, to cancer when I was still a small child. As we talked about marriage in general, I brought up the topic of interracial marriage, which is what I desperately wanted his advice on. A retired minister who had been President Richard Nixon’s pastor in Washington, D.C 11 my grandfather had married mixed couples in the nation’s capital when it was still illegal in many states. He seemed to comprehend immediately that I was talking about marrying Mark. My mother had told him a great deal about Mark.

“You’ve got to find out what the reasons are for each of you to be together,” Grampa said. “I think you should back into it, march toward it, and go sideways all at the same time. It’s complicated.

You’ve got to make sure you’re not marrying for a cause or to prove something to someone else.”

“I guess I should just follow my feelings and not worry about other people,” I said.

“No, that’s not the solution either. You’re not only marrying one person, you’re marrying a set. Unless you expect to live in isolation.

Sue and I got married quietly, but we also knew we wouldn’t mind having a big public wedding later. My friends were her bends. But you can’t very well marry interracially and keep it a secret,” he said, laughing.

I had not mentioned anything about a secret marriage, and it made me wonder whether he was predicting one. And here I was with Mark, filling out marriage license applications, most likely in the same room Grampa and Sue did about sixty years earlier.

Besides calling my grandfather, I had also gone to the New York Public Library to do research on mixed couples. The main questions in my mind were: Do interracial marriages last? Are they common?

How do mixed couples feel about their marriages?

I did not find much, and most of what I found was negative. Socalled experts on interracial relationships had a plethora of absurd theories and explanations about white woman-black man marriages.