The Fugitivities, стр. 12
The coffee shop was filled with light bouncing off simmering coffee pots. The wide steel fan in the corner shuffled sticky air without providing any relief.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jonah said. “You want to go for a walk?”
“Sure. I don’t mind heading down the West Side, but let’s go up first so we can take that path, you know, the one that goes through the campus.”
They walked together up Amsterdam Avenue along the outer ramparts of Columbia. The weather was cooling off into evening; fit young students jogged by or stood around laughing in small huddled groups. They cut into the main section of the campus and sat down on the steps facing Butler Library. The sun was going down to Union City. Warm rays bathed the library’s massive frontal colonnade, catching the light like a massive neoclassical grill. They stared across the patchy turf where commencement tent poles had bruised the grass below the pantheon chiseled into the facade: Homer. Sophocles. Plato. Aristotle. White teeth. Washington’s fake smile. Harvested out the mouth of his slaves. Jonah lit a cigarette.
“You know something?” Isaac said.
“What’s that?”
“This is the only place, I mean it’s the only thing, that could ever make me wish I were white. Nothing else. And I’m not saying I do. But I’ve felt it before. Man, when you first lay your eyes on a nice college campus, and you see the girls reading on the steps, and everyone’s got this flair about them, like they belong there, like they’ve always belonged there. I look at it, and I wish, man, I wish I could feel that.”
Jonah knew inexactly what he meant. He said nothing.
4
June was moving closer to July and Jonah still hadn’t given Octavio an answer. It wasn’t like Jonah was doing anything that required him to be in New York, but Isaac wasn’t wrong in questioning why Jonah should spend money he didn’t really have. Surely he could do something. When he wasn’t writing in his journal now he was scribbling out a loony screenplay for a secret-agent spoof movie about black underground radicals with a plan to set up a revolutionary resistance base in Paris that gets foiled when they discover a time machine that would allow them to control the future but that they end up using against each other instead in a series of backstabbing leggy entanglements with white women. He would pitch it as Solaris meets Austin Powers, preferably to be directed by Melvin Van Peebles. He thought about asking Isaac to collaborate. Maybe he could do the soundtrack? But when Isaac did catch him typing away furiously in his room one evening, Jonah lost his nerve and made up a story about a set of school reports and self-assessments.
Summery days full of hypothetical promise flowed by uneventfully, until one morning Jonah got a call from his father in Paris. In a strained and uncharacteristic voice, he instructed Jonah to pack an overnight bag and meet him the next day at the airport rental lot in Newark. His father’s brother, Vernon H. Winters, had died of a heart attack at his home in Pleasantville, New Jersey. He was flying home for the funeral, his father said. Home was a word he rarely used.
Jonah didn’t know his uncle Vernon. “Vern,” as his father referred to him, was unmarried and childless (a striking anomaly by family standards), and he and Jonah’s father hadn’t gotten along. But then, his father didn’t seem to get along with anyone. Toward Uncle Vernon, though, Jonah suspected his father of harboring some degree of envy. Vernon was considered the successful sibling in the Winters family. He had worked his way up at a local division of Honeywell, one of the biggest employers in South Jersey. The only time Jonah had met him was also the first and only other time Jonah had been down to Pleasantville. It was for his grandfather’s funeral. His uncle was one of the pallbearers, and he stood out to Jonah because he had never seen old-fashioned conked hair before. He remembered his uncle’s long, thin frame, his severe expression, the sweat dripping down at his temple, and his thin mustache, wet with tears. Jonah was still a boy then, and had been completely overwhelmed by the event, by all the faces of family that he didn’t know, by the rawness of the emotion and the clamor of the church, and also because it was the same week Tupac was killed in Vegas, and the two events had become linked as a period of deep confusion and mourning in his mind. Now it was Vernon’s turn to be put to rest, and it would be Jonah’s father shouldering the box of his estranged older brother. Jonah would take the train out to Newark and