Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [140]
All of this and more I’d learned in Austin, Texas. Now I was serving the murderous ruling class in one of their homes, and of course they weren’t talking about it. They were free of it. They were here now. They were Americans.
The party and our cleanup was over by nine o’clock. I tried to stay polite to whoever talked to me, but it was like coming down with a fever at a picnic and trying to pretend you felt fine. After I’d loaded my boss’s van with plastic bins of leftover food, the trash bags of half-eaten food, the crates of china and cases of wine we hadn’t opened, he handed me a check and offered to drive me to North Station. I thanked him but told him I needed some exercise, that the late train was still two hours away.
He gave me a half hug and wished me luck in Wisconsin, then he drove off and I was walking down a hill street of more fine homes, my bow tie in my pocket alongside my last paycheck, this money that may as well have been stained with dried blood.
It was a Saturday night in late summer, and I could smell mown grass and pool chlorine, citronella candles and cigarette smoke. From behind a wall came the splash of water, a woman laughing. Jazz played on a record player through an open window somewhere, and I imagined more doctors lived there, or professors, lawyers, businessmen and businesswomen, anthropologists, psychologists, people with culture. People who read books and knew things. All those full bookcases back in the South Africans’ house: medical journals, yes, but also novels and collections of short stories, books on art history, music, and world wars. Wasn’t learning from these just the beginning? Weren’t we then supposed to do something?
At the bottom of the hill were the tracks of the subway train. One was just pulling away, its windows bright lighted squares of faces, most of them young and laughing and on their way to a good time. To the left was an intersection of streets and rail tracks where there were restaurants and bars, their doors open, rock and roll playing, a rising tide of voices and laughter, a horn honking, a shout, the smells of baked flour and oregano and the exhaust of a small imported car shooting past me for Kenmore Square where I was walking, this need to move and clear my head. But being in the midst of all this humanity could not possibly clear my head. Life, it seemed, was one big party, and what happened in faraway places or shadowy places at home or in places where people’s skin was darker was just bad news nobody wanted to hear.
And did I really want to hear it? Didn’t I want to be in one of those bars drinking a cold beer and watching all the pretty young women? Maybe talk to one of them? Maybe dance? Liz had been accepted to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and all summer she’d been renting an apartment in Boston. The day before she left, we stood under the sun in her parking lot. Her hair had blonde streaks in it from afternoons at Wollaston Beach, and she was tanned and looked happy.
Write me from Wisconsin.
Write me from Colorado.
I will.
Me too.
She gave me a kiss and a hug and I climbed into my car knowing these were lies we’d just told while smiling and waving goodbye. Who was I to feel above anyone? And now I was going off to study the work of dead men nobody read anymore.
But the thought of turning away from what was written about injustice would be like turning my back on a thousand little brothers, all of them standing there with their arms at their sides while grown men punched them in the face.
KENMORE SQUARE was a small pulsing city, a place I knew only as the subway stop that had gotten me here. A few hours earlier, it was a sunlit convergence of traffic from three directions, two-and three-story buildings on all sides that under the sun were like well-dressed grandfathers dozing on park benches, but now the old men had been replaced by the neon-electric young;