1
FOR DEANNA KROLL, THE crisis started at three thirty in the morning on Friday, November 13, in the lobby of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh building at Twenty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Actually, of course, the crisis had started much earlier—in another time zone, in another country—when a thick fog had rolled across the rump end of Great Britain and settled stubbornly in the hollows made by Gatwick and Heathrow airports. All flights in and out were canceled for hours, and remained canceled, even as DeAnna was getting out of her chauffeur-driven limousine onto the pavement in front of the Hullboard-Dedmarsh’s tall glass doors, muttering under her breath about how she was going to go stark raving bonkers permanently if she had to spend one more minute listening to white people. Actually, the chauffeur-driven limousine wasn’t DeAnna’s idea, and she didn’t usually categorize the problems in her life by the race of their perpetrators. Gradon Cable Systems insisted on the limousine for the middle-of-the-night runs DeAnna made to headquarters. It was the only way old Bart Gradon could be sure he wouldn’t be woken up personally because DeAnna was either stranded or (God help us) arrested. DeAnna got stranded because there wasn’t a cab driver in Manhattan who wanted to pick up a six-foot-tall black woman with the curves of a Nubian fertility goddess and the shoulders of an NFL linebacker—at least not in the middle of the night. She got arrested because a certain segment of the New York City police force was convinced that no black woman could afford to wear that much Gucci suede if she wasn’t turning tricks. DeAnna credited these arrests with having changed Bart Gradon’s mind about all the really important things. Until he’d been forced to find a lawyer to get her out of jail before dawn, he’d be fond of arguing that racism didn’t exist any more. DeAnna credited herself with having memorized his private phone number out of his executive assistant’s private phone book in the less than four seconds it had taken that assistant to pop into Bart Gradon’s private office bathroom and deposit a bar of gift soap on the Baccarat crystal soap stand.
As for white people, DeAnna Kroll usually got on quite well with them. She got on especially well with the long-term staff of The Lotte Goldman Show, many of whom she had known for over fifteen years. The Lotte Goldman Show had been DeAnna Kroll’s own personal idea, back in the days when she was still living her job from day to day, convinced that any second now she was going to be fired and sent right back to where she’d started from. Unlike the other young women at the other desks crammed into the small square room called Programming and Development, DeAnna had not started in Rye or at Wellesley. She hadn’t even started in school. She’d been sitting in a two-room apartment on 145th Street and Lenox Avenue, counting out the twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents left of her welfare check and wondering how in God’s name she was going to feed the baby for the next two weeks, when she got word that she’d passed her high school equivalency exam. She had been eighteen years old. Her new baby had been eight months old. The baby who had provided the occasion for her dropping out of school had just turned three. There were people who made the kind of big leaps DeAnna had made in the years since who said they didn’t remember any of it, it all went by in a blur. DeAnna thought they were full of shit. She remembered all of it, thank you very much, from her first job interview to her first apartment in midtown to the endless interview with the admissions director of the Brearley School, where she wanted to send her daughters. DeAnna remembered all of it and would just as soon forget.
The night doorman at the Hullboard-Dedmarsh was asleep in his chair. DeAnna pressed her face to the glass and rapped as sharply as she could with the edge of one of the gold rings on her right hand. On the other side of the dimly lit foyer, she could see a shapeless form stretched out on a leather couch. That would be the driver who was supposed to pick up the Siamese twins at the airport, and apparently hadn’t. In the middle of the foyer there was a bright tall sign, with red letters on a white background, leaning on a rickety wooden tripod. The sign said,
MY SIAMESE TWIN IS A TRANSVESTITE.
DeAnna swung cornrows over her shoulder and knocked again.
At the check-in station, the doorman stirred. On the couch, the driver turned just enough to make DeAnna think he was going to fall off. He didn’t. DeAnna rapped for a third time and sent up a prayer that her chauffeur wouldn’t decide to take off for parts unknown. On her way up, DeAnna had thought there would be places she could get to in this city that would be safe. Now she knew better.