"LA is definitely on the list." His deep chuckle fills the small office. "If that's your next question."
"Now I really want in." I take a deep breath. "But I want a seat at the table, not just somewhere to throw my money."
"What does that mean exactly?" Iz takes off his glasses and polishes them on the hem of his Morehouse College T-shirt.
"With your organization, is there any room on the board of directors for a ridiculously rich budding philanthropist who needs to learn the ropes?" The question comes easily, but I'm holding my breath. I want this-as much as I wanted my first record deal, as much as I wanted studio time so badly I swept the floors for it. The only thing I've ever wanted more than this was Bristol. I got her, and I'm getting this, too.
"For a man with your resources," he says, leaning back in his chair and steepling his fingers at his chest. "That could be arranged."
"For real?" I don't want to sound eager, but the chance to pour my energy into something that will have immediate impact on the community where I grew up? Hell yeah, I'm eager.
"For real." Iz nods. "And when I say your resources, I'm not just talking about your money, Grip. You're a smart guy-principled, articulate. You have a level of influence, a platform no amount of money could buy."
Iz's words affirm me in a way I don't think I ever have been, in a way I don't think I knew I needed. It feels different than the things my mother told me growing up. He may not be old enough to be my father, and I may not have known him very long, but there's no one else I respect more. That was one of the few things Angie Black and I did agree on.
"By the way," I say, turning the subject partially to avoid the emotions his encouragement elicited. "Not sure if you caught that panel I was on last week, but Angie Black was singing your praises."
He picks his pen back up to resume grading papers, his forehead crinkling into a frown.
"Yeah, I saw it." It feels like the words are being pulled from his mouth with pliers. "As much as we'd talked about your girl, I never thought to ask if she was a sister. I just assumed."
"And I never thought to mention it because it doesn't matter." I suck my teeth then grit them. "I can't believe Angie turned what should have been a thoughtful, productive dialogue into a circus, and she had the nerve to question my commitment to these causes because my girlfriend is white. How ridiculous is that?"
He's especially preoccupied with the papers in front of him. He doesn't acknowledge my statement with even a grunt, and suddenly I need him to.
"Right, Iz?" I press. "The idea that my effectiveness is compromised somehow because Bristol is white-it's bullshit, right?"
He doesn't lift his eyes from the page in front of him.
"Well, you do like to make it hard for yourself, don't you?"
Tension stretches across my back like a wire hanger.
"What does that mean?"
"It's just an awkward time to be talking black and sleeping white." He shrugs the linebacker shoulders rebelling against his tweed sports jacket with patches on the elbows. "To be dating someone outside your community when you're emerging as such a voice for it."
The smartest man I know just said some dumb shit.
"You see those two things as somehow incongruous?" My question is laced with dread as I brace myself for the man I saw as a hero to show his feet of clay.
"I just think a lot of successful brothers do what you're doing." He finally meets my eyes, tossing the pen down again. "You probably don't even realize that you've been societally conditioned to see the white woman as the ideal. On some level, winning the white man's prize is a symbol that you are now equal to him. You acquire her as an extension of your success."
"Acquire her?" I throw my voice across the desk like a blade, honed and precise.
"It's natural really," he continues matter-of-factly. "It's the ultimate act of defiance against those who have traditionally oppressed you. She's an ideal to achieve, and we see that, in every aspect of your life, you're an overachiever."
"Bris isn't some ideal, some lie mainstream media fed me and I fell for. This is love, not politics."
"Love is politics," he counters. "Because love is merely a function of your values and priorities."
"If you think love is politics, then I see why your marriage failed."
A storm cloud bursts on his face, raining anger.
"Watch it, Grip," he says. "You're way out of line."
"I'm out of line?" Incredulity and fury brawl within me. "You dare to bring this bullshit to me, insult the woman I plan to marry, insult me this way, and then you say I'm out of line?"
He narrows his eyes on my face at the word "marry."
"That's your decision, of course," he says. "Not one I would ever make. I believe the greatest expression of commitment to black people and the black family is the commitment to a black woman. For that reason, I don't date outside of black, much less marry."
"Oh, so I imagined the vibe between you and Callie?" A mocking laugh grates in my throat. "You don't date or marry outside your race, but you'd fuck outside of it if Callie was down."
The fury in his eyes bores into me. "Who the hell do you think you're talking to?"
"I really have no idea who I'm talking to." I grab my saddlebag and stand, my hands shaking with the rage I'm suppressing. "I can't believe I moved to New York to study under a bigot."
He surges to his feet, fists balled like a boxer.
"You have the audacity to call me a bigot?"
"I have the audacity? You're the one talking to me about Gandhi and Martin then spouting this crap. Martin said we should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, yet here you are judging Bristol because she's white before you've even met her? Hypocrite."
Anger ignites in his eyes at the insult, but he runs a slow hand over the stubble on his jaw. He sighs, shoving big hands into the pockets of his jeans.
"Look, we're both upset," he says. "This is why I didn't bring it up. I knew we didn't agree on this subject, and it does no good to talk about it. We can still work together, do a lot of good. That seat on the board is yours, and I meant what I said-it's not just because of your money."
"So we can work together and do all this good," I say, "but the whole time you're looking at my wife and thinking she's a mistake? That she's some Anglo trophy I use to prove something to other people? Even worse, because of some self-hate, to feel better about myself?"
He goes quiet, his chest swelling with the deep breath he draws in. I gesture to the proposal abandoned on his desk, my excitement smothered by disappointment and disillusion.
"How do you squeeze such big ideas into such a narrow mind? You're smarter than this, Iz," I say quietly. "I thought I could follow you. I thought you had answers, solutions."
I walk to the door and give him one last sad, disgusted glance, saying what I'm fully prepared to accept may be my last words to him ever.
"Turns out you're the problem."
18
Bristol
I'm in the kitchen when Grip comes home. I bought a cookbook, and it openly mocks me from the counter, its pages a reminder of my culinary failings. Occasionally I have these domestic urges. They typically pass, but ever since we moved into this beautiful place that has never been anything but a home since the O'Malleys drafted their first designs, the urges are harder to ignore-to buy fresh flowers for the kitchen from the stand up the street, to try cooking pan-roasted chicken with lemon garlic green beans.
That's why I'm in the kitchen asking myself how the hell to make lemon garlic sauce when Grip comes home. It's crazy that I know him so well, but I allowed Angie Black and Jade and others to get under my skin, to play on my unreasonable insecurities. And I do know him. I know how his steps sound at two in the morning when he's been at the studio laboring over a track and drags himself through the front door, or when Dr. Hammond says something that rocked him to the core, rearranges the way he thought about life. Those days his steps eat up the hardwood floor, eager to find me and share. Today's steps stutter, like someone lost and looking. They pause, wait. They're not sure.
He's on the couch when I enter the living room, head in his hands and elbows on his knees. On bare, silent feet, I pad over to him. He doesn't look up until I rest a hand on his head, caress the tight muscles in his neck.
"Hey." He manages a bend of his lips, almost a smile, but his eyes are defeated.
I instantly want to make whatever it is better, and my fix-it instinct springs into action. He pulls me down onto the couch to straddle his lap. Many days I don't leave the house because it's also my office, but today I met with Charm about Grip's book deal. The Stella McCartney dress I wore to her office inches up my bare legs as I settle over him. His hands are on me right away, caressing my calves and feet, venturing over my thighs, reacquainting himself with the shape of my back through the thin silk. He greets my body the way he typically does, but there is nothing typical about his expression as he lays claim to me one limb at a time.