The Candy House, page 1
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To my writing group—Collaborators and compatriots,
Ruth Danon
Lisa Fugard
Melissa Maxwell
David Rosenstock
Elizabeth Tippens
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—
Emily Dickinson
For nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
BUILD
The Affinity Charm
1
“I have this craving,” Bix said as he stood beside the bed stretching out his shoulders and spine, a nightly ritual before lying down. “Just to talk.”
Lizzie met his eyes over the dark curls of Gregory, their youngest, who was suckling at her breast. “Listening,” she murmured.
“It’s…” He took a long breath. “I don’t know. Hard.”
Lizzie sat up, and Bix saw that he’d alarmed her. Gregory, dislodged, squawked, “Mama! I can’t reach.” He had just turned three.
“We’ve got to wean this kid,” Bix muttered.
“No,” Gregory objected sharply, with a reproving glance at Bix. “I don’t want to.”
Lizzie succumbed to Gregory’s tugs and lay back down. Bix wondered if this last of their four children might, with his wife’s complicity, prolong his infancy into adulthood. He stretched out beside the two of them and peered anxiously into her eyes.
“What’s wrong, love?” Lizzie whispered.
“Nothing,” he lied, because the trouble was too pervasive, too amorphous to explain. He chased it with a truth: “I keep thinking about East Seventh Street. Those conversations.”
“Again,” she said softly.
“Again.”
“But why?”
Bix didn’t know why—especially since he’d only half-listened, back on East Seventh Street, as Lizzie and her friends called out to one another through a cumulus of pot smoke like disoriented hikers in a foggy valley: How is love different from lust? Does evil exist? Bix was halfway through his PhD by the time Lizzie moved in with him, and he’d already had those conversations in high school and his first couple of years at Penn. His present nostalgia was for what he’d felt overhearing Lizzie and her friends from his perch before his SPARCstation computer linked by a modem to the Viola World Wide Web: a secret, ecstatic knowledge that the world these undergrads were so busy defining, in 1992, would soon be obsolete.
Gregory nursed. Lizzie drowsed. “Can we?” Bix pressed. “Have a conversation like that?”
“Now?” She looked drained—was being drained before his eyes! Bix knew she would rise at six to deal with the kids while he meditated and then began his calls to Asia. He felt a wave of desperation. Whom could he talk with in that casual, wide-open, studenty way that people talked in college? Anyone working at Mandala would try, in some sense, to please him. Anyone not at Mandala would presume an agenda, possibly a test—a test whose reward would be employment at Mandala! His parents, sisters? He’d never talked to them that way, much as he loved them.
When Lizzie and Gregory were fully asleep, Bix carried his son down the hall to his toddler bed. He decided to get dressed again and go outside. It was after eleven. It violated his board’s security requirements for him to walk New York’s streets alone at any hour, much less after dark, so he avoided the trademark deconstructed zoot suit he’d just taken off (inspired by the ska bands he’d loved in high school) and the small leather fedora he’d worn since leaving NYU fifteen years ago to assuage the weird exposure he’d felt after cutting off his dreads. He unearthed from his closet a camouflage army jacket and a pair of scuffed boots and entered the Chelsea night bareheaded, bridling at the cold breeze on his scalp—now bald at the crown, it was true. He was about to wave at the camera for the guards to let him back in so he could grab the hat, when he noticed a street vendor on the corner of Seventh Avenue. He walked down Twenty-first Street to the stall and tried on a black wool beanie, checking his look in a small round mirror affixed to the side of the stall. He appeared utterly ordinary in the beanie, even to himself. The vendor accepted his five-dollar bill as he would have anyone’s, and the transaction flooded Bix’s heart with impish delight. He’d come to expect recognition wherever he went. Anonymity felt new.
It was early October, a razor of cold in the breeze. Bix walked uptown on Seventh Avenue intending to turn around after a few blocks. But walking in the dark felt good. It returned him to the East Seventh Street years: those occasional nights, early on, when Lizzie’s parents visited from San Antonio. They believed she was sharing the apartment with her friend Sasha, also an NYU sophomore, a ruse Sasha corroborated by doing laundry in the bathroom the day Lizzie’s parents came to see the apartment at the start of fall semester. Lizzie had been raised in a world oblivious to Black people except those who served and caddied at her parents’ country club. So frightened was she of their presumptive horror at her living with a Black boyfriend that Bix was banished from their bed during her parents’ first visits, even though they stayed in a midtown hotel! It didn’t matter; they would just know. So Bix had walked, occasionally collapsing in the engineering lab under the guise of pulling an all-nighter. The walks had left a body memory: a dogged imperative to keep going despite his resentment and exhaustion. It sickened him to think he’d put up with it—although he felt it justified, on some cosmic balance sheet, the fact that Lizzie now managed every facet of their domestic lives so that he could work and travel as he pleased. The legion of good things that had come to him since could be seen as recompense for those walks. Still, why? Was the sex really that good? (Well, yes.) Was his self-esteem so low that he’d indulged his white girlfriend’s magical thinking without protest? Had he enjoyed being her illicit secret?
None of that. What had fueled Bix’s indulgence, his endurance, was the thrall of his Vision, which burned with hypnotic clarity on those nights of slogging exile. Lizzie and her friends barely knew what the Internet was in 1992, but Bix could feel the vibrations of an invisible web of connection forcing its way through the familiar world like cracks riddling a windshield. Life as they knew it would soon shatter and be swept away, at which point everyone would rise together into a new metaphysical sphere. Bix had imagined it like the Last Judgment paintings whose reproductions he used to collect, but without hell. The opposite: disembodied, he believed, Black people would be delivered from the hatred that hemmed and stymied them in the physical world. At last they could move and gather at will, without pressure from the likes of Lizzie’s parents: those faceless Texans who opposed Bix without knowing he existed. The term “social media” wouldn’t be coined to describe Mandala’s business for almost a decade, but Bix had conceived of it long before he brought it to pass.
He’d kept the utopian fantasy to himself, thank God—it looked comically naive from a 2010 perspective. But the Vision’s basic architecture—both global and personal—had proved correct. Lizzie’s parents attended (stiffly) their wedding in Tompkins Square Park in 1996, but no more stiffly than Bix’s own parents, for whom proper nuptials did not include a mage, jugglers, or fast fiddling. When the kids started coming, everyone relaxed. Since Lizzie’s father died last year, her mother had taken to calling him late at night when she knew Lizzie would be asleep, to talk about the family: Would Richard, their oldest, like to learn to ride horses? Would the girls enjoy a Broadway musical? In person, his mother-in-law’s Texas twang grated on Bix, but there was no denying the zing of satisfaction her same voice, disembodied at night, afforded him. Every word they exchanged through the ether was a reminder that he’d been right.
The East Seventh Street conversations ended on a single morning. After a night of partying, two of Lizzie’s closest friends went swimming in the East River, and one was carried away by a current and drowned. Lizzie’s parents had been visiting at the time, a circumstance that chanced to place Bix near the tragedy. He’d run into Rob and Drew in the wee hours in the East Village and done E with them, and the three of them had crossed the overpass to the river together, at sunrise. The impulsive swim happened after Bix had gone home, farther down the river. Although he’d repeated every detail about that morning for the police inquest, it was vague to him now. Seventeen years had passed. He could hardly picture the two boys.
He turned left on Broadway and followed it all the way up to 110th Street—his first such perambulation since becoming famous over a decade ago. He’d never spent much time in the neighborhood around Columbia, and something appealed to him about its hilly streets and grand prewar apartment buildings. Gazing up at the lighted windows of one, Bix thought he could practically hear a potency of ideas simmering behind it.
On his way to the subway (another first-in-a-decade), he paused at a lamppost feathered with paper flyers advertising lost pets and used furniture. A printed poster caught his eye: an on-campus lecture to be given by Miranda Kline, the anthropologist. Bix was deeply familiar with Miranda Kl ine, and she with him. He’d encountered her book, Patterns of Affinity, a year after forming Mandala, and its ideas had exploded in his mind like ink from a squid, and made him very rich. The fact that MK (as Kline was affectionately known in his world) deplored the uses Bix and his ilk had made of her theory only sharpened his fascination with her.
A handwritten flyer was stapled alongside the poster: “Let’s Talk! Asking Big Questions Across Disciplines in Plain Language.” An introductory meeting was scheduled to follow Kline’s lecture three weeks later. Bix felt a quickening at the coincidence. He took a picture of the poster and then, just for fun, tore off one of the paper tabs from the bottom of “Let’s Talk” and slipped it into his pocket, marveling at the fact that, even in the new world he’d helped to make, people still taped pages to lampposts.
2
Three weeks later, he found himself on the eighth floor of one of those stately, faded apartment buildings around Columbia University—possibly the very one he’d admired from below. The apartment bore a pleasing resemblance to what Bix had imagined: worn parquet floors, smudged white moldings, framed engravings and small sculptures (the hosts were art history professors) hanging on the walls and over doorways, tucked among rows of books.
Apart from the hosts and one other couple, all eight “Let’s Talk” attendees were strangers to one another. Bix had decided to forgo Miranda Kline’s lecture (presuming he could have finagled entry); her antipathy toward him made it seem wrong to attend, even in disguise. His disguise was “Walter Wade,” graduate student in electrical engineering—in other words, Bix himself, seventeen years ago. What gave him the chutzpah to pose as a graduate student all these years later was the confidence that he looked much younger at forty-one than most white people did. But he’d erred in assuming that the other discussion group members would be white: Portia, one of their art historian hosts, was Asian, and there was a Latina animal studies professor from Brazil. Rebecca Amari, the youngest, a PhD candidate in sociology (the only other student besides “Walter Wade”), was ethnically ambiguous and, he suspected, Black—there’d been a twinge of recognition between them. Rebecca was also disarmingly pretty, a fact heightened, not muted, by her Dick Tracy eyeglasses.
Luckily, Bix had marshaled other tools of identity concealment. Online, he’d purchased a headscarf with dreadlocks emerging from the back. The price was exorbitant but the dreads looked and felt real, and their weight between his shoulder blades was like the touch of a ghost. He’d known that weight for many years, and liked having it back.
When everyone had settled onto couches and chairs and introduced themselves, Bix, unable to repress his curiosity, said, “So. What was she like, Miranda Kline?”
“Surprisingly funny,” said Ted Hollander, Portia’s art historian husband. He looked to be in his late fifties, a generation older than Portia. Their toddler daughter had already charged into the living room pursued by an undergraduate babysitter. “I thought she’d be dour, but she was almost playful.”
“What makes her dour is people stealing her ideas,” said Fern, dean of the women’s studies department and rather dour herself, Bix thought.
“People have used her ideas in ways she didn’t intend,” Ted said. “But I don’t think even Kline calls it theft.”
“She calls it ‘perversion,’ doesn’t she?” Rebecca asked tentatively.
“I was surprised by her beauty,” said Tessa, a young professor of dance whose husband, Cyril (mathematics), was also in attendance. “Even at sixty.”
“Ahem,” Ted said good-naturedly. “Sixty isn’t so very ancient.”
“Is her appearance relevant?” Fern challenged Tessa.
Cyril, who took Tessa’s part in everything, bristled. “Miranda Kline would say it was relevant,” he said. “More than half the Affinity Traits in her book have to do with physical appearance.”
“Patterns of Affinity can probably explain each of our reactions to Miranda Kline,” Tessa said.
Despite assenting murmurs, Bix was pretty sure that, apart from himself (and he wasn’t telling), only Cyril and Tessa had read Kline’s masterwork, a slender monograph containing algorithms that explained trust and influence among members of a Brazilian tribe. “The Genome of Inclinations,” it was often called.
“It’s sad,” Portia said. “Kline is better known for having had her work co-opted by social media companies than for the work itself.”
“If it hadn’t been co-opted, there wouldn’t have been five hundred people in that auditorium,” said Eamon, a cultural historian visiting from the University of Edinburgh and writing a book on product reviews. Eamon’s long deadpan face seemed to shield an illicit excitement, Bix thought, like a generic house containing a meth lab.
“Maybe fighting for the original intent of her work is a way of staying connected to it—of owning it,” said Kacia, the Brazilian animal studies professor.
“Maybe she’d have some new theories by now if she wasn’t so busy fighting over the old one,” Eamon countered.
“How many seminal theories can one scholar produce in a lifetime?” Cyril asked.
“Indeed,” Bix murmured, and felt the stirring of a familiar dread.
“Especially if she started late?” Fern added.
“Or had children,” said Portia, with an anxious glance at her daughter’s toy stove in the living room corner.
“That’s why Miranda Kline started late,” Fern said. “She had two daughters back-to-back, and the husband left her while they were in diapers. Kline is his name, not hers. Some kind of record producer.”
“That is fucked up,” Bix said, forcing out the profanity as part of his disguise. He was known not to curse; his mother, a sixth-grade grammar teacher, had heaped such withering scorn on the repetitive dullness and infantile content of profanity that she’d managed to annul its transgressive power. Later, Bix had relished the distinction that not cursing gave him from other tech leaders, whose foulmouthed tantrums were infamous.
“Anyway, the husband is dead,” Fern said. “To hell with him.”
“Ooh, a retributivist among us,” Eamon said with a suggestive waggle of eyebrows. Despite the stated goal of using “plain language,” the professors were helplessly prone to academic-ese; Bix could imagine Cyril and Tessa’s pillow talk including terms like “desideratum” and “purely notional.”
Rebecca caught his eye and Bix grinned—as heady a sensation as taking off his shirt. At his fortieth-birthday party last year, he’d been presented with a glossy pamphlet entitled “Bixpressions” that codified, with photographs, a system of meanings assigned to barely perceptible shifts of his eyes, hands, and posture. Back when he was the only Black PhD student in NYU’s engineering lab, Bix had found himself laughing hard at other people’s jokes and trying to make them laugh, a dynamic that left him feeling hollow and depressed. After getting his PhD, he cut out laughing at work, then cut out smiling, and cultivated instead an air of hyperattentive absorption. He listened, he witnessed, but with almost no visible response. That discipline had intensified his focus to a pitch that he was convinced, in retrospect, had helped him outwit and outmaneuver the forces aligned in readiness to absorb him, co-opt him, shunt him aside and replace him with the white men everyone expected to see. They had come for him, of course—from above and from below, from inside and from every side. Sometimes they were friends; sometimes he’d trusted them. But never too much. Bix anticipated each campaign to undermine or unseat him long before it coalesced, and he had his answer ready when it did. They couldn’t get in front of him. He gave some of them jobs in the end, harnessing their wily energies to advance his work.
His own father had regarded Bix’s rise with wariness. A company man who wore the silver watch he’d been presented at his retirement from a managerial role at a heating and cooling corporation outside Philadelphia, Bix’s father had defended Mayor Goode’s decision to bomb the house of the MOVE “slobs” who “put the mayor in an impossible position” (his father’s words) in 1985. Bix was sixteen, and the fights he’d had with his father over that bombing, and the resulting destruction of two city blocks, had opened a chasm between them that never quite closed. Even now he felt the whiff of his father’s disapproval—for having overreached, or become a celebrity (and thereby a target), or failed to heed his father’s lectures (delivered liberally to this day from the helm of a small motorboat his father used to fish along the Florida coast), whose refrain, to Bix’s ears, was: Think small or get hurt.
