Halle Berry
by Andrew Altschul
The third time his father said it, Darren couldn’t stop himself. Truly, he knew nothing good could come of his opening his own mouth – or rather, any good would be abstract, principled, maybe even karmic, while the bad would have the tangible and dismaying effect of a dog hunching up to leave a long turd on a sidewalk. He would not be forgiven. And though the list of his unforgiven infractions scrolled eloquently back through the decades he had promised himself – more importantly, he’d promised his wife, explicitly and abjectly promised – that he would do everything in his power to make this visit a peaceful one, fun even. Like a family, she’d pleaded, as if referring to some exotic species in the Everglades: long rumored, never seen.
So it was with what he felt was extreme delicacy, and a sense of already regretting what he hadn’t yet done, that he leaned toward his father, keeping his expression neutral, and said, “Dad, please don’t say that.”
The reaction was swift as a golf swing. “Say what, Darren?” His father looked straight at him, eyes moist and pink at the rims. It was still early – his father and Mel, who had joined them for dinner, were only on their second Old Fashioneds. That’s how Darren knew it would get worse.
“Don’t say, ‘Halle Berry.’”
“Why not?”
He sat back and shut his eyes. He knew he could still turn back; the odor would linger briefly and then disperse. The waitress was standing behind Mel, reaching over his shoulder to point at the menu. If she’d heard, she didn’t let on.
“You know why not, Dad,” he said. “Don’t make me explain it.”
His father was still eyeing him, one finger tapping the table. He nodded at Darren’s wine glass. “Drink your drink.”
And just like that Darren was silenced, as if a sheet of steel had been cast across his jaw and riveted into place, like something from one of Artie’s cartoons – maybe the very cartoon he was watching on his iPad across the table. Crime-fighting dogs, or extradimensional superheroes, Darren couldn’t keep them all straight. He imagined the metal clamped over his mouth and wished distantly this could be his own superpower: to shut himself up. Mute Man, they’d call him, able to erase entire conversations in the blink of an eye. Able to turn back time.
He took a long sip of his wine.
The dining room was bustling, improbably loud, a stream of residents squeaking through the marble foyer and lurching across the tasteful carpet with walkers and canes. The restaurant had been newly redesigned: new décor, new menu, and all new staff, hired, Darren assumed, through one of these agencies that vacuums up poor people in places like Trinidad and Slovakia, promising them new lives. Out the tall windows he watched the Florida sun liquify behind the 18th green, shimmering orange and gold on the pond. His wife was attempting to sneak bits of hot dog between Artie’s lips, his father and Mel had gone back to arguing about college football or Israel – maybe the exchange with his father was an isolated flare-up, he thought, one little bump of turbulence and not the extended, seat-belt-sign-on, white-knuckled ordeal it so often became. He took another sip and caught his wife’s eye. See? he told her silently. Just like a family. She gave a wan, unpromising smile in return.
Then the waitress came back.
She was Black, late twenties, with pixie-cut hair that reminded Darren vaguely of someone he’d gone to college with, maybe even dated. He’d noticed her when they first came in, felt a small, guilty thrill when she appeared at the table. He wasn’t a lecherous man, but wasn’t it always nicer to be around attractive people? Especially in a place like Crystal Grove, where the eye inevitably met with sadness and decay. Her nametag, clipped to a black turtleneck, read “Monique!”
“Sweetheart,” Mel said, “come here, sweetheart. Now, where exactly do you come from?” Mel was Darren’s father’s best friend – his only friend, Darren sometimes thought, now that Darren’s mother was gone.
“You know where I come from, Mr. Weiss.” She spoke with a crisp West Indian accent, smiling indulgently at Mel. “I tell you every time you come in here.”
“Tell him again,” Darren’s father said. “Mel’s lost a few marbles, you know.”
“I’m from St. Vincent, Mr. Weiss.” She bent to pick up a fallen napkin and Mel stole a glance at her backside, raising his eyebrows for Darren’s father’s benefit.
“Never heard of it,” Mel said affably.
“It’s in the Windward Islands, Mr. Weiss. In the Caribbean. You can google it.”
Mel rocked in his chair, anticipating his own joke. “I’d like to google you,” he said, then he and Darren’s father broke into giggles, coughing at their drinks. Darren, in growing panic, signaled to the waitress.
“Could you tell me the specials again?” he said.
While she recited the various dishes, he tried to catch her eye, to let her know she had an ally. His wife studied the menu as if it contained step-by-step instructions for teleportation.
“How the hell do you remember all that?” his father asked Monique.
“So smart,” Mel said. “Your mom and dad must be so proud of you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Weiss.”
“You’re so good,” he said, squeezing his chair. “You could work anywhere, you know that? And with a face like yours…”
Darren startled in his seat. Here it comes, he thought.
“Has anyone told you you look just like Halle Berry?” his father said.
“Only you, Mr. Schenk,” she said. In the slow blink of her eyes Darren thought he detected the faintest condescension. “And thank you for that.”
“It’s true!” Mel said. “So pretty.”
“Dad –” Darren said.
“I don’t believe that,” his father said. “You’re a dead ringer. You could go to Hollywood, get a job as a body double. No one’s ever told you?”
The waitress allowed just the right pause before resting a hand on Darren’s father’s shoulder. “Have you gentlemen decided?”
When she left, the older men’s eyes following her to the next table, there was a long silence. Darren fell back exhausted. Something on the iPad squawked and Artie looked around, poked at the screen, and settled again into stupor. Darren’s wife asked Mel what he’d ordered, and then Darren’s father. “This new menu is delightful,” she said.
“Wait till you see the desserts!” Mel said, and was rewarded with a warm smile.
“What’s with you?” Darren’s father asked him. He knew better than to respond, knew this seemingly anodyne question for the provocation it was. As it had been for decades, his father relished the confrontation, what Darren’s mother used to call the “family food fight,” occurring, as it invariably did, over an otherwise placid meal. And as it had been for decades, Darren couldn’t stop himself.
“I can’t believe you said that,” he said.
“Said what?”
“You know what.”
A glint of insolence came into his father’s eye. “You don’t think she looks like Halle Berry?”
“Other than being Black? No.”
And so it was joined. His father took a long sip of his Old Fashioned. “Let me tell you something, Darren –” he began.
“It’s offensive, Dad. You can’t just –”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “It’s not about race. Race has nothing to do with it. You have no goddamned idea, Darren. Just keep it to yourself.”
Darren could only stare stupidly at his father’s glowering face. Mel was squinting in confusion and Darren’s wife had taken a sudden interest in Artie’s cartoons.
“Dad –”
“Just leave it alone,” his father said. “Let me enjoy my dinner, for once.”
“How did I ever survive the two of them?” his mother used to ask Darren’s wife, who shrugged and played along. He thought of that now, as he watched the waitress laughing with the geezers at the next table – How did I survive them? – and then, before he could stop himself, thought, She didn’t.
“Darren,” Mel said, “what’s wrong? You don’t like your wine?”
“His wine’s fine,” Darren’s father said.
“Did you order Artie’s milk?” his wife said.
“Let me get you another glass,” Mel said.
“Daddy, where’s my milk?” Artie said, looking up from the iPad. He had Darren’s mother’s hazel eyes, the same sweetness to the mouth. Darren’s father adored him, spoiled him with books and LEGO sets, crawled around on the floor in a way he’d never done when Darren was a child.
“Monique?” Darren’s father called, twisting in his chair.
“I’ll get it,” Darren said.
“Can we get some milk over here?”
“I said I’ll get it,” Darren said, and as he turned his elbow brushed his water glass and sent a sheet of water rushing toward his wife. He scrambled for napkins, avoiding her eyes – and then Monique was there, mopping up the water, smiling and cooing to Artie, and as she leaned over the table Darren glanced at his father and at Mel, who were staring half-risen from their chairs, and that’s when he knew that the black turtleneck worn by all the waitresses was more than just a simple fashion choice.
They should have come a week earlier. Darren knew that, knew his father was still upset. The unveiling had been scheduled for months, but his father had neglected to tell him the date until a few weeks ago, and by then Darren had committed to a work function: an award luncheon, at which he was to be crowned, temporarily, “Client Service King.” A Legacy Advisor at a Chicago wealth management firm, Darren spent his days finding hospital wings and college dorms for clients to put their names on. At the luncheon, while his father and Mel were standing in the cemetery, toasting his mother with thermoses of Scotch, Darren received a plaque and a pair of tickets to Hamilton, beneath a banner that proclaimed the firm’s motto: Helping others is our reward!
But since when had his father cared about ritual, about tradition, anyway? There’d been no rabbi at the funeral, no yahrzeit; when his mother’s birthday came around his father spent the day on the golf course. So it was easy enough to dismiss the matter as a passing irritation. Darren felt generous for dismissing it, for letting his father’s ill temper roll past. He’d rented a car rather than ask his father to come to the airport, he’d made up the guest beds, gone out of his way to demonstrate solicitude – and now this nonsense about Halle Berry.
But she did look like Halle Berry – at least a little, at least the Halle Berry-shaped image in Darren’s mind, an image that was a decade old or more, the crop-haired punky figure with the lovely, squarish face from Monster’s Ball and the first X-Men films. And that, he knew, was the problem: How closely had he ever looked – at Halle Berry or any of a hundred other celebrities or, for that matter, most of the flesh-and-blood people he encountered briefly in life and made no special effort to remember? And here was an attractive – undeniably attractive, beautiful even – Black woman with a short haircut and a complexion not distinctly unlike Halle Berry’s, and his father, unschooled in today’s careful conversations about race, having probably never heard the term “microaggression,” just a lonely widower hoping for a brief thrill of flirtation – and Darren understood all of this and still couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
But it wasn’t about his father! That’s what he reminded himself as they rattled home, unspeaking, in the golf cart. His father, like most residents of Crystal Grove – excepting, of course, the odd Holocaust survivor – had led a long life of security and privilege and could afford to pass what unavoidably had to be called his last years in this place of philistine comfort, a place that, despite its modest property values, worked hard to convey a bygone elegance, with its parking valets and its clubhouse “villa,” its residents who still used “class” as a term of approbation while being fawned over by staff who worked, Darren was sure, backbreaking schedules for minimum wage. Yes, Darren’s father, and Mel, were doing just fine. They had everything anyone could reasonably want in life – except youth, there was no denying that – and so did not need anyone standing up for their rights, their dignity. They were living a fantasy, an expensive fantasy of continued relevance, of social power, and if it never occurred to them that no one was paying Monique and her co-workers to indulge the fantasies of old men (they weren’t whores!), well that hardly excused the men’s behavior, nor Darren’s complicity. No – he would not be complicit. He was glad he’d said something, even if it ruined the evening, even if his wife was now not speaking to him, if they’d spend the next two days in brittle cooperation before flying home and jointly resolving to forget any of it had happened.
But did it matter that she looked like Halle Berry – no, he corrected himself, that she reminded Darren, whose memory of Halle Berry was fuzzy and who, in daily life, had only infrequent interactions with Black people, but who, truth be told, reflexively categorized women of any race as attractive or un- – not that he treated them any differently! – that she reminded him of Halle Berry? Did it matter that, however much she may or may not have looked like Halle Berry, he would never in a thousand years have said so, that he knew enough to keep that thought to himself and thereby spare the waitress – Monique! – the discomfort and, probably, understandably, fury of yet again being compared by a white person to one of the only other Black people to whom they’d ever given any thought?
Yes, he thought, as they whizzed in the moonlight across the 14th fairway: it mattered. One couldn’t control one’s thoughts, however benighted they might be, but one could control one’s actions. One could refrain from gestures that upset or offended others. One could keep one’s mouth shut.
Which he now resolved, once again, to do.
“Good night, Dad,” he said, when they’d parked the cart and wound through the dark house to the kitchen, downing glasses of water side by side, setting them in the sink. He could hear his mother telling them not to wash anything, that she’d take care of it all – and she always had.
“Good night,” his father said.
Darren’s wife was in the den, settling Artie to sleep. He stood in the middle of the house – the house his mother and father had bought for their retirement nine years ago and which, it occurred to him now, they must have known they would die in – and listened. He could hear the tv grumbling in his father’s room. The whirring of a golf cart rose and fell outside. If he closed his eyes he could just make out the traffic on the boulevard outside Crystal Grove, a low hum infrequently punctuated by a racing engine or a horn blast.
“Are you coming to bed?”
His wife stood silhouetted in the guest room doorway, as if waiting for one of her more truculent tenth-graders. It was a familiar pose, a staple of these family visits: the Florida Formation, proof, as if any was needed, that things had gone exactly as expected.
“Quite a night,” he said now. He didn’t expect credit for confronting his father, only, perhaps, some acknowledgment that he might easily have ignored it. He tried a sardonic grin. “How was the swordfish?”
“Come to bed, Darren,” she said wearily, closing the door before he could say the next wrong thing.
The clubhouse was nearly empty, the lights still blazing, reflected in buttery pools on the marble. Through the door to the restaurant Darren could see a skinny, white teenager with a mullet vacuuming. He fumbled to turn off the vacuum cleaner when Darren walked in.
“Is closed,” the kid said, looking around nervously. “Not eating now.”
“I’m looking for Monique,” Darren said, his voice more proprietary than he’d intended. “You know Monique?”
The kid stared back. With a tentative nod he indicated a hallway near the rest rooms. A row of walkers stood by the wall, chrome gleaming. Darren’s father didn’t use a walker, not yet, though in recent years his gait had grown halting, one hand always in the small of his back. For his birthday Darren had sent an elegant, hand-carved walking stick which his father promptly shoved in a closet with old photo albums and boxes of his mother’s clothes.
He followed the sound of voices until he found a group of servers mingling outside the kitchen. They turned as he approached and he spotted Monique leaning against the wall, chatting with an older, thick-waisted Asian woman. When she saw Darren, a flicker of alarm crossed her face, quickly replaced by the same agreeable composure with which she’d set down their espressos.
“Mr. Schenck,” she said, straightening. “Did you forget something?”
He wasn’t used to being called by his father’s name. “No, not really. I’m sorry… could I talk to you for just a minute?”
The others were listening intently, but she held Darren’s gaze. “Of course.”
She led him through the empty kitchen and out a steel door until they were standing on a loading dock overlooking a parking lot he’d never seen. Orange light slouched to the asphalt. In the dark he heard a van door slide and slam to.
“Is everything alright, Mr. Schenck? Is your father alright?”
“Please, don’t call me that,” he said. “My name’s Darren.” He held out his hand stupidly and she cocked her head before taking it. Her hand was cool, the fingers long and ringless. He forced himself to let go.
“I wanted to apologize,” he said. “For my father’s behavior. For Mel. It’s not right. I’m sure they’re not the only ones. I’m sure you put up with worse. But I just wanted to say something. It made me uncomfortable, so I can’t imagine, for you –”
She was watching him, a faint smile on her lips. He knew he should leave it there.
“I just wanted you to know there was someone else,” he said, “at least one person who found it, finds it… unacceptable. You shouldn’t have to – when you’re working – I mean, it must get exhausting. That’s all.”
When he broke off she took a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket and held it out to him. He shook his head and watched her light one, cocking an elbow across her forearm and eyeing him as she smoked.
When she still said nothing, he stumbled on. “I don’t know how you do it. Honestly. I couldn’t do it.”
She blew out a narrow stream of smoke. “Your father’s a lovely man. Mr. Weiss, too.”
“You don’t have to say that,” he said. The orange light made her skin more pale, the lines of her face sharper. He found it hard to look her in the eye. “You’re off duty. We’re just two people talking.”
“We are?” she said, raising her eyebrows. He felt a quickening of alarm, but then she shifted her weight and dropped his gaze. “It’s nice of you, Mr. Schenck. You didn’t have to come back.”
“I did. I mean –” and here he hesitated, knowing he was entering dangerous territory – “that stuff about Halle Berry. It’s not okay. My father doesn’t get that. He’s from another generation, but that doesn’t make it right. So I apologize.”
She considered this, nodding vaguely to herself. Behind him, he heard the metal door open, and a voice said Oh!, and the door closed.
“You don’t think she’s pretty?” the waitress said.
Darren checked over his shoulder. “Who?”
“Halle Berry. You don’t think she’s a beautiful woman?”
“Yes, no – of course,” he said. “Of course I do.”
“Why would I mind being compared to a woman so beautiful?”
He felt his balance tilting, the darkness of the parking lot rising at him like water in a swimming pool. “It’s not that. It’s not about beauty.”
“What’s it about?” She took another drag and again locked eyes with Darren. “You can say it.”
He steeled himself. “It’s about being Black.”
Her smile was his reward – of course it was the right answer but he knew the real test was whether he would say it aloud. In an access of relief, he went on. “He’s not a racist. Really, or not… he doesn’t hate anyone, or think anyone’s less than he is. He had a partner once, another lawyer, who was Black. He had clients, back before that was normal – I mean,” he hurriedly added, “before it was common. It didn’t matter to him, I swear. He would never…” Darren looked down at the concrete. He wished he had accepted the cigarette. He wished he had a magic button in his pocket, a kill switch for his uncontrollable mouth. “It’s just that you… being Black is all he sees.”
She was still smiling, but there was something else in her smile. “What do you see?”
“What do I –?”
“Look at me.”
With great effort he held her gaze, let his eyes move over her high cheekbones, her thin, flared nose, the lips painted a shade darker than their natural hue. Her slightly pointed chin and longish neck. He stopped at her collarbone, fighting vertigo.
“Do I look like her?”
“Like who?”
She laughed. “You know who.”
It took him a second to place what was different in her voice: the accent was gone. Her posture had changed, too: she was taller now. If anything, she was more beautiful.
“I mean, maybe a little? It’s the haircut.”
“Your father says I could be her body double. What do you think? Does my body look like hers?”
Darren gaped. He would not look at her body. He would not do it. “I’m sorry,” he heard himself say. “I’m really sorry.”
She watched him another moment and then with a long sigh dropped the cigarette and ground it under her toe. “So listen,” she said. “No one else knows. Can I trust you? I like it here. I don’t want to leave. Can we keep it between us?”
He nearly collapsed against her in gratitude. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.” Then: “Keep what between us?”
Her eyelids drooped shyly. “I’m just surprised no one figured it out till now. Hopefully you’re the only one. They all think I’m crazy,” she shrugged, “but I like it here. I like being a waitress, just taking care of people. It’s like being undercover. But I can’t go back.”
He stared at her, wordless for once.
“You have no idea what it’s like. No peace. Everyone with their favors, their fake friendship. You think being Black here is hard? Jesus Christ, man, you think out there anyone gives a shit about anything else?” She let out a guffaw that was unlike any sound Darren would have expected from her. “Those motherfuckers,” she said. “I’ll take a hundred of your father and Mel every day for the rest of my life. Just don’t make me go back there. Keep my secret, okay Darren?”
“Your secret?” he managed, relief curdling to low-grade alarm. “What are we talking about?”
She wrapped her long fingers around his biceps. “I’m so happy you came back,” she said. “I feel so much better.”
The 14th fairway was empty, a long and silent stretch frosted in moonlight, squat, angular houses in shadow on either side. A kidney-shaped water hazard guarded the distant green; along its shores he could make out the nervous forms of geese, their garbled and secret nightspeak carrying in the silence. The first time he’d visited his parents after their move to Crystal Grove, his father had made an eagle – two under par – on this hole, set up by a towering drive that flew and flew, straight and high as youth itself.
“You see that, kid?” he’d cried, clamping an arm around Darren’s shoulders as they walked off the green. “The old man’s still got it!” And though he’d had terrible misgivings about his parents’ move to Florida, he watched his father’s tanned, beaming face and for a moment allowed himself to believe what all the websites and realtors insisted: It was a new life, a second chance, unbound from the laws of time. He allowed himself to feel hopeful. “That a boy,” his mother said when they got home. She’d kissed his father’s cheek and smiled girlishly. “That’s my boy.”
They’d had six years. Six years of soirees at the clubhouse and weekend jaunts to Key West, of this sun-drenched second youth. When his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer – she hadn’t smoked since before Darren was born – they took it stoically. “This is what happens,” Darren’s father said over the phone, in the same tone he used to report dues increases or oncoming hurricanes. “It’s how it goes.” Darren knew he should admire such mature acceptance but he felt only the hard splinter of contempt.
“Your father,” she’d said, the next time Darren saw her. She smiled to herself. “When I’m gone these old biddies will snap him right up.” They sat on the back patio, his mother’s bony hands wrapped around a mug of tea, and watched carts rattle over the wooden bridge. DO NOT FEED ALLIGATORS!, read the sign at the edge of the irrigation ditch. She was frail, already vanishing; as they listened to the clatter of the carts, the humid whirr of insects, he felt as if he could see right through her, to the cushions of the chaise longue that would, he knew, be empty soon enough.
“Mark my words,” she said to his skeptical frown. “I’ll still be warm in the ground when the yentas start their matchmaking. He’ll be a hot commodity.”
But it hadn’t happened. As far as Darren knew, his father hadn’t made any new friends, had avoided the social opportunities – Trivia Nights, poolside “luaus” – that Crystal Grove provided. He still played golf, still went to the occasional Happy Hour, but he and Mel stood at the end of the bar telling off-color jokes, reminiscing about “fast girls” they’d known in college.
“You have to make an effort,” Darren said over the phone. “Why don’t you play Bridge?”
His father snorted. “Your mother hated Bridge.”
As he stepped off the springy grass onto the sidewalk, Darren felt a pang of sympathy, almost respect. What would his wife do, if something were to happen to him?
He was only forty-four, his wife two years younger. They’d have to spend thirty-five more years together for the comparison to matter. And then, he thought, it would be Artie, maybe with a family of his own, who came to visit them with a combination of tolerance and dread, Artie’s own child – Darren’s grandchild – glued to some insidious device, insensible to the grownups’ ancient resentments…
No, he thought, stopping to gulp at sweet night air. Somewhere out on the boulevard, there was a long shriek of brakes. No, one couldn’t accept it, this grim, inexorable progression. “This is what happens,” his father had said, but one couldn’t accept it so blandly. On the 15th hole, a tricky Par 3, the green concealed behind a stand of eucalyptus, his father had pitched his tee shot into the sand. He’d squinted at the sky, then pulled a new ball from his pocket.
“I think I’ve earned a mulligan, Darren. Don’t you?”
At breakfast, they were waited on by a short, plump woman with beaded cornrows and a wide mouth full of plastic braces. She doted on Artie, helped him tuck his napkin into his shirt collar and, while Darren’s wife watched nervously, filled his orange juice glass to the rim. “Little Master,” she called him, to which Artie gave a confused smile. “The Little Master likes bacon? Caroline get you some more bacon, Little Master. I’ll be right back.”
The dining room blazed with sunlight, jittering with the sound of forks and plates. When they’d walked in Darren felt himself look for her, scanning the juice bar, the omelet station. He’d lain awake half the night, replaying the conversation in his mind – Keep my secret, Darren! – writhing on the saggy guest-room mattress in nervous elation while his wife snored delicately, arms crossed over her chest like an Egyptian queen.
Halle Berry. He remembered her silken voice, the wry set of her mouth. Was it so unimaginable? Was it impossible to believe someone would want to disappear, change everything, choose a humble waitress’s life over the glitter and recognition of fame? Just taking care of people, she’d said. And why not? Shouldn’t that be what everyone really wanted? Wasn’t that what Darren insisted to his clients, third- or fourth-generation heirs, mostly, right before he brought in the firm’s tax specialist? Padding to the bathroom before dawn, he’d scrolled through images on his phone, squinted at the tiny thumbnails. Halle Berry. It could be, he thought. It really could.
“You sleep alright?” Darren’s father asked, not looking up from his eggs.
“Not too bad,” Darren said. “You ought to get a new mattress for the guest room.”
“You came in late. Where the hell did you go?”
“I took a walk. I was restless.”
“A walk,” his father said.
Darren pictured the moonlit fairways, the silent streets of Crystal Grove. He thought he might go back that night, find her smoking on the loading dock. If it was her – if it was really her – he wouldn’t tell anyone, he wouldn’t give her away. Later, they would exchange phone numbers. An alternate future arose in his mind, in which he actually looked forward to these trips to Florida. He imagined this new Darren, tanned and happy, striding through the airport with wife and child beaming at his side. Halle Berry. Halle Berry. He repeated the name in his mind, turning it over like a wrapped gift.
When the waitress came back with Artie’s bacon, Darren’s father handed her his plate and said, “Where’s Monique?”
She flashed her plastic braces. “She’s not coming today.” At his evident displeasure, she cocked a hip. “Caroline’s not good enough for you, Mr. Schenck?”
“Sure,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “No problem.”
He sipped his coffee, gazing vaguely out over the dining room. Darren could feel his annoyance – as if it were somehow Darren’s fault, as if he’d driven her away. Darren, distantly alarmed, wondered the same thing. His wife set her napkin by her plate.
“So,” she said with forced brightness, “when can we see the stone, Marty?”
Darren’s father turned to her, eyes narrowed in confusion. And though Darren, too, had not at first understood, though he’d all but forgotten why they’d come, his father’s searching face, its uneven shave and the shred of spinach clinging to the corner of his mouth, flushed him with resentment.
“Mom’s headstone,” he said. “Remember? The one we should have seen last week?”
His father frowned. “We’ll go, dear,” he told Darren’s wife. “You’ve got time.”
And though he could have left it alone, could have finished his Belgian waffle and let his father head off to the golf course, something – the hunched shuffle of residents at the bagel tray, Caroline waddling back with the bill – inflamed him.
“Plenty of time!” he said. “The stone’s not going anywhere, right Dad?”
He felt his wife’s stare, felt a sharp pain as her sneaker struck his shin. His father chewed his lip and scanned the tall windows, then pushed his chair back.
“Why don’t you shut up for once, Darren?” He said it offhandedly, as though he were plucking grass on a fairway, letting it fall to test the wind. Darren stared, made speechless by this nonchalance. “I’ll see you all this afternoon,” his father said, leaning to muss Artie’s hair. “Okay, Little Master?” To Darren’s wife, he said, “Why don’t you go to the pool and relax? You deserve it.”
Then he tottered across the dining room, pausing every now and then to raise a stiff arm in greeting, or nod to someone he knew. The dining captain swerved over to shake his hand and the two men shared a laugh that carried through the room. At a table of five women, all wearing tennis visors, his father stopped and rested his hands on the back of a chair; five faces turned to him like daisies after a rainshower. Darren watched, awestruck, as his father’s face broke into an easy smile, the smile of a much younger man, the man he remembered coming home from work each night in a well-cut suit, or offering his elbow to Darren’s mother as they left a restaurant. He remembered the swell of applause at his father’s retirement party, the warm and witty toast he’d made at Darren’s wedding. It had all been such a long time ago. Your father’s a lovely man, Monique had said. It struck him now that she might have meant it.
“You can’t just let him go,” someone said, and he turned back to find his wife staring at him with stern pity. She, too, was older, her face softer, fine lines at the corners of her eyes. “Darren, you have to say something.”
He rose off balance, stunned by the room’s brightness. In a daze, he traced his father’s route through sheets of sunlight, winding toward the table of women – These old yentas! – but his father had already slipped outside. When he stepped out onto the broad terrace, heat slicked his brow. The 18th green lay before him, the grounds furling out into morning haze; directly below, a confusion of carts navigated around one another, beeping, clubs clattering. He thought he saw Mel in one, but lost him in the glare. A young man in a bright white golf shirt eyed him from the valet stand. He took the stairs quickly, spotted a sign that read FIRST TEE and dashed down the path, nearly colliding with an approaching cart – “Sorry!” he called over his shoulder, “Sorry!” – half-twirling, stumbling past a groundskeeper’s truck, waving stupidly to the man trimming the hedge.
She’s not coming today. Was it her day off? Had she not shown up for work? He imagined her hastily packing a bag, speeding away in the night having had second thoughts – entirely justified – about Darren’s trustworthiness. He remembered the press of her hand on his arm, the sincerity in her voice. I’m so happy you came back, Darren. When was the last time anyone had said that?
He came into the clearing just in time to watch two carts traveling out along the fairway, vague as cattle in a watercolor landscape. The musical jouncing of clubs carried back through the stillness. He had not found his father or Halle Berry. He stood panting in the spangled light, marveling at how poorly the visit had gone. He’d promised his wife, but as usual he couldn’t deliver on his promise. As usual, he hadn’t taken care of anyone. The last time he’d seen her, his mother hadn’t gotten out of bed. Her hands, when Darren held them, were skeletal and palsied. Nurses came throughout the day while his father watched tv and Darren hid in the guest room, sending work emails. When his mother cried out it was the nurses who went to her, who cleaned her, turned her, who left at the ends of their shifts with bile streaking their scrubs. “Thank you,” his father called from his armchair. Darren stood holding the front door, face hot, not knowing what to say.
The clubhouse was very far away. As he turned back, his eye caught on a wooden sign half-hidden in the shrubbery: STAFF ONLY. A narrow path wound into the trees. The nurses were all women, all Black. He’d never learned their names, just stood at the door while they came and went – like the valets at the clubhouse, like the bartenders and the pool cleaners, the plumbers and personal trainers, countless others he’d never noticed. A vast army that cared for Crystal Grove’s residents – saw them at their very worst, listened to their bad jokes, smiled at photos of their thoughtless children. Helped them to die when their own families didn’t know how. He stood staring at the sign, then out at the distant green. He remembered his father, years ago, pumping his fist in joy after sinking the long putt. He thought of Halle Berry, coolly smoking at the edge of the loading dock.
“I met your mother once,” she’d said as he left. He’d been so flustered he could only nod. “Such a beautiful woman.”
Three years later, Darren’s still standing there.
What I mean by that is, it’s been three years since I wrote a story that I called, from the very beginning, “Halle Berry.” I hadn’t written a short story in a very long time, but after a fraught visit to my parents in Florida I’d come home and set to work, grinding out what felt like well-made scenes over the next couple of weeks. It felt good to be writing fiction again, and this story felt important to me, it felt meaningful. I’d been thinking a lot about these issues, you see. We all had. It was the summer after George Floyd and all the white people I knew – which is to say, virtually all the people I knew – were gripped by an agony of self-examination that verged toward narcissism. In the supermarket, they pointedly drew Black cashiers into conversation. They dropped references to James Baldwin as if they’d known him back in his Harlem days. After one dinner party, my wife got an email from her friend who was mortified that, in telling an anecdote, she’d referred to someone as a person of color: “I realize I didn’t do the same for others in the story. I didn’t say they were white. I’m sorry to have subjected you and your family to my implicit bias.” It was all very admirable, and very pointless, and very sad. We all wanted to do better. I suppose, in my naiveté, I thought I could write a story that said something worth saying. I thought “Halle Berry” could make a difference.
I wrote that last scene in a rush of anticipation, knowing there would have to be one more movement, some kind of reckoning. Darren would have to make a choice – his father or the waitress – and this would somehow bring together the various themes. I was sure that with another few days’ work I could nail it. But the opposite happened: I struggled with it for weeks, then months, without finding a true ending. In one version, Darren follows that STAFF ONLY sign down a winding path, hoping to find her, but finds only his father sobbing in the woods. In another, he somehow obtains Monique’s address and knocks on her door, but her bungalow, in a trash-strewn neighborhood that’s the stark opposite of Crystal Grove, has been abandoned. In still another, he returns to Crystal Grove for his father’s funeral, secretly hoping she’ll show up, and that meeting her again will somehow help him learn how to take care of people the way she does, the way the nurses took care of his mother. They were all viable endings in their way, but none of them really fulfilled my hopes for the story. None were truly about Halle Berry – ultimately, they were all about Darren and his problems and how Halle, or Monique, could magically solve them. I knew I couldn’t call the story “Halle Berry” unless it was really about Halle Berry (or “Halle Berry”) and I was determined to call the story “Halle Berry.” I was determined to make the story speak to these things we were all thinking about. Also, I liked the sound of it: Halle Berry. Frustrated, I sent out a version I knew was no good, then shook my head and muttered when the rejections came back. Finally, I set the story aside, admitting to myself that I wasn’t smart enough to write it. At least, I thought, I was humble enough to admit it.
Then, two weeks ago, I got a message from the arts editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, for whom I sometimes write reviews. Did I want to do a piece on the Romeo & Juliet about to open at the New Oakland Playhouse, starring Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry? “Normally I’d give it to someone who knows Oakland, but my usual guy is on book leave,” he said. I’d been vaguely aware of the opening – there’d been some excitement in the national press about Halle Berry’s return to acting after a long hiatus, some grousing about the age of the actors, and some about race. George Will, with his usual hemorrhoidal acerbity, lamented “the tedious cultural revisionism from which even 16th century children can’t be spared.”
But my editor wasn’t interested in the race angle. San Franciscans are above all that, of course. We’re far too evolved. He wanted a straight review of the show with maybe some discussion of “how far Oakland has come” that it now offered prestige theater starring major celebrities and could sell out a five-week run. I jumped at the assignment. I hadn’t had a piece in the Chron for over a year and my department chair was hinting that I needed to be publishing more. Plus, I’ve always loved Hugh Jackman. It was only after I’d sent my reply that I remembered the short story.
As it happened, my father was planning to visit that same week. My mother, who had been recently diagnosed when I first tried to write “Halle Berry,” had died a year earlier, and my father had been coming out every couple of months “to spend time with my precious grandson and my lovely daughter-in-law.” Getting a plus-one to the opening was no problem, but I struggled with whether to take my father or my wife. Some part of me wanted to see how he’d react, I suppose. But it’s also true that I’d grown more aware of the passing of time since my mother’s death. It was important that he and I do things together, for there to be moments I would remember.
“You two should go,” said my wife, who is wise and jarringly honest and half-Jamaican. In my mind, she’d been the model for Darren’s wife, but I’d never found a way to work her race into the story. “I’ll need a break from you and your dad by then.”
“You and I haven’t had a night out in a while,” I said, already talking myself out of it. “We could try that new ramen place…”
She waved this off with a laugh. “Shakespeare’s not my jam.”
My father was predictably unenthused about the show but willing to go “if it makes you happy.” He enjoyed the finer things in life, but Shakespeare wasn’t his jam either. Unlike me, he hadn’t always had those things. He’d grown up in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood where Jews and Blacks lived side by side, sometimes beating each other up but most of the time just stealing penny candy from each other’s stores and mouthing off at stickball. “Nobody gave a damn what color you were,” he’d told me a hundred times. “If you knew the Dodgers’ starting lineup, you were okay.” It was a version of urban life I found almost impossible to imagine. In San Francisco, we lived in a neighborhood that was nearly all white. When my son was still in a stroller, if we saw a Black woman walking down the street he would point and say, “Mommy!”
We arrived at the theater half an hour early and sipped Old Fashioneds in the lobby. I’d put on a sport jacket and my best shoes; my father wore a golf shirt and penny loafers. The elegant walking stick I’d bought him years earlier leaned against his stool. I scribbled some notes while he scanned the room, nodding his approval at the plush carpets and chandeliers. Portraits of iconic Black actors hung on every wall, in dismaying contrast to the pale crowd. As the lights flashed and people began moving toward the doors, my father drained his glass and said, “So, you finally killed off the old man.”
It took me a second to remember that I’d sent him the story to read on the plane, the version in which Darren attends his father’s funeral. I hadn’t done it for any particular reason – he was always asking to read my work, and lately I hadn’t had much to show him. And there was the Halle Berry connection. I didn’t worry that he’d be offended by the father’s death. In the peculiar (my wife would say “fucked up”) way my father and I communicated, I thought he would find it funny.
“It’s just a story, Dad,” I said. “It’s not autobiography.”
“Tell that to your mother.”
I stared at him, then turned and headed down the aisle. The seats were fantastic – ninth row, center. Around us the bright theater throbbed with voices, the easy chatter of liberals who feel their privilege and politics momentarily aligned. My father must have sensed that he’d stung me, because as we settled into the seats he leaned over and said, “It’s a good story.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean it. When are you going to publish it?”
“I’m not,” I said, with more bitterness than I’d intended. To soften things, I added, “I can’t publish it. I had no business writing it.”
“No business?” he said. “What the hell does that mean?”
With a sigh, I said it wasn’t my story to tell, that I didn’t have the perspective to say anything new or useful and so it was better not to write it at all than to reduce urgent questions of racial justice to the anxieties of a privileged white man.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said, with such certitude that I set down my notepad.
“It’s not ridiculous, Dad,” I said. “It’s the truth. You don’t know anything about it. You can’t see it, sitting in that cocoon down in Florida. Places like that are half the problem. These are real people with real lives. Who am I to say what any of it means?
“I could publish it,” I said, though this wasn’t exactly true. “Of course I could. I’m a white man. But if a Black person wrote it, someone who’s actually had these experiences? That’s the problem, Dad. We don’t listen to them. We don’t even see them.”
Throughout this lecture, he watched me with a bored expression. “Speak for yourself,” he said, as the lights went down.
The show was very good, if flawed by a hamhanded premise (a hotshot civil-rights lawyer falls for the daughter of a notorious Black Panther), and over-reliant on the star power of its lead actors. They didn’t disappoint: Berry brought unexpected humor to the balcony scene, a slyness that was demure and seductive at once. Jackman was, as usual, a force of nature; the desperate ferocity with which he flung himself at Tybalt left the audience visibly shaken. But it was Juliet’s last scene – when she awakens to find Romeo dead – in which Berry really shone, channeling a deep, unreconcilable fury that made of her own death an improbable triumph: a reclaiming of agency, vengeance upon a world that preferred to kill her in its own way. As the curtain came down, I snuck a glance at my father, who was wiping a tear from the corner of his eye.
But a strange thing happened as I sat watching these gifted actors interpret the most exhausted roles in all of theater. While I silently seethed at my father, struggling to focus on the stage, I felt a creeping dislocation: the splendid theater, the Oakland of 1970, the cosmetic opulence of Crystal Grove – in my mind they swam over and around one another, blurring into one another. What held them together was the body on the stage, a body with no fixed identity but with sweat and spit I could see in the stagelights. I’d spent months thinking about her, writing about her, and now here she was. Halle Berry. “Halle Berry.” It was a good story, in its way, but it hadn’t managed to do what I wanted it to do. It hadn’t said what I wanted it to say – more likely, I thought, it said exactly the opposite, my failure to make “Halle Berry” be about Halle Berry was all too predictable, one more example of someone like me trying to make things better but in fact making them worse.
And yet, by the fifth act I knew I’d found a solution, a way to redeem that failure. The end of my story, the one that had escaped me for years, was right here, in this performance, this blurring of roles and perceptions, the unbridgeable distance between a woman sobbing on the stage and a man watching passively from a comfortable seat. It was that distance that had to be bridged – here, now, while I had the chance. I owed it to the story. In some semi-coherent way, I thought I owed it to her.
As we shuffled out to the aisle, I told my father, “I’ll meet you in the lobby.” Then, ignoring the stares of ushers, I threaded my way to a side exit, moving against the current until I came to a door marked KEEP OUT. Behind it, a warren of dim hallways bustled with stagehands, bare concrete ringing with the sweaty jubilation of a successful premiere. In that confusion, it was easy enough to make my way to the dressing rooms. No one stopped me or gave me a second glance. I was a white man who knew how to look like he belonged there, and if my editor hadn’t mentioned anything about backstage access such things weren’t unheard of, if anyone asked I could always play dumb. I thought of Darren, barging into the restaurant at Crystal Grove, and smiled at the irony. I didn’t know what I would say to her, only that I needed to see the actual person, to close the circuit. Then I’d go home and pull out the story and let the ending write itself. I’d stay up all night until I’d nailed it.
What I’d failed to anticipate was the small crowd outside her dressing room, the mass of managers and tv reporters, theater personnel and faceless hangers-on, all squeezed into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor waiting for a glimpse of the star. In front of her door stood three large, unsmiling men – for a moment I thought they were actors, extras who’d played Panthers, but then I realized they were bodyguards. By now I’d convinced myself I was supposed to be there. I really believed it. I strode up to the guards and held out my hand and said I was from the Chronicle. “For Ms. Berry,” I said.
They weren’t fooled. One guard folded his arms threateningly; the other two burst out laughing. “Get the fuck outta here, man,” said the largest of the three. He put his thick hand on my shoulder with a gentleness that was almost camaraderie.
“But she’s expecting me,” I said. And when the other man uncrossed his arms and stepped toward me I held my ground and said, “I’m supposed to be here.”
What followed was a certain, predictable choreography, a sharp lurching of some bodies accompanied by the drawing back of others. I felt myself half-lifted, impelled down the hall – my feet were not under my control, my body was not my own – twisting to keep my eye on the dressing room door. “But I know her,” I insisted. “I’m supposed to be here!” The two guards – the third had already lost interest – moved toward the street door, their grips unbreakable but without anger. I wasn’t afraid, I knew the worst that would happen was that they’d throw me roughly to the pavement, but I was determined not to lose this opportunity and so I braced my stance and shoved backward, halting our progress just as the dressing room door opened.
She stood squinting into the dim light, in dark jeans and a faded black t-shirt, startled and perplexed by the sudden ruckus. She was smaller than I remembered, almost delicate; her eyes glimmered, her face was drawn with fatigue and concern. It was astonishing, that face, for an instant we all stood mesmerized, shocked by its simplicity, its beautiful ordinariness.
“I have to tell you something,” I heard myself say, in a pinched, pleading voice, and then her eyes found mine and she regarded me with such interest, such human curiosity, that I couldn’t think of what it was.
In another second, the guards had kicked my legs into motion and flung open the metal door. “Who you think you are?” one asked. “Goodnight, Irene,” said the other, as he twisted my arm back and shoved me at the cold air. I caught a last glimpse of the woman in the doorway – she was watching the scene with a faint smile of disappointment – and though she may not have been who I was looking for I could swear, in the end, that she knew exactly who I was.
So it was with what he felt was extreme delicacy, and a sense of already regretting what he hadn’t yet done, that he leaned toward his father, keeping his expression neutral, and said, “Dad, please don’t say that.”
The reaction was swift as a golf swing. “Say what, Darren?” His father looked straight at him, eyes moist and pink at the rims. It was still early – his father and Mel, who had joined them for dinner, were only on their second Old Fashioneds. That’s how Darren knew it would get worse.
“Don’t say, ‘Halle Berry.’”
“Why not?”
He sat back and shut his eyes. He knew he could still turn back; the odor would linger briefly and then disperse. The waitress was standing behind Mel, reaching over his shoulder to point at the menu. If she’d heard, she didn’t let on.
“You know why not, Dad,” he said. “Don’t make me explain it.”
His father was still eyeing him, one finger tapping the table. He nodded at Darren’s wine glass. “Drink your drink.”
And just like that Darren was silenced, as if a sheet of steel had been cast across his jaw and riveted into place, like something from one of Artie’s cartoons – maybe the very cartoon he was watching on his iPad across the table. Crime-fighting dogs, or extradimensional superheroes, Darren couldn’t keep them all straight. He imagined the metal clamped over his mouth and wished distantly this could be his own superpower: to shut himself up. Mute Man, they’d call him, able to erase entire conversations in the blink of an eye. Able to turn back time.
He took a long sip of his wine.
The dining room was bustling, improbably loud, a stream of residents squeaking through the marble foyer and lurching across the tasteful carpet with walkers and canes. The restaurant had been newly redesigned: new décor, new menu, and all new staff, hired, Darren assumed, through one of these agencies that vacuums up poor people in places like Trinidad and Slovakia, promising them new lives. Out the tall windows he watched the Florida sun liquify behind the 18th green, shimmering orange and gold on the pond. His wife was attempting to sneak bits of hot dog between Artie’s lips, his father and Mel had gone back to arguing about college football or Israel – maybe the exchange with his father was an isolated flare-up, he thought, one little bump of turbulence and not the extended, seat-belt-sign-on, white-knuckled ordeal it so often became. He took another sip and caught his wife’s eye. See? he told her silently. Just like a family. She gave a wan, unpromising smile in return.
Then the waitress came back.
She was Black, late twenties, with pixie-cut hair that reminded Darren vaguely of someone he’d gone to college with, maybe even dated. He’d noticed her when they first came in, felt a small, guilty thrill when she appeared at the table. He wasn’t a lecherous man, but wasn’t it always nicer to be around attractive people? Especially in a place like Crystal Grove, where the eye inevitably met with sadness and decay. Her nametag, clipped to a black turtleneck, read “Monique!”
“Sweetheart,” Mel said, “come here, sweetheart. Now, where exactly do you come from?” Mel was Darren’s father’s best friend – his only friend, Darren sometimes thought, now that Darren’s mother was gone.
“You know where I come from, Mr. Weiss.” She spoke with a crisp West Indian accent, smiling indulgently at Mel. “I tell you every time you come in here.”
“Tell him again,” Darren’s father said. “Mel’s lost a few marbles, you know.”
“I’m from St. Vincent, Mr. Weiss.” She bent to pick up a fallen napkin and Mel stole a glance at her backside, raising his eyebrows for Darren’s father’s benefit.
“Never heard of it,” Mel said affably.
“It’s in the Windward Islands, Mr. Weiss. In the Caribbean. You can google it.”
Mel rocked in his chair, anticipating his own joke. “I’d like to google you,” he said, then he and Darren’s father broke into giggles, coughing at their drinks. Darren, in growing panic, signaled to the waitress.
“Could you tell me the specials again?” he said.
While she recited the various dishes, he tried to catch her eye, to let her know she had an ally. His wife studied the menu as if it contained step-by-step instructions for teleportation.
“How the hell do you remember all that?” his father asked Monique.
“So smart,” Mel said. “Your mom and dad must be so proud of you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Weiss.”
“You’re so good,” he said, squeezing his chair. “You could work anywhere, you know that? And with a face like yours…”
Darren startled in his seat. Here it comes, he thought.
“Has anyone told you you look just like Halle Berry?” his father said.
“Only you, Mr. Schenk,” she said. In the slow blink of her eyes Darren thought he detected the faintest condescension. “And thank you for that.”
“It’s true!” Mel said. “So pretty.”
“Dad –” Darren said.
“I don’t believe that,” his father said. “You’re a dead ringer. You could go to Hollywood, get a job as a body double. No one’s ever told you?”
The waitress allowed just the right pause before resting a hand on Darren’s father’s shoulder. “Have you gentlemen decided?”
When she left, the older men’s eyes following her to the next table, there was a long silence. Darren fell back exhausted. Something on the iPad squawked and Artie looked around, poked at the screen, and settled again into stupor. Darren’s wife asked Mel what he’d ordered, and then Darren’s father. “This new menu is delightful,” she said.
“Wait till you see the desserts!” Mel said, and was rewarded with a warm smile.
“What’s with you?” Darren’s father asked him. He knew better than to respond, knew this seemingly anodyne question for the provocation it was. As it had been for decades, his father relished the confrontation, what Darren’s mother used to call the “family food fight,” occurring, as it invariably did, over an otherwise placid meal. And as it had been for decades, Darren couldn’t stop himself.
“I can’t believe you said that,” he said.
“Said what?”
“You know what.”
A glint of insolence came into his father’s eye. “You don’t think she looks like Halle Berry?”
“Other than being Black? No.”
And so it was joined. His father took a long sip of his Old Fashioned. “Let me tell you something, Darren –” he began.
“It’s offensive, Dad. You can’t just –”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “It’s not about race. Race has nothing to do with it. You have no goddamned idea, Darren. Just keep it to yourself.”
Darren could only stare stupidly at his father’s glowering face. Mel was squinting in confusion and Darren’s wife had taken a sudden interest in Artie’s cartoons.
“Dad –”
“Just leave it alone,” his father said. “Let me enjoy my dinner, for once.”
“How did I ever survive the two of them?” his mother used to ask Darren’s wife, who shrugged and played along. He thought of that now, as he watched the waitress laughing with the geezers at the next table – How did I survive them? – and then, before he could stop himself, thought, She didn’t.
“Darren,” Mel said, “what’s wrong? You don’t like your wine?”
“His wine’s fine,” Darren’s father said.
“Did you order Artie’s milk?” his wife said.
“Let me get you another glass,” Mel said.
“Daddy, where’s my milk?” Artie said, looking up from the iPad. He had Darren’s mother’s hazel eyes, the same sweetness to the mouth. Darren’s father adored him, spoiled him with books and LEGO sets, crawled around on the floor in a way he’d never done when Darren was a child.
“Monique?” Darren’s father called, twisting in his chair.
“I’ll get it,” Darren said.
“Can we get some milk over here?”
“I said I’ll get it,” Darren said, and as he turned his elbow brushed his water glass and sent a sheet of water rushing toward his wife. He scrambled for napkins, avoiding her eyes – and then Monique was there, mopping up the water, smiling and cooing to Artie, and as she leaned over the table Darren glanced at his father and at Mel, who were staring half-risen from their chairs, and that’s when he knew that the black turtleneck worn by all the waitresses was more than just a simple fashion choice.
They should have come a week earlier. Darren knew that, knew his father was still upset. The unveiling had been scheduled for months, but his father had neglected to tell him the date until a few weeks ago, and by then Darren had committed to a work function: an award luncheon, at which he was to be crowned, temporarily, “Client Service King.” A Legacy Advisor at a Chicago wealth management firm, Darren spent his days finding hospital wings and college dorms for clients to put their names on. At the luncheon, while his father and Mel were standing in the cemetery, toasting his mother with thermoses of Scotch, Darren received a plaque and a pair of tickets to Hamilton, beneath a banner that proclaimed the firm’s motto: Helping others is our reward!
But since when had his father cared about ritual, about tradition, anyway? There’d been no rabbi at the funeral, no yahrzeit; when his mother’s birthday came around his father spent the day on the golf course. So it was easy enough to dismiss the matter as a passing irritation. Darren felt generous for dismissing it, for letting his father’s ill temper roll past. He’d rented a car rather than ask his father to come to the airport, he’d made up the guest beds, gone out of his way to demonstrate solicitude – and now this nonsense about Halle Berry.
But she did look like Halle Berry – at least a little, at least the Halle Berry-shaped image in Darren’s mind, an image that was a decade old or more, the crop-haired punky figure with the lovely, squarish face from Monster’s Ball and the first X-Men films. And that, he knew, was the problem: How closely had he ever looked – at Halle Berry or any of a hundred other celebrities or, for that matter, most of the flesh-and-blood people he encountered briefly in life and made no special effort to remember? And here was an attractive – undeniably attractive, beautiful even – Black woman with a short haircut and a complexion not distinctly unlike Halle Berry’s, and his father, unschooled in today’s careful conversations about race, having probably never heard the term “microaggression,” just a lonely widower hoping for a brief thrill of flirtation – and Darren understood all of this and still couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
But it wasn’t about his father! That’s what he reminded himself as they rattled home, unspeaking, in the golf cart. His father, like most residents of Crystal Grove – excepting, of course, the odd Holocaust survivor – had led a long life of security and privilege and could afford to pass what unavoidably had to be called his last years in this place of philistine comfort, a place that, despite its modest property values, worked hard to convey a bygone elegance, with its parking valets and its clubhouse “villa,” its residents who still used “class” as a term of approbation while being fawned over by staff who worked, Darren was sure, backbreaking schedules for minimum wage. Yes, Darren’s father, and Mel, were doing just fine. They had everything anyone could reasonably want in life – except youth, there was no denying that – and so did not need anyone standing up for their rights, their dignity. They were living a fantasy, an expensive fantasy of continued relevance, of social power, and if it never occurred to them that no one was paying Monique and her co-workers to indulge the fantasies of old men (they weren’t whores!), well that hardly excused the men’s behavior, nor Darren’s complicity. No – he would not be complicit. He was glad he’d said something, even if it ruined the evening, even if his wife was now not speaking to him, if they’d spend the next two days in brittle cooperation before flying home and jointly resolving to forget any of it had happened.
But did it matter that she looked like Halle Berry – no, he corrected himself, that she reminded Darren, whose memory of Halle Berry was fuzzy and who, in daily life, had only infrequent interactions with Black people, but who, truth be told, reflexively categorized women of any race as attractive or un- – not that he treated them any differently! – that she reminded him of Halle Berry? Did it matter that, however much she may or may not have looked like Halle Berry, he would never in a thousand years have said so, that he knew enough to keep that thought to himself and thereby spare the waitress – Monique! – the discomfort and, probably, understandably, fury of yet again being compared by a white person to one of the only other Black people to whom they’d ever given any thought?
Yes, he thought, as they whizzed in the moonlight across the 14th fairway: it mattered. One couldn’t control one’s thoughts, however benighted they might be, but one could control one’s actions. One could refrain from gestures that upset or offended others. One could keep one’s mouth shut.
Which he now resolved, once again, to do.
“Good night, Dad,” he said, when they’d parked the cart and wound through the dark house to the kitchen, downing glasses of water side by side, setting them in the sink. He could hear his mother telling them not to wash anything, that she’d take care of it all – and she always had.
“Good night,” his father said.
Darren’s wife was in the den, settling Artie to sleep. He stood in the middle of the house – the house his mother and father had bought for their retirement nine years ago and which, it occurred to him now, they must have known they would die in – and listened. He could hear the tv grumbling in his father’s room. The whirring of a golf cart rose and fell outside. If he closed his eyes he could just make out the traffic on the boulevard outside Crystal Grove, a low hum infrequently punctuated by a racing engine or a horn blast.
“Are you coming to bed?”
His wife stood silhouetted in the guest room doorway, as if waiting for one of her more truculent tenth-graders. It was a familiar pose, a staple of these family visits: the Florida Formation, proof, as if any was needed, that things had gone exactly as expected.
“Quite a night,” he said now. He didn’t expect credit for confronting his father, only, perhaps, some acknowledgment that he might easily have ignored it. He tried a sardonic grin. “How was the swordfish?”
“Come to bed, Darren,” she said wearily, closing the door before he could say the next wrong thing.
The clubhouse was nearly empty, the lights still blazing, reflected in buttery pools on the marble. Through the door to the restaurant Darren could see a skinny, white teenager with a mullet vacuuming. He fumbled to turn off the vacuum cleaner when Darren walked in.
“Is closed,” the kid said, looking around nervously. “Not eating now.”
“I’m looking for Monique,” Darren said, his voice more proprietary than he’d intended. “You know Monique?”
The kid stared back. With a tentative nod he indicated a hallway near the rest rooms. A row of walkers stood by the wall, chrome gleaming. Darren’s father didn’t use a walker, not yet, though in recent years his gait had grown halting, one hand always in the small of his back. For his birthday Darren had sent an elegant, hand-carved walking stick which his father promptly shoved in a closet with old photo albums and boxes of his mother’s clothes.
He followed the sound of voices until he found a group of servers mingling outside the kitchen. They turned as he approached and he spotted Monique leaning against the wall, chatting with an older, thick-waisted Asian woman. When she saw Darren, a flicker of alarm crossed her face, quickly replaced by the same agreeable composure with which she’d set down their espressos.
“Mr. Schenck,” she said, straightening. “Did you forget something?”
He wasn’t used to being called by his father’s name. “No, not really. I’m sorry… could I talk to you for just a minute?”
The others were listening intently, but she held Darren’s gaze. “Of course.”
She led him through the empty kitchen and out a steel door until they were standing on a loading dock overlooking a parking lot he’d never seen. Orange light slouched to the asphalt. In the dark he heard a van door slide and slam to.
“Is everything alright, Mr. Schenck? Is your father alright?”
“Please, don’t call me that,” he said. “My name’s Darren.” He held out his hand stupidly and she cocked her head before taking it. Her hand was cool, the fingers long and ringless. He forced himself to let go.
“I wanted to apologize,” he said. “For my father’s behavior. For Mel. It’s not right. I’m sure they’re not the only ones. I’m sure you put up with worse. But I just wanted to say something. It made me uncomfortable, so I can’t imagine, for you –”
She was watching him, a faint smile on her lips. He knew he should leave it there.
“I just wanted you to know there was someone else,” he said, “at least one person who found it, finds it… unacceptable. You shouldn’t have to – when you’re working – I mean, it must get exhausting. That’s all.”
When he broke off she took a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket and held it out to him. He shook his head and watched her light one, cocking an elbow across her forearm and eyeing him as she smoked.
When she still said nothing, he stumbled on. “I don’t know how you do it. Honestly. I couldn’t do it.”
She blew out a narrow stream of smoke. “Your father’s a lovely man. Mr. Weiss, too.”
“You don’t have to say that,” he said. The orange light made her skin more pale, the lines of her face sharper. He found it hard to look her in the eye. “You’re off duty. We’re just two people talking.”
“We are?” she said, raising her eyebrows. He felt a quickening of alarm, but then she shifted her weight and dropped his gaze. “It’s nice of you, Mr. Schenck. You didn’t have to come back.”
“I did. I mean –” and here he hesitated, knowing he was entering dangerous territory – “that stuff about Halle Berry. It’s not okay. My father doesn’t get that. He’s from another generation, but that doesn’t make it right. So I apologize.”
She considered this, nodding vaguely to herself. Behind him, he heard the metal door open, and a voice said Oh!, and the door closed.
“You don’t think she’s pretty?” the waitress said.
Darren checked over his shoulder. “Who?”
“Halle Berry. You don’t think she’s a beautiful woman?”
“Yes, no – of course,” he said. “Of course I do.”
“Why would I mind being compared to a woman so beautiful?”
He felt his balance tilting, the darkness of the parking lot rising at him like water in a swimming pool. “It’s not that. It’s not about beauty.”
“What’s it about?” She took another drag and again locked eyes with Darren. “You can say it.”
He steeled himself. “It’s about being Black.”
Her smile was his reward – of course it was the right answer but he knew the real test was whether he would say it aloud. In an access of relief, he went on. “He’s not a racist. Really, or not… he doesn’t hate anyone, or think anyone’s less than he is. He had a partner once, another lawyer, who was Black. He had clients, back before that was normal – I mean,” he hurriedly added, “before it was common. It didn’t matter to him, I swear. He would never…” Darren looked down at the concrete. He wished he had accepted the cigarette. He wished he had a magic button in his pocket, a kill switch for his uncontrollable mouth. “It’s just that you… being Black is all he sees.”
She was still smiling, but there was something else in her smile. “What do you see?”
“What do I –?”
“Look at me.”
With great effort he held her gaze, let his eyes move over her high cheekbones, her thin, flared nose, the lips painted a shade darker than their natural hue. Her slightly pointed chin and longish neck. He stopped at her collarbone, fighting vertigo.
“Do I look like her?”
“Like who?”
She laughed. “You know who.”
It took him a second to place what was different in her voice: the accent was gone. Her posture had changed, too: she was taller now. If anything, she was more beautiful.
“I mean, maybe a little? It’s the haircut.”
“Your father says I could be her body double. What do you think? Does my body look like hers?”
Darren gaped. He would not look at her body. He would not do it. “I’m sorry,” he heard himself say. “I’m really sorry.”
She watched him another moment and then with a long sigh dropped the cigarette and ground it under her toe. “So listen,” she said. “No one else knows. Can I trust you? I like it here. I don’t want to leave. Can we keep it between us?”
He nearly collapsed against her in gratitude. “Of course,” he said. “Of course.” Then: “Keep what between us?”
Her eyelids drooped shyly. “I’m just surprised no one figured it out till now. Hopefully you’re the only one. They all think I’m crazy,” she shrugged, “but I like it here. I like being a waitress, just taking care of people. It’s like being undercover. But I can’t go back.”
He stared at her, wordless for once.
“You have no idea what it’s like. No peace. Everyone with their favors, their fake friendship. You think being Black here is hard? Jesus Christ, man, you think out there anyone gives a shit about anything else?” She let out a guffaw that was unlike any sound Darren would have expected from her. “Those motherfuckers,” she said. “I’ll take a hundred of your father and Mel every day for the rest of my life. Just don’t make me go back there. Keep my secret, okay Darren?”
“Your secret?” he managed, relief curdling to low-grade alarm. “What are we talking about?”
She wrapped her long fingers around his biceps. “I’m so happy you came back,” she said. “I feel so much better.”
The 14th fairway was empty, a long and silent stretch frosted in moonlight, squat, angular houses in shadow on either side. A kidney-shaped water hazard guarded the distant green; along its shores he could make out the nervous forms of geese, their garbled and secret nightspeak carrying in the silence. The first time he’d visited his parents after their move to Crystal Grove, his father had made an eagle – two under par – on this hole, set up by a towering drive that flew and flew, straight and high as youth itself.
“You see that, kid?” he’d cried, clamping an arm around Darren’s shoulders as they walked off the green. “The old man’s still got it!” And though he’d had terrible misgivings about his parents’ move to Florida, he watched his father’s tanned, beaming face and for a moment allowed himself to believe what all the websites and realtors insisted: It was a new life, a second chance, unbound from the laws of time. He allowed himself to feel hopeful. “That a boy,” his mother said when they got home. She’d kissed his father’s cheek and smiled girlishly. “That’s my boy.”
They’d had six years. Six years of soirees at the clubhouse and weekend jaunts to Key West, of this sun-drenched second youth. When his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer – she hadn’t smoked since before Darren was born – they took it stoically. “This is what happens,” Darren’s father said over the phone, in the same tone he used to report dues increases or oncoming hurricanes. “It’s how it goes.” Darren knew he should admire such mature acceptance but he felt only the hard splinter of contempt.
“Your father,” she’d said, the next time Darren saw her. She smiled to herself. “When I’m gone these old biddies will snap him right up.” They sat on the back patio, his mother’s bony hands wrapped around a mug of tea, and watched carts rattle over the wooden bridge. DO NOT FEED ALLIGATORS!, read the sign at the edge of the irrigation ditch. She was frail, already vanishing; as they listened to the clatter of the carts, the humid whirr of insects, he felt as if he could see right through her, to the cushions of the chaise longue that would, he knew, be empty soon enough.
“Mark my words,” she said to his skeptical frown. “I’ll still be warm in the ground when the yentas start their matchmaking. He’ll be a hot commodity.”
But it hadn’t happened. As far as Darren knew, his father hadn’t made any new friends, had avoided the social opportunities – Trivia Nights, poolside “luaus” – that Crystal Grove provided. He still played golf, still went to the occasional Happy Hour, but he and Mel stood at the end of the bar telling off-color jokes, reminiscing about “fast girls” they’d known in college.
“You have to make an effort,” Darren said over the phone. “Why don’t you play Bridge?”
His father snorted. “Your mother hated Bridge.”
As he stepped off the springy grass onto the sidewalk, Darren felt a pang of sympathy, almost respect. What would his wife do, if something were to happen to him?
He was only forty-four, his wife two years younger. They’d have to spend thirty-five more years together for the comparison to matter. And then, he thought, it would be Artie, maybe with a family of his own, who came to visit them with a combination of tolerance and dread, Artie’s own child – Darren’s grandchild – glued to some insidious device, insensible to the grownups’ ancient resentments…
No, he thought, stopping to gulp at sweet night air. Somewhere out on the boulevard, there was a long shriek of brakes. No, one couldn’t accept it, this grim, inexorable progression. “This is what happens,” his father had said, but one couldn’t accept it so blandly. On the 15th hole, a tricky Par 3, the green concealed behind a stand of eucalyptus, his father had pitched his tee shot into the sand. He’d squinted at the sky, then pulled a new ball from his pocket.
“I think I’ve earned a mulligan, Darren. Don’t you?”
At breakfast, they were waited on by a short, plump woman with beaded cornrows and a wide mouth full of plastic braces. She doted on Artie, helped him tuck his napkin into his shirt collar and, while Darren’s wife watched nervously, filled his orange juice glass to the rim. “Little Master,” she called him, to which Artie gave a confused smile. “The Little Master likes bacon? Caroline get you some more bacon, Little Master. I’ll be right back.”
The dining room blazed with sunlight, jittering with the sound of forks and plates. When they’d walked in Darren felt himself look for her, scanning the juice bar, the omelet station. He’d lain awake half the night, replaying the conversation in his mind – Keep my secret, Darren! – writhing on the saggy guest-room mattress in nervous elation while his wife snored delicately, arms crossed over her chest like an Egyptian queen.
Halle Berry. He remembered her silken voice, the wry set of her mouth. Was it so unimaginable? Was it impossible to believe someone would want to disappear, change everything, choose a humble waitress’s life over the glitter and recognition of fame? Just taking care of people, she’d said. And why not? Shouldn’t that be what everyone really wanted? Wasn’t that what Darren insisted to his clients, third- or fourth-generation heirs, mostly, right before he brought in the firm’s tax specialist? Padding to the bathroom before dawn, he’d scrolled through images on his phone, squinted at the tiny thumbnails. Halle Berry. It could be, he thought. It really could.
“You sleep alright?” Darren’s father asked, not looking up from his eggs.
“Not too bad,” Darren said. “You ought to get a new mattress for the guest room.”
“You came in late. Where the hell did you go?”
“I took a walk. I was restless.”
“A walk,” his father said.
Darren pictured the moonlit fairways, the silent streets of Crystal Grove. He thought he might go back that night, find her smoking on the loading dock. If it was her – if it was really her – he wouldn’t tell anyone, he wouldn’t give her away. Later, they would exchange phone numbers. An alternate future arose in his mind, in which he actually looked forward to these trips to Florida. He imagined this new Darren, tanned and happy, striding through the airport with wife and child beaming at his side. Halle Berry. Halle Berry. He repeated the name in his mind, turning it over like a wrapped gift.
When the waitress came back with Artie’s bacon, Darren’s father handed her his plate and said, “Where’s Monique?”
She flashed her plastic braces. “She’s not coming today.” At his evident displeasure, she cocked a hip. “Caroline’s not good enough for you, Mr. Schenck?”
“Sure,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “No problem.”
He sipped his coffee, gazing vaguely out over the dining room. Darren could feel his annoyance – as if it were somehow Darren’s fault, as if he’d driven her away. Darren, distantly alarmed, wondered the same thing. His wife set her napkin by her plate.
“So,” she said with forced brightness, “when can we see the stone, Marty?”
Darren’s father turned to her, eyes narrowed in confusion. And though Darren, too, had not at first understood, though he’d all but forgotten why they’d come, his father’s searching face, its uneven shave and the shred of spinach clinging to the corner of his mouth, flushed him with resentment.
“Mom’s headstone,” he said. “Remember? The one we should have seen last week?”
His father frowned. “We’ll go, dear,” he told Darren’s wife. “You’ve got time.”
And though he could have left it alone, could have finished his Belgian waffle and let his father head off to the golf course, something – the hunched shuffle of residents at the bagel tray, Caroline waddling back with the bill – inflamed him.
“Plenty of time!” he said. “The stone’s not going anywhere, right Dad?”
He felt his wife’s stare, felt a sharp pain as her sneaker struck his shin. His father chewed his lip and scanned the tall windows, then pushed his chair back.
“Why don’t you shut up for once, Darren?” He said it offhandedly, as though he were plucking grass on a fairway, letting it fall to test the wind. Darren stared, made speechless by this nonchalance. “I’ll see you all this afternoon,” his father said, leaning to muss Artie’s hair. “Okay, Little Master?” To Darren’s wife, he said, “Why don’t you go to the pool and relax? You deserve it.”
Then he tottered across the dining room, pausing every now and then to raise a stiff arm in greeting, or nod to someone he knew. The dining captain swerved over to shake his hand and the two men shared a laugh that carried through the room. At a table of five women, all wearing tennis visors, his father stopped and rested his hands on the back of a chair; five faces turned to him like daisies after a rainshower. Darren watched, awestruck, as his father’s face broke into an easy smile, the smile of a much younger man, the man he remembered coming home from work each night in a well-cut suit, or offering his elbow to Darren’s mother as they left a restaurant. He remembered the swell of applause at his father’s retirement party, the warm and witty toast he’d made at Darren’s wedding. It had all been such a long time ago. Your father’s a lovely man, Monique had said. It struck him now that she might have meant it.
“You can’t just let him go,” someone said, and he turned back to find his wife staring at him with stern pity. She, too, was older, her face softer, fine lines at the corners of her eyes. “Darren, you have to say something.”
He rose off balance, stunned by the room’s brightness. In a daze, he traced his father’s route through sheets of sunlight, winding toward the table of women – These old yentas! – but his father had already slipped outside. When he stepped out onto the broad terrace, heat slicked his brow. The 18th green lay before him, the grounds furling out into morning haze; directly below, a confusion of carts navigated around one another, beeping, clubs clattering. He thought he saw Mel in one, but lost him in the glare. A young man in a bright white golf shirt eyed him from the valet stand. He took the stairs quickly, spotted a sign that read FIRST TEE and dashed down the path, nearly colliding with an approaching cart – “Sorry!” he called over his shoulder, “Sorry!” – half-twirling, stumbling past a groundskeeper’s truck, waving stupidly to the man trimming the hedge.
She’s not coming today. Was it her day off? Had she not shown up for work? He imagined her hastily packing a bag, speeding away in the night having had second thoughts – entirely justified – about Darren’s trustworthiness. He remembered the press of her hand on his arm, the sincerity in her voice. I’m so happy you came back, Darren. When was the last time anyone had said that?
He came into the clearing just in time to watch two carts traveling out along the fairway, vague as cattle in a watercolor landscape. The musical jouncing of clubs carried back through the stillness. He had not found his father or Halle Berry. He stood panting in the spangled light, marveling at how poorly the visit had gone. He’d promised his wife, but as usual he couldn’t deliver on his promise. As usual, he hadn’t taken care of anyone. The last time he’d seen her, his mother hadn’t gotten out of bed. Her hands, when Darren held them, were skeletal and palsied. Nurses came throughout the day while his father watched tv and Darren hid in the guest room, sending work emails. When his mother cried out it was the nurses who went to her, who cleaned her, turned her, who left at the ends of their shifts with bile streaking their scrubs. “Thank you,” his father called from his armchair. Darren stood holding the front door, face hot, not knowing what to say.
The clubhouse was very far away. As he turned back, his eye caught on a wooden sign half-hidden in the shrubbery: STAFF ONLY. A narrow path wound into the trees. The nurses were all women, all Black. He’d never learned their names, just stood at the door while they came and went – like the valets at the clubhouse, like the bartenders and the pool cleaners, the plumbers and personal trainers, countless others he’d never noticed. A vast army that cared for Crystal Grove’s residents – saw them at their very worst, listened to their bad jokes, smiled at photos of their thoughtless children. Helped them to die when their own families didn’t know how. He stood staring at the sign, then out at the distant green. He remembered his father, years ago, pumping his fist in joy after sinking the long putt. He thought of Halle Berry, coolly smoking at the edge of the loading dock.
“I met your mother once,” she’d said as he left. He’d been so flustered he could only nod. “Such a beautiful woman.”
Three years later, Darren’s still standing there.
What I mean by that is, it’s been three years since I wrote a story that I called, from the very beginning, “Halle Berry.” I hadn’t written a short story in a very long time, but after a fraught visit to my parents in Florida I’d come home and set to work, grinding out what felt like well-made scenes over the next couple of weeks. It felt good to be writing fiction again, and this story felt important to me, it felt meaningful. I’d been thinking a lot about these issues, you see. We all had. It was the summer after George Floyd and all the white people I knew – which is to say, virtually all the people I knew – were gripped by an agony of self-examination that verged toward narcissism. In the supermarket, they pointedly drew Black cashiers into conversation. They dropped references to James Baldwin as if they’d known him back in his Harlem days. After one dinner party, my wife got an email from her friend who was mortified that, in telling an anecdote, she’d referred to someone as a person of color: “I realize I didn’t do the same for others in the story. I didn’t say they were white. I’m sorry to have subjected you and your family to my implicit bias.” It was all very admirable, and very pointless, and very sad. We all wanted to do better. I suppose, in my naiveté, I thought I could write a story that said something worth saying. I thought “Halle Berry” could make a difference.
I wrote that last scene in a rush of anticipation, knowing there would have to be one more movement, some kind of reckoning. Darren would have to make a choice – his father or the waitress – and this would somehow bring together the various themes. I was sure that with another few days’ work I could nail it. But the opposite happened: I struggled with it for weeks, then months, without finding a true ending. In one version, Darren follows that STAFF ONLY sign down a winding path, hoping to find her, but finds only his father sobbing in the woods. In another, he somehow obtains Monique’s address and knocks on her door, but her bungalow, in a trash-strewn neighborhood that’s the stark opposite of Crystal Grove, has been abandoned. In still another, he returns to Crystal Grove for his father’s funeral, secretly hoping she’ll show up, and that meeting her again will somehow help him learn how to take care of people the way she does, the way the nurses took care of his mother. They were all viable endings in their way, but none of them really fulfilled my hopes for the story. None were truly about Halle Berry – ultimately, they were all about Darren and his problems and how Halle, or Monique, could magically solve them. I knew I couldn’t call the story “Halle Berry” unless it was really about Halle Berry (or “Halle Berry”) and I was determined to call the story “Halle Berry.” I was determined to make the story speak to these things we were all thinking about. Also, I liked the sound of it: Halle Berry. Frustrated, I sent out a version I knew was no good, then shook my head and muttered when the rejections came back. Finally, I set the story aside, admitting to myself that I wasn’t smart enough to write it. At least, I thought, I was humble enough to admit it.
Then, two weeks ago, I got a message from the arts editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, for whom I sometimes write reviews. Did I want to do a piece on the Romeo & Juliet about to open at the New Oakland Playhouse, starring Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry? “Normally I’d give it to someone who knows Oakland, but my usual guy is on book leave,” he said. I’d been vaguely aware of the opening – there’d been some excitement in the national press about Halle Berry’s return to acting after a long hiatus, some grousing about the age of the actors, and some about race. George Will, with his usual hemorrhoidal acerbity, lamented “the tedious cultural revisionism from which even 16th century children can’t be spared.”
But my editor wasn’t interested in the race angle. San Franciscans are above all that, of course. We’re far too evolved. He wanted a straight review of the show with maybe some discussion of “how far Oakland has come” that it now offered prestige theater starring major celebrities and could sell out a five-week run. I jumped at the assignment. I hadn’t had a piece in the Chron for over a year and my department chair was hinting that I needed to be publishing more. Plus, I’ve always loved Hugh Jackman. It was only after I’d sent my reply that I remembered the short story.
As it happened, my father was planning to visit that same week. My mother, who had been recently diagnosed when I first tried to write “Halle Berry,” had died a year earlier, and my father had been coming out every couple of months “to spend time with my precious grandson and my lovely daughter-in-law.” Getting a plus-one to the opening was no problem, but I struggled with whether to take my father or my wife. Some part of me wanted to see how he’d react, I suppose. But it’s also true that I’d grown more aware of the passing of time since my mother’s death. It was important that he and I do things together, for there to be moments I would remember.
“You two should go,” said my wife, who is wise and jarringly honest and half-Jamaican. In my mind, she’d been the model for Darren’s wife, but I’d never found a way to work her race into the story. “I’ll need a break from you and your dad by then.”
“You and I haven’t had a night out in a while,” I said, already talking myself out of it. “We could try that new ramen place…”
She waved this off with a laugh. “Shakespeare’s not my jam.”
My father was predictably unenthused about the show but willing to go “if it makes you happy.” He enjoyed the finer things in life, but Shakespeare wasn’t his jam either. Unlike me, he hadn’t always had those things. He’d grown up in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood where Jews and Blacks lived side by side, sometimes beating each other up but most of the time just stealing penny candy from each other’s stores and mouthing off at stickball. “Nobody gave a damn what color you were,” he’d told me a hundred times. “If you knew the Dodgers’ starting lineup, you were okay.” It was a version of urban life I found almost impossible to imagine. In San Francisco, we lived in a neighborhood that was nearly all white. When my son was still in a stroller, if we saw a Black woman walking down the street he would point and say, “Mommy!”
We arrived at the theater half an hour early and sipped Old Fashioneds in the lobby. I’d put on a sport jacket and my best shoes; my father wore a golf shirt and penny loafers. The elegant walking stick I’d bought him years earlier leaned against his stool. I scribbled some notes while he scanned the room, nodding his approval at the plush carpets and chandeliers. Portraits of iconic Black actors hung on every wall, in dismaying contrast to the pale crowd. As the lights flashed and people began moving toward the doors, my father drained his glass and said, “So, you finally killed off the old man.”
It took me a second to remember that I’d sent him the story to read on the plane, the version in which Darren attends his father’s funeral. I hadn’t done it for any particular reason – he was always asking to read my work, and lately I hadn’t had much to show him. And there was the Halle Berry connection. I didn’t worry that he’d be offended by the father’s death. In the peculiar (my wife would say “fucked up”) way my father and I communicated, I thought he would find it funny.
“It’s just a story, Dad,” I said. “It’s not autobiography.”
“Tell that to your mother.”
I stared at him, then turned and headed down the aisle. The seats were fantastic – ninth row, center. Around us the bright theater throbbed with voices, the easy chatter of liberals who feel their privilege and politics momentarily aligned. My father must have sensed that he’d stung me, because as we settled into the seats he leaned over and said, “It’s a good story.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean it. When are you going to publish it?”
“I’m not,” I said, with more bitterness than I’d intended. To soften things, I added, “I can’t publish it. I had no business writing it.”
“No business?” he said. “What the hell does that mean?”
With a sigh, I said it wasn’t my story to tell, that I didn’t have the perspective to say anything new or useful and so it was better not to write it at all than to reduce urgent questions of racial justice to the anxieties of a privileged white man.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said, with such certitude that I set down my notepad.
“It’s not ridiculous, Dad,” I said. “It’s the truth. You don’t know anything about it. You can’t see it, sitting in that cocoon down in Florida. Places like that are half the problem. These are real people with real lives. Who am I to say what any of it means?
“I could publish it,” I said, though this wasn’t exactly true. “Of course I could. I’m a white man. But if a Black person wrote it, someone who’s actually had these experiences? That’s the problem, Dad. We don’t listen to them. We don’t even see them.”
Throughout this lecture, he watched me with a bored expression. “Speak for yourself,” he said, as the lights went down.
The show was very good, if flawed by a hamhanded premise (a hotshot civil-rights lawyer falls for the daughter of a notorious Black Panther), and over-reliant on the star power of its lead actors. They didn’t disappoint: Berry brought unexpected humor to the balcony scene, a slyness that was demure and seductive at once. Jackman was, as usual, a force of nature; the desperate ferocity with which he flung himself at Tybalt left the audience visibly shaken. But it was Juliet’s last scene – when she awakens to find Romeo dead – in which Berry really shone, channeling a deep, unreconcilable fury that made of her own death an improbable triumph: a reclaiming of agency, vengeance upon a world that preferred to kill her in its own way. As the curtain came down, I snuck a glance at my father, who was wiping a tear from the corner of his eye.
But a strange thing happened as I sat watching these gifted actors interpret the most exhausted roles in all of theater. While I silently seethed at my father, struggling to focus on the stage, I felt a creeping dislocation: the splendid theater, the Oakland of 1970, the cosmetic opulence of Crystal Grove – in my mind they swam over and around one another, blurring into one another. What held them together was the body on the stage, a body with no fixed identity but with sweat and spit I could see in the stagelights. I’d spent months thinking about her, writing about her, and now here she was. Halle Berry. “Halle Berry.” It was a good story, in its way, but it hadn’t managed to do what I wanted it to do. It hadn’t said what I wanted it to say – more likely, I thought, it said exactly the opposite, my failure to make “Halle Berry” be about Halle Berry was all too predictable, one more example of someone like me trying to make things better but in fact making them worse.
And yet, by the fifth act I knew I’d found a solution, a way to redeem that failure. The end of my story, the one that had escaped me for years, was right here, in this performance, this blurring of roles and perceptions, the unbridgeable distance between a woman sobbing on the stage and a man watching passively from a comfortable seat. It was that distance that had to be bridged – here, now, while I had the chance. I owed it to the story. In some semi-coherent way, I thought I owed it to her.
As we shuffled out to the aisle, I told my father, “I’ll meet you in the lobby.” Then, ignoring the stares of ushers, I threaded my way to a side exit, moving against the current until I came to a door marked KEEP OUT. Behind it, a warren of dim hallways bustled with stagehands, bare concrete ringing with the sweaty jubilation of a successful premiere. In that confusion, it was easy enough to make my way to the dressing rooms. No one stopped me or gave me a second glance. I was a white man who knew how to look like he belonged there, and if my editor hadn’t mentioned anything about backstage access such things weren’t unheard of, if anyone asked I could always play dumb. I thought of Darren, barging into the restaurant at Crystal Grove, and smiled at the irony. I didn’t know what I would say to her, only that I needed to see the actual person, to close the circuit. Then I’d go home and pull out the story and let the ending write itself. I’d stay up all night until I’d nailed it.
What I’d failed to anticipate was the small crowd outside her dressing room, the mass of managers and tv reporters, theater personnel and faceless hangers-on, all squeezed into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor waiting for a glimpse of the star. In front of her door stood three large, unsmiling men – for a moment I thought they were actors, extras who’d played Panthers, but then I realized they were bodyguards. By now I’d convinced myself I was supposed to be there. I really believed it. I strode up to the guards and held out my hand and said I was from the Chronicle. “For Ms. Berry,” I said.
They weren’t fooled. One guard folded his arms threateningly; the other two burst out laughing. “Get the fuck outta here, man,” said the largest of the three. He put his thick hand on my shoulder with a gentleness that was almost camaraderie.
“But she’s expecting me,” I said. And when the other man uncrossed his arms and stepped toward me I held my ground and said, “I’m supposed to be here.”
What followed was a certain, predictable choreography, a sharp lurching of some bodies accompanied by the drawing back of others. I felt myself half-lifted, impelled down the hall – my feet were not under my control, my body was not my own – twisting to keep my eye on the dressing room door. “But I know her,” I insisted. “I’m supposed to be here!” The two guards – the third had already lost interest – moved toward the street door, their grips unbreakable but without anger. I wasn’t afraid, I knew the worst that would happen was that they’d throw me roughly to the pavement, but I was determined not to lose this opportunity and so I braced my stance and shoved backward, halting our progress just as the dressing room door opened.
She stood squinting into the dim light, in dark jeans and a faded black t-shirt, startled and perplexed by the sudden ruckus. She was smaller than I remembered, almost delicate; her eyes glimmered, her face was drawn with fatigue and concern. It was astonishing, that face, for an instant we all stood mesmerized, shocked by its simplicity, its beautiful ordinariness.
“I have to tell you something,” I heard myself say, in a pinched, pleading voice, and then her eyes found mine and she regarded me with such interest, such human curiosity, that I couldn’t think of what it was.
In another second, the guards had kicked my legs into motion and flung open the metal door. “Who you think you are?” one asked. “Goodnight, Irene,” said the other, as he twisted my arm back and shoved me at the cold air. I caught a last glimpse of the woman in the doorway – she was watching the scene with a faint smile of disappointment – and though she may not have been who I was looking for I could swear, in the end, that she knew exactly who I was.