I got up, walked over to the food, poured myself more wine in a plastic cup, tossed a sweaty piece of aged Gouda in my mouth, and went back to my seat.
“The Browns are our last family,” Suzanne said. “And funnily enough, their sponsors are the Blacks.” She let out a slight snort.
It was a stupid joke, one I wished she’d not made. But unlike the woman who’d come in earlier, I could clearly sense Suzanne’s embarrassment. If I were to be charitable, perhaps she’d said it because she recognized that, in fact, there had not been any browns or blacks in these interviews. But where before I might have smiled, wanting to make her feel OK about it, wanting to be part of the joke even as I felt guilty about smiling and thereby offering my approval, now I ignored her as I sat back down. If there was one of us who was going to say something stupid and inappropriate, it was Suzanne. For all her decorum, she had a need to elicit laughter. But then again, so did I.
Eva had warned me that this tendency would get me in trouble, and it had, on more than one occasion. In Suzanne’s case, of course, we would all laugh it off and move on. I didn’t always have that luxury.
Once, when I was in my first year of graduate school, I was at the anthropology department potluck, waiting in the food line in front of a senior visiting scholar who’d written a remarkable book on matrilineage in an East African tribe which rethought ideas of power, hierarchy, and seemingly everything else. I admired her work so much it left me tongue-tied. As I piled my plate with too much pesto pasta, I tried hard to figure out the right thing to say so that she might remember me. I wanted to take a class she was offering the following semester that I knew would be packed. I should have just told her how much her book had shaped my thinking and taken my chances with that, but instead, this came out of my mouth: “So how was it spending so much time with all those strong women for a change?” I had meant it to be a genuine question, with a playful chaser—something that gestured at our mutual struggle, as different kinds of minorities in a field traditionally dominated by old white men. But the second the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d missed my mark. Did she think I was suggesting that she had no strong women in her life already? That she had to travel halfway across the world to find them? Maybe she didn’t like me suggesting that we were similar, considering that she was at the top of this particular academic totem pole and I was the Indian at the bottom.
She didn’t answer my question. Instead, she turned to the table with the food, took a few slices of a beautifully glazed ham, and walked away. I didn’t bother trying to get into her class. And a few days later, my advisor stopped me in the department hallway and suggested I needed to work on my professionalism.
It was the same advice I now wanted to pass on to Suzanne.
“Here they are,” she said. Two couples walked into the clubhouse.
The Blacks, of course, were white. But the Browns were black. I looked at the handsome couple and breathed a sigh of relief. It was as if an alternate, younger version of the Obamas had just walked in.
I glanced at the rest of the committee, all of them looking at the alt-Obamas with big, friendly grins. The room was completely silent. We could hear the cicadian murmur of kids finishing up at the pool outside.
“Let me introduce you to Doctors Bill and Valerie Brown,” Mark Black said.
Bill was roughly six feet tall and fit. He was wearing lean, perfectly fitting khakis, loafers, a button-down, light pink shirt, and a navy-blue wool blazer. I had recently read an article somewhere about how every man needed a perfect navy-blue blazer. Bill’s certainly was that. On one of his wrists was a bracelet of Tibetan prayer beads, and on the other, a blue-faced octagonal Audemars. I placed my hand on my stomach and sucked it in a bit. I wished I went to the gym more often, got my shirts pressed more regularly.
Valerie was a tall, striking woman who stood comfortably on her own, close enough to be intimate with her husband, but not subsumed by him.
The Browns’ sponsors were Mark Black, a well-regarded cardiologist in town, and his wife, Jan. Mark had the confidence that comes with being able to slice open chests. I didn’t see him on the courts often, but when I did, his strokes were compact and tidy, his body always moving instinctively in the right direction. He struck me as a little uptight, always appropriately dressed for whatever occasion he was attending. I don’t think I’d ever seen his toes, which was noteworthy given the fact that one of the only things we had in common was access to the same pool.
Jan was pretty and put together, her prettiness perhaps enhanced by all the time and money she had to take care of herself. They were a family obsessed with being on the cutting edge of trends. They bought their Range Rovers—his in black, hers in white—while most people were stuck in their Audis. Jan took the family to spend a year in Spain so their kids could get used to playing on real, red clay before everyone was taking a year off and calling it a sabbatical. Once, I overheard Mark say that his shoulders were sore because he had been skeet shooting the day before. I genuinely thought he was kidding, until I realized he wasn’t. Who goes skeet shooting? Perhaps everyone soon enough, if the Blacks continued to have their fingers on the upper-middle-class pulse.
The Browns went around the room, shaking hands with all of the committee members. When they came to me, they lingered for an extra few seconds, their eyes asking for help managing what was clearly an awkward situation: a roomful of white people deciding whether they wanted to let a black couple into their club. I’m here for you, I tried to say as I reached out my hand to shake theirs. “Rajesh Bhatt. Everyone calls me Raj.”
“I knew a Raj in college,” Bill said, smiling.
I think everyone knew a Raj in college. Except, of course, the woman from earlier in the evening.
Bill had a deep, calming voice, one you might hear on a TV commercial for a Mercedes sedan. “I think he runs Google now. Or something.”
“I use Google,” I said, returning his smile.
“Can we get you anything?” Suzanne asked.
“Water would be great,” Bill said.
I happened to be the one closest to the table with the drinks. Suzanne glanced at me for the slightest beat of a second. I looked at her as Bill looked at me.
“You know, how about a sip of something stronger instead,” Bill said, moving toward the table. “I’ll get it.”
I stepped over to the table with him.
“What do you like?” he asked, examining the open bottles of white and red. I sensed that he knew his way around labels.
I reached for a lone, half-full bottle of a nearly translucent pinot tucked behind the mineral waters. “This is the high-end stuff.”
Bill took two clear plastic cups from a stack. I gave us both a liberal pour. Bill took a small sip and then turned to me and said, “It certainly is.”
Our backs were turned to the rest of the group. Bill ate a dried apricot, I had a piece of salami, and we both took another sip. Before placing the bottle back, I poured us a little more of the wine.
“Shall we?” I asked.
Bill took his wine in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. He handed the water to his wife and took a seat next to her. I sat down on the couch facing them.
For a moment, I wondered whether Bill was originally from the Caribbean. If he was, he would have grown up with Indians, maybe had a grandfather who had arrived on the island as an indentured servant, worked through his contract, and decided to stay instead of going back to the small Indian village he barely remembered. Maybe somehow, over the years, the “Bhatt” had changed to “Brown.” If that was the case, I mused, going back several generations, Bill and I could well be cousins.