Fury

These days, whenever Professor Solanka heard his friend deliver a version of this not infrequent speech, he detected a strengthening note of insincerity. Jack had gone to war—as a noted young radical journalist of color with a distinguished record of investigating American racism and a consequent string of powerful enemies—nursing many of the same fears expressed a generation earlier by the young Cassius Clay: most afraid, that is, of the bullet in the back, of death by what was not then known as “friendly fire.” In the years that followed, however, Jack witnessed, over and over again, the tragic gift of his species for ignoring the notion of ethnic solidarity: the brutalities of blacks against blacks, Arabs against Arabs, Serbs against Bosnians and Croats. ExYugo, Iran-Iraq, Rwanda, Eritrea, Afghanistan. The exterminations in Timor, the communal massacres in Meerut and Assam, the endless color-blind cataclysm of the earth. Somewhere in those years he became capable of close friendships with his white colleagues from the U.S.A. His label changed. He stopped hyphenating himself and became, simply, an American.

Solanka, who was sensitive to the undertones of such rebrandings, understood that for Jack there was much disappointment involved in this transformation, even much anger directed at what white racists would eagerly have called “his own kind,” and that such anger turns all too easily against the angry party. Jack stayed away from America, married a white woman, and moved in bien peasant circles in which race was “not an issue”: that is, almost everyone was white. Back in New York, separated from Bronislawa, he continued to date what he called “the daughters of Paleface.” The joke couldn’t hide the truth. These days Jack was more or less the only black man Jack knew, and Solanka was probably the only brown one. Rhinehart had crossed a line.

And now, perhaps, was crossing another one. Jack’s new line of work gave him an all-access pass to the Palaces, and he loved it. He wrote about this gilded milieu with waspish venom, he tore it apart for its crassness, its blindness, its mindlessness, its depthless surfaceness, but the invitations from the Warren Redstones and Ross Buffetts, from the Schuylers and Muybridges and Van Burens and Kleins, from Ivana Opalberg-Speedvogel and Marlalee Booken Caudell, just kept on coming, because the guy was hooked and they knew it. He was their house nigger and it suited them to keep him around, as, Solanka suspected, a sort of pet. “Jack Rhinehart” was a usefully non-black specific name, carrying none of the ghetto co

Yes, women, of course. Women were Rhinehart’s addiction and Achilles’ heel, and this was the Valley of the Dollybirds. No: it was the mountain, the Everest of the Dollybirds, the fabled Dollybird Horn of Plenty. Send these women his way, the Christies and Christys and Kristens and Chrysteles, the giantesses about whom most of the planet was busy fantasizing, with whom even Castro and Mandela were happy to pose, and Rhinehart would lie down (or sit up) and beg. Behind the infinite layers of Rhinehart’s cool was this ignoble fact: he had been seduced, and his desire to be accepted into this white man’s club was the dark secret he could not confess to anyone, perhaps not even to himself. And these are the secrets from which the anger comes. In this dark bed the seeds of fury grow. And although Jack’s act was armor-plated, although his mask never slipped, Solanka was sure he could see, in his friend’s blazing eyes, the self-loathing fire of his rage. It took him a long while to concede that Jack’s suppressed fury was the mirror of his own.

Rhinehart’s a

But he wasn’t single. And in eleven years he could surely have, for example, moved across the state border to Co

There was also, however, another possible reading of the situation. Up where Rhinehart now mostly lived, on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Diamond as Big as the Ritz, he was literally outclassed and, the moment he fell into the trap of wanting what was on offer up there on Olympus, also out of his depth. He was, remember, their toy, and while girls will play with toys, they don’t marry them. So maybe being half-married, stuck in this endlessly divorcing condition, was also a way for Rhinehart to kid himself. In reality there probably wasn’t much of a line forming to wait for him. Single, and aging—he had turned forty—now he was almost out of time. Almost—the killer word for any ambitious lady-killer—ineligible.