This was the year they were living in Brett’s house. Eating off Brett’s plates. Shitting in all five of Brett’s special water-conserving toilets. Jane hadn’t been about to miss out on the opportunity to pretend they were rich Black artists who lived in the hills. She had been determined to be that couple this year. She wanted it, and Lenny knew how badly she wanted it.
This was the year she would finish the book she’d been writing for so long. She’d publish it and get tenure and they’d be middle class and maybe even have the money to buy a house of their very own. Lenny had played up the martyrdom, but she could see he was enjoying the use of Piper’s studio at the far end of the lawn. He was plainly enjoying all of it. He just wouldn’t admit it to her.
That first day in Brett’s office, Jane had made herself dizzy swiveling circles in his Herman Miller Aeron chair. Then she’d taken a La Croix from the mini fridge, enjoying the crack and sizzle as she popped it open, imagining this would be how she’d start every day. A writer’s call to prayer.
Brett had once been, like Jane, a writer of that most doomed of genres, literary fiction. He had written and published just one book, a pithy short story collection called Lemon Rock. He had also, like Jane, been the product of an unsuccessful interracial marriage that had ended in divorce. In the graduate workshop where they met, they had been the only two people of color. The white kids in their cohort used to say that he and Jane looked like siblings. It wasn’t true—their hair textures and features were quite different—but to the untrained Caucasoid eye, light brown equaled beige, 3B hair texture was identical to 2B curls. Potato, potahto, mulatto, mulatta. But it was true that in that room of white faces they had developed a fierce, almost sibling bond, and the connection had held even as their lives had gone in such different directions.
When Brett shifted to television, his career leapt ahead. He specialized in supernatural phenomena, mostly zombies. It was as if the same blankness that had made his fiction writing fall flat became a superpower in television. He worked his way up in the bright, glittering industry that had hovered behind Jane for years while she stubbornly hunched over her novel, pretending not to notice it. By the time he was thirty-nine, he was a showrunner. Now he was beginning to direct.
Was Brett happy with his success? Did the money make up for what seemed to Jane rather mind-numbing work? She wasn’t sure. Brett sometimes spoke about wanting to make a different sort of show, something more personal, a show, he said, about people like him and Jane—a show with two halfie leads. He’d said he wanted the fact of them being biracial to be not the subject of the show, exactly, but just something they happened to be—when race came up at all, it would be more an impetus for humor than something tortured and heavy. In other words, it would be a comedy, not a tragedy, something so punchy and funny that people wouldn’t remember all those old-timey tragedies of yore—the Douglas Sirk of it all—and would only see the future of mulattos, the whole sunshiny vista that lay ahead. He called it his vanity project and usually ended his musings by saying he’d never get the time to do it, he had too much else on his plate. Jane always encouraged him to find the time if he really wanted to make it, but secretly she hoped he would never attempt his race comedy. For one thing, he’d make a mess of the subject. He lacked the invisible thing that she possessed, that thing nobody talked about anymore: Black consciousness. If you did not get it as a child, as she had, it would not come to you later, not really. You couldn’t pick it up in a college AfAm seminar after the fact. She thought it best, given Brett’s childhood, that he stick to zombies and Thor and giant arachnids.
Once, at a bar, Brett had told Jane, drunkenly, that the older he got the more he valued friends who had been his friends through all his life changes. People who were witnesses to the whole arc of it. He told her that night that he loved her. Not in a creepy way but in an intense way that surprised her, his eyes burning. She got the sense that she was a thread he was trying to hold on to, a tenuous tie to both the starving artist he’d never become and the Blackness that was always just out of his reach.
She’d been pleased to discover that Brett still had a copy of her first novel on his office bookshelves. She could not remember having written the inscription though. Fuck those pale-faced motherfuckers, it read. Let’s burn this house down. Love, Jane.•
From Colored Television, by Danzy Senna. Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2024 by Danzy Senna.
Join us on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Senna will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Colored Television. Register for the Zoom conversation here, and preorder the book, which will be published on September 3.
