Robert carried his coat and cowered from a cold breeze flowing over these near eastern Cleveland suburbs. He was walking from his back door to his garage. The oaks conversed, ruffling and creeking, and the century homes tucked-in their brick. The trees might have spoken truths from a history that Robert could not know, a proud conservative truth, that once spewed out of fountains and into the pools of the city's early suburban past. But, in the same way that visions of abandonement mean nothing to those on the run, the stories of historical priviledge leave no mark on Robert. Like everyone, he lives his own blind truth, stoutly, and with a burning heart, and whatever faults can be attributed by this motivation can also be admired. It depends on the particular affliction of nostalgia thriving inside.

The slow, free, open-windowed drive from his well-heeled home to the corner bar never failed to infect Robert with some nostalgia. Being a native with a feeling of ownership and comfort.

It was unusually cold for a Cleveland August, but that didn't bother Robert Kennedy Fitzgerald. He entered The Estuary warmed over with a sense of freedom and with nothing in particular on his mind. His wife was on the east coast attending the funeral of her cousin's daughter, a Radcliffe girl who was found inexplicably dead, and the brief respite from the 18 year marriage felt especially good.

The bar was noisy but less than half full. Through lazy motes of dust the faces and colors were varied yet familiar. Robert slid onto the bar stool and arranged his regular setting: cigarettes, coins, cash, cell phone. A Swedish-looking bartender named Jill filled Robert's tumbler and peered over his vicinity.

It was Saturday evening around 9:30. The inside of the bar made a large U that was surrounded by worn wainscoting, wooden booths, a few games, a fat juke box, and some loose chairs for larger parties. The clientelle ranged in age from their 20's to their late 40's. The air was still but for the steady puffs of smoke rising through conical, yellowing light.

“You mine 'fi sit he-yah?” Janquell Williams spoke at the left rear of Robert's head in a softened inner-city vernacular. She was alone, swept in on the swirling dimness of the night. A quick look gave Robert some excitement; she was very young, maybe even half his age, he thought.

“Oh no, please do.” He said. She reminded him of someone he couldn't recall, from one of his public defense cases he thought, the grieving mother of a condemned man's crying baby, perhaps.

Janquell settled herself. She was lean and strong, but everything she touched she touched delicately, as if she were only partly there. Which was her plan.

She'd never been in The Estuary. Though she'd seen the back of it from her Grandma's subsidised apartment, which looked down at the back, over a pebbly, concrete parking lot. She'd been living there two weeks, ever since her immediate family of three had fallen apart. Her Grandma, a gnarled, slow-moving woman, wrapped in gray, featureless dress, assumed the final days of her granddaughter's guardianship. She had prayed for her and cautioned her: 'the streets is calm here, better'n East 55th and Browner, better'n where all them guns and criminals find'n all kinda troubles...but ya steel gotta be awares and look after yo-self.'

The impulse that brought her into this bar had something to do with boredom and curiosity; how far could she go with this mature-beyond-her-years look? She wasn't even officially an adult yet, but tomorrow would be her eighteenth birthday and tonight she'd be as adult as she wanted to be. For that was the age when the great tides of youth and maturity swirl together dangerously. She felt strong and capable and could reason with all the distant discoveries of her future, yet she was still captive to that inexplicable feeling of invincibility that possesses the young.

Robert faced solemnly forward, as if waiting for an elevator.

He became infused by the first fingers of his drink.

He loved this bar. He had bought the place anonymously three years ago and had given it its name: The Estuary. His wife had never wanted to be here, but in this place Robert indulged the powerful remnants of a lifelong dream, a communal dream which had emerged out of all the newsworthy changes of his days. During his life, lived entirely in this city, he had watched friends leave and attitudes grow hard and infectious. He had watched the city succumb in all but the most expensive areas to white flight; and then, as a successful lawyer, he had stuggled like a child to understand these changes and to conjure some kind of remedial plan that could help everyone see themselves a little better and be less afraid or spiteful or whatever it was they felt that kept the people apart from each other. Robert had felt as though the great force of some malignant disease had washed over everyone around him while he remained immune and energetic and still touched by the revolutionary voices of the 60's. He'd made it a project, an experiment, to attract and intermix the blacks and whites in the surrounding neighborhoods. And so, on this Saturday night, when he could come freely to his place, he too had inexplicable feelings, rising up in him, out of the steady hum of an otherwise unmoving life. He wore a smile and felt proud of the fact that, like tonight, his smokey dream seemed to have some life; it seemed to him the bar was open to all, that it was more than an estuary, it was a sanctuary.

Robert sometimes spoke of this place as though it were a kind of tourist attraction, where, he imagined, the excursive yet parallel lines of the living can meet for a brief and exalted moment.

“My name is Robert. How are you tonight?” She stared ahead, wincing and playing a drag on her cigarette.

“Aw-right. I'm Janquell.” Robert looked at her quickly, closely. He got lost in her flawless complexion and the features of her face seemed exaggerated in the shadowy light. He memorized the sculpted, marbly turns of her jaw and lips. She wore sleeveless khaki and blue jeans. Her hair was drawn back into a tough, fiberoptic pony tail. Her arms were cut long and feminine.

He swallowed from his drink.

Robert's reflections had taken leave; in the realm of Janquell's beauty he felt old and unattractive. It was not in his nature to see himself like other's do, to see the invitation of his charming features. He fought with the absurdity of these vain worries. 'How could I even imagine being with this beautiful, young woman. She is someone's daughter.' He thought. Yet he could not control the reaction within. He was, afterall an animal on this Earth with a million generations of cultivated hunger lurking in every cell of his body. He straightened himself and tried to hide his worry.

Janquell looked through a keen corner of her eye. She sensed his experience, his softness, his thoughtful hope. This was one of her skills, seeing detail, nuance; it is something people who survive by wit develop. She was curious about this man. She could tell by the health of his appearance, the comfortable clothes, the ready confidence of his fingers, and the clarity of his eyes, that he was not the kind of survivor she was. It made her wonder how comfortable he really was. She feigned a subtle air of anger because this is what she knew how to do and because from that position it was nothing to cut and run, and besides, what would she want with a man not man enough to overcome the feigns of a little girl. In the cultivated part of her she held aloof all but one tender thread in her mind, which trespassed all the otherwise inbred suspicions, and which she could not separate from some vague childhood fantasies.

She started on her second Chivas on the rocks.

“Are you working now?” Robert asked.

“Naw, I's thinking 'bout college.” she replied, making no effort to hide her inner city tongue. She continued looking only through the corner of her eye. Robert indicated to Jill he needed a refill.

“That sounds good. Oh, would you like another drink?” He asked.

“I'm alright. Thanks.” Robert smiled and swayed his head shyly. This was rather out of character for him, but there was no doubt that something fateful was going on. With the moments of shared silence his composure was returning. He began to see this as something he'd planned; not the circumstance of a possible tryst, but the real-life comingling of racial strangers, the potential for making some kind of social connection.

"Are you from around here?" Robert asked.

"I'm from Cleveland but I moved recently. You?" A sharp rise of laughter somewhere nearby discomposed the conversation for a moment. They took drinks.

"I have lived here all my life. How long have you lived here?" Robert asked.

"Well, my Grandma live real close. I came there a few weeks ago."

Robert ventured a brief look into Janquell's averted eyes. "It's nice to meet you. I'm glad you're here." He said. Janquell muttered "Yeah."

The alcohol had begun to loosen her and she had a vague feeling that they were celebrating, as if this particular time and place had been benevolently chosen for their meeting.

"Do you like it so far at your Grandma's?" Robert asked, trying to maintain a boyish respect in his voice. "I mean, are you comfortable here in the Heights?" Janquell thought for while. They took another drink together.

"I can't say, really. I think its nice to be away from the trouble. I can't see my friends much though."

"Do you see yourself living in a place like this? I mean in your future?" Robert pressed for her feelings.

"Sure, it'd be nice. I don' know though"

"Well, why not? This is your bar as much as it is anyone else's. This is your city, your Earth."

"I walked on the other side of Lee road. Them houses is sump'n. Sheet. But how's girl like me gonna get into a place like one a dem?" Janquell's feelings became muddied. She was proud of herself, her survival, and her parents and parent's parents, they were all proud people, no matter what had been taken from them, because she knew the truth and the truth was that pride is the only honest currency in the ghetto. But here it felt completely powerless. Even in the second generation black folks whose parents had moved here as Robert had begun his law career.

They tilted their glasses and tongued the alcohol and ice, savoring the induction of warm tranquility and gaining emboldened comfort from its velvety gifts.

"You have an interesting name. At first I wasn't sure about, but I think I really like. Its poetic, almost French sounding, and unique. I like that. I like unique things. Especially artistically unique things." He paused for a careful drink ritual: squeeze the lime, stir, toss the rind and stick.

"I have the idea, Janquell, that everyone on Earth is a hero. Think about it. What does it take to become a hero? A hero is simply someone who is thought of as a hero. I know its not right to define a word using the word itself, but in this case it works. If one person chooses you as a hero, than thats what you are, and if you choose someone else as a hero, then that is it and there is a kind of balance in the world. Its relative, I suppose. Some people are more often chosen as a hero than others, but that goes all the way to the top and right back down. When you think about it, all you really need is to be chosen, and to believe the one who is choosing you. I think this is part of what allows people to be proud. Pride comes from knowing you are chosen." Janquell was not clear on where this was going, or what exactly Robert was talking about, but she could sense his genuineness, and that, coming from a comfortable older white man, was something new to her. It was the making of a Moment.

They continued lifitng their drinks together, and Janquell smiled and nodded her head in a kind of rhythmic agreement.

"Okay. So, let me ask you a question. Do you think a black man's hero can be a white man? Is the 'chooser' color blind?" This question brought a break in her rhythm. Robert was steering for the crux of his project. It was new territory for him, even though he'd practised this moment over and over in his mind. She didn't answer.

"You know, I have seen this neighborhood change so dramatically. I have stayed because I have been hopeful and interested in this change. I have dreamt of this being the one place on Earth where we can all get along and help each other and recognize each other as heros. Do you get it?" Janquell nodded. And they fell into a thoughtful silence.

Over the course of several moments each had trains of thought which touched on impossible dreams as well as feelings of the ludicrousness of the ideas. They worked their way through these thoughts and nursed themselves with their drinks. And Robert spoke again.

“Janquell, do you ever want to get inside the head of a white man who has money, a lot of money?” This made her turn and look at him, full-face through the graduated blackness of her sunglasses. She and Robert mused together like orbiting masses for a prolonged moment and she finally said with mocking demand:

“Can I?”

Robert, whose thoughts favored a certain angle, considered this a profound utterance, a plea, an invitation. It brought hope and despair, in waves; it came as if the bells of civilization had heralded a new species. He felt instantly nostalgic. The dialog, like two-way prayer, was now and forever. And its shared captivity made unearthly promises.

Janquell watched Robert's face. She pulled in her chin and wondered how her sarcasm had been so hard to understand.

“What am I gonna find there? Sheeet!” Robert let out a breath. “You know what I'm gon' find. I'm gon' find a horny old man who probably got kids and a wife and wanna sneak all around.” At this point she might have left, but her words and her posture caused an unexpected reaction in Robert. He slumped and his face pursed and he said, as if he were a child with a small language, “No.”

She reloaded a cigarette and indicated a refill to Jill. Robert's posture retreated. He considered her rebuke. He wondered why she didn't recognize this meeting, the potential, the profoundness. He was from the generation that helped bring real freedoms for her, this woman, this black woman. He was a connection to the ideals of yesteryear.

Janquell shook her head and held her drink airborne, tilting it. She shuttered her eyes tightly and grimaced dramatically. Robert rejoined with clarification.

“Well, you are definitely easy on the eyes. Is that a surprise? But there's more to my question than that. I was trying to see if we could both get inside each others' heads. I call myself a rich white man because that's what I am. But I don't think of myself that way at all. In fact, there are things I'd trade the money for.” Janquell smirked. She knew he was honest, but this kind of honesty was foreign to her, and she struggled between thoughtfulness and her combative instinct. She wondered where could be the success of white naivete – somewhere in there where the light of his heart is.

“Are you married?” She asked.

“Yes.”

"You got kids?”

“No”.

“You got problems at home?”

“Well. My wife is gone to visit her cousin in New Jersey. Left yesterday. She'll tell me later when she's coming home. Frankly, I love her, but I'd sort of prefer to be separated from her right now.”

"May I?" Robert offered to buy Janquell another drink. She agreed. They sat and watched Jill. The bar was filling up.

"Let me ask you, Janquell, how do you see yourself?"

"Well, first I'm black, and proud. Ma family survive God knows what. Ya know what I'm talk'n 'bout?"

"Do you know your ancestry?" Robert took another look at her. She was very dark. Her skin was the kind of dark that inspires people, inspires fear, inspires curiosity, inspires a desire to touch. Her face bore depth and shadows that made shapes and angles Robert hadn't ever imagined before. Her movements drew on the Earth, like roots and rivers, breathing and natural and purposeful.

"My Grandma say we from the Gold Coast, but I don't know. I think we just from Sing Sing." She laughed.

"I'm Irish. Almost completely. I was born the day Robert Kennedy died June 6, 1968. I was named after him. My mom used to tell me on that day she cried tears of pain out of her left eye and tears of joy out her right." Janquell became thoughtful. She had a vague appreciation for the Kennedys, one or two of them, she wasn't sure.

Robert watched her more boldly now. And Janquell succeeded in forgetting some of her thoughts. In time the encroaching patronage hemmed them and drove them closer together.

"What's your biggest dream?" Robert asked. Janquell twisted her head and played her opulent fingers over her hair and neck.

"I wan' respect. You know. For all of us. That's what I dream." The sound of these words entered Robert's mind, forming and reforming in the guises of day and night.

"How 'bout you?" She asked.

"I can say the same thing, really. It's the same."

"But you got it. People hear you. You got somp'n dey want."

"Well, maybe. But it's different." He turned toward her, taking a breath. "You are a beautiful woman. That's something people want. Its something I want. In this way I respect you."

"Sheeet." Janquell rejected this talk.

"Well, yeah, that's not the kind of respect you want. It's the same for me, I don't want respect for my money. That says nothing about who I am. In fact, it represents me pretty poorly. "

"But its about da first damn thing you say to me, how much damn money you got."

"Well, I didn't say I won't use my money..." For the first time Robert and Janquell smiled together, like a couple. After some thought, Robert continued.

"Let me ask you a question, Janquell. Why do you think the whites are all leaving this city?" Janquell's expression soured.

"You know jus' like me, dey don' want a live with black folks."

"But I am still here. I want to be here. Some of us like this city too much to leave. What does that make you think of me?" There was a long silence. Janquell could not put her thoughts into words. She liked this man. She felt the strength of his interest. She considered a little bit of the forces acting on his life and felt a measure of sympathy for him. But she also wanted to challenge him.

"Ya know. You gotta tell me what you think. It ain't my people's leaving here." This agitated Robert whose reaction was like a flashflood.

"Okay, I'll tell you, not about what to think of me, but what to think of this business of white flight. There are simple reasons and there are complex reasons. But the white's won't even tell me because they know they would have to face my seeing their hypocrosy. They actually make up reasons just to confuse people like me and to hide their true feelings. Sometimes, when I am feeling Christ-like, I just think people naturally want to be with their own kind, and maybe that's true, but I think I have evidence that this can not be the real reason. People in this city came here, at least the people I've known, because they like its location, near the university, the hospital, the museums, the music school, and because they are not content to be just another quaffed modern man parking his new car in one of the endless subdivisions out there in the nth circle of hell. Then they have children and suddenly they believe they carry the destiny of the world in the flesh of their children. Their children are somehow made of antique bone china and can not take the roughness of the sight of something unfamiliar, or something they think is hostile to them. But they don't even understand their own feelings. What is really happening is that they have reached a kind of midlife crisis and by some instinctive law of nature their lives stop and their offspring become the utter most personal rendering of their own flesh. They loose all sense of reality. They simply can not reason accurately. Its like the vagueries of the stock market. Its a collective psychology thing having no honest connection with reality, and by the time they've restored their senses they can look back at it and feel good about what was simply a senseless self-fulfilling destiny." Janquell did not understand his ideas, but she did understand his tone and his feeling and she wanted to show her faith.

"It's okay Robert." Was all she said. They sat in silence while Robert worked abortively on ways to clarify himself and Janquell considered the attractiveness of Robert's sincerity. After sometime Robert spoke softly:

"Let's get some air." Janquell quietly aggreed. They wove out into the street. A singing breeze began to cleanse them of the everywhere Estuarial murk. Janquell approved of the full body view of Robert, he was tall, fit, clean, and more youthful than the twilight lines on his face. Outside the bar she looked across the avenue into a vague suburban forest like a freed, riderless convict.

Robert stopped and turned to her. "It's been a really nice time. Are we...ahh..is this...good night?" Janquell blinked three times and said: "No."

He laced her arm tenderly with a strong hand and lead her to his car. Janquell had never imagined anything like this, not even in a best-friend fantasy, not even when they hopped the rail and blew around the business worlds in downtown. She was a practical girl. But in that parking lot, behind The Estuary, where real people met, where from her Grandma's window she accepted in silence the curious world, she discovered herself gazing down in the rounded, shiny black panels of Robert's brand new Mercedes at the distorted reflection of her own smile.

The trip was three whizzing, reticent minutes, into the suburban forest, down a tunneling drive, into a three car garage. She felt herself breath. All around their walk from the car were neglected images of wealth, drooping foliage, luxuriant touches of female idleness, a pool, cushions, umbrellas, forget-me-nots. She was overwhelmed. They didn't stop till they found a rhododendron nook, where he invited them to sit in armchairs on a flagstone patio. Robert excused himself, peripheral lights came on, deepening the scene, and he returned with tumblers of a cognac that preceeded itself.

"God, Robert."

"I told you I was rich."

Janquell's emotions bred as in a cage; she felt insignificant yet powerful. Her excited mind wandered to thoughts of her Daddy. Malt liquor on the porch. Momma crack'n in the can. Daddy was sweet in those moments. Laughing and smiling and switched on. He was always dreaming about some kind of power. She believed in his power, even after he died all rolled-up in that prison bed. She felt his legend grow in these suburban shadows. She missed her Daddy; she missed the tender shoot of respect they'd shared in all those dirty days.

"I hope it doesn't sound stupid, but I've always dreamed of sharing and fairness and love between the races." Robert spoke with a sophomoric mixture of romance and altruism. He continued:

"I keep dreaming of a way to reset the world's thinking, like applying one collective jolt of electroshock therapy and seeing everyone wake up with the intention of cooperating. Nothing but cooperation – no more fear, no more bigotry. We'd all waddle around like a bunch of ducklings looking for the closest mother to cling to. Hell, did you know that ducks don't even care if Mom is the same species? I also fantasize about finding the gene that allows people to understand the concept of blame. If we could obliterate this gene, how peaceful we'd all become. Do you think science will be able to find in the brain the physical loci of language concepts like this? They already believe language is hard-wired from conception." Robert stopped himself. 'Oh shit,' he thought, 'Why am I talking like this. Is it the alcohol? Is it the fateful combustion of fantasy and reality sitting right in front of me?'

Janquell sat quietly listening to the rolling song of his voice. She was so overwhelmed at the moment that she simply let it take her.

They remained quiet for a while.

Robert realized that the time for talk was over. He got up and walked around behind Janquell's chair and kneeled so his head was at the same height as hers. He breathed her unfamiliar scents and they became instant memories, rich and immortal. He put his hand on her shoulder and she let her head fall away. He moved his hand across her neck onto her cheek, everything about her was museum quality, rare and beautiful. And they kissed.

Thoughts became fleeting, dodging emotion. They stood and moved from the patio into the house, and Janquell had a vague feeling of being ushered over the mountain.

They explored each others' nakedness; they were happy and giggly and full of warm appreciation. The moments fed Robert's instincts and he pressed for the ultimate prize. Cornered in fear and delight, Janquell spoke softly.

"Ya know. Is almost ma birthday. Fiteen minutes. Happy birthday to me!"

A motherly sun rose and poked slivers of light around the heavy curtains. Janquell raised her eyelids. She was alone in a sea-foam dream of pillows thrown and collected. The sheets were cool and voluptuous and her skin swam in the refreshing luxury. The air carried the mannered smells of the suburban forest.

Robert appeared carrying a tray with continental goodies and wearing an open robe. She watched him on the whole, a lord listing spiritedly in and out of the shadows.

"Janquell, good morning. Happy Birthday!" She smiled and lifted herself onto her elbows. "I have a present for you. I hope you don't mind." He set down the tray on the end of the bed, pulled an envelope out of his robe pocket, and handed it to her. The state of her helplessness, that is, the befuddlement of her senses, continued and all she could do was smile. She opened the envelope and extracted a card. It had a picture of a beautiful, empty cottage on a warmly lit beach. She opened it and several one hundred dollar bills fell out. He'd written an inscription:

"Dear Miss Williams, on your birthday we changed the world, and I am in a debt of service to your beauty forever and ever. Love, RKF."

She collected the money and held it close to her heart. She leaned to him and offered satisfied affection.

"Do you mind if I ask how old you are now?"

"Naw, is okay, I'm 18!"

She left later that morning. For Robert the aftermath was played-out in the silence of his lazy, tree-covered property. It took him one difficult night to pass the fantasy and to see clearly that his fate was now on a thin wire of hope. He fought with the fact that Janquell might return with subpeonas or blackmail or cops and the frayed hope that she understood his point of view. He knew he could not contact her, that a relationship between them was not something either one could sustain publicly.

Over the following days he struggled with periods of paranoia. It was when he felt his message of racial harmony was something that could not survive the tests he put it to. It was when he thought Janquell would consider his lust a more honest motivation for him.

Eventually his wife returned and the entire episode in The Estuary left nothing but a high-water mark in Robert's mind.