“I’m narrowing it down,” I said. An utter fiction.
I waited in the limo for another half an hour after switching off Harrison’s panel, time I passed in monitoring its lively Twitter response. This debate ranged in substance from deeply unpleasant comments about Shaunta Owens’s “Black accent” to the usual praise for Eli Absalom Stone and his great, self-reliant rise. Regarding Harrison himself, the predominant words were: “blowhard” and “dickwad,” with an opposing cluster of “sensible” and “hypocritical libtards!” but none of this struck me as at all remarkable. I put my phone away when he finally turned up.
“Hello there,” my brother said, climbing in beside me. He gave me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, then another on the other cheek. （It was one of the habits—some might call them affectations—he had picked up during his Rhodes years.） “Eli’s here. We’re dropping him at his apartment.”
Eli had been waylaid on the sidewalk. He was signing a book for a man and his teenaged son.
“Okay,” I said.
I had met Eli before, of course. It was hard not to meet Eli when seeing Harrison. Eli lived a few blocks from my brother, in another elegant Sutton Place building, and though his primary affiliation was with a policy and education think tank based in DC, the two of them were mainly engaged in the common pursuit of writing books and “instigating change” together. Not the kind of change my own classmates were always going on about, either.
“Hello, Eli,” I said when he joined us.
“Little Phoebe! My word. How old are you now?”
I told him. Seventeen. “And please don’t ask me where I’m going to college. It’s all anyone wants to know.”
“It’s a glorious time! Don’t suffer. Delight in your choices and opportunities.”
“By which you mean,” I said, “my privilege?”
“There is nothing wrong with privilege. The suffering of others is no reason not to make the most of your own life. Should you stay home and rend your garments because somebody in Calcutta can’t take the SAT?”
I glanced at Harrison. He was smiling, looking out at Sixth Avenue as it passed.
“Go to college, become educated, and create opportunities for people in Calcutta. This is called progress.”
“Oh,” I said with what I hoped was evident sarcasm.
“Your generation has become so marinated in self-loathing. They talk about the phones and the internet as great afflictions. These are not afflictions. The utterly pointless whining about collective guilt—this is the affliction. Let me ask you something. Have you ever enslaved another human being?”
I sighed. “Directly? No, of course not.”
“Bashed a little puppy’s head in?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Called someone…” He made quote marks with his fingers. “The N-word?”
I looked, involuntarily, at the driver, who was Black.
“No. Please.”
“I’m happy to hear it. Great job! Now as a person”—again with the quote marks—“of color, I wave my magic wand and absolve you of all crimes real and imaginary. You may go, secure in the knowledge that the best thing that can be done for so-called minorities is to stop trying to help them because they are minorities. People can rise on their own. If it isn’t on their own it doesn’t last and it doesn’t count.”
“Like you,” I said. “On your own.”
“Entirely. Albeit with the great assistance of Plato, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Homer, Shakespeare, Donne.”