The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  At night, in his second-floor apartment above the Persian-language bookstore in Westwood, he sat alone and plotted and planned the next day’s meetings, practiced his tone and body language, his handshake. Every Saturday morning he walked eight blocks to Wilshire and Beverly Glen and sat in on the Sinai Temple shul just to watch all the Iranians who converged upon the place like an ancestral homeland. Following old-country practices, they came late and lingered in groups. The men prayed earnestly; the women socialized and sized up each other’s marriage-age sons and daughters. They spoke Persian in the lobby and the hallways, threw candy at the bar and bat mitzvah kids, announced a wedding for eight p.m. and expected the rabbi to still be there, waiting patiently and in good humor, when at ten the bride and groom hadn’t yet made their arrival.

  Raphael’s Son spent the entire three-and-a-half-hour service standing at the back by the entrance to the main sanctuary, doing his best to appear austere and authoritative, like someone from within the inner circles of the synagogue’s leadership who had been infused with the power to vet newcomers for significance and suitability. He ignored the inquisitive looks and invitations to take a seat from the temple’s real proctors, all of whom were Ashkenazi and therefore unable to distinguish between one Iranian Jew and the next. He took stock of all the Iranians who recognized him and pretended they hadn’t so they wouldn’t have to shake his hand, the ones who didn’t know him and didn’t want to, and those who, out of ignorance or pity or plain old courtesy, smiled and nodded every time they walked past him. He despised this last group at least as much as he did the others; they reminded him of everything he had always refused to be—powerless, servile, accepting of limitations. If the rich and well connected deserved to be destroyed for their sense of entitlement and their indifference to justice, these others, who showed respect just because, should be stepped on like the undiscerning cretins they were.

  __________________

  His biggest wish was to run into Elizabeth at one of these shuls. It had been easy enough to track her down in LA and learn her jareeyan—her current plight. He knew where she lived, had driven dozens of times past the gray two-story building with the cottage-cheese roofs and old plumbing where she and Zeeba Raiis were still roommates. He knew that she worked for John Vain, that he had arranged for her to do the bookkeeping for a few other restaurant owners. They paid little because she was not an actual CPA, but they swore by her abilities, insisted she was “smarter and more honest, more organized, even, than the Filipinos,” which was as high a compliment as you could give. Raphael’s Son rejoiced at the news of Elizabeth’s travails. She may not be poor, or desperate, or physically decimated like Raphael’s Wife had been back in Iran, he thought, but nor did she any longer have the power she had waved so easily over Raphael’s Son and his mother.

  In this country, at this time, he wanted to say to her, you and your kind don’t have a prayer . . .

  He figured his best chance at finding her in a temple was on the high holy days, and that she would go to Sinai Temple because that’s where John Vain must go. Both these assumptions were wrong—John Vain did not belong to any shul, and Elizabeth would not step inside Sinai Temple for many years still. Nevertheless, Raphael’s Son put on his best black suit and, on Yom Kippur Eve in 1990, set out for the corner of Wilshire and Beverly Glen. He had been to Sinai many times before without any trouble, but this time, a security guard at the entrance asked to see “the ticket.”

  “I’m not going to a movie,” Raphael’s Son snickered as he tried to walk past the man. Next to him, a second guard was tearing off a portion of other people’s tickets before they were let in. He looked like an Israeli paratrooper who should be guarding the gold vault at the Federal Reserve.

  “Only members with tickets tonight,” the first guard said.

  Raphael’s Son had never heard of a temple that required membership. As far as he had ever known, synagogues, like mosques and churches, were built by philanthropists and community leaders, out of sheer benevolence or to fulfill a personal agenda. They were maintained through fund-raising efforts that spanned the entire year and culminated in the practice of “buying” Torahs on the high holy days. What you bought was a chance to hold the scrolls and walk through the congregation, and it cost you as much as the rabbi knew you could afford.

  The security guards were big Israeli men without much interest in social niceties or patience for explaining the concept of membership to yet another Jewish immigrant. Raphael’s Son took their rudeness personally and refused to leave, at first because he didn’t believe their “you must have a ticket to get in; yes, it’s just like going to the movies, only more expensive” pretext, and then because he demanded an apology that wasn’t forthcoming. Before he knew it, two dozen Iranians were watching him get yelled at by an Israeli twice his height. One Iranian declared that it was people like this who gave “all of us” a bad name, and another volunteered to serve as translator, lest the misunderstanding be language related.

  Raphael’s Son sucked in his breath and muttered a few expletives in English, then turned around and headed down Wilshire toward his apartment in Westwood.

  * * *

  At Midvale outside the Avco theater, a woman sat behind the wheel of an ancient Honda, waiting for the light to change. Next to her in the passenger seat was a heavyset child with bulky glasses and wavy brown hair. It was dusk then, and though the car’s headlights were on, he could still see in through the windshield.

  Raphael’s Son stepped off the curb and in front of the car, glanced to his left at the woman, and wondered if he had seen her before or if she just reminded him of someone. He stopped for a second, gazed harder at the pale face, the high cheekbones, that air of intense concentration on something visible only to her, and moved on.

  On Broxton by Diddy Riese, he felt his chest tighten and had to stop. The sidewalk pulsed with sound and movement and the headlights of cars. For a moment, Raphael’s Son feared he would be devoured by the crowd, erased and forgotten like the child trawling the streets of Tehran behind his mother. He took his glasses off and closed his eyes, dropped his head and pressed his thumb and forefinger into his tear ducts.

  Something hard and heavy slammed into him, causing him to stumble sideways before regaining his balance. It was a chubby young woman wearing strawberry-scented lip gloss; she looked like she had been pushed by one of the boys she was with, and who was now laughing. Raphael’s Son was never so intimidated as when he found himself facing young American kids. Compared to their counterparts elsewhere in the world, they were overly confident—insolent, even. They were not expected to show adults the kind of deference a younger person normally would, but they were forgiven every misdeed on grounds that they were “still children.”

  All the way through the village and down Veteran he felt a piercing ache in his temples, but it wasn’t until he had put the key in his door and was about to turn it in the lock that he felt his hand go limp and a cold wave of terror rise in his stomach: He had seen Elizabeth. He had even walked in front of her, paused, and peered at her face without recognizing her.

  * * *

  The Elizabeth he had known as a child and had been chasing ever since was much older, bigger, more fearsome and detestable than this other woman in the Honda.

  __________________

  For the first time since Raphael’s Son became Muhammad Jadid al-Islam, he began to doubt his own potential. He hadn’t recognized Elizabeth, it was true, but nor had she recognized him. She had seen him—he was sure of this. She had stared right at him as he peered through the windshield of her car.

  It occurred to him that she may not be as aware of his existence, or as fearful of it, as he had wanted to believe. That she may not be lying awake at night thinking about the damage Raphael’s Wife had done to her, mourning the dead husband and missing child, knowing she was being punished for her own and her family’s cruelty.

  He decided to take the fight to her. He wasn’t going to run
into her at temple and he didn’t want to risk the humiliation of showing up at her home only to have the door close in his face, so he resolved to look for her at Lucky 99. One Saturday morning he stopped at Bernini, the men’s clothing store on Rodeo Drive that catered mostly to Arab men with money to burn, and bought a suit, dress shirt, and tie. Then he went across the street and bought a pair of Ferragamo loafers. The suit needed alteration, and he was shocked to learn that, unlike in Iran where tailors were on hand to get the work done within the hour, he would have to wait five business days before he could get the suit back. In the end, he decided to wear it as is.

  He had made a reservation for nine thirty, but when he arrived, the hostess ignored him for a full five minutes, then asked his name and said, without bothering to look at him, “It’ll be forty minutes.” He objected that he had a reservation; she gave him a condescending smile and said, “So does everyone else. You’re welcome to have a drink at the bar.”

  For the next half hour, Raphael’s Son watched as the hostess, a classic California blonde, planted a kiss on every newcomer’s face and walked them past Raphael’s Son to a table. He finally went up and asked why he wasn’t getting a table when there were so many still vacant.

  “Because everything’s spoken for,” she said.

  He pointed out again that he had a reservation.

  “So does everyone else,” she repeated with a smirk.

  But what about the empty tables?

  “They’re being held.”

  He objected that she had seated patrons who clearly did not have a reservation.

  She rolled her eyes. “They don’t need a reservation.”

  Raphael’s Son was sweating in his too-large, brand-new suit. The more he snapped at the hostess, the more disdainful she became. He asked to speak with the manager.

  “I’m the manager,” she said. “You can wait for the owner to come in if you want. It’ll be a couple of hours.”

  Behind him, a tall bald man with a disastrous face-lift and too much foundation whispered to his companion, “You’d think he’s in the industry.”

  It would be years before Raphael’s Son learned that in LA, “the industry” meant the film business, and that it ruled hearts and minds above and beyond all else. In a rage, he turned to the face-lift and said, too loudly, “I can buy and sell this place with you in it three times in one day if I want to.”

  Then he marched out, the man’s laughter trailing him.

  __________________

  The night of Angela and Nilou’s high school graduation, John Vain hosted a dinner in their honor at Lucky 99. It was June 1990, and he invited ninety-nine guests. He closed the restaurant to the public, printed menus on scrolls of parchment paper painted like diplomas, had a string quartet play music in the background. “Invite all your friends,” he had urged the girls and their mothers. Zeeba and Nilou each had a dozen guests. Angela came up with three, and Neda and Elizabeth had no one. At the last minute, to avoid the embarrassment of having a party with so few in attendance, John Vain made some phone calls and filled the place. He even invited a date for himself.

  In the nearly ten years since he had met and, in his own heart, married Elizabeth, John Vain took fewer than a dozen women out to lunch or dinner or a movie. All things being equal, he would have much preferred to spend even those times with what he called, only half jokingly, “my real family.” If he gave in to pressure from women who courted him or friends who insisted he should “get out” every once in a while, it was only to avoid making an even bigger spectacle of his devotion to the Soleymans. Not that anyone who knew him even casually could have missed the extent of his infatuation with Elizabeth or fondness for Angela. He had practically turned them into celebrities without their consent or participation. He had even taken Zeeba Raiis and her daughters under his wings. But he was much too kind, perhaps much too love-struck, to ever take a chance on declaring his feelings to Elizabeth herself. She’d turn me down, and it’d be over.

  He was right about this—that Elizabeth did not reciprocate his ardor, would never have agreed to marry him or become more than friends. To Angela, who loved John Vain and yearned to recreate the family she had lost in Iran, her mother’s tacit rejection of the man who had done so much for them only validated the Ice Queen hypothesis.

  To hear Angela say it, the last time Elizabeth had made a display of emotion was when she went into the girls’ room and found that Noor was missing. After that, through every ordeal, she had looked stricken but not lost; when they brought her Noor’s body, when she watched the little corpse, like a headless doll, be washed and wrapped at the morgue, when she threw the first fistful of dust on the grave—all that time and forever after, Elizabeth displayed more determination than grief.

  * * *

  At the dinner, John Vain served champagne and toasted the girls with as much delight and appreciation as any father might have shown. He had written his speech and practiced it half a dozen times in front of a mirror, asked his “date”-to-be, an attractive Iranian woman with a fast-ticking biological clock, to correct any mistakes and substitute “better” words for the ones he had used. He had been doing this—trying to better himself—consistently since he met Elizabeth. He read books on etiquette and biographies of “great men,” dressed more formally, even replaced the cowboy boots for lace-up oxfords much of the time. He knew there was no way to catch up with her in sophistication or ancestry, but he wanted to be as good as he could become. Most of the time, this meant spending large sums of money.

  “I thank God and the ayatollah,” he said in his speech to Angela and Nilou, “for sending you to me.”

  He teared up, paused to swallow, and tried to memorize the scene—the faces of the two girls beaming with joy and excitement, the color of Elizabeth’s eyes in the yellow mist of candlelight, the certainty, within him, that he had managed to make something grand and meaningful with his life after all. Then he said, “Whatever happens from here on, I will know that I was blessed.”

  The dinner ended at midnight.

  John Vain left the restaurant at one thirty.

  The staff locked up at three.

  At six a.m., the police called.

  __________________

  He headed down Loma Vista and onto Foothill with his eyes half closed from sleep, decided he shouldn’t drive in that state, and drove back home to call a cab. The driver was a shaggy-haired, “I’m an artist, this job is beneath me, my mother was related to the last king of Hungary though I forget his name” type, who called himself Laszlo de Varga and had driven John Vain many times before and been treated to more than a meal and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot at the restaurant. John Vain called a taxi whenever he drank, and he was such a good tipper, drivers argued with dispatch over who should be sent to pick him up. Laszlo de Varga usually won, though he was often half-drunk himself, even at lunchtime.

  That day, he had a fierce hangover and was in a confessional mood. As they drove east on Sunset, he started to tell John Vain that he—Laszlo—wasn’t related to a royal as he had previously claimed; in fact, he was an orphan and didn’t know his mother, and the so-called relation to the king was a story he had invented to help him get better tips because, let’s face it, “people want to impress royals, they think we deserve more than regular folk.” The “de” in de Varga was something his wife had suggested he throw in when he applied for his license just to emphasize his noble background.

  They had driven as far east as Vermont when they realized they had gone way too far, and doubled back. This time, they went through the light at Crescent Heights and still didn’t see the restaurant, so they made another U-turn and stopped behind the fire trucks.

  The cop who called John Vain said there had been a fire at the restaurant, but there was no fire here. Nor was there a restaurant.

  John Vain circled the trucks and looked up and down the intersection. All he saw was an empty lot, the charred remains of cars, and a heap of smoldering wood and metal.r />
  He stood there, mouth agape. The air was cool but he could feel perspiration drip from his neck onto his back. Someone in a heavy jacket came up and asked if he was the owner.

  “Your insurance company’s going to want to send their detectives over; you should call them right away.”

  John Vain didn’t answer. This was the second time that week he had heard the word “insurance.” The first was when Elizabeth told him that the policy on Lucky 99 had lapsed and should be reinstated.

  “Stop worrying so much,” John Vain had reassured her. “Insurance is for unlucky people.”

  __________________

  He went home and opened the safe where he kept his $5,000 “earthquake” fund. It was something all LA residents were advised to do: keep cash on hand in case the Big One hits and all the banks are shuttered and you have to live like in one of those apocalyptic films, where the entire world has crumbled around you and you alone are the key to the survival of the human race, and one gallon of gas, if you can find it, costs $5,000.

  It occurred to him as he was taking the money out of the safe that he must have seen a devastating earthquake as a more likely prospect than a flood or fire. That was because earthquakes happened to everyone in an entire region; a flood or fire was reserved for the afflicted—which he was not.

  He took out $4,000 and went back to the site of the restaurant in time for the afternoon shift to arrive. One by one he hugged the employees—the busboys, the chef, the doorman, the waiters and waitresses and bartenders. He divided the $4,000 among them equally and apologized for leaving them “on furlough” without notice. He was going to take a few weeks to straighten out his finances, then rebuild on the site, and he would hire back every one of them if they wanted to return, with a raise, plus back pay for the months they were out of work. He might have lost a great deal of money in the fire, but he had other significant assets, not the least of which was an infinite line of credit at Bank United.